Held (16 page)

He was barely listening. He said, “They must have climbed the fence, looking for a private place to smoke.”

“They’ll be back, in that case,” I warned him.

“When were they here?”

“Around two in the afternoon.”

He looked at me even more intently. He was deathly pale, and it scared me.

“You saved my life,” he said evenly. “You had a chance to be free, and you didn’t take it.”

“If I were free I wouldn’t see you again. That’s too awful to think about.”

He sat down and tried to regain his equanimity. He was very wound up.

His nervousness was making me nervous. “I don’t seem to be making much progress in Italian,” I said, trying to change the subject. “I have all this time, and I’m wasting it. I used to hate wasting time, but now I’m starting to see that it has its own appeal.”

He didn’t hear me. He was too preoccupied.

“Why don’t you have some tea?” I suggested. “I’ll make it for a change.” I looked inside the bags he’d brought. “Oh, lemon squares! My favorite, how did you know?”

“I’m sorry, I have to leave.” He got up abruptly, went out, locked the door. I didn’t hear him drive away. Maybe he had an escape route through a tunnel or under the floor of another warehouse, like in war movies. He’d probably considered all eventualities—except the simple one of a group of kids looking for a safe place to smoke.

I felt more alone than ever, after he’d gone. I couldn’t really blame him for not trusting me—he had no way of knowing what I was thinking and feeling. But it was demoralizing all the same.

The only way to escape the lonely room was to sleep, but I wasn’t tired. I paced, ate five lemon squares, had another shower, paced some more, tried to read. Finally I drifted off, but it was a light sleep, and I woke up as soon as I heard the key in the door.

“You’re back! Were you hiding all this time?”

He looked at me for a few seconds as if I’d changed, as if something was different about me. But what had changed, of course, was him. I could see it in his eyes. He finally trusted me.

He plugged in the kettle. “I want to thank you,” he said. “You sacrificed your freedom for me.”

“It wasn’t a sacrifice.”

He made tea for me and coffee for himself. He was still wound up, but in a different way. His face was less impassive, though probably only I would have noticed it.

“Your body’s telling me something,” I said.

“My body?”

“Yes. You don’t have an expressive face, but you have an expressive body. Sometimes I can read it.”

“I’m sure it’s your imagination.”

“Oh, no! Not at all. Your body says everything you don’t say with your face.”

“What is it saying now?”

“I’m not sure. No, that’s a lie. I am sure, but I’m not allowed to say. But I’ll say it anyhow because I have nothing to lose. That’s the definition of desperation, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What I’m reading in your body is that you like me.”

“Yes, I like you very much,” he replied casually, trying to change the meaning of what I’d said. “You’re a beautiful person.”

I felt a rush of happiness coursing through me when he said that. No compliment had ever meant anything, compared to this.

Of course he didn’t know about my obsessive side, the side that drove people crazy. But it seemed to me that I was changing.

“I think my personality is changing a bit,” I told him.

“Hard experiences always change us, for better or for worse. Sometimes both.”

“I sometimes felt when I was growing up that I was the parent and Mom was the kid. I don’t mean in a bad way. It’s just that Mom was the one who believed in being spontaneous, taking chances, enjoying life. I was the opposite. I was always checking the time to make sure we weren’t late, I kept a list on the fridge of things we had to buy, and if we were going out I wanted to make sure we knew the way. I don’t think Mom would have let me go into gymnastics if anyone there had turned it into boot camp. But the club I joined was run by the sweetest, funniest coach, Luanne. She wore her hair in a braid that reached down to her waist, and she sang along to country and western music while we trained. But anyhow, finally she retired. We all cried on her last day.

“It wasn’t the same after that. The coach who took over was nice too, but much more ambitious. Mom said ambition was about something outside of you, something that didn’t even exist. Whatever. The real reason I quit was that I was getting sick of giving up sixteen hours of my life every week. I wanted a normal life.”

