Afterparty Part 27

Rovil sat on the couch facing the wall and the camera. His palms lay on his knees, the two fingers of his left hand still taped together. He wore a business suit, and his face was locked into a pleasant expression. He was on hold.

Ollie and I stood in the kitchen, out of sight of the camera. Ollie had connected her pen to a receiver Rovil wore in his right ear, and she'd synched the display with the wall screen so that we could see what he was seeing. Right now, that was a commercial for the Delwood Detention Facility, a private prison in Ohio that offered excellent outsourcing options for overcrowded state and federal prisons. The minute-long commercial had already looped a dozen times.

"Just hang in there, Rovil," I whispered into the pen. He nodded, very slightly.

We'd applied for the visit three days ago, and it had taken that long to get approval from the Delwood. Ollie told us that the odds of being granted a visitation were not good; Rovil was not a relative, and his status as a witness in the murder trial had probably flagged him as an Inappropriate Contact. But the paintings told us that Edo, another witness, had been allowed to have contact with Gil. Of course, that could have been because he was a billionaire who'd donated millions to Delwood.

The final step of the approval was Gil Kapernicke himself. If the prisoner didn't want the visit, he couldn't be forced. So when the approval came through, we knew that Gil was interested in talking to his old intern from Little Sprout.

"Are you okay?" Ollie whispered.

"I'm not going to fall apart when Gil pops on screen," I said.

"You shouldn't even be in the room," she said. "Let Rovil handle this."

"I'm fine."

This was a lie. Ever since the day Ollie showed me the pictures, I woke up every morning asking myself the question, Are you going to drink today? My alcohol-starved brain was still cramping from my cruel trick. Over the four-day bender I'd given it a good long gulp of what it most craved-and then I'd yanked away the cup.

Ollie had asked the question too, but not aloud. I felt her tense every time I went out alone, then a.s.sessing me when I returned, that a.n.a.lyst's brain checking for signs and symptoms. Each morning I had no idea if I was going to make it through the day without a drink. And so far, for three days at least, I'd arrived back at home each night, achingly sober.

And I'd done this every day without Dr. Gloria. The angel was still angry with me.

The wall screen flipped on to show a man's face. It wasn't pale, fat Gil, but a Hispanic-looking guard. He adjusted something at the top of the screen, then stepped out of the way. The camera was sitting on a table, pointed at an empty chair.

"h.e.l.lo?" Rovil said.

No one answered. A minute later there was movement at the edge of the frame, and a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit appeared. He was fifty-five or sixty years old, white hair shaved down to bristles. He was very thin, with ropy arms.

He sat down in the chair and rested his arms on the table. "Rovil," he said, his voice radiating pleasure. "I know that Gil is so pleased to see you."

Rovil glanced over at me, his eyes wide. He turned back to the camera and said, "I think there's been a mistake. I'm to speak with Gilbert Kapernicke."

The man laughed, and it wasn't until then that I could see that he was Gil. He'd lost at least 150 pounds. He looked simultaneously more healthy than the Gil I'd known and much older than he should have been.

"Gil is here," Gil said. "Anything you say, he'll hear."

Rovil blinked at the screen.

I took the pen from Ollie. "Ask him if he's Gil's G.o.d."

"Are you Gil's G.o.d?"

"Not just Gil's," he answered. "But yes, I speak, and Gil repeats what I say. Years ago he decided not to fight me, but to get out of the way. He has surrendered his life to me. I decide everything-what he eats, when he should exercise, what he should do for recreation, and..." He nodded at the screen. "Who he should talk to."

"That's awful," I said.

"That's ... fascinating," Rovil said.

Gil shrugged. "It's Gil's choice. He chooses, every day and each moment, to let me guide his life. He could stop listening to me at any moment."

"But he doesn't?" Rovil asked. "Not ever?"

"Gil would be the first to say that he was not doing a very good job of managing himself. Surely you could understand that better than anyone, Rovil. Don't you think your life would be better if you gave it all to me?"

"To you?" Rovil asked.

Gil tilted his head. "There's only one G.o.d. Even if I take a different form for each person."

I said into the pen, "Ask him to tell you something that only you would know."

Rovil glanced at me, frowning.

"Jesus Christ," I said into the pen. "Why'd we give you the earpiece if you're going to keep looking at me?"

"Breathe," Dr. Gloria said.

Gil said, "Rovil, put Lyda on the line."

"I'm sorry," Rovil said, "I don't know what-"

"It's all right," Gil said. "The guards don't pay any attention to these calls. We have been such a good prisoner, for so long, that they let us talk to whomever we want."

I covered the pen and looked at Ollie questioningly.

