Forgive Me: A Xanadu Marx Thriller Read online

“No, Jeffrey,” she said. “We’re not going to sue the airline. Because we’re not. Because tomorrow we’re going to be in Paris and…yes, you told me…there is no air-conditioning in Paris and everybody hates Americans.”

  Scott sighed.

  Crystal offered him an apologetic frown.

  Scott replied with a sympathetic grimace.

  Then Scott returned to the bathroom. He closed the door behind him. The tub was already half full. He let it reach the blue line and turned off the knob and sank into the hot water. He shut his eyes. Crystal would be on the phone for a while.

  Damn it, Jeffrey.

  After a few minutes, Scott began to toy with the control panel. The massage setting was especially fun. Jets of water pulsed against his back like gentle fists. He let out an involuntary moan. He looked to the closed door. He played around with some of the other settings. He sank underneath the water and then resurfaced. He kicked at the water with his feet, splashing puddles across the white marble floor. He looked to the closed door. He sighed again. How long had he been in here now? Thirty minutes? An hour? He grabbed a towel from the rack, let the water in the hot tub sink into the drain, and shuffled back into the bedroom.

  Crystal lay diagonally across the silk sheets. The phone was in her left hand. She made a few beeping noises. Some people snored. Scott’s wife beeped. He took the phone and found its charger in her carry-on and plugged it in. The time on her phone read 11:19 P.M. Scott found the remote and clicked on the fifty-inch TV that was recessed in an armoire. Immediately, he lowered the volume, but it was too late. His wife stopped beeping.

  “How was the Jacuzzi?” she asked sleepily.

  “It was nice. How’s Jeffrey?”

  “He wants me to remind you that the Eiffel Tower gets struck by lightning more than any other object in the world.”

  Scott nodded, sat beside her, patted her softly on her right thigh. “OK, then.”

  “I’m going to take a shower.” She stood up, headed to the bathroom. “Don’t forget to plug in your phone too.”

  “Want me to join you?”

  “Not this time, champ.”

  She closed the bathroom door behind her.

  Scott sat up. Flipped through the channels on the TV. Settled on a Vietnam War movie, the one with what’s-his-name in it. Since their luggage was still at the airport, he had no choice but to put his old boxers back on. Ugh. He returned to the bed and turned the volume up a notch on the TV. Wasn’t this the scene where they rescued those Vietnamese kids from the burning village? Yep. Look at those GIs being all heroic.

  Jeffrey had gone to war. Nobody was going to make a movie about him.

  Scott flipped to a cooking show. The chef was demonstrating how to peel an onion without crying. How very—

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Scott glanced at the door.

  Silence.

  Must have been for the suite next to theirs. Either 2701 or 2703. It wasn’t as if they were expecting anyone to—

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Scott set the TV on mute and padded to the door. Paused and then peered through the door’s fancy, gold-inlaid peephole.

  On the other side of the door was a very short brown-skinned man in a crimson hotel uniform. The brown-skinned man was carrying a covered silver tray.

  After getting off the phone with her brother, had Crystal ordered room service? It was true that they hadn’t eaten in hours. And perhaps she hadn’t told him so it would be a surprise. She was full of surprises, that one.

  Maybe she’d ordered him a BLT. God, he could go for a BLT.

  He opened the door.

  “Room service,” the man chirped. He spoke with a heavy accent. “Compliments of the management.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. May I come in?”

  Scott stepped aside.

  The tiny man came in.

  The weighted door shut by itself. The tiny man placed the tray on the kitchen counter.

  “So what’ve we got?” Scott asked.

  Underneath the cover of the tray was a pair of manacles and a long, large hacksaw. The tiny brown-skinned man picked up the hacksaw and replied without a hint of malice:

  “First, I’m going to chop off your hands.”

