Markus Vinzlee is, in all probability, dead.
This changes things.
"Come with me," I say.
She looks at me. "Where?"
"My office." I keep my voice level. Matter-of-fact. "You can sit down. I'll get you some water. And then I'd like you to tell me what happened."
Something moves behind her eyes at that, and I watch her calculate in her shocked and limited way, whether she has any better options. She doesn't. She knows she doesn't. But she's not the kind of person who accepts a thing just because the alternative is worse.
She looks at me for a long moment, taking her own measure of me, and I find I don't mind being looked at by her.
"You know who he is," she says. Not a question.
"I know a lot of people," I tell her. True. Uninformative. Enough.
I take one step toward her, keeping my hands loose at my sides. She doesn't step back, and I note that too, file it alongside the other things I'm filing. The steadiness in her voice, the chin that hasn't dropped, the way her hands are trembling very slightly.
"Okay," she says quietly.
It's a small word for what it's carrying.
I turn and she falls in behind me as I lead her down the corridor toward the elevator that leads to my office at a pace that doesn't rush her, because she's running on almost nothing and I need her coherent. I need her to be able to tell me what happened, in sequence, with enough detail that I can begin to understand what I'm dealing with and what, if anything, needs to happen before morning.
That's what I tell myself.
That's the entirely reasonable, operational logic for why I'm paying careful attention to the sound of her heels on the concrete behind me, and the slight unsteadiness in the rhythm of them, and the way I find myself moderating my own pace to match hers without deciding to do it.
Operational logic.
I push open the office door and hold it for her until she walks past me. For a brief moment she is close enough that I catch the cold air still in her hair and underneath it a fruity perfume that smells all too much like peaches in summertime. But over it all is the copper bite that I can identify all too well.
She stops in the middle of the room and looks around with the slightly suspended attention of someone who is still split between two worlds.
I cross to the cabinet. Pour two glasses of water. When I turn back, she's still standing.
"Take a seat, Mia," I say.
She sits.
I bring the water across and hold a glass out to her. She takes it, and I see her hands up close for the first time. The dried blood in the lines of her knuckles. Bruises on her wrist.
I straighten up and step back to a distance that’s not crowding, and I look at her sitting in the chair in her ruined dress with both hands around a glass of water, and I think several things in rapid, quiet succession. I think: she's going to need more than water. I think: I need to know exactly what happened before anyone else does. I think: whoever she is, whatever she came from, she walked into my club tonight and that makes her, for the time being, my problem.
And then, underneath all of it, the thought I don't examine yet, the one I set aside the way you set aside something that will still be there when the practical things are handled:
She said okay like she was talking herself into surviving the rest of the night.
I pull the chair out from behind my desk, turn it to face her, and sit down.
"Tell me," I say quietly, "from the beginning.”
Mia
I stare at the water while he waits.
It's not an impatient kind of waiting. There's no shift in his weight, no clearing of his throat, no glance at a watch. He simply sits in the chair he's turned to face mine, and he waits with the specific quality of a man who has decided he will wait as long as it takes and means it.
