CHAPTER 15



 

Ariadne was no stranger to disturbing sights—to blood and gore, to dismembered limbs and disemboweled torsos. But she turned away from the vision of Bourne’s rolling waves of flesh spilling out from the small towel he wore as he sat at the edge of the marble platform in the subterranean Turkish bath.

Aside from the two of them the hamam was empty. It was easy to feel small inside the cavernous room, a few stubborn turquoise tiles clinging to its otherwise denuded, sloping ceiling. Clouds of steam hung languidly around the chipped and neglected statuary, fogging the warped and half-shattered shaving mirrors. The heat wilted Ariadne’s clothing, frizzed her long hair.

Bourne was trying very hard to look nonchalant, but Ariadne could sense his anxiety. He had not expected her to find him here. As she drew near he remained still, bared his fangs.

“Where the hell did you go last night?” he demanded.

“I could ask you the same question, Bourne. You deserted us at the train yard.”

“No.” He shifted, revealing a glimpse of ashen, vascular thigh. “While you were playing spelunker, I got a phone call from my sire that his—our—safehouse was under attack. That took priority.”

“No, it didn’t,” she snapped. “You had orders from the Prince’s Hand.”

“Don’t lecture me about politics, girl. This was my sire. But you can’t ever understand that, can you?”

Despite herself, Ariadne felt a pain inside. In all of their verbal sparring over the years, even Bourne tended not to hit that spot.

Ariadne stiffened. Coming here hadn’t been an easy thing to begin with. She’d had to grill one of Silas’s retainers for Bourne’s location. She’d had to travel halfway across town to this decommissioned bathhouse. Whatever doors of diplomacy inside of her that she had forced open had already half-closed, and Bourne wasn’t doing much to keep them ajar.

Ariadne force herself to continue: “While you were here luxuriating, Mister Rose and the Council tried to close us down.” She began to describe the events of the night, only to have him interrupt her.

“Oh, I’m well aware of all that,” he said.

“If you know why I’ve come, don’t drag this out.”

“Why not?” Bourne leaned back, put his meaty arms behind his neck. His sneer belied the way he laid himself bare and vulnerable. “Goading you is all the pleasure I get these days.”

“Besides this.” She indicated the bathhouse with a gesture.

“This?” Bourne’s face took on an expression of wounded dignity. “This isn’t relaxation. This is important business. I’ll have you know I’m meeting Archibald here in half an hour. The man won’t talk at length anywhere other than here. Says the wizards warded it against spying. There’s always room for one more. Of course, you’d have to dress for the occasion.”

Ariadne narrowed her eyes. “Bourne, I am trying . . . to ask you . . . a favor.”

“No such thing as favors, love. There’s always a tradeoff. First rule of politics.”

“You have a duty to the Prince’s court. I shouldn’t need to do anything other than order you to help me out.”

“Sure. You could also order a turkey sandwich. Ever sent back a sandwich at a restaurant? The chef’ll make you a new one, sure enough, you’re the boss. Here’s a hint, though. Don’t look between the slices. Spit tastes better when it’s invisible.”

“I knew this was a mistake.” Ariadne spun on her heel to leave.

Bourne let her get within one stride of the exit before calling out to her. “Tell me where you were last night and I’ll give you all the help you could ask for. I’ll be your Bernard Baruch.” At her blank look, he added, “Financier, advisor during both world wars, confidante to presidents. Before your time, I guess.”

Ariadne gathered her thoughts. What had happened with Andrei last night had been confusing and uncontrollable. It hadn’t given her what she was looking for, and it had turned out to be a serious mistake as far as the war was concerned. But Andrei was hers. What they shared had happened before her death, had taken part in the daylight hours. The fact that very sun would burn Bourne to a crisp proved that he had no right to any part of that world.

Of course, neither did Ariadne . . .

A memory came to her, unbidden.

Andrei leans over her, re-arranging the scattered pile of course registration forms into rows and patterns. He is pointing to the various configurations and block schedules, and she is snapping at his finger with her mouth, giggling harder the more he gets frustrated. . . .

“Well?” asked Bourne. “It’s a simple trade. Really kind of unfair to me, too, if you look at it. I get a piece of trivial, not very useful information, and you get a genuine clean-up man to fix your botch.”

