The Wicked City. Beatriz Williams
Everything okay?”
“Fine!”
“There’s no issue here, is there? Conflict of interest? Because this is a sensitive project, like I said. Some big names involved. And the whole thing could blow up on us, depending on what we find, which is why we want you on the team. We need our best people, and we need them at their best. We can’t afford a single mistake on this. Got to have your head in the game. Are we clear, here?”
Ella laid her left hand flat on the surface of the briefing book, obscuring the cutout white rectangle of black block text.
“Absolutely clear,” she said.
ELLA’S CELL PHONE VIBRATED AT a quarter to midnight, while she lay flat on the folding table in the laundry room, listening to the sounds from the other side of the wall.
She picked up the phone and looked at the caller ID. Set it down again. The table buzzed beneath her back, at soothing, regular intervals, before lapsing back into stillness. Immediately after it stopped, Ella felt the familiar twinge of guilt. Imagined Patrick flipping his own phone closed, staring despondently at the reclaimed-wood floor in the living room or the tight, golden sisal weave in the bedroom. Or, just as easily, the industrial carpet in his twenty-ninth-floor office at Sterling Bates.
He called every day, sometimes twice. He also e-mailed, not as frequently. Most of those messages sat unopened in her inbox, but not all. Last week, the morning after she met Hector and Jen and came down to the laundry room in the middle of the night, she had such a terrible insomnia hangover at work, she actually forgot she was separated from her husband, forgot what had happened the last time she saw him, and clicked on his name. Automatic response. Started reading before she could help herself.
I AM SO SORRY. I’ll keep saying it, over and over, until you believe me. If you could just see what a wreck I am right now. I know I have a problem. I’m getting help now. I just want to see you and try to explain and apologize. I swear to God it will never, ever happen again. I love you. I love our marriage. You are the most important thing in my world. Please—
She’d clicked away to a spreadsheet. Looked down at her keyboard and tried to breathe. Sipped some coffee while her heartbeat rippled her silk blouse and her head ached and her stomach swam.
Do not reply, she’d told herself. Do not reply.
She’d sent back the flower deliveries that arrived daily at Aunt Viv’s apartment, each one more fragrant and costly than the last. She’d filed the cards and notes in the circular. She’d let her cell phone vibrate into voice mail. She’d restrained her mouse from clicking on any one of the e-mails, until now. She hadn’t even told him her new address. She knew better. There wasn’t an argument Patrick couldn’t win, a deal he couldn’t close. All he needed was a foot in the door.
The phone buzzed again. This time she turned it off entirely and concentrated instead on the music drifting through the walls, a jazz tune of exuberant syncopation, in which a trumpet and a bass and a clarinet chased each other in dizzying circles, making her think—God knew why—of forest animals. That was it. Scurrying up and down trees. This was real jazz, not the junk they played in tourist traps. Sound, bluesy, inventive jazz, and the patrons knew it. They laughed and chattered and danced—Hector was right, the vibration of heels sometimes rattled the floor—and while Ella couldn’t distinguish any particular voice, she was starting to feel like she knew them, these people, communing by night in a Greenwich Village basement. Hiding from the rest of the world, experiencing this elemental music in the shared marrow of their bones.
The first night, she had listened for maybe an hour, standing the whole time, not moving a muscle for fear she might lose. Like the sound would dissolve if she reached out to touch it, or even to approach the gray cinder-block wall that separated her from them. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the table, and the sight of her own mesmerization startled her. Eyes soft and lips round. If the image were of anyone else, she’d have said it was the look of someone in love. When she turned at last and climbed the stairs, five long prewar flights back to her apartment, she went to bed and fell right asleep to the pensive, delicate notes of a piano.
And she knew that she hadn’t chosen this apartment, after all. The apartment had chosen her.
THE MUSIC NEXT DOOR WAS already having its effect. Her brain settled into a comfortable trance; she wasn’t ready for sleep yet, but she was close. The images shifting in and out of focus behind her eyes, the scenes and ideas, they weren’t the frightful thoughts about Patrick—about Patrick and other women—about her vast, unfamiliar future—about the once-sturdy milestones now scattered about that future like bowling pins—but about other things. People she didn’t know. A champagne bottle tottering on a sofa, next to a man’s black tuxedo leg. Another man, playing a nimble clarinet, except he’s not a stranger, he’s someone you know, and you’re trying to tell him something. Now driving a narrow, tree-bordered highway while a sunset burns behind you. (Somehow Ella knew that Manhattan lay between her and that sunset, though she couldn’t say why.) Sitting down for a drink at a bar, where you know the bartender; you’re commiserating about something. The colors, the colors are so beautiful. A rich, red-streaked mahogany. Gold something. The taste of salt.
Time to go to bed now, Ella. You’ve had your fill. Jazz and conversation. She lifted her head and rose to her elbows, groggy, jostling the cell phone so that it crashed to the floor. She leaned over the edge of the table and reached to the floor, but the phone lay just beyond the tips of her fingers, and for some reason she didn’t want to get down from the table altogether, which was the logical solution, but to snag the phone from her current position, and while she was attempting this awkward maneuver, some woman next door started to scream bloody murder. The music broke up. Ella, startled, fell right off the table to the gray linoleum floor.
For several seconds, she didn’t do anything. Just listened in shock to the sound of that screaming woman, the long, excruciating rip of vocal cords, the bang of furniture turning over. Or was that a gunshot? A man shouted something terse, and the screaming stopped.
Ella rose on her hands and knees. Her heartbeat crashed in her ears; her arms shook. Somewhere in her chest, a gash opened up, as if someone had taken a knife and sliced right down the center of her sternum.
She braced her hands on the table and staggered to her feet. Spots broke out before her eyes, and she realized she wasn’t breathing, that her terror and the downright physical pain assaulting her had frozen her rib cage. Breathe, she whispered. Forced her lungs to act. The cavity inside to expand—painfully—and contract.
On the other side of the wall, silence had fallen. Not a sound, not a note. She thought, I have to call the police. She picked up her phone, which was blank and dark, and pressed the power button.
The light came on. She flipped it open. No bars. No bars, when there had been three or four a moment ago.
Go upstairs, she thought. Go see if anyone needs help.
She turned around, still clutching her phone, waiting for it to find a signal, and ran for the laundry room door. Up the dark staircase, around the corner, down the dim hallway to the front door. She flung the door open and ran down the steps to the wet sidewalk. The drizzle fell softly on her hair and nose and hands; the smell of rotting garbage lay in the air, though the sanitation pickup had come yesterday and the pavement was clear. She wrapped her fingers around the railing that surrounded the basement next door. Not a sound, not a light, not a single sign that anyone lived there, let alone ran an exclusive jazz club into the small morning hours.
“Hello?” she called. “Anyone there?”
No reply. Ella became conscious of all the windows stacked up around her, the curious New York eyes behind them. On the other side of the street, a pair of men walked briskly, heads bent under the drizzle. Probably glancing her way and thinking she was some kind of crazy, some kind of loony, out this late in her bathrobe and slippers, maybe locked herself out, maybe tossed out by her jealous boyfriend. A taxi turned the corner of Bedford and crawled down the street, between the rows of parked cars.
She tried again, a little more loudly.