Die for You (18 page)

I considered lying again. But instead I nodded, lifted a finger to my mouth, and started backing toward the door.

“Do you have a gun?”

“No,” I said, startled by his boyish question, which seemed at the same time frighteningly practical. New York City kids are just a little too savvy for their own good. “Of course not.”

He shrugged. “You might need one.”

I might at that. “Don’t tell them you saw me leave.”

“Maybe I should. Maybe this is a bad idea.” He was one of the best players on his chess team. He could see that I was outmatched and about to make a stupid move that might cost me the game. Suddenly this little kid who I’d watch enter the world, who I’d rocked and carried, fed and changed, seemed smarter, more worldly than I was.

“Don’t,” was all I could manage. “Not for the next fifteen minutes.”

“Izzy?” I heard him say as I turned and moved quickly through the door and flew down the stairs as fast as I could. I knew him. He was a good egg, wanted things orderly, still thought the world was black and white, just like his mother. He’d tell—but he’d hesitate, just because he was a boy, because he liked the idea of being in on a secret. With luck, I’d be gone before anyone tried to come after me.

“Dude, you’re making me look bad,” Erik complained when we were all on speakerphone together.

“Yeah,
really
bad,” said Linda. But I could hear the smile in her voice. They’d had their share of romantic trips and enviable moments. And now they had kids, as Linda liked to say.
Romance is a pizza delivery and a bottle of wine after Emily and Trevor go to bed
.

We stayed in a small, intimate hotel near Jardins des Tuilleries on the tranquil rue Saint-Hyacinthe and passed our days shopping, eating, drinking, fairly skipping through the streets of that magnificent city. I spent my mornings writing in a small café, ensconced at a tiny table in the corner, the competing aromas of fresh bread, coffee grinds, and cigarette smoke mingling in the air with lively conversation and the clinking of cups and silverware, while Marcus slept until nearly noon.

In the evenings, we dined slowly, lingering for hours over beautiful meals, then visiting nightclubs, dancing and drinking, returning to the hotel to make love. I don’t remember even the tiniest disagreement on that trip, but maybe that’s revisionist history. Maybe we argued over what sights to see, or whether we could afford more than one Hermès scarf, or where to go for dinner—all the normal negotiations of living a life together, that might blow up into something bigger. But I don’t remember anything like that.

On the other hand, there are some things that come back to me now, moments I hadn’t given much thought to then. He said he’d never been to Paris, that my surprise was secretly a gift for himself, too. But he seemed strangely at ease on its streets, as if he knew his way around.

“Are you sure you haven’t been here before?” I asked, my nose in our guidebook. He navigated the Metro with ease, quickly found exactly the café or shop or museum we were searching for, while I might as well have been on the moon.

“Maybe in another life,” he answered. There was something solemn to his tone that caused me to look up from my reading. But he was smiling when our eyes met. He pointed to his temple. “Smart. You married a very smart man.”

The truth was Marcus always seemed to know where we were or how to get to any destination. He had a mind for navigation, an uncanny internal GPS. I might wander lost and confused, even in my own city, turned around after a ride on the subway, unsure of east and west. Not Marcus. Not ever. It was annoying, how he was always right, but I found myself relying on it. A man like Marcus was the reason other men didn’t ask for directions.

Our last night in Paris, we were returning to the hotel, both of us a bit glum that the trip was coming to a close.

“One more,” Marcus said, grabbing my hand.

A narrow stairwell led down beneath the sidewalk. An electric strain of music seemed to waft up from the darkness. It was late. We had an early flight.

“Why not?” he said when I hesitated. “This time tomorrow we’ll be home.”

The damp stone staircase ended at a heavy wooden door. When he pulled it open, sound and smoke came out in a wave that pushed us back, then washed us in. Soon we were one with a throbbing mass of bodies that seemed to pulse in unison with the dance beat. We made our way to the bar, where Marcus shouted something at the pierced and scantily clad young woman who leaned in to take our drink order.

