“Javier Ruiz has been eliminated,” Victor says, as calmly and professionally as any other time I’ve heard him speak to Niklas.
“Yes,” he answers a question I can’t hear but I still dumbly push my head forward a little as if it’ll amplify the volume in some way. “Police arrived at the scene before I made it out of the neighborhood. It was not a clean kill.” He listens to Niklas for a moment and goes on, “I believe Samantha led them there. The girl was alive when I arrived just before I took Javier out. He had shot her, but she managed to tell me that she overheard Samantha on the phone with someone just after I left for Tucson. Yes. No, Samantha is dead. Inform Vonnegut that Safe House Twelve has been compromised. A Cleaner should be sent there immediately to confiscate her files. Yes. Yes.” He glances at me. “That will not be necessary. The girl died of her wound. I left her there.”
My stomach twists into knots. I cross my arms over it.
“Niklas,” he says, dropping the professionalism in his tone a degree. “Come to my New England location as soon as you can. We will get the payment squared away and then…I wish to tell you what happened in Budapest.”
I tilt my head gently to one side upon hearing those last words. Everything else that Victor told Niklas, I understand it all for what it was: a lie, a ploy to get him here. But the last part felt real, personal. The fact that he said it in front of me strikes me as peculiar. I know it has nothing to do with me, so why would he include it in this particular conversation? It’s in this moment that I begin to understand that Niklas is something more to Victor than his liaison, more than someone he works with and that whatever happened in Budapest needs to be said because his conscience needs to be cleared.
That’s what people do when they say their goodbyes.
I don’t know why, but despite Niklas trying to get me killed, I feel this pain and sadness inside. Because I know what Victor is going to do. I know he’s going to kill him. Yet, I feel like it’s the last thing that he wants...
He sets his phone on the glass end table next to the chair and breaks apart the buttons of his vest.
“I have nowhere else to go,” I tell him from the couch again. “I know I’ve been a burden and I’m sorry. Samantha told me that you’re risking everything, even your life to help me and I don’t have anything to give you in return. Other than my gratitude and I know that’s not much.”
I sigh and add, “And I’m sorry about Samantha.”
He tosses his vest and afterwards his tie over the back of the chair with his jacket.
“It was my decision to help you,” he says while untucking his dress shirt. “And Samantha was a good woman.”
“Did she love you?”
I fold my hands together within my lap.
“No,” he says, not looking at me. “She wanted to, but she was incapable.”
My brows wrinkle in confusion.
“Incapable of love?” I ask. “No one’s incapable of that.”
“You can’t fall in love with someone who isn’t there,” he says matter-of-factly. “I left before she had the chance.”
“Did you love her?” I mentally hold my breath.
“No I did not. Love is an impediment in this business. It’ll only get you killed.”
Although his answer leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, I can’t deny that maybe he’s right. Though I think about how Victor, or anyone for that matter, could go through life without loving someone. But then I realize that I’ve never loved anyone, either.
“And I know you have no place to go,” he adds, “but when this is over and I know you’re safe, you will have to be on your own. I will help set you up, give you a decent start.” He stops and looks at me intently, his eyes locking on mine as if to seize my undivided attention. “But this ends soon. You’ve been with me too long already as it is.”
It feels like suddenly he’s angry with me, or at least angry with himself for helping me. Maybe it has to do with whatever’s going on between him and Niklas, I could never know, but since his phone call with Niklas, Victor is different.
And it fills me with dread.
He turns and walks through a marble archway that leads to another part of this massive house. In a way it reminds me of the places Javier used to take me all dressed up and on his arm, but this house, although massive from what I’ve seen, is smaller than the others were. And darker, with dark cherry hardwood floors so shiny I can see my reflection, and covered with expensive rugs of the deepest reds and browns and grays. Tall rust-colored curtains dress the expansive windows that cover the entirety of one wall from ceiling to floor and overlooking the turbulent ocean below. Even outside the beach isn’t a bright ocean-side paradise with white sands and blue skies. Here it’s gray and gloomy and the waves crash angrily against the rocks many feet below, yet it’s not even storming.
For the next several hours, Victor stays out of sight. I don’t feel like he’s intentionally ignoring me, but I know that he wants to be alone.
I think a lot about Samantha. And Lydia. And Izel. And Javier. I’ve seen so much death. I killed a man tonight, yet, the only thing that picks at my mind more is the fact that I’m already over it. For the most part, that is; I still can’t get it off my mind. I still see Javier’s dark, almost black eyes staring back at me with that jammed gun in his hand. I still shake—I’m shaking right now—when I think about pulling the trigger, when his eyes followed mine all the way down until his body hit the floor. And I’ll never forget what he said to me just before he died:
“I knew you had it in you, Sarai.”
