The Messenger (26 page)

Nadja comes back from questioning everyone in the station about how to find Paula’s house. “It’s not good. She is living in an inconvenient area, very far away …” she reports, slumping back into her seat.

“Too far to take a cab?”

“A cab? No way. We don’t have enough money.” Nadja scans the restaurant as if looking for a job opportunity. “It’s completely across the city. We take a bus. We have to change here and there. It’s confusing.” She has the street names scribbled on a napkin.

“It costs us two dollars and seventy-five cents. Exact change.” She takes a section of the newspaper from under Daria’s elbow, glares briefly at the headlines. “This is getting sick. This is horrifying …” she says, letting the paper fall from her fingers.

“He stole a
horse
.” It is Marty Grimaldi, managing to look perfectly starched and groomed. “They had him last night. Cornered him in Wenatchee, but he
stole a horse
and broke out.”

“What?”

“That’s right. They lost eight full hours because it turns out Yaghobi
can ride really well. Bastard played polo when he went to boarding school.”

“Holy shit …”

“That’s right. They had two companies of Special Forces ready to take him, and he rode right through them. Now he’s up on the side of that mountain and, well, you can see …”

She looks down to the monitors displaying live feeds bounced to them via satellite from Washington State. A row of specialists tends the screens. There are helicopter views, and pop-up menus and maps that show the terrain from any angle. It takes him some time to recognize what he’s seeing—the camera is looking straight down on fir trees and a mountainside.

On the screen a movement—a moment later he sees that it is an exhausted horse, terrified by the helicopters, trying to turn and run in the thick trees.

“Shouldn’t be very long now.”

But it takes another hour, at least another hour. Maybe more.

Gradually the views all tighten on one small portion of the mountain, a rocky bluff that juts out, perhaps a hundred yards below the panicked horse. One by one all the cameras end up focusing there, flicking between infrared and normal imagery.

Yaghobi appears to be resting under a shelf of rocks; maybe he is sleeping, maybe he is injured. He has covered himself with branches, but they are not enough to hide his body heat.

Now the screens show additional figures, what looks like a squad of Special Forces, creeping down through the woods.
“Gunfire,”
Sam hears a panicky voice say. There is a jerking movement from the brush-covered cave where Yaghobi hides, then—a pinprick of bright light—

“Oh, God …” he hears Grimaldi murmur. A flare of white light bursts out, swiftly engulfing the length of the man, who begins to twist and jerk in a savage dance, pushing himself out of the cave and leaping, one, two—three times.

“He’s done it,” someone says.

Behind the burning man are smaller pools of flame, as he stumbles
and collapses near the dark base of a tree. Sam can see the soldiers making their way down the slope, drawing closer to Yaghobi’s little hiding place. They look as if they are swaying, but more likely they are rappelling down the cliff face.

“Take his spleen,” Sam says.

Grimaldi swings around to him.
“What?”

“Operate. Take his spleen out. Get one of the medevacs. Get someone!”

“He’s burned himself to death, Sam.”

“Yes, yes. I know, I know, I saw … Just tell them to go in and remove his spleen. We need his B cells.” Grimaldi looks at him for a long moment.

“Get them to do it,” Barrigar says to one of the techs.

There is a pause. Maybe a dozen seconds. It might as well be a month, Sam frets.

“Negative on viability …”
From the infrared view, Sam watches as Yaghobi’s image loses heat.

Grimaldi is looking at him, her beautiful face troubled. Someone else pats him on the back. Why? What are they consoling him for? Are his feelings supposed to be hurt? What does it matter, it’s not like he has lost some personal victory, is it?

Cautiously, the soldiers converge on the blur. They all know Yaghobi is hot with a Level 4 virus, but still …

Unless they harvest Yaghobi’s spleen now, it’s too late, Watterman knows. He shakes his head, bends over and shuffles from side to side. The cells begin to break down immediately, but surely … surely they can get
something
out of him? Goddamn it to hell … Above on the slope, a stretcher is being lowered. It looks like the aluminum-frame kind that ski patrols use. The soldiers unfurl a long plastic bag. It gleams because it’s made out of some kind of super Mylar that can’t be ripped or punctured.

Some miracle weave you can wrap up America’s worst nightmare in.

* * *

Here is a main street and their bus whistling along.