I normally don’t like crowds, overwhelmed as I become by details, energies, expressions on faces. But I felt oddly centered, able to coolly observe my environment. I could tell it was a local haunt; it lacked that Parisian self-awareness of its place in the dreams of the rest of the world. There was something gritty and slapdash about it, as though you could come back tomorrow and it might be gone. The chic, lithe Parisians I’d been staring at in envy for days in high-end shops and restaurants were replaced by an alternative set, tattoo covered and glinting with metal in odd places, nipples and tongues, eyebrows. I watched an androgynous couple make out near the door, a woman moving slowly to some internal beat, her eyes pressed closed. On a small stage, three men with identically styled dark hair and black garb were surrounded by electronic instruments and computers; they seemed to be the origin of the sound, though they were as grim and stone-faced as undertakers. I turned to comment to Marcus, but he was gone. I peered through the crowd and saw the back of his head as he moved toward the bathrooms. He must have yelled to me and I didn’t hear him over the din. There was a fresh drink on the tall table beside me which I assumed he’d left for me—something bitter and heavily alcoholic. When nearly twenty minutes passed, my drink gone, my interest in the scene around me dwindling, I headed in the direction I’d seen him disappear.

When I saw him, he was standing with a woman—she was emaciated and pale, with features too sharp, too angular for her to be quite pretty. She was talking to him heatedly, and he was looking around, clearly uncomfortable. Just as I approached them, she reached out and touched his face. I saw him grab her hand and push it gently away. She looked so injured, so confused, that I felt my heart clench for her.

He turned away and almost ran right into me.

“What’s going on?” I asked. It was quieter away from the stage but I still had to yell.

“Some crazy woman thinks she knows me. I can’t convince her otherwise,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Let’s go.”

“Kristof, please!” she yelled after us. “Please.”

He didn’t turn back to her, just hurried me toward the door. I felt some kind of primal tug to look at her again. She was yelling something I couldn’t make out.

“You don’t know her?” I asked him when we were outside. I felt oddly shaken, a slight tremble in my hands.

He was already walking away, came back and grabbed my hand. “No,” he said with a scowl. “Of course not.”

“The way she touched you—” I said, and found I couldn’t finish. From where I stood, I would have thought them lovers. Her touch was so intimate—her eyes so desperate. I stood rooted, not willing to follow him. I kept an eye on the door, wondering if she’d come out after us. I saw his eyes drift there, too.

“Isabel, she was
high,”
he said, tugging at me, his hand still in mine. I resisted, made him move back closer to me. “She called me by another name. You heard it yourself. She was clearly unwell or at least impaired.”

I found myself studying his face. His expression was earnest, even amused. His eyes were wide, brow lifted. He matched my gaze and then finally dropped his eyes to the sidewalk.

“Okay, you caught me,” he said, lifting his hands. “I have a girlfriend here in Paris. This whole trip was just a ruse so that I could rendezvous with her this last night—while you stood a few yards away.”

He gave me that magic smile then and the lightest drizzle started to fall. It all just washed away as he pulled me close.

“You’re not the jealous type, Iz.”

I bristled. It wasn’t about me being jealous or not. It was about a woman who wore an expression I recognized on some cellular level. Loss, betrayal, a touch of anger. I knew that face; I’d worn it for different reasons. But I didn’t say anything else. I let him drop his arm around my shoulder and steer me toward the hotel. I stole one last look behind us, sure I’d see her standing there grim and lonely in the rain. But the stairwell was dark and empty; I didn’t hear the music that had drawn us there anymore, either.

After my shower, I looked at myself in the long mirrored wall over the marble sink and was shocked at how horrible the cut on my head looked, reaching from the middle of my brow to my temple—like something out of a horror film. My hair had been hideously shaved back a bit, which was bad enough. And the wound itself was too red, some dark yellow puss leaking out between the black stitching. I didn’t think the leakage was healthy, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I found some gauze and medical tape in the first-aid kit under the sink and bandaged myself up again, nearly nauseated by how much the wound hurt to the touch. I recalled then that I was supposed to be taking antibiotics. Were they in my bag? I couldn’t remember. Brown watched me mournfully, hands on his paws. He emitted a low whine from the doorway, as if he was concerned about me.

“It’s okay, Brown,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

I padded into the kitchen with him at my heels, put some food in his bowl and changed his water, gave him a doggie treat. He seemed to feel better about things after this.

After choosing a pair of jeans and a black wool sweater from Linda’s closet, a matching pink bra and panties from her underwear drawer, I dressed and went into Trevor’s room, where I knew the computer was on 24/7, no log-in required.

