Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [216]
“You saw Zenia today,” says Charis.
Roz’s mouth opens. “How did you know?” she says.
“Because, so did I,” says Charis.
“And so did I,” says Tony.
Roz sits heavily down, and stares at each one of them in turn. “All right,” she says. “Tell.”
Tony waits in the lobby of the Arnold Garden Hotel, which would not have been her own hotel of choice. It’s a graceless fifties construction, cement slabs on the outside and a lot of plate glass. From her vantage point she can see out through the double doors at the back, into a patio dotted with chunky planters and with a large circular fountain off in one corner, non-functional at this time of year and overlooked by tiers of balconies with orange-painted sheet-metal railings. The post-modern awning and brass at the front is just an add-on: the essence of the Arnold Garden is those balconies. Though efforts are being made: above Tony looms a prehensile arrangement of purplish dried flowers and wires and strange pods, daring the aesthetically uninitiated to call it ugly.
The patio and the fountain must be the garden part of the Arnold Garden, Tony decides; but she wonders about the Arnold. Is it Arnold as in Matthew, he of the ignorant armies clashing by night? Or Arnold as in Benedict, traitor or hero depending on point of view? Or perhaps it’s a first name, denoting some bygone city councillor, some worthy backroom fixer whose friends called him Arnie. The lobby, with its framed prints of rotund pink-coated foxhunting Englishmen, gives no clue.
The chair Tony sits in is leathery and slippery and built for colossi. Her feet don’t touch the ground even if she moves well forward, and if she slides herself all the way back, then her knees can’t bend over the front edge and her legs stick out stiffly like the legs of a china doll. So she has adopted a compromise – a sort of hunched curvature – but she is far from comfortable.
Also, despite her demure navy blue coat and her sensible walking shoes and her wimpy Peter Pan collar, she feels conspicuous. Her bad intentions must be sticking out all over her. She has the sensation that she’s growing hair, little prickles of it pushing out through the skin of her legs like the quills of a porcupine, hanks of it shoving through in tufts around her ears. It’s Zenia doing this, the effort of tracking Zenia: it’s fusing her neurons, rearranging the molecules in her brain. A hairy white devil is what she’s becoming, a fanged monster. It’s a necessary transformation perhaps, because fire must be fought with fire. But every weapon is two-edged, so there will be a price to pay: Tony won’t get out of this unaltered.
In her outsized tote bag is her father’s Luger, unearthed from the box of Christmas decorations where it’s usually stored, and freshly oiled and loaded according to the instructions in the manual of forties weaponry she photocopied in the library. She took care to wear gloves while photocopying, so as not to leave fingerprints, just in case. In case they try to pin anything on her, afterwards. The gun itself is unregistered, she believes. It is after all a sort of souvenir.
Beside it is another