or excuses. So there was no hemming or hawing when he finally ran out of obstinacy and decided to answer Cassandra’s questions, no heavy sighs or tears, and but a single regret.
“No, I didn’t think about my wife and kids- and why the hell should I? What business is it of theirs? I thought about fucking you six ways from Sunday, and nothing else. You had a lot of promise and I’m only sorry you turned out to be such a freakin’ headcase.” It was impossible to say whether that satisfied Cassandra, but she seemed to know that she’d gotten all she was going to get.
Images of Bluto’s blurred face, looming above her, were insistent, and they made my jaw ache. I heard Monroe’s voice from far away. “You’re sure about that drink?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Are the others as bad as Bluto?” I asked.
Monroe thought about it. “He’s the most brutal, I think, but there are tense moments in all the interrogation scenes.” He drank some scotch and ran a hand over his chin. “Of all the dangerous things she does in her videos, I think those segments are the scariest.”
He was right. Alone in a hotel room with an angry, scared, and cornered man- she was juggling chainsaws. There’d been just a hint of danger with Skinny, a moment when her back was turned and his hand went up, but it went no further than that. There’d been more than a hint with Bluto.
“Does she always get them talking at the end?”
Monroe bumped ice around in his glass and looked up at me. His eyes were blurry and his little beard was dusted with salt. His words were nearly lost in the din of the place. “Always,” he said. “They posture and threaten and evade and lie, but in the end they answer.”
It didn’t surprise me. From what I’d seen, Cassandra was good at getting people to talk, very good. She was patient and firm and seemed to have an innate understanding of the theater of interrogation- of the fragile chemistry of power, fear, and empathy that drove it along, and the cocktail of guilt and vanity and fatigue that could bring it to confession. She would’ve made a good cop that way.
I paid off Chaz Monroe and poured him into a taxi, and I walked up Smith Street in the general direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Besides some bar stragglers and a few late diners, I had this stretch of Brooklyn to myself. But if the cold and wind had cleared the sidewalks, they did nothing for my head, which was still full of Holly Cade. Holly, Wren, Cassandra- the equation played and replayed, cut with lurid images from her videos and snippets of dialogue from her bad plays, a bleak and desperate loop. I’d completed one part of the job David had hired me for: I’d found out who Wren was, and what it was that she wanted from him. Now if only I knew what the hell to do about it.
12
The sky was freighted with heavy clouds on Tuesday morning, and the local news was freighted with snowstorms, churning up the East Coast, driving down from Canada, and colliding all over New York. The timing was uncertain- maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day- but the predictions were dire.
“Bullshit,” Clare muttered, and tore a piece of toast in half. “They get all hysterical but they never get this stuff right.” She smeared some strawberry jam on the bread and went back to the Times.
She’d arrived early this morning, as I was getting back from my run, and we’d been sitting in amiable silence since, she leafing through the paper and I writing a report for David. I drank some orange juice and read it over.
The facts were straightforward, albeit strange: Holly was making another video and, unbeknownst to him, my brother was her costar. She’d shot most of it already, and now she was gearing up for the grand finale. For that she needed David to make a return appearance.
What to do with these facts was the problem. Ignoring Holly’s demands was one option, though a risky one. She had proven relentless in pursuit of her quarries, and the hours of video documentation she presumably had of her sessions with David would give her a lot of leverage. But leverage ran two ways. Orlando Krug had said that Cassandra was jealous of her privacy, and the kind of art she was making required anonymity- so the threat of revealing her secret identity might actually pull some weight. But Holly was also demonstrably nuts, which made her motives hard to read and her reactions impossible to predict. I sighed and ran my hands through my hair. The speculation was pointless, I knew- a little game I was playing to keep from dwelling on the videos themselves.
Twelve hours or so had given me perspective enough to see them as unique and beautifully made works. And I knew also that Holly’s former colleagues Moira Neal and Terry Greer had understated her talents as an actress. She was remarkable, and her ability and willingness to abandon herself to a role was frightening. But the queasy, sticky feeling the videos evoked still lingered. The desperation they depicted left me bleak, and their contempt and studied cruelty made me angry.
And it was impossible, of course, not to cast David as one of those faceless, mechanical men- impossible not to think about what had brought him to Holly, and what she’d captured of him with her hidden cameras. Impossible not to wonder what reserves of rage and brutality she’d tapped, and how much encouragement he’d needed. The more I thought about him the less I knew; the more he was a silhouette, receding down a darkened hallway.
Maybe it was the smell of toast that brought the memory back. Maybe it was the threatening light in the sky.
It was a bleak February Wednesday and I was home from boarding school, not for vacation but because I’d been caught, for the third time, smoking a joint in the woods behind my dorm. The dean of students said a month’s suspension might teach me a thing or two, and he’d been right. I’d learned that I could buy decent weed at decent prices from our building’s late-shift doorman, and that the weeknight bartenders at Barrytown, over on First Avenue, wouldn’t card you if you tipped well enough. I’d slept until three that day, and would’ve slept later if not for the noise. It was my parents.
My mother had delayed her midwinter pilgrimage to Boca that year, and my father was making a rare foray from his study, and they’d decided to have it out right outside my bedroom door. As was often the case in those days, I was the convenient excuse. It was nothing new and I tried to tune it out, but they were uncharacteristically loud.
“What’s he doing with himself?” my mother said.
My father chuckled. “He’s finding his way. He’s only fifteen, after all.”
“He’s sixteen, and as far as I can tell he’s not finding a goddamn thing.”
“Must everyone in this family grow up to be a banker?”
Peter Spiegelman
JM03 — Red Cat
Then there were footsteps in the hallway, and David’s voice. He was at Columbia by then, but kept turning up at home, looking for a meal or clean laundry or something. He was going on about the dean’s list and about sitting in on someone’s graduate seminar, and the sound was bright and penetrating. There was a silence when he finished, though not a long one; then my parents took up just where they’d left off.
“Apparently, not everyone must be a banker,” my mother said. “But must they be undisciplined and immature? Must they be so goddamn self-indulgent?”
My father’s laugh was grim. “And who, exactly, are we talking about now?” His words hung there for what seemed a long time. Then I heard more footsteps and figured everyone had retreated to their corners, but I was wrong. There was a shuddering sigh in the hall, muttered words, and a single curse.
“Asshole,” David said.
I’d stared at the ceiling for a while, and when it was clear there’d be no more sleep, I’d wandered into the kitchen. I was reading the paper and eating burnt toast when David came in. He wore a coat and tie and his hair was freshly cut, and he looked like a poster boy for some Bible-belt college- the debate captain, maybe. He made a show of checking his watch.
“Up early, I see,” he said. “Busy day, I guess. Plenty of TV to watch, lots of dope to smoke?” I ignored him, and he smirked. “What, no smart remark today? Maybe you’re a little fuzzy still- still buzzed from last night.”
“If I was, you just killed it.”
