The Guest Room (16 page)

“Not a lot of money to a guy like you. But it is to a guy like me. And I don't know where this is going.”

“What makes you think I won't go to the police? I met a lot of them on Friday and Saturday.”

“Because the last thing you want is more publicity. It can't be good at home—or at work. You don't want your wife to see what I have. Or your boss. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

“Five words: sexual assault on a minor. They're dangling that one over me. Well, I have video evidence of you with the girl. The police would have way more on you than they have on me.”

“She wasn't a minor!”

“I sure hope not. But we just don't know, do we?”

He feared if he didn't leave Spencer now, he might punch him—which, perhaps, was just what Spencer wanted. “Let me think about it.”

“I think that's best.”

“What's your number?”

“Oh, just call me at the Cravat. I have nothing to hide.” Then, much to Richard's absolute disbelief, he extended his hand, expecting Richard to shake it.

I was fifteen years old when I was abducted.

I turned sixteen at the cottage.

When I was seventeen, they brought me back to Moscow and started having me work with Western men: men from the United States and England and France. They brought Sonja and Crystal, too. These men were more refined than the black and whites. I thought they were more interesting. More educated. More perverse. Most nights, things took longer.

My skin wasn't scratched by their stubble.

I was almost eighteen when my grandmother stopped trying to visit. When she stopped asking for photos of me at the dance studio. When she stopped asking questions about my progress and when I might return to Yerevan for a visit. She died on January 6, the day we celebrate Christmas in Armenia, when she was killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was crossing the street just outside her apartment. There was a witness, but the car—the long black sedan of an oligarch—was moving so quickly that he never got the license plate. She was dead even before an ambulance got there. Inga pretended to be so sad when she told me the news, but she wasn't a good actress. I have a feeling that my grandmother had started giving Vasily hard time, asking too many questions about where I was and what really was going on. He got sick of her.

They didn't let me go home to Yerevan for the funeral.

I was nineteen when I reached what they told me was the summit: New York City. They promised us all there would be special freedoms when we got there because, by then, there was no going back. Besides, what was there for me to go back to? My mother and grandmother were dead. I had spent nearly four years on my back.

They told us we were going to get Internet access without a chaperone. Shopping without an escort. Maybe even a phone. That was how much they said they trusted us.

And, of course, there was the deal: freedom in two or three years.

On Tuesday, the cops left and the cleaners came. Richard recoiled when he saw the carnage inside his house and recalled the ugliness behind it, and he thought of his wife and his daughter less than a mile away at the school. He watched the cleaners, two young men and a third his age in navy blue jumpsuits that made them look like a cross between the prisoners who picked up garbage along the highway and technicians at a microchip processing plant, as they scrubbed and disinfected. As they blotted and dabbed. As they mopped. He put on a pair of black sweatpants and a Giants T-shirt and threw bottles into recycling tubs. He loaded the dishwasher with plates and glasses and silverware. He ran the dishwasher twice, and still there were plates and glasses in the sink and along the kitchen counters. The men at the party must have grabbed a new glass every time they poured themselves another drink. Someone had been drinking Scotch from the two-handled Peter Cottontail cup Melissa had used as a toddler.

He fed Cassandra and then, when she looked up at him plaintively with her
Oliver!
“More, please” cat eyes, he fed her again. Fortunately, the cat was one of those felines who found people amusing. Once she was full, she seemed rather happy to be home. She watched the cleaners work from different perches: atop the breakfront, on the stairs, half under the living room pouf. What must the animal have thought on Friday night when the Russians were killed and the blood had drained from their bodies like wine from an overturned bottle? Had she licked some off the tile? Had she wondered why these two strange people never awoke? Had she found the spent shell casings and rolled them around the floor with her paw, as if they were little metallic cat toys?

