She found Griffiths at the apartment, in bed with Cledilce. Both were unconscious from drink. “Hey Juan,” she said, shaking him.
“Huh,” he said, pawing at his eyes. “Estela? Where you been?”
“With Rudy. He straightened me out, said I owed you.”
“What about the deal?”
“Later, at his hotel. First, I wanna do you a favor.”
“What favor?” Griffiths slurred.
Estela got up and searched in a drawer. She came back to the bed and told him to sit up. She popped an Aktive ’poule against his fleshy neck. “Jeez,” he said. He reached up and grabbed her breasts.
“Not here,” Estela said, nodding toward Cledilce. “We’ll go out, pick her up later.”
She took him to the Sayonara, a club on the second floor of one of the high-rise blocks in Rochina. She led him up a dark flight of stairs to a dance hall. Paint peeled from the walls and the curtains at the side of the stage were dank and shabby. A band drowsed onstage and a few decrepit Babes sat perched on barstools, painting their nails. They climbed a second flight to where an old woman sat dozing at a dirt-stained desk. Griffiths gave her money and she pointed to a door. In the room a bed with a single sheet stood in the corner.
Griffiths sat on the bed and began to remove his clothes. She kept her back to him and removed the gun from her bag. “You owe it all to me,” she heard him say. “I want you to suck me dry.”
“You didn’t have to do it, Juan,” she said, turning with the gun in her hand.
“What’s that?” Griffiths said. “You gone crazy or what?”
She saw the fear in his eyes. “You wanted it all for yourself.”
“What are you fucking talking about?”
“Deborah, you cocksucker.”
“Who gives a shit about that whore?”
“I did.”
“She’s nothing,” Griffiths said. “She’s the disease.”
Her body shook with ferocious anger as she squeezed the trigger. The bullet hit him in the stomach and smashed him flat on the bed. He groaned and, with an effort, pushed himself up on one elbow. “You fucking bitch whore-cunt, you can’t kill me,” he said, his face a mask of incomprehensible rage as he pawed at the bloody hole. “I fucking own you. It’s impossible for you to kill me. Fucking impossible.”
“Yeah?” Estela said, then emptied the gun into his head. She ran downstairs and out into the street, where Thessinger was waiting in a taxi. He told the driver to take them out to Galeâo airport and it was only when they were aboard the shuttle waiting for takeoff to Paris that she remembered Cledilce.
“Where is she?” she asked him.
“The cops were there before I had a chance to get her out,” Thessinger explained.
“What are you talking about? How the fuck did the cops find out?”
Thessinger sighed. “The Luxor is a big hotel, Estela, full of Americans and Europeans. If someone’s shot dead in one of their rooms, then they have to be seen to be taking action if they don’t want to lose business. So the cops make more of an effort than usual.”
“But how did they get to Cledilce?
“They must have found an address or something.”
“Jesus,” Estela said, seeing that that made sense. “They’ll pin it all on her. We can’t leave her to answer for this.”
“Someone has to.”
“They’ll kill her,” which was probably true. But what could she do without Thessinger’s help? “I owe her everything,” she said, weakly.
“We’ll protect her. Now think of yourself—you shot someone. I’m saving your ass. Remember that, remember in the future how much you owe to me.” He talked continuously, trying to soothe her, holding her as the shuttle took off, telling her about all the wonderful things the future held. But Estela de Brito was no longer listening. Her thoughts had turned inward, searching for whatever it was that had motivated her to do what she had done. She needed that hatred now, that strength. For a long time she searched, but there was nothing there, only the sweet temptation of flight, and of Paradise.
Thessinger plays Satie’s Gymnopédies on the piano as Heinrich enters the room to inform me that Cledilce Macedo will meet me for lunch at the Kopenhagen. Patterns of fear distort my perceptions, undermining the solidity of my bones. It’s difficult to distinguish between the past and dreams. This morning I dreamed I awoke to find the sheets scarlet with blood and instructed Heinrich to burn them.
“You must go,” Rudy tells me, but I ignore him because he does not know how the dream will turn out. “She can’t harm you.”
“Harm me?” The idea both attracts and repulses me. “I never dreamed that.”
Rudy smiled. “I never took you for a dreamer, Estela, a sad romantic clinging bitterly to the wreckage of what never really was.”
Is that what I am now? A broken fairy doll? “My dreams are all of the disease,” I tell him.
“We’ve talked about that before. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Why has she come?”
“I don’t know,” he lies, shrugging his shoulders; it’s what gives him away. He’s been lying to me for a long time.
“You knew she was alive all this time?”
“We were unable to maintain her contract at the time. It lapsed and someone else bought her option.”
Over the years I’ve grown to despise Rudy. It’s more than the fact that he and Spengler never sent for Cledilce, more even than hollowness of this life to which he brought me. I ask, “You think she knows what happened in Rio?”
“It hardly matters now, I’m sure she—”
“Shall I tell her this life is a lie?” I interrupt.
“Say what you like,” Thessinger says. “She is owned.” He leaves without another word.
Cledilce Macedo is waiting in a booth by the window at the Kopenhagen. She is resplendent in silver and black, her hair plaited and studded with jewels. I feel this meeting is part of the dream and that, in it, a solution will be revealed. I sense no threat.
“Cumo vai?” she says.
“I’m well” I say. “The police? They hurt you?”
She smiles and says, “They didn’t kill me.”
“I wanted to go back for you.”
She waves her hand, dismissing the idea. “You look good.”
“You shouldn’t have come. They lied, it’s not like our dream.”
“I had no choice,” Cledilce says. “He took you away from me.”
“I had to go. I killed Griffiths.”
“Juan was a fool. But why the Hernandez woman?”
Nausea hits me in the stomach. “What do you mean?”
Cledilce leans forward, touches my arm. “They were both killed by the same gun. It was in the reports; that’s why they couldn’t prove anything against me.”
The truth infects and sickens me. I stumble to the bathroom, Cledilce close behind. She holds me while I vomit, uttering words of comfort, words I haven’t heard since I left the other life. When there is nothing left to throw up I crouch on the floor, sobbing, searching for the words to beg forgiveness. But the words are dead on my tongue. Thoughts twist and reel in my skull and all I can do is sit and wait for the world to get back on an even keel.
In a room at the Kempinski Hotel, I watch the last of the daylight struggling through the blinds, falling on Cledilce’s mahogany flesh. The surgeons have crafted a fine vagina for her and her fingers explore me to the full; even so I derive no pleasure from her touch. The truth is, the sex we shared was more like that between whore and client than between two lovers, except in this instance, neither of us feels the need to fake anything. She’s silent and still but not sleeping. Neither of us has spoken for more than twenty minutes and the claustrophobic silence crushes any understanding we might have had. The gulf of the past yawns between us as I knew it would. I realize that what we’d once shared is now ashes.