The Night Dahlia Page 7

  A gray-haired, very tan and fit gentleman who made me reflexively think of George Hamilton approached me. He had the faint scent of soap and Royal Eagle cologne. We shook hands, a good solid, “Hey, let’s build a relationship where you give me all of your money, and I charge you to use it” kind of handshake. He did a very good job of not seeming weirded-out by how sketchy I looked.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” he said in slightly accented English. “How can we help you today?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I work for Theo Ankou.” I handed him one of the cards Vigil had given me a stack of. The card stating that I, under an assumed name, was a consultant for the Arcadia Group, Ankou’s umbrella of legit corporations. I waited to see the name sink in behind the banker’s eyes. “Mr. Ankou is considering doing some business with your institution, and I wanted to sit down and discuss that with somebody.” The smile was in danger of splitting his face in half as it grew past human limits.

  “Of course, sir,” he said. “If you’ll step into my office here…”

  “That will be fine,” I said, as I stopped him at his own door, “but I want to discuss it with her,” and pointed to Dree, who was just finishing up with a customer at her desk.

  “Oh, I’m afraid Dree isn’t an executive accounts supervisor,” he said, like everyone would know what the fuck that was, “but I’ll be more than happy to see to Mr. Ankou’s—”

  “Mr. Ankou said I talk to her, or he’ll take his business elsewhere,” I said. The smile dimmed a bit, but the guy was good, and he was obviously very adept at dealing with the mad requests of rich douchebags. He nodded and gestured toward Dree, who look confused, but also put on her best customer service smile and walked over, heels clicking.

  “Dree,” the tanned man said, “Mr.…”

  “Hammett,” I said, “Dashiell Hammett,” and shook Dree’s hand. She smiled, I smiled, management guy smiled. Somewhere, puppies and children smiled. A tear came to my eye.

  “Mr. Hammett wants to discuss some new corporate account business with you.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Hammett,” Dree said, shaking my hand and nodding. She glanced at her boss for a second but stayed cool as she did it. She had obviously learned from the master.

  “If you need anything or have any questions, please let me know,” the manager said. “Please use my office so you can have some privacy.” We entered the manager’s office. It was all mahogany wood and leather furniture. Dree closed the door and sat behind the moat of a desk. I sat in one of the comfy chairs before it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Okay, first things first. I am working for Theodore Ankou, and I’ll make sure he parks some of his wealth in your bank and that you get credit for that, Dree, but I need to have a conversation with you, and I need you to be straight with me. I need to know where Caern Ankou is.”

  Dree’s eyes darkened. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket and clutched the makeshift doll I had fashioned at lunch and focused the energies of my Manipura chakra, my will, stoked them, and then connected to Dree through the sympathetic connection of her hair. I had sensed her slight attraction toward me when I walked in, and I knew from her apartment she was a very sensual person, so I focused her Svadhisthana chakra, her desire. I knew the initial response would be one of arousal and confusion—why the fuck would she be so turned on by some sketchy old bastard here under false pretenses looking for her friend?

  “If you insist,” I said and stood, headed for the door.

  “Wait,” she said, visibly flushed. “Don’t go. Please sit down.” It worked. Score one for Team Manipulative Bastard. “Why are you looking for her? Is it her father? You said you worked for him.”

  “Yes,” I said and eased up a little on her sacral chakra. It would be hard for her to think of much else if I didn’t, and I needed her thinking with her brain, not her glands. “He’s worried about her, just wants to know she’s safe and happy. I’m not here to drag her home if she doesn’t want that. Just checking in.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “That sure doesn’t sound like old Theo to me.”

  “Did Caern talk a lot about him? He the reason she took off?”

  “Pretty much,” Dree said. I could tell her head was clearing, and I could see the nagging doubt struggling in her mind. She was questioning why she was telling me anything. I flexed my will and sent the power of it straight into her Svadhisthana again, through the genetic ace up my sleeve I had with her hair. This was bad fucking shit I was doing, and I knew it, and as usual, I kept right on doing it. “He was so controlling after Caern’s mom died, afraid she was going to break like a china doll. She really loved her mom. I wish I had gotten a chance to meet her.”

