Solomon's Sieve (36 page)

Mercy gaped. “You’re saying you think the collapse is my fault? Because I’m a woman?!? You’re supposed to be an educated person, regardless of appearance to the contrary. I know that you of all people do not believe that superstitious nonsense.”

He turned to her with a expression that was so smug it was smarmy. “I wasn’t talking about that. I’m talking about the fact that no one wants to die with fucking yammering and shrieking hurting their ears.” His face was inches away from hers by the time he finished his tirade. “Bitches and their runny mouths!”

“You really are an imbecile, you know that?”

“Maybe, but this imbecile is your only hope of getting out of here alive, Your Royal Cuntness.”

“You did
not
just say that.”

“I did.” He got right in her face and grinned as he said it, but she didn’t miss the way his eyes lowered to her mouth and lingered there a little too long.

She backed away a couple of feet and regarded him warily. After a lengthy pause, she responded with a quiet calm he hadn’t expected. “That really was an ugly thing to say.”

He turned his back to her and took a deep breath. When he felt like he had his emotions under control, he turned back.

“
I was trying to tell you that we need to take care of a couple of things. First, are you hurt?”

She stopped and took inventory. There was a stinging on her leg. She angled the headlamp toward it. When she put the light on it, she could see that it was a scrape that needed some cleaning and some antibiotic salve, but not stitches.

Raif bent to take a close look. “Is that the worst of it?”

“Yes. You?”

“I’m fine.”

“Really fine or macho fine?”

He looked up at her. “I have no idea what ‘macho fine’ is?”

“It’s that thing men do when they don’t want to make an effort to communicate or when they feel all depends on preserving a delusion of being super-human.”

“Delusion, huh. Got it all figured out, don’t you?”

“Is that what you’re doing? Are you hurt somewhere?”

He turned a smile her way that she could read as wicked even through the dust. “Are you wanting an excuse to check me over? Inch by inch?”

“Okay. Not hurt. I believe you. What’s second on your agenda?”

“Second is preserving what little resources we have. One of us needs to switch off the helmet light. That will make the light we’ve got last twice as long.”

“Good idea. I’ll do it.”

“Okay.”

“What do you mean ‘okay’?”

“I mean okay. How many ways are there to take that?”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘I wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll switch mine off first.’ That would be the gentlemanly thing to do.”

“Yeah, well, I have no aspirations to be a gentleman. Unless you mean it in the sense of being a frequent patron of strip clubs.”

“What a surprise!” She said with as much sarcasm as she could infuse into three words. “Exactly what I would expect from somebody who couldn’t get a
real
date if his life depended on it. Naturally you would have to resort to looking at women who are being
paid
to let you look.”

He gaped. “It shouldn’t surprise me that your first reaction to this predicament is to act like a raving bitch.”

“You, on the other hand, haven’t missed a beat. You’re still the same dick I know and loathe.”

“You’re calling me a dick?” He barked out a laugh riddled with ridicule. “What’s it like to be the only woman in history so caustic that she could bring down a mountain WITH A SINGLE WORD!!”

By the time he finished that sentence he was yelling. He braced for her next volley of insult and barb, but instead saw that her face had gone slack and her bottom lip trembled.

“Holy shit. I didn’t mean…” Raif had no idea how to go about damming up an impending burst of female emotional turmoil. The idea of making a woman feel better was far outside his skill set and even farther outside his comfort zone. “You know that was just trash talk, right? You can’t really start an earthquake like that.”

She sniffed and looked away. “I know that. You don’t get a doctorate in archeology without learning a little geology along the way.” She tried for haughty, but was quivering on the inside because she wasn’t entirely sure that she didn’t cause the quake. Sometimes an unfortunate pairing of timbre with the right note on the scale can create a vibration that destabilizes…

“You know they’re going to do everything humanly possible to get us out of here.”

“Would you mind looking to your right?”

“Why?”

“So I can see what’s there. The only light we have between us moves with your head. I think I might as well sit down because there’s no place to go.”

He looked to the right. The ground next to the wall was uneven and the floor of the cavern featured a variety of embedded sharp rocks. He looked to the left and found a small spot where the floor looked like smooth sand.

“Right there,” he said, pointing to the spot with his headlamp. “We can rest for a little bit.”

“Rest for a little bit before what?”

He shrugged. “Nothing concrete, but it’s not give up the ghost time until we’ve surveyed our options. When I was a kid I was fascinated by the Knights Templar. I remember something about some of these old mountain monasteries having escape tunnels underneath. They were always getting raided by thieves…”

“And the Pope, himself.”

“Yeah. Maybe not the Pope
himself
, but at least his minions. Anyway if this happened to be one of those…”

“Then we might come to a way out if we go farther in.”

Raif shrugged and nodded, bracing in expectation of verbal abuse. He knew she was going to tell him it was a truly stupid idea.

“You’re a lot smarter than you look, you know that?”

That was just about the last thing he expected to hear from Dr. Renaux.

“I thought I was an imbecile.”

She giggled and he had to admit he liked the sound of it a lot better when it was directed toward him and not Torn.

“Maybe you’re an imbecile who has his moments.”

They sat down a foot apart on the small patch of smooth ground and put their backs against the cold cavern wall. Unlike an overstuffed sofa, it wasn’t going to warm up from body heat after a while.

