Blast from the past
The idea that her father might be alive was no unalloyed blessing. DREADFUL PENNY, Ep. 42
In Episode 41, Penny makes the fateful decision not to kill Viktor – not on someone else’s terms – but barely escapes the encounter.
They dropped her without ceremony in front of the apartment door. Chester pressed the electronic keycard to the lock.
“What now?” she mumbled. It came out thick through her lips, but it was two clear words.
“Now we consult,” Charles said.
“And you wait,” Chester added.
“Although I suspect we know the outcome.”
“Mr. Konstantin is consistent in such matters.”
She had a question, but when she opened her mouth, out came a whoosh and she was crying. She couldn’t believe the force of it. It was profoundly embarrassing, but she couldn’t help it: grief possessed her. Vivian…Fuad.
She had betrayed them all.
“Pathetic,” Charles said as they picked her up. She wanted to enter the living quarters on her own steam but felt utterly defeated.
“Yes, you might have seen your father again.” They dumped her in front of the sofa.
Penny said, “He’s dead.” It seemed pointless to correct them; the response was merely automatic.
“Perhaps not,” Charles said.
“Not after all,” Chester said.
“Wait,” Penny said. “What?”
“Mr. Konstantin might shed some light,” Charles said.
“He’s privy to all sorts of information.”
She hoisted herself to a sitting position against the sofa. Time for a full sentence. “My father died in a car accident ten years ago.”
The two men shrugged simultaneously, like a pair of vaudeville players.
“Wait,” she rasped, but they had already shut the door.
Revulsion wouldn’t leave her be. It was the same sensation Penny had experienced in the wake of the massacre in Tuscany. It was a deep-in-the-gut howl. Cooped up in that underground, windowless apartment, the insatiable, blind static was the only thing in her mind that kept her from finding a way to kill herself. That… and the enigmatic shrug of the two vaudeville clowns. The comedians with the knives and the canes had cast her a lifeline. They had done it with purpose. She had failed their test—or maybe she hadn’t.
Jonas Tang alive. Could it be true?
Thinking about him helped when she looked at the bathroom mirror. Her nose was swollen and red. Bruises ringed her eyes like obscene sunglasses. Any distraction helped, although when the construction workers began their drilling, sending the room into booming shivers, the pain grew nearly unbearable.
That was not the only thing hard to endure. The idea that he might be alive was no unalloyed blessing.
She had adored her father. She had wept for him more times than she cared to admit. Had she failed him by not getting to the bottom of his death? Or, worse…had he betrayed her?
She thought about these things as she lay on the sofa with a bag of frozen peas from the kitchen fridge pressed against her nose. She kept her head propped up on pillows to counter the swelling, wishing for an aspirin or something stronger. Even a can of beer would have helped dull the pain.
She had no sense of time: the construction work was too sporadic, fifteen or twenty minutes of intense noisemaking, punctured by long silences or the occasional hammer’s staccato.
The coldest comfort was that, most likely, Charles and Chester were clever liars who knew how to manipulate her. They were playing her, teasing her along to complete their mastery over her. They wanted to convert Penny to their side, so they had served her a sham sandwich with extra rubbish.
Which would mean Jonas really was dead. Some happy ending.
They left her with plenty of time to think things through, to refreeze the bag of peas and to tend to a possibly broken nose, to endure the intermittent drilling. The bookshelves were lined with freshly printed classics in hardback, and she found Aeschylus again, hoping to finish the Orestes, but it hurt too much to read. Time stretched and she slept, awoke, slept again. Maybe a day or a day and a half? The fridge and the kitchen cabinets were stocked with basics: granola and cereal, oranges to peel, bread she could toast, pre-sliced cheese and salami, tea to brew. No knives though, or forks, just some dull spoons for the sugar.