  “How did you two meet?” I asked. She was relaxing again, fascinated by me and clueless why.

  My dad is a career guy with Alpha,” she said. “Years ago, he got the job that Mr. Artino”—she nodded toward the tanned owner of the office—“has now, corporate accounts manager. We moved from the mainland to Spetses when I was nine. I met Caern that summer, when she and her dad came from Britain for holiday. When she moved here a few years later, we started hanging out all the time at my family’s place.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “her place seemed pretty cold.”

  “She loved hanging out, sleeping at our place. I never really understood why,” she said. “My parents, my brothers and sisters, everyone shouting and screaming all the time. Greek family, we scream ‘I love you’ at each other. It was crazy.”

  “It was family,” I said, and I felt another sharp sting of connection to Caern and I felt a lot more like a dirty, evil old bastard for doing what I was doing to this girl. I stopped the working. I knew it would fade in a few minutes, quicker if I pushed her. I didn’t care. Dree blinked and straightened in her chair. The suspicion began to slip back behind her eyes.

  “She gave you her cat,” I said. “She loved that cat a lot.”

  “Artemis,” Dree said, “yeah, she’s a moody little thing. Caern got her when she was a kitten, after her mom died. Sometimes it seemed like the two of them could actually talk. It was cute. Caern wanted Artemis to have a good home, so she gave her to me before she left. Theo, everyone from her other life, she didn’t tell them about me. I was kind of like her safe place, her escape, y’know?”

  “I do, very well. Where did she go, Dree?” I asked. “I swear to you, I won’t drag her home to Theo, if she’s happy and okay,” and I meant it. “I swear. I just want to make sure she’s all right. You have to be worried about her, unless, of course, you two keep in touch.”

  Dree shook her head. She looked close to crying. She looked down at the blotter on Mr. Artino’s desk, looking for guidance there. She talked to the blotter, not to me. “Nothing for about five years, then I got a letter back in 2014. She was happy then, said she was getting into films. She’d met some people while she was working a waitress job, and they were going to get her into movies.” She looked up at me and saw the frown on my face. “Yeah, I thought the same thing, but there was no return address, no phone number, nothing, no way to find her, to get her help. I’d have gone myself, y’know. I didn’t even know where to start. I haven’t heard anything since.

  “She’s my sister, in a lot of ways more than my flesh and blood. She was always so … alive, even in her sadness it was like she felt, she experienced everything … more. That make any kind of sense?” I nodded. “The thought of someone like that getting all that life stolen away, snuffed out … it’s obscene.”

  “The world’s a jagged place,” I said, “especially for people with too little skin and too many nerves.” I saw literally hundreds of faces of the dead, some still walking, most long gone. Killed by this world’s apathy, its rapacity. Your choices were to weep or get calloused up.

  Dree was crying. She held it together, no sobs, no shaking, just a trickle, like raindrops racing to oblivion, sliding down her cheeks. I dismantled my makeshift voodoo do
ll in my pocket and handed her the cloth napkin to dab her eyes. She took it.

  “She said she was in L.A.,” Dree said and sniffed. “In America.”

  “Thank you,” I said, standing. “I’ll make sure Ankou sets up some large accounts…”

  “I don’t give a damn,” Dree said, also standing. She offered me her hand to shake. I took it. Her red eyes locked with mine. “Just do what you promised. If she’s okay, leave her alone. If she’s in trouble, you get her out of it.”

  “I will,” I said. She didn’t let go of my hand.

  “Swear it,” she said.

  “I promise,” I said. She released my hand. I opened the door and walked toward the lobby and the front doors.

  I stopped to assure Mr. Artino that Dree had closed the deal. He seemed relieved. I wasn’t sure if that was because the deal went down or I was leaving. Probably both. I was almost to the door when I heard Dree’s heels click, coming toward me. She had an old Polaroid Instamatic photo in her hand. She handed it to me.

  “Here, it’s the only picture I have of us. She was weird about getting her picture taken.”