I knew I was rambling. It was excitement. The way he was looking at me made me hyper and also happy, and being happy made me talkative. I wanted to be close to him, I wanted him to know me better, now that he knew I loved him. I went on, “I take more after my father, he was a biologist. He died when he was only thirty-seven—he had a heart defect … So, do you have to contact all your revolutionary friends now and tell them about the close call? Do you guys have a name, by the way? You know, like the Gourmet Liberation Front, or something? Working to release prisoners who’ve been convicted of withholding recipes … Sorry. I don’t mean to make fun of you.”

“Jokes are allowed by the GLF.”

“If the police had come, would you have shot at them?”

“I don’t own a weapon.”

I laughed. “You’re joking!”

“No.”

“You studied martial arts, though,” I said, remembering our fight in the forest. “You really don’t have a gun?” I asked.

“There wouldn’t be any point. If I’m caught, I’m caught.”

“You could hold the gun to my head and pretend you’re going to kill me,” I suggested.

“It’s a good thing we have films to give us valuable information,” he said.

“So … I could have escaped right there in the limo?”

“I don’t think so. I would have found a way to hold on to you.”

“I was sure I’d be killed if I didn’t cooperate.”

“We were counting on that.”

“Well, it was worth being terrified out of my skull. It was worth everything, even … It was worth it, to find you. I knew you wouldn’t shoot at the police. Do you think it’s wrong to kill someone for the greater good?” I asked.

“Is this a test?” Absently, he cut off a piece of lemon square with a fork, but he didn’t eat it.

“Well, do you?” I insisted.

“You don’t kill innocent people to help humanity. It’s a contradiction in terms. At least that’s my view.”

“But what about a dictator, for example?”

“That would not be an innocent civilian,” he replied.

“So you might believe in assassinating someone.”

“If you assassinate one person, someone else will just take over. Even if they’d succeeded in killing Hitler, probably Goebbels would have taken his place, though it would have been worth a try.”

“What about in a war? I mean, when you bomb a city, you kill innocent people, but sometimes it’s the only way to win a war.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It would be good to prevent war in the first place.”

“Well, no one would argue with that! But it’s unrealistic. There are terrible people in this world. And sometimes they have power.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he said. “Anyhow, bombing a city is a war crime.”

“You’re one to talk about crimes! Taking me hostage is a major crime.”

“Yes, but maybe not as serious as burning infants to death.”

“You think you know everything.”

All at once, out of the blue, I wondered whether the sadistic man who had nearly killed me was dead.

I don’t know what made me think it at that moment—whether it was his tone of voice or his eyes or his body. Angie believed that images sometimes passed from one person’s brain to another. Or maybe there had been lots of clues that I’d noticed only subconsciously, and that had suddenly come to the surface.

He seemed to know what I was thinking, but he didn’t ask me what was wrong, even though I was suddenly staring at him.

“Did you kill him?” I asked. I was afraid of his answer. I had no idea how I’d feel if he said yes. I hated the man who had hurt me, I wanted him dead, but I didn’t want to be in love with someone who was capable of murder.

There was a long silence. Then he said, “Yes, in a way.”

“What does that mean?”

“He was an addict. We gave him a huge amount of money and he bought a huge amount of heroin. He died of an overdose.”

My reaction took me by surprise. I began to cry. “I’m glad,” I said. “I’m glad he’s dead. Of course if you weren’t a criminal yourself, you could have had him arrested.” I began pounding my leg with my fist.

“Chloe.” I was so startled to hear my name that my arm froze in mid-air. He had never said my name before. “It’s not your responsibility. There’s a long and complicated story behind this, one that started many years ago. Sometimes you try to save people who don’t want to be saved. And you finally realize that they’ll push you and push you until they get what they want.”

“Is that why you were away for so long that time?”

“No, that was something else. He was already dead by then.”

“I feel so weird. As if the world’s tilting a little.”

“Someone once told me a joke,” he said. “‘I’d like to be a pacifist, but people keep getting in the way.’ I made a decision to fight for my friend in prison. It was a deliberate decision. It isn’t the only way—it’s just something I decided.”

“But how can you trust your judgment?” I protested. “How can one person decide which laws count and which ones don’t? Laws have to be decided on collectively, by a society.”