  Chapter 3

  As far back as she could remember, Crystal loved showers. Her earliest happy memories in fact found her eye-height with her mother’s knees, getting her hair—back then its natural color of brown—shampooed as an endless rain of warm water cascaded over her body. And even though her mother had steely fingers and even though the act of scrubbing all that shampoo out of her hair often involved Crystal’s head getting jerked this way and that way and even though her mother, through it all, would repeat, “Stand still!” and “Stop fussing!”—even though sometimes the process reduced Crystal to tears, these were the happiest memories from her childhood because they were the only memories from her childhood that she had of her mother.

  For Crystal, showers were escape hatches. Showers were time machines. No matter what stressors existed in her life, be it something at school or an argument with her father or a troubling article she read online, no matter what was going on in her present life, she could step into the shower and, with her mother’s help, wash it all away.

  In the shower, Crystal would always be three years old and her mother would always, always be alive.

  And showers were everywhere.

  And showers were loud! What wonderful white noise. Good-bye, world. It took her many, many months of dating before she allowed Scott to join her in the shower. At first he didn’t understand. At first he thought he was being rejected. And true, maybe she hadn’t done the best job of explaining it to him. And sure, maybe she hadn’t helped the matter when, in reaction to his sulking, she beaned him in the head with an avocado. But this was a private space for her. Eventually, he stopped pestering her about it. After all, it was only a big deal to him because it was a big deal to her.

  On their one-year dating anniversary, she allowed him into her private space. They went out to eat at an upscale steak house in Lincoln and then they went to see a romantic movie in the theater and then, upon returning home, she led him by the collar of his plaid shirt into the tiny bathroom of his tiny apartment. Crystal had been vaguely nervous that sex with Scott in a shower might in some way spoil the specialness of her private space, but she had underestimated how special sex with Scott, sex with the man she loved, could be, and how difficult it was to remain on one’s feet when orgasming….

  This more recent memory was what kept her company as she finished rinsing the hotel’s apple-scented conditioner from her hair. She noticed how steamy the hot water had made the bathroom, so steamy that she could barely make out the clumps of purple and pink-purple hair that had accumulated in the shower drain. She giggled like a fourteen-year-old. Steamy. So silly. And yet.

  When she finally, reluctantly, shut the water off, she still had a wild, wet grin on her lips. She grabbed one of the oversized towels from the rack and had begun to dry herself off when she heard…something…from the bedroom. A dull thump. Scott must’ve dropped one of their carry-on bags on the soft floor. Why place something down when you can drop it? Men. No, scratch that. Man. Her man. Her husband.

  If the mirror hadn’t been fogged up, Crystal could have seen herself blush.

  She continued to dry herself off. Toes first, then between the toes, then ankles, then up, then up, then up. This was how her mother had dried her off, although again with a much rougher touch. The hair, which all the while continued to drip, came last. It was an impractical system, but it was habit. She did it without thinking.

  Or, rather, she did it while thinking about Paris. What were the showers like in Paris? She had read that the water pressure wasn’t great and that the showers didn’t stay hot for very long. Something about old pipes or—

  Another dull thump from the bedroom.

  She paused. “Scott?”

  No respons
e.

  Hmm.

  Crystal slipped into a terry-cloth bathrobe and walked toward the bathroom door. She walked with slow, careful precision. Her feet were still a little slippery.

  “Scott?”

  She reached for the gilded doorknob.

  “Scott?”

  She opened the door.

  The bedroom was empty. City light from the window glazed it a dreamy blue.

  More light, lamplight, came in from around the corner, from the living room. Crystal turned the corner. She saw the carrot-top of her husband’s head poking out from the back of a chair. Was he reading that Napoleon biography on his phone?

  “Hey,” she said, stepping into the living room, “I thought I heard a—”

  The short brown-skinned man appeared between her and the chair. He pointed the hacksaw like an accusatory finger.

  “You must be his whore,” the man said. “You will sit down.”

  Crystal put up her hands.

  “Scott?” she muttered. She still couldn’t see her husband’s face.

  “You will sit down,” repeated the man. “Now.”