  The photo was taken in a crowd of people. Dree was on the left with a red plastic Solo cup in her hand, her arm around Caern’s shoulder. Caern was on the right. She was small, with blond hair, almost platinum, and bright blue eyes. She had her dad’s angular features and high cheekbones. Both girls were laughing, frozen in time.

  “This is from a Muse concert in Rome we went to back in 2009,” Dree said. “We would both have been about thirteen. It was a few months before she left.”

  “Thank you, Dree.”

  “Just … be sure to tell her Artemis is okay,” Dree said, “and that she misses her.”

  SIX

  The club was called Naos, and it looked like a neon fortress in the city’s Old Harbor. I had been drinking at a bunch of small bars and pubs after I left Alpha Bank. The pub crawl had led me here. I moved through the dance floor, hundreds of beautiful bodies swaying under a shower of multicolored lights. “How Many Fucks?” by Erika Jayne pumped through the sound system as rays of greens, blues, reds, and golds swept back and forth across the floor, bathing the crowd in time to the music.

  I felt a little bit like Death walking through all the laughing, tanned, drunk faces. I slipped into a gap that opened at the bar and waved down a bartender, a young black guy with a Fu Manchu mustache and Afro, wearing a red mesh T-shirt.

  “A bottle of the shittiest tequila you got,” I said, sliding him a couple hundred euros. “Plastic bottle, can also be used as oven cleaner.”

  “Gotcha,” the kid said, palming the cash.

  “And Budweiser, bottles,” I added. “Keep them coming. You know, you bear a slight resemblance to Isaac on The Love Boat.”

  “The who on the what, malaka?” he said.

  I shook my head. “Forget it.”

  I did four shots of the nasty tequila in rapid succession and then followed them with my first beer. Isaac kept the beers coming.

  I watched the dance floor. The DJ, who was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, and who occasionally lobbed smoke bombs of different colors into the crowd, shifted the music to tyDi’s “Fire & Load.” I figured this was as good a place as any to repay my debt to the Mother of Cats. The Egyptians’ favorite holiday a long time ago was Bubastis, a festival of dancing, singing, and, above all else, boozing in honor of Bastet—or Bast—whichever you prefer, the goddess of dance, joy, music, families, love, and oh, yeah, cats. I had offered her the well-loved squeaky mouse and a night of my life devoted to drunken revelry in her honor, and you know how much I hate to welsh on an obligation. So I drank, and drank, and tried to enjoy the revelry part vicariously through all the happy, shiny people out on the floor.

  Magdalena had loved dancing, so much so that it had become a component of many of her workings. The music syncing with her mind, her body. The movements, the sweat shining on her tattoos. I remembered for a moment the taste of her, her lips, her skin. I remembered her voice, husky, like wine and smoke. I could feel her body heaving against mine. She found so much joy in the simple acts of breathing, of letting the universe work itself through her. She was in love with being alive, and I have to admit that it was intoxicating to be around; a little bit of it had even started to rub off on me. She was as giving in her magic as she had been as a lover, as a friend.

  Magdalena was submissive by choice. She was passionate about the experience of power exchange, the sensation of giving yourself freely to the will of another. She was strong enough, confident enough in herself that she didn’t need to be in control of every little thing. She thrilled at the novelty, the mystery of being part of another.

  She told me, when we first met, that she had once been pulled under the influence of a cruel and manipulative dominant, a mage, like us. This woman had nearly devoured all the light in her, nearly made Magdalena her slave in soul as well as body and mind. Magdalena had gotten away from the toxic relationship, running, hiding, until she healed herself. She shared all this with me the night I told her about her potential, her power. I had promised her that night I would be her friend, that I would never take advantage of her or use her. I told her she could trust me. I drained the last of the bottle of tequila and gestured for Isaac to bring me another one.

  One evil, mind-fucking bastard had nearly broken her, and then I had taken my best shot at it. I was proud of Magdalena; she didn’t stand for my shit. She told me to get the fuck out. I filled my glass again from the new bottle and drained the shot.

