“Just one more thing.” Melchior jerked his thumb at the mill. “Are the keys in the truck?”
Boston, MA
October 27, 1963
He had a bottle in his car. Vodka rather than gin. “Doesn’t need a mixer,” he said by way of explanation. She told him her landlady didn’t allow coed guests (“Neither does mine”) but if he was surprised that she insisted on this particular motel, so far out in East Boston that it was practically at Logan Airport, he managed to hide it. When he excused himself to go to the bathroom, she poured a pair of drinks and pulled the glassine Morganthau had given her from her purse.
Sometimes the stamps were blank, sometimes they had pictures on them. A rising sun, a cartoon character, one of the Founding Fathers. These depicted a bearded man. She thought it was Castro at first—it was the kind of joke she’d come to expect from the Company—then realized it was actually a William Blake engraving. One of his gods. What was this one called? Orison? No, that was some kind of prayer. Origen? She couldn’t remember.
She was about to drop the stamps into Chandler’s drink when she heard a door in the next room. She looked up and there was the mirror. It hung over the dresser, screwed tightly to the plaster. Naz had been in this room enough times to know that if you got right next to it you could see that it was recessed an inch into the wall. A design flaw, she’d thought—how many five-dollar motels went to that kind of trouble?—but Morganthau told her it minimized the dark corners out of camera range.
She stared at the mirror for a long moment. Then, making sure her actions were fully visible, pulled both stamps from the glassine, dropped one in Chandler’s glass, the other in hers. She swished with her fingers, and in a second they were gone.
“Cheers,” she said to the mirror.
“I suppose if I looked as good as you, I’d toast myself too.”
She whipped around. Chandler stood in the bathroom doorway, his face wet, his hair freshly combed. He’d taken off his jacket and his white shirt hugged his slim torso. Her heart fluttered beneath her blouse. What am I
Chandler just looked at her a moment. She could feel his uneasiness, knew he was picking it up from her. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to scare him away. But beneath that she could also feel his curiosity. Not lust—or not just lust—but a genuine desire to know this girl wrapped in clothes that, like his, were expensive but worn. For the first time in the nine months since Morganthau had recruited her, in the three years since she’d started doing what she did, she felt a mutual current between her and the man in the room.
“Naz?”
She looked up, startled. Somehow Chandler was beside her. His right hand cupped her left elbow softly, the way her father had always held her mother.
“I-I’m sorry,” she stuttered, lifting her glass to her lips. “It’s just that I—”
“Whoa there,” he said, catching her hand. “That’s mine, remember?”
“Oh, uh.” Naz grinned sheepishly, handed him his glass. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I don’t normally do this.”
Chandler looked around the little room, as if her lie was somehow evident in the dingy walls, the scuffed furniture, the dusty TV with one bent antenna. The unerring way she’d guided him here. He touched his glass to hers.
“I’m here too,” he said, and pounded his drink just as she had. The fingers of his right hand shivered and squeezed as the warm vodka went down, and she felt a tingle through her entire body.
Urizen, Naz suddenly remembered as Chandler grabbed a bucket and ducked into the hallway. That was the name of Blake’s god. Blake claimed to have seen him in a vision, as she recalled.
She rubbed her arm and contemplated her face in the mirror—and what lay on the other side of it—and wondered what she would see.
In the nine months since Morganthau had recruited her, she’d slipped the drug to almost four dozen men. She wasn’t exactly sure what he was hoping it would do. She only knew what she’d seen. One minute the men would be pawing at her, the next they’d jump back from something she couldn’t see. Occasionally it seemed pleasurable. One time a man sighed, “Cerberus? Is that you, boy?” in a way that made her think it must be a long-lost childhood dog. But nine times out of ten the visions seemed terrifying, and half the men ended up huddling in a corner, swatting at imaginary tormentors. Morganthau suggested that the things the men saw— hallucination seemed an inadequate term, at least from her perspective; they were more like demonic visitations —were influenced by context. Since this was Boston, where Puritan roots ran deep, her johns had a tendency to manifest whatever pillar of judgment they most feared: the police, their wives, their mothers. Urizen himself.
Yet none of them felt as guilty as Naz. She was the whore, after all. The one who’d lived when her parents died. The one who traded her body for a few dollars and the numbing bottles of alcohol they bought. It was only after she’d ingested the drug that she allowed herself to admit that perhaps she hadn’t taken it to defy Morganthau, or to find out what it was she’d been giving unwary men for the past nine months, but to punish herself even more than she normally did. To keep herself from getting close to the man who was even now staring into her eyes with a look of wonder on his face, a feeling of positive amazement radiating from his pores, as though he was asking himself what he’d done to deserve her.
She blinked, wondering when—how—he’d come back into the room. The ice bucket was on the table, fresh drinks had been poured. He’d even kicked his shoes off. One sat on the bed like a kitten with its legs folded beneath it.
“Are you cold?” he said.
She looked down and saw that she was still rubbing her arm where he’d held her.