Levitate, p.12
Levitate, page 12
A black vinyl wall base ran the perimeter of the room. She ran her eyes along it until she had to move to see around the bed. There, next to the nightstand, the vinyl had been pried away from the wall just enough to leave a gap. She doubted there was enough room behind it to hide anything, but it was the tell that she’d been looking for. She walked over and crouched down, pulled the vinyl away from the wall, and hooked her fingers under the edge of the carpet.
The tacks came up easily. She smiled at her own cleverness and pulled it further, revealing several much-folded pieces of paper on the concrete below.
Con spread the papers out on the bed and smoothed down the creases so they would lie flat. It seemed to be one continuous piece of correspondence rather than a series of letters. The top of one page was addressed to “PR.” Everything after that was encoded, but she scanned it anyway. Codes were good for concealing a message from being immediately read. What they couldn’t do was disguise the shape of a conversation. A two-letter word here, a single letter here. She could already tell the code was crackable, but she didn’t have the time. She would work on it back at the psychiatrist’s office while Timo questioned Rudin.
The other page was a map of the city. Rudin was too smart to mark anything other than the hotel’s location, but it still might be useful to them somehow. She refolded everything and stacked them on the armoire where she could retrieve them on her way out.
She checked the heating vent and behind the artwork but, as she’d suspected, found nothing there. She assumed the code would be something easy, something his stressed mind would have no trouble remembering, and she was correct. 2-3-2-7, the room number with a random number tacked onto the end. Seven was the second number she tried, a very common lucky number. Within the safe she found a handgun with two boxes of ammunition. She took it all, slipping it into the pockets of her trousers.
Someone knocked on the door, but she ignored it. She made sure she had all of the papers. The person outside knocked again. She looked at the clock and knew she would either have to answer or wait for whoever it was to go away before she could leave. She rolled her eyes as the knock came for a third time, this time with an angry but breathless shout.
“Open up! Right now!”
Con opened the door. The manager, whose name Cassiane had told her was Ernst, glared at her. The maid she’d spoken to was cowering in the hall a few feet away.
“I don’t know who you are,” Ernst said, “but you owe me one hundred marks.”
“Incorrect,” Con said.
He blinked, then narrowed his eyes. He slapped the door. “One occupant! One! Big Russian man makes one, you are two, extra charge for two.”
Con looked past him at the maid. “Are you Heloise? I don’t blame you for telling him about me. I assume he runs this place quite strictly. You must have been worried about your job.”
Ernst waved a hand in front of her face. “Don’t talk to her! We are talking and you owe me one hundred.”
Con remembered the maid she’d threatened so Cassiane could take her job. She remembered the warning about the manager, the liberties he took with his staff. She kept her eyes on Heloise.
“This man. He steals from you? Tips, wages. Maybe he does more?”
“Do not speak to her!”
Heloise didn’t answer, but her body language confirmed Con’s questions.
“Okay,” she said.
The gun would be too loud. She didn’t know how many other guests were in the hotel, but she couldn’t risk it. Plus it would be extremely messy. Too much of a hassle. So she grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and hauled him into the room. She bent her arm at the wrist, feet planted, and slammed him hard against the wall next to the door. She clapped her free hand over his mouth and nose, then shifted the position of her other hand to his throat. His eyes were wild, furious above her hand. She squeezed so he couldn’t open his jaw to bite her hand.
She stared into his eyes and saw the fear creep into them, saw the realization that he wasn’t dealing with the type of woman he normally victimized. Subordinate women, women who couldn’t afford to make a fuss, who had to take whatever he did to them out of fear of something worse. She stared, unblinking, and saw him understand that he had no power over her. He threw his hands at her torso, but he was no fighter. His fists bounced off her ribs leaving nothing but a slight soreness in their wake. It hurt when he kicked her shin, but it only made her squeeze harder.
“Don’t kill him,” Heloise said from the doorway.
“Sh,” Con said.
Heloise looked down the hall, panicked and afraid. Con considered Heloise’s plea. She hated this part of herself. The violent part, the part which reminded her of her father. He had been an angry person. Drunk. Cruel. When she recognized those tendencies in herself, she pushed them down along with her questions about her sexuality, hiding it all under a stone in her mind, focusing on her education. That led her to the KYP, to a job where violence was occasionally necessary.
“Better, worse, or the same?” Con asked.
“What?”
She still hadn’t broken eye contact with Ernst. His anger was gone now, replaced with fear. “Would your life be better, worse, or the same without him in it?”
Heloise blinked. Her eyes were full of tears and her face was bright red. “I-I don’t know. More difficult at first...” She swallowed a lump in her throat and looked at the floor. “But there are other girls who work here. Their lives would be better without this man. But you don’t have to kill him.”
“I don’t have to,” Con agreed.
She pulled him away from the wall, kicked his knee, and followed him as he collapsed onto the ground. She put her body on top of his and with a motion as quick as blinking, broke his neck. She heard a sharp inhale behind her and looked back to see Heloise looked green around the gills.
“If you’re going to throw up, do it somewhere else.”
Heloise fled.
