Operator - 01

  Operator

  by

  David Vinjamuri

  Copyright 2012 by David Vinjamuri. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9857756-1-2

  Features Index

  Dedication

  Prologue – Wednesday

  Chapter One – Friday

  Chapter Two – Saturday

  Chapter Three – Sunday

  Chapter Four – Monday

  Chapter Five – Tuesday

  Chapter Six – Wednesday

  Chapter Seven – Thursday

  Epilogue – Three Months Later

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Bonus excerpt from Binder

  About the Author

  Dedication

  for S.K. and Spenser, his namesake

  Prologue – Wednesday

  She almost misses the child: a small, frail thing trembling in the rain. The pale young woman hasn’t come looking for anyone, but only to right the trashcan. She was grading a stack of essays when she heard the metallic clatter outside her window. Seeing that it was the neighbor’s can and not hers, she was tempted to ignore the spill. But it is not in the woman’s constitution to let a thing go un-righted, and so she ventured outside in a bright yellow raincoat to investigate. As she opened her door she smelled the river, out of sight but always sharp in the air. The silver can had rolled to a halt at the concrete curb, its guts emptying sideways on the road. Not much of a spill, just a couple of intact white kitchen-size trash bags peeking out. The woman stuffed them one-two back in and replaced the lid. Then, anchoring the bottom of the can against her sneaker, the woman pulled it back upright. Only then did she see the girl. Actually, just the hair at first, a real mop of it, pale blond and tangled like seaweed.

  Now the woman leans in to investigate. The woman has not seen this particular girl before, and she knows all the children of the neighborhood. This one looks to be a grade-schooler – perhaps nine or ten. The girl is sobbing gently, indifferent to the rain as it soaks through her light cotton dress. Her thin fingers are pressed together as if she’s praying while she rocks slowly back and forth. The pale woman sits down next to her and rests a hand lightly on the girl’s back. The girl flinches but never looks up. Instead, she starts crying in earnest, putting her weight on the stranger’s shoulder.

  After a few moments the convulsions subside. The girl wipes her face with her fists as a toddler might, and looks up. The woman sees an ugly bruise covering the girl’s cheekbone. She touches it gently with her thumb, pulling away the strands of tangled hair, and sees that the bruise isn’t new. Whatever has the girl crying now hasn’t surfaced yet. The girl starts speaking softly. It’s not English but the woman understands some of what she’s saying. The girl is speaking Russian with an unfamiliar accent, not the St. Petersburg lilt that is familiar to the woman. “He hits me,” she makes out, “always he hits me.” Then the girl haltingly begins to tell her story and the pale woman forgets the cold rain on her feet, the trashcan and everything else.

  “Yelena, come here at once!” a voice barks in Russian, and the girl and the woman both jump. The girl trembles. A man is striding across the yard. The woman sees his eyes first. They are so dark that the pupil fades into the iris. The man meets the woman’s startled stare with a basilisk’s gaze. He is built as thick as the metal trashcan beside her, but he crosses the lawn in four paces without seeming to hurry. Tattoos swirl down the sides of his neck from the fringe of the blond hair on his closely shaven scalp and snake down his thick forearms. A smile is fixed on his face as he looks at the woman, but his eyes are dead flat.

  The woman’s instinct is to protect the girl, to shield her, but those reptilian eyes paralyze her and she does not move. As the thick man grabs hold of the girl’s wrist, he says gruffly in stumbling English, “Thank you for watching my daughter. She is being very bad tonight.” Then he pulls the girl onto her feet and drags her toward the house with the blue shutters. He speaks to the girl rapidly in Russian. The woman doesn’t understand the man until she hears him say, “You stupid girl, now you will pay.” Then the woman gasps involuntarily. The man stops immediately, standing stock still on the threshold of his doorway. “You speak Russian?” he asks slowly in Russian. The woman stares at him, still paralyzed by fear. Then, taking hold of herself she forces a smile, ignores the question and walks purposefully to her house. She steps through the front door, closes it and slams the deadbolt home. Without removing her raincoat she gradually slides down to the floor, her back against the door, sniffling at first and then descending into sobs. It takes her a few moments to regain her senses, to begin to think clearly.

