She lay in bed with her eyes open. The sun penetrated the drawn blinds in her bedroom, spilling little slashes of sunlight across the room. The clock at her bedside said 9:12 a.m.
Her stomach churned. Her nerves wouldn’t settle. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes. Then, next to her in her bed, she was aware of light snoring.
Oh, yeah. She was married.
Beside her, Rocco, her husband, slept fitfully. She had arrived home before he did in the early morning hours, and he had crawled into bed next to her.
Not unusual. Rocco was a musician, a guitarist for a techno-pop band that had a modest following around the city. He often came poling in shortly before dawn, usually smelling of sweat, booze, and cigarettes, sometimes smelling of cheap perfume, but never smelling of nothing. He would set the clock radio in their bedroom for 2:00 p.m. the following afternoon. He would set it LOUD with a heavy metal American CD. The intense volume of music was the only thing that could rouse him.
Whatever. Constanza had given up caring and always made plans to be out of the apartment when the music blasted on. She and Rocco had been married for four years and had started to go their separate ways. He was particularly repulsive, she had come to learn, when he crawled out of bed in the early afternoon after his usual night of debauchery. So she arranged each day to miss those golden moments.
She edged up in bed and looked at him. How could she ever have made such a mistake? She could only see half his head since he was facing away from her. But that was enough. Dark, dirty hair. No shirt. Unshaven for a week.
She sighed. Her head pounded. What a life. There was a time when she had been philosophical about it. No matter where you are, there you are. Recently, however, she had become more proactive about her fate.
Her future: she decided she wanted to have one.
Extra work. Specialty jobs. Some significant income on the side. Like the previous night. Stash some money, put together enough to take off. Make sure she had a passport that was good to go on a moment’s notice-or more than one passport if she could work it right. Make sure no one could ever find her. She could start again under a new name. After all, some bad people might come looking for her.
Maybe she could even get to America. She had heard that in the cities of the United States a woman could pay off certain priests and get a marriage annulled. Well, she decided, she would do that and find a way to stay in America.
It would be a new life, and it would be all hers.
But first, that horrible headache, the one that threatened to define the new day.
The buzz in her head graduated to a full firestorm. Time to go proactive on that too.
She had some Vicodin stashed in her purse, thanks to an amateur pharmacist she knew from some of the clubs. The Vike and a Red Bull would get the day off to a good start.
Got to get up. Got to get moving.
A few more weeks and she’d be out of this nightmare.
She rose. Above her bed, a halfwit movie poster in Swedish, not even framed, just tacked to the wall to cover some cracks and peeling paint.
Cheech and Chong-de korsikanska bröderna.
She eyed the poster in anger. Stuff like that had destroyed her life. Set her on the wrong path. Well, not much longer. Not much longer.
She stepped over her dress and shoes from the night before. She lurched uncomfortably into the bathroom, stared at herself in the mirror and winced. She looked awful and felt worse. But her life was a mess. She took her clothes off and turned on the shower.
She walked to the next room. She was in the habit of stashing her purse somewhere so that her husband wouldn’t filch money. Her head was hurting badly. Where had she hidden the purse this time? It took a moment to remember.
Then she found it. It had been under a pile of shoes in the front closet.
She found the Vicodin. She went to the refrigerator and found the Red Bull.
So far, so good.
On the kitchen counter, she found some bread. It was yesterday’s, half a loaf of good stuff from the corner panetteria. But it was unwrapped and half stale. Her pig of a husband must have come in late with the post-gig munchies. You’d think he could at least rewrap the food. But no.
She had given up complaining. On the walls of the apartment were several pictures of her a few years earlier when her career as a model had been taking off. Print ads in glossy magazines. Her on the runways of Rome. For two years, everything had been crackling with excitement. Then it all crashed, about the time she met Rocco and started spending too much time out late. She started to look too tired and dissipated for morning shoots. The business went away to younger, thinner, fresher girls. It never came back. Now, as she stood in her apartment surrounded by the glossy ghosts of the recent past, all she wanted was to get out, which was what the income on the side was all about.
There was a soft knock on the apartment door. The sound startled her. Everything startled her these days. She kept still. Then the soft knocking came again, followed by a familiar voice in accented Italian.
“Constanza, ci sei?” Constanza, are you there?
She recognized the voice. She moved to the door. The last thing she wanted was for one of her butch male friends to wake her husband. There would be explaining that she didn’t wish to do, plus arguments and sour recriminations. Fortunately, Rocco slept through early mornings as if he were hibernating.
She leaned to the door.
She peeked through the eyehole. Two male figures shifting nervously, an empty hallway behind them. One with a twitchy left eye, one in wraparound shades. They must have slipped by the old woman, Masiella, who kept guard downstairs. Masiella was deaf as a doorknob and not much smarter.
“Eccomi,” she answered. “I’m here.”
Twitchy Eye switched to English. “Open us the door. We have you the money,” he said. Twitchy was a good-looking guy, but he spoke no language perfectly.
“Let me get my robe,” she said, her voice very low.
She quickstepped into the bathroom where the warm water continued to run in the shower. She found a robe and pulled it on, tying the sash around her waist.
She returned to the door, turned the bolts, undid a chain, and unlocked it.
Two men stepped in. She embraced the first one, Twitchy Eye. The second man shut the door. “Anyone else here?” the first man asked. “
My husband,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “He’s sleeping.”
The nervous eye was on overdrive now, blinking, twitching, worse than she had ever seen it. He gave the second man a nod. “Okay,” he said.
“So? Where’s my money?” Constanza asked.
“Don’t be so anxious,” he said. And she saw him give a slight nod to the second man. Then he turned back to her. “It’s in my pocket,” he said, indicating to a spot within his jacket. “Give me a kiss first.”
She glanced as he beckoned to his jacket, open to show a black and white camo T-shirt that showed off the muscles of his chest. She also saw he was wearing a gun, not unusual. And he had an envelope, as promised, in his inside pocket.
She grinned slightly. She saw what she wanted. She saw, in fact, a great deal of what she wanted in comparison to the geeky husband who slumbered noisily in the next room. Well, today she would have to content herself with the denaro, the cinquecento dollari that she had been promised. Five hundred bucks of blood money.
She leaned to him and reached in, bringing her body close to his. The man leaned forward to savor the closeness and the scent of her body. She winked at him as she reached into his coat. Why not? They had been lovers once recently, though no one else knew that. Flirtatiously, he planted a gentle kiss on the lips, something she did not resist.
Then he did something rougher than usual and something that was highly unexpected.