The Guest Room (21 page)

Richard's day ended where it began: on a futon on the floor. Another news van trolling the neighborhood and pausing at the end of his driveway.

He stared up at the ceiling at the dim light from the moon and listened to Cassandra snore ever so slightly in her sleep. He took comfort that at least the cat had not deserted him. Usually she slept upstairs. Tonight she was downstairs with him. His mind, as it had all day, ping-ponged between the unfairness of Franklin McCoy still refusing to allow him to return to work, the sword that Spencer Doherty was dangling over his head, and the hurt he had inflicted upon his family. He was angry at the world, but he was also awash in self-loathing. And somewhere in the maelstrom behind his eyes that was keeping him awake was that poor girl he had brought upstairs in this very house. Sometimes he was haunted by her eyes as she sat on the guest bedroom bed. Sometimes he heard her voice in his head. He thought of her sadness when she spoke about Yerevan. He thought of her playfulness when she described a sculpture of a cat.

Manhunt.
Now she was the object of a manhunt. Everyone wanted to find her. The Russians probably wanted to kill her. He was, he realized, terrified for her. It made him loathe her parents, whoever they were and wherever they were.

He sat up on the futon, his head in his hands. He thought of his wife and daughter, upstairs in the master bedroom. He hoped he hadn't made a mistake not coming home with a gun.

Sonja was sobbing when we ran from the party for the bachelor. We were both crazed, we were both all adrenaline. We climbed into Pavel's car, because she said that was how we were going to get away, and she got into the driver's seat. She slammed shut the big Escalade door and right away banged into the side of one of the other cars in the driveway when she was backing out. She didn't know how to drive. Neither of us did. She didn't even know how to turn on the windshield wipers at first, and it was pouring rain. But she had planned this thing in her mind and didn't plan to drive very far. We were just going to the train station, she said, which we had seen when we were driving around Bronxville before the party. We had gotten there so early, Pavel had gone to the village to find a liquor store for his vodka. Sonja figured even she could drive the mile or two to the train station.

“What the fuck were you thinking!” I asked. “Why did you do that?”

“Because they killed Crystal, why else?”

“I know, I get it! But why? Why now?”

“Because I think they were going to kill me tonight—on the way back to the city. They probably would have killed you, too.”

“What the fuck? Why?”

“We'll get on the first train that goes to the Grand Central,” she said instead of answering my question, and she screeched to a halt in front of a red light by a beautiful brick library and a beautiful stone church. I bumped into the dashboard. I hadn't put on a seat belt. “We'll disappear on the subways. New York City is so big, maybe they'll never find us,” she said, and then she banged her fists twice on the steering wheel.

We had ridden the subways before, but I had no idea where we could go. And while Sonja had started thinking about what she wanted to do the minute they told us that Crystal was dead, I was a little nervous about her
maybe
.
Maybe they'll never find us?
Seriously, that was her plan?

We had a lot of cash, because Pavel and Kirill always carried big rolls of money in their pockets. But I guessed we had also made another four thousand dollars in tips. Richard had given me nearly a thousand when we were upstairs. I almost didn't take it because he hadn't let me finish him, but in the end I did. I knew if I didn't, Pavel would have thought I was hiding money from him. He never would have believed that some dude had just decided not to finish. And after they'd killed Crystal, there was no way I was going to risk getting him mad at me. Besides, I had held up my end of deal. I had earned the money. Still, I had felt a little guilty when we were upstairs in the bedroom and he gave me all that cash. But now in the car, when Sonja and I were running who knew where, I was very glad I had it. I was very glad I had all those extra fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Where are we going on the subway?” I asked her when we got to the train station maybe two minutes later.

She didn't answer. “You have the money?” she asked me instead.

“I do.”

“And the gun?”

“Yes.” I knew she had one, too. They were both Makarovs. She had eight rounds in hers—full magazine. I had six left in mine.

When we were on the platform, she pointed at a train schedule under glass. “See?” she said. “See? There will be train in seven minutes.”

“Seven minutes,” I repeated.

“That will fucking teach them,” she said, and she wiped some of the mascara off her cheek. I knew it was running because she was crying, but we had also gotten soaked when we had raced to the car and then a second time when we had climbed the steps to the train platform. Her eyes were red and her makeup was a mess. I was relieved the platform had a roof. “God, I'm glad they're dead. I am so fucking glad they're dead,” she said.

“Tell me: Where are we going?” I was going a little crazy myself not knowing.