She shrugged. "Your choice."

I handed Ollie the pen and walked into the living room. I didn't sit down. My heart was racing, and I felt a rush of heat across my chest. The wall screen was gigantic, and Gil's face was as big as the Great and Terrible Oz. In the corner was a small mirror window that contained a miniature version of me and Rovil.

I sucked in a breath. "How you doing, Gilbert?"

The giant face smiled slightly. "I've been expecting you to call. Gil had hoped you'd visit in person before his parole, but this will have to do."

"You think you're going to get out on parole?"

That head tilt again. I could remember the old Gil doing that. "We'll be out in a year."

It was a shock, but I absorbed it. "That's ... good," I said.

"Gil is in no hurry to leave," he said. "We teach art here. We counsel troubled inmates. It's been a rewarding period. But he accepts that it's time for us to move on."

I said, "And what did Gil want to talk about before you moved on?"

"He wanted to ask your forgiveness."

I wasn't ready for that. The emotion hit in a rush, the gates of the limbic system thrown wide open. I didn't know what I was feeling-rage? confusion? sorrow? The flood washed everything downstream and knocked me to h.e.l.l.

At the trial Gil had said that he had only fragmentary memories of killing Mikala. He testified that his first fully conscious thought came as he stood over her body with the knife in his hand and he realized what he'd done. He confessed immediately. He told the police he'd become obsessed with Mikala. It was absurd, an obese white man falling in love with a beautiful black lesbian, but that was why, he said, he'd never admitted it before, not even to himself. In the frenzy of the overdose, his jealousy had taken over. He cried several times during the trial.

It was a performance. Gil didn't kill Mikala. And we both knew it.

"Yeah, well..." My voice was shaky. I cleared my throat. "You can shove your apology up your a.s.s."

"Lyda, please..."

"Tell me about the paintings, Gil. The ones you gave to Edo."

Gil sat back. His hands dropped to his side.

I said, "I know he's been talking to you. Did he ask you to build a machine, Gil?"

"We only paint," Gil said. "We don't build machines anymore."

"Fine. Did he ask you to paint a f.u.c.king machine?"

He tilted his head. "Have you seen our paintings? I know that you have. If you've seen them, then you know."

"Are there more, Gil? Are you still painting them?"

He smiled, but didn't answer.

I leaned against the wall with both hands leaned close to that smug face. "Give Edo a message, Gil. Can you at least do that?"

"What would you like to say to him?" Gil asked.

"Tell him to call me-now-or I will tell the world about his printers. And you and your G.o.d will never get out of jail."

Within twenty-four hours, a message appeared on my pen: 1 White Mesa Drive, Los Lunas, New Mexico. Gate code: 7221. Do not come until after Sat.u.r.day.-Your old friend, E.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

Since the time she was very small, on the days that Grandpop was coming home she would wait in the hallway, out of sight, listening for the sound of the door. (If it was only Eduard and Suzette returning, she would stay in her room with her music on loud and pretend to hear nothing.) Grandpop would step inside and yell, "Where's that little girl who lives here?" Sasha would launch herself across the room and crash into his legs. This giant man would stumble back in a show of how strong and fast she was, and then scoop her into his arms. She would direct him around the house, pointing out all the things she'd painted and made while he was gone.

She was older now, and too big for h.e.l.lo Tackles. She waited with Esperanza in the foyer, and when the maid opened the door Grandpop looked at Sasha in mock confusion. "I'm sorry. Where's that little girl who used to live here?"

She could not help herself; she threw herself into him and hugged him tight. He laughed and said, "Ah! There she is."

Eduard and Suzette stepped around them. Suzette handed her coat to Esperanza, and Eduard gave her his briefcase. Sasha released her grandfather and presented herself to her parents. Eduard said, "h.e.l.lo, Sasha." Suzette patted her on the back as if she'd seen this greeting behavior on a nature doc.u.mentary.

Sasha knew that she was adopted, and she knew that it was Edo who wanted her, who loved her. Eduard and Suzette did not have to say a word; they deferred to Grandpop for all decisions about her. It didn't occur to her that this was unusual; stories were full of children who were unloved by their False Parents, and had to search for their True ones. She felt lucky that the search had ended before it had begun. She had Grandpop, and she didn't need anyone else.

He was tired tonight, but still glad to be home. They ate together in the big dining room, and Grandpop cried only once, when Suzette mentioned seeing homeless people in Chicago, but quickly recovered. Afterward, Eduard went upstairs to his office. Later Sasha heard him yelling at someone over the phone.

