“He is armed, this man?”
“Yeah, but I thought if I could get his gun away …” John shrugs. “So I went to the bathroom first, because, well, because I had to. Also I thought it would lull him, that I wasn’t attacking immediately. When I was finished at the toilet I didn’t flush, I just flung the door open, hoping to surprise the guard. He was standing a few feet away, and the gun was tucked into his waistband, and I could see that he wouldn’t have time to raise the weapon, so I rushed him, tried to body-slam him against the wall, but he shunted me aside, and I lost my balance. He punched me in the side of the head. I stumbled backward, and he hit me again in the front of the face, really hard.”
“This was a punch made with the left hand, yes?”
John looks at Moniz blankly.
Ariel feels a nearly physical urge to stop this interview, but she knows she should let this ride out as long as possible, to try to glean what the cops are thinking. What they’ll do next.
“Your injury is on the right side of the right half of your face, so a person facing you”—Moniz raises his left hand slowly, forms a fist, moves it in slow-motion in the general direction of John’s face—“must be using the left hand to be hitting you in that location. That angle.”
John closes his eyes, remembering. “Yes.” He opens his eyes. “It was the left hand.”
Moniz writes something. “And then?”
“And then I fell, and he was standing over me, still wearing sunglasses, now holding his gun again, aiming it down at me. He said, That was stupid.”
“Yes,” Moniz says. “If you do not mind me saying it, I agree. Why are you doing that?”
“Honestly? I really don’t know.”
Ariel hates that John keeps saying honestly.
“I was kidnapped, and I thought this was a chance to escape. Maybe my only chance.”
“But why did you believe that you needed to escape?”
John looks confused.
“Did you not think that the ransom would be paid? By your employer? Or by your wife?”
“Well, honestly”—
Will he just stop saying that?
“—because of the holiday I was worried that my company wouldn’t be reachable, and Ariel would have to handle this all herself. She doesn’t have that type of money—”
“Excuse me, please,” Santos interrupts again. Ariel is really beginning to dread this woman’s interruptions. “Are the kidnappers telling you how much ransom they are demanding?”
“No. But Ariel doesn’t have any type of ransom level of money.”
“How are you knowing this?” Santos asks. “How much money do you believe your wife is able to secure? For a ransom?”
“I don’t know.”
“No?” Santos looks briefly at Ariel, then back at John. “You do not know how much money your wife has in banks? In investments?”
John doesn’t answer immediately, and Ariel jumps in. “Why are you asking about this?”
“I am just trying to understand your husband’s thoughts.”
“What do his thoughts about my bank accounts have to do with his kidnapping?”
“Nothing,” Santos says. Then adds, “Perhaps.”
Now Ariel can put a name to the prickle in her stomach: fear.
“Do you enjoy your work, Senhor Wright?” Moniz takes over again. The ping-pong questioning is making Ariel feel like her head is spinning. That’s probably the point.
“Mostly.”
“Do you ever think about quitting?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Me.” Moniz smiles. “I love my work. I hope to do my work until the day I die.”
“Well then you’re very lucky. Or something.”
“Have you calculated how much money you need to go on the retirement?”
“To retire? No, not specifically.” John has a quaver in his voice. All this cage-rattling has worked. “I’m pretty young for that.”
Ariel has been in this sort of predicament before: certain that something terrible is about to happen, but unable to do the necessary thing to stop it, reluctant to admit the defeat, to make the decision to confront. She has always ended up regretting it, putting off the uncomfortable that would stave off the unbearable. She has always thought, later: I should’ve done something when I had the chance.
*
When he was finished, Charlie yanked the towel from Ariel’s mouth, used it to wipe off his dick.
She was rubbing her jaw, her face muscles aching from the wadded-up terry cloth, in addition to all the other pains in all the other parts of her newly battered body. She watched as Charlie zipped up, preened in the mirror, smoothed his hair, adjusted his mouth into something that looked like a smile, putting his party face back on—just a fun-loving guy on a Saturday night, wearing those goddamned bracelets.
“I’m-a go out first, okay?” Charlie was slurring again, and Ariel could see him constructing the narrative, the justifications, the excuses—sure, okay, maybe he was a little drunk, but he had definitely not misunderstood Ariel’s overtures, she’d been coming on to him forever, and then she’d gone ahead and followed him to this out-of-the-way bathroom, what the hell was he supposed to think she wanted? Exactly what she got.
“Okay?” he asked again.
Ariel couldn’t find any words, just stared at him, aghast, until Charlie turned his eyes from his reflection, met hers. It was just for a second, but that was long enough for her to see it, even through the thick cloud of her anguish: the lie.
At that point it had been nearly two decades since Ariel’s first sexual assault, two decades during which she’d come to understand what gaslighting was. She knew it was purposeful; she knew how it worked. It worked like this.
Did Charlie know he was a monster? Did he make a concerted effort to hide his monstrosity from everyone, maybe even from himself? Did that explain the ostentatious philanthropy? The cool-dude bracelets, the do-gooder galas, the twenty-dollar tips he doles out to bellhops, to garage attendants, and especially—extravagantly—to coat-check girls? There, see: I’m a good guy.
Did he actually believe this, himself? Or did he know full well that what he was doing was a con? That he was trying to hide what he really was.
“You,” Ariel said, “are a fucking monster.”
CHAPTER 37
DAY 2. 9:37 P.M.
“How did it end?” Moniz asks.
John sighs in relief. He too had grown uncomfortable with the cops’ line of questioning, and is thankful to be back on the more secure footing of straight-up factual chronology.