Penny had spent the first years as Fuad’s ward obsessing over his relationship with her father. Fuad’s story never really stacked up: how in the US he had saved Jonas’s life in the wake of an accident, how he had introduced him to the beautiful woman from Germany studying on a Fulbright scholarship, how Jonas seemed to owe so much to Fuad that he made him the godfather to his daughters, only for Fuad to break off contact long ago.
She had probed Fuad and Daliyah and even Etienne about these things during those first, difficult years in Beirut. Fuad kept to the same line, and gradually she came to recognize it as a cover story: his recollection was always too precise, too consistent, to be true. But by the time Penny had recognized the obfuscation, she had become invested in the lifestyle. Shimura’s dojo became her refuge in times of doubt; she began to enjoy the work and grew addicted to its benefits. She had grown out of her teenage anger and blossomed into someone of surprising confidence and competence. At some point she decided she didn’t care anymore. Melody Tang was gone: she was now Penelope Lee, and the past could go to hell.
Always a loner—yet she had never felt more isolated than in Sergey Konstantin’s prison. Penelope Lee had been a fabrication that she decided had become real. But if Jonas Tang were alive… then who was she? What was she?
The only answer she had: I’m not theirs. Such a reaction made no sense, of course. With Fuad dead she had no employer. She had no income, no work. Why not switch to Charles and Chester’s operation? What did it matter who they worked for, if they were prepared to be generous employers? As they had said, she didn’t work for a government or a cause. She had always worked for herself —for cash, lots of cash that she burned through as quickly as she could make it. She had embraced industrial espionage with no strings attached.
So why not work for Konstantin?
Maybe it had been the Daesh killing spree in Paris. Or perhaps something deeper was going on, something she couldn’t pinpoint. Maybe this charade about her father was part of the problem. But she knew in her gut—a feeling almost as strong as the revulsion that now sickened her—that she couldn’t work for these people. The Chamouns and their corporate clients were far from noble, but there had been an underlying contract, perhaps never voiced, that stipulated for her a degree of independence and dignity. Fuad had thought she had betrayed him. She’d give him that much credit.
On Konstantin’s side, no matter how shiny the diamonds, they were baubles worn by slaves.
And the one thing she didn’t regret was sparing Viktor. She wasn’t going to let him die that easily, or on someone else’s terms.
Penny had worked that much out, when the door opened.
She couldn’t believe who had just come in.
He entered with no warning. She was dozing on the sofa when she heard the soft electronic beep of the door’s lock. Penny roused herself as the door opened. Alarm sped her awake, because only predators prowled on the other side of that door. But she knew when she saw him that he hadn’t come to murder her.
At least, that’s what she hoped.
He slipped inside with a furtive motion that suited his slender frame. Kasym Shokay closed the door with a quick backward glance. He looked wary and worn. The cheesy mustache quivered, and he had lines of stress around his black eyes that she hadn’t noticed before. He wore a dark suit, no tie. The bulge beneath his jacket was obvious as he leaned against the door. His eyes darted around the room, returning to her over and over. He looked as though he was already regretting having come here.
Penny stood up but remained by the sofa, her hands loose at her sides.
“This is a surprise,” she opened.
“Yes, it is.”
They remained standing apart.
Penny gestured to the coffee table with its empty mug and a plate of orange peels. “Would you like something to eat? Or some tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“I don’t have any alcohol here.”
“I don’t drink,” he said. And that was right. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Kasym participate in one of Timur’s binges. “I am a true Muslim.”
“Of course,” she said. “Well, then, would you like a seat?” She gestured to one of the two chairs facing the sofa.
“No.”
“All right,” she said. “Then we’ll stand.”
“In here, you are alone?”
“Yes.” As he peered into the bedroom, she asked, “How’s Timur?”
“Chairman Buribaev is fine, no thanks to you.” He seemed to be working up a sort of courage. “Don’t waste my time asking these things. We both know you don’t care.”
“So why are you here, Kasym?”
He paused. He shouldn’t be there. The next words would be his Rubicon.
“I’m the…how do you say…the diplomat, between Sergey Konstantin and Michel L’Orancourt.”