The City Under the Skin Read online

  She squirmed, tried to roll away, kicking as she moved, but he was ready for that too. He seemed skilled, practiced, keeping her immobile as he tied her wrists and ankles. He didn’t speak, didn’t threaten her, didn’t press a weapon to her head or throat, didn’t need to.

  She assumed the obvious, that this was the prelude to humiliation, violation, rape at the very least, though since her ankles were tied and her face covered, she already had an inkling that he might have something specialized in mind. But first there was a journey. She was lifted up, then placed in the back of a vehicle, a van. The way he handled her wasn’t exactly careful, but he didn’t throw her around, expended no unnecessary energy. The doors slammed, and in due course the van began to move. The journey seemed a long one, and even though she wanted it to be over, she also knew that what came next would surely be worse.

  The van stopped. He hauled her out. She was aware, briefly, of being in the open air and then inside a building and then being maneuvered awkwardly, half-carried, half-dragged, down a set of stairs into a basement. There she was lifted up again, set facedown on a metal bench, maybe an examination table, and belts or cords were strapped around her to hold her in place.

  It hardly came as a surprise when her clothes were pushed aside, but they were not ripped, not pulled off; instead, they were carefully raised and folded back. She remained some way from being naked, but her back and buttocks were laid bare. She steeled herself for the touch of his hands, but it seemed some preparation was required. She could hear drawers and cabinets being opened and closed. Some kind of equipment was being set up. She wondered if he was going to play doctor and patient.

  Then it started. She heard a drone, like a high-pitched dentist’s drill, and then she felt something in her back, a precise line of pain. Was that a knife, a needle? A syringe? Was that the feel of drugs or chemicals entering her body? No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t an injection, nothing so limited or clearly defined. Rather, something seemed to slice through her, repetitive, broad but not deep. She thought of a sewing machine, as if she were being stitched and patched. She considered several other possibilities before she thought of a tattooing machine, but then she knew that’s what it had to be. She was being marked, inked, tagged.

  It hurt, of course, but it was hard to separate the specific pain of the tattooing from the more general pain and degradation that went with being kidnapped, bound, hooded, bared, penetrated. The needles going into her flesh might have been bearable in themselves, no more than a long series of nasty stings, but not knowing how long it would go on and when, if ever, it would stop: that was excruciating.

  She knew next to nothing about tattooing, but even so, she’d heard that sooner or later endorphins were supposed to kick in, that the pain became a kind of pleasure. But she didn’t let it happen. She wasn’t going to allow herself to experience relief, much less pleasure. Her back felt hot and cold, alternately then simultaneously. She knew her skin was wet, with sweat and blood and maybe ink and some liquid that he kept swabbing her with. She had no idea what design he could possibly be making. She tried to make sense of it, tried to envisage what the clusters and lines of pain might add up to, what private imagery they were mapping: cracked madonnas, orange-eyed felines, devil women, galleons with their black sails on fire. She knew she was close to hallucinating.

  She had no idea exactly how long it went on. It seemed like hours, but it could have been much less, and as with the journey in the van, she didn’t know what would come at the end. If he wanted to kill her, then there’d be no stopping him. She was his. Nobody was coming to save her, and she certainly wasn’t going to be able to save herself.

  At last the tattoo machine stopped. There was a silence and a stillness that seemed the most delicious she had ever known, a tide going out, a reprieve, even though her back and buttocks felt as if they’d been mashed into raw hamburger. Then there was the sound of the equipment being cleaned and stashed, drawers closing, water running, something being washed away. She felt her clothes being straightened and put back into place. The straps that held her to the table were removed.

  Her hands and feet were still tied, and the leather hood remained in place as she was made to stand up. She could just about keep herself upright, but her legs felt elastic and newborn, and the ground seemed very far away. She was led up the stairs, back out onto the street, and again into the van. The anticipation of what might or might not come next was its own torture. The drive seemed shorter this time, the journey less urgent, until the van stopped and she was being hauled out, dumped on the sidewalk. The ties at her hands and feet were loosened though not removed. The hood was taken from her head, and she was pushed facedown onto the ground again so she couldn’t see her assailant. Somehow the cold, abrasive surface of the street felt reassuring and solid, and there was air, not good air, not fresh air, but something wonderfully different from the inside of that hood. Before she could even sit up, she heard the van driving away, and it was gone before she could turn around and try to get a sighting of it.