Con looked down at the body underneath her and sighed. She didn’t like the idea of what she had to do next, but it had become a necessity.
Over the next ten minutes, she moved Ernst’s body onto the bed. She stripped off his clothes and replaced them with the underwear she’d discarded when she came into the room. She loaded one bullet into Rudin’s gun, placed the weapon in Ernst’s hand, and twisted his arm so that the barrel was resting against his temple. She put his finger around the trigger and pulled. The force of the explosion was enough to make the bed shake, and the hollow pop seemed to echo off every surface in the room at a staggered interval.
The police would be summoned and find a deviant who had finally taken himself out of his misery. It probably wouldn’t even warrant a full investigation. Someone might notice the broken neck, but she doubted they would pursue the mystery. People who did odd things during sex were mentally deranged, the police might say, it’s a wonder he didn’t do it sooner.
Setting up the display made her feel far sicker than the actual murder. The police would think the same thing about her if they knew what she’d done with Timo. Deviancy and shame went hand-in-hand, didn’t it, and surely anyone suffering from this affliction was doing the world a favor by removing themselves from it. She wondered if any of the police officers who responded to this call would look at the scene and feel shame for his own secret fetish, and she hated herself for it.
She couldn’t worry about that now. Ernst was a difficulty in her path and he needed to be removed. This was the most expedient way of achieving that goal. She squeezed her hands into fists to stop them shaking and checked her clothes for signs of blood. She hadn’t intended to wear Rudin’s suit home, but she couldn’t take the time to change now. Someone in the hotel might have already called the police. She gathered her clothes and the papers she’d recovered and pulled the door shut behind her as she left.
She fully expected she would have to pick the lock on the courtyard gate to get out, but she was surprised to find Heloise waiting there, holding the gate open with one hand.
“I’ll need to let the police in,” she said, pushing it wider to let Con out.
Con nodded to her and ran off into the night.
Chapter Fourteen
Cassiane took a lamp from Timo’s office and placed it in front of the ghost station entrance. She removed the bulb and turned it. When she opened the door, all Rudin saw was a blinding beam of light shining directly at him. He recoiled as if she’d splashed cold water in his lap, twisting and squeezing his eyes shut so hard that his face looked like a fist. Cassiane shut the door but left the overhead lights off. She didn’t need them.
She stood in the dark and waited. She could hear his breathing. The rumble of a train in the distance was no more distracting to her than her stomach growling at lunchtime. This was the room where she had died and come back to life. This had been her womb, her whole world. She didn’t need lights to know every inch of it, and nothing in it could distract her from the task at hand. She started to pace, her footsteps quiet on the floor tile.
“Which one are you?” Rudin asked.
“The one who had to make promises to get into the room alone with you. Do you want names? You can call me Circe.”
Rudin laughed quietly. “The villain appears. Your friend attempted to use logic to gain my cooperation. When she failed, she sent in the monster. To scare me. To threaten me with physical violence.”
“No, actually, she was very insistent that I not harm you. We disagreed about that, but she won the argument. For the time being, anyway. I’m just here to get a feel for you as a person. You’ve been abstract before now. Sitting here, you’re a real person. Living and breathing. Real people are different than ideas. Pavel Rudin is different from a Soviet agent. I was curious to know who we’re dealing with so I can plan accordingly.”
“You can’t even see me.”
“I’ve seen enough of you, Mr. Rudin.” She reached the false wall, the one separating their ghost station from the tracks. “This is something different. I can see it better in the dark.”
He laughed again. “Look all you want, Miss Circe. The other one already tried to get inside my brain and appeal to my humanity. What about your humanity? Don’t you care about what your people are doing to mine? The crimes they’ve committed?”
“Everyone has committed crimes. No one’s hands are clean. I don’t waste much time thinking globally. I know what’s happening here and now. One man, planning to cause an untold number of deaths. That’s an easy decision to make.”
“The trolley problem,” Rudin said. “Pull a lever to sacrifice one person in order to save five.”
Cassiane said, “This is not a hypothetical riddle about morality. You stand with a gun to the head of an innocent person, threatening to pull the trigger, and I have the ability to knock the gun from your hand to save them.”
“You have a peculiar definition of the word innocent.”
“And you have a maddening definition of humanity. You care about others. Hell, we took advantage of that to get into your hotel room. You showed compassion for a stranger. How could someone put himself at risk to help a person in need be the same man who unflinchingly provides the means to kill so many others?”
Rudin was silent. She could hear his breathing.
“Of course,” she said. “It wasn’t an unflinching choice, was it? You’re still not certain about the part you’re playing in this scheme.”
“It is necessary. Our enemies, you, have made it necessary.”
Cassiane said, “Preemptive strike, counterstrike, retaliatory strike, repeat. All until someone can’t get back up again. You don’t have to take part in that, Mr. Rudin. You can end it now. You can step out of the cycle and maybe let it collapse.”
Rudin said, “You would pull the weapon from our hands and leave us defenseless for whatever the Americans have waiting for us next.”
