Tony is alert now, on her inner toes. Her darkest suspicions are being confirmed: this is obviously a fallback story, a story Zenia and West have concocted together just in case Tony should sniff the wind, or should run across Zenia in some unlikely place such as Tony's own bedroom. The story is that the message was for Tony, not for West. It's a cunning story, it has Zenia's paw-prints all over it, but West must be colluding. Things are worse than Tony thought. The rot has gone deeper.
"Come on," says Zenia. "We'll go up to my room; I'll order coffee." She takes Tony's arm. At the same time she glances around the lobby. It's a look of anxiety, of fear even, a look Tony is not intended to see. Or is she?
She cranes her neck, peering up at Zenia's still-amazing face. Mentally she adds something to it: a small red X, marking the spot.
Zenia's hotel room is unremarkable except for its largeness and its neatness. The neatness is unlike Zenia. There are no clothes in evidence, no suitcases strewn around, no cosmetic bags on the bathroom counter, as far as Tony can see in one sideways glance. It's as if no one is living here.
Zenia sheds her black leather coat and phones for coffee, and then sits down on the flowered pastel green sofa, crossing her endless black-stockinged legs, lighting a cigarette. The dress she wears is a clinging jersey wrap, the purple of stewed blueberries. Her dark eyes are enormous, and, Tony sees now, shadowed by fatigue, but her plum-coloured smile still quirks up ironically. She seems more at ease here than in the lobby. She raises an eyebrow at Tony. "Long time no see," she says.
Tony is at a loss. How should she play this? It would be a mistake to display her anger: that would tip Zenia off, put her on her guard. Tony shuffles her inner deck and discovers that in fact she's not angry, not at the moment. Instead she's intrigued, and curious. The historian in her is taking over. "Why did you pretend to die?" she says. "What was all that stuff, with the ashes and the fake lawyer?"
"The lawyer was real," says Zenia, blowing out smoke. "He believed it too. Lawyers are so gullible."
"And?" says Tony.
"And, I needed to disappear. Trust me, I had my reasons. It wasn't just the money! And I had disappeared, I'd set up about six dead ends for anyone trying to track me down. But that dolt Mitch was following me around, he just wouldn't stop. He was really messing up my life. He was so goddamn persistent! He had the money too, he hired people; not amateurs either. He would've found me, he was right on the verge.
"People knew that; the other people, the ones I didn't really want to see. I was a bad girl, I did a shell game involving some armaments that turned out not to be where I'd said they'd be. I don't recommend it - armaments types get sniffy, especially the Irish ones. They tend to be vengeful. They figured out that all they had to do was keep an eye on Mitch and sooner or later he'd dig me up. He was the one I needed to convince, so he'd quit. So he'd lay off."
"Why Beirut?" says Tony.
"If you were going to get yourself accidentally blown up back then, what better spot to pick?" says Zenia. "The place was festooned with body parts; there were hundreds they never identified."
"You know Mitch killed himself," says Tony. "Because of you."
Zenia sighs. "Tony, grow up," she says. "It wasn't because of me. I was just the excuse. You think he hadn't been waiting for one? All his life, I'd say."
"Well, Roz thinks it was because of you," says Tony lamely.
"Mitch told me that sleeping with Roz was like getting into bed with a cement mixer," says Zenia.
"That's cruel," says Tony.
"Just reporting," Zenia says coolly. "Mitch was a creep. Roz is better off without him."
This is a little too close to what Tony thinks herself. She finds herself smiling; smiling, and sliding back down, back in, into that state she remembers so well. Partnership. Pal-ship. The team.
"Why us, at your funeral?" says Tony.
"Window dressing," says Zenia. "There had to be somebody there from the personal side. You know, old friends. I figured you'd all enjoy it. And anything Roz knew, Mitch would know too. She'd make sure of that! He was the one I wanted. He ducked it though. Prostrate with grief, I guess."
"The place was crawling with men in overcoats," says Tony.
"One of them was mine," says Zenia. "Checking up for me, to see who was there. A couple of them were from the opposition. Did you cry?"
"I'm not a cryer," says Tony. "Charis sniffled a bit." She's ashamed, now, of what the three of them had said, and of how jubilant and also how mean-minded they had been.
Zenia laughs. "Charis always did have mush for brains," she says.
There's a knock at the door. "It's the coffee," says Zenia. "Would you mind going?"
It occurs to Tony that Zenia may have a few reasons for not wanting to open doors. A prickle of apprehension runs up her spine.
But it really is the coffee, delivered by a short brown-faced man. The man smiles and Tony takes the tray and scrawls a tip on the bill, and closes the door softly, and puts on the safety lock. Zenia must be protected from the forces that threaten her. Protected by Tony. Right now, in this room, with Zenia finally incarnate before her, Tony can hardly remember what she's been doing for the past week - the way she's been sneaking around in a state of cold fury with a gun in her purse, selfishly planning to bump off Zenia. Why would she want to do that? Why would anyone? Zenia sweeps through life like a prow, like a galleon. She's magnificent, she's unique. She's the sharp edge.
"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 mini-bar, 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 be 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 Californiacoloured 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 set-up. 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 lie, 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 hypothetical. 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.
She stuffs her filched sprig into her tote bag and aims for the front door, and wavers through it, and is finally outside, breathing in the cold air. There was so much smoke up there. She shakes her head, trying to clear it. It's as if she's been asleep.