  She realized that with just a little effort she could untie herself. She still didn’t know if this was a beginning or an end. And as she looked around her she realized he had delivered her to exactly the place he had picked her up, not far from where she lived. That indicated a fastidiousness, a kind of consideration that was deeply menacing.

  She stood up. She was in one piece. She was herself. She hadn’t even been robbed. Her keys, money, and cell phone were still in her pockets. She walked the short distance home, convinced that nothing worse could happen to her. She went inside, through the outer gate, up via the big, unstable elevator, into her own space. She sat on the bed, too hurt to cry, and at last, because she knew, however unbearable, it would have to be done, she went into the bathroom, stripped off the clothes that she knew she’d have to burn. She steadied herself, took a deep breath, and turned her back to the mirror so she could look over her shoulder and see what had been done to her.

  4. HOW BILLY MOORE FIRST MET “MR.” WROBLESKI

  A hulking, matte-black SUV stood at the center of the courtyard, customized to express deep aggression and luxury. The courtyard, a broad, wet, scuffed square of tarmac, was enclosed on three sides by several levels of solid, workaday buildings, a series of former workshops, offices, storage units, all linked by open metal staircases, decks, and catwalks. There were many doors, all of them shut, and all the windows were covered, in some cases barred. It was impossible to tell what went on here now, but certainly nothing explicitly industrial. A few guys in overalls who looked as if they might have jobs to do were standing around, conspicuously not doing them.

  But one guy was working, which was why the tarmac was wet. A young black man, wearing shimmering orange shorts and nothing else, was cleaning the SUV, resentment oozing from his every pore. Above him, on a second-story deck, his boss, Wrobleski, was watching him intently. This car, these buildings, this whole compound, belonged to Wrobleski. This was the place he did a lot of business, and it was also where he lived. If you looked up to the rooftop, you’d see that along one side of the structure was an extra level, a lavish, hard-edged architectural addition. In a way this new part looked just as industrial as the buildings below, with metal girders, glass walls, exposed ducting; but it was an apartment, a penthouse. The girders were painted bright red, the walls of glass curved symmetrically, the ducting had a polished gleam to it. The corner of a domed conservatory was visible nearby on the flat roof.

  Wrobleski could hear the sound of a car idling outside the solid, gray steel gate that separated the compound from the rest of the world. Charlie, a lean, rigid, sunburned old man, with impeccably disreputable credentials, had been employed by Wrobleski solely to open and close the gate, and now he performed his job with quiet, solemn efficiency, and saluted, not quite seriously, not quite playfully, at the car that entered the courtyard. It was a metallic-blue Cadillac, a good thirty years old, sagging, battered, with a scratch or dent on every panel.
The car parked alongside the SUV as Charlie slid the gate shut. Billy Moore got out of the Cadillac, adjusted his leather jacket, as battered as the car, and readied himself.

  He didn’t especially want to be here. This whole part of the city was alien territory as far as he was concerned. He had got here only by obeying the instructions of his GPS, a bit of modern gadgetry his daughter had insisted he buy. He was glad he hadn’t had to think his way here, through the old meatpacking districts and between the abandoned factories and the gravel pits. He didn’t belong here at the edge of things, where the city was all but exhausted, close to the docks, in sight of power stations and rail yards, near dumps, landfills, and recycling facilities that used to call themselves junkyards. He couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to live here, although he knew that these days, in this city, people lived in all kinds of postindustrial wastelands and considered themselves very fancy indeed.