  She pulls herself up to the kitchen counter, grabs the phone and starts to dial 9-1-1, still shaking. She misdials twice and almost laughs at herself, at her inability to string three simple digits together. When she finally dials the number in sequence, the line rings twice and the 9-1-1 operator says, “9-1-1 – what is the nature of your emergency?” As the woman is about to respond, a hand clamps down on her mouth and the phone is suddenly not in her hands. She is pulled back off balance as she hears the words, “Hello? Hello?” in the accented voice that is burned into her memory. The man pauses for a moment, listening, then says contritely, “Very sorry I am trying to reach information for pizza delivery – Dominos.” Then he chuckles, the sound coming out of his throat like lumps of coal clattering in a hollow stove. “Please excuse, I am very sorry.” He hangs up the phone.

  He releases his hand over the woman’s mouth and nose and she gasps for air. Before she can scream he slaps her across the face with the back of his hand, stunning her. Waving a stubby finger in her face with disapproval, he speaks to her again in Russian: “Now, what are we going to do with you?”

  Chapter One – Friday

  Angry voices spill from the darkness as I gently pull the door to the funeral home closed. From a distance, individual words are indecipherable, but the tone is unmistakable. A man and a woman stand twenty yards away on damp asphalt, centered in the pale circle of yellow light cast by a street lamp. The woman is barely over five feet tall, slender and pale with glossy, straight brown hair. She wears a black dress cut just below the knees and flat shoes. She is talking with her hands, jabbing her finger at the man’s chest to punctuate her words. The man towers over her by at least a foot and a half. He has blond hair and the clean-scrubbed look of a commuter, an office-worker. His jaw is chiseled and he looks like the kind of guy whose photo a teenage girl would cut out of a magazine. Except for his eyes, which are clear blue but not kind. The man is leaning into the argument, trying to intimidate the women with his size, but the woman clearly has him off-balance. There’s steam rising from his head as if he’s been running. He tries to interrupt the woman and fails, and I see his eyes narrow to slits. Then something the woman says makes him swear and take a step toward her. She does not step back.

  The look on the blond man’s face freezes me in mid-step. My feet are carrying me in a different direction, toward my car. I want nothing more than to return to my motel room, put a hot towel over my head and let this awful day evaporate in the steam. But the conversation between these two strangers has crossed a line. I can feel it snap; the fragile filament of social contract between them is gone. I hesitate, and it saddens me. Time was I’d have stepped forward without a second thought. But as I look at the tall blond man looming over the short woman, I see him rocking on h
is heels, see his right hand clenching into a fist. I sigh and redirect my steps.

  As I draw closer, the angry tones resolve into words. The man says, “I’ll be damned if I let some little bitch talk to me like that…” Self-narration in the middle of an argument is not a good sign. A few yards closer and I can see that his face is the same shade as a cherry-flavored popsicle. He may not have thrown a punch yet, but his fists are clenching and unclenching rhythmically. He is large and fit, but he has lost emotional control and he’s leaning forward onto his right foot, which puts him physically off-balance. His hands are callused at the knuckles, but not the way they get when you fight barehanded. His face is unmarked, and his nose has never been broken. He is right handed and not carrying a gun. If he has a knife, it’s not someplace he can reach it quickly. I relax marginally. Whoever this man is, he’s not a professional.

  I consider how to defuse the argument as I approach the couple. When I get close enough for them to see me, I extend my hands in front of me with the palms up and fix an unnaturally broad smile on my face. As I open my mouth to speak, I hear the door to the funeral home open twenty yards behind me, followed by footfalls on the wooden porch. My mind transforms these sounds into shapes: a couple, the woman less than a hundred pounds in heels and the man about a hundred sixty, walking slowly with a cane. An elderly couple; I’ve seen them inside. I tune them out and step into the pale circle of light.

