Body Work (39 page)

“She gave it to me,” he said.

Mitch suddenly yelped, a piercing shriek of pain. A white ball of fur bolted between his legs, crossed the hall, and ran into Nadia’s place. The dog’s nose was bleeding.

“What’d you do to my dog?” Mr. Contreras demanded as Urbanke opened the door, shouting, “Ixcuina! Chain up that vicious dog or I’ll shoot him. Ixcuina! Ixcuina, kitty, kitty!”

Urbanke ran after the cat, tripping over Peppy, who was standing in Nadia’s doorway barking her head off. Petra was doubled over with laughter.

I grabbed her shoulders. “Get those dogs under control! Now! This is an investigation, not Comedy Central.”

I didn’t wait for her response but took the opportunity to go into Urbanke’s apartment. Jepson and Radke followed me. And Mr. Contreras. And two of the people from the building. And Mitch.

Urbanke lived in three shabbily furnished rooms, with a layout similar to Nadia’s. Jepson and Radke went through the rooms as if it were a terrorist hideout in Iraq, crouching, peering around the corners. After a moment, Jepson called to me from Urbanke’s bedroom. They’d found a shrine to Nadia that he had created inside his closet.

Photographs he’d shot of her when she didn’t know he was watching her. A few pieces of her artwork that he’d filched. We didn’t find her computer or any of her missing DVDs, but there was a red-covered notebook, propped up inside an open papier-mâché box, with roses and candles around it.

The notebook was open. I bent over to read it.

September 2. Leaving Istanbul for Baghdad. It’s so hot that we all sit unmoving, waiting for them to close the plane doors and turn on the air-conditioning so we can breathe again.

“Is that what we were looking for, ma’am?” Jepson asked.

I nodded, breathless, and lifted the notebook carefully as if it might disintegrate with careless handling. The interior of the box was decorated with paintings of Alexandra Guaman—Alexandra in a coffin, arms crossed over her chest, tears like chandelier drops falling from her eyes. Alexandra kneeling in front of the Virgin, who was placing a crown of roses on her head. Alexandra in heaven, reaching her hands down to Nadia, Clara, and Ernest.

“Clara should have this box,” I said to Jepson. “She’s the surviving sister.”

He helped me place the journal back into its papier-mâché container and said he’d carry it for me. Before heading home, I went looking for Urbanke. I found him in Nadia’s kitchen, trying to coax Ixcuina, the attack cat, out from behind the refrigerator, where she’d taken refuge.

“I’m taking the diary,” I told him. “It wasn’t Nadia’s, by the way; it was her older sister’s.”

He looked up at me. “I know. I read it. The sister was perverse. But the diary mattered to Miss Nadia, and I am protecting her memory. Or I was
trying
to protect her from people like you who want to drag her through the mud. I could sue you for breaking into my home. And for having a wild dog.”

I smiled. “Your neighbors are worrying now about whether their daughters are safe around you. If I were you, I’d lay low for a bit, not bring any lawsuits where you might need a witness to describe what happened tonight. Their version and yours are likely to be a million or so miles apart.”

An ugly expression crossed his face, but before he could speak I added, “Another thing. I wouldn’t mention Alexandra Guaman’s journal to anyone. To a neighbor, to your children, even to your pastor. We don’t know what the people who trashed this apartment were looking for. Maybe it was Nadia’s computer. But maybe it was this diary. If they learn that you’ve read it, you will need the charmed nine lives of this cat here to escape.”

He tried to stare me down, but my words had taken the stuffing out of him. He turned back to the cat, looking a little pale. It made me think he’d already told someone about the journal.
The sister, she was perverse
, he would have hissed to a coworker, trying to make himself the center of attention.

I couldn’t worry about his problems. I just hoped he was embarrassed enough by his neighbors’ reaction to his actions that he wouldn’t complain publicly about my taking the journal.

