“Yeah,” I said, “her place seemed pretty cold.”
“She loved hanging out, sleeping at our place. I never really understood why,” she said. “My parents, my brothers and sisters, everyone shouting and screaming all the time. Greek family, we scream ‘I love you’ at each other. It was crazy.”
“It was family,” I said, and I felt another sharp sting of connection to Caern and I felt a lot more like a dirty, evil old bastard for doing what I was doing to this girl. I stopped the working. I knew it would fade in a few minutes, quicker if I pushed her. I didn’t care. Dree blinked and straightened in her chair. The suspicion began to slip back behind her eyes.
“She gave you her cat,” I said. “She loved that cat a lot.”
“Artemis,” Dree said, “yeah, she’s a moody little thing. Caern got her when she was a kitten, after her mom died. Sometimes it seemed like the two of them could actually talk. It was cute. Caern wanted Artemis to have a good home, so she gave her to me before she left. Theo, everyone from her other life, she didn’t tell them about me. I was kind of like her safe place, her escape, y’know?”
“I do, very well. Where did she go, Dree?” I asked. “I swear to you, I won’t drag her home to Theo, if she’s happy and okay,” and I meant it. “I swear. I just want to make sure she’s all right. You have to be worried about her, unless, of course, you two keep in touch.”
Dree shook her head. She looked close to crying. She looked down at the blotter on Mr. Artino’s desk, looking for guidance there. She talked to the blotter, not to me. “Nothing for about five years, then I got a letter back in 2014. She was happy then, said she was getting into films. She’d met some people while she was working a waitress job, and they were going to get her into movies.” She looked up at me and saw the frown on my face. “Yeah, I thought the same thing, but there was no return address, no phone number, nothing, no way to find her, to get her help. I’d have gone myself, y’know. I didn’t even know where to start. I haven’t heard anything since.
“She’s my sister, in a lot of ways more than my flesh and blood. She was always so … alive, even in her sadness it was like she felt, she experienced everything … more. That make any kind of sense?” I nodded. “The thought of someone like that getting all that life stolen away, snuffed out … it’s obscene.”
“The world’s a jagged place,” I said, “especially for people with too little skin and too many nerves.” I saw literally hundreds of faces of the dead, some still walking, most long gone. Killed by this world’s apathy, its rapacity. Your choices were to weep or get calloused up.
Dree was crying. She held it together, no sobs, no shaking, just a trickle, like raindrops racing to oblivion, sliding down her cheeks. I dismantled my makeshift voodoo doll in my pocket and handed her the cloth napkin to dab her eyes. She took it.
“She said she was in L.A.,” Dree said and sniffed. “In America.”
“Thank you,” I said, standing. “I’ll make sure Ankou sets up some large accounts…”
“I don’t give a damn,” Dree said, also standing. She offered me her hand to shake. I took it. Her red eyes locked with mine. “Just do what you promised. If she’s okay, leave her alone. If she’s in trouble, you get her out of it.”
“I will,” I said. She didn’t let go of my hand.
“Swear it,” she said.
“I promise,” I said. She released my hand. I opened the door and walked toward the lobby and the front doors.
I stopped to assure Mr. Artino that Dree had closed the deal. He seemed relieved. I wasn’t sure if that was because the deal went down or I was leaving. Probably both. I was almost to the door when I heard Dree’s heels click, coming toward me. She had an old Polaroid Instamatic photo in her hand. She handed it to me.
“Here, it’s the only picture I have of us. She was weird about getting her picture taken.”
The photo was taken in a crowd of people. Dree was on the left with a red plastic Solo cup in her hand, her arm around Caern’s shoulder. Caern was on the right. She was small, with blond hair, almost platinum, and bright blue eyes. She had her dad’s angular features and high cheekbones. Both girls were laughing, frozen in time.
“This is from a Muse concert in Rome we went to back in 2009,” Dree said. “We would both have been about thirteen. It was a few months before she left.”
“Thank you, Dree.”
“Just … be sure to tell her Artemis is okay,” Dree said, “and that she misses her.”
SIX
The club was called Naos, and it looked like a neon fortress in the city’s Old Harbor. I had been drinking at a bunch of small bars and pubs after I left Alpha Bank. The pub crawl had led me here. I moved through the dance floor, hundreds of beautiful bodies swaying under a shower of multicolored lights. “How Many Fucks?” by Erika Jayne pumped through the sound system as rays of greens, blues, reds, and golds swept back and forth across the floor, bathing the crowd in time to the music.
I felt a little bit like Death walking through all the laughing, tanned, drunk faces. I slipped into a gap that opened at the bar and waved down a bartender, a young black guy with a Fu Manchu mustache and Afro, wearing a red mesh T-shirt.
“A bottle of the shittiest tequila you got,” I said, sliding him a couple hundred euros. “Plastic bottle, can also be used as oven cleaner.”
“Gotcha,” the kid said, palming the cash.
“And Budweiser, bottles,” I added. “Keep them coming. You know, you
