Die For You

“Isabel!” he calls. He sounds so even, so measured. He could be calling me to ask if I remembered to buy razors or did I steal his gym socks. But that’s not why he’s calling me. I lean against the cold stone of the wall; the space behind me echoes. I hear water dripping. I am unarmed, trapped. I close my eyes and try to harness my breathing.

“Isabel, let’s talk. I’ll put the gun down.” I peer out the slim opening in the door and see him lay his weapon in the snow, raise his hands into the air. Every instinct in my body screams to stay still, to stay hidden, to move further into the darkness, to hide. But that one question, the one that drives me, the one that is responsible for every bad decision I’ve made over the last few days, forces me forward. Even with all he’s told me, I still don’t have the answer. I still want to know. Why?

I push open the door and it emits a loud groan. He turns to face me and the wind picks up, howls around the courtyard, lifts a flurry of snow. The world is gray and white and black. He looks different, somehow. He has let his hair and his beard grow and it looks darker as a result, closer to brown than the dark blond I was used to seeing. We stand there for a moment, regarding each other. He drops his hands to his side, then stuffs them in his pockets.

I wonder if I look as strange to him as he does to me. I am self-conscious of my tattered clothing, my one shoe. I fold my arms across my chest. He gives me a sad smile.

“Isabel,” he says. “This has always been your problem. You’re too trusting.”

Before I can ask him what he means, he’s pulling another gun from his coat, and all I really see before a white-hot, mind-altering pain in my center is a muzzle flash. The cold of the ground is shocking as I hit it hard and the sky is an impossibly silvery gray. There is another color in the world now. A deep red. The only thing I hear is the muted sound of his footfalls. He’s walking slowly away.

“KDE JE KRISTOF Ragan?”

I hear the sound of my own voice asking that question. Before that, we were still safe. If I hadn’t asked that question and the girl hadn’t answered, I’d probably be on a plane home to New York right now. I feel elevated above the pain, risen high above the fire in my gut. Not far away, I think I hear the sound of gunfire. But I can’t be sure what’s real-it might just be the beating of my heart. I watch the snow fall in big, wet flakes, a starfield through which I’m traveling. The events of the last few hours play back for me.

THE GIRL WITH the tattoos on her face answered Ales in Czech. She spoke softly, quickly. I couldn’t understand her at all.

He nodded and looked at me. “She says she can take you to a place where they’ll know.”

Jack gives me a look; it’s a warning. “This is a bad idea.”

“What does she want?” I asked.

“What does everyone want?” said Ales, lighting another cigarette. “Money. Two hundred U.S.?”

“Fine.”

Jack took hold of my arm, pulled me away from them. “This is crazy. Let’s go. I’m not letting you follow this girl to wherever. Think about it. They’re playing you.”

He looked at Ales, not releasing my arm. I could tell that he’d reached the end of his patience with what he considered a flight of my fancy, a desperate act he’d expected to yield nothing. Now he was afraid. Afraid that I might actually find what I’d come here to find.

“Make her tell us where he is,” he said. “She can still have her money. But we’re not going with you unless she tells us right now where she wants to take us.”

Ales relayed Jack’s words but it seemed to me that the girl understood, was looking at Jack with a sullen resentment. She uttered a curt sentence in Czech.

“There’s a place where they know him. You can get what you want at this place-drugs, guns, whatever,” Ales translated.

“What kind of place?” asked Jack. He was angry now, sounding hostile. His neck was shading red, and a vein was starting to throb next to his eye.

The girl turned, muttered something else to Ales, and then started to walk away. Ales shrugged. “She says forget it. She doesn’t have to help you. She doesn’t want your filthy American money.”

“Good,” said Jack, physically moving me toward the car. “Let’s get out of here.”

He stopped, still holding on to my arm, and looked over at Ales, I suppose remembered that we stupidly let our guide hold the key.

“What about you?” Jack said. “Do you want our filthy American money?”

Ales just looked at him with that same bitterness I saw everywhere overseas these days. He gave a slight nod.

“Then let’s go.”

“Wait!” I yelled after the girl. She was already halfway across the large lawn. She stopped and turned back toward us. I wrested myself from Jack and ran after her.

“Isabel!” Jack called.

“Jack. Please. Wait with the car. I’ll be right back.”

He put his head in his hands, leaned up against the Mercedes. I heard him talking to himself but I didn’t hear what he was saying.

“You speak English,” I said to her. Not a question.

“A little.”

“Can you help me?”

She nodded. “I can help you find him.”

I remember thinking she might have been pretty before all the tattoos, a series of black swirls around her eyes, across her nose, framing her mouth. I wondered how badly it hurt to have your face tattooed, where she’d gotten the money to have it done. She smelled of cigarettes and sex. Was it allowed at the orphanage to do this type of thing to yourself? Were there no counselors? Did no one care? There was something dead to her eyes, something flat and empty like the eyes of a cat. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Under other circumstances I probably would not have, but desperation made me stupid.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We returned to the car. Jack and I argued for fifteen minutes, while Ales and the girl looked on from a distance, smoking, smug and superior. Eventually, Jack and I were so angry at each other, there was nothing left to say. We climbed into the car, and a moment later the other two joined us. As the girl climbed in, I noticed that she clutched a small nylon bag.

“Don’t you need to ask someone if you can leave?” I asked her. I glanced over at the building, expecting to see someone come out, ask us where we were taking the girl, but the whole place suddenly had an aura of desertion to it, even though I knew there were plenty of people inside. She gave an unkind little laugh.

“What is your name?” I asked the girl. But she’d gone back to not speaking English, just looked at me blankly.

“Her name is Petra,” said Ales from the front seat. He was pulling from the drive onto the long, winding road we traveled to get here. The sun was sinking; it was late afternoon. And there were no other cars as far as the eye could see ahead or behind us.

“She can just leave the orphanage whenever she wants?” I asked, still fixating on this, wondering if we’d just kidnapped a child.

“She’s not an orphan,” said Ales finally, impatiently. “She doesn’t live there.”

“Then who is she?”

Petra and I sat in the backseat, with Ales and Jack up front. Jack, who had been staring out the window, not talking-sulking-turned to look at our driver.

“Then who is she?” he repeated.

Ales opened his mouth to answer, when the car seemed to lose power, to slow to a crawl, and then silently die. He deftly maneuvered it to the side of the road.

“What’s wrong?” asked Jack, sitting forward. He had a hard, suspicious frown on his face.

“I don’t know,” said Ales. Our guide reached down and pulled a lever and I watched the hood pop open. Jack got out of the car, too, and they were both obscured by the open hood. I moved to exit as well, suddenly feeling that I didn’t want Jack out of my sight. But Petra caught my arm. I looked at her; she was smiling, shaking her