Two for the Show (19 page)

“You’ve really done your research. Careful preparation. Congratulations.”

“You were good, Amanda.”

“Maybe I’ve got a little of my dad’s onstage talent. Or big ego,” she says with a diffident smile.

If you do, it’s your own talent. It has nothing to do with his genes. Maybe instead you’ve got your real dad’s diffidence, modesty, curiosity, powers of observation.

“Well, I think you should continue your singing. You have real talent. I’ve got a girlfriend who could be helpful.” I pause, debating saying more, but press forward, can’t help myself. “How are your teachers this semester?”

She looks at me.
Are you serious?
“Do you really expect me to answer that? To have some pleasant little conversation with you?”

I shake my head no—she doesn’t have to answer. We sit in silence.

Until she looks up at me quizzically in a moment. Then: “Math’s a bear.”

Yes, you always have trouble with math.

Is she genuinely confiding? Or is this just a shrewd little girl deciding to keep the lines of communication open? I’ll take it, either way. “The secret with math is, just spend a few minutes a day with it. Honestly, that’s all it takes. It builds on itself.”

She looks at me. Shakes her head a little at the absurdity of this exchange. Suppresses a smile. But we’re both in on its absurdity. It’s a shared joke. So I smile a little too. The smile she noticed before. A smile I call on now to somehow reassure her.

“How much?” she asks, suddenly.

“How much what?” But I know what she’s asking.

“How much money are you trying to squeeze from my dad?”

“I’m not sure that’s your business.”

“I know more about money than you think a fifteen-year-old would. I’m a girl from Las Vegas, remember? Go ahead. How much?” Challenging me. Curious.

“How much are we asking, or how much are we getting?” I say. Resisting the urge to smile a little. Trying to steer away from specifics.

“Either.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“You seem to have trouble with math too,” she says. And I see her resisting her own smile. Like me, it occurs to me. Like her dad.

We regard each other silently, blankly for a moment. Neither of us sure what a kidnapper or victim can or should say to each other.

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I say suddenly. It comes out unbidden, unrehearsed.

She looks at me, cocks her head.

“I won’t let it,” I tell her.

She stares.

Searches my face, my hairline, my eyes, my nose and mouth, as if picking up the scent of our biological connection. She stares into me, into my being, into my soul, and again seems to latch onto something. “Thanks,” she says, genuinely. But her puzzled expression is asking again,
Are you sure we don’t have some connection?

“There’s something weird going on here,” she says. “Weirder than kidnapping. Isn’t there?”

I of course cannot respond. Sharp little girl, she seems to pick up on that too.

“I can tell that you can’t tell me,” she says. “But it doesn’t matter. There’s something weird going on here.”

Think zombie movie. We’re holed up and hiding from the populace as if this is a zombie movie. Everyone is dangerous. The fan base is activated. We see news reports and videos of fans forming search parties. Accent on the party part. Drinks, hors d’oeuvres. A novel social excuse. Faces from the search parties leaning into the frame of the local news cameras, waving and smiling. They’ll split the reward, they say on camera. Like lottery winners from a factory shift.

We track the parts of the city where the searches are going on, flipping between local channels to try to get coverage as complete as we can, but of course, we know the news coverage isn’t comprehensive.

Although it is a city long on security—with security cameras in lobbies, on boulevards, in casinos, a city of metal detectors and pat-downs and gym-buffed guards, it is also, paradoxically, a city that’s easy to hide in. There are more hotel and motel rooms per square foot than in any other city in the world, and no hotel or motel operator is very interested in much more than payment and a passing assurance you won’t bomb or burn down the place. The issue in hiding is that you must hide intelligently. Not necessarily in an otherwise empty and stray motel, where you’re more likely to be noticed, which would likely be included in any systematic search, but in a busy place where you’re part of the crowd, where it’s impractical to search. But maybe even in plain sight. Should the Stewartsons and I all become conventioneers? Blend into the ophthalmologists’ convention? The gastroenterologists’ annual event? And Amanda here, she can be my daughter, along on a junket, along for the ride.

If Wallace the Amazing doesn’t respond in some way, I’m worried about what the Stewartsons will do to Amanda. They won’t kill her. But they will blithely, eagerly, do something short of that. A finger. An ear. Something traditional. They are trained in maiming, highly versed in such tactics, and eager about it, and it provides a further way for them to test my loyalty, bind it with blood. I feel it coming.

Because by now I know who they are. Or were. Sitting with my laptop in the down hours with Amanda, waiting for Wallace’s response, I’ve been able to follow the thin digital thread further—track their post-government, pre-Wallace career. An electronic maze, a warren, of military and federal government sites opened their digital doors to me just a crack, just enough, leading me twisting, turning, down narrow Internet alleys to a little discovery that on reflection isn’t startling at all. They were part of a response team for US corporations whose executives were kidnapped in South America. They were the experts called in to recover the executive, and they have seen all the tactics from the other side, seen how well they work, how effective they are, know just how and when to deploy them. Their names are scrubbed. No Stewart Davidson, no Sheila Barton. But there they are, in photos on black websites that I managed to hack, depicted on a team of operatives. A whole little subworld of security firms, paramilitaries, mercenaries—and there they are.

No one comes in or goes out of the motel room. We have called off the maid service, but clearly in a change of shift there has been a miscommunication, because I hear a maid and her cleaning cart rattling up to our door, the maid humming vaguely to herself. She knocks, announces herself in English badly fractured with some kind of Eastern European accent, waits in an unrushed silence for our response.

Stewartson, annoyed, gestures us to be quiet, draws his gun, goes to the door, keeps his attention keenly on the door handle.

