She was strangely comforted. The natural thing for Zula to be asking herself at this moment was What did I ever see in this guy? Other than his physical beauty, which was pretty obvious. Those occasional left-handed insights, like the arches. Another thing: he worked very hard and knew how to do a lot of things, which had put her in mind of the family back in Iowa. He was intelligent, and, as evidenced by the books stacked and scattered all over the place, he was interested in many things and could talk about them in an engaging way, when he felt like talking. Being here now, alone (for he was down in the bay unpacking his gear), enabled her to walk through the process of getting a crush on him, like reenacting a crime scene, and thereby to convince herself that she hadn’t just been out-and-out stupid. She could forgive herself for not having noticed the relationship-ending qualities that had been so screamingly obvious for the last twelve hours. Her girlfriends had probably not been asking each other, behind Zula’s back, what she saw in that guy.
Which led her to question, one last time — as long as she was alone in the dark and still had the opportunity — whether she should have broken up with him at all. But she was pretty certain that when she woke up tomorrow morning she’d feel right about it. This was the third guy she had broken up with. Where she’d gone to school, mixed-race computational fluid dynamics geeks didn’t get as many dates as, say, blond, blue-eyed hotel and restaurant management majors. But, like a tenement dweller nurturing a rooftop garden in coffee cans, she had cultivated and maintained a little social life of her own, and harvested the occasional ripe tomato, and maybe enjoyed it more intensely than someone who could buy them by the sack at Safeway. So she was not utterly inexperienced. She’d done it before. And she felt as right about this breakup as she did about the other two.
She turned on the lights, which hurt her tired eyes, and began picking up stuff that she knew was hers: from the bathroom, her minimal but important cosmetics, and some hair management tools. From her favorite corner, some notes and books related to work. A couple of novels. Nothing important, but she didn’t want Peter to wake up every morning and be confronted with random small bits of Zula spoor. She piled what she found at the top of the stairs that led down into the bay and looped back through the living quarters, gleaning increasingly nonobvious bits of stuff: a baseball cap, a hair clip, a coffee mug, lip balm. She went slower and took longer than necessary because when this was over she’d have to carry it all downstairs to the bay where Peter was fussing with his snowboarding gear, and that would be awkward. She was too tired and spent to contend with that awkwardness in a graceful way and did not want Peter’s last recollection of her to be as a fuming bitch.
When she returned to her stuff pile for what she estimated was the penultimate time, she heard voices downstairs. Peter’s and another man’s. She couldn’t make out any words, but the other man was vastly excited. A cool draft was coming up the stairs from below: outside air flowing in through the open bay door. It carried the sharp perfume of incompletely burned gasoline, a smell that nowadays came only from very old cars, precatalytic converter.
Zula looked out a small back window on the alley side of the building and saw a sports car parked there with its lights on, the driver’s door hanging open, the engine still running. The driver was arguing with Peter down in the bay. She assumed that this was because Peter had left the Scion blocking the alley while he unloaded. The convertible was stopped nose to nose with the Scion; its driver, or so Zula speculated, was pissed off that he couldn’t get through. He was in a hurry and drunk. Or maybe on meth, to judge from the intensity of his rage. She couldn’t quite follow the argument that was going on downstairs. Peter was astonished by something, but he was taking the part of the reasonable guy trying to calm the stranger down. The stranger was shouting in bursts, and Zula couldn’t understand him. He had (she realized) some sort of accent, and while her English was pretty much perfect, she did have a few weak spots, and accents were one of them.
She was just about to call 911 when she heard the stranger mention “voice mail.”
“… turned it off…” Peter explained, again in a very calm and reasonable voice.
“… all the way from fucking Vancouver,” the stranger complained, “rain pissing down.”
Zula moved to the window and looked at the stranger’s car again and saw that it had British Columbia license plates.
It was that guy. It was Wallace.
There had been some kind of problem with the transaction. It was a customer service call.
No. Tech support. Wallace was complaining about a “fucking virus or something.”
The tension somehow broke. The adrenaline buzz on which Wallace had blasted down from Vancouver had abated. They had agreed to talk about this calmly. Wallace shut off the convertible’s engine, killed the lights, came into the bay. Peter pulled the door down behind him.
“Whose car is this?” Wallace demanded. Now that the big door was closed, the sound echoed up the steps and Zula was better able to follow the conversation. Her ear was tuning in to the Scottish accent.
“Zula’s,” Peter said.
“The girl? She’s here?”
“I dropped her off at home.” Zula noted the lie with grudging thanks and admiration. “She parks it here when she’s not using it.”
“I have to take a vicious piss.”
“There’s a urinal right over there.”
“Good man.” The freestanding urinal in the middle of his shop was one of Peter’s proudest innovations. Zula heard Wallace’s zipper going down, heard him using it, thought it would be funny to come down the stairs and make her exit at that point. But her car was now blocked in by Wallace’s. “I’ve been assuming that you deliberately fucked me,” Wallace remarked, as he was peeing, “but now I entertain the possibility that it is something other than that.”
“Good. Because it was totally on the up-and-up.”
“Other than being a massive identity theft scheme, you mean to say.”
“Yes.”
“Convincing me of that is easy enough. Already done. But the people I work with are another thing.” Wallace finished and zipped up again. Zula could hear the timbre of his voice change as he turned around.
“I thought you said you worked alone.”
“I was telling the truth the first time,” Wallace said.
“Oh,” Peter said after a noticeable pause.
“I’ve already had three fucking emails from my contact in Toronto wanting to know where the hell are the credit card numbers. As a matter of fact, I’d better send him an update right now. If lying through my teeth can be so called.”
The conversation lapsed for a few moments, and Zula guessed that Wallace was thumb-typing on a phone.
“I guess I don’t understand why you haven’t just sent him the numbers,” Peter said. “So maybe you should just take this from the top, because everything you were shouting when you pulled up a few minutes ago left me totally confused.”
“Almost finished,” Wallace muttered.
“The password to my Wi-Fi is here,” Peter said, and Zula heard him sliding a piece of paper down the counter.
“Never mind, I used something called Tigmaster.”
“You should use mine; it is way more secure than Tigmaster.”
“What is that anyway, an animal trainer?”