Book of night, p.18
Book of Night, page 18
“You went through my things?” The sudden flatness of his voice was unnerving.
But Charlie rushed on, all her hurt finally alchemizing into anger. “That’s right. I found the license. And then I found the newspaper story about how you murdered a girl, and then yourself,” she said. “You want me to feel bad about invading your privacy?”
“Yes,” he said, rubbing his hand over his face. “A little. I don’t know.”
“You know what else? I heard everything you said to Hermes. All of it. That’s when I knew you were lying. And now I know why you killed him—because he recognized you.”
Vince shook his head again, as though he could shake off her words.
“Go on,” she said. “Deny it. Tell me you’re not a pretend person in a pretend relationship.”
“Is that what you really think?” His eyes were bright with a fury she’d never seen before. Shining with rage.
It made her hesitate. “What am I supposed to think? How many people did you kill for Lionel Salt?”
“Lots,” he said, and closed his eyes.
She stared at him in horror. “The girl?”
He shook his head. “No, not Rose.”
“How about the man they found in the car? The body you let everyone think was yours?” Her voice was as cold as she could have hoped, and as relentless.
“I couldn’t make myself stop—” he began.
“—killing?” she finished for him. “My hand slipped and it happened to have an axe in it! Again. Whoops!”
“I’ll go,” he said abruptly, and turned toward the hall to their bedroom.
“You’d rather leave than answer?” she shouted after him.
He kept walking, his hand going to the wall at one point, as though he needed to catch himself. Of course he was going to go. Of course he was only there when she was easy, when everything was easy.
The cat followed him, tail lashing in an accusatory manner.
Charlie followed him. “Okay, where’s the Liber Noctem? How about that? Everyone wants to know. Hermes did.”
“What, so you can steal the book from me?” he asked, yanking open a drawer.
“Ideally,” Charlie told him from the doorway, watching him start to stuff clothes in a bag. “It would sure make me a lot of money.”
He stopped packing. “Salt is playing a game, and someone is playing a game with him. They want to make pawns out of all of us. The worst thing anyone could do is find that book.”
“Okay, explain,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I can’t,” he told her.
“You don’t want to,” she said. “You never wanted me, did you? You only wanted somewhere to hide out and lick your wounds. You never loved me.”
He looked as though she’d slapped him. Then something in his expression shifted, became a locked house at night, alarms set. “What do you know about love?” he said, hefting his duffel onto his shoulder. “I wasn’t the only one who lied.”
Charlie opened her mouth, but of all the things she had been ready to answer for, that hadn’t been one of them. “Maybe I didn’t tell you everything about me, but that’s not the same as pretending to be someone—”
“You’re right,” he shouted, interrupting her. It was frightening to see him let go after so many months of restraint, and there was something in his eyes that made her wonder if he was afraid too. “I couldn’t give you what you needed. I kept things from you. Even if you didn’t know what was wrong, you could tell there wasn’t enough of me. I wish I could say I was sorry, that I wanted to be honest the whole time, but I didn’t. I never wanted to be honest. I just wanted what I told you to be the truth.”
“Tell me anyway,” she yelled back, unwilling to back down. “Be honest now. At least you owe me that.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I won’t.”
“Fine, then fuck you. Run away. That’s what you do, right? Go find another stupid girl to con.”
The cat lunged and climbed halfway up Charlie’s ankle and bit down on her calf three times in succession.
“Ow! Shit!” she shouted as Lucipurrr leaped away, racing into the other room. “The fuck is your problem, cat?”
Vince smiled, eyebrows going up, and Charlie laughed. A moment later, she was furious with herself for laughing, and with the cat, for being a demonic asshole, but she couldn’t help it. And in that moment, she wondered if maybe she was wrong in thinking she didn’t know Vince, that maybe there was some truer truth beneath the lies.
There was still a trace of a grin on his face when he turned away from her, duffel over his shoulder.
“It’s not what you think,” Vince said, from the mouth of the hall. He didn’t turn, so she couldn’t even try to interpret his expression. The humor had left his voice, though.
“Oh yeah?” she called after him. “Then why are you leaving?”
“Because it’s worse.”
A few minutes later she heard the screen door bang.
Charlie had to press her nails into her palm to force herself not to chase after him. Then the engine of the van started. Then the sound of tires on the crumbling asphalt of the driveway.
Charlie kicked the dresser. It hurt her bare feet more than she hurt the chipboard. She kicked it again.
Not only was there something so deeply wrong with her that the guy she’d been sure was a good person turned out to be a murderer who faked his own death and also the grandson of a person she hated, but even that guy left her.
She was a poisoned well of a girl.
Charlie kicked the dresser a third time for good measure.
And yet she wouldn’t unknow any of it. She would have still stolen the receipt. Called the bookstore. Whispered mangled French. Gone through his stuff. That was her problem. Charlie Hall, never satisfied unless every last carcass was turned over and every last maggot revealed.
No, she was going to not think about the last forty-eight hours. She was going to rob Adam and then turn him over to Doreen, just like she’d planned. At least Charlie could torment someone else’s terrible boyfriend, since she no longer had one of her own.