  He led her saw-first to the other chair. She sat, trembling. Across from her, on the other side of the solid glass coffee table, in the other chair, sat Scott. His wrists and ankles were chained together. Manacled together.

  His lower lip was plump and bleeding from several locations. His chin ran red.

  Her man. She looked him in the eye. Did he have any idea what was going on?

  No. He did not have any idea what was going on.

  And that made it all the worse.

  The little man moved within view and began to yammer at them both in excited French, rapid-fire, thousands of miles from the casual parler Crystal had been taught. She was able to catch one out of every ten words. I. He. They. And a name: Wilkerson. Hardly helpful hints to the source of this man’s fury, and he was furious. He paced as he spoke, spit flinging from his lips, hands fidgeting with ever-increasing acceleration.

  So as he paused for a breath, Crystal offered up her best French: “You’ve made a mistake. We don’t know anyone named Wilkerson.”

  “Mensonges!” he snarled back.

  Lies.

  “No! I swear! Check our…our…” Shit, what was French for passports? She knew the word. She just couldn’t conjure it, not now, not with a crazy man only a hacksaw’s length away from the tip of her tongue. “We’re Scott and Crystal McCormick!”

  The intruder stared at her with contempt, and then at Scott, and then, hacksaw in hand, approached Scott, who struggled fruitlessly against his chains.

  Scott’s arms were bare. Only a soft layer of hair, and then a few layers of skin, each finer and more delicate than a sheet of paper, and then muscle. Bone.

  “Listen to me!” Crystal protested. “This is a mistake!”

  “This is how mistakes are corrected!” the man replied, his French clearer now, for what it was worth. “This is how the scales of justice are balanced!”

  Scott gazed up at him. “Please don’t kill us.”

  The man stopped, lowered his hacksaw a bit. Looked at them in bewilderment.

  “Kill you?” he said, now in English. “Mr. Wilkerson, the thief is not killed. Do you know what happens to the thief?”

  Crystal knew what happened to thieves. She knew it from the moment she connected the existence of the saw to the existence of the manacles. But she’d be damned if she was going to say it out loud.

  And she could tell that Scott knew it too. He bowed his head in resignation. His lip-blood was dripping on the Persian rug.

  “You will keep quiet now,” the small man informed Crystal, “or I will kill you.”

  And he brought the hacksaw toward Scott’s bound wrists.

  And Crystal prepared her lungs to shout, filled her chest with as much oxygen as they could handle. Let him kill her. She would scream and scream until the people in the room next door heard her. Let him kill her if it meant possibly saving Scott.

  Her man.

  Crystal filled her chest and opened her mouth to scream and…

  Knock, knock, knock.

  The short brown-skinned man froze. Crystal froze. Scott glanced up, confused, and then over at the door.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  “You will keep quiet,” the man reminded them, and he quickly made his way to the door.

  He peered through the peephole.

  He stepped back.

  “Room service,” called a voice from the other side of the door.

  Chapter 4

  The brown-skinned man selected Crystal to answer the door. He hid nearby against the wall.

  “You will send him away,” the man whispered, “or I will kill you.”

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Crystal opened the door.

  The hotel attendant was too tall for his crimson uniform. His wrists and ankles were clearly visible. But he held the requisite tray.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  It was the exuberant gentleman from before, the fellow who had gifted them his key card.

  Crystal needed a moment to process everything—but only a moment before she angled her eyes to the right, to behind the open door.

  The man, who she had a hunch was the actual Wilkerson, nodded. Then he mouthed, “Step back.”

  Crystal stepped back.

  Before the French-speaking fellow could react, Wilkerson charged into the door, slamming him against the wall. The door closed. The psycho, only briefly stunned, came at Wilkerson with the saw.

  But Wilkerson already had his gun—a sound-suppressed Glock—out and he fired two bullets into the brown-skinned bugger at point-blank range.

  BAM! BAM!

  And that was the end of the brown-skinned bugger.

