Safe House

were just where I thought they’d be, inside the cover, repasted so fine you’d never spot the seam if you weren’t looking for it. The pictures were all of the woman. And him, I guess, from the waist down. About what you’d expect. Weren’t worth much unless her next fiance wanted to marry a virgin. Not even erotic, unless you liked ropes and ball-gags and mirrors. Just trophies from an ugly hunt. I placed them flat on a piece of thick glass, used a box-cutter to shred them down, made a little bonfire in a stone jar, lighting a cigarette from the flames licking over the open top. It tasted good. The negatives needed something better, and I’d take care of it soon. I know a guy who works in a crematorium. Nights.

“It was all here,” she said on the phone when I called later, a wave of happiness bubbling under the surprise in her voice. “Everything. My letters. The . . . gifts I’d given him. Even the last of the . . .”

“I know. The one he hadn’t used yet.”

“Yes! Everything except . . .”

“The pictures?”

“Yes.”

“They’re gone,” I told her. “I watched them go.”

“Oh God.”

“Sure.”

“There was a letter. Should I . . . ?”

“Read it to me,” I told her.

“It just says: ‘You already got the rest. There is nothing more between us. Please leave me alone.’ Can you imagine? Like I was terrorizing him.”

“Doesn’t matter, right?”

“Yes, you’re right. I don’t know what to say.”

“Let it sit for a while. Don’t do anything. If he ever shows up again, tell your friend, okay?”

“Yes. Thank you! I—”

I clicked off the cellular.

Impossible to know which buttons would drop his elevator, so we’d pushed them all. Maybe it was the high-pitched sound blast ripping his ear when he picked up his home phone. Maybe it was the message on his computer screen when he fired it up, black-bordered like an obituary:

Maybe knowing we had copies of everything he’d stored on his hard drive made him real nervous and he popped a Valium. Big mistake—the perfect-match lookalike pills we substituted would give him bad enough stomach cramps to make him think he’d been poisoned. And if he tried to drive himself to the Emergency Room, the air bag exploding into his face when he turned the ignition key in the BMW wouldn’t calm him down much.

And after what we left in his bed, somebody was going to get a great condo at a bargain price. Kind of a pre- fire sale.

“Harriet told me what happened,” Crystal Beth said to me. “Well, I guess, she didn’t actually know what happened. But he’s gone. Really gone, she thinks.”

“If she doesn’t call him,” I said, nothing in my voice but the words.

We were at a small table by ourselves, seated next to the palm-print-smeared window of a coffeehouse on the Lower East Side. Some residents call it the East Village, part of the neighborhood-renaming frenzy that hit the city during the co-op boom. They tried other names for it too—Alphabet City, Loisaida—anything that would make it sound sweeter than it is. Lots of new names came to Manhattan for different pieces. “SoHo.” “TriBeCa.” Even Hell’s Kitchen became “Clinton.” I’ve known that sorry game since I was a little kid. When they put me in a POW camp and called it a foster home.

Crystal Beth had picked the place. With a day’s notice, I’d sent Clarence over to check it out. “Big nothing, mahn,” he said. “No action.”

The street outside was covered in a thin film of the gray filth that passes for snowfall down here. She took a long hit off one of her hand-rolled cigarettes, letting the smoke bubble slowly from her broad nose, wafting up past her almond eyes. “I should be angry at that,” she said.

“At what?”

“At your . . . assumptions. That women ask for it.”

“I never make assumptions,” I lied. All of us, all the Children of the Secret, we all make assumptions. We assume you’re going to hurt us. Use us. Betray our love and violate our trust. We all lie too. You taught us that.

“So why would you say Harriet would ever call him?” she challenged.

“I don’t know Harriet. I know the . . . dynamic.”

“Yeah,” she said, sadly acknowledging. “I do too. I hope she never—”

“Her choice,” I said. “At least she’s got one now.”

“Choices aren’t cheap,” Crystal Beth replied. “Are they?”

“I paid heavy for mine,” I told her. Thinking about when I was too small to know what it cost. Or to steal the price. But while I was learning, a lot of people paid. Mostly the wrong ones.

I love it when citizens talk about hard choices. Where I live, you don’t get many. And the ones you do get are all hard.

“Speaking of which—” She started to reach in her purse.

“Not here,” I cut her off. “You don’t flash cash in a joint like this.”

“I know better than that,” she came back, insulted.

“Oh. You did this before?”

Her face turned to her left, the tattoo clear in the feeble afternoon sunlight. “Why would you . . . ?”

“Porkpie ever come back for his money?” I asked her, trying to catch those almond eyes.

“Porkpie?”

“It was five K, right?” Then I told her enough of what I knew to show her there was more.

As soon as I was finished talking, she went into herself. Deep. I know what it looks like. What it feels like too. Her eyes were open but unfocused, her breathing was so shallow I couldn’t see her chest move. Her hands were gently folded on the table between us.

I left her there, undisturbed. Sat waiting, not smoking or sipping my hot chocolate. Table sounds all around us, but she was safe in her capsule, untouched.

I knew what she was doing. She wasn’t in shock, she was looking for answers. I could walk down the same path, but I couldn’t join her, so I stayed where I was.

Time passed. Prison-slow.

Her eyes refocused. “Want to take a walk with me?” she asked suddenly, her mouth straight and serious, the corners turned down slightly.

“In this weather?”

“It’s not far.”

“Okay.”

I left a ten-dollar bill on the table. Figured it was more than enough to cover my hot chocolate and Crystal Beth’s mint tea. But she tossed another bill on top as we were getting up—I couldn’t see what it was. She wasn’t doing some feminism number—the joint was a dive, but it was probably chic enough to charge uptown prices.

On the street, she flicked the hood up over her shiny hair, tucked her hands into the pockets of her long red coat. I put on a pair of leather gloves, zipped my jacket to the neck, turned the collar up. The wind cut at us with ice-edged neutral hostility. Nothing personal—city winter hates everyone. Crystal Beth stuffed her hands into black mittens, inhaled a deep breath through her flat nose.