2. Delilah
DELILAH
The cough wakes me before the cold does.
It starts under my ribs and comes up dry and scraping. By the third one, my whole chest hurts. I bend over as far as the rope lets me and hack into my own shoulder until it finally has mercy on me and relents. Then I sit there with my eyes watering and try to breathe slow through my nose.
My mouth tastes chemical and sour. That's the chloroform, or what's left of it. I've been throwing up since sometime in the night, and there's a plastic bucket near my left foot that somebody put there for that reason.
It's maybe twelve feet by fifteen in here.
The old paint on the cinderblock walls used to be yellowish white.
There's a drain in the middle of the concrete floor and one hopper window up high, its glass painted over gray.
I can only tell it's morning because the paint is glowing a little at the edges.
There's a metal door with a bar across it on the outside. I know that because I heard the bar drop last night.
My hands are in front of me, wrists crossed, wrapped in a zip tie with duct tape over it. My ankles are taped to the chair legs. There's a rope over my right shoulder and around my back, which is what keeps me from standing up and shuffling around with the chair.
I still have my apron on. They dragged me out of an alley and threw me in a van and drove me God knows where, and nobody thought to take it off. It's tied in a bow at the back like I'm about to pull a tray out of the deck oven.
I run my tongue along the inside of my lip. It's split. The blood's dried into a scab that cracks when I open my mouth wide.
Okay.
Okay, Delilah.
Where do we go from here?
I do what I do when I'm opening up the shop on any given day of the week:
I make a list.
One. I'm alive. Whatever this is, they want me to remain that way. For now, at least.
Two. My chest is aching from the inside. I was in that kitchen with the smoke for a while before I got out the back, and I can hear something in me when I breathe, a faint whistle that triggers all the wrong alarm bells.
Three. Nobody's told me anything.
Four… I got nothin'.
It's a short list.
I lean my head back and look at the ceiling. Floor joists, wiring stapled along them, a bare bulb in a porcelain socket. A furnace pipe. It reeks of mildew and old cat and dust cooking on a heat exchanger.
Above me, a floor creaks. A chair leg scrapes, then somebody laughs, one loud honk, and somebody else says something and the laughing stops.
I count the creaks between the two of them and decide there are at least three men upstairs.
The bar comes off the door around the time the window paint goes from gray to almost white.
A big guy backs in with a plate in one hand.
He's thick through the middle, wearing a brown work jacket and jeans, and half his face is taped up.
A gauze pad the size of a playing card runs from his cheekbone down under his jaw, held on with white medical tape.
The tape has turned pink and crusty in one spot.
That's my handiwork.
I look at that pad and feel pleased with myself in a way that isn't very Christian.
I did that. I had my keys wedged between my fingers and I swung with everything I had and I felt it catch.
He puts the plate down on the floor near my feet. On it, there's half a bagel, no butter, and a cup of water.
"You gonna behave?" he says.
"I'm taped to a chair. I don't think I have many options."
He looks at me a second, then he crouches and cuts the tape off my wrists with a folding knife, leaving the zip tie. Now, I can get my hands to my mouth. He leaves my ankles as they are.
I pick up the cup with both hands and chug the whole thing. It's warm and tastes like the tap, but I don't care. Then I start coughing again and lose half of what I just drank down my chin.
He stands there and watches me cough. He doesn't do anything about it, but he doesn't leave, either. When I finally stop he says, "You sound like my aunt."
"Was your aunt in a fire?"
"Emphysema."
"Great. Very reassuring."
He picks up the cup. I try the bagel. My mouth is so dry that the bread just sits there in a lump. It hurts to chew on the split side, so I work at it slow on the right.
"What's your name?" I ask.
He keeps his name to himself.
"I'm going to call you something. You'll like it even less if I make it up."
"Yeah?"
"I've got nothing else to do in here."
He almost smiles. I can see it happen behind the tape, one corner of the visible half of his mouth. Then he decides against it.
"If you need the bathroom, knock the plate over," he says. "Don't bother yelling. I won't come."
"Roger that, Shithead."
The door shuts behind him, and the bar thuds into place.
I sit with the bagel in my lap and go over what just happened.
He cut the tape. That's not nothing. Somebody told him to keep me able to eat and drink, which means they want me in decent shape.
Also, he could've hit me in retaliation for his effed-up face or the Shithead comment. He didn't.
So the orders are strict.
A little while later, I meet the man who issued them.
Osip Vetrov comes down. He steps in and stands just inside the doorway with his hands folded in front of him as he looks around, inspecting the place.
He looks so innocent. Just a hunched, withered old man.