The maid waits a few moments, then knocks again. I would have brought Amanda to the bathroom, to join Archer Wallace in there, but there is no time, and it will look more obviously suspicious if we are seen in the process of locking a teenage girl in a motel bathroom. A foreign-born maid, with limited English? With any luck, completely unaware of, out of touch with, a Vegas stage show, or the televised images of a kidnapped daughter.

We hear the maid’s key card slide into the slot and the beep of the door unlocking, and Stewartson says loudly, “It’s occupied.
Ocupado!
” and before Stewartson can stop her, the maid enters, babbling to herself in some Eastern European language, still humming to herself, and only looks up after a beat, fear seeming to fill her eyes, as she sees the room is occupied. Extremely occupied. She is wearing a hearing aid, so she obviously couldn’t hear Stewartson.

Now Stewartson flies at her, stands over her, gesticulating, but it’s unnecessary. She is already backing out, apologizing profusely in broken English and her own tongue, pointing to the hearing aid in explanation.

But not before Dominique and I exchange glances.

I am, as you can imagine, very impressed with her performance. The hearing aid. The mumbled, concocted Eastern European dialect. I don’t know, of course, what she thinks of
my
performance. Sitting on the bed next to Amanda, my hands snugly behind my back, as if tied. Trying to look like a victim, alongside Amanda. Dave and Sandi, occupied with the maid, don’t even notice me.

Falsehood, inconclusiveness reigns. The moment is, shall we say, interrogative.

And tapping somewhere deep in Dominique’s alert, attuned researcher/detective brain—does she notice similarities beyond our identical, vaguely imploring side-by-side position on the edge of the bed? Does our identical seating provide a clue to her unconscious? Does she take note of the similar scoop of eyes, the identical lower lip, the similar cherubic faces? And pick up on something that no one else in the world knows?

“Stupid bitch,” says Stewartson, after he has slammed the door on the crazy, mumbling maid.

I don’t know where Dominique stands, of course. Loyal employee and bedmate of Wallace, or has the discovery of my existence changed her, as discovering her is part of what changed me? And beyond that, isn’t there the confirmation, the resurfacing, of what I thought I sensed before? A chemistry between us? A heightening connection?

And she—in parallel, a mirror—doesn’t know where I stand.

How could she, since I don’t know?

We gather for the Amazing Wallace’s show once more. Once more, he seems to go on as if nothing is wrong, the consummate showman, and then, consummate showman, he sees it.
It comes to him
.

“My God.” He falls to his knees, struck down by the knowledge. He can’t contain it, as he must know he should, but he can’t. It’s too much, too burdensome. He blurts it out. It is knowledge pounding inside his head that must come out. “I see the door. The room number. Room 201. A motel.” He pauses, bends his head to the floor. Looks up, stunned. “1508 Trailer Road. That’s it. She’s there.” He turns desperately to the crew offstage. “She’s there. Call the police right now. Right now. Go, go, go.”

And he collapses onto the stage.

The audience gasps.

Some of the crew comes onstage to help him. A stage manager takes the microphone. “Please . . . let’s all just wait a few minutes, all right?” The motel is only minutes from the theater. “Let’s just take a deep breath here, and wait . . .”

The police arrive in force, en masse, tires screeching, sirens wailing, baying like excited hounds wearing buffed metal coats of black and white, plus Incident Command and SWAT—all barely ahead of the TV camera crews. We see it all on the television in our room, watch them surround the motel, watch the quick action, examine the methodology, compare this reality to the fictional version we have seen in dozens of TV shows.

It should have occurred to me that Wallace the Amazing, finding us through Dominique, would co-opt the moment first for theater.

Of course, we have moved. We are watching from a much safer place. A place no one will ever look for us, I feel sure.

Big Eddie’s hideout house. In a Vegas development of hundreds of identical homes. Nondescript. Off the radar. Its identicalness to the houses around it, still its best architectural feature. And never occupied. Perennially empty real estate. Which I know from my reconnaissance of Eddie and his henchmen when they took Wallace here. When I saved him.

The site of my boss’s kidnapping, which I singlehandedly foiled.

The site of his daughter’s kidnapping, which I have cooperatively planned.

Big Eddie’s unoccupied hideout house—where I have gone from hero to criminal.

In the wake of Dominique’s visit to the motel, I suggested that we move. They thought I was being overly cautious, but I pointed out that the coincidence of the maid’s screwup and her hearing aid was all a little too much for me. We discussed it; they argued about the risks of moving itself, I stood my ground, and prevailed. I assured them I had the perfect place. I knew of course this would endear me more to the Stewartsons, they’d trust me more—but mostly, I was afraid for Amanda’s safety in a police raid. If the atmosphere was sudden, and intense, and unanticipated, I was afraid of what Dave or Sandi or a suddenly unchained Archer Wallace might do.

And if Wallace the Amazing knows that I’m involved in some measure (whether as perpetrator or victim), will he think to look here? He was brought here blindfolded on that night of course, but he presumably does know the location because he left here by crossing through the desert himself. Will it occur to him that we are here? I don’t think so (it never occurred to you, after all, did it?), but I have to admit, there’s a little piece of me that wants him to think of it. A little piece of me that wants him to find us. To end this.

The Stewartsons’ car is in the garage. The house’s curtains are all drawn. We transmit no signs of life. The only light inside is the television, which we are gathered around.

Back to the show. An audio patch to a police captain, his voice crackling across the stage. “Your daughter was here. We showed the picture to the night manager. He doesn’t speak English—but he pointed to the photo and nodded and said yes and gave us the room number. You were right. But we missed them.”

You couldn’t ask for more drama onstage. But we had avoided it. And I had a little more time to decide where I stood, whose side I was on, and what to do about my daughter. Or so I thought.