So it was Tony who suggested the Toxique, this time. Roz may have something to tell, but Tony has something to tell also and it’s fitting that it should be told here. She has requested their usual table, the one in the corner by the smoked mirror. From the young woman, or possibly man, who appears beside her, dressed in a black cat-suit with a wide leather stud-covered belt and five silver earrings in each ear, she orders a bottle of white wine and a bottle of Evian.
Charis arrives at the same time as the bottles, looking strangely pale. Well, thinks Tony, she always looks strangely pale, but tonight she’s even more so. “Something weird happened to me today,” she tells Tony, shedding her damp woollen sweatercoat and her fuzzy knitted hat. But this is not an unusual thing for Charis to say, so Tony merely nods and pours her a glass of Evian. Sooner or later they will get the story of the dream about shiny people sitting in trees, or the odd coincidence involving street numbers or cats that look just like other cats that used to belong to someone Charis once knew and doesn’t any more, but Tony would rather have it wait till Roz gets here. Roz is more tolerant of such intellectual wispiness, and better at changing the subject.
Roz comes in, waving and yoo-hooing and wearing a flamered trench coat and matching sou’wester, and shaking herself. “Judas Priest!” she says, pulling off her purple gloves. “Wait till you hear! You won’t believe!” Her tone is dismayed rather than jubilant.
“You saw Zenia today,” says Charis.
Roz’s mouth opens. “How did you know?” she says. “Because, so did I,” says Charis.
“And so did I,” says Tony.
Roz sits heavily down, and stares at each one of them in turn. “All right,” she says. “Tell.”
Tony waits in the lobby of the Arnold Garden Hotel, which would not have been her own hotel of choice. It’s a graceless fifties construction, cement slabs on the outside and a lot of plate glass. From her vantage point she can see out through the double doors at the back, into a patio dotted with chunky planters and with a large circular fountain off in one corner, non-functional at this time of year and overlooked by tiers of balconies with orange-painted sheet-metal railings. The postmodern awning and brass at the front is just an add-on: the essence of the Arnold Garden is those balconies. Though efforts are being made: above Tony looms a prehensile arrangem,ent of purplish dried flowers and wires and strange pods, daring the aesthetically uninitiated to call it ugly.
The patio and the fountain must be the garden part of the Arnold Garden, Tony decides; but she wonders about the Arnold. Is it Arnold as in Matthew, he of the ignorant armies dashing by night? Or Arnold as in Benedict, traitor or hero depending on point of view? Or perhaps it’s a first name, denoting some bygone city councillor, some worthy backroom fixer whose friends called him Arnie. The lobby, with its framed prints of rotund pink-coated fox-hunting Englishmen, gives no clue.
The chair Tony sits in is leathery and slippery and built for colossi. Her feet don’t touch the ground even if she moves well forward, and if she slides herself all the way back, then her knees can’t-bend over the front edge and her legs stick out stiffly like the legs of a china doll. So she has adopted a compromise—a sort of hunched curvature—but she is far from comfortable.
Also, despite her demure navy blue coat and her sensible walking shoes and her wimpy Peter Pan collar, she feels conspicuous. Her bad intentions must be sticking out all over, her. She has the sensation that she’s growing hair, little prickles of it pushing out through the skin of her legs like the quills of a porcupine, hanks of it shoving through in tufts around her ears. It’s ‘ Zenia doing this, the effort of tracking Zenia: it’s fusing her neurons, rearranging the molecules in her brain. A hairy white devil is what she’s becoming, a fanged monster. It’s a necessary transformation perhaps, because fire must be fought with fire. But every weapon is two-edged, so there will be a price to pay: Tony won’t get out of this unaltered.
In her outsized tote bag is her father’s Luger, unearthed from the box of Christmas decorations where it’s usually stored, and freshly oiled and loaded according to the instructions in the manual of forties weaponry she photocopied in the library. She took care to wear gloves while photocopying, so as not to leave fingerprints, just in case. In case they try to pin anything on her, afterwards. The gun itself is unregistered, she believes. It is after all a sort of souvenir.
Beside it is another implement. Tony has taken advantage of one of the many tool circulars littering her front lawn to purchase a cordless drill, with screwdriver attachment, at a third off. She has never used one of these before. Also, she’s never used a gun before. But there’s a first time for everything. Her initial idea was that she could use the drill to break into Zenia’s room, if necessary. Unscrew the door hinges, or something. But it occurs to her, sitting here in the lobby, that the drill too is potentially lethal, and might be put to use. If she could murder Zenia with a cordless drill, what policeman would be smart enough to figure it out?
But the actual scenario is unclear in her mind. Maybe she should shoot Zenia first and then finish her off with the drilclass="underline" the other way around would be cumbersome, as she would have to sneak up behind Zenia with the drill and then turn it on, and the whirring noise would be a giveaway. She could always do an ambidextrous murder: gun in the left hand, cordless drill in the right, like the rapier-and-dagger arrangements of the late Renaissance. It’s an appealing thought.
The catch is that Zenia is considerably taller than Tony, and Tony would of course be aiming for the head. Symmetrical retaliation: Zenia’s pattern has been to attack her victims at the point of most vulnerability, and the most vulnerable point is the one most prized, and Tony’s most vulnerable point is her brain. That’s how she was trapped by Zenia in the first place: that was the temptation, the bait. Tony got suckered in through her own intellectual vanity. She thought she’d found a friend who was as smart as she was. Smarter was not a category.
Tony’s love for West is her other most vulnerable point, so it stands to reason that it’s through West that Zenia will attack her now. It’s to protect West that she’s doing this, really—he would not survive another slice cut out of his heart.
She hasn’t shared her plans with Roz or Charis. Each of them is a decent person; neither would condone violence. Tony knows that she herself is not a decent person, she’s known that ever since childhood. She does act like one, most of the time, because there’s usually no reason not to, but she has another self, a more ruthless one, concealed inside her. She is not just Tony Fremont, she is also Tnomerf Ynot, queen of the barbarians, and, in theory, capable of much that Tony herself is not quite up to. Bulc egdirb! Bulc egdirb! Take no prisoners, because in order to protect the innocent, some must sacrifice their own innocence. This is one of the rules of war. Men have to do hard things, they have to do hard man-things. Hard-man things. They have to shed blood, so that others may live out their placid lives suckling their infants and rummaging in their gardens and creating unmusical music, free from guilt. Women are not usually called upon to commit such cold-blooded acts, but this does not mean they are incapable of them. Tony clenches her small teeth and invokes her left hand, and hopes that she will rise to the occasion.