“And your interactions with the men?”
“Honestly, there wasn’t much. Only when they brought me meals, and took me to the bathroom.”
“No questioning? They are not wanting any informations from you?”
“I guess not.”
“Is it always the same two men?”
“Hard to know. They looked so similar, with their heads covered, and sunglasses. For all I know there were a half-dozen of them. They barely spoke, so I couldn’t get a sense of their voices.”
Suddenly Santos cuts in. “Tell us about the bathroom.”
“The bathroom?” John is surprised at this question, and by the person asking it. The bathroom is a private place, the only truly private place, a place so private that we don’t even discuss it.
Or at least that’s what it’s supposed to be.
*
“No!”
She felt Charlie lift her, roughly, and as her feet left the floor she felt the immediate loss of balance, of any hope of control— “Stop!”
—and then he had already shoved her dress up over her waist, he was pawing aside her panties, and she felt the harsh exposure of her unprotected skin against the cold marble.
“No, Charlie,” she said, and caught a glimpse of herself over his shoulder, in the mirror on the opposite wall, where she could also see Charlie’s face in the mirror within the mirror, the infinity effect.
“Please no.”
He didn’t even acknowledge her plea, just pushed himself in, but she was dry, unreceptive, and she felt a tearing, a burning.
“Ow,” she heard herself say. “You’re hurting me.”
He ignored the pain in her voice, and pushed more deliberately, more forcefully. More viciously.
She continued to watch the woman in the mirror struggle, saw her trying to twist herself away, to shove him off and out of her, but she had no leverage. Ariel’s arms felt useless against this man who was twice her weight, like a completely different species of animal.
Her strength was draining fast, her arms burning from the effort of trying to push him off, as if she’d been attempting to lift a sequoia, a failure so abject that the tree didn’t even realize anyone had been trying. She felt the back of her head banging against the mirror, the faucet digging into the small of her back. Tomorrow there would be bruises, but they’d be hidden by clothing, by hair. These wounds would be invisible. The others too.
In the mirror Ariel saw herself begin to cry, she heard it too, and in response Charlie yanked a hand towel off the rack, shoved it into her mouth, and she felt a burst of energy to renew her struggle against this fresh outrage, tried harder to push him away but failed again, tried to spit out the towel but gagged instead.
It wasn’t sex that was happening here, this was just violence—taking something, hurting someone. She couldn’t believe that he was enjoying this. She almost couldn’t believe that it was actually happening, and she turned her eyes away from the infinity mirrors to look directly at the one real Charlie, his head lolled back with each burning thrust, his eyes clamped shut, his jaw jutted out in self-assurance, in challenge, in the arrogance of savage conquest.
She could see gray hairs sprouting from his nostrils, the saggy wattle under his chin. His breath was hot whiskey; he emitted the rancid sweat of a habitual drunk, comingled with cologne. She felt nausea rising up within her, the acid onslaught of bile, and she knew she’d throw up if she continued to look at him, so she turned her eyes back to the far wall’s mirrors, where an infinite number of Ariels were trapped, being raped by an infinite number of Charlies, forever.
*
“Operations or Intelligence?” Griffiths asks.
“Ops.” Jefferson hands her the report. “John Wright’s first overseas assignment was a year-plus in Belgrade, then he abruptly resigned. Apparently changed his mind about how he wanted to live his life.”
“And his polygraph agreed?” Griffiths is turning pages.
“Looks like it. There were no red flags on any of his polys.”
“Any red flags at all?”
“Nope. At least, none in the paperwork. But I’m planning to call some of his old colleagues.”
“Definitely do that. My suspicion of this guy just ratcheted up pretty fucking high. He served in the army in Afghanistan, then in the CIA in Serbia, then he gets kidnapped in Portugal? That’s a lot of international intrigue in the background of a middling business consultant, isn’t it?”
“I’m on it,” Jefferson says. “Also, the mechanic situation is interesting. That’s a guy named Billy, who checked his sales receipts for the period around the phone call, and didn’t find anything to do with anyone named John Wright. As far as Billy can remember, the only possibility is a follow-up call to a guy a couple weeks after a sale, to see if everything was working out.”
“That sounds unusual.”
“It is. Apparently the sale in question was a used motorcycle to someone who didn’t seem to have an excess of familiarity with that particular type of bike, so Billy was concerned for the guy’s safety. And Billy admits that although record keeping is not his forte, he doesn’t tend to just lose bills of sale. This one, though? It’s completely missing.”
“Huh.” That too is pretty suspicious.
“Even without the records, Billy was able to recall two important details about the transaction: one, the guy paid twenty-five hundred dollars; two, it was in cash.”
“You said that particular type of bike. What does that mean, exactly?”
The phone rings, Antonucci calling.
“I don’t know,” Kayla says. “It’s just what the mechanic said.”
“Please find out.”
Griffiths picks up the phone. “What’s up, Guido?”
“I think you want to come listen to what’s happening now in their hotel.”
*
“My room was at one end of a hall. At the other end, maybe twenty feet away, was a door I never saw open; I assumed that was the exit. The bathroom door was in the middle of the hall. Just a toilet, a roll of paper on the floor, and a sink. But no shower, no tub, no window, no soap, no towel, no mirror, no nothing other than the toilet, the paper, the sink.”
“This is on the left side of the hall? Or the right?”
Ariel feels a churn in her stomach. She doesn’t like this line of questioning, the challenge that’s implicit in its specificity, in its irrelevancy. This detail can’t matter for the investigation; the only reason for asking this question now is to ask it again later, and see if the answers match. This question is a trap.
“As I walked away from my room, on the right.”
“Please, tell me about this.” Moniz indicates John’s injured face. “How is this happening?”
John grimaces in what looks like shame. “It was stupid, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’d been asleep for a while, and when I woke I really needed the bathroom. So I knocked on the door, and when it opened I saw there was only one man instead of the usual two, and it occurred to me that this was my chance. That I should try to overpower him.”