Songs of Innocence

Chapter 26

There was a different woman at the front desk, but she was cut from the same bolt. Willowy. Slender. Glossy lips, slightly parted. Soft voice.

“Have you been here before?” she said.

I told her I had.

“Would you prefer a massage or a scrub?”

I had too little money for either; I didn’t even have enough to use the facilities.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m just here to meet someone. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes. I was hoping you’d let me wait for him back there.” I nodded toward the changing area. I could see her getting ready to say no. Before she could get the word out, I held out two folded bills, a twenty and a ten. It was the last of my cash.

She took it, spread the bills, and took a minute to consider whether it was a respectable bribe or an insult. She pocketed the money. “Stay in the changing area,” she said. “Keep your clothes on.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Thankfully this time there was no one else there. I pulled one of the high-backed couches toward me to block the view a bit more. It was five minutes to midnight.

The train ride downtown had been excruciating. I’d kept my hat pulled low and my jacket collar high and a copy of the Village Voice in front of my face, but all the same I’d been expecting to feel cuffs cinched around my wrists every time the doors opened, every time someone got on or off.

Now I was indoors and alone, but if anything the tension was worse. Because now I was waiting for a man who’d told me he’d kill me if he ever saw me again. A man who’d killed two people because of me.

I asked myself why I was here. I’d asked it all the way down. The answer was because he’d killed Di. (Candace, I reminded myself. He’d killed Candace.) I’d believed Ardo when he’d said they didn’t kill women. In his own crazy way, he’d meant it—it seemed to be a point of pride with him, of integrity, maybe dating back to when he’d been a child and seen his sister shot by the Arrow Cross.

But Miklos hadn’t seen his sister shot. And Miklos didn’t seem to have a problem killing women.

He’d certainly attacked Julie, and I was confident he’d been the one who’d strangled Candace—why the hell should I believe he wouldn’t have killed Dorrie?

If nothing else, he was my leading candidate for who Dorrie had been preparing to leave the city to get away from. I already knew Dorrie had been afraid to tell me about him once—she hadn’t said a word to me about the incident with Julie’s hand. That didn’t guarantee it was Miklos she’d been too scared to tell me about this time...but how many people that frightening could she have known?

The clock on the wall ticked slowly toward true north.

I was carrying nothing I could use as a weapon. I thought for a moment about tracking down the barber’s shears Lisa had found for me the last time I’d been here—at least they had a sharp point. But realistically I might just as well have asked her for the manicure scissors, for all the good they’d do me. Might as well ask for a toothbrush.

12:01 came and went, 12:02. Then I heard the dull chime that accompanied each opening of the elevator door. Moments later I heard heavy footsteps on the wooden walkway. Over the tops of the couches I could see the crown of his head approaching.

When he turned the corner and saw me, he didn’t recognize me, not at first. Then I saw recognition blossom on his face as he extended his key toward one of the lockers. He let his hand drop, tossed the key on the seat beside him.

“Blake?”

His hands slowly closed into fists. Opened and closed. Slowly.

“I’m just here to talk, Miklos.” I held my hands up, palms out. “I’m unarmed.”

“So?” He laughed. “So what you’re unarmed? Mr. Lucky.” He stepped forward, closing the distance between us. “Tell me, Mr. Lucky, do you want I should kill you fast or slow?” The smile that spread across his face was an ugly thing. “Or should I make you suck me off first like your faggot bartender friend would?”

I felt sweat running down my sides, from my armpits to the bandages strapped around my torso. This would work or it wouldn’t work—and if it didn’t work, I was dead. It was that simple.

“Before you kill me, Miklos,” I said, “there’s something you need to see.”

“Something I need to see like what?”

“Evidence,” I said. “Evidence you left behind, tying you to Candace Webb’s murder. Starting with those King Kong fingerprints of yours, but that’s just the beginning.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” he said. “You got evidence like that, you’d take it to the police, get them off your back.”

“I can’t go to the police—thanks to you. Even if I showed them I didn’t do Webb, they’d lock me up for Ramos. But I’ll tell you who I can go to, Miklos. I can go to your boss. And we both know how he feels about killing women.”

“This woman pulled a fucking gun on me—”

“Well, maybe you can explain that to Ardo. While you’re at it you can explain why you weren’t able to take a gun away from a woman half your size without killing her. He’s probably a very reasonable man when it comes to these things. That’s certainly what they say on the street.”

He didn’t say anything.

“You remember what he told me,” I said, “the last time we were all together? ‘People who work for me sometimes make mistakes. They pay for them when they do.’ ”

He remembered. I could see it in his face.

“I’ve also got evidence, Miklos, that you were a regular at Julie’s place long before Ardo sent you there to break her hand. How do you think he’s going to like that? That you were giving your business to a woman who stole customers from him?”

Between clenched teeth he said, “What do you want?”

“I need to get out of town—at least till this blows over, maybe for good. And that takes money. You know how much money I have?” In another context, my thumb-to-forefinger gesture might have meant Okay. “You got me in this mess—now I want you to fix it.”

“Yeah? How?”

“You give me ten thousand dollars, cash, I’ll hand you all the evidence I’ve got and we’ll go our separate ways. You’ll never see me again and neither will Ardo.”

He reached out and closed one hand around my throat. “How about I break your fucking neck and take the evidence off your dead body?”

“You think I’m stupid?” I said. “It’s not on me. I’ve got it downstairs, in my car.”

“Your car.”

“That’s right. And if I’m not downstairs in five minutes, unharmed, my friend who’s driving my car has instructions to take the evidence to Andras, hand it over to him. He’ll know what to do with it.” I stared at him over his outstretched arm, tried to keep my voice from breaking. “I think you know he’ll do it, too. My faggot bartender friend.”