  “Uh – pardon me – this is a little embarrassing but I think I’m turned around. I parked near Oak Street, do you know which way that is?” I speak a little louder than necessary and address the question to the small space between the man and the woman, causing them both to turn toward me. I see the man’s angry blue eyes sweep over me once, quickly. He registers me as a half-foot shorter than him and thus not a threat. That’s the lizard brain inside of him thinking. The woman’s eyes dart toward me briefly. They are hazel and larger than I expect. But she will not be distracted and quickly shifts her attention back to the man. She holds herself like a little terrier barking after a Doberman: indignant and furious without any sense of her tiny stature or what happens if the big dog takes the bait.

  The question hangs in the space between the two of them for a second before the man responds. “It’s on the other side of the hill,” he says, barely glancing at me. He doesn’t make eye contact but jabs his finger in the direction I was heading. “That way.”

  “Thanks. I really should know better, but it’s been a long time.” I keep my voice even and friendly, pretending to be oblivious to the intense silence that follows. I let the moment stretch out for a spell before asking, “Were you at the memorial service?”

  “Yes,” the tall man responds. His voice lacks inflection. Hostility radiates off of him in waves. There’s another moment of tense silence. I keep smiling and nodding, like an amiable idiot or perhaps an overbearing uncle who hasn’t realized he’s not welcome at the family reunion. Then something in the air shifts imperceptibly. The woman turns to me.

  “How did you know Mel?” she asks, her eyes meeting mine for the first time. I can see her register that I’m throwing her a lifeline.

  “We…we dated in high school. I haven’t seen her in…” here I pause to count and then pause again as I realize the size of the number, “twelve years.” My throat is suddenly dry as I try to swallow. Twelve years. Then the man turns toward me. His eyes lock on mine like the targeting radar on an F-22 Raptor. I instinctively widen my stance and balance forward onto the balls of my feet.

  The woman’s mouth drops open and a manicured hand quickly moves to cover it. “My God! Are you Mike Herne?” she asks.

  I nod slowly, caught off-guard by the question. I take a closer look at this woman. She looks to be somewhere near my age, maybe just on the sunny side of thirty. She’s pretty in a refined way. The little black accents the curves on her small frame. It hugs her well enough that I’d have trouble believing it’s off the rack, though I’m no expert. A double-strand of pearls wraps her neck, large enough to flatter the dress but small enough to look elegant rather than vulgar. The jacket that hangs over it all, a sort of fitted black trench coat that she’s left open, probably cost more than my last car. Her nails are manicured short and glossed with clear-coat. The flats she is wearing look expensive, the leather reflecting the glow of the street lamp from somewhere deep inside. She obviously comes from money and is just as obviously not from Conestoga.

  “Well, my car is on the other side of the hill, too. Why don’t you walk me there?” she says and steps forward, linking her arm through mine as if I’m escorting her to a cotillion. She pivots toward the tall blond man for a second as we step away. “We can finish this conversation later,” she says firmly and turns her head, not waiting for a response. He stays rooted in place, glowering as we disappear into the gloom.

  We walk in silence for a few moments, but once we’ve crested the hill and are safely out of earshot, she speaks.

  “You weren’t really lost, were you?” Then she shakes her head, answering her own question before I can. “I don’t know what I was thinking, picking a fight with him. That was stupid. I could have gotten myself in trouble. Thank you for saving me from my own pig-headedness.” She nods once sharply to accent her point.

  I shrug. “Who was that guy?”

  “George Jeffries. He was in Russia with us. Now he’s telling everyone he was Mel’s fiancé. Which is an outrageous fabrication. He’s the reason she left the program. She came back home because of him!”

  “Russia?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know anything.” It is true; I did not speak to Mel once in the last dozen years.

  “I guess you don’t,” she says, and we continue on for another moment in silence. “But here’s my car,” she points to a silver Mercedes coupe, “and I need to call home soon, or my parents will worry. It’s amazing that after college and grad school and four years abroad they still think I’m sixteen. Are you going to the funeral tomorrow?” She is speaking so rapidly that it takes me a second to identify the question. I nod slowly.

