Ardo picked something up from the arm of his chair. He threw it at me. It bounced off my chest and landed in my lap. It was the wallet I’d given Miklos in the bar.
“Now,” Ardo said. “Who the hell is Jorge Ramos?”
I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “You tell me,” I said.
“No,” he said. He stood, walked up to me, took my chin in his hand and turned my face slowly to one side, then the other. “No, Mr. Lucky. I don’t tell you. You answer my questions, or I let Miklos here cut your eyes out.” He bent forward. I could smell his heavy cologne. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
Ardo paced around me. He put me in mind of a cat in a nature film, a lion or a cougar on a sun-drenched African plain, sluggish-seeming until the moment it attacks.
“I never heard of Jorge Ramos. You, I’ve never seen in my life. But you come into my brother’s bar and announce that I paid this Jorge Ramos to kill you. You’re not a crazy, are you?”
“No,” I said. Thinking: his brother’s bar. I remembered the bartender’s words—
“No. You’re not a crazy,” Ardo said. “And it isn’t that you don’t know who I am. Andras says he warned you, though why he did I don’t know. You’re not his type.”
Miklos said something in Hungarian and laughed rudely at the end. Ardo shot a glance his way and the laughter quickly died off.
“My brother says you want to revenge some friend of yours who’s been killed,” Ardo said. “This friend, what’s his name?”
“Her name,” I said. “Dorrie Burke.”
He spat on the ground. “Dorrie Burke. Another I never heard of.”
“You might have known her as Cassandra.”
He shook his head.
“She worked with a woman named Julie. Julie worked for you at Vivacia.”
Now his eyes narrowed beneath their heavy lids. “Julie I do know. Julie we taught a lesson. She knows better now than to do what she did. She should’ve known better to begin with. You say your friend worked with her?”
I looked over at Miklos. “Ask him. Dorrie was there when he taught Julie her lesson.”
Ardo looked at him and Miklos said something I couldn’t understand.
“Your friend is a black woman?” Ardo said.
“No,” I said. “The other one.”
Ardo leaned forward till he was just inches away from my face. “Well, I didn’t kill her. Either of them. The black one or the white one. Or the Korean. We don’t kill women.”
“What about the waitress at Bishop’s club?” I said. “The one in the hospital.”
“We don’t,” he said, taking hold of the bridge of my nose and squeezing hard, “kill women.” The pain was intense. When he let go, my head fell forward, my chin against my chest. There were spots in front of my eyes.
“People who work for me sometimes make mistakes. They pay for them when they do.”
“Well, one of them killed my friend.”
“No,” he said flatly. “No. I would know it if they had.”
“Well, someone did,” I said. “And people are saying it was you.”
There was real anger in his voice.
“On the street,” I said, my heart pounding. “People told me this is Black Ardo’s work. He’ll kill anyone.” Ardo had stopped pacing. He stood in front of me, and I could see the springs winding tighter under his skin. “Men, women, children, he’s an indiscriminate murderer. Kills like—” Ardo’s hand shot out, wrapped around my throat. “— the Black Plague.” I could barely get the words out.
He held me. I felt the calluses of his palm against my Adam’s apple. I was conscious of how little force it would take for him to crush it. His voice, when he spoke, was a guttural whisper. “You know why they call me Black Ardo? You want to know why, you little ant? It’s my name.
He walked out of my line of sight. I heard him behind me, pounding up a flight of stairs. He called down to Miklos, who hesitated for a moment, reluctant to leave me with two perfectly good eyes still in my head and all sorts of bones not yet broken. But Miklos lowered the knife, picked up the wallet from my lap, and followed his boss up the stairs. I heard a door open and then the lights went out.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I know my arms lost all circulation. After the first hour, I could only feel pins and needles and after the second I felt nothing at all. My legs ached. My back ached. I spent ages struggling to loosen the ropes or to reach the cell phone on my hip and only managed to give myself severe rope burns. I was tempted to rock the chair over on its side, but I didn’t, for fear that I wouldn’t be able to get up again.
I listened for any signs of movement, of life, any hint of where I was. There were the sounds of plumbing in the walls, water sloshing through pipes on the way to some distant toilet, but nothing else. Not even, thank god, the skittering of rats or insects. It was quiet, and it was cold, and my twisted, strained, abraded hands were numb.
I thought about dying. It wasn’t the first time. But this time I thought I was closer to my own death than I’d ever been. They could kill me here and no one would ever know. I wouldn’t show up for work and they’d wonder what became of me, but after a few days they’d write me off. In a program like GS, people came and went. Lane would hire some other assistant. Michael would find someone else to rent the apartment. My father, living out in Petaluma, might wonder why he didn’t get a Christmas card from me this year, or he might not. The people who ran the cemetery out in Brooklyn where my mother was buried would wonder why I’d stopped visiting. Or they wouldn’t.
My disappearance wouldn’t be the stuff of headlines. I hadn’t spoken to Leo in years, Susan in months. If Dorrie were alive, she’d have done something, she’d have stood up for me the way I was trying to stand up for her. But Dorrie was dead and who else was left?
It was dark, the complete dark of a windowless room, and I felt adrift, as though my chair were a tiny boat and I was on a silent, starless sea. Some unused corner of my brain dredged up a line of Coleridge remembered from my days at NYU:
I shook my head, fought against the temptation to fill the void with self-pity. No one had forced me to go looking for Ardo. I could have guessed this was how it would end. A psychologist might even tell me I’d been wishing for this outcome. You go to a zoo and walk into the lion’s cage, you can’t complain when he bites you.
But I’d leave that to the psychologists. The only question for me to consider now was how I could get out again. Not whether I wanted to. I wanted to. I had a job to do. If Ardo hadn’t been behind Dorrie’s death, someone else had, and if I didn’t get out of here, the person responsible would go unpunished. That was unacceptable.
But it was dark and I was so very tired. My nose, my ribs, my legs—I was a symphony of aches, and the pain was part of the huge weight drawing me down. I didn’t notice when my eyes slid shut. I didn’t know when I slept. Only when I woke.
There was light in my eyes. A hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake. I couldn’t see till the hand holding the light swung away. I blinked, tried to clear my vision. A face swam into focus. The bartender. Andras.
“What are you...”
He raised a finger to his lips. Then he stepped behind me and began tugging at the knots in the rope. Looking down, I saw he’d already freed my legs. I stretched them out in front of me, tried to get the blood flowing again. It felt like knives were stripping the muscles from the bones.
From behind my head, his throaty whisper came. “We need—”
“Your brother,” I said, and he hissed at me. I lowered my voice. “Your brother. Where is he?”
“Out. You made him very angry. He is showing what a reasonable man he is by finding someone to kill.”
“Why are you—” I heard the rope drop to the ground and my hands sprang apart. I brought them around in