She looked at me, but her face was blank behind all that messy makeup. Still, I could tell she had heard me. It was just that she was so lost in her own thoughts that she couldn't answer me that second. And the seven minutes until that train came felt like forever. I kept looking for police cars or one of the cars that we'd seen in Richard's driveway—but I thought a police car was more likely. Those guys from the party were too scared to follow us. They weren't coming. God, one of them was crying when I was getting into my jacket. Another begged me not to shoot him when I put on my skirt. At one point Sonja and I heard a siren when we were waiting on the platform, but to this day I don't know if it was an ambulance or police car. I don't even know if it was going to the party for the bachelor. In the end, no one came after us that night. No one tried to find us. No one came to stop us. In my mind, I saw the men from the party back at the house, and they were staring at Pavel's and Kirill's bodies, and wondering what they were going to do. I saw Richard. Poor sad, sweet Richard.

When Sonja and I had our seats on the train, we made a list of what we had. We had just under eight thousand dollars in cash, which we knew would not last as long as you might think, and we had the credit cards in Pavel's and Kirill's wallets, which we did not believe we could ever use because that would tell people where we were, and we had the two guns and the fourteen bullets inside them. We had that big kitchen knife, but Sonja said she had only brought it because it was evidence. She said she would throw it into a garbage can in the city. (And later she did.)

She turned to me. “Fuck. I left something at the house.”

“We left lots of somethings at the house.”

“No. Something important. A phone number. I hid it inside a condom wrapper.”

“Whose number?”

She put her finger on my lips to shush me. “It will be fine. I can remember enough of the numbers. Trust me. It'll be fine.”

She closed her eyes and tried to look calm. We were the only people in that train car. We knew that later the conductor would tell the police about us, but there was no one else who saw two pretty girls whose makeup was a meltdown disaster.

Sonja, it would turn out, was full of surprises. When we got off the train in New York City, we took the shuttle to the Times Square. There she bought us blue and red knit caps for a New York football team to cover our hair, and sunglasses at a late-night souvenir shop. She bought knapsacks for this football team, handing me one.

Then we went to a twenty-four-hour store and bought two cell phones that were called “prepaid.” She said they were “burners.” We hadn't had cell phones since we had been abducted, but sometimes we'd used Catherine's or Inga's or even one of the men's. So we knew how much they had changed. But I was still impressed that Sonja knew that “burners” were the kind we wanted, because no one would know who we were or where we were. There was no contract, she said. We would use them and throw them away. Then we would buy more. She didn't let me come into the store with her, because she didn't want the man behind the counter to remember seeing two women together. She wore the knit cap but not the sunglasses, since sunglasses after midnight would look suspicious.

“We're going to get hotel rooms—but in two different hotels,” she said. “People will be looking for us together.” She said the knapsacks were so it would look like we were tourists when we checked in, not courtesans hiding from our bosses or police guys.

“We look like schoolgirls,” I said. “Not tourists.”

She thought about this for a second and then said, “We do. Sort of. We look like we're runaway stripper girls, maybe. That's good. If we don't like the hotels, maybe there's a place we can find for runaway girls.”

She was right about how we looked. Schoolgirls don't wear black thigh boots and miniskirts. We hadn't put our stockings and garter belts back on when we left. She was wearing a thong, but neither one of us was wearing a shirt or a blouse under our leather jackets.

“Let's just get off the street,” I said. “Any hotel is good hotel.” I knew they wouldn't be nice places because we weren't going to use Pavel's and Kirill's credit cards. We needed the sort of hotel that would take our cash and wouldn't care who we were. “Okay? I'm really scared.”

“I know, Alexandra dear,” she said. “I am, too.”

“But tell me what you know. I have to know.”

“About Crystal…”

“Yes. About Crystal. Why did they kill her? Why were they going to kill us?”

She looked at one of the huge, blinking video billboards, alive even at this hour of the night. They were crazy hypnotic. Then she turned back to me. “Crystal had dude five days ago who turned out to be police guy.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“I know.”

“But he didn't arrest her?”

She shook her head. “She had him again two days ago. He didn't want sex. He wanted her to help him trap Yulian. Inga. You know, all bosses.”

“They're too smart. Never happen.”

“He promised her she'd be okay. We'd be okay.”

“He was lying. We'd go to jail for sure, too.”

“She believed him.”

“She was crazy then. Crazier than you even.”

“I know. But think of how unhappy she was. Think of how much she wanted out. How she dreamed of being rescued.”

