The Wonders (28 page)

I
T HAD BEEN
an uneventful booth show, the third from last, in a newly built venue next to a shopping mall in the Brazilian capital. Eight hundred audience members already fizzing with excitement from the circus, charging around the booths, dropping their sweets and popcorn and drips of sauce and trampling them into the sawdust floor. To the Wonders it was the same old show, same old music, same old awe and astonishment. In the final scene, Christos cut short his performance by thirty-two seconds and left the tech fumbling with the sound and lighting and projections to bring the show to a close without its being obvious that they'd messed up. Back in the dressing room, Kathryn stomped around on the glossy parquetry.

“Call yourself an artist, Christos? You think these people don't deserve a proper performance? Or do you only care about some art collector in fecking Soho?”

“I don't care about any of them. And you don't either. You hate them. You said so last night. You said they are stupid shits who'd pay to see a turd if it was celebrity endorsed.”

Leon laughed. He loved Kathryn's smart mouth—when it wasn't used on him. That was exactly what she had said the night before at the rooftop restaurant in the hotel as they looked out over the sleek modernist buildings of Brasília. They were squabbling and toying with their food. They had seen enough of the world, at least the world they inhabited, one of vectors and passages and windows. Enough of bird's-eye views from the top floors of hotels. Enough of countries where the language meant nothing and the food tasted too fruity or too fatty or too thin or of nothing but dusty old spices. And enough of each other.

Christos had thrown four tantrums in a month about trivialities: whole milk instead of half-and-half; the width of the seats on their private jet; Yuri's failure to master English grammar; Kathryn's noisy heels on the floors at Overington. Furious, Kathryn had ordered forty pairs of wooden Swedish clogs delivered to Christos's apartment. Christos responded by hiring a bouzouki orchestra to play in the common room for five hours. When Rhona arrived home to find Christos and Kathryn shouting at each other over the music, she joined in the yelling herself. After a house meeting, where she once again explained the penalties in the fine print of the contracts that meant that early departure or expulsion from the Wonders would result in a massive depletion of percentages, they settled into an uneasy truce.

At night Leon and Minh lay in the quiet darkness whispering about what was to come for each of them. Minh wasn't worried about Christos, who reminded her of the spoiled proud boy children of her neighborhood when she was growing up. “Those little kings,” she said to Leon. “Someone always picks up after them.”

But Kathryn was her best friend, and as the end of the Wonders drew closer, Minh had begun to talk about Kathryn's plan.
What was the point of buying a Caribbean island if you had to live on it by yourself? Kathryn's wool had lost its glossy sheen. She often finished dinner early if they were dining together, or got up and left the room in the middle of group conversations. Between shows she threw herself into long bouts of reading where nothing could penetrate her concentration. She was the most famous woman on the planet, and she was preparing to become the most alone.

Over their time together, Leon had gradually learned something of how the scar lines streaked through Kathryn like damaged nerve sheaths. He was better at avoiding the sensitive places, the words, the emotional bruises that made her flinch. He had grown used to her sharp edges, her funny lines—“Don't try to fool me, Leon, I can see right through you.” She had always been determined to puncture the fast-inflating bubble of their self-importance. “We are the humans where you can see the seams. It's like looking at those deepwater fish that are transparent and have odd protuberances from their heads.” When she'd said that, Kathryn had glanced slyly at Minh, then put on a fake posh accent. “Protuberances, there's another one of those wonderful words. Like Christos's wings. Do you think he'd appreciate that title—the Magnificent Christos and his Protuberances.” The three of them split into laughter.

“I want to ask her to come with us myself,” Leon had said to Minh before the Wonders left for the South American tour. “She knows you want her to. If I ask, she'll know we both do.” Kathryn's whole life had been shot through with threads of pain and betrayal—perhaps their home could be her sanctuary.

In the dressing room of the Brazilian auditorium, Kathryn swiveled on the parquetry floor, soles scraping with the resin Yuri had put on all their shoes to prevent slipping.

“Well, they pay to see us, and we are celebrity-endorsed turds. So fuck you, Christos. Just shut up, will you?”

As she disappeared into the bathroom to clean off her makeup, Christos and Yuri snapped shut their equipment cases and called the escort guards. Leon quickly changed into clean clothes and packed his costume into a pull-along suitcase.

“Let's go!” Christos shouted through the bathroom door at Kathryn. “Hurry up!”

Leon was impatient to get moving too. Tonight they would fly home to Overington, where the final plans for the house he and Minh were having built in Australia would be waiting.

Kathryn emerged from the bathroom with a shiny face, wearing her velvet traveling cape. She handed her bag to the security guard and wheeled around to face Christos.

“Oh, you're still here. Shouldn't you be striding ahead in the vanguard of the art movement?”

The group of six headed out of the dressing room and along the corridor. Christos and Yuri hurried alongside the guard at the head, Leon trundled his case along in the middle and Kathryn and the rear security guard walked behind. The head guard opened a door in the wall and they slipped into a service corridor, descended two flights of stairs and found themselves in a winding tunnel that ran below the shopping mall. At regular intervals they passed cleaning stations and other tunnels leading further into the bowels of the complex. Leon had his head down as he followed Christos and Yuri, pulling the case behind him and hearing the irregular rumble of the wheels as they rode the bumps of the concrete flooring. His signature tune was repeating relentlessly in his head, and he tried to oust it by humming snatches of pop tunes from his teen years. Anything to get rid of that melody. It was only after minutes of trying song after song that he realized he could no longer hear the clicking of Kathryn's heels behind him.

