“No. Well, I’m not sure, but I don’t think ever then.” Her gaze turned to the zip-tie that secured her left hand to the chair. “When he slaps me, clamps a hand around my throat, when he’s rough…”
Her voice feathered away into silence, and it seemed as if her mind had taken wing through a dark woods of memory.
In time, Petra said, “Yeah, when he calls me Anabel, there’s always this anger. It’s a little scary, but it’s not me he’s angry with. I always thought he was angry with himself. For not, you know, being able. Mostly he’s super ready, though sometimes not. But I’m hearing him now, how he sounds, and maybe it’s not all anger, maybe mostly hatred. So bitter how he says her name, and then he’s rough with me, and if he’s rough enough, then he’s ready and able.”
“Able to get an erection,” Jane clarified.
“Poor Simon,” said Petra with seeming sympathy. “How awful for him when he’s got trouble with it.”
39
In the wake of some nameless catastrophe that had extinguished the lights of the city and its surrounding settlements, fires leaped in man-made craters, and undulatory ashes rose on hot currents into a night watched over by a sinister smiling moon, but mostly there was darkness and smoke and a greasy odor not to be contemplated. Bier carriers bore the deceased upon their weary shoulders and Brahmans officiated in the otherworldly light, as sweating cremators in loincloths stoked the flames. Here in the shamshan ghat, where dead bodies were burned, uncountable mourners roamed less than half-seen, to whom Tanuja must be as shadowy as they were to her, cries of grief issuing from their shadow mouths. She was in Mumbai again, not as a child, but as a woman, yet somehow it was the night her parents had perished in the plane crash. And though the plane had gone down far from India, she knew they were inexplicably here, among these victims of this unnamed cataclysm. Although they must be dead, Tanuja grew ever more desperate to find dear Baap and Mai, for it was urgent that, in death, they reach out to Sanjay, as she at the moment could not, reach out and warn him that he was in great peril.
Waking from the dream, she needed a moment to realize she was lying on the restroom floor. She smelled hot candle wax and orange-scented soap.
The man who had Tasered her stepped into view and stood over her and reached down, offering assistance. She didn’t want to touch him, but when she shied from his hand, he seized her by the wrist and yanked her into a sitting position.
“Get off your ass,” he said, “or I’ll drag you out of here by your hair.”
She found her strength, rose, swayed, regained her equilibrium, and put one hand to her neck to learn the nature of something that constricted her. A collar. Her attacker pulled on a lead, and the collar tightened. While she had lain unconscious, he’d put her on a leash, as if she were a dog.
After seven years during which she and her brother had been ensnared by their aunt and uncle, the devious Chatterjees, freedom was no less essential than air to Tanuja Shukla. She prided herself on being a woman who coped with any situation, who was not easily alarmed. But a fright akin to panic now seized her. Heart knocking as though she’d run miles, she fumbled for the clasp on the collar but could not release it.
“Leave the candle,” her captor said. “Don’t think you can throw it in my face. We’re going to the kitchen. You know the way.”
As they approached the open door to the hallway, she shouted a warning to Sanjay, and her keeper slapped her hard upside the head. She cried out again—“Sanjay, run! Run!”—and the man whipped the end of the leash across her face.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “It’s too late.”
Stepping out of the restroom, Tanuja hoped desperately he’d not meant that her beloved brother had been captured, but instead that Sanjay had already escaped, that it was too late for them to get their filthy hands on him.
With the lavatory behind them, darkness shrouded the first hallway, which seemed like a passage to jahannan, where demons bred and all hope must be shed. She knew they entered the intersection of the two halls when to the left she saw a doorway defined by a faint aura of wick light: the kitchen.
When she crossed that threshold, her keeper at her back, she saw this was indeed jahannan, and she wept silently at the sight of Sanjay sitting at the table in defeat. His shirt was torn, his hair disarranged, as if he’d struggled against the hulking man who stood beside his chair. In the glow of the two remaining candles, Tanuja could see the collar around his neck, the leash drawn taut down the back of his chair and tied securely to the stretcher bar between the two back legs.
40
“I’m sorry about this, but it’s necessary,” Jane said as from her tote bag she withdrew a prepared ball of gauze and a roll of duct tape. “Although I don’t think Simon could hear you from the foyer upstairs, I can’t risk you calling out a warning. Once I’ve got him in the theater, I’ll come back and strip off the tape, take out the gag, so you’ll be more comfortable.”
“You can trust me,” Petra said. “I get it now—my situation.”
“That sure was quick, huh? ‘I was blind, but now I see.’?”
“I’m not scamming you. I really get it. The only way out for me is your way.”
“I believe you do get it, kid. But you’ve got Simon under your skin.”
“No. That’s over.”
“He hits you, chokes you, gets rough with you in I don’t know what other ways, but when you’re sitting here alone, without me to focus you on that one way out, you’ll slip loose from your common sense and drift back toward him.”
The girl was sufficiently self-aware not to argue. She said only, “Maybe not.”
“?‘Maybe’ isn’t good enough.”
As though a hangover now pincered its way through her skull hours ahead of schedule, the girl’s face paled under its light coat of foundation and powder blush. She had lip-printed the most recent martini glasses with much of her Maybelline; and the natural pink of her mouth now grayed a little as if with the memory of her night on the town, of all that she had drunk and said and done.
“Later,” Jane promised, “when I’ve opened his safe and put his money in front of you, I’ll let you have a look at him and decide whether you want him…or the cash and a new start. I can try to trust you then. Because when I’ve finished with him, I think you’ll rather have the money.”
“What are you going to do to him?”
“That depends on Simon. Whether it’s a cakewalk or a firewalk is up to him. Now let me put this gauze in your mouth. If you try to bite me, I’ll slap you harder than Simon does, and I’ll damn sure leave a mark or three.”
Petra opened her mouth, but then turned her head aside. “Wait. I have to go potty. I need to pee.”
“There’s no time for that. You’ll have to hold it.”
“How long?”
“Until you can’t anymore.”
“That is so wrong.”
“It is. It’s wrong,” Jane agreed. “But with Simon arriving soon, that’s the way it has to be.”
“You’re a total bitch.”
“You’ve said as much several times before, and I haven’t once disagreed—have I? Now open your mouth.”
Petra took the gauze gag without trying to bite.
Jane patched the girl’s mouth shut with a rectangle of duct tape and then wound a longer strip twice around her head to secure the first.
41