The Tattooed Heart

Oliver shrugged. “Or”—he patted the couch beside him—“you can sit here with me and chill for a while, smoke a little weed, and we see what’s what.”

  Graciella hesitated with the money in her hand. Forty dollars would buy her a meal and maybe a place to spend the night. On the other hand, more of that pile of money might mean finding a steady place, maybe a place she could stay in long enough to find a job. The calculation was all over her face.

  She sat down beside Oliver, who nodded and lit a joint that he handed to her without inhaling himself. Graciella took a hit and coughed out a cloud of smoke.

  “Would you like a beer?”

  Graciella nodded. One of the other boys, now clearly subservient to Oliver, fetched a bottle from a cooler full of mostly melted ice.

  “So, tell me your sad story, Candy.”

  “I don’t have much of a story,” Graciella said. She sat almost primly, perhaps clinging to a hope that no more would be asked of her.

  “Oh, come on, we both know that’s not true. A pretty girl like you does not do this unless there’s a story. And we both know it involves some bad shit happening to you.”

  Graciella told Oliver her story. She smoked some more pot, drank a little beer, relaxed enough to put her feet up. The other two girls were now shooting her looks of poisonous jealousy.

  Oliver gave every impression of listening intently, nodding at times, making small noises of sympathy at other times.

  Finally, he said, “Yeah, there’s always a father involved, isn’t there? A father, a stepfather, one of those. It’s tough, isn’t it? My father’s no better.”

  “I’m sorry,” Graciella said.

  “Well, it happens, doesn’t it? Some people get the easy life, some people don’t. Those people, the people like you and me, Candy, we have to make our own way in the world. We have to survive. Right? And that means doing what has to be done.”

  Graciella nodded. She was, by this time, noticeably high.

  “Now, here’s the part where I tell you what I’m about,” Oliver said. “I am what is commonly known as a pimp. I also occasionally sell a little weed, and even a little smack. You know what that is?”

  “Heroin?”

  “Heroin. It kind of goes with the whole lifestyle, you know? Some of my girls find it makes it easier doing what they have to do to survive.” He smiled, shrugged, all very casual.

  “Are you asking me to . . . to work for you?”

  “Look at it more like I’d be your agent. Let’s face it, what are you getting? Twenty, thirty bucks? I mean, come on, that’s no life for a girl who looks like you. I can set you up on dates where you charge three hundred, four hundred bucks. You keep sixty percent. And I’m a straight shooter about that, isn’t that right, Buffy?”

  One of the girls nodded. “Oliver isn’t like some guys. He’s more like a manager.”

  “For example, right now we’re waiting on a party that starts in, what, an hour and a half. Older guys, but respectful. And they’re rich as hell. They want three girls, and look at me with only two.” He waved a hand toward the other girls, a salesman showing his wares. “It’s a party on this dude’s boat. They’ll take it out on the river, drop anchor or whatever it is they do, I’m not exactly an expert on yachting, have a little party, and drop you back at the dock. The whole thing is two grand. I keep eight hundred of that as my commission, and the three of you split the rest. That comes to four hundred each. Tax-free cash.”

  Graciella looked toward the front door and her fingers rubbed the two twenties she had been given. A sick look of dread came over her, but she pushed it down and forced a desperate smile.

  “Good girl,” Oliver said. “Tony, get cooking. The girls are going to want to be relaxed.”

  Graciella stiffened but did not bolt as Tony opened a small packet of white powder into a big soup spoon. He lit a Sterno, the kind of thing caterers use to keep chafing dishes warm. He added a little water to the powder and stirred carefully with his little finger.

  Then he placed the spoon over the flame until the liquid began to boil just a little at the edges.

  “I don’t think I want to—”

  “Oh, stop that,” Oliver said in a teasing voice. “We’re not mainlining, we’re just chipping. You can’t even get hooked from a little skin pop.”