Charlie vaguely remembered that she wasn’t supposed to want to do things like that, but that was back when she was trying to be good.
Trouble had found her once again, and she was ready to welcome it back. And if Adam happened to have the Liber Noctem, if by some chance he’d lifted it off Vince, so much the better.
Revenge on everybody. That would fill her time. That would keep her busy. Keep her from feeling her feelings.
If she couldn’t be responsible or careful or good or loved, if she was doomed to be a lit match, then Charlie might as well go back to finding stuff to burn.
17
DO NOT DISTURB
One wonderful thing about heists was all the attention they absorbed.
When you were going to steal something or con someone, you couldn’t think about your quickening shadow and whether to feed it blood or starve it back to sleep. Couldn’t think about Vince’s last words, or the way he’d looked at you when he’d come in from the store, grocery bags still in his arms.
What do you know about love?
Couldn’t think about how she’d left the food on the counter and it was probably rotting.
No, she had to put aside whatever pain or trouble or sorrow she had. Table all her feelings until the work was done.
It stung to admit how right Rand had been about her, all those years ago. She’d taken to the hustle like a tiger takes to water, finding in it a respite from the heat.
Balthazar was right too. This was the only thing she’d ever been good at.
* * *
In the parking lot outside the MGM hotel, Charlie got ready as quickly as she could. Primer over the lid, a smoky dark brown shadow in the crease. She drew liquid liner over the lash line on top, pressed white pencil to the tear line on the bottom, and black pencil lining the rest of her eye. She finished off with mascara—gobs of it, going over the lashes three times, four times. Then fake ones glued on top.
Blinking at herself in the rearview mirror, she smeared on foundation two shades lighter than her skin, blending it out with her fingers, added contouring under her cheekbones and along the sides of her nose with a brush, followed by more blending, blush, and highlighter. When she was done, her nose looked narrower and her cheeks fuller, changing her face. Finally, she put on her wig, pinned it, and brushed her red hair around a bit with her fingers until it looked as natural as she could get it.
When she looked in the mirror, Charlie Hall was gone. It was more of a relief than she liked to admit.
The hotel at the MGM Springfield was about twenty minutes from Easthampton. The casino had opened a handful of years ago, on the theory it would bring money into a city sorely lacking for it. Despite endless editorials in the local paper on how it was likely to make things worse for residents instead of better, nothing could stop the wheels of industry once they had whirred into motion.
The result was a football stadium–sized warehouse of slots, complete with flashing lights, multicolored carpet, and almost-all-night cocktails. But as Charlie walked into the hotel, she was surprised to find it to be both industrial and cozy.
Bookshelves covered the brick walls, with a balcony library suspended over the front desk. Oversized printer blocks hung behind the receptionists, and the couches were of brown leather, the kind you’d expect to nap on in a professor’s study. The whole place had a Vegas-meets-train-station feel that Charlie didn’t mind at all.
One look around, though, and she could tell it was populated the same way as any other casino hotel, people there to party with friends or to step away from their lives for a few hours, surrounded by grifters hoping to leech off any winnings. Charlie didn’t mind that either.
An afternoon wedding must have just concluded in one of the ballrooms, because kids were running around in white dresses, their hair in puffs and their braids dressed with flowers. A few elegant sequined and suited individuals—including two women in magnificent hats—stood at the edge of the bar, talking.
Charlie sat in one of the library chairs, far enough from people so as not to be heard, and called Adam’s room. It rang five times before it went to messages. He wasn’t there.
Then she checked discreetly for the positions of the security cameras and got on the elevator. As she did, Vince’s words came back to her.
I wish I could say I was sorry, that I wanted to be honest the whole time, but I didn’t. I never wanted to be honest. I just wanted what I told you to be the truth.
She’d thought some variation of that before herself, and never admitted it to anyone.
In the elevator, Charlie was carefully not meeting the eyes of the other passengers—a pizza delivery guy and two girls with wet hair and towels, coming from the pool—while cultivating a demeanor of boring and slightly dissipated benevolence. On the eighth floor, she stepped out and followed the signs until she counted her way down to room 455.
A “Do Not Disturb” card hung from the handle of the door. Charlie pulled it off and stuck it in the pocket of her coat. For good measure, she knocked. There was no sound from within.
Better and better.
Charlie was well aware she’d missed her chance for the quick in-and-out of two nights before. This was going to be a bit trickier. Still, it was one door between her and success.
She knew a woman who’d stumbled into a lobby in lingerie, with an ice bucket, stinking of liquor, claiming to have locked herself out of her room. It had gotten her a “replacement key,” but Charlie wasn’t sure she could pull that off, nor was she sure she wanted to be quite that memorable. Her current scheme was less flashy but had a lot less potential for humiliation.
In all but the fanciest hotels in the biggest cities, there’s a room with an ice dispenser and, if you’re lucky, a soda machine. They never have cameras in them. She slipped into the one on the eighth floor, and from there, called the front desk.