I nodded. I remembered.

“And Yulian had hunch about Crystal. He had Pavel follow police guy second time he came to the town house—after he left. When Pavel told Yulian he had guessed right and dude was police guy, that was it for Crystal.”

“Oh, God.”

“And Crystal had told me all about this! Asked me for my advice. I told her to tell police guy nothing, but she was into him. Believed him. So into him, she offered to wear a wire. Only reason she didn't was because he wouldn't let her. Said that was way too dangerous and she was way too young.”

A part of me thought this was almost funny: Crystal was old enough to fuck American johns but too young to wear a wire. But obviously nothing was really funny to me that night.

“So Yulian—”

“He beat Crystal until she confessed,” she said. “And then…well, you know what they did after that.”

“And you?”

“Police guy never came to me. I hadn't been asked. But Crystal had told me too much, and Pavel had a feeling I hadn't snitched on her. I said I didn't know anything, but he didn't believe me. He said I could no longer be trusted.” She reached out to me and held my arms in her hands. “Look, I don't know for sure they were going to kill you. But I overheard what they were saying about me tonight. It was when they were in kitchen. And if they killed me, how could they not kill you? How?”

This was almost too much news to absorb, and I am smart enough girl that I can absorb a lot. When she felt me shivering the tiniest bit, she rubbed my arms like it was January in Moscow. Then she even gave me a small smile and said, “These blocks have strip clubs.” She let go of me and pointed first at one near where we had bought the knit hats, and then down a street where she said there was another. “And there was also one by the Empire State Building, yes?”

“Yes, uh-huh.”

“Don't worry, Alexandra, we'll make some quick money at those places before we leave.”

“Leave for where?” I asked.

She tucked a lock of her platinum hair under her cap so you couldn't see a single strand. Then she adjusted my cap so you couldn't see any of my hair either.

“Well, we can't go home,” she said. “Not to Volgograd and not to Yerevan.”

“Too much Vasily,” I agreed. Besides, she had no one left in Volgograd and I had no one left in Yerevan. All we had waiting for us in those places was shame.

“That's right.”

“So?”

“So, we are going to Los Angeles. Land of the Bachelor. Land of the Kardashians. We are going to disappear into the most glamorous place on earth.”

All of the men at Philip Chapman's bachelor party had described the two girls to the police, but they had agreed there were no photographs. Not a single one. Spencer Doherty swore that he hadn't taken any pictures. (Did he protest too much? Days later Richard would wonder.)

It wasn't simply that the men had found Pavel and Kirill utterly terrifying—though they did; as drunk as the men were, they were confident that the Russians with their shaved heads really would (worst case) break their fingers or (best case) break their phones if they tried capturing even a single image of either girl or five or ten seconds of video. No, the men kept their phones in their blazers or pants because none wanted to risk banishment from the party; none wanted to risk missing a moment of the girls' performances; none wanted to jeopardize their chance to be taken by the talent to one of the other rooms in Philip's brother-in-law's house. (After reveler Martin Scofield returned to the living room and the blonde had retreated to the bathroom to—yet again—clean up, he told the men in detail how she had finished him off. She was insane, he'd said, she was ravenous; he'd never felt anything like it. After that? The men viewed the suburban living room—the whole house, really—as their own private seraglio. Each fully expected that he, too, would experience a moment of ineffable carnality with one of the girls, an episode that in memory would outlast the innumerable, inexorable indignities of old age, and offer a fodder for tumescence infinitely more powerful than even the bluest of pills.) And so the police sketch artists did what they could, creating one girl with platinum hair and one whose mane was jet black. They did what they could to bring the girls' eyes to life, and capture the fullness of their lips. They tried to add the demure pitch to the nose of the girl who may (or may not) have been named Alexandra, and the slight upturn to the nose of the one who may (or may not) have been called Sonja. But the pictures were, in the end, relatively blunt objects; certainly they failed to convey the way each of the girls moved, a winsome fluidity that was lissome and licentious at once.

“Did they have any birthmarks or moles? Any tattoos?”

No, the men agreed—and this was one of the only things about which they were all in complete agreement—they did not. Their skin was flawless. Unsullied by either imperfection or ink.

Thursday morning when Richard woke up, he found a text from Spencer waiting for him on his phone.

So, how are you doing, buddy? Want to talk? I'm thinking of you and your family and your future at that bank of yours.