At one point, when he stood in the doorway to the mahogany-paneled room that had once been a library—his private chancel of movies and music—the cat sniffed the air, her nose twitching with fascination. He smelled it, too. Sex. He glanced at the leather couch and saw the splotches. In his mind, he saw the police investigators swabbing the stains with Q-tips, and then dropping the Q-tips in sealed plastic bags. He saw them using powders to extract fingerprints. Dactylogram. The scientific word for a fingerprint. One night Kristin had astounded him and a friend when they'd been dating by building the word on a Scrabble board from the modest four-letter
gram
.

He realized that there was absolutely no way the cleaners would be done by three-thirty or four in the afternoon, when Kristin and Melissa got home. No. Way. It was possible they wouldn't finish until after most of Bronxville had put their dinner plates in their dishwashers.

He carried the wannabe Bierstadt out to his car, folding down the backseats so he could lay it flat in the rear of the Audi. The blood on the canvas seemed pretty dry, but he was still careful not to touch it because he wasn't wearing gloves. He remembered that he wanted to phone the detective to get the name of her cousin at NYU—the woman who taught art history there. When he went back inside, for a long moment he hovered in the hallway and watched one of the men cleaning; he lost himself in the way the middle-aged fellow dabbed cold water and ammonia onto the wide swaths of blood that had splattered the wallpaper. The guy was working with the concentration of an artist, and Richard imagined that he was trying to resurrect a Renaissance fresco somewhere in Tuscany. And, alas, he was going to fail. It was hopeless.

“Maybe if we'd been able to start on Saturday,” he said to Richard, his shoulders sagging a little apologetically. “But the blood has really set in.”

“I kind of figured,” he said.

“Do you have an extra roll of this paper floating around someplace? A roll the contractors didn't need when they papered the hallway the first time?”

He shook his head. Then he added, “I actually did the wallpaper myself in a couple of rooms in this house. I'm…I'm weirdly good at hanging paper. It's one of the few home improvement projects I don't screw up. But this wallpaper was here when we moved in.”

“Well, maybe it was time for a change.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Meanwhile, one of the younger guys was using a basting brush to coat the bloodstains on the living room couch with a paste made of water and cornstarch. The fellow had thick yellow hair that fell to his shoulders and a model-perfect Roman beak for a nose. He looked like he should be surfing, not cleaning crime scenes.

“Will that really work?” Richard asked, aware of the way hope—wholly unearned—had leached into his voice.

“Probably not. It's kind of a part of the fabric now. And there's a ton here.”

“Of blood.”

“Yeah. Blood. Sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“Too bad it's not slipcovers.”

“I agree.”

“Because then you could just trash them and get new ones.”

“Yup.”

“I mean, I can keep working. It's, like, my job, man.”

“But…”

“I'd just get a new couch.”

“I probably will,” Richard agreed.

“I'd say give it to Goodwill, but I think it's too bloody for them.”

He nodded. He made a mental note to find some rubbish removal service to take the sofa off his hands. But still the young guy continued to work. They all did.

Eventually, Richard wandered upstairs, eyeballing the bedrooms to make sure that the party hadn't spread there. He was pretty sure it hadn't, but he couldn't be sure. After all, that prick Spencer had been on the second floor. He was under the impression that the police had spent very little time in the bedrooms, because all of the guests had insisted at the station that they'd remained downstairs.

Richard, of course, had told the police—
Confessed?
It had sure felt like a confession—that he'd been in the guest room with one of the girls, and so he presumed that the investigators had at least taken a quick peek in that room. But it really didn't matter what they might find there. Obviously his fingerprints were there. This was his home. He lived here. His fingerprints—and the girl's—were all over the house.

Still, he saw nothing untoward in his and Kristin's bedroom or in Melissa's bedroom. The bedspreads were still army-inspection flat. Well, his and his wife's was. Melissa was nine and usually made her bed pretty quickly before school. But it looked about the way it always did, and there were no glasses or beer bottles in the rooms. There were no ashtrays and no plates that any of the men might have used as ashtrays.

Plates. As ashtrays.

