Chapter 4
Angela
Iwalked for an hour with the taste of him still in my mouth.
Two o’clock in the morning in a part of the city I had never been in before, the kind of neighborhood where the streetlights came on every third pole and the rest stood dark like teeth knocked out of a smile.
My boots hit concrete in the rhythm I had walked in since I left him in the alley—not fast, not slow, the pace of a woman who did not want to be remembered by anyone watching from a window.
Cold air worked its way under the collar of my coat.
My ribs hurt from where the second man had slammed me into the wall, a dull plate of bruise spreading under my left breast that I could feel every time I took a breath.
None of it registered the way it should have.
What registered was his thumb.
The meat of it, between my back teeth. The give, then the resistance, then the give again.
The fact that he had not pulled away. The fact that he had not made a single sound when I bit down.
I had bitten him hard enough to break skin.
I knew because I could still taste the iron of it, faint, mixed with the soap on him, which was a soap I had never smelled before—clean and slightly bitter, the kind men who had money wore without thinking about it.
The two flavors were sitting on my tongue like two acetate sheets laid over each other, and I could not get either of them off.
I turned a corner I had not planned to turn.
A man who does not flinch when bitten, the analyst in the back of my head said, in her dry careful voice, has been hurt worse than you can do to him. A man who does not flinch when bitten and does not look surprised has been hurt worse than that, and recently.
Shut up, I told her.
I kept walking. There was a closed liquor store on the corner, the security gate down, a small red light blinking inside that was either an alarm or a credit-card reader pretending to be one.
I clocked it without meaning to. I clocked the alley between the liquor store and the laundromat next door.
I clocked the second exit at the back of the laundromat where the dryers vented onto the street in a column of warm air that smelled like wet wool and dryer sheets.
I walked through the column of warm air and felt my face thaw for a second and then refreeze.
What kind of man was he?
But deep down, I knew what kind of man. That was the worst part.
I had spent eighteen months in a federal courtroom telling other men, very carefully, in very dry language, what kind of man this one was.
I had wired myself for sound and sat in conference rooms with men who held themselves exactly the way he had held himself in the corridor, and I had testified against them, and I had ruined my life to put a smaller, paler, less competent version of him in prison. I knew exactly what kind of man.
I crossed another street.
The wind picked up off the lake somewhere to my right, and I felt it find the seam at the back of my collar and travel down between my shoulder blades and I shivered, and the shiver did something to me I was not prepared for. It went past my ribs. It went lower. It settled.
No. No, no.
I walked faster.
The thing that the analyst was now saying, in her dry careful voice, was that I had been very afraid in the corridor for approximately eleven seconds—the eleven seconds in which the first man’s hand had been on my wrist—and then I had stopped being afraid the moment his hand had been on the first man’s wrist instead.
My body had registered him and reclassified the situation, and what it had reclassified the situation into was not safety, exactly, because nothing in me was capable of registering safety anymore, but it was something close enough to safety that the rest of my body had taken the opportunity to do something else.
The something else was what I was now walking off.
How, I asked myself, how is it that I am thinking about the taste of that mafioso’s skin and not the two men who tried to put me in a van?
There was no answer.
The diner on Lincoln was open, thank god.
I took the booth at the back, the one against the kitchen wall, because the kitchen wall was the only wall in the room I could not be approached from.
The waitress was the kind of woman who had worked nights for thirty years and did not waste energy on a face like mine.
She poured coffee into a cup that had been in the rack so long it was warm, and she did not ask if I wanted anything else.
I ordered a piece of toast I would not eat, because ordering food in a place like this at this hour was the price of being allowed to sit in the booth.
I put my hands flat on the formica. They were shaking.
I made them stop.
For so long, I felt like I didn’t have a sex drive. Like I did not have a body, really, except as a thing that needed coffee and occasional protein. I had been invisible to men, and my needs—if I had them—were invisible to myself.
What I was, was a brain. Something that cataloged. Something that analysed.
That’s what I’d do right now. Ignore my body, my needs. Think about the details.
His watch.
I had notice it before I had even known he was looking at me.
He had been holding his glass in his right hand and the watch had been on his left wrist, half-covered by his cuff, and the sliver I had seen had been enough.
Patek Philippe. Steel case, blue dial, the small subsecond at six o’clock.
I knew the model the way I knew several models, because in my prior life I had reviewed expense reports for men who bought watches with money that was not theirs, and Patek Philippe had appeared on those reports often enough that I had learned to recognize the silhouette from across a room.
The watch was something between forty and ninety thousand dollars depending on the year.
He had worn it pushed slightly down his wrist, the way a man wore a watch he did not think about, which meant he had owned it long enough to stop noticing it.
Old money, or money that had been around long enough to act old.
The shoes.
I had only seen them in the alley, under the streetlight, when I had bitten him.
They had not been polished. That was the thing about them.
They had been hand-made, the cut of the leather across the toe was wrong for anything off a shelf, and the soles had been the kind of soles that cost more than my coat had cost—but they had not been polished.
A man who owned shoes like that and did not polish them had ten other pairs at home.
He did not have to make these ones last. He probably did not even own polish. He probably had a person.
The analyst made a small dry sound in the back of my head that, in another lifetime, might have been a laugh.
The accent.
He had spoken to me twice. Once in the corridor and once in the alley, and in both instances the syllables had been shaped by a mouth that had grown up speaking something else.
Not Italian generally. Sicilian. I knew the difference because my grandmother had been from Palermo and had spent my whole childhood teaching me the difference between her dialect and the Italian of the schools, and his consonants had been my grandmother’s consonants, the soft scrape of the final vowels, the slight upward bend at the end of a question that was not Italian at all but something older and more local.
He was from there. He had been there as recently as a couple of years ago, judging by how unworn the accent was on his English, which was otherwise good.
The staff.
This was the thing the analyst kept returning to.
When I had come up the back stairs of the club following the bouncer’s instruction—when I had been moved through the side corridor by a staffer who had clearly been waved off by Mick on the door—the staff in that club had not looked at the booth I had eventually found him in.
They had not looked at it the way a waiter did not look at a table that did not need anything.
They had looked at it the way the people in the courtroom had not looked at the partners’ wives in the second row.
The look that was not a look. The deliberate absence of attention that was, in fact, its own form of attention.
He was somebody, in that club. He was somebody enough that the staff did not raise their eyes to him.
The violence.
The first man, in the corridor, had gone face-first into the wall and had slid down it.
That was a thing. I had watched the second man—the bigger one, the one who had grabbed me harder—go down with no sound and no struggle, and I had watched him get up no better afterwards.
I knew, because I had been in the back of the courtroom for the cross-examination of certain witnesses, what unprofessional violence looked like: messy, loud, three or four blows where one would have done.
This had not been unprofessional violence.
The second man had been a fully grown adult human in the middle of an assault and he had been disabled by something that, from where I had been standing, had looked almost like a courtesy.
Quick. Precise. The arm around the throat, the angle, the wall, the release.
The man on the floor had been breathing.
He had let the man breathe.
I picked up the coffee. It was already cold. I drank it anyway. The toast sat in front of me, two triangles on a white plate, the butter congealed.
The analyst sat down across from me in the booth, metaphorically, and looked at the file she had been compiling, and looked at me, and did not say what she was thinking, because she did not have to. I already knew.
He was exactly the kind of man I had spent eighteen months testifying against.
He was, in fact, almost certainly higher up the food chain than the men I had testified against.