  Certainly Wrobleski’s place was close to fast roads that might take you to bridges and tunnels, to airports and ferry terminals, a good place to be when you needed to be somewhere else in a hurry. But Wrobleski didn’t look as if he needed to be anywhere else, and he definitely didn’t look like a man you could hurry. Today he was wearing one of his better suits, charcoal-gray mohair with a bright blue pinstripe, single-breasted, single-buttoned, single-vented, all the edges scalpel-sharp, but he was wearing it for his own pleasure, certainly not in anticipation of meeting Billy Moore. Wrobleski eyed the battered Cadillac, and disapproval registered briefly on his face, but the look was gone before Billy Moore had crossed the courtyard. Billy raised his eyes toward Wrobleski, and Wrobleski beckoned him up to the open second-floor deck.

  This was not in the strictest sense a first meeting, and Billy had heard plenty about Wrobleski long before he saw him in person. He was quite a legend in some of the dubious worlds into which Billy had occasionally strayed, considered to be a mad dog, way out of Billy’s league, in a league Billy did not aspire to join.

  Their actual first encounter had taken place at a real estate auction. Billy Moore was there to buy a piece of land suitable for turning into a parking lot and home for a couple of trailers. Originally he’d had his eye on a plot out by the shuttered women’s reformatory—there was talk of turning that place into a boutique hotel or maybe live/work spaces—and he’d registered his interest with the auction house, but right before the bidding was due to start, one of the auctioneer’s flunkies asked him to step aside for a “private word.”

  The flunky was tall and lean to the point of chemical imbalance. In a low-ceilinged, institutional-yellow corridor outside the main auction room, as people pushed and milled around them, the flunky said, “This is slightly delicate. One of our special clients has his eye on the same plot as yourself. We think it would be better if you didn’t bid against him.”

  “What?”

  “In exchange he won’t bid against you on the lot at the corner of Hope Street and Tenth.”

  “I’ll bid on what I want.”

  “Of course, but if you bid on the reformatory lot, you’ll only drive up the price, and in the end you still won’t get it. And if you then try to buy the Hope and Tenth lot, our client will most likely bid against you and ensure that you don’t get that either.”

  “Who is this jerk?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “And why do you care?” said Billy. “Don’t you want the price as high as possible?”

  “Sometimes there are other considerations.”

  “Why don’t you tell this special client to go fuck himself?”

  The flunky winced, and something he saw over Billy’s shoulder caused him to cast his eyes down. Under his breath he said to Billy, “The other bidder, the special client.”

  A voice behind Billy said, “Who’s telling who to go fuck himself?”

  Billy turned and looked at a man he’d never seen before, large but compact, serious, dangerous-looking.

  “Who are you?” said Billy.

  “My name’s Wrobleski,” said the man.

  “Okay,” said Billy calmly, cautiously, as several important things clicked into place. “Well, only a damn fool would tell the great Mr. Wrobleski to go fuck himself.”

  “So you’re not a damn fool,” said Wrobleski, and if he was the kind of man who smiled, he might have done it then.

  They took up seats on opposite sides of the auction room. The bidding went fast. Wrobleski got what he wanted, and Billy got the lot at the corner of Hope Street and Tenth, and he did get it cheap. In the end there was nothing to feel bad about. The thing that surprised him most was that a guy like Wrobleski was involved in anything so small-time as buying pieces of land. The Wrobleski of his imagination inhabited a quite separate world, one of speedboats, limos, assignations in foreign hot spots. He was even more surprised when word came through, sometime later, that Wrobleski wanted to see him. A part of him was flattered, and in any case, there was no way he could have refused to go, even if he’d wanted to. Wrobleski was a man very few people got to meet, and certainly there were quite a few who never met him more than once. Even so, as Billy climbed the metal staircase that led to the second-floor deck of the compound, where Wrobleski was waiting for him, he thought it unlikely that this meeting was going to be either pleasurable or straightforward.

  Billy put out his hand for the expected handshake, but Wrobleski declined it. “Billy Moore,” he said quietly. It wasn’t quite a greeting, more a simple acknowledgment that Billy Moore existed. If the president and first lady had turned up at his gate, Wrobleski would have addressed them in the same easy, gruff tone of voice.

