screech.
“Stop moving. We’re not going to hurt you,” the first man said. Pia wriggled once more but stopped. She was struggling to get enough oxygen through her nose and her head was throbbing where she had hit it on the floor. Her arms were getting numb where the man was kneeling on them. She looked into his eyes and nodded.
“Okay. I’m going to let you up. Don’t do anything stupid.”
The man got to his feet, digging his knees into the fleshy part of Pia’s arms as he did so. He stood back and she got up. She felt small. She was wearing only a pair of panties, and even though they were wearing balaclavas, she knew the eyes of the two men were moving up and down her body. She was going to be raped, she was certain. Pia raised her arms to rub her sore triceps and cover her breasts.
Pia thought,
Pia thought,
Pia thought,
Pia looked from one man to the other and then down at the floor. She wanted them to relax, even slightly. Then she got up on her tiptoes, tapped her right foot on the floor behind her, and in one move, using her arms first for balance and then for forward thrust, she drove her right foot heel-first into the front man’s groin. He doubled over and staggered back and into his colleague, and Pia stood square at once, moved forward and reached over and hit the second man in the face twice, boxing jabs that fit the narrow space she was in. Both men were hurt but not enough. Pia got in a couple more kicks that would leave bruises, but the two men quickly regained momentum and charged her. The first man, his groin aflame, feinted a couple of times, then smashed Pia in the jaw with a right hook, knocking her unconscious.
When Pia woke up her head hurt like hell, and she couldn’t move her limbs. She understood why: She was duct-taped to her chair, her arms bound behind her and her ankles fixed together. Pia’s eyes were barely open, but she could make out one of the men coming toward her, his arm moving back and then quickly forward. She flinched, then took a face-full of cold water that the man had thrown over her using the Tupperware container she sometimes fixed oatmeal in.
“That’s what you do when I say do nothing stupid, huh?” The man’s concealed face was very close to hers. His blue eyes bored into Pia’s. She tried to speak, or at least snort.
“You are a good fighter, but we are more experienced, and there are two of us. We have respect for you because we are family men. But we know some young men who are less, what is the word? Civilized. They are, in fact, animals. If they were here now and not us, then God help you.”
The man was speaking in a whisper. The fight and the overturned furniture that resulted had prompted the upstairs neighbor to bang on her floor to ask for quiet. The men didn’t want to try the neighbor’s patience.
“I say this only once. We are here to give you a message. Stop what you are doing. Stop asking questions. Your doctor was careless and got himself and the other doctor infected, and he put the whole medical center in a compromised position. It will be dealt with quickly and quietly and everyone will move on.”
Pia was rocking back and forth in her chair, her eyes wide with fury. It was her rebelliousness surfacing.
“Stop rocking!”
Pia didn’t stop. The man slapped her in the face, not hard but well placed enough to make her jaw throb even more severely than it had been. Pia sat still.
“You will be watched. Not by us, by our friends. If you keep meddling, if you call the police, our other friends, the animals, will come and take you away and you will ask them to kill you after a couple of days. You will beg them. You understand?”
Pia stared at the man. He moved even closer than before and the rough material of the balaclava touched her skin. She could feel his hot breath through the damp wool. He spoke in barely a whisper.
“You understand?”
Pia waited a beat, then nodded.
“You will tell no one we were here. If you talk with anyone here, like that boy you are with, they will be killed too. If you go to the police or the medical authorities, you will be killed. It’s easy. Just stop, go about your life, and all this goes away.”
The man stood up. His colleague stepped forward and jabbed the needle of a syringe hard into Pia’s thigh. She gasped at the pain, then fell unconscious almost at once. The men tore off the duct tape binding her, leaving her skin red and swollen where it had been in contact with the tape. When they pulled the tape from her mouth it tugged at the wound on her jaw and further opened a tear in her lip. Blood trickled down her chin. The first man wiped it off with a tissue he got from a box on Pia’s dresser. He pocketed it after using it. He picked her up and laid her on the bed with her head over the side. He knew that the drug he’d given her had the tendency to cause vomiting.
The men removed their balaclavas and prepared to leave. If Pia had been conscious she would have seen at once that the face of one of the men, the leader, was marked with a cleft lip. The other man had a peculiarly and memorably pointed nose. The first man cracked the door open and, seeing an empty hall, quickly exited the room, followed by the second man. They put on their official hats and, adjusting their uniforms, made their way quickly to the stairs.
38.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25, 2011, 8:07 A.M.
Pia woke up in stages. First, when it was still night, she skimmed the surface of consciousness but quickly fell back into the darkness. Then, later, it had become light outside, and she was aware of her own breathing and a sharp pain in the back of her head and a throbbing along her jaw. Finally, she awoke and was hysterical-there were men in her room, chasing after her, she had to get away. She tried to get up, but her body wasn’t obeying her commands. She slumped back on the bed and closed her eyes.
Then she remembered. Men had been hiding in her bathroom and had attacked her. The last thing she remembered was getting jabbed with a needle. She felt her leg at that spot, and it was sore. She looked down at the puncture wound. So she had been drugged, and hit. No wonder she felt so bad. She reached down and felt between her legs: nothing; she experienced a modicum of relief.
Dazed with the fog of her drug hangover, Pia was unsure of what to do. Her mind clicked over to George. Pia remembered the conversation they’d had in front of the elevator, the confessions George made to her and the look on his face when Pia said she wasn’t thinking about those kinds of things right now. Last night she wanted George to leave her alone; now she wished he were here with her.
As the drug gradually started to wear off, the pain in Pia’s jaw intensified. She stood up. She was dizzy. She managed to get herself into the bathroom. She looked at her face in the mirror, and it was a mess. A livid red welt with a small laceration covered much of the left-hand side along the jawline. Pia’s lip was swollen and bloody, and there were red marks where the duct tape used to gag her had ripped at her skin. She remembered the fight, how she’d kicked one of the men in the groin and been smashed in the face in return. Pia leaned in and looked at her eyes. She saw that they were puffy and ringed with dark circles. She hadn’t had a normal good night’s sleep in an age. Being unconscious for hours didn’t count. Pia looked at herself again and hoped to get an answer to the question: What was she going to do now?
She washed her face with cold water and took a long, hot shower. She put on her most comfortable sweatshirt and pajama pants. She located a bottle of Advil in her travel bag and took four tablets, washing them down with two glasses of water. Then she called George on his cell phone. When he didn’t answer, she didn’t leave a message, fearing she wouldn’t be able to say anything coherent. She sent a text message instead: “Something’s happened. Please come over. Urgent. P.”
Pia lay down on the bed and waited.
George’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He hung back a little from the group doing radiology rounds and read the message. He had a coffee break coming up, and he figured he could wait until then to