52
This is not how Tony tells it to Roz and Charis, exactly. She leaves out the part about the term paper, although she conscientiously includes all the other bad things Zenia said about her. She includes the gun, which has a certain serious weight, but leaves out the cordless drill, which does not. She includes her own ignominious retreat. At the end of her account she produces the purple branch, as evidence.
"I must have been a little crazy," she says. "To think I could actually kill her."
"Not so crazy," says Roz. "To want to kill her, anyway. She does that to people. You were lucky to get out of there with both eyes, is what I think."
Yes, thinks Tony, checking herself over. No obvious parts missing.
"Is the gun still in your purse?" Charis asks anxiously. She wouldn't want such a dangerous object colliding with her aura.
"No," says Tony. "I went home after that, I put it back."
"Good plan," says Roz. "Now you go, Charis. I'll be last."
Charis hesitates. "I don't know whether I should tell all of it," she says.
"Why not?" says Roz. "Tony did. I'm going to. Come on, we have no secrets!"
"Well," says Charis, "there's something in it you won't like."
"Heck, I probably won't like any of it," says Roz jovially. Her voice is a little too loud. Charis is reminded of the earlier Roz, the one who used to draw lipstick faces on her stomach and do the bump-and-grind, in the Common Room at McClung Hall. Maybe Roz is getting overexcited.
"It's about Larry," says Charis unhappily.
Roz sobers up immediately. "It's okay, sweetie," she says. "I'm a big girl."
"Nobody is," says Charis. "Not really." She takes a deep breath.
After Zenia turned up at the Toxique that day, Charis spent about a week wondering what she should do. Or rather she knew what she should do, but she didn't know how to go about doing it. Also she needed to fortify herself spiritually, because an encounter with Zenia would be no casual thing.
What she foresaw was the two of them locked in a stand-off. Zenia would be shooting out blood-red sparks of energy; her black hair would be crackling like burning fat, her eyeballs would be cerise, lit up from within like a cat's in headlights. Charis on the other hand would be cool, upright, surrounded by a gentle glow. Around her would be drawn a circle of white chalk, to keep the evil vibrations at bay. She would raise her arms upwards, invoking the sky, and out of her would come a voice like tinkling bells: What have you done with Billy?
And Zenia, writhing and twisting and resisting, but mastered by the superiority of Charis's positive force-field, would be compelled to tell.
Charis was not yet strong enough for this trial of strength. All by herself she might never be. She would have to borrow some weapons from her friends. No, not weapons; merely armour, because she did not see herself attacking. She didn't want to h
urt Zenia, did she? She just wanted Zenia to return stolen property: Charis's life, the part with Billy in it. She wanted what was rightfully hers. That was all.
She went through some of the cardboard boxes in the small room upstairs, once a storeroom, then Zenia's room, then August's nursery and playroom, now a spare room, for guests if any. It was still August's room really; that was where she stayed on weekend visits. In the boxes were a bunch of things Charis never used and had been meaning to recycle. She found a Christmas present from Roz - a horrifying pair of gloves, leather ones with real fur cuffs, dead animal skin, she could never wear those. From Tony she found a book, a book written by Tony herself: Four Lost Causes. It was all about war and killing, septic topics, and Charis has never been able to get into it.
She took the book and the gloves downstairs and put them on the small table under the main window in the living room - where the sunlight would shine in on them and dispel their shadow sides - and set her amethyst geode beside them, and surrounded them with dried marigold petals. To this arrangement she added, after some thought, her grandmother's Bible, always a potent object, and a lump of earth from her garden. She meditated on this collection for twenty minutes twice a day.
What she wanted was to absorb the positive aspects of her friends, the things that were missing in herself. From Tony she wanted her mental clarity, from Roz her high-decibel metabolism and her planning abilities. And her smart mouth, because then if Zenia started insulting Charis she would be able to think up something really neutralizing to say back. From the garden earth she wanted underground power. From the Bible, what? Her grandmother's presence alone would do; her hands, her blue healing light. The marigold petals and the amethyst geode were to contain these various energies, and to channel them. What she had in mind was something concentrated, like a laser beam.
At work, Shanita notices that Charis is more absent-minded than usual. "Something bothering you?" she says.
"Well, sort of," says Charis.
"You want to do the cards?"
They are busy designing the interior for the new store. Or rather Shanita is designing it, and Charis is admiring the results. In the window there will be a large banner made of brown paper with the store name done on it in crayon, "like kids' writing," says Shanita: Scrimpers. At either end of the banner will be an enormous bow, also of brown paper, with packing-twine streamers coming out of it. "The idea is, everything needs to look totally basic," says Shanita. "Sort of homemade. You know, affordable." She's going to sell the hand-rubbed maple display cabinets and have different ones made out of raw boards, with the nails showing. The orange-crate look, she calls it. "We can keep some of the rocks and herbal goop, but we'll put that stuff at the back, not in the window. Luxury is not our middle name." Shanita is busy ordering fresh stock items: little kits for making seedling-transplanting pots out of recycled newspaper, other kits for pasting together your own Christmas cards out of cut-up magazines, and yet other card kits involving pressed flowers and shrink wrap that you do with a hair dryer. Kitchen-waste corn-posters with organic wooden lids are an item; also, needlepoint kits for cushion covers, with eighteenth-century flowers on them, a fortune if you buy them already made. Also coffee grinders that work by hand, beautiful wooden ones with a drawer for the ground coffee. Minor electrical kitchen items, says Shanita, are no longer the rage. Elbow grease is back.