I left him to Ixcuina and rejoined my circus in the hallway. Mr. Contreras had struck up an acquaintance with the woman from the floor above, both of them clicking their teeth over the dangers of living in the city, the dangers of apartment life where you couldn’t know what kind of fiend might be renting right next door to you!

“Look after your beautiful granddaughter,” she told him, nodding her head toward Petra when she saw we were leaving, which delighted Mr. Contreras so much he repeated it several times on our way down the stairs.

42

A Love Story/A Horror Story

W
hen we got home, the two vets followed us inside. Staff Sergeant Jepson seemed to think I needed extra support on my way up the stairs. I wondered if he saw me as elderly and frail or mature and exciting, and then I remembered Kystarnik’s thug calling me a dried-up cougar the previous night and felt myself blushing.

Jake and his friends were still rehearsing. They were working on Berio’s
Sequenze,
discordant, not to everyone’s taste. Still, I resented it when Tim Radke muttered, “Sounds like that guy Urbanke’s cat is dying in there,” and Petra burst out laughing.

“Vic, you totally rock! How did you even know he’d
built
a shrine to Nadia?” my cousin demanded when we were inside my place.

I bent over the piano bench and slipped Allie’s journal inside my score of
Don Giovanni.
“I didn’t. Lucky guess. Even luckier was when the cat ran for cover.”

The adrenaline wave I’d been riding began to recede, leaving me so overcome with fatigue that I had to hold on to the piano for support. I guess the answer to my question was “elderly and frail.”

“That wasn’t lucky!” Mr. Contreras huffed. “I have half a mind to report him to Animal Control, keeping a cat like that. Wild animal, it attacked my dog.”

“Just don’t let them see the poor, abused victim,” I said, collapsing on the piano bench.

Mitch grinned up at me, red tongue lolling, to show he knew he was a con artist—and what was I going to do about it.

I looked at Petra and the two vets. “Thank you all for your help tonight, but I need to get some rest.”

“Hey, no way,” my cousin said. “We didn’t go through all that so you could go to bed. We’re reading Allie’s journal before we leave.”

I pushed myself to my feet and propelled Petra into the kitchen. “You’re not a child, and I’m not your nanny, so don’t start whining and cajoling. Looking at a piece of evidence in a murder investigation is not the same thing as begging for a new bike.”

“I told you when I agreed to work for you, I won’t be bullied.” Petra scowled.

“And I told you I was running a detective agency. If you want to be part of it, please respect the fact that we are working for people who often are in desperate need. You had one assignment tonight, to hold on to the dogs. You blew that. Mitch roared around Urbanke’s apartment and was a major nuisance until Tim grabbed his leash and got him under control.”

“If Mitch hadn’t gotten away, he wouldn’t have freaked out Urbanke’s cat and we wouldn’t have gotten in to find that creepy shrine. I did you a favor.”

“You’ll get your Distinguished Service Medal first thing in the morning,” I said drily. “In the meantime, if you want to keep working for me you can’t be playing games. And you can’t ignore your assignments because they’re dull, or because you’re flirting with Tim Radke.”

“I don’t believe you,” Petra cried. “Is this about you being jealous because I’m young and attractive?”

I was so angry I jammed my hands into my pockets to keep from slapping her. “Weren’t you the one who chewed me out yesterday for teasing you about your youthful attractiveness? Your looks are off limits, but my age isn’t?”

She glared at me, but asked, “Am I fired?”

“Not tonight. But you are not captain of this expedition.”

I went back to the living room, wondering how long it would be before I ended up in the Dwight women’s prison for murdering Petra.

Jepson and Radke got to their feet. “We’ll take off now, ma’am,” the staff sergeant said. “Thank you for dinner.”

“Thanks for coming along tonight,” I said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Jepson flushed. “A pleasure to help you, ma’am. Vic.”

“What is this? A recruiting commercial for the Marines?” Tim punched his friend in the ribs, and added to Petra, who was trailing behind me, “We’re going to Plotzky’s to catch the last period of the Hawks game. Want to come along?”