I tried my accountant’s office again and just got an endless ringing, no voice mail ever picking up. I called directory assistance, tucking Trevor’s cordless phone between my shoulder and ear while simultaneously searching for the firm on Google. Maybe I had the wrong number.

“No listing for a Benjamin and Heller, Inc., in Manhattan or the five boroughs, ma’am.” And nothing online.

I realized I’d never visited their offices or even made a call to Arthur, the man who came to our house at tax time, who called me with the occasional question about my expenses, requesting this receipt or that canceled check. I let Marc handle it all. I just signed the quarterly tax reports and year-end returns without so much as a glance.

The computer screen swam before my tired eyes as I rechecked my bank accounts, since I knew those log-ins and passwords by heart. Nothing had changed except my recent withdrawals, when I’d basically cleaned myself out.

Then I checked our American Express bill, looking for Marc’s last charges, knowing he was too smart to be using his cards now. I was just grasping at what little information was available to me. All the usual charges—the smoothie shop at the gym, take-out places we liked, the grocery store, our local bar. I started scrolling back through the last few months.

Linda did this all the time, I knew. She checked the Amex bill daily, since they used it like cash, tracked all their expenses that way.

“Poor Erik can’t even buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks without my knowing about it,” she joked. The joke was on her, though, wasn’t it? She was so busy looking at the little things that the big ones completely eluded her. Not that I was one to judge.

I hadn’t looked at my credit-card statements in months, charged what I wanted, took out cash from the accounts I was told to and never once thought about what I was spending. I’d only checked a couple of months ago because my card had been declined.

“You’re using an expired card, Isabel,” said Marcus when I’d called him. Funny how I’d not thought to contact Amex or my accountant. “I left the new one on the kitchen counter about three weeks ago.”

I sifted through a pile of mail and found it with a little note: “Tear up your old card and use this one. Love you, M.”

Still I’d been sufficiently annoyed to think I should start taking more interest in our finances. But I’d quickly lost interest after a couple of days of checking things out.

At Trevor’s desk I found myself scanning Marc’s charges, his small-business card sharing an interface with our personal cards.

I sifted through a few months of charges before I started to see a pattern emerge. On or around the fifteenth of every month, there was a large charge on Marc’s business card, nearly two thousand dollars spent at a vendor listed on the statement as Services Unlimited, Inc. It really could have been any kind of legitimate business service, cleaning or document shredding or some kind of software licensing maybe. But it was the only thing that I could see that brought up any questions—even his charges on our personal card at Cornucopia (my favorite florist), dinner at the Mandarin Oriental, an obscene sum at La Perla, all coincided with gifts and evenings out that I remembered well.

I searched the Internet for Services Unlimited and found a Web site offering temporary “reception services.” Uniquely beautiful women in scanty business attire leaned over provocatively to take dictation or reach for files, listened attentively with pens in their mouths at a board meeting. I would have laughed under other circumstances at the raunchy silliness of it, but instead my insides clenched as I scrolled through page after page of leggy, pouty girls offering their “business skills.” Services Unlimited was an escort service, legal, ostensibly not offering sex, just arm candy. They took credit cards like any legitimate business. I tried to imagine Marcus with the type of woman I saw on page after page; I just couldn’t. I tried to imagine him paying for sex. He was too arrogant; it didn’t seem possible. But what did I know about Marcus? About anything? I’d only in the last few hours learned his real name.

I grabbed a worn Transformers notebook and a purple-inked pen from the shelf above Trevor’s computer. I was about to write down the number emblazoned across the top of the screen, a 718 exchange, meaning one of the outer boroughs, when I saw her, the woman from Marcus’s office. She was listed simply as “S.” Her description read:
Six feet of pure stamina and efficiency
.

I unconsciously lifted a finger to the cut on my head and startled myself with the pain—of the physical wound and the memory of the text message.
I can still feel you inside me
.

I tried to force the pieces together—the text message, the woman who’d attacked me carrying a gun, impersonating an FBI agent, now vamping on this Web site, the monthly charge on my husband’s credit card. This was beyond my experience, beyond my ability to weave a narrative from disconnected facts. I was still staring at her, all kinds of dark imaginings parading through my thoughts, when my phone started ringing. I checked the screen.
Jack calling
. My agent.