  The other girls drew closer now, drawn like moths to a flame. When Graciella looked away Oliver’s expression grew hard and contemptuous. The mask had dropped and although what I saw beneath it was nothing as horrifying as the demon’s hideous face, it had about it some of that same hunger and greed. And in some ways it was worse for being a young face, a face you’d expect to see smiling from the pages of a high school yearbook.

  Tony used an eyedropper to measure the cooling liquid into a syringe.

  “Buffy, you have seniority, so you go first,” Oliver said. “I run my business like a business,” he added as an aside to Graciella. “You work your way up in the ranks. Fair is fair.”

  Graciella watched in fearful fascination as Buffy took the syringe, bared her arm, and stuck the needle just beneath the skin.

  Buffy squeezed the plunger slowly. A small bubble like a skin blister formed, but the expression on the girl’s face was not one of pain.

  The other girl, Kitty, did the same but added in a whisper, “More later, right?”

  “After you get your work done,” Oliver said sternly. “Your turn, Candy. Here, I’ll do it for you.”

  I already knew the end of this story. I knew Oliver was lying. I knew from a shocking glimpse of Kitty’s arm, with veins that looked too black beneath her light skin, that she had been using for some time, and almost certainly mainlining. Kitty was a confirmed junkie and could barely pull her eyes away from the scattering of plastic bags on the table.

  “Like a vampire at a blood bank,” Haarm said. “But maybe, if she just does it this once . . .” He looked at me and saw the answer on my face. “Ah. So. This is the one we want, isn’t it?”

  Messenger said, “His name is Oliver Benbury.”

  Oliver now poked the needle into the delicate skin of Graciella’s inner arm.

  A look of surprise, followed by shock and then utter, profound bliss, transformed Graciella’s face.

  “See?” the pimp said. “Doesn’t that feel great? That high will last until you’re all done with your work tonight. And who knows, the old dudes may have other stuff for you. Maybe some coke. Booze for sure.”

  Graciella smiled and lay back, relaxed and careless, on the couch.

  “Bring the van around,” Oliver said with a knowing look at the two boys. “You know where they’re going.”

  14

  TO MY SURPRISE, MESSENGER MADE NO MOVE TO follow Graciella, nor to advance in her time line. Instead, we waited, watched, unseen, as the boy who had answered the door and the three girls departed, none walking too steadily.

  When they were gone so was the pimp’s mellow act. He stood up and snapped, “Clean this up, Tony. Like we were never here. Find me another squat. Text me when you have it. I’m going home.”

  It was Oliver we followed, out of the ramshackle building, and two blocks away to a covered pay parking garage where he slid behind the wheel of a very new Mercedes.

  Rather than follow him on his drive, Messenger took us to his destination. I suppose the house should not have shocked me, not after seeing the car. I don’t know what the exact definition is of a mansion, but the house was set way off the road, down a long paved driveway. It was two stories, brick and stone, with expensively dressed windows pouring buttery light across a manicured lawn big enough for a game of field hockey.

  What did we see when we followed Oliver inside? Nothing in particular. His parents were both at home. His mother was doing some sort of paperwork that involved piles of documents and envelopes spread all over the dining room table. When Oliver came in she smiled, asked him about his day and about the study group where she’d thought he was. She offered him a snack. He declined.

/>   It was all very average, very normal.

  Oliver’s father was in an easy chair in front of the TV. He had dozed off and woke only when Oliver patted him on the shoulder.

  “Hey. Oh. Hey, Oll. Did I fall asleep?”

  “Nah, you were snoring while you were awake,” Oliver teased.

  They had a five minute sports conversation and then Oliver went up to his bedroom, quickly blew through some homework, grabbed a bowl of ice cream from downstairs, brushed his teeth, and fell asleep.

  There was no demon. There was no evidence that this was anything but a normal, loving home. Oliver had just recruited an underage girl for his prostitution ring, and in order to ensure his grip on her, he had started her on the road to heroin addiction. There was no obvious explanation for his moral blindness that I could see in this home.

  “I want to see more of his past,” I said.

