“You said you needed to talk to me,” Tony says, creating an opening.
“Want some rum in your coffee? No?” says Zenia. She unscrews a small bottle from the minibar, pours herself a dollop. Then she frowns a little and lowers her voice confidentially. “Yes. I wanted to ask a favour: You’re the only one I could go to, really.”
Tony waits. She’s alarmed again. Watch it, she tells herself. She should get out of here, right now! But what harm can it do to listen? And she’s avid to find out what Zenia wants. Money, probably. Tony can always say no.
“All I need is to stay somewhere,” says Zenia. “Not here, here’s no good. With you, I thought, just for a couple of weeks.”
“Why?” says Tony.
Zenia moves her hands impatiently, scattering cigarette ashes. “Because they’re looking! Not the Irish, they’re off my track. It’s some other people. They’re not here yet, not in this city. But they’ll get around to it. They’ll hire local professionals:”
“Then why wouldn’t they try my house?” says Tony. “Wouldn’t that be the first place they’d look?”
Zenia laughs, the familiar laugh, warm and charming and reckless, and contemptuous of the idiocy of others. “The last place!” she says. “They’ve done their homework, they know you hate me! You’re the wife. I’m the ex-girlfriend. They’d never believe you’d let me in!”
“Zenia,” says Tony, “exactly who are these people and why are they after you?”
Zenia shrugs. “Standard,” she says. “I know too much:”
“Oh, come on,” says Tony. “I’m not a baby. Too much about what? And don’t say it would he healthier for me not to hear.” Zenia leans forward. She lowers her voice. “Does the name Project Babylon mean anything to you?” she says. She must know it does, she knows what line of knowledge Tony is in. “The Supergun for Iraq,” she adds.
“Gerry Bull,” says Tony. “The ballistics genius. Of course. He got murdered:”
“To put it mildly,” says Zenia. “Well.” She blows out smoke, looking at Tony in a way that is almost coy, a fan dancer’s look. “You didn’t shoot him!” says Tony, aghast. “It wasn’t you!” She can’t believe Zenia has actually killed someone. No: she can’t believe that a person sitting in front of her, in a real room, in the real world, has actually killed someone. Such things happen offstage, elsewhere; they are indigenous to the past. Here, in this California-coloured room with its mild furniture, its neutrality, they would be anachronisms.
“Not me,” says Zenia. “But I know who did.”
She’s lighting another cigarette, she’s practically chain-smoking. The air around her is grey, and Tony is slightly dizzy. “The Israelis,” she says. “Because of Iraq:”
“Not the Israelis, “ says Zenia quickly. “That’s a red herring. I was there, I was part of the setup. I was only what you might call the messenger; but you know what happens to messengers:” Tony does know. “Oh,” she says. “Oh dear.”
“My best chance,” says Zenia eagerly, “is to tell everything to some newspaper. Absolutely everything! Then there won’t be any point in killing me, right? Also I could make a buck, I won’t say that wouldn’t be welcome. But nobody’s going to believe me without proof. Don’t worry, I’ve got the proof, it’s not in this city but it’s on the way. So I figured I could just hole up with you and West until my proof comes through. I know how it’s coming, I know when. I’d be really quiet, I wouldn’t need more than a sleeping bag, I could stay upstairs, in West’s study .. :’
Tony snaps to attention. The word West cracks across her mind: that’s the key, that’s what Zenia really wants, and how does Zenia know that West has a study, and that it’s on the third floor? She’s never seen the inside of Tony’s house. Or has she?
Tony stands up. Her legs are wobbling as if she’s just been pulled back from a crumbling, cliff edge. How nearly she was taken in, again! The whole Gerry Bull story is nothing but a huge he, a custom-designed whopper. Anyone could have cobbled such a thing together just by reading Jane’s Defence Weekly and The Washington Post, and Zenia—knowing Tony’s weaknesses, her taste for new twists in weapons technology—must have done just that.
There is no vendetta, there is no them, nobody’s after Zenia but the bill collector. What she wants is to break into Tony’s castle, her armoured house, her one safe place, and extract West from it as if he were a snail. She wants him fresh and wriggling, speared on the end of her fork.
“I don’t think that will be possible,” says Tony, trying to keep her voice even. “I think I should go now”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” says Zenia. Her face has gone still. “Well, help yourself to some righteous indignation, you little snot. You always were the most awful two-faced hypocrite, Tony. A smug dog-in-the-manger prune-faced little shit with megalomaniac pretensions. You think you have some kind of an adventurous mind, but spare me! At heart you’re a coward, you hole yourself up in that bourgeois playpen of yours with your warped little battle-scars collection, you sit on poor West as if he’s your very own fresh-laid fucking egg! I bet he’s bored out of his skull, with nobody but you to stick his boring dick into! Jesus, it must be like fucking a gerbil!”
Zenia’s suave velvet cloak has dropped away; underneath is raw brutality. This is what a fist sounds like just as it smashes. Tony stands in the middle of the room, her mouth opening and closing. No sound comes out. The glass walls are closing in on her. Wildly she thinks about the gun in her purse, useless, useless: Zenia is right, she could never pull the trigger. All her wars are hypotheticaclass="underline" She’s incapable of real action.
But Zenia’s expression is changing now, from angry to cunning. “You know, I’ve still got that term paper, the one you., forged. The Russian slave trade, wasn’t it? Sounds like your brand of displaced sadism, all those paper dead bodies. You’re an armchair necrophiliac, you know that? You should try a real dead body some time! Maybe I’ll just pop that paper in the mail, send it to your precious History Department, stir up some shit for you, a tiny scandal! I’d like that! What price academic integrity?”
Tony feels the blunt objects whizzing past her head, the ground dissolving under her feet. The History Department would be pleased, it would be more than happy to discredit and disbar. She has colleagues but no allies. Ruin looms. Zenia is pure freewheeling malevolence; she wants wreckage, she wants scorched earth, she wants broken glass. Tony makes an effort to step back from the situation, to view it as if it’s something that happened long ago; as if she and Zenia are merely two small figures on a crumbling tapestry. But maybe this is what history is, when it’s really taking place: enraged people yelling at one another.
Forget the ceremony. Forget the dignity. Turn tail.
Tony walks unsteadily towards the door. “Goodbye,” she says, as firmly as she can; but her voice, to her own ears, sounds like a squeak. She has a moment of panic with the lock. As she scuttles out she expects to hear a feral growling, the thud of a heavy body against the door. But there’s nothing.
She goes down in the elevator with the odd sensation that she’s going up, and meanders across the lobby as if drunk, bumping into the leather furniture. There’s a bunch of men checking in at the front desk. Overcoats, briefcases, must be a convention. In front of her looms the dried flower arrangement. She reaches out, watching her left hand reaching, she breaks off a stem. Something dyed purple. She makes for the doors, but finds herself at the wrong set, the ones facing the patio and the fountain. This is not the way out. She’s disoriented, turned around in space: the visual world looks jumbled: She likes to have things clearly sorted in her head, but they are far from sorted.