See this city going by? See it vaporizing? See a bomb, a good bomb, or maybe a dirty bomb, see it exploding. A plume of smoke. Screams heard distantly at first, then getting closer. Closer.

See the people in the cars? The little shops with alien alphabets, Chinese characters, Spanish words. Crazy lettering and façades jam-packed with information. Above the doors and windows are advertising placards. The windows are open, many of them. The air, churned through ten thousand motors and warmed by all the concrete, blows through the bus. Daria closes her eyes against the sunlight, soaking up the heat like a cat. She’s been sleeping a lot, she realizes. Maybe her death will be gentle, when it comes. Maybe she will just go to sleep, curl up in a ball and die like a bee succumbing to vampire mites. Her sisters will carry her corpse out of the hive and toss her down to the ants. Eyes closed, half dreaming, she shakes her head. She was ready to fly apart in an explosion of nails and glass shards while attacking an anonymous skyscraper, so she ought to be ready to suffer slowly, yes?

“When we get there, you have to remember to call her Paula. She hates Paulina,” warns Nadja, and then falls silent, watching the signs. They are heading through the downtown core. “This is it … I think,” she mutters, and then goes up to the front to ask about Prospect Avenue.

Somewhere in the bus someone else is laughing. It’s a beautiful morning in Kansas City.

Only two cases reported.

They have found their stop on Prospect Avenue, and now they are lugging their rucksacks along the residential streets of Brush Creek.

The blocks are sun-drenched and laid out in perfect alignment over the slightly rolling land that borders the creek. Along one street there is a high dike meant to control floods. There don’t seem to be too many people, and several of the houses on the long blocks appear vacant.

A car comes up behind them. It is a low car, an American car
with big everything, painted midnight blue, the engine customized and growling. Two boys, one sleeping it off.

“Hey …” calls the driver. “Where you goin’?”

“I’m going to my sister’s,” says Nadja.

“Your sister don’t live around here …”

“Yes, she does. Can you help me with the address?”

“Where is it?”

Nadja stops and gets the paper, reads it out.

“That’s four blocks. You be killed before you get there.” The boy’s smiling. He is a teenager, with closely cut hair and a sparkling stud in his ear. “You ain’t got the bug, do you?”

“We’re okay,” Daria says, straightening up, and slinging the bag off her shoulder so she can drop it or grab Officer Preston’s gun if she has to. “Four blocks which way?”

“Just like you’re going now and then right at Bellefontaine …”

“Okay. Thank you,” she says, and the boys roar off. Maybe she and Nadja should walk a little faster before they come back with a couple of friends to rape them. At least it’s daylight.

They walk through the faded neighborhood. Here was a church, here was a family. Here was a long row of apartments that once housed the elderly. Here was a store on the corner that would send out your fine cleaning.

It must have been beautiful at the end of the Second World War. Then it would have been full of life and children, and big yards with mowed grass. But that’s all changed. This morning the neighborhood is starting to wake up and have its first smoke, drink, or injection. This morning nobody can afford to go to the dentist, and this morning there is no big meal to pray around.

After he’s dropped off his friend the boy comes back, his engine thrumming. It’s the only thing he’s got, that car. He goes right past them, turns and reverses out of someone’s disused driveway, then crawls idling up beside them again as they walk down the street.

“Your sister is at Monica Morton’s house. She’s the midwife.”

“Midwife …”

“What that means is, she’s going to have the baby at home, with Monica there. I saw her. She’s pregnant as shit.”

“I thought Paula was going to be in a hospital …”

“No, they send her back if she goes in there. Are you from Russia too …?”

“How far is it?” Nadja asks.

“Not too far. I’ll take you there.”

“That’s all right.”

“Come on now, bullshit. I’ll take both of you over there.” Daria gets the front seat so that she doesn’t have to bend as much. They rumble on down the street and around the corner.

His name is Brutus, named for a famous Roman gladiator, the boy tells them, and he leans back in his seat and drapes the wrist of one hand over the steering wheel and lazily controls the car as it glides through Brush Creek. The 3000 block of Fifty-second Street is on a little rise of ground. The numbers on the houses are hard to see. Some have been ripped off the fronts; some have been covered over with plywood and the numbers spray-painted on. You have to figure out where to look.