“Sometimes breaking the law is just the best of several bad options. Sometimes a situation is so desperate that you can’t go by the rules.”

“If you were a law-abiding citizen you wouldn’t get into desperate situations in the first place,” I pointed out.

He paused, then said, “It’s just beyond belief, what power does to some people. It acts as a sort of drug. The stupider the person, the more likely it is that having power will corrupt them.”

“I saw that happen once,” I said. “I never thought of it that way, I never thought of it as a power thing. But I used to be in the student council at school, and one time this shy, friendly girl got to chair a meeting. We were trying to give everyone a chance to chair, and it was her turn. We couldn’t believe the personality transformation … she turned into an army general, putting everyone down, bossing people in this totally inappropriate way—it was weird. I guess that’s what it was—power. She really did act like she was on something.”

He wasn’t listening to me. He was thinking about something else, something that happened a long time ago. I could tell by the faraway look in his eyes.

The man who’d hurt me seemed human to me for the first time. It was safe to think of him as human now that he was dead. Now that I didn’t have to be afraid of him.

“The writer Emile Zola thought guilt haunts you, but he was wrong. Have you read him?”

I shook my head.

“He has this woman and her lover killing the woman’s sickly, selfish husband,” he said. “After they do it, they’re haunted by guilt and by the horror of it, and it destroys their lives. But it’s not like that. You’re sick the first few days, and then it fades.”

“Yeah, that writer is way off,” I said. “Sociopaths never feel guilty at all. This girl who used to go to my school, Rik—every day she had a few people in tears, otherwise her life just wasn’t worth living. I’m sure she’ll never feel guilt. She loved who she was.”

He seemed to be considering what he could and couldn’t say. He didn’t usually come across as undecided, but for once I could sense his uncertainty.

“Can you open the door, please?” I asked.

“You can open it yourself,” he said, and I saw that the door wasn’t locked. I stepped out into the dark and my hostage-taker followed me. It was a hot, moonless night and I could see millions of stars against the vast black sky.

I looked up at the starry sky and said, “Good-bye, messed-up person. If there’s an afterlife, I hope you get a second chance there. Also, I guess I forgive you, even though you hurt me a lot. And tried to make me feel like I was a person who deserved to be hated, or like no person at all. Anyway, I forgive you. And my hostage-taker forgives you too, though it’s hard for him to say it now.”

My hostage-taker placed his arm around my shoulders. It was so unexpected and comforting that I didn’t dare breathe.

“How do you keep people off the property?” I asked.

“I won’t have to. You’re going to be moving to another location.”

“When?” I asked.

“In a few hours. I’m just waiting for the vehicle.”

“Another warehouse?”

“No, a room. Smaller, but you’ll have a bath.”

“How? How will you move me?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“What if you’re caught on the way?”

He led me back inside and dropped his arm from my shoulder. What if he never touched me again? Maybe holding me had only been a friendly gesture, a way of showing gratitude or consoling me for the bad news.

He took out the white wine and filled two glasses. He handed me a glass and sat down at the table with his.

“I hope this teaches you a lesson,” I said primly. “No matter how carefully you plan, things can go wrong.”

“That’s true enough.”

“Don’t you see? Someone might have seen me getting on the plane. Or coming off the plane—I was asleep so I don’t know how you managed to do that inconspicuously. That guy—the addict—he might have told someone. You’re risking your life, apart from everything else.”

It felt good, lecturing him. I wanted to shake him out of his stubbornness. “When you release me, I’m going to say that you gave me a choice of staying or leaving right on the first day. And that I stayed here of my own free will.”

“We’ll talk about that another time.”

I looked down at the floor and jiggled my legs nervously. “Maybe in a few months, when everyone’s forgotten about me, we can meet, as if by chance—like at a party or something.”

He shook his head. “It’s not possible. Once you go home, we won’t be able to meet again, ever.”

The thought of never seeing him again made me desperate. “Is it because you don’t have feelings for me? Is that why we can’t meet again?”