There was not a word in it that would look incriminating in a court of law, or appear even mildly threatening. But Richard understood perfectly well the subtext beneath the text.

It was degrading. Kristin knew what she was doing was degrading. But her nerves were frayed and her equilibrium was in shambles. Her self-esteem was in shambles. She knew this was a bad idea—no, this was a terrible idea—but she was incapable of stopping herself. She emerged from the master bathroom shower Thursday morning, toweled herself off, and then stood stark naked before the full-length mirror in the adjacent bedroom. Her and Richard's bedroom. She studied her body with pitiless, hardhearted eyes, finding only the ways it had been diminished by age, methodically ratcheting up the self-hatred. She was forty, and while she knew that forty was not old, it also was not twenty. She believed she was still pretty…but was she now only pretty for forty? (She heard the cultural ageism in that question, and chastised herself. But she also knew that she couldn't transcend aesthetic preconceptions any more than her breasts could transcend gravity.) She stared for a long moment at her nipples, objectifying and then loathing them. She had a hint of rib, but did she need a hint more? She examined the crease of her lips, the slope of her nose. She ran her fingers over her cheekbones. She cringed when she saw that she needed a bikini wax—and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn't the pain. It was the whole idea that she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.

She needed to spend more time at the gym. She needed a different lipstick. She needed…

She needed, she told herself, to get dressed. And so she did, but the damage to her psyche had been done.

She had read articles over the years about a man's supposed biologic craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe. But the idea of Richard desiring a woman perhaps less than half his age—half
their
age—was at once appalling and infuriating. She thought of a line from Nabokov: “Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”
Lolita.
In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage—not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren't pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn't Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game. She—a forty-year-old female history teacher—may not yet have morphed into Shelley Winters, but it was getting harder and harder to compete with the real-life Lolitas of the world.

Yet men's tastes in pornography weren't really the issue, were they? It was one thing for a middle-aged man to access his inner ninth grader and lust after a porn star on his tablet or TV screen; it was quite another to bring a prostitute (or, far sadder, a sex slave) upstairs in this very house. Some lines were more blurred than others—at the word
blurred,
her mind conjured an appalling music video from a few years back—but the line between lusting after a porn star and fucking an escort was clear. Berlin Wall clear.

When she was dressed, she sat on the bed to put on her shoes. She had grabbed a pair of modest heels today from her closet. She wondered if this was how the girl had sat before her husband last Friday night on another bed in another room just down the hall. She saw the girl vividly in her mind. Her insouciance. Her mouth, half open with carefully feigned desire. Her youth. She closed her eyes, wishing her imagination were impervious to pain.

Nicole stirred the berries and granola in her yogurt parfait. She was nauseous, sick with loss and despair, but she felt that she had to order something. Across the booth (thank God he had gotten a booth, she had thought when she first arrived, and thank God he had arrived before her), Philip was wolfing his western omelet as if he hadn't eaten in days. She feared he had missed all the signals she had offered since she had gotten to the restaurant. He had stood and embraced her, apologizing with uncharacteristic zeal, and she had not lifted her arms to hug him back. He had tried to peer into her eyes in a way he almost never did—with an earnestness that suggested he was not simply hearing whatever she had to say, he was listening—and she had looked down at the toes of her boots. He had offered to take her jacket and hold it for her while she had slid into her side of the booth, and she had replied that she would be more comfortable keeping it on. She glanced down at the engagement ring since she knew this was the last time she was ever going to see it.

“It was a nightmare,” Philip was saying now. “You can't imagine how awful it was to see that crazy bitch stabbing the Russian dude. I will never be able to scrub that image from my eyes. Never. We thought she was going to try and kill one of us next.”

She wasn't completely surprised that he was trying to elicit her sympathy. And, the truth was, she knew that it must have been terrifying.

“And then we heard the gunshots, and that's when we thought we were all going to get killed. I mean, Chuck Alcott fell to the floor, just sobbing—sobbing!—like a baby. And I know I ducked.”

“You ducked.”

He sipped his coffee and nodded as he swallowed. “Maybe more than ducked. You know, it was a reflex. I knelt behind the couch.”

She assumed that
knelt
was a euphemism.
Knelt
suggested a gradual descent and some premeditation. She was pretty sure that even
duck
was a euphemism: it was likely that he had thrown himself to the floor as if someone had tossed a hand grenade into the room.

“I mean, guns and knives at what was supposed to be a harmless bachelor party?” he added. “That's nuts!”

She agreed that it must have been horrifying for him to have witnessed the murder of the two bodyguards, but there was never anything harmless about this bachelor party. And so she told him precisely that.

“Look, I know it got a little out of control,” he said. “We all drank too much. But you know how sorry I am, right? I wouldn't have told you if I wasn't sorry and knew I could assure you that I would never, ever do something like that again.”

“You only told me because you got caught,” she countered.

He held his fork as if it were a pointer and glanced at the tines. There was a bit of yellow egg there. “But I know we can get past this. I know I can.”

She wanted to say,
Well, that's big of you.
But she still hoped she could remain above sarcasm. She wanted only candor in this final breakfast. “I can't,” she said instead.

“And what does that mean?”

“It means…it means a lot of things. It's not just about trust, and how that's gone. I kept hoping you'd grow up or expecting you'd grow up or believing you'd grow up. And that's crazy on my part. Because you won't. I used to love that little boy in you. But now that little boy is just a horny teenager who wants his women to be skanky girls gone wild. Beautiful things with eating disorders.”

“Not you. You know how much I respect you.”

“And yet you stare at other women on the street. You really think I don't notice?”

“I'm a guy. It's how I'm hardwired. If it bothers you, I'll stop. I usually only do it when some woman is dressed, I don't know, provocatively.”

“If it bothers me? Really? It never crossed your mind that I might not want you ogling some other girl's ass?”

“I'm not perfect, I know that. I'm not my brother, I'm not—”

“I'm not sure that your brother is much better.”

“You would be in the minority thinking that.”

She dropped her spoon onto the white plate with the parfait glass, embarrassed by how much noise it made. “Damn it, Philip, this is not about your sibling issues!”

“I'm sorry.”

She could feel people in the restaurant watching them. She could sense Philip's fear that she was about to make a scene. She hadn't wanted to make a scene; she certainly hadn't planned that she would. But at this point? It didn't matter. What mattered was that if anything good had come from that appalling debauch at his brother's, it was this: she had (and the ghoulish irony of the expression was not lost on her) dodged a bullet.

“How dare you say, ‘I can get past it,' as if that means you're such a big person or you're better than me? How dare you! It really doesn't matter if you can get past it. I can't,” she said, and she was crying, her voice a little lost in her sniffles, but she didn't care. She didn't care at all. She stood and lifted her purse over her shoulder and held out her left hand. Then, with her right, she pulled the engagement ring off her finger and—as he was standing, reaching out to her, imploring her to stop, to think, to not throw away all that they had—she tossed it onto the table. It bounced onto the floor, and Philip fell to his hands and knees—dove, as a matter of fact—after it. As far as she knew, he never followed her out the door or tried to catch her, because she never looked back.

Later that morning, Richard reassured his younger brother that Nicole might change her mind in a few weeks or a few months. But he didn't believe it. He only said she might because he felt he had to say something, and he couldn't quite read the tone of his brother's voice on the phone. But the wedding clearly was off. That part of the conversation was brief and, it seemed, almost rote. It was as if Philip had grown accustomed to the news, bad as it was, and in hours had jumped four stages to acceptance. In truth, Richard wasn't surprised that Nicole was leaving him before they could even get to the altar; Kristin, he surmised, would have done exactly the same thing. Any woman with even a teaspoon of self-respect would. Nevertheless, he felt bad for his brother. It seemed the collateral damage from Friday night was only getting worse for everyone.

“Are you weirded out that all those Russian dudes made bail?” Philip asked him suddenly.

“They didn't all make bail,” he answered carefully.

“Okay, most. I find it amazing that one was the guy who Spencer used to talk to on the telephone when he was lining up the girls.”

“You do hang with an impressive crowd,” he said. He still hadn't decided whether to tell Philip what his despicable friend was doing and enlist his help. He guessed this was because he suspected, in the end, he was going to pay the guy off. Maybe after he had written the check or transferred the money he would rat Spencer out. Inform Philip that his friend was a dirtbag. But he kept coming back to the reality that there was no guarantee Spencer wouldn't keep coming back for more, which was one of the reasons why he hadn't called his portfolio manager and moved around some money already.

“The guy was just a voice on the line,” Philip was saying. “They never met.”

“Next time, Philip? Tell him to just use Craigslist, okay?”

“Yeah, that's a deal,” his brother agreed, though Richard would have preferred that Philip had said there wouldn't be a next time. Then: “Spencer is fucking terrified. He just can't believe those guys are back on the street.”