“Hey yourself.”
Dinner service ends at eleven, which is when the other restaurants in town close, the ice cream parlor too, the liquor store, the pizza shop, the clam bar, the seafood shack out on the wharf. For ten miles in every direction, nearly everything closes at the same moment, discharging a whole population—cooks and servers, hostesses and bartenders, busboys and dishwashers—into the world with the night’s tips in their pockets and steam to blow off and self-destructive habits to feed. Someone needs to take in all these people; someone needs to take their money.
That’s the real source of the Sprit’s recent financial success. It’s not the salad of heirloom beets with farmstand chèvre that appears on the cover of the local lifestyle magazine. It’s this pint of IPA and shot of whiskey that Suze plunks in front of Persephone, and the hundreds of other drinks that’ll be served in the hours between the last boat-shoed retiree’s departure and last call, with baskets of fries and cheeseburgers and wings while loose pills and packets of smack and the occasional vial of crack are sold by Greg, who a decade ago was the football team’s all-county defensive captain. Kirsten and Persephone had been co-editors of the yearbook, they were ones who put together the full-spread feature about Greg. Now look at him, slinking off to the bathroom. Now look at them.
“So?” Kirsten says. “I’m dying over here.”
Persephone holds her whiskey in front of her face, then knocks it back. “Okay. But seriously: no way this can be traced back to me. You have to promise me, K. It’s really important.”
“I promise.”
Persephone reaches into her back pocket while looking around at the other customers. As usual, Jerry the lawyer is staring down into a glass of brown.
“When you freak out, don’t do it too loudly.” Persephone nods in the lawyer’s direction, then hands the folded-over papers to her oldest friend. They played grade-school soccer together, joined the middle-school literary magazine, ran the high-school paper. They both went off to college and grad school to become literary intellectuals; they both slunk home, treading the deep water of semi-adulthood.
“What am I looking at here?”
“That’s a police report.”
“Yeah I can see that. But who’s this? Laurel Turner?”
“That, my friend, is the name of the person who’s now known as Ariel Pryce.”
Kirsten’s mouth falls open. She turns a page, turns back. “This”—her voice lower—“is a fourteen-year-old report of sexual assault?”
Persephone nods.
“And her kid is how old?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“But that’s not all. In fact, that’s not even the bombshell.”
Kirsten is turning the pages, shaking her head, not seeing it.
“There,” Persephone says, pointing. “That’s the name of the alleged perpetrator.”
“What the actual fuck? Are you serious?”
“Yes I am.”
“Holy. Fucking. Shit.”
CHAPTER 43
DAY 3. 5:43 A.M.
Ariel can’t for the life of her figure out what to say to these Spanish airport police. Her story seems too outlandish to even begin to explain, but she can’t seem to come up with any alternative. She’s worried that this failure of imagination means that her mind has stopped functioning. Too much stress, too much fear, not enough sleep.
“This is going to sound crazy,” she begins, directing herself at the cop who seems to be in charge. Though maybe he’s just the one who happens to speak English.
“On Monday morning, while on a business trip in Lisbon, my husband was kidnapped. I reported this to the Lisbon police, and to the American embassy, but there was nothing any of them could do. I was able to get the ransom from an acquaintance in America, and yesterday evening I gave the cash to the kidnappers, and my husband was released. We immediately returned to our hotel to give a statement to the police, but we felt very unsafe in Lisbon, and we didn’t especially trust the police, who for all we knew were part of my husband’s abduction.”
“That is a very grave accusation.”
“It’s not an accusation. It’s a concern. Maybe not a rational concern. But we’d undergone a deeply traumatic experience, and maybe we were not—are not—thinking clearly. We really just wanted to get out of Lisbon, home to America. So late last night, we left the hotel. We didn’t take our luggage because we didn’t want anyone who might be watching us to know we were leaving.”
“Anyone who might be watching you? Such as?”
“Such as whoever kidnapped my husband.”
“Why, se?ora, did you lie about the stolen luggages to the security officer?”
“Because as you just heard, the truth is complicated. I wanted to have a simple interaction.”
“Why are you not with your husband?”
“We decided that it was safer to travel separately. To ensure that one of us, at least, would get home safely to my son.”
“Where is he now, your husband?”
“I don’t know. He was going to purchase a ticket on a different flight to New York.”
“Here? In the Sevilla airport? On what airline?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please write down your husband’s name. And his date of birth.”
As Ariel does this, the spokesman cop leans over to whisper to the other cop, who nods in agreement, tears off Ariel’s piece of paper, and leaves the room. The interrogator seems to be digesting Ariel’s story, and doesn’t seem to come to a definitive conclusion about its fishiness.
“If we are talking to the Lisbon police? Are they telling us the same story?”
“Definitely. Except they don’t know that we don’t trust them, of course.” Ariel retrieves her wallet, extracts a small pile of business cards, shuffles through. “Here.”
She puts Moniz’s card on the table, then Santos’s.
“These are the detectives investigating the case. They interviewed me and my husband last night. Please call either of them right now so we can clear this up. I have a flight to catch.”
*
A few weeks after she returned to the city, Ariel walked out of the hotel on the Upper East Side where she’d been living, into the stifling humidity of late-afternoon August in New York City, the blacktop shimmering, the car exhaust suffocating, the surprising blasts of cold when shop doors opened, spilling their air-conditioning out onto Madison Avenue along with women carrying shopping bags filled with lingerie or bathing suits, makeup or sunglasses. It never ends, that job.
Ariel arrived early. She wanted to give herself time to collect her wits.