I paused, hoping for an outcry from Rainier Cowles or Jarvis MacLean, but they were holding themselves still. Squinting through the spotlight, I saw Gilbert Scalia half start to his feet, but Cowles pulled him back down.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Off to one side, I saw my cousin’s unmistakable spiked hair. She was helping wait tables.
Well, boys and girls, you can imagine how happy-or not-the sprouting-corn company was to see this story going round the blogosphere. The company was making out like bandits, selling the Army sand-filled armor instead of the real deal. They began having corporate meetings, the kind where they muttered, “Can no one rid us of this meddlesome vet?” They didn’t know what to do. Then Fate intervened and played a rotten trick on the soldier.
You see, once upon the same time that our soldier was serving his country, there were three sisters who all shared a bedroom in a bungalow on Chicago’s South Side. Unlike Cinderella, or other fairy tales about sisters, these girls loved each another. Sure, they argued, as sisters do, but each was more beautiful than the other, and each worked hard to help the other two. They had one brother who laughed with them and kidded them and made them feel special the way a good brother can. The oldest sister was called Alexandra, the middle sister was named Nadia, and the baby, we’ll call her Clara, the bright one.
The Guaman sisters’ faces were flashing on the giant TV screens.
The eldest sister led the way for the younger two, going to a good prep school and off to college. She took a job at the same company that made the Achilles shield.
The world should have been golden to Alexandra, but she had a secret that weighed heavily on her, and that was the secret of her sexuality. Her priest told her to go to Iraq because her company had high-paying jobs in the war zone. She could start a new life there, a life untroubled by what her priest told her were her sinful desires.
Alexandra obeyed him, but, for better or worse, she made friends with an Iraqi woman, who found a small room, with a date tree outside the window, where they could leave the atmosphere of war and occupation behind and sometimes just rest and pretend they lived in peace.
But Alexandra’s coworkers harassed her over her friendship with a local woman. And her boss, who tried to assault her, was furious that she turned him down.
The day came when men in her office took Alexandra away and raped her. Perhaps their assault got out of control, or perhaps they thought they needed to silence her. Whatever the reason, they strangled her. They then set her on fire so they could pretend to her bereaved parents that she had been killed by an Iraqi bomb.
The company sent her home and told her parents she was so badly damaged by fire that they should not look at their dead daughter’s body. But a military pathologist had seen Alexandra after her death, and he could read the story of her murder by the marks on her body. His conscience gave him no rest until he wrote her parents. You can imagine their shock. You can imagine the phone calls they made to the people for whom their daughter had worked. And these people told the parents that they would pay them a lot of money if they never mentioned Alexandra’s name again in public.
The screens were showing battle scenes and then a drawing Rivka had made of Alexandra and Amani, sitting under a date tree. On the left screen, Captain Walker’s autopsy report was displayed, slowly, paragraph by paragraph.
“No!” Lazar Guaman was on his feet. “You cannot speak like this about Allie. She was not that kind of girl. She was a saint on this earth!”
Tim Radke was at his side, arguing with him, but Lazar was frantic.
“They murdered her-yes, it’s true, the Tintrey people murdered her-but this woman, this whore, standing in front of you, she is telling you lies-all lies-about our blessed one.”
A hubbub broke out in the audience. People began repeating Lazar’s words, began realizing they were hearing a true story. Beth Blacksin from Global Entertainment tried to get a mike in front of Lazar’s face. Murray Ryerson had spotted Rainier Cowles with the Tintrey execs. He leaned over them with his cell phone.
“But what happened?” a woman cried from one of the side tables. “What happened to the soldier?”
In the shadows, the Raving Raven began playing “He Had It Comin’,” from Chicago. She sang at full volume until the uproar subsided to a buzz. When I began speaking again, she lowered her sound so that it became part of the background.
My naked body under a spotlight, a perfect target, nothing between my heart and a bullet but a layer of paint. My palms turned wet, and sweat began to seep down my neck from my lacquered scalp.
Nadia, the second sister, and the angry soldier ended up at the same nightclub, the nightclub where the Body Artist was performing. Poor things: each thought the other was spying. The sister thought the soldier was a spy from the company, checking to see if she’d violated their order not to talk about Alexandra in public. The soldier thought the sister was a spy for the armor maker, checking to see what he was saying about their body armor.
Ever since our soldier wrote in his blog about the defective body armor his outfit had been given, the manufacturer had kept track of him. Because they had the highest level of clearance, they had access to the Defense Department’s most advanced technology. It was a piece of cake for them to go into people’s computers and erase their websites or their blogs. That’s what they did to our soldier: erased his blog.
The company heard how enraged our soldier became every time Nadia painted their logo on the Body Artist. So they worked out a sweet plan: Kill the sister, frame the angry soldier, give him roofies, and make it look like he committed suicide out of remorse.
And where do you get roofies when you need them? You go to your local drug dealer, to the Body Artist. The Artist was working for a notorious mobster, letting him use her body to send messages to his team of thugs. She’d made a name for herself years ago on the North Shore as drug dealer to the rich and famous, the rich and notorious. When someone came to her asking for Rohypnol, the date rape drug, she knew just where to send them.
“No, you ignorant bitch!” The shout came from the back of the room. “I never gave anyone drugs. You know nothing about me. If they wanted drugs, they wouldn’t come to me, they’d go to the source. They’d go to Anton. Ask him! Ask him how he treated his own daughter!”
The room was briefly silent, and Rivka’s voice rose from somewhere near the bar, “Karen! Karen! It’s me, Rivka. Where are you, oh, don’t go away!”
The audience erupted into noise. I shielded my eyes from the spotlight, but could make out only shadows of people rising from their seats, necks craning. I saw Murray’s unmistakable bulk trying to carve a path through the crowd toward where Karen had been standing. I hoped one of the Streeter brothers would make sure she stayed in the bar until I could talk to her.
Above the roar, I heard a louder roar, the unmistakable sound of a gun, and glass shattering. A second shot, and then screams. In the small space the sounds echoed and bounced from the glassware hanging over the bar; I couldn’t tell where the shots had been fired, but the screams had come from the back of the room, where I’d heard Karen’s voice. Rodney or Anton, they must have tried to kill her. I forgot I was naked. I ran into the crowd, tried to muscle my way toward where Karen/ Frannie had been standing, but my painted body was slippery, and I couldn’t make any headway.
Another shot sounded, so close to me I knew at once it had come from my left. I whipped around and saw a cloud of smoke rising near where the group from Tintrey had been sitting. I managed to push through to their table.
Rainier Cowles was slumped in his chair, blood pouring down his back. His tablemates sat frozen, their eyes on Lazar Guaman, who was pointing a gun at Jarvis MacLean.