  She opens a slim black purse and with two fingers extracts a silver case. Delicately she opens it and withdraws a card, which she hands to me. The paper is thick and textured in my rough hands.

  “I’m Veronica,” she says, extending her hand. I clasp it briefly. It is cool, the ambient temperature of the air around us. “Why don’t we have coffee afterward? Mel talked a lot about you. I’d like to hear your story.” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just smiles and slips into her car. A second later she’s gone. I’m left standing in the middle of the damp road, holding her card. It has her name, Veronica Ryan, and a phone number printed on it in neat black letters. No company or title, not even an e-mail address. I shake my head. This is a nannies-ponies-and-private-school kind of girl. She doesn’t belong here.

  * * *

  I sit in the bathroom of the small motel room with my head hanging forward over the tub. A threadbare white towel hangs over my head, dripping monotonously onto the faded white porcelain surface. I watch the beads of water gather into a tiny stream that twists slowly downhill to the drain, and wish they would spin counterclockwise as they do south of the equator. A light veil of steam rises from the towel, inhibited by the damp fall air. I breathe slowly and deeply as I count my pulse descending towards its resting rate of fifty beats per minute. With my fingers I trace the raised lines of the jagged scars on my neck, then the puckered one on my left shoulder.

  My mind drifts back to my last days in Conestoga twelve years ago. I can still smell the overpoweringly sour fragrance of lilies at my dad’s funeral. I remember the angry, strained look on my mother’s face as we argue. Mostly I remember the lost look of my youngest sister Ginny as I close the door to my mother’s house, leaving her on the wrong side, then walk away with a single duffle bag slung over my shoulder. The stink of my cowardice overpowers the cheap floral sent of motel soap. Eventually, I lie down on th
e narrow bed, close my eyes and wish to God that I smoked.

  Chapter Two – Saturday

  Dawn comes late to Conestoga, as the sun must scale the bluffs on the east side of the Hudson before peering down on the town nestled against the river. My footfalls echo softly against the row of clapboard houses as I run through the sleeping town, now and then peering up at the gray sky. The houses on King’s Road huddle together on their small plots like crows perched on a telephone wire. The colors on this street are muted, almost monochrome in their palette, with the exception of an azure blue house with yellow shutters sitting in the middle of the block like an orphan flower in a sea of weeds.

  I reach River Road and turn left, heading north toward Main Street. Conestoga is still, but for the occasional car that passes with headlights on or a stray head poking out from behind a door to snatch the newspaper from the front stoop. I’m conscious of retracing my childhood as I move through the deserted streets. I loop around Church Street onto High Bridge Road. Mel’s parents live here. Their driveway is full and there are a number of cars with out-of-state plates parked on the road. The house is dark, excepting a single light in an upstairs bedroom. Three blocks further and I make the turn onto Green Farms Road. My childhood house looks the same, except that someone has painted the old swing chair on the front porch. Mom’s battered Chevy pickup is parked in the driveway next to a spotless Cadillac Escalade that could only belong to my oldest sister Amelia and her husband Jeff. There is a beaten down Jeep Cherokee from the nineties sitting behind the Escalade and a Honda Civic parked on the street in front of the yard. Everybody’s home.

  I arrived at the funeral home late enough last night to miss my own family, though I did see Mel’s. I’ll see them this afternoon at the cemetery, though – no avoiding that. It can’t be put off any more. The farther I get from Conestoga, the more it pulls at me. I shake off the thought as the house fades into the gloom and I turn onto Ridge Road, climbing in earnest. I keep up a brisk pace for three miles as the road twists and turns until I reach the old mill. I pull up just shy of the rusted chain link fence barring the entrance. This is where my father and grandfather spent every working day of their lives. This is the mill that closed two weeks before I graduated high school. The place has power for me, like a Native American burial ground.