I saw temptation in his eyes. His palm was pressed against my throat, his fingers almost touching at the back of my neck. One hard turn of his wrist and I had no doubt my neck would snap. Then he could deal with my hypothetical friend in my hypothetical car at his leisure.

But what if the car and friend weren’t hypothetical? What if they did make it uptown to Andras and Ardo before he could stop them? What if I really had something on him?

He let go of my throat and switched his grip to my upper arm, which he squeezed tightly enough to cut off circulation. “Move,” he said, and pushed me toward the front.

He marched me into the elevator. The digital readout counted down as we dropped, like the timer on a bomb. I only hoped I’d kept him occupied upstairs long enough.

When ‘2’ ticked over to ‘M,’ the door slid open. He stood behind me, his chest pressed against my back, one hand still holding onto my arm, the other arm wrapped around my waist. He wasn’t letting me get away. Together, we stepped out into the narrow hallway.

At one end, I saw that the fire door was slightly ajar. We turned the other way, toward the street. But there was someone there, standing between us and the door. She had a gun raised in her left hand and a cast on her right. The gun was aimed a good nine inches above my head. I’m rarely glad not to be taller, but I was now.

“Hello, Miklos,” Julie said. In her posh British accent it almost sounded welcoming. But the expression on her face left no doubt about her intentions.

“This is your friend?” he said sneeringly. “This little fucking jap cunt?” He yelled at her: “You should have stayed in the car. I kill you both—”

I felt the point of a knife then, punching into my back.

The blade went in half an inch, an inch—but then it stopped. And through the pain I realized that Miklos’ hands were still both in view—one on my arm and one around my waist.

His hold on me loosened. I staggered forward, out of his grasp.

I turned around. He was standing, gasping, looking down at his belly. The point of a knife was protruding through his shirt. Blood was pouring out around it.

He sank to his knees, then to all fours, and I saw the handle of a camp knife sticking out of his back. Behind him, Kurland Wessels stepped forward. Behind Kurland, the fire door was open wide.

Kurland braced himself against Miklos’ back with one hand and drew the knife out with the other. The blade must have been eleven, twelve inches long. Miklos tried to crawl forward. There was blood coming out of his mouth now.

“What did you do?” I shouted. “I said I wanted him alive!”

“Yeah, well, Julie wanted him dead.”

I dropped to a crouch beside Miklos’ head. He was struggling to talk, spewing wet and bloody curses in Hungarian.

I could feel my own blood soaking into my bandages.

“Talk to me,” I said desperately. “Did you kill Dorrie Burke? Cassandra, from Julie’s place—did you kill her?” I was holding onto his shoulders, pressing him back as he tried to bull his way forward. He was weakening, but he was still stronger than me, and I found myself inching backward as he pressed forward. “Tell me the truth. I can still get you to a hospital—but you’ve got to tell me the truth. Did you do it?”

With an enormous lunge, Miklos raised one arm from the floor and buried it in the fabric of my shirt, pulled me toward him. His teeth were red like a feeding lion’s. “I...kill you...” He spat out a mouthful of blood and saliva, some of it in my face. He swung me, hard, into the wall. I grabbed his wrist between my hands, tried to pry his fingers open.

“Answer me,” I shouted. “Did you kill Dorrie Burke?”

He bellowed his answer: “No!”

It was the last word he ever spoke. A gunshot split the air and a bullet split his skull. The wall behind him was spattered. The three of us were, too.

Miklos toppled over sideways and lay there in a pool of his own blood.

Julie walked up to him, gun still smoking. She was wearing heavy boots and used one of them to kick him viciously in the jaw.

“I’m Korean, asshole,” she said, “not Japanese.”

“Come on,” Kurland said. “Move.” He wiped the long blade of the knife on Miklos’ pants. I saw that he was wearing gloves. My pulse was racing and the little I’d eaten today was threatening to come up, but Kurland looked calm, unaffected. Well, the man was a professional. It’s why I’d asked Julie to bring him along. But now Miklos was dead and anything he might have been able to tell me about Dorrie had died with him.

“I wanted to talk to him,” I said as Kurland hustled Julie and me toward the fire door. We raced down an echoing flight of metal steps and emerged at a basement door.

“You got your answer,” Kurland said. “He said no.”

“He was dying. He didn’t know what he was saying.”

“He knew,” Kurland said.

We were outside, behind the building, surrounded by black plastic garbage bags piled up in heaps. I saw a long tail disappear behind one.

Kurland led us to a staircase that took us back up to street level. We came out on 33rd and starting walking north. You could hear honking and a siren a block away. It sounded like an ambulance, not a police car. Not that either would do Miklos any good now.

I looked over at Kurland and noticed that the knife had vanished somewhere and so had the gloves. He was wearing a dark jacket, so you couldn’t see the blood on it. You could see it on mine.

Julie ran beside us, keeping up with some difficulty. She was still holding the gun. Kurland took it from her, buttoned it up inside his pocket, propelled her ahead of him with a hand at the small of her back. They started down the flight of stairs to the subway station at 34th and I started after them, but Kurland stopped me with a hand on my chest. “Don’t follow us,” he said. “We don’t want to be seen with you.”

I looked around. We were alone on the sidewalk.

“You don’t want to be seen with me? You just killed a man. That’s more than I’ve ever done.”

“First of all, that’s not what I hear on the news.” I started to protest and he threw a hand up. “Doesn’t matter. Second of all, you were in on this one as much as we were, so you’re certainly no virgin now. Think about that before you shoot your mouth off about this to anyone. And third of all— Ah, hell, there is no third of all. Just go. You’re on your own.”

They plunged into the station, leaving me behind. I turned away.

Now what, god damn it? Now what?