“I’m sorry,” she said into her hands. She took them away and looked up not quite in my direction. “I should have trusted you. It’s just,” she clenched and unclenched her hands, “the last two years have been pretty tough, you know?” Her voice rose a little too high at the end of that sentence.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting down beside her. “Can I ask you just one question?”
She shrugged.
“What were you doing that whole year I was in Rubacava?”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “I was lost,” in a hollow voice.
“What did—”
She surged to her feet and strode toward the door. “I don’t want to talk about that year!” She stopped and turned back. “Please,” she said weakly.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll lay off the questions.”
“Great,” she said with forced brightness. “Now if we could only get you to lay off the cologne.”
“Hey, I’m a sailor now. We have to wear this stuff.”
She ‘smiled’ weakly and sat down on a short stack of suitcases.
“What this safe needs is a couple of nice easy chairs,” I said.
“Vault,” Meche said.
“Huh?”
“If you can walk inside it, Manny, it’s a vault.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Meche looked pensive for a moment. “Did you mean what you said the other day? About a ship, I mean?”
“Every word.”
“And Glottis is alive?”
“Definitely.”
She went silent again and I didn’t interrupt. “That wasn’t your gun, was it,” she said eventually, sounding miserable.
“Well, I traded good junk for it. But,” I shrugged, “two hours ago it wasn’t mine.”
She shook her head slowly. “I’ve made a mess of everything.”
“Don’t kick yourself around. You did what you thought you had to… although I can’t understand why you’d believe what Domino said about DOD agents being armed.”
“Stockholm syndrome,” she said sadly, shaking her head again.
“Uh, what?” I stammered, baffled.
“That’s the name for what happens when people in hostage situations come to identify and sympathize with their captors.”
“That’s crazy!” I said without thinking.
“In a sense,” Meche said with a shrug, “if you want to be crude about it. But it’s a real condition. Put a person through enough stress and they’ll believe anything, especially when there’s only one source of information. It’s a coping mechanism, I suppose. If you come to believe that the person putting you through hell is somehow on your side, it becomes easier to endure.” I must have looked skeptical because she declared, “I’ve seen it, Manny. Once, when I was volunteering at a mental hospital.” She shook her head. “I never thought I’d ever fall victim to that… ‘craziness’.”
“Well, if that’s so,” I said carefully, “you didn’t have much of a choice.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier to accept,” she snapped, sounding bitter. “I know,” she sighed after a moment, “you’re only trying to help but… it’ll take time.” She took a deep breath. “Manny,” she said, fixing her eye sockets on me, “why didn’t you look for me?”
I got a creepy feeling of déjà vu, except this really was Meche, not some demonic raven perched on coin-operated binoculars. “I did,” I said, wishing I had something stronger than words to prove it with. “Glottis scoured every road between El Marrow and Rubacava and I hounded by phone every soul in every jerkwater stop along the way. We pestered waitresses and short-order cooks, bus drivers and wrench monkeys… everybody human or demon who worked along every stretch of blacktop we could find.” I laughed bitterly. “It never occurred to anyone on our side that you were still in that damned forest. I figured you were hiding out, thinking the whole world was after you.”
“Well, I wasn’t hiding. When Domino found me,” Meche wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, “I was ready to welcome the devil.” And she wasn’t too far off, I thought.
“If only…” I began, then slapped the cold, hard floor. “I suppose Domino sent you into the club to draw me out.” I felt like punching something, but managed to hold back. There wasn’t anything I wanted to sock in that vault, anyway. “Why didn’t you tell Lupe what was going on?”
“Domino was outside the door,” she answered, “with a gun.” That was chilling. “He said he’d shoot the ‘dingbat’ if I said anything other than what he’d told me to.” She looked down, projecting embarrassment. “His word. Sorry.”
“Well,” I said slowly, tamping down my unsettled feelings, “I’m glad you didn’t endanger Lupe.” I didn’t need yet another soul on my conscience. And, suddenly, I felt irrationally guilty because I had never bothered to learn anything about my ditzy hat-check girl. She worked for me and that was all I knew about her. And then one day I vanished and she was out of a job. I hoped she was doing OK.
Meche was silent for a moment for reasons of her own. “Well, as soon as she went to find you, Domino burst in and dragged me away. But once we were on the boat, I had a little bit of freedom. I kept watch for you from on deck, and when I saw you running toward the boat…”
“Bam!”
“Domino was not happy about what I’d done. I spent the trip locked up in the brig, until I was tossed overboard at the Pearl. The captain was on Hector’s payroll. And so,” she said, “here we are, locked in a vault on a deserted factory island on the edge of the world. Pretty bleak, huh?”
I didn’t want to answer that. I would have had to be honest. “So, um,” I looked around, trying to think of anything safe to say. “What’s in those cases?” I finally asked.
Meche got up from the stack of suitcases she had perched on. “Take a look.”
I opened the top one and gaped.
“It’s all the Double-N tickets Hector and Domino have stolen over the years,” she said. “Each one stolen from a good soul, and now they just… sit there.”
Something finally clicked. “That’s it!” I exclaimed, slamming the lid shut.
“What?”
“That’s what’s been bothering me!” I said, half to myself. “They just sit there! In the days when I was a hot salesman,” I explained to Meche, “I used to see Double-N tickets all the time, and they move!”
“What do you mean, ‘they move’?”
“They become agitated around human souls, and the ticket that belongs to you will actually fly into your hands. But these tickets,” I popped the suitcase open again and waved my hand over the little golden slips, “and the tickets in that suitcase of Charlie’s, it’s like they’re dead.” I closed the case again. “Why would Hector and Domino be hoarding cases of counterfeit Double-N tickets?” I asked, mostly of myself.
“They’re selling them, right?” Meche asked.
“That’s what Domino says. Salvador thinks that’s what’s happening, too, but I’m not so sure that’s the whole story anymore.”
Meche cocked her head.
“Think about it,” I said. “We’ve been assuming they’ve been stealing the tickets and then selling those very same tickets. Get it?”
“I think so,” she said slowly. “If they’re stealing tickets only to sell them, why bother making counterfeits?”
“Right. And if they can counterfeit…”
“…why bother stealing!” we finished together.