3050 is on a large lot, an old bungalow-style house with a wide porch, and a set of steps that has been augmented with a black wrought-iron banister.

A driveway of broken concrete climbs from the street and vanishes behind the house. There are a few low windows set in the stone walls of a half basement—granite, Daria supposes, gray and yellow in tone and rough cut. Someone has repointed the front corner, a labyrinth of white mortar that spiderwebs starkly from the rest of the wall.

Behind the house there is a dilapidated garage overhung by the thick branches of an oak. An old car is up on blocks, a chain dangling into its open hood. Something broken from before she was born.

The street is a distant memory of an American neighborhood from fifty years earlier. She has seen magazine illustrations of such places, illustrations by a famous American artist, Daria forgets his name. Portraits of scared, sunburned, baseball-playing boys being examined by dentists, of whole families praying around the Thanksgiving
turkey, of blushing girls following an oblivious older male student.

The faces here are different. Everything now is different. On the 3000 block, two houses have burned to the ground. One lot has been scraped clean—ashes and stones pushed into a heap at the back of the property, already grown over with blackberries whose thorns anchor waving fronds of plastic bags. The other site is newer, a pile of charred two-by-fours, a collapsed chimney, and trampled charcoal where men have gone in to pull out all the copper.

Between the bulldozed site and the house where Paula is staying is a wide vacant lot that has become a jungle. Once, somebody must have tried to clear all the brush along the lot line of Paula’s yard, but now a bamboo hedge leans into the gutters on that side of the house; a grass fire would burn the whole thing down.

The yard itself is completely bare, scabs of dried grass of different varieties. It looks more like the surface of the moon than a lawn.

Brutus’s chariot idles up the driveway and stops with a lurch beside a set of steps that lead to the front door. “Do you have to stay here tonight, or you want to go out with me for a little while?” Brutus says. He’s become obsessed with Nadja already.

“You’re a pleasant guy, but I have the HIV,” she says.

“Naw … bullshit. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He gestures to his dashboard as if the car itself has been doing all the driving.

Nadja just shoots him a glare. As they climb out, it is Daria who smiles. “Thanks, you’re sweet …”

“See there, somebody knows what’s right,” he says to Nadja. “I’ll take both of you out …”

They haven’t even got to the front door when it opens and Nadja’s sister reveals herself. She is a tiny girl, extremely pregnant, who uses an old man’s four-toed cane to support herself. The two girls collapse in tears and prolonged kisses in the Russian style. For a long stretch, Daria just stands there not understanding anything, before an introduction is made. Paulina’s looks make her seem younger, but she
is
young—only seventeen. She has put on weight only where the baby is, and from behind as they go down the hall,
she resembles a child carrying a large yoga ball under her T-shirt. They immediately go back into her bedroom because “Monica says I’m not supposed to be up,” Paula apologizes, and rubs her huge middle.

The conversation jumps immediately back into Russian, so Daria looks for a convenient place to drop her bag, and heads back into the kitchen to make tea. There is a bag of groceries on the counter that has not been put onto the shelves, so she unpacks it while she waits for the kettle to boil.

The house has seen many better days. The appliances are old; the refrigerator shakes and growls. After a few minutes of nothing, she cycles her hand over the coils of the stove and discovers they’re all broken but one. Before she handles the cups, she washes her hands in dish detergent. Will it do any good? It’s far too late for that, she supposes.

Back in the bedroom, the three of them sit on the floor discussing the progress of Paulina’s pregnancy, and a good number of facts begin to emerge about how the sisters have come together in this unlikely place.

First, they are running from Big Niv-L. That’s how he spells it: Niv-L. It has some meaning that the girls have never quite understood. His real name is Rodney. Nadja and Paulina laugh.

The pressing problem is that Big Niv-L owns them, having paid to get them into the United States as temporary workers. If they want to buy out their indenture, they owe Niv-L five thousand dollars each, plus expenses: food, board, legal fees for all the different papers, and medical costs. They began their temporary work as dancers in one of Niv-L’s clubs, but were also expected to entertain his friends, or important customers Niv-L was trying to impress. They were also expected to cater to the needs of potential partners for Niv-L’s schemes, various members of his retinue, and Niv-L himself. In this way Paulina Pravdina found herself with child, and when told she was going to be forced to abort, she ran away.