Chapter 6 – Getting to The Woman’s Story
Gwen got up and moved the kitchen table into a corner. She and Catherine then dragged the woman’s chair to the table, and positioned it so she was on one side, with three chairs opposite her. The woman now had her back deep into the corner of the kitchen, and Gwen and Catherine pushed the table into the woman, trapping her. Roger watched this with interest. Catherine transferred dishes, silverware, and food from the counter to the table, and set four places. It now was 6:30am, almost three hours since the dog had growled in the bedroom. Gwen picked up the three guns and took them out of the kitchen.
The eggs, potatoes, and bacon were dished out, four helpings, and four cups were filled with Kenyan coffee. Catherine nodded at Gwen, who took a boning knife from a drawer, leaned over the table, and carefully cut the duct tape binding the woman’s arms to the chair. She placed the knife back in the drawer, and sat down in her chair. The woman raised her arms above the table and massaged her wrists. Gwen pushed the table farther into the woman’s chest.
Roger felt a little nervous. Hadn’t this woman penetrated into their home in the middle of the night, armed and dressed in black, intent on perpetrating malice against them? What if she is some kind of special ops person, who can kill just by looking at you? What if she could pick the table up and throw it away, killing the three of them with two kicks and one good karate chop? What if she had special weapons in her undies? Roger had offered to check that out but Gwen had vetoed the idea. She could be armed to the teeth with high tech Russian weaponry. Roger thought he had good reason to be nervous.
After massaging her arms the woman went straight for the coffee. She downed the cup in three swallows and held it out to Roger for more. What, was he the waiter all of a sudden? Catherine and Gwen looked at him, and he went and got the pot. After filling her cup he asked, “Ah, isn’t she an assassin who came here to kill us? Why is she loose? She probably can kill us just by looking at us.”
Catherine sipped at her second cup, and watched the woman, who had ignored Roger’s rather pointed comments and attacked the eggs with gusto. She agreed that French breakfasts were for wimps, and that a good English breakfast led to excellence in thinking. If Sartre had been eating English breakfasts instead of croissants and jam, he wouldn’t have come up with all the crap he did. Existentialism, my ass. She was feeling feisty, now that she was loose and had some caffeine in her. Catherine watched the woman eat for a few moments before answering Roger’s questions, forgiving the woman for stuffing too many potatoes into her mouth. The girl had had a rough morning. Rough night, for that matter.
“I don’t know if she’s an assassin,” Roger, “or if she can kill us by looking at us. I just know she’s not going to kill us now. Right, honey?” she said, watching the woman eat.
The woman nodded.
Gwen was all for this magical stuff The Deneuve did. She really believed it, because she was part of it. But that didn’t mean she was going to trust her life to it, so she kept the table pressed into the woman’s chest. And she wasn’t eating or drinking much just yet, either. She was watched like a fucking hawk. Roger believed The Deneuve, and started stuffing eggs and bacon into his face. He too had had a hard morning. So three people ate and one person watched. Gwen had gotten over the giggles associated with the idea of killing the woman and burying her in the garden, and was vigilant again. Gwen couldn’t help, though, nibbling on a strip of bacon.
The woman finished eating first, Roger second, and Catherine third. Catherine wasn’t used to eating such large breakfasts, but she enjoyed it. When they were done, Roger looked at Gwen, telling her he would watch the undies, er, the woman, while Gwen ate. He put his hands on the edge of the table and applied pressure to the woman’s chest while Gwen chowed down.
While his wife was eating, Roger asked Catherine if she and Gwen had done the Rudyard Kipling thing? Catherine nodded. Roger was the one who originally knew about Kipling, having learned it years ago when he first started writing romance fiction. It always worked for him, and he had taught it to Gwen. Gwen sometimes used it on the firing range. She would close her eyes, drift, and wait. When the impulse to fire came, she obeyed, and would empty a full magazine into the center of the target.
Soon Gwen was satiated and pushed her chair away from the table. It was time for the story.
Oh, no, not yet time for the story. Time to feed the cats and the dog. Roger?
Roger was happy to feed the dog, because it was his dog. And he didn’t mind feeding the mutt American cat, because the cat once had caught a rat that had had the temerity to emerge out of the Charleston wharves and intrude into the June’s house. But so far he had not had to feed the Russkie cats. Gwen, Guignard, Jinny and even Gale, the June’s friend, would feed the blues. Roger didn’t even know how or what to feed them. He supposed they ate caviar or something absurd like that. Fresh fish at the very least. He never had seen them not sitting on the counter.
He asked Gwen, “What do the hoity cats eat?”
“There’s some caviar in the bottom of the fridge.”
The Russian woman got Gwen’s joke first, and burst out laughing. Then Catherine got it, and smiled. Then Roger got it. Slowly.
Gwen said, “The hoitys eat the same as ours. But they won’t eat off the floor. Gotta put it up on the counter.”
“WHAT? They’ve been eating on the counter the last six months?” He spooned some cat food out of a can into two small dishes, and put it on the floor under the counter on which the blues were sitting. The cats did not even look at the food in the dishes. They did not give it even a hint of a glance; they just looked at Roger. Once before he thought he had detected a smirk on their faces, but not being used to Russian cat body language, he wasn’t sure. Now he was sure. Those were smirks.
The hell with them, let ‘em go hungry.
Ok, now it was time for the woman’s story. Jesus. Woken up in the middle of the night, Gwen on point, female assassin, guns, duct tape, black underwear, breakfast, inscrutable cats. Jesus.