Suzette, as usual, went out to the patio. Sasha did not know what her mother did by the pool at night; she didn't swim, didn't look at any of the screens, and didn't even look at the stars. The few times Sasha had interrupted her mother out there she found her staring at the water with a tablet of paper on her lap. The top page of the tablet was always blank, but with some portion of it torn away, as if she'd written something there and then destroyed it. Sasha imagined that Suzette was writing an invisible diary; each day, once recorded, could be disposed of. No one could ever steal her thoughts.

Even though he was tired, Grandpop made sure to tuck Sasha in. The tutors were coming in the morning, he said, and she needed to be in bed on time. He sat down on the floor beside her bed and made up stories about haunted hotels and terrible room service. "I ordered breakfast in London and they brought me antlers. They did! I opened the silver lid and there was nothing on the plate but reindeer antlers. And a bottle of hot sauce."

She knew it was an effort for him to make up funny stories, and not just tonight. Eduard said Grandpop "carried the weight of the world." Sasha knew it was the weight of his G.o.d. Every day, he'd told her, G.o.d reminded him that most people in the world were suffering terribly.

"It's a wicked world out there," he said to her as he tucked her in. "We all have to do our part to make it better. But what? That's the question."

She didn't answer. But when he left her room, she sent a text to his bedroom wall that said, We'll figure something out, GP! Love you.

A minute later (Grandpop was slow at working the house interface) he sent back: I know we will. Now go to sleep!

Two hours after midnight, Bucko shook her awake. "Time to get our raid on." Sasha retrieved a few items from her black bag, and then the bear climbed onto her back.

Eduard's office was on the second floor. To get there they had to walk past the master bedroom. "They're probably having s.e.x," Bucko said into her ear. "You know they do it all the time." She did not want to think about what Eduard and Suzette did in their bedroom. She'd seen enough s.e.x online to know that she didn't want to see it in person, especially not between her parents.

The office door sensed the key fob in her pocket and unlocked itself before she touched the k.n.o.b. She closed the door behind her but did not turn on the light. She did not know this room as well as she knew the other rooms in the house-Eduard did not like her in here, and it was one of the few rooms that the house did not let her see-but the gap in the drapes allowed enough moonlight to make out the desk, the armchair, the bookcases. Leaning against one of the walls was a stack of paintings wrapped in brown paper, each one much taller than Sasha and wider than she could span with her hands outstretched.

"Blimey, more paintings?" Bucko asked. "Since when does Eduard like art? He sure doesn't like yours."

She'd discovered the first painting on a raid months ago. And now there were four, no, five paintings. Eduard hadn't unwrapped any of them.

"Forget that," Sasha said. "It's the briefcase we're after."

"I'm on it," Bucko said. He hopped down from her back and ran over to the desk, where the briefcase lay. "Let's pop the lock on this dead man's chest."

Sasha climbed onto the chair beside the bear. She ran her hands over the lock like a safecracker. She'd found the combination two years ago, written on a piece of paper in Eduard's desk, and Tinker had memorized it for her. Eduard had never bothered to change it. She worked the wheels, and it popped open.

"Avast!" Bucko said.

Inside the briefcase, the slate was in its usual holder. She turned it on and unlocked it with the same four-digit code he used on all his devices. Why was he so lazy about security?

The messages she wanted to look at were in the Vik Group network storage. She didn't have the latest pa.s.sword for that, because it was the one pa.s.sword Eduard was forced to change regularly-and that's why she needed his slate. Eduard never logged off the device.

She searched for all messages addressed to Edo Anderssen Vik, or that mentioned him in the body. There were thousands. Many messages she'd seen before, but there were hundreds of new ones since the last time she'd broken into his slate. She transferred them all to her own storage on the house's network. Then she put everything back where it belonged, and Bucko remembered to give the slate a wipe with his furry paw to erase any of her fingerprints.

She wondered, not for the first time, if she was a bad person. There seemed to be something in her that wanted to sneak and steal. It was this bad thing, she was sure, that had caused her real parents to leave her at the orphanage. It was this bad thing that had made her listen to the Wander Man. And it was this bad thing that had made her try to kill Mr. Paniccia when she was five years old.

She wasn't like Grandpop. He was a good person, and his IF was G.o.d himself. Sasha's friends, on the other hand, could be so ... immature.

"Let's roll," Bucko said. "Mission f.u.c.king accomplished."

"Wait." There was something new on the floor near the desk, a package about two feet square. Did Eduard bring that into the house with the latest paintings?

The box was marked up with s.h.i.+pping stickers, and the flaps had been opened. Sasha squinted to make out the label in the dim light. It was addressed to Grandpop. The "from" address was a series of numbers. She should have brought Tinker with her to remember it for her.