  I’m not quite sure when I had started to have an opinion about what we should see next. I’d always just followed along with Messenger. But there was something about this case, this girl, Graciella, and the cold-blooded way she’d been destroyed by Nicolet and by Oliver that got under my skin. Maybe it was guilt over my earlier arrogant dismissal of her as a loser. Maybe now that I had seen what she endured, and seen my own callousness exposed, I felt an obligation to her.

  Or maybe she reminded me of an earlier guilt, of Samantha Early, the talented young writer that I—yes, I—had cruelly driven to suicide. Maybe I saw too much of myself in Nicolet and Oliver both.

  “You are looking for an excuse?” Haarm asked. “For this drug-dealing pimp?” He sounded incredulous.

  Messenger answered, “We are the eyes of Isthil. We must understand, so that she understands.”

  It was the first time he’d said that and I was a little surprised. I had not thought of myself in those terms. It suggested that Isthil, or some arcane mechanism involving Isthil, decided the outcome. But it was the Master of the Game who created the contest, and the mind of the guilty one that supplied the punishment.

  We spent some time figuratively leafing through Oliver’s life, searching for the precipitating event, the abuse, the parental neglect, the addiction, the brain injury, whatever, whatever excuse might possibly explain Oliver’s descent into evil.

  But there was no easy explanation. Oliver had had a good life. He had once been a seemingly good kid. Then, for reasons I could not uncover, he had started down the path of arrogance, of contempt for everyone around him, of indifference to right and wrong, blindness to the pain of others.

  What had been his excuse for ruining the life of an innocent girl?

  What had been mine?

  I felt sick inside, disgusted by the Trents and Olivers and Nicolets of the world, hating them for what they did. What people like them did. What people like me did.

  “There’s nothing,” I said at last. “He’s just rotten. A rotten human being. He doesn’t even need the money.”

  We went from there to pay an unseen visit to Nicolet.

  Nicolet did not have Oliver’s money, nor his stable family. Her mother was an alcoholic who was in prison for a drunk-driving accident that killed two people.

  Her father was a hard-working baker, up every day at four a.m. to go to a commercial bakery and make bread and rolls. It was repetitive work, but he loved it. Mostly they used big mixers, but Nicolet’s father would sometimes pull out a wad of dough and knead it in his hand, just for the pleasure of smelling the yeast, and feeling the elasticity of the living dough under his floured palms and fists.

  Growing up, Nicolet was alone a lot, and I felt some sympathy for her. Her father would come home while she was at school, take a nap but set the alarm to greet her as she got off the afternoon bus. Then he would help her with her homework until she reached eighth grade and he found he was no longer able to keep up. He was not an educated man himself and felt ashamed of it.

  He would stay awake long enough to make Nicolet dinner, and on occasion drive her to after-school events. At eleven he would go back to sleep, catch five hours, and start the grind all over again.

  It wasn’t a great life, but as I watched him with his daughter I felt acutely the loss of my own father.

  “A good man,” Haarm said.

  I found his commentary irritating. It brought home to me the unseemliness of what I was doing, peeping into people’s lives, weighing them up, deciding on the basis of a few minutes of their lives whether they were good people or bad, and whether their actions had contributed to the tragedy we were there to understand.

  Haarm seemed untroubled by the moral complexities. Of course he was even newer to this life than I, and perhaps his master had been even less communicative than Messenger. But I judged Haarm, as I judged everyone, and found him lacking. I was aware of my own hypocrisy, judging him for being judgmental, but I told myself that I was a better person than he because at least I cared. At least I had not shut myself off from the pain. And at least I recognized my own hypocrisy.

  Humans really are geniuses at excusing their own behavior while condemning others—especially those others they don’t really know.

  Haarm, I decided, was unfeeling and harsh and I resented his presence. He confused me. He unsettled things with Messenger. He was a third wheel, as the old saying goes, one more person than was needed in the tight little world of Messenger and Mara.

  I hoped he would return to Chandra soon.

  But what if Chandra did emerge from isolation with her mind gone? What then? Messenger had said that there could be only one master for each apprentice, so presumably he would go, eventually.