Cassiane crouched in front of him. The darkness was complete, with not even a small amount of light to let her eyes adjust, but she had pinpointed his voice. She knew the room well enough to know she was looking directly at him.
“It is not my job to promote reason,” she said. “I leave that to the other one. Call her Medea. When she fails, I bring my fists. I bring pain. I break fingers, legs, toes. I pull teeth. It’s not an attractive specialty, but it works more often than talking. It’s much faster, too. But I know there are times when it isn’t going to work. That won’t work on you, will it? Pavel. You would let me break every bone in your body before you told me who you were going to meet and where.”
He was silent.
“The trolley problem doesn’t tell you who the people on the tracks are. If they are good people or bad. Maybe the five people are criminals. Maybe the one person is a man simply doing his job. It doesn’t tell you why they’re on the tracks or why they can’t move. What if the one person is deaf? Does he deserve to die because he can’t hear the train coming?”
“What is your point?”
“Morality exists in the moment, Mr. Rudin. No resentment, no fear of future reprisal. I told you I don’t think globally. I think very small. I don’t know what decisions brought you here with a bag of poisons. You came. You plan to kill a great many people. It is my moral duty to stop that from happening.”
She stood up and moved closer so she could lower her voice.
“If my friend is not successful, it will be proof enough to me that you will never see reason. I’ve already determined torture won’t work on you. So at that point, you will be worthless to us. You’ll be eliminated. And I assure you, Mr. Rudin, I will make it hurt.”
“You just said you know torture won’t work on me.”
She could hear the tremor of fear in his voice. She reached into her pocket and removed the item she had placed there before coming into the room. It was just a matchstick, the type that could be struck with the bottom of a shoe, a brick wall, a concrete floor.
“The pain won’t be a means to an end,” she said. “It will be pain for pain’s sake. It will be solely to ensure that you suffer before you draw your final breath. If it becomes clear we cannot save the lives you’re putting in danger, I will take some solace in making you suffer as well.”
“I suspected you would kill me when this is all over. And yet you call yourselves heroes.”
Cassiane snorted. “I said no such thing. It doesn’t matter what country I call home, the history books are either full of atrocities we committed or beautiful lies that paint us as heroes. Every successful kingdom on the globe is fueled by bloodshed. I’m not a hero, Mr. Rudin. I’m just a person standing at the lever deciding which track I can live with.”
She closed her eyes and flicked her thumbnail across the matchstick’s flint, igniting it in a flash of bright yellow. Rudin had been staring directly ahead with his eyes wide open and pupils dilated. He recoiled, his brain telling him it was a flash of gunpowder even as his eyes stopped working. She blew out the flame and cast the room back into a darkness that was even more complete for him now.
“Think, Mr. Rudin. Think very hard.”
Cassiane straightened and left the room. Timo was waiting for her outside, arms folded over her chest, close enough to the door that she could have eavesdropped on the conversation.
“I didn’t hurt him.” She looked down at the match, smoke still curling from its tip. “Not much, anyway.”
“I heard. Do you think you got through to him?”
Cassiane shrugged. “I don’t really care.” She started toward the ladder, and Timo followed. “The timeline on this is too tight and he’s too dedicated. If we haven’t made progress getting him to talk by tomorrow evening, we should kill him and consider the mission a failure.”
“We won’t know it’s a failure until the people he’s working with go through with their plan.”
“And we have no way of knowing when that is,” Cassiane said. “We won’t recognize the awful event as one we might have prevented. We could spend the next month working him, and it won’t matter. One more day and then we should cut our losses and end the mission.”
Timo looked like she wanted to argue, but Cassiane knew she had no tactic. Finally, she dipped her chin and said, “One more day.”
Cassiane returned the nod and ascended the ladder to the office.
#
Con tensed when a shadow in the corner of the office moved, but she relaxed when she realized it was just Cassiane climbing up from the basement. She had been standing with her hands flat on Timo’s desk, head down, trembling. The adrenaline from her adventure had faded, leaving her jumpy and unable to catch her breath. She hadn’t even bothered turning on the lights when she got back to the office, hoping she would be able to compose herself before anyone knew she was back.
Cassiane stood on the other side of the desk and stared at her. “Everything okay?”
“Yes.” She nodded and stood up straight. “Everything is fine.”
“Why are you dressed like that?”
She had almost forgotten she was still wearing Rudin’s clothes. She’d dropped the clothes she’d worn to the hotel next to the door in the waiting room.
“It’s a long story,” Con said.
Timo had also climbed up into the office. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.” Con held up the papers she’d retrieved from Rudin’s room. “I got these out of the hotel room. A coded letter and a map. Nothing very useful on the face of it, but if we can crack the letter, it may lead us to something important.”
“Why are you dressed like a man?” Timo moved closer and touched the lapel of the jacket. “Whose clothes are these?”
Con averted her gaze, inadvertently letting it fall on Cassiane. “They’re Rudin’s. I put them on when I got to the hotel. I do it often when I have to search someone’s private space. I put on someone’s clothes to see things through their eyes. To get into their head. Usually I change back into my own clothes before I leave, but there were issues with that this time.”
