He stepped into it, facing her. “This is a really big tub.”
“It’s one of the reasons I chose this apartment. I always thought I would bring a man in here. It never happened until now.”
He sat in the water, and they found that they could both fit if he kept his legs straight, and she put hers over his. After a few minutes she straddled his thighs and leaned forward to kiss him. They stayed that way for a time, and then she said, “I think it’s time to get out, don’t you?”
“Yes.” He looked down and cleared some of the suds from the surface of the water. “How long will this last?”
“Long enough. Don’t talk now.”
They dried off and went into the bedroom. In concentrating on Sherri, Kapak almost immediately forgot that it was the medicine that had changed everything, and not some return of his youth. Then he forgot everything but her. She seemed to him tonight to be a composite and holder of the best qualities of all the women he had slept with when he was young: his wife, Marija; Ava the thirty-year-old whore he had paid with stolen money when he was fifteen and visited on the way home from school every day; the college girls in Budapest. She seemed to him to be a gift—maybe the final gift—the universe letting him remember why its creatures fought so hard to be alive.
Afterward, Sherri lay with her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and slept. He lay there staring at the ceiling of the unfamiliar little bedroom. He didn’t want to move because if he did, she might not come back to his shoulder. He lay still for a long time, and while he thought, he began to feel the sensation. It wasn’t exactly pain, just an uneasy awareness that something inside his chest wasn’t right. It was almost a sadness. This was happening too late, after he had gotten old.
It didn’t go away. He started to feel short of breath. It was as though each breath he took was more difficult, and when he exhaled, a belt tightened on his chest so the next breath would be shallower. Then there was a feeling as though weights were being piled on his chest. “Sherri.” He had to take two breaths before he could say it again, so he touched her foot with his and said it louder. “Sherri!”
“What?” She lifted her head and brought her face closer.
“Something’s wrong. It’s in my chest. I’ve got to go to a hospital.”
She got up quickly. She found his clothes and tossed them on the bed beside him. “All right. I’m going to drive you to Valley Presbyterian. It’s the closest, and it’s big enough to have a lot of doctors on duty.” She drew back the covers and crawled onto the bed beside him. “I’ll help you put on your clothes. If something hurts, just tell me.”
“It’s like a tightness. Hard to breathe.”
She dressed him efficiently, and then threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. They walked out into the living room. As he passed the couch where they had been sitting, everything looked different. The clear sides of the half-empty bottle of Armagnac had a film that looked sticky and nauseating. The uniform he had taken off Sherri was still lying crumpled on the floor. She snatched up her purse, led him to the top of the exterior staircase, and said, “Wait here.”
He gripped the railing and stood still, watching her lock the door, then run down the stairs to pull her Volvo out of the garage, then run back up to him. “Feel any different?”
“No.” But he did. Besides the tightness in his chest, or maybe because the tightness had gone on for a time and made his muscles tense, it hurt. And time was part of the discomfort. Everything seemed to take an eternity. He let her help him down the stairs and into the passenger seat of her Volvo. She ran around the car and drove.
She drove with care all the way to the emergency room of Valley Presbyterian Hospital. He sat in tense immobility on the end chair of four that were connected, while she talked to the receptionist, then the triage nurse, and then some kind of clerk who handled insurance matters. As soon as she had her back turned, people came and sat down beside him on the row of chairs. Every one of them sat by simply releasing the tension in their knees and letting their buttocks drop a foot or so onto the chair. Each time it happened, Kapak would be jolted suddenly, his muscles would contract, and the pain would increase.
Finally, to nobody in particular, he announced loudly, “I’m having a fucking heart attack.” All conversation in the room stopped while everyone looked at him. It was still a wait before the nurse called him into an examining room off the hallway, let him lie on a gurney, took his vital signs, gave him two aspirin, and disappeared. By then he had lost his sense of time. Sometime later another nurse took blood for a test, and he fell asleep. A young woman doctor in a long white lab coat appeared after that and spoke to him.
“Well, Claudiu, how do you feel now?”
“Like a crap sandwich.”
She hesitated. “Crab?”
“Never mind. It doesn’t seem to hurt as much, but I feel this weird pressure on my chest. Did I have a heart attack?”
She looked uncomfortable. “We looked at the test, and it’s inconclusive. There’s an enzyme we test for. If you haven’t had a heart attack, there’s no enzyme in your blood. If you did, there is. You had a tiny amount, so we can’t really be sure. A cramp in the esophagus feels exactly like a heart attack. If you had one it was small. It was like a warning.”
“A warning?”
“Your age is a risk factor for heart disease. So is your weight, and the fact that you get no exercise, and probably the cholesterol, fat, and sodium in your diet.”
“So what happens now?”
“I’m releasing you and recommending that you see your family doctor tomorrow. He may order more tests and help you work out a plan for a healthier lifestyle.”
Sherri drove him back to her house and helped him go back to bed. He fell asleep immediately. He woke up after two hours and saw her lying beside him. He touched her bleached hair, her sleep-closed eyelids and soft cheek, her smooth shoulder and thin waist and the swell of her hip. He had so much to regret.
18
IT WAS AFTER 2:00 A.M. Jeff and Carrie sat in her white car down the street from Siren and watched the building from a distance. A dozen people walked out the side door in a small gaggle, talking to each other, and stepped onto the darkened parking lot. A couple of them waved, and all of them got into cars. In the headlights from one of the cars, Jeff picked out Lila from the corn-silk blond hair and her tall, thin silhouette. She got into the little red Honda and started it. Jeff watched her as she drove off the lot and disappeared down the road.
“I don’t see any lights on,” Carrie said.
“There aren’t any windows. It’s a strip club.”
“Oh. Yeah. I suppose they don’t want to give it away for free.”
“They’re closed for the night, so the neon light on the roof is off, and the floodlights for the parking lot.”
“How did you think of this place?”
“It’s the club where the money came from last night. Those three guys who were outside the bank last night work for Manco Kapak, and the money was his profit. They were depositing it for him.”
“I could see what they were doing with it. But don’t we have all their money now?”
“No. That was just last night’s take—l ast night’s money. We want tonight’s money.” He looked at her closely. “Unless we don’t. You were the one who said you wanted to do a robbery tonight.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to rob a strip joint.”
“Fine. Let’s go home.”
“Not so fast. I’m thinking. Have you cased this place—gone inside so you know your way around in the dark?”
“I have. I know the layout fairly well.”
“You’re so pathetic. Coming out here and sitting in a dark bar with a couple hundred of your fellow losers to see one girl dance naked. Couldn’t any of you get a date?”
“In the first place, it isn’t one girl, it’s like four or five at a time. Over an evening, it’s a lot of them.”
“Oh. Only fifty to one, then. No wonder you’re an expert.”