Ariadne pondered. Bourne wasn’t the only clean-up man around. Back in college, Andrei had always been good at shuffling pieces on a playing field, mastering the system. Liliane had authorized Ariadne to use any resource, to speak with whomever she needed, hadn’t she?

“Come on, girl. The whole reason Archibald’s coming here is to help me help you out. We can be your dream team. Just tell me. I’m waiting.”

Some part of Ariadne shouted to her that seeing Andrei was what had gotten her into this mess. But she had seen him with the eyes of a battle-shattered refugee, not with the cool gaze of the Silent Knife. If she saw him again, she would be stronger. It wouldn’t be a spastic wallow in emotion. It would be a simple business consultation.

“Never mind, Bourne,” Ariadne called over her shoulder. “Go back to your steambath. Tell Archibald I say hello. I have other resources.”

“Hey, come on. Don’t be like that. Ariadne?”

Bourne called after her several times as she departed. The increasing desperation in his shouts made her smile.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

“Ari?”

She brightens to hear his voice on the phone. “Dre! How are you?”

“Listen, sweetie, I have to cancel tonight. My interview with VisionTech is tomorrow, and I need to prepare.”

Her heart, having not quite settled down from the start caused by the phone’s unexpected ringing, kicks into high gear.

“But, tonight’s the poetry reading.”

“I know, I know.” His voice sounds tired, yearning. So much of her wants to reach out and comfort him, to soothe his pain, to tell him his life will work out just fine. “But what can I do? I want to go with you, but this . . . this is crucial. This firm only hires two students out of the entire graduating class.”

“It’s okay,” she mutters softly. “It’s just . . . well . . . you told me that the last interview was the important one. Last week.”

“It was last month.”

“Whatever.” She flops down on the bed, conscious of the hard plastic of the phone at her ear, disrupting the softness of her pillow. “It’s only your junior year, Dre. How important are these interviews anyway? Aren’t they just practice?”

She hears the familiar intake of his breath, a signal of the onset of another explosion. She moves the phone a few centimeters away, then quickly pulls it back. Even to hear the punishing sounds of this familiar rant about how competitive the business-technology program is, to hear his biting remarks about how “not everyone was born into a family like yours, a family that never had to worry about getting ahead,” even to have this is to have a little piece of him close to her, is worth the pain. So she grits her teeth and bears the lash of his anger, tries to embrace it in lieu of his warm body. He’ll apologize later. He always does.

She stares at the Picasso print on her wall, the poster of Koko the gorilla petting a small white kitten, the flyer from last year’s Earthfest.

Andrei finally seems to expend himself. “I got up with you at dawn last week like you asked me, didn’t I?” he concludes. “You have to be reasonable.”

She offers him vague encouragement. He wishes her luck at the poetry reading. They exchange the routine language of amends, that easy script lovers fall back on when real words are too challenging. And then Ariadne is cast into the abyss of the dial tone.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

Ariadne and Andrei sat across from one another at a dockside restaurant, where the candlelight from the tables reflected like a thousand small ghosts in the shimmering folds of the river at night.

Andrei’s shirt bore the burn mark of a poorly laid iron, an effort at looking neat for her. Ariadne, for her part, had broken into a clothing store in West Somerville on her way over and, for the first time since her Embrace, was wearing a dress. The fabric was soft and shimmery, the cut alluring, but Ariadne still felt ugly and corpselike.

She pushed those thoughts aside. This was a business consultation. That was all.

Andrei laid down a rain of chatter, betraying his own anxiety. He didn’t seem to notice that Ariadne was merely picking at her food and re-arranging it in piles. He kept speaking to some space over her shoulders, or far to the left or right of her. After long minutes of awkward exchanges of pleasantries, Andrei finally looked her in the eyes.

“So your parents didn’t know what happened to you either? You really had run away, and they weren’t just trying to keep me from learning where you were?”

“Did you even want to know?” Ariadne heard herself ask.

“I . . . I don’t know.” He turned his gaze away again. “I mean, ah, I had other things on my mind then. I had . . . plans.”

“You always had plans.”

“My plans.” Andrei laughed bitterly, running a hand through his hair. “Yes, my plans. I’m reassessing them at the moment, given how they turned out.”

“How did they turn out?”

He reddened, and Ariadne was flooded with memories: How he would storm in, fuming about some defeat, some bad grade or missed opportunity, and she would wait patiently on her bed, sometimes reaching over to massage his shoulders, until it finally all washed out as a story. Here, tonight, Ariadne also found herself letting him ramble on—but only because it would make him feel more comfortable, more pliable to her plans. That was all, wasn't it?

