*
I slip back down the stairs into Paulus’s home and look around. It’s just a gangster’s gaudy apartment—Schl?gertypen. Too much leather, too much glass, too much expensive, ugly shit. How long do I have before someone comes looking for me? Ten minutes? Two?
I pass the kitchen and head into the hallway. Here’s the bedroom, an enormous bureau, an enormous armoire. Here’s the bathroom, marble everywhere. And here’s a locked door. I pause, listen to the party again. The clomping of a hundred feet, screeches of laughter, a shout, something landing hard on the floor.
Paulus, where would you keep the key? In your pocket, of course, but maybe—I head to the living room. Quietly as I can, I open the closet, rummage around through coats and jackets, but come up with nothing. Shit. So maybe Paulus changed before the party. Maybe the key is in his pants, lying on the floor in the bedroom.
But the bedroom floor is tidy, the top of the bureau, too. In the armoire and drawers of the bedside tables I find nothing other than a novel in Russian, loose change, a few receipts. The fear is coursing through me now like a narcotic, but I give myself one last moment. In desperation, I search the hamper: T-shirts, socks, underwear, Veronika’s and his. Fucking gross. I search a department store shopping bag: silk nightgown, price tag still attached. I search under the bed: a single cardboard box from a courier.
I slide it out and see it’s already been opened. There’s no shipping label inside, no customs form. Only a beautiful wooden box packed in foam. It looks like a humidor, but when I lift the lid, I see it’s something else entirely.
A pistol plated in gold nests in a bed of form-fitted velvet. I move a little notecard aside to see it better. It’s gaudy as hell and exactly the sort of thing I’d expect someone like Paulus to collect. A brass plate in the lid says:
?eská Zbrojovka Uhersky Brod
Made in Czech Republic
Limited Edition 64/100
The notecard on top of it, though, isn’t gaudy. It’s made of thick paper with rough edges and feels like linen. On the inside, written in blue ink, it says in English: As ever, a pleasure doing business. Your admiring friend, BK. For a moment I squint at the initials. What had Veronika said? That ghoul Boris or Bandar or Buh-something.
Time’s up, I tell myself. Time to get out of here, back to the party. With the package put back exactly as it was, I slide it under the bed and head down the hallway toward the living room. Forget the key to the locked door; it’s just too risky to be down in the area Veronika said was private, access denied.
As I’m turning into the living room, I freeze. Christian is standing at the bottom of the stairs. He stares at me, eyes narrowed with anger. “The fuck are you doing?”
Swallow the terror, I tell myself. Be Sofia. I approach him, put my hands on his chest, and give the sexiest smile I can manage. “Waiting for you,” I say.
He yanks my hands away by the wrists, gripping them tightly. “You can’t be down here. You know that.”
Knee to the groin, thumbs to eyes. Blind him. Run. But I don’t. “Christian, let go, you’re hurting me,” I say instead. “I wanted you to come find me, so we could be alone.”
His face slackens, and I see uncertainty. Then he releases his grip.
More footsteps on the stairs, hurrying this time. I wrap my arms around Christian and pull him into me. His mouth meets mine, and I slide my tongue between his teeth. I feel his body tense with shock.
Then he’s ripped from me with a violent shove. Paulus switches his eyes from me to Christian and back again. “You little bitch,” he says. “Little street thief.” Then he turns to Christian. “And you. Either you’re stealing, too, or too stupid to realize she was.”
Christian tries to stammer something but fails. Paulus grabs me by my jacket and pushes me hard against the wall. “What’s your story? A thief, or were you planting bugs? You working for the cops?”
“Paulus!” cries Christian.
“Shut up.”
“Paulus!” Christian shouts again, stepping forward, the awkward teenager, forcing himself to be brave. “It was me. My fault. I invited her down here. I wanted—I wanted someplace to be alone.”
“Bullshit,” Paulus says. “Veronika told me she didn’t come up with the others.”
Christian inhales sharply, rubs his mouth with his hand. “All due respect, Paulus. But Veronika is drunk and stoned. No offense. But you saw it yourself.” He gestures toward me. “She said she would, you know, sleep with me tonight. But I couldn’t wait. So I said we could sneak down here.”
My eyes are trained on the side of Paulus’s head as he stares at Christian. Then his hands relax and he lets go of my jacket. “Fucking children,” Paulus seethes.
“I’m sorry,” says Christian.
Paulus seizes me by the back of the neck and shoves me toward the stairs. I grab the railing and manage not to fall. “You,” he says, pointing a trembling finger at my throat. “Get out of my house.”
Then he turns to Christian. “And you. You stay right the fuck here.”
Sixteen
With my phone plugged into the wall and the power cord stretched as far as it can, I lie on Marina’s couch, staring at the screen and the three unanswered messages I’ve sent to Christian:
Bist du ok?
Bist du ok?
??????????
I typed the first on the U-Bahn back to Marina’s, and the second an hour later, and the third an hour after that, the whole time wondering in what ways Paulus was torturing him. The fact is I need Christian. He was my way in. Then I screwed it up for both of us. Without him, there’s no more access to the men who took my dad.
And while the thing inside me worries and clenches its teeth at the strategic loss, my heart, my human heart, aches for the boy, just a little. He’s a thug, and a sloppy, grabby drunk, but he was brave in the end. He stood up for me. That’s worth something, right?
After a long while, I’m able to sleep in fits and starts but wake up every so often to phantom vibrations of the phone resting on my chest. I get up just after dawn, pace the living room, and send Christian another sad, hopeless Bist du ok?
I brush my teeth and shower, phone turned all the way up and resting on the edge of the sink. But no reply comes in. As I brush my hair and get dressed, I hear Lyuba and Marina moving around in the kitchen. When I open the door, however, I see a third person standing between them. He has a scrubby red beard and a round, bean-shaped belly. Lyuba points to me, and he cocks the lapels of his denim jacket, taps the toe of his cowboy boot on the floor.