“Hello,” she said. “Could you transfer me to housekeeping?”
“Just a second,” said a man’s voice.
The phone rang twice and picked up. A woman this time, who grunted out a greeting.
“This is Shirley in 450,” Charlie said, affecting a thick Long Island accent. “Can you send someone up to clean the room?”
The woman said she would. By the time Charlie disconnected the call, an anticipatory thrill sped her pulse, not unlike that from a downed shot of espresso. It was the worst cure for a bruised self-esteem, to test your mettle and wit against the universe.
The universe was always going to win, but maybe not today.
At her most depressed, Charlie had seen a therapist to whom she’d admitted a very abbreviated list of problems. She’d been told to practice “mindfulness,” which involved “being present in the moment” and “not dwelling on all your past mistakes,” as well as “all the mistakes you plan to make in the future.” Charlie had not been very good at doing that in the therapist’s office, nor had she been good at the mindfulness app she’d downloaded, but in the middle of a con, she felt as though she might understand what mindfulness actually felt like.
She was fully present in this moment.
A tense twenty minutes later, a young woman with purple hair pushed a cart full of towels out of the elevator and down the hall.
Charlie took a breath, stepped out, and passed her. As she did, she made herself stumble. One bump with her elbow as her fingers snatched the universal key card from the pocket of the woman’s housekeeping shirt. Dropped it into her own pocket and took out a cinnamon hard candy, just like Ms. Presto had taught her.
It was possible that when the young woman noticed her key card missing she’d connect it to Charlie, but by the time a security team decided to knock, she planned on being long gone.
“You okay?” the woman asked.
Charlie laughed. “Got a little tipsy at the wedding,” she said, and then she was three doors down and into Adam’s room.
It was clear that the “Do Not Disturb” sign had been hanging on the door for some time. Clothes covered the wooden floor and a large plastic bottle of cheap vodka, half-empty, cap off, sat beside the sleek television in its modern frame. The air smelled of stale cigarettes, and wires hung from the smoke detector Adam had disabled.
Now she just had to find the book.
The side table next to the bed was empty, save for a box of condoms. In the bathroom, she found an array of hair products, aftershave, and cologne. The drawer held a gold vape pen and nothing else.
As she moved around the room, she was uncomfortably reminded of going through her own bedroom just a day before.
That memory brought her to the closet. She opened it to find only a coat hanging inside. She shoved her fingers into the pockets. Just some paper.
She unfolded that and found herself looking at the receipt for a ring, from Murray’s pawnshop. Adam had gotten seven hundred for it. Huh. The description read: Woman’s cocktail ring, antique red gold, replacement stone. Doreen had a ring like that, passed down to her from her grandmother.
Charlie shouldn’t have been surprised that Adam was stealing from Doreen. Once you started light-fingering things, once you realized you could get what you wanted by saying what other people liked to hear, it was easy to make excuses and hard to stop.
Rand used to say that con artists lived on the edges of society, smiles firmly in place no matter how bad things got. It had seemed romantic.
But now Charlie saw the vast insecurity that fed it. The constant need to be the cleverest. The knowledge that no one wins every time becoming more dare than warning.
She wondered what Adam had gotten into, and how bad it had gone, that despite having a book to move, he needed money on top of it.
For regular people, pawnshops were used for a quick infusion of cash to get them through a tough time, hoping that the due date on the payback for their grandmother’s porcelain, or their wedding ring, or whatever, didn’t come before they managed to be able to put together the funds to retrieve it. For criminals, they were a decent way to move items. Murray’s pawnshop was one that Charlie knew. She’d sold things there herself.
Since she had the receipt, Charlie could get the ring back, if she had seven hundred dollars. Which she didn’t. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have spent it on this.
Charlie shoved the paper in her pocket. It was possible that Doreen could take it to the police. Stolen items weren’t supposed to be sold in pawnshops, and getting busted occasionally was just the price of doing most of your business looking the other way.
At least she had something to hand over to her client.
She was about to turn away when the coat snagged her attention. It was hanging oddly, as though a weight pulled down the back. Charlie pressed against the length of the lining until she felt something solid.
Solid and rectangular and … fuck.
Charlie took out her knife and carefully cut open the lining until the contents fell into her hand: an A5-sized leather notebook. This was no ancient Book of Blights. This was a modern notebook, the kind you could buy in any stationery store. The writing inside was done in ballpoint pen.
The first page was labeled The Myriad Observations of Knight Singh. For a moment, Charlie just stared at it.
This was the book Balthazar had tried to get her to find, and steal, on the same night Doreen came into Rapture. The night that Paul Ecco was murdered.
She was too puzzled to be disappointed.
What was in Knight’s papers that was so important Adam would need to hide behind Amber with the long hair? Who was it that he wanted to sell it to that he didn’t think Balthazar would work with?
Charlie had a sinking feeling.
Well, Adam might have been clever enough to get Knight’s papers, but he wasn’t going to be clever enough to keep them. Charlie shoved the book up under her dress, so the underwire of her bra pressed it against her skin.
