Sara opened her fists, regarding her hands as if repulsed by some filth that only she could see. “The men held me down.”
After a silence, Jane said, “Rape.”
“No. They stripped me naked. Cuffed my hands. Indifferent. As if I wasn’t a woman to them. Not a person. Just a thing.”
Her voice had gone flat, deflated of all emotion, as if she had so often examined this memory that she’d worn away its sharp edges and its ability to distress her. But the truth of its enduring effect could be seen in the paleness of her lips, the color burning in her cheeks, and the stiffening of her body as if in defense against a hard blow.
“They took me to a bathroom,” she continued in a voice eerily detached from the cruelty she described. “The woman had filled the tub with cold water. Also with ice. Cubes from the kitchen icemaker. A lot of ice. They forced me to sit in the tub.”
“Hypothermia is an effective torture,” Jane said. “Iranians use it. North Koreans. Cubans. When they don’t want to mark the victim.”
“One man sat on the toilet. One brought a chair. The woman sat on the tub. Edge of the tub. They talked movies, TV, sports, like I wasn’t there. If I spoke, she zapped my neck with a Taser, then held my head out of the water by my hair till the spasms stopped.”
“How long did this go on?”
“I lost track of time. But it wasn’t just one session. They did it to me on and off all weekend.”
Jane listed some symptoms of hypothermia. “Uncontrollable shivering, confusion, weakness, dizziness, slurred speech.”
“Cold is its own kind of pain,” Sara said. She closed her eyes and bent her head and might have been mistaken for a woman in prayer if her hands had not cramped into fists once more.
Jane waited in patient quiet, Sara in the chilly silence of mortification, until Jane said, “It wasn’t primarily about the pain. Sure, they wanted you to be miserable. And afraid. But mainly it was about humiliation. Making you feel helpless, submissive, using shame to break your resolve.”
When at last Sara spoke, her voice trembled as if the needled cold of that long-ago ordeal pricked her bones again. “The men…when they had to…”
Jane spared her from the need to say it. “When they had to urinate, they did it in the tub.”
Finally Sara raised her head and met Jane’s eyes. “I never could’ve imagined such a thing, treating anyone with such contempt.”
“Because you’d never dealt with their type before. I have.”
The character of the tremor in Sara’s voice changed, no longer occasioned by a memory of cold or humiliation, but by a virulent and righteous anger. “Will you do to Simon what those three did to me?”
“I don’t work that way, Sara.”
“He deserves it.”
“He deserves worse.”
“Will you ruin him?”
“Possibly.”
“Take his money?”
“Some of it, anyway.”
“Will you kill him?”
“If I force him to tell me what I need to know, other people will probably kill him for ratting on them.”
Sara considered that prospect. “What’s this all about?”
“You don’t want to know. But if you hope to get your self-respect back, entirely back, you need to help me.”
Outside, rain and wind. In the mind of Sara Holdsteck, a different but equal turbulence.
Then she said, “What do you want to know?”
5
Tanuja Shukla, thrashed by fear but driven by duty, owing her brother no less than everything, hurrying through the dark stable where no horses had been kept for years, hooding the flashlight with her left hand even though distance and foul weather made it unlikely that one of the men in the house, glancing out a window, would glimpse the pale beam…Rain beating on the roof like the booted feet of marching legions, the earthen scent of the hard-packed hoof-imprinted floor, the musty but sweet smell of old straw moldering in the corners of the empty stalls…
What had once been the tack room, where saddles and bridles and other horse gear had been stored, now contained a riding lawnmower, rakes and spades and gardening tools. A long-handled axe could serve as a weapon, but it wouldn’t be enough to help one slender girl drive off or chop down three men, even if she had the stomach for such violence, which she didn’t.
Because the tack room was without windows, she no longer hooded the flashlight beam. She swept it quickly across bags of fertilizer, terra-cotta pots of all sizes, redwood stakes for tomato plants, cans of Spectracide Wasp & Hornet Killer….
From the shelf she took a container of hornet spray. Removed the safety cap. The can was about ten inches tall. Weighed maybe a pound and a half. It contained a lot of poison.
A cadenced wind now brought complex rhythms to the rain as Tanuja returned to the open door of the stable, where she switched off the flashlight and put it on the floor.
Hindu by birth but not by practice, she had not believed in the faith of her mother and father since she’d been ten, which was the year they perished in the crash of a 747 while on a flight from New Delhi to London. Yet now she sent up a prayer to Bhavani, the goddess who was the benign aspect of the fierce Shakti, Bhavani the giver of life and the great font of mercy. Provide me with strength and allow me to triumph.
She plunged into the cold rain, vigorously shaking the can of Spectracide as she ran toward the house where Sanjay was perhaps in mortal danger. Sanjay had slid into existence and taken his first breath close behind her, following her from womb to wicked world; therefore, she must always be his rakshak, his protector.
6
A crystal bowl, like a Gypsy’s instrument of foretelling that had failed to predict the current threat, seemed to float on the translucent milky quartz tabletop, bright with a fullness of ripe roses that shed petals as portentous as blood drops.
Sitting at the kitchen table, held there at gunpoint, Sanjay Shukla was both fearful and exhilarated. He was sufficiently self-aware to marvel that, in such dire circumstances, a thread of delight was woven through his dread.
His sister wrote a kind of magic realism, and her new novel, only in stores three weeks, had earned all but universal critical acclaim. Sanjay, too, had been declared an author of promise for importing into the literary novel certain qualities of hard-boiled detective stories. Sometimes he worried that he’d not experienced enough of the dangers and roughness of the world to be able to write neo-noir fiction as effectively as he wished. Yes, his parents had died when terrorists blew up an airplane. Yes, his and Tanuja’s mausi—their mother’s sister—Aunt Ashima Chatterjee and her husband, Burt, during their guardianship of the Shukla twins, had embezzled two-thirds of the inheritance before their niece and nephew could induce a court to declare them adults at the age of seventeen. But none of that was the kind of noir ordeal that would have made a good movie with Robert Mitchum; therefore, Sanjay often wished that he had more gritty experience of threat and violence.
Now here he was, staring down the barrel of a pistol held by a neighbor who previously seemed as straight-arrow as Captain America. A second gunman, a stranger, stood near the door to the mudroom. A third man, whose caterpillar eyebrows nearly met over the bridge of his nose, placed on the table a small cooler from which he produced a packaged hypodermic needle with cannula and a stainless-steel box about nine inches square, seven or eight inches deep; he handled the box with cotton gloves, evidently because it was cold enough to take the skin off bare fingers.
Sanjay was less alarmed by the pistol than by the syringe. A gun was an easily understood threat, but the needle injected an element of the unknown. It made him think of illness, disease. He wasn’t sick, and even if he had been, these men were not here to heal him, which meant they might be here to infect him.
That made no sense, but people did a lot of things that made no sense.