Like a balloon slowly losing its air, Andrei leaked the story of his life. He had graduated from college with honors, landed his dream job with VisionTech, Matthew Legatt’s socially responsible technology firm. All the goals he had chanted to her like a mantra during their three years together had finally become tangible reality. Somewhere buried between the folds of long hours, marked by eyestrain and carpal tunnel and a thousand business-class flights, he had met a woman and fallen in love.

Ariadne shivered, something in her clenching into a kind of knot she had not felt in all those sessions with Liliane. This was a new kind of fear, a nausea combined with an adrenaline rush, a pounding demand to hear more. She was in the flaming powerhouse at Fresh Pond again, except this time, the flames were singing to her, calling, and she could not help but walk straight into them.

Andrei continued. Gave a name, described her looks, her mannerisms, her likes and dislikes, casually, as if rattling off the stats of a baseball team. He refused to meet Ariadne’s eyes. Andrei and this woman had married, moved into a house, began a family, had a daughter named Cassie.

A frost blossomed within Ariadne and moved to her extremities. She remembered the pictures of the little girl in Andrei’s motel room. She felt dizzy. She pushed her high-heel clad feet into the floor beneath her to steady herself.

Andrei’s tone, rising with the talk of Cassie, began to plummet, until soon it was entirely flat as he described the stock market bubble implosion, the revelations of accounting malfeasance at VisionTech, the evaporation of his portfolio and his job. The strings upon which his family’s life had been strung snapped one by one, and all the pieces of the whirling mobile—house, cars, savings accounts—came crashing down. He moved the family into what his wife decided was a “hovel.” His checks from freelancing failed to keep pace with the calls from his creditors, until eventually:

“I just . . . went somewhere,” Andrei said, a hopeless smile creeping across his face. “For weeks, everything just seemed, I don’t know, behind a wall of fogged glass. I would forget to eat, forget to take Cassie to school in the morning, forget to turn off the car when I got out of it. The world passed before my eyes, but I just kind of slipped outside it. I’m not sure I’m making any sense.”

Ariadne swallowed slowly, with difficulty.

Andrei wrapped up his tale by relating a litany of lost lesser jobs, the loss of even the hovel, the divorce. His wife took Cassie.

“I made some bad mistakes,” he said. “It’s unforgivable, what it did to Cassie, I know. But I’m sorting it all out. The second job is for her. Every dollar I make driving that cab goes to her private school tuition. You saw my motel room. I’m living simply. The freelance jobs are adequate, and soon enough a big one’s going to come by. I’m going to fix everything.” He paused. “And you, Ariadne? You still haven’t told me what happened two nights ago.”

She steeled herself. This was her whole reason for coming here, right?

“I have something that needs to be fixed, too.” She collected herself and explained, with as many details as she deemed prudent, her situation.

Andrei’s eyes locked on her. She had hardly spoken three sentences when she knew the wheels in his brain were turning.

“So let me get this straight,” Andrei said, his posture already fallen into a focused hunch. “Your company’s being investigated and you need to get the investigators to leave you alone.”

“Yes.”

“Your . . . company. It’s not exactly something I’ve read about in Forbes, is it?”

Ariadne raised her eyebrows, shook her head emphatically. “Consider this a hypothetical situation. What would a hypothetical Ariadne do in a situation such as this?”

“After insulting the investigator?”

“Grievously insulting him.”

“Is he with the Feds?”

Another head shake.

“Hmm.” Andrei rested his chin on his wrists, his food and drink entirely forgotten. “Well, anyone that high up in an organization has to have skeletons in the closet.”

“I’m sure he does,” said Ariadne. “Literally.”

Andrei didn’t even notice she wasn’t smiling. “It’s a matter of finding them. Leveraging them against him, persuading him to keep his mouth shut.”

“I think he’s not in a position to do that anyway,” said Ariadne. “It’s more a matter of his bosses finding out about his . . . um . . . absence.”

“Absence?” Andrei raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t ask.”

He swallowed, exhaled. “Ari, I have to admit I’m getting a little creeped out at some of the implications.”

“Good. Keep going. We’re still speaking hypothetically.”

“Okay, okay,” Andrei outlined boxes in the air with his hands. “Well, you could go right to his superiors and expose the skeletons—once you find them, of course. Convince them that their man’s the problem, not your company.”

