The gun in the sink
Better to hate him than to let him scare her. DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 12
From Episode 11: A half-dead Penny reaches her apartment in the heart of Beirut.
Penny walked up the winding steps that led to her apartment on the third floor of a broad, six-story building. She had bought the apartment six years ago, at the start of her career, when she got her first taste of money. It had proven a sound investment, as the rebuilding of the city and the influx of Gulf cash had since driven property prices higher than the ficus trees. She had done so well that she had felt free to blow every last dollar on partying during her summer days off, because there was no better way to avoid memories than getting high on a banker’s boat along the Amalfi Coast.
It was Fuad who had suggested she make Beirut her base—close to the Chamouns, in a city whose politics were too chaotic for any one group to ever dominate. That meant it was too gridlocked to get anything done, but this also enabled something like freedom to prevail. Lebanon was not directly in the oil spots that obsessed her clientele, but it was near enough, on the edge of the Middle East—of it but different, open and cosmopolitan, lawless but refined. The Syrian war and the rise of Daesh, the Arabic term for Islamic State, were testing every sinew in Lebanon’s factional truces. But for now, in the autumnal days of 2015, it was holding together.
She punched the code to her apartment and passed through the gate. A corridor turned a corner to the stairs and an old-fashioned elevator girded in wrought iron. She stepped onto the landing and unlocked the heavy door to her home.
The first thing Penny did was cross to the bathroom, where she kept a store of first-aid medicine and a variety of prescription drugs. She found the Vancocin, legal but considered an antibiotic of last resort, lethal to bacteria and sometimes to vital organs. She’d need to be alive for that to become a worry. She swallowed two of the fat, nuggety pills.
The bullet had passed through her upper arm, stealing some of her flesh. Her skin bordering the wound was red and testy. The likely scarring might be a problem for her looks, but she was lucky and she knew it.
She shed her clothes and put the Beretta and the cash on the rim of the sink. Showering was a slow and delicate process. The hole bled again and burned. She wrapped it in gauze, not sure how else to treat it until she could get some proper help.
The flat came with three guest bedrooms, one of which had become her wardrobe, if such a term could dignify that mountain of Hermès scarves and Oscar de la Renta suits for day jobs, Fox & Rose lingerie for evenings, stacked boxes of Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo shoes, and for the serious work, items from Pleasurements, sourced from visits to the Amsterdam shop where she could have the slightest bits of silk or leather tailored exactly to her curves. The treasure room had devoured most of her earnings, although she had no idea how much cash she had spent on these things. What she did know, despite the clutter, was exactly where to reach for her favorite Olivia von Halle silk kimono.
Tying it around her waist, she felt the wound open. She slipped her arm and shoulder free and hurried back to the bathroom.
The pistol had slid into the bowl of the sink.
That’s when the shock hit her: the sight of the gun in the wrong place. The normality of her apartment and the quiet charm of the morning lost their ability to soothe. The madness of the blown operation crashed around her. The killers hadn’t come for Timur or Shokay. They weren’t interested in KazPetro.
Viktor had come for her.
The weight of the head in her hands as she broke it on the counter corner like a coconut.
But somehow the unease of that moment seemed too far removed, too abstract. The guilt felt forced. Or maybe it was just her way of trying to be normal. Normal people would feel…bad. She felt incredibly, amazingly, alive.
And throw-up inducing scared. Now she knew why they called it getting the butterflies. She wanted to rip out her stomach and shake it free of the damn bugs.
Police and intelligence agencies would be poring over countless images of her. They didn’t know anything about Penny Lee. But it wouldn’t take long for the UAE’s intelligence services to realize Veronique Goetzle didn’t exist. Penny didn’t have any official records that could be linked to Veronique; Fuad always maintained firewalls, Etienne was scrupulous with his fake identities. But even if they never tied Veronique to her or to Fuad, Penny’s life in corporate espionage was probably over.
Which she’d welcome, if it didn’t come with a death sentence.
Had Viktor come on someone’s orders? Or had he gone rogue, on a personal mission of vengeance? Neither answer offered even a crumb of solace.
How had he known to find her at that moment in Dubai?
Fuad. Had Fuad discovered what she and Stack had done, ratted his errant spies to the Russians?
She laughed for everyone in the bathroom to hear as she cleaned and bandaged the wound again. Look out, it’s Penny Lee: evil maid, honey pot…killer.
She had been weeping. But not because of that man whose face she had crushed.
She forced herself to stop and steady her breathing. She focused on Viktor. Hating him was a palliative for the shakes he had induced. Being scared in her own home, here in Beirut, made her angry. This place was her only refuge. Viktor had robbed her of it.
Yeah, better to hate him than to let him scare her.
But she was terrified.
Breathe, Pen.
Because you’re not going to live like this. They’ve taken so much from you…
But she had taken something from them, too, hadn’t she?
No. Not like this. Didn’t compare. Not even close.
You’re not going to let them take any more.
She put the gun and the bands of cash into a safe that she kept in the second guest bedroom. She had converted this room to a library, all shelves groaning with books acquired as compulsively as her clothes. She locked the safe and hid it behind her growing collection of ancient Greek plays, her latest jag.
Hunger replaced the tremors with a different kind of urgency. There wasn’t much to eat in the apartment other than cereal and crackers—her teenage penance at a Swiss finishing school had taught her about cuisine but had failed to instill any desire to actually make it herself. But her maid had recently replenished the bananas and oranges in the bowl on the kitchen counter.
Penny boiled water to make green tea and ate the fruit. The bananas sated her for now. It was still hours before the coffee shops would open. At a loss, weak and exhausted but wanting to plan her next move, she sat on her couch and sipped the tea. The leather cushions swallowed her, and the hallucinations returned.
Flames.
Viktor’s hollow gaze: the foulness of his breath on her face, the disgusting bacterial stink of his saliva that lingered on her skin.
Her sister, an intrusive memory—her sister on TV, Penny’s idea of a joke gone horribly wrong.
And the joker, Stack, smirking even in death.
When she woke, she didn’t know what time it was. She only knew that she wasn’t alone in the apartment.