  “Do you want my man Akim to clean your car for you?” Wrobleski asked.

  Billy had a feeling that something might depend on his answer, that with Wrobleski there would never be anything so simple as a direct yes or no, and simultaneously he realized he might be overthinking this whole business.

  “He’s very good,” Wrobleski added.

  Billy said, “Okay then, sure.”

  Wrobleski peered down into the courtyard where Akim was already moving sullenly toward the Cadillac, bucket, hose, and chamois at the ready. Without saying more, Wrobleski turned and walked away along the deck, and Billy could only follow.

  The layout of the place was confusing, walkways and staircases running up and down and across, some open to the elements, some enclosed, leading into inscrutable hallways and landings, and everywhere more blank doors and windows. Wrobleski opened one of the doors, at random, as it seemed to Billy, and they went into an unexpectedly welcoming space, not so industrial after all, carpeted, carefully lit, with groupings of leather chairs and couches. It looked like a waiting room, though Billy couldn’t imagine who’d be waiting here or for what, and he didn’t have much time to think about it before he was distracted by what was on the walls: a multitude of framed maps, and of course Billy had seen framed maps before, in hotels and in certain kinds of bar, but he hadn’t seen any quite like these.

  Some of them were conventional enough, though sufficiently antique that the shapes of countries and continents didn’t quite resemble those on contemporary maps. Others were more modern, but there was something off-kilter about them. There was a symbolic map of a railway line passing through cities named Sacrifice, Enlightenment, Hubris, and False Friendship. There was a map of an imaginary country in the shape of a woman’s head, another was a tapestry with a map of the Hindu Kush woven into it. There were maps of desert islands, diagrams of caves and cavern systems. Few looked like maps of places anyone could ever set foot.

  Wrobleski turned to see what was interesting Billy. “This stuff’s okay,” he said. “But one day I’ll show you some really good stuff,” and he waved a vague hand, to indicate that those closed doors outside gave access to a storehouse of real cartographic treasures, not that Billy Moore had any idea what a real cartographic treasure would look like.

  Billy saw now that at one end of the room was a small elevator, and he and Wr
obleski stepped inside and went up to the top of the building. The doors opened onto the roof terrace. Billy could see Wrobleski’s penthouse with its glass walls and metal girders, and he got a brief impression of high ceilings, ancient polished hardwood, violently colored rugs, and many, many more framed maps. But he and Wrobleski weren’t going there. Wrobleski wasn’t inviting him into the place where he lived. They were heading for the domed conservatory at the other corner of the roof.

  They entered, through angular glass doors, to be enveloped by bone-dry heat. Billy saw that there were very few plants. Stands and low tables arranged around the edges of the space supported just a small number of cacti and succulents, some small, a few very large, a ghost euphorbia, agaves, barrel cacti, opuntias: the overall effect was of a sparse skyline of spikes, columns, spheres, paddles, flailing arms. The arrangement seemed appropriate enough: Billy wouldn’t have expected Wrobleski to be growing petunias.

  Something more surprising was in the center of the conservatory: a horizontal, glass-topped display case that took up a good amount of the space. At first Billy thought it was a model village, something a kid might have played with, but a second look showed it was something more serious than that. It looked as if it belonged in a museum: detailed and carefully constructed. And he saw now that it wasn’t a village but a whole island, shaped like a leg of lamb, surrounded by a blue resin sea.

  Wrobleski’s explanation—“It’s a raised relief map of Iwo Jima”—didn’t help, but Billy said nothing, and things got no clearer when he saw there was a woman in the conservatory, draped diagonally across a rattan sofa, reading a thick, unwieldy fashion magazine. She looked young, and her heavy makeup and overelaborate hair didn’t make her appear any older. A tiger-print dress and some discarded stripper shoes only emphasized the sense that she was playing dress-up. There was a bright pink cocktail on a low table beside her.

  “This is Laurel,” said Wrobleski. “Some people might say she’s a filthy, gold-digging slut. But I’d never say a thing like that.”