“How do I find them?”

“Speak to co-workers. Sniff around. I used to think corporate espionage was deplorable, but that’s before I saw the kind of folks Legatt would hire to dig up dirt on our opponents. Tobacco executives, corrupt congressmen—exposing them was a public service.”

Ariadne took mental notes. As they spoke, she knew Liliane and Archibald were interrogating Rose, but the Councilor seemed to be willing to let both mind and body turn to jelly before revealing anything useful.

“Andrei—” Ariadne leaned forward “—what if I needed your help . . . manufacturing dirt?”

“Manufacturing?” Andrei pulled back an inch.

“This is a really bad guy I’m talking about. Worse than tobacco executives or corrupt congressmen. This is a guy who has friends who, if I don’t throw them off the trail, will do some horrible things to me. Hypothetically.”

Slowly, Andrei leaned back in. “I saw what you looked like two nights ago. Whatever happened was hardly hypothetical.”

She nodded, saw the concern in his eyes. Two nights ago, she had been trapped by his presence. Tonight, it seemed, she was returning the favor, entrapping him by his need to save her.

“You need to go to the police, or—”

“No. This has to be you, Andrei. You have the computer skills. Consider it a freelance opportunity. A paying job.”

She quoted a figure. Andrei could not hide the sudden hunger that came into his eyes. But then he stared at his drink. “No. I’m not going to take any money from you.”

“Look, I understand if you don’t want a part of this. It’s okay.” She began to rise.

He reached out, grabbed her hand. The warmth of his skin made her flinch.

“That’s not what I meant. I mean, I would never need money in exchange for helping you. The timing of this, it’s no accident. You were right, you know. The whole time. Back in school I wasn’t paying attention to the right things. Life could have turned out differently. If I can help now . . .”

She had him. She knew she had him. Yet something squirmed inside Ariadne’s eyes, a hot acid feeling that made her jump, made her have to bite her tongue so she wouldn’t scream. Burning wax, or something like it, was working its way down her cheeks.

For the first time since her Embrace, impossibly, Ariadne found herself crying. It felt like slugs creeping down from her eyelids, eating at her flesh. The tears were made of blood.

She leapt up from her seat, knocking over her glass and causing the patrons around to crane their necks. She wiped the red streaks madly away from her cheeks, praying Andrei hadn’t seen.

Andrei called her name, but she didn’t hear. Demons snapping at her heels, Ariadne fled. Her heels staggered her gait, and she made it as far as the alley behind the restaurant before she collapsed against a dumpster, sliding down its metal side, grime streaking her beautiful new dress.

She heard Andrei calling.

She cursed herself. She had been in control! Then, all of a sudden, this. She fought for some way to right her thinking. Then she had it: If anything, her sudden helplessness would only serve to only draw Andrei in deeper.

He put his arms around her. “Something’s wrong with you. Something serious. But, hey, look at me!” He laughed bitterly. “I’m hardly going to judge you. We both seem to have hit bottom, eh?”

It was a speech, an Andrei-knows-best speech, just like the old days.

“But this is perfect. I can help you. We can help each other. We’re not kids anymore. We’ve been kicked around a bit, we’ve grown up. Things are different. Things . . .”

He trailed off. Ariadne stared at his hand as if it were burning. Slowly, she reached out and clasped it.

“I’m sorry.” The words spoke themselves through her. “For all the stupid things I did that drove you away.”

Andrei’s arms were around her, despite the grime and the surroundings. “Ari, you’re fine. Wonderful. You were always wonderful. I was a stupid kid. I didn’t know what I wanted, what I was doing. Let’s take this slow. Whatever you’re going through, whatever it takes, I can help.”

It was the prize she had been seeking all along. Her mission had been accomplished. She would think about the costs later.

“Come with me,” she said.

Back in college, he always would have asked where, always would have tried to map out the best way to go. This time, he said nothing, just took her hand and walked beside her.

 

 




 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

DAVID NURENBERG, PhD, is a teacher, freelance writer, and social activist who lives in the Boston area. His credits with White Wolf include writing for the Vampire: The Requiem, Scion, and Exalted lines. His nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Newsweek, USA Today, and Multicultural Review, as well as many lesser-known papers, ’zines, and blogs. Silent Knife is his first novel published by a major press. His favorite animal is the wombat.