  We followed Nicolet as at age eleven she suddenly began to take her music lessons seriously. She was never more than able on a piano, and the guitar was beyond her, but as she progressed into puberty her voice, which had been shrill and unsteady, deepened and widened and began to be a really extraordinary thing. By the time she was fourteen she was singing with a cover band, sneaking out to late-night jams while her father was sleeping, and rushing home to be in bed when he woke before first light.

  “It is almost dull to watch,” Haarm said. “But her voice . . .”

  I nodded. Yes, her voice. The girl had a gift.

  Once a month Nicolet and her father would drive to the prison where her mother was finishing a seven-year sentence. And I saw that for both the father and the daughter, the impending release of the mother was fraught. They both made the right noises about wanting her home, but they had achieved a stability, the two of them. It was a lonely stability, a dishonest one, too, since Nicolet was sneaking out most nights and so sleepy that she often ditched school. But they had found a way to survive, to be happy, and that’s rare enough in this world.

  Within two months of the mother returning home from prison, she was dead of alcohol poisoning.

  We watched the funeral ceremony.

  I’d only ever been to one funeral before becoming Messenger’s apprentice, my father’s. That had been a military ceremony, with blanks fired by crisply uniformed soldiers, a bugler, and something like a hundred people in attendance, many of them his fellow soldiers. There had been comfort in the formality of it all. I can never forget the ceremonial removal of the American flag that had covered his coffin, the careful folding of it into a neat triangle, the handing of it to my mother who passed it to me.

  The ceremony made it more than just the death of one sad girl’s father. By that ceremony my father was inducted into the honored ranks of men, and some women as well, who had worn the uniform and died doing what they had been ordered to do. Even though I was young at the time of his death, I knew enough to feel the spiritual presence of long lines of brave soldiers and felt that perhaps, if there was any truth to our fantasies of an afterlife, my dad would have company and plenty of guys to swap stories with until the day when I would join him again.

  But this was not that funeral. Four people attended this funeral. The father, the sister-in-law, the clergyman, and Nicolet.

>   I saw in Nicolet’s eyes the moment she shut down the pain and pushed away all feeling, not just for her mother but her father as well. On that day the struggling remains of Nicolet’s family had died.

  Nicolet had an excuse. Not enough of an excuse, for nothing is ever enough to excuse ruining a person’s life as she had ruined Graciella’s life. But there was at least some event we could point to and say, “Ah, it started here.”

  The odd thing was that the coldness that now filled Nicolet did not hamper her talent. If anything she found a new depth, so that when she sang songs of love betrayed, she didn’t sound like a girl who knows little of life. There was an honesty to those kinds of lyrics now.

  And this was how Mr. Joshua discovered her. He joined his greed and ruthlessness to her unsparing pitilessness, and a grim partnership was formed.

  I saw that Messenger was watching me.

  I said, “The title of this week’s lesson is monsters.”

  Haarm laughed quizzically. “What’s that mean?”

  “Demons and pimps, greed and ambition,” I said, not really caring if Haarm understood, knowing that Messenger would. “They come with excuses or come with none. Rich and poor, male and female, every race, every religion. Evil is an equal opportunity affliction.”

  Haarm shrugged uncomfortably. “And we do what we can, yes? We stand up for the victims.”

  I shook my head. “No. We just protect the balance. We push back against evil so that it will not tip us into nonexistence.”

  “That’s a dark way to put it,” Haarm said. “You make it sound as if we’re just limiting the damage. Come on, little Mara, we’re the good guys, right?”

  I know he was just trying to break me out of my funk. Or maybe he was just being a smart-ass because he’s a smart-ass by nature. I probably should have said something lighter, something generous to improve the mood. I didn’t.

  I said, “What deed of yours made you a messenger’s apprentice, Haarm?”

  Haarm actually took a step back. His pale skin flushed.

  “Good guys,” I said with more aggression than was kind. “We’re monsters, too, the three of us. Monsters being punished by being made to punish monsters.”