“Hey,” he said when I picked up. “Good news. A nice check arrived. On signing from the UK sale.”

She seemed to be challenging me, standing with her legs spread apart, clutching a phone, lips parted. I wanted to leap through the screen and strangle her, all my rage at the situation directed at her.
Who are you? Who are you to my husband?

“Iz?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.” When would all this hit the news? I wondered. Soon, I would think. Authors are rarely celebrities, but something like this could make me one. It would be just the kind of hook the media needed to sell the story:
BESTSELLING AUTHOR’S HUSBAND TURNED VILLIAN—TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION
.

“I need that money, Jack.”

“Okay,” he said, drawing out the word. “I’ll wire it tomorrow.”

“No. I need it today. In cash.”

There was a pause where I heard him tapping on his keyboard—multitasking, which I hated. Then: “Very funny.”

“Jack, pay attention,” I said. “I’m not kidding.”

Another pause, but the tapping stopped abruptly. “What’s going on?”

Jack and I had been friends since NYU. We met in a creative writing class. But he never had the patience—or the talent—for the actual writing, he realized. He just wanted the sale. After graduation he went straight to work at a literary agency, where a few years later he represented and sold my first novel. Eventually he started his own agency. We were allies, friends, and colleagues.

And once, just weeks before I met Marcus, we’d traveled together to a conference, where we’d gotten loaded at a local bar and wound up sleeping together. It might have always been there, this attraction, just beneath the surface, but the friendship and business relationship were so good that we’d just ignored the other, more volatile, aspect of our affection. I talked to him almost as often as I did my sister or my husband, but neither of us had ever again addressed the night we spent together. In the wee hours after our lovemaking, I’d dressed hastily and left his hotel room while he slumbered heavily. I wasn’t even certain if he remembered what happened that night.

Now I told him everything about the recent events of my life. Everything beginning with the night Marc didn’t return home, ending with the Web site open in front of me.

“Holy
Christ,”
he whispered into the phone when I was done. “Isabel, is this for real?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Unfortunately, it is.”

“You’re hurt. Are you okay? Really okay?”

“I think so. How do I know? How is one supposed to handle a situation like this?”

“I think you’re
not
, Iz. I think you’re supposed to get into a bed somewhere and let the professionals handle it. Cops, lawyers—that’s what these people
do.”

If we were in the room together, he’d put a hand on my shoulder or usher me to a chair somewhere. I imagined him running a big hand through his thick, dark hair. I wished I was looking into the warmth of his dark eyes, noticing he needed a shave, feeling relaxed and calmed by his presence. Instead I stared at the harsh beauty of the woman still on my screen and felt something akin to indigestion, some acidic brew of anger and fear.

“I can’t do that. I’ve already given too much power away. He stole from me. He hurt my family. He’s not going to stroll off, with the police always just behind chasing warrants and following leads. No.”

Jack issued the exasperated sigh that I’ve heard often in our relationship, a kind of tired blowing out of his lips. He regarded me as generally pig-headed and stubborn and had said so many times—during contract negotiations, with editorial matters, regarding women he’d dated whom I found wanting, or where to have lunch.

“So now what?” His voice had raised an octave in concern. “You’re on the run from the police? This is not good. We need to rethink this.”

“I’m not ‘on the run.’ I didn’t do anything. I’m just trying to figure out what’s happened here, to fix all the damage. So, are you going to give me my money or what?”

“Am I aiding and abetting you right now?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I repeated.

“But if asked by the police, I’m supposed to say you haven’t contacted me and I don’t know where you are?”

“I haven’t. You called me,” I said. “And you don’t know where I am.”

There was silence on the line. “Okay. I’ll get you some cash.”

“I’ll find you later.” I was about to end the call but I heard his voice and put the phone back to my ear.

“I wish I could say I was surprised that this guy turned out to be a disaster,” he was saying. “I never liked him.”

“
This guy?
H
e’s
my husband of five years.”

“I know. I never liked him,” he said, sounding grave. “Seriously.”

“You never said so.”

“You never asked.”

“Still.”

“I was trying to be supportive. I could see that… you loved him.” There was a strange pitch to his voice, something I hadn’t heard before. And in that moment I realized: He did remember.

“Jack.”

“Just please be careful.”