  “Jesus!” Wilkerson said. “Did you hear how loud that was? I paid a couple hundred bucks for this silencer and the gun still sounds like it’s barking thunder. Turn on the TV.”

  “Huh?”

  “The TV! Turn it on! That way, if anyone comes, we can just say we had the TV on too loud.”

  Crystal obeyed. There was a war movie on. It was the one her brother liked to make fun of, where the Americans save the Vietnamese refugees. She pushed the volume to its max.

  Then she went to her husband.

  “Where’s the key?” she asked him—loudly.

  “I don’t know…are you OK?”

  She nodded.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  She shrugged.

  Wilkerson joined them. He still had his gun out. “Hello again.”

  “We need a key!” said Crystal.

  “Oh. Hmm. Check his pockets?”

  Ah yes. The dead madman’s pockets. That made unfortunate sense. Crystal returned to the scene of the crime. The itty-bitty psycho was slumped against the wall by the door. His eyelids were shut. The hacksaw had fallen from his grip and was a few feet from his reach. If she didn’t find the key in his pockets, maybe she could use the hacksaw to cut Scott’s chains.

  She found the key in his pockets.

  A minute later, Scott was free. The two of them hugged and kissed and hugged, all to the soundtrack of a village in South Vietnam burning down.

  “So,” said Wilkerson, finally. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Sorry?” replied Scott. “Dude, what the heck!”

  “What can I say? I knew they were coming for me. I knew where and when. I didn’t know how. So I figured I’d, you know, lay a trap. Do you have any idea how long I was waiting in that lobby for someone around my height? It’s like everybody who was coming here was part of a midget convention.”

  “Who’s they?” asked Crystal.

  “Who cares?” replied Scott, who was rubbing his wrists. “It’s not our problem. We’re out of here.”

  And he angled to the bedroom for their carry-ons.

  Meanwhile, Crystal repeated her question: “Who are they?”

  “A bunch of lunatics.” Wilkers
on grunted in disgust. “Ever heard of the Serendipity Group? They make money by putting strangers in the same room as kings and CEOs. Want to meet Bono or the pope? Write them a large check and Serendipity will make it happen. It’s not the worst idea in the world, except for the part that makes it the worst idea in the world. See, on the side, they put crazy motherfuckers like this guy in touch with people who they believe victimized them and then let the chips fall where they may. I’m just lucky I was tipped off that they were coming for me. I’m sure as hell luckier than the others.”

  “How many others?”

  Wilkerson took out a slip of yellow paper and showed it to her. On it was a typed list of names, thirteen names total. Names and dates. Phillip Wilkerson, Oct 8 was one of the two which were not crossed off.

  “And that’s just this year,” he told her. “Or at least that’s what my guy said. Jesus. I’ve never killed anyone in my life. I’m a mortgage broker!”

  “Good for you. I’m a banker. Who cares? I just almost got my hands chopped off!” Scott added. He was dressed and had Crystal’s clothes with him. He handed them to her. She took them and headed off to the bedroom.

  Wilkerson nodded toward Scott. “So. Honeymooners. Own your own property yet?”

  “Not that it matters, but yes.”

  “Oh, of course it matters. Having your own property is a vital rite of passage. And hey, I want to apologize again to you folks. I really hope I didn’t ruin your honeymoon. You two are off to…wait, don’t tell me…let me guess…the Bahamas? No. No. Paris. Am I right? I knew it. Where in the city are you staying? Let me set you up at the Shangri-La. It’s this converted palace by the river. Used to belong to a nephew of Napoleon’s.”

  “I…I’m reading a biography about Napoleon.”

  “See? There you go.”

  Crystal returned, fully dressed.

  Meanwhile, the movie had segued into the helicopter-battle sequence. Wilkerson paused until after the whirring of the helicopter blades and the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire subsided before concluding, “So let’s get you back to your original room and I’ll clean up in here and tomorrow we’ll have a pleasant breakfast and then I’ll drive you to the airport. How’s that sound?”