He hated his brother's friends. He hated Spencer in particular. He hadn't heard from him since yesterday, but Richard knew if he didn't call him soon, he would. He hadn't told anyone yet about the threat except for his lawyer, and that conversation hadn't been as helpful or as reassuring as Richard would have liked.

“You said that you and the girl didn't have intercourse. Is that true?” Dina Renzi had asked him.

“Absolutely.”

“And no oral sex?”

“Correct.”

“So there's nothing criminal on the video?”

“Well, certainly not sexual assault on a minor—if she even is a minor, which I doubt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm telling you, she had to be eighteen.”

“Look, if you're sure that's the case, then maybe you should pay this jerk off. We don't go to the police. Twenty-five G? Kind of a small price for the peace of mind. It would certainly help ensure marital harmony. And it would be one less reason for the press to write about you. Eventually, this story will go away, Richard—unless we keep feeding it with tasty little morsels like blackmail.”

“But what if he asks for more?”

“You say he's a friend of your brother's. As despicable as your brother sounds, I have to believe that he and his pals could shame him into letting this go.”

“After I've given him twenty-five thousand dollars…”

“I think the important things we have to accomplish here are to get you back to work and preserve your marriage. Then, just in case, we need to be prepared if those people claiming ‘emotional distress' decide to come after you, too.”

“Might they?”

“I told you, I think it's unlikely. It would be groundless. You didn't bring the girls into your home or call the escort service. You said you didn't even know for sure there would be a stripper.”

“Quite true.”

“Okay then. Maybe you should just view the twenty-five grand as a fine for your indiscretions and move on.”

It seemed that his initial reaction on the street—the video would devastate Kristin—was the correct one. Dina was female. It was pure fantasy to think that he could diffuse the threat by telling Spencer that Kristin already knew about Alexandra and he should fund his war chest elsewhere. Something about the way Dina had caved so quickly—
help ensure marital harmony
—made clear that the images on Spencer's phone might be a last straw in ways that he couldn't fathom as a male.

And, of course, there was always the reaction of Franklin McCoy to consider. If it got into the tabloids that a managing director was being blackmailed, he'd surely be finished.

Now he went to the guest room, where he had brought Alexandra, and breathed in the smell of the room. Unlike the TV and music room downstairs, the cat would have noticed nothing new here. It smelled fine—which meant it smelled not at all. He stared at the spot on the bedspread where Alexandra had sat. Where they had sat together. He wondered where her father was. Her mother. He tried to imagine how a nice kid like Alexandra wound up in a foreign country, sitting naked in a strange man's house. He took a deep breath, wondering how long it would be before his memories of this nightmare turned to steam.

Much later, he would wander the first floor of his house, noctivagant as his cat. Then he would sit alone at the kitchen table, unable to sleep. Unwelcome in his own bed. He sat there drinking herbal tea, even though he hated herbal tea. He hated all tea. But he still hoped he might somehow get some sleep. Besides, drinking this tea was rather like wearing a hair shirt. He was punishing himself.

Upstairs, Melissa was sleeping in the master bedroom with Kristin. It was Kristin who had insisted. It was Kristin who had somehow kept it together when she surveyed the living room and the kitchen and the front hallway—when she, too, had watched in fascination as the cleaning crew had tried to wash away the stigmas of madness and degradation—and it was Kristin who had then brought Melissa up to her bedroom, the child still carrying her school backpack over her shoulder.

And that meant it was Kristin who had been with Melissa that afternoon when their daughter had found—there it was, right atop the plastic Tucker Tote filled with Barbie dolls, but somehow he had managed to miss it—what the child had mistaken at first for a jellyfish. A sick jellyfish. A dead jellyfish. Something she might have found washed ashore at the beach that summer.

It seemed that Spencer had taken Sonja to his daughter's bedroom. That's where he'd gone on the second floor. And when he was done with her—on his way back downstairs, perhaps just before pulling his iPhone from his pants pocket and peering through the camera lens into the guest room—he'd tossed his used condom onto a child's plastic carton of Barbies.