“I don’t want you to get your hopes up or anything. Odds are greatly in favor of us dying in here, hating each other. I don’t know which will get us first: lack of air, lack of water, or lack of food.”

“Don’t sugar coat it.” He shrugged as if to say it was what it was and no apology should be necessary. “Well, just look at it this way. I’m a cheap date.”

Raif laughed in an open and unguarded way that seemed antithetical to everything she’d learned about him up to that point. “Hey,” he said. “It’s our second date and we’re escalating. Maybe next time we can cause the entire universe to implode.”

She giggled again. “What you said about us hating each other…” She let that sentence trail off and die.

“Yeah?”

“We can’t do anything about the air or water or food, but we don’t have to die hating each other.” Raif didn’t respond. “So tell me something. What was it about me that made you hate me instantly? On sight? I mean at the, um, speed date lunch.”

He let out a big sigh and didn’t answer right away. “I didn’t hate you. Far from it. That… behavior. It was more like a preemptive strike.”

“Preemptive strike? I don’t get it.”

“You asking to hear my sob story?”

“Uh. Sure. I’m not otherwise occupied.”

“Well, like I said I don’t think there’s a rat’s ass chance of us getting out of here still breathing, but just in case, can we agree that what happens in the cave collapse stays in the cave collapse?”

She turned her head toward him and smiled. She couldn’t read his expression because the helmet light was shining in her eyes, but he appreciated that smile, even if it was covered with teeny bits of ground up rock.

“Sure,” she said.

“Okay. Here goes. I was in an awkward place when I first started noticing girls. They made fun of me and I learned not to trust them.”

When it sounded like he might not say more, she prompted. “What do you mean by awkward place?”

He’d never talked to anybody about his damage. Not even Torn. But sitting there in the abject blackness next to Dr. Renaux, whose faint scent could still be detected under the dust coating, it all just came bubbling up like a geyser.

“My mother left my dad with a promising career as an aerospace engineer and two little boys who looked just like her. I don’t know why she left. If Dad knew, he never said.

“You hear about people who go into depression and then bounce back. Well, he just did the first part. No bounce back. He knocked around odd jobs for a few years making just enough to get by. When I was thirteen, he got a job working daytime security at a private school for rich kids, the kind who are already wearing Ivy League sweatshirts because they know where they’re going to college
and
that they’re going to get in.

“One of the perks of the job was free tuition and books for my brother and me. We got free tuition and books, but not the stuff that would help us fit in. Like wardrobe and good haircuts. We were trashy kids who lived in a rundown trailer park, or community as they preferred to call it. And we looked like what we were.

“My older brother managed it better. He was a lot more easygoing, good natured about the teasing. Eventually his peers decided he was more or less cool, like their mascot James Dean or something. I don’t know. Let’s just say that my adjustment had sharper edges.

“
Long story short, I figured out early that I liked girls and wanted some of what they had to offer. Unfortunately the admiration wasn’t mutual.”

“That’s… hard to believe.” Mercy ventured in a soft voice after he was silent for a bit.

Raif really didn’t know what to say to that. So he went on.

“The girls… They looked so clean and shiny and smelled so good, not like perfume, more like the smell of wholesome. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. They looked like they’d been taken care of. Of course they were. Taken care of that is. And I wanted to be close to that.

“When I tried to get close enough to talk to them, they looked at me like I’d gotten lost on my way to the back door. Sometimes they laughed. One girl, I remember, just sniffed.
Sniffed
. And turned away like I wasn’t there.”

Mercy could hear the emotion in his voice and could almost imagine the way he must have felt as a little lost boy.

“The other news is that, about the same time, everybody was starting to figure out that I was good in school. Despite rumors of me being a imbecile,” his helmet light turned toward Mercy pointedly, “I was good enough to compete with the brainiacs. Right before I turned fourteen, Black Swan found me and I was out of there. Had
no
reason to want to stay.

“Fast forward to speed dating because of a bet I lost to Torn. First, I’d had a bad night. A really bad night. When I first saw you sitting there at that speed dating table, what I saw was what I imagined one of those girls might look like all grown up. Prim and proper and entitled and sure that nobody who wasn’t fourth generation Yale was good enough to talk to her. So I lashed out.”

“Preemptive strike.”

He turned toward her thinking there was no reason to hold back. He didn’t have any reason not to tell the whole story.

“Yeah. Seeing you sitting there almost knocked me over. I wanted you to like me so much and I was so sure that you were going to make me feel like a walking piece of shit…

“The thing is that, right after I blew the place up, I realized that maybe I hadn’t been fair. I hadn’t even given you a chance to say hello before I shut down all the possibilities. I deliberately put you on the defensive, but it wasn’t you I was mad at. I figured that out.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. For all the good it did. You were already long gone when I got my shit together and I didn’t know anything about you. I remembered your first name, but not your last name. I was being so intent on not looking and feeling like a fool, again, that I left myself without any way to find you. Like an idiot.”

“You wanted to find me?” She sounded like it was the strangest thing she’d ever heard, but she also sounded enthralled, which encouraged him to continue.

“Yeah. For all the good it did. So - and believe me I know how lame this is going to sound - I started going back there on days off. I’d just walk around the area hoping that maybe you lived or worked close to where that restaurant was.” He laughed. “I got to know the neighborhood really well. I could mark on a map every single place to sit down or urinate. I could write a guidebook and call it
Looking for Mercy in Midtown
.”