And I hate myself for it, but I…well, I feel an out-of-place sense of sadness over Javier. A void. That part of me which grew to accept him as being the only life I had, whether I wanted him to be or not, misses him. I guess because I was used to him after so long.
“Sarai?” Victor’s voice snaps me out of the memory.
I look up at him standing over me. I never heard him walking up, or noticed his tall form approaching the couch, I was so absorbed.
“Niklas will be here in about twenty minutes,” he says. “You’ll need to stay out of sight. You’ll go in my room and keep the door closed. Is that understood?”
“Yes.”
I hate how cold he feels again, just like he felt when I first met him. All traces of empathy and openness that I felt grow within Victor over the time we’ve been together are gone.
“What are you going to do?”
“What I have to do.”
He walks past me wearing a long-sleeved black pullover shirt and black pants. It’s refreshing to see him dressed in something so casual after only ever seeing him in suits. He is attractive in whatever he chooses to wear, I admit to myself.
I follow him to whatever part of the house he’s going.
“Victor?” I call out behind him, but he just keeps walking. “I-I could help you.” I can’t believe I’m saying this. “Have you ever…trained anyone? You know, to be like you?”
Victor stops mid-stride underneath the entrance of some spacious, marble-floored room out ahead.
I see his shoulders rise and fall. Then he turns to me.
“No,” he says, “and I never will.”
He leaves it at that and walks into the room where I continue to follow and once I’m inside, the beauty of it takes my breath away. There are four life-sized statues of Greek women wearing flowing gowns, standing tall in all for corners of this round, dome-shaped room. To my right another wall-sized window overlooks the turbulent ocean and in front of it, sitting proudly on display is the most beautiful piano I’ve ever seen.
I try to tear my eyes away from it.
“But why not?” I ask, coming up behind him. “What else am I going to do with my life? I can’t go back out there. I have no education, didn’t even get to graduate. I have no friends, no family, no work history. Victor, I don’t even have a real driver’s license or a birth certificate and social security card. I have no identity, at least not a legal one.”
He leaves the room with the piano, walking through an exit on the other side and I stay close behind him.
Now we’re in a smaller side room with a ceiling-to-floor bookshelf situated on the back wall, filled to the brim with books—mostly leather-bound—and an antique-looking black lacquer desk on one wall. A leather recliner sits in the center of the room with a small table and lamp beside it.
“You can get those things back,” he says walking toward the table beside the recliner. “It will take some time, but you can get them. As far as an education, you can get a GED, go to a community college.” He glances at me and adds, “It will be hard, but it’s your only option.”
He takes a writing book of sorts from the table and begins flipping through the edge-tattered pages.
“But that’s not what I want,” I say. “I want to…do what you do. I know it sounds ludicrous but—”
“It is ludicrous,” he says, snapping the book shut in his hand. “The answer is no. It will always be no, so do not waste your time or mine going on about it anymore.”
He walks past me again.
And I follow him out again, through the room with the piano and back into the living room area.
He starts to leave me standing here again, but I stop him.
“I want to stay with you.”
With his back to me, he just stands there, quiet and immobile as though my admission stole his movements and voice away. I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but I felt it was the only thing I had left with which to throw at him.
For a long moment, I think he’s going to respond, even if only just to tell me no again and lecture me about how I don’t know what I’m talking about or what I’m asking. But he says nothing. And then finally rounds the corner heading back to his room.
Feeling defeated, I sit down on a barstool in the kitchen and watch the video surveillance television fixed inside the wall to my left; one screen split four ways to show four different areas of the property simultaneously. And each individual square also changes to another camera every few seconds to show yet more areas of the property.
Minutes later, a sleek black car, much like the one Victor had that I hid in when leaving the compound, pulls up to the front gate.
Victor, probably watching the same screen in another room, comes into the kitchen.
“He’s here,” he announces and gestures for me with one hand. “Remember what I said: stay quiet and don’t come out of my room until I tell you.”
I nod nervously.
My stomach is swimming again, my heart already beating twice as hard as seconds ago.
I get down from the barstool and walk quickly into Victor’s immaculate room where there’s, unsurprisingly, another wall-sized window. A massive king-sized bed is pressed against another wall, dressed by black and gray bedding pulled tight over the mattress so that no wrinkles or imperfections can be found. It seems that’s the case in every room I’ve seen thus far: devoid of imperfections and signs of even the slightest disarray.