“You’re aware,” I said, “that people think you had your father done.”
“Sure,” she said. “And I let them. I’m a girl, remember? Everybody figured I was going to be Miss Valentine, the sweetheart of the underworld. So I took the blame, and it made a lot of people afraid of me, people who wouldn’t have been afraid of me otherwise. It was useful.”
“And I might be up against the guy who had your father killed.”
She drew a square on the surface of the table with a carnelian-tipped index finger. “Believe me,” she said, “I never thought it would get to this point.” She erased the imaginary square with her palm and offered me a slender smile. “And maybe it won’t.”
“Whether it does or not, here’s the problem. I’m only one guy. I haven’t got a squad I can deploy. I can check out your ex, or I can stick with Thistle. I can’t do both. And I can’t protect this whole movie, although I’m pretty sure that Thistle is the obvious target.”
“She’s the only indispensable element.” Trey said.
“But you’ve got resources,” I said. “It’s just you and me here, and nobody else is listening. Why don’t you kill somebody?”
She didn’t look surprised, although she let a three-heartbeat pause go by before answering. “Kill whom? If I put Tony under, I’m the first place the cops will look. Lots of public rancor there, wrangling over assets, the whole mess.”
“Somebody close to him. Somebody you think might be working for him, helping with this. Send a message right back, let them know that the film is not to be fucked with.”
“Aren’t you the cold one? Kill this one, kill that one. I thought you were a burglar, not a hitman.”
“They killed a friend of mine. Somebody’s probably going to die for that, anyway.”
“I see,” she said. “But it’ll wait until you have some time on your hands.”
“It might, it might not. So what about it? There’s nothing like a well-placed bullet for getting people’s attention.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m supposed to be turning my back on all that. Kicking it off with a murder seems inconsistent, to say the least.”
“Just a thought.” I got up. “By the way, as long as we’re talking, you know that this movie isn’t good for Thistle.”
“That’s on my conscience, not yours.” She stood as well. “And listen. Underneath all the dope and the psychic wreckage, Thistle may be a perfectly nice girl. I admit that. You might be right about her. And you know what? That’s too bad. For my purposes, she’s irreplaceable. She did to the whole world what Tony did to me. Hundreds of millions of people bought into what she was selling, and she blew them off. She’s my primary asset here. I’m deadly serious about protecting her, up to the point where it endangers her making the movie. Don’t make any mistakes about that.”
“Noted,” I said.
“And as you said, as long as we’re talking, I think you have a problem with women. You sympathize with Thistle in a way you wouldn’t if she were male. And you don’t take me as seriously as you would if I’d been my father’s son instead of his daughter. But I’m telling you now. I am every bit as dangerous as my father was. And if you find yourself torn between taking care of Thistle or taking care of me, just remember that I’m an Annunziato, and we don’t deal well with betrayal. Is that clear?”
“Transparent.”
“Your job is to help me get this movie done, no matter what you think about it. Understand?”
“No one would accuse you of ambiguity.”
“When it’s all over, we’ll sit down and discuss things.” She smiled and put a hand on my upper arm. “We can probably wind up friends, as hard as that may be to believe right now.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “A man can always use a friend.”
25
Her hand in mine was a surprise.
Trey had commandeered a large screening room for the press conference. It seated maybe forty people, and from the sound of it, it was jammed. We could hear the hubbub the moment we opened the door into the backstage area, a jumble of voices like a crowd scene in an old radio show.
The moment she heard them, Thistle reached over and grabbed my hand. Her palm was damp and her hand was as small as a child’s.
It was dark backstage, but there was a spill of light from the proscenium, which was brighter than the equator at high noon. We came in stage left, about ten feet from the brilliant stage, and the first things I saw were two sixty-inch flat-screen TVs with a tall wood-and-canvas director’s chair dead center between them. The chair was on the monitors, too. And then I saw the five gigantic blow-ups of Thistle, taken when she was fourteen or fifteen, propped up on easels. Judging from their underexposure and general graininess, they were probably blowups from video. Technically they were a mess, but their message was clear, and it was sick enough to stop Thistle in her tracks.
“How could she?”
“She’s smart, Thistle. She knows what her visual is. You, talking about doing this kind of a movie, in front of those pictures.”
She was shifting from foot to foot, still hanging onto my hand. “I can’t. I can’t go out there. Not with those.”
I thought, the hell with it. I gave her hand a tug. “Good. Let’s go.”
“But she’ll fire me. I need-I need that money.”
“She can’t fire you. If she fires you, she hasn’t got a movie.”
She put both hands over mine, squeezing hard. “She will. She’s using this to figure out whether I’m going to do what she wants me to do. If I don’t go out there, I won’t get anything.”
“Thistle. Listen to me. I’m working for her. It’s my job to make sure she gets this movie done. But I’m telling you that this isn’t worth a couple hundred thousand. Let’s go.”
“I can’t. It’s not … you don’t know. I can’t even pay my rent.”
“I’ll pay your fucking rent.”
“What, for the rest of my life? Are you hearing yourself?” She dropped my hand and turned away from me, the carefully brushed hair catching fire in the light from the stage. She put both hands on top of her head, one atop the other, palms down. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Oh, I am so fatally fucked.” One hand dropped to her stomach. “I don’t feel good.”
“Come on. We’ll get out of here and think about this later.”
“Later. Later. There isn’t any later. This is later. Before is over, it ended a long time ago, and this is where I am. Oh, God, look at those dickheads out there. I need a wastebasket.”
I didn’t see one, but there was a fire bucket against one wall, and I said, “Over there,” and Thistle ran to it, bent over, and vomited. She heaved until there wasn’t anything left, and all I could do was watch the spasms rack her narrow shoulders and listen to her cough as she tried to bring up more. The cough turned into a sob and then two and then three, her body forcing them out as though something massive was squeezing her, and I thought she was going to lose it completely, but she choked it off somehow and remained there, bent over the bucket, as the chatter continued from the screening room and erupted into laughter. Her fists were clenched, her arms straight down with the elbows locked. Then, when she knew she had it under control, she relaxed her back and arms, straightened, and wiped her mouth.
She turned around and looked back at the light pouring off of the stage area, as though she wouldn’t be surprised to see an arena full of lions, lazily waiting for her. Then she closed both eyes tight, squared her shoulders, and breathed out, hard. Her eyes opened again, and she was looking at me.