He looks like someone who reads the newspaper front to back and complains to the co-op board about the recycling.
"Mrs. Dorsey," he says.
"Ms."
"Ms. Dorsey." He nods. "I apologize for the accommodations."
"I've stayed in nastier places. My mother's basement had wasps."
He almost looks pleased. "You're in good spirits."
"I'm in a chair."
"That, unfortunately, is necessary." He takes two steps in but stays carefully out of reach, just in case I get feisty.
"I want you to understand your situation, because I think that will make this easier on you.
You are not being punished. You have not done anything to me.
This is a business arrangement, and you are, regrettably, the instrument of it. Nothing more."
"An instrument, huh?"
"It's not a kind word, I know." He tips his head. "In seven days, it will be concluded. You'll be returned. There'll be no permanent harm."
"You people love the word 'temporary.'"
"Because it happens to be true." He looks at the bucket by my foot, and then at my face. "You've been sick."
"I've been coughing since I got here. There's something in my chest. I was in a smoke-filled kitchen for a while before your guys grabbed me in the alley." I hold his eyes. "I need a doctor."
He watches me. Nothing on his face moves.
"I'm serious," I say. "I don't know what you know about smoke, but I had to sit through a fire department lecture two years ago for my permit.
You get sicker afterward, on the second day and the third.
If my lungs fill up in your basement, then you don't have an instrument anymore, you've got a body, and then whatever you're doing with those seven days is over. "
I can tell he only cares about that last part.
"There is a man who works for us," he says. "He was a physician in Odessa. He is not licensed here."
"Is he sober?"
"Generally."
"Then send him."
Vetrov considers that for a moment, then nods once. "Tonight."
"Thank you," I say. I hate thanking him, but I need him coming back.
He turns like he's finished.
"My bakery," I say. "Did it burn?"
He stops. He looks at me over his glasses.
"I know you know. So just tell me. Is it standing or is it gone?"
"The kitchen and the rear of the building are heavily damaged," he says. "Water and smoke throughout. The front wall and the facade are largely intact. The fire department did good work. I'm told the sign is fine."
I don't know why I feel it in my throat when he tells me about the sign. It's a piece of painted metal. My father held the ladder while I hung it.
"Was anybody hurt?" I ask.
"No."
"Was there anybody in the building?"
"No one but you."
"Priya locks up on Thursdays," I say. "If she'd been on last night instead of me—"
"She wasn't."
"That's not as reassuring as you seem to think it is."
He shrugs and gives me no reply.
I sit up as straight as the rope allows. "Then let's talk about the seven days," I say. "You want the deeds, right? Has he agreed?"
Vetrov's eyebrows go up about a millimeter, which for him I think is a shout. "You're direct."
"So I've been told. Has he agreed?"
He takes his glasses off, breathes on them, wipes them with a pocket square, puts them back on.
"He has," he says. "Within hours, faster than I anticipated.
His attorneys worked through the night to prepare the paperwork.
" He stops for a moment. "He didn't negotiate or counter, and he asked for no proof of life beyond what I sent him.
In thirty years, I've never seen a man surrender a position like that in one night. "
"So it's done."
"The documents are prepared. They haven't been delivered."
"Then take them and let me go."
"No."
"Why not?" I demand. "You said it yourself, he folded. You got the whole thing. What do you need six more days for?"
"Because seven days is what I said. Makov needs humility. I intend to teach it to him."
"So I sit here for six more days while you have a dick-measuring contest?"
"You've gone from direct to crude, Ms. Dorsey, and I don't appreciate it.
I am not a crude man." He purses his lips.
"The time will pass quickly. You'll be fed.
You'll be seen by the doctor. The men have instructions about you that they will not break.
They know what happens to them if they do.
" He puts his hands back together in front of him.
"Understand something else: I offered you a clean solution in your own shop, and you turned it down.
I don't hold it against you. But you were never going to be left out of this. "
With that, he turns and raps twice on the metal door. It opens for him from the other side.
"Six days," he says. "Then you go home."
The door shuts. The bar drops into its brackets, and the sound of it ricochets up through the floor joists.
I sit in the chair with the drain in front of me and my apron still tied and I let myself be scared for about a minute and a half, all the way, no fighting it, shaking hands and everything.
Then I stop.
Six days.
I turn my head toward the door and I put my ear as close to the gap as the rope will let me, and I listen.
I hear boots shifting and two men talking, one of them laughing about something on his phone. A radio is playing above with the volume down, and water gurgles in a pipe.
If I'm going to be stuck here for six days, I'm going to keep my eyes and ears open. I'm going to learn everything I can about Osip Vetrov's operation.
You never know when it might come in handy.