My cousin smiled warmly at the two young men, glowered at me to make sure I knew I was not forgiven, and bounded out of the apartment with them. It was harder to move Mr. Contreras and the dogs, but they finally left as well.

I moved slowly through my nighttime routine. Anton didn’t care about the Body Artist’s website anymore, or so he said. He wanted papers he thought I had. Perhaps he’d meant Alexandra’s journal. But if that was the case, it meant he’d somehow hooked up with Tintrey, because Alexandra’s journal was of interest to them. Even if he was only looking for it as a potential way to blackmail Jarvis MacLean, it still meant that somehow, in the last two days, he’d learned about Tintrey’s interest in the Guaman family.

September 2. Leaving Istanbul for Baghdad.

Even after I was lying exhausted in my bed, the words kept running through my head. I saw Alexandra Guaman, her dark curls damp with sweat. She’d taken the overseas job because the money would help Clara go to a good college. At least, that’s what Clara believed. What else? What had happened to her? Why, with no experience as a convoy driver, had she left the safety of the Green Zone to drive a truck to the Baghdad airport?

Around one in the morning, I finally got out of bed and took the journal from between the pages of my
Don Giovanni
score. I curled up in my big armchair with it and a glass of my dwindling supply of Longrow.

September 7

Baghdad. I’m half in Iraq, half in Chicago. Everything is the same and everything is different. When I go to work in the morning, it’s almost like I’m at home on a hot August day, except it’s already 110. Everywhere you go there are soldiers with weapons, but inside the Tintrey building it’s weirdly like being home. Same desks, same air-conditioning, same systems. People are friendly but cautious.

One of the older women in the office told us newbies never to leave the compound unless we’re with soldiers or armed Tintrey personnel. No woman is safe from them, she says.

September 13

Everyone is nervous. None of us has been close to war before.

In our training before we left we were told, “We are a Team. As a Team, we will win! Stress, fatigue and terrorists cannot defeat a Team!”

When I read that to Nadia, she made a poster for me of the Tintrey Team, Mr. Scalia and Mr. MacLean behind big shields made of dollar bills. Ernest and I laughed so hard, we almost made ourselves sick. Ernest scanned it for me into the computer, but if I look at it I must be careful, everybody spies on everybody else. It’s only because we’re bored or lonely. Or scared. Even in the tiny apartment I share buried deep inside the compound, we hear the bombs.

At night in bed, I try not to remember my week in Michigan with Karen. Sometimes I can’t help it—I go to her website, although I get no real glimpse of her, only the many masks she wears in public.

She is not worth my immortal soul—I must remember those words in times of temptation, Father Vicente said when he urged me to take this job. A chance to start over, he said, to leave your sinful tendencies in America and serve your country overseas. I thought, maybe he’s right, and anyway, the money is so good! Clara is the smartest of the Guaman sisters, she deserves the chance to go to a good college. And I thought, maybe I can become a normal person if I’m far away, although, how could anyone become normal in this very un-normal place?

Everybody drinks a great deal. Even I, who used to have a glass of wine only on New Year’s or my birthday, find myself drinking almost every night after work.

September 24

Mama calls twice a week. She is worried. But we are really not in danger inside our great marble compound. I didn’t tell her that yesterday, I took a walk outside the compound. I went with Amani, who is one of our translators. A very serious young woman who wears the typical black covering of an Iraqi woman so you can only see part of her face. She speaks perfect English and perfect French. I trade her a few words in Spanish for a few words of Arabic.

Mama would be frightened to think of me outside the Green Zone, and why should I add to her fears? And Amani is so reliable. She made sure I was covered head to toe in one of her abayas so that we would not be targets, American and Arab side by side.

September 28

My roommates learned of my second trip into the city with Amani and they screamed like ten-year-olds. Oh, Allie, how could you? And you put on her abaya? Weren’t you afraid of germs?

Germs! I am afraid of bombs, but not of a woman’s body. I thank you, Jesus, for sending me such silly girls to live with. They will not rouse any tendencies in me.