  “It can’t be all that bad, can it?” the woman said to me as she slid up next to me at the bar. “Give me another old-fashioned, please, Terry,” she said to the kid I had been calling Isaac all night. As her drink was being made, she turned to look at me. I returned the favor. She was in her thirties, I’d guess, with ringlets of jet hair falling past her bare, tanned shoulders. She had laugh lines and warm, playful brown eyes. She was very fit with a hint of some lovely curves under her red boho dress. She took a slender cigarette from a clutch purse that I’m pretty sure if sold would go a long way to alleviating Greece’s financial problems. She put the cigarette to her lips and waited. I let her wait a second while I weighed the pros and cons of moving ahead here. I finally clicked open my old, dented Zippo and lit her cigarette; the reflection of the flame danced in her dark eyes, then I lit my own.

  “It’s usually never ‘all that bad,’” I said, exhaling smoke. “When it is, it’s usually too damn late to do much of anything about it anyway.” I tipped my beer toward her. “Laytham.”

  “Kynthia,” she said, taking her drink and tipping Terry about three hundred euros. She clinked her glass to my bottle. “I love your accent. Texas?”

  “Close,” I said. “West Virginia. You ever been to the States, Kynthia?”

  “Shopping trips,” she said. “New York City, Los Angeles. My husband and I do well.” She watched my eyes when she said “husband” and must have been satisfied with whatever she saw or didn’t see there. “It doesn’t bother you I’m married. Good.”

  “Any particular reason it should?” I asked and finished my beer. The music warped into “California Dreaming” by Benny Benassi. I poured another shot.

  “You drink like you want to die,” she said. “I lived with one of my university professors in Paris. He drank like that. He was a fascinating drunk. I think you will be as well, Laytham. Tell me, do you want to die?”

  “Not at the moment,” I said. “So where is the hubby tonight? Let me guess…”

  “On our yacht with … what day is it? Thursday? That would be the blonde tonight. Kristos’s got one for every day of the week.”

  “Poor choice on his part,” I said.

  “We’ve an arrangement,” she said, “which brings me back to you. Do you do anything but drink and brood?”

  “I look good,” I said, “and I have fun. Oh, and falling down, I’m good at falling down.” She laughed politely, but I could have quoted Urdu poet
ry and I’m pretty sure she would have laughed. I was pretty sure that I was now part of Kynthia and her husband’s “arrangement.”

  “Dancing,” Kynthia said. “Do you dance?”

  “Why me?” I asked. “All these young, tanned little stud-muffins unce-unce-ing about. Any of them would give their six-pack abs to get up with a woman like you.”

  “Eager is boring,” she said, smoke streaming from her nostrils. “Those bruises, the scars on your knuckles, that split lip—you look like you were just in a fight. You look dangerous; I’d wager you’re the most dangerous man in this club.”

  “You’d win,” I said.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” she said, leaning forward and sipping her drink.

  “You just lost points, darlin’,” I said.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “Dance with me.” It was an order. I narrowed my gaze, and we locked eyes.

  “You can ask prettier than that, a fancy lady like you.” I saw a tiny flash of real fear pass behind her eyes. She hid it well.

  “Please,” she said, a smile playing at the edges of her lips. I crushed out my cigarette and took her hand, leading her toward the dance floor. I hadn’t danced since Magdalena. It felt good. The smoke was rainbow-hued clouds drifting, the bass was thunder, and then came the electronic rain falling on the crowd, on the floor, washing away our minds, our sins, sweating out the poisons, and making us all pure and one. Dancing, at its core, is ecstatic ritual, is magic.

  When the two of us couldn’t anymore, just couldn’t, Kynthia and I fell back to the bar. She drank water that cost as much as a swimming pool and smoked, and I bought some water laced with K from a nice young lady selling it covertly at the fringes of the crowd. I chased it with another beer, and more tequila. By the next song, an extended mix of How to Destroy Angels’ cover of “Is Your Love Strong Enough?” I was deep in the K-hole, feeling like I was watching my life from a detached, comfortable distance through a warm, soft gauze of pleasure. I drank some more of the water and kissed Kynthia deeply, enjoying the playful wrestling of our tongues, the taste of the nicotine smoke, the soft, yielding of her lips, the salt of her perspiration. It was all so familiar and so alien, so different than with …