For a moment everything became supercharged. He smelled a whiff of cleaning fluid and another of cooked meat. He heard the distant clatter of a cleaning cart and voices from a corridor far away. He noticed how dimly lit the space was. A chilly draft curled around his ankles. He turned and saw only an empty tunnel behind him.

“Kathryn?” he called.

The concrete whispered with a sound like falling scree. Kathryn didn't reply. He called her name again, and his voice rattled around the walls. They had turned a corner about three hundred feet before. Leon dropped the handle of his case and ran back. He turned the corner. Nothing. He pressed his hand to his chest. Running without warming up made him instantly breathless and panicky. He called Christos and Yuri.

Further inside the tunnel, beyond another bend, they found the security guard slumped unconscious on the floor near a junction, a hypodermic sticking from his leg. Three more corridors led off from the junction.

There was no sound apart from the clanking and rumbling of the workings of the complex. Leon found himself gasping for breath. Yuri was silent and wide-eyed, staring at the guard on the floor. Christos strode from entrance to entrance in each tunnel, calling Kathryn's name. The remaining security guard had run off along one of the corridors where he thought he had heard a cry. No one else had heard it. She was gone.

The message came later that night. It told Rhona to go home to the US, to wait for instructions, to tell no one. Kathryn had been taken.

L
EON PRESSED THE
Play
arrow again.

The room had a low ceiling and scuffed cream paintwork. A metal-framed camp bed was pushed against the rear wall. A kitchen chair with turned legs and a brightly patterned orange-and-yellow flat cushion sat at the end of the bed. Under the bed was a green plastic bucket. A soiled pillow and rumpled sheet lay on top of the bed. Leon looked at that sheet and he felt terror that Kathryn would think of how to use it to escape from hell.

The room was shadowy from the poor lighting.

Kathryn sat on the bed, head bowed. She was draped in a length of dirty red brocade curtain material that might have been torn from a decaying mansion. A dull gleam at her ankle indicated a manacle attached to a chain that led to an eyebolt in the wall beside the camp bed.

A voice spoke from behind the camera. “Tell them you are being treated well.” The voice was electronically transformed into menacing digital dictation.

She didn't respond. The camera operator zoomed the camera in spasms until her bowed head filled the frame.

“Look at the camera.”

She didn't move. A black object appeared in the frame, pushed past her shoulder and prodded her neck. She convulsed. The brocade covering fell from her head and shoulders. She couldn't have lost weight in such a short time, but her shoulders seemed bony and fragile under the wool.

Kathryn looked up after she had been shocked with the electric prod. Her eyes were heavy lidded and bloodshot and focused on a point behind the camera.

A male voice, accented, from another part of the room. “I thought you would have horns under that hat.”

“You're a fecking idiot.”

The robotic voice from behind the camera told the other speaker to be quiet, then grunted. It grunted as if the owner of the voice was exasperated by this woman he had kidnapped and was holding captive. When Rhona heard that grunt as they watched the footage for the first time, Leon saw her face shift as if a magic cloth had been smoothed across her features. Her rage and fear and helplessness froze into an icy mask.

On the screen, two men in loose gray cloth masks moved to stand either side of Kathryn. The scraping and shuffling of their boots on the concrete floor gave the scene an incongruous atmosphere of banality. One of them accidentally brushed Kathryn's woolly shoulder with his hand and he recoiled, shaking his hand and wiping it against his trouser leg.

Someone off camera passed the two hooded men, or boys they might have been from the way they moved, a pair of rubber gloves each. As they snapped the thin translucent gloves onto their hands, a puff of white talc rose from their wrists.

Kathryn stared ahead. She was motionless except for her
shuddering, which had been intensifying over the course of the footage and was now causing the metal feet of the camp bed to jitter against the concrete floor.

The gloved hands took hold of her upper arms and lifted her to a standing position. Still she refused to look at the camera. The camera panned up and down her body. Her feet were bare and childlike. Leon rarely saw her in bare feet. She always wore those frivolous slippers or high heels.

“She is not harmed,” the robotic voice said.

This was the ninth time Leon had watched. Each time he saw a new detail. The eighth time he noticed a flicker of the light, not enough to be called a shadow. The almost imperceptible flicker hinted at more people moving around the room out of the camera's visual field. On this ninth viewing he became aware that the man on the right had a way of standing that made him look as if he had himself been beaten. A closure of the shoulders. A hollowing of the chest. The chin thrust toward the breastbone. He imagined that if he watched the film enough times, he would hear a noise, or see a blur of old writing on the wall, or recognize the pattern on a woven blanket. There would be a sign belonging to a small town or a foodstuff that identified a specific region. The reprieve that always happened on TV.

When he finally went to bed, he lay dreaming about how this would happen, then pulling himself up, then drifting into reveries of detection and rescue. Each time he caught himself fantasizing about discovering a clue or working out a pattern that could reveal her location, he writhed in shame, twisting the sweaty sheets around his thrashing legs in the dark, waking Minh and apologizing and trying to lie still even though he wanted to shout and rip holes in the sheets. He lay rigid in the long dark of the night wishing he had turned around during the walk through the underground tunnels of that shopping
center. Wishing he hadn't been humming to himself, hadn't been caught up, as always, in his solipsistic meanderings. Hadn't he learned from Minh that the story of his life did not always revolve around him?

Minh cried as she told him the next morning that she had dreamed Kathryn was nearby, and that Minh was following the high sharp note of Kathryn's keening out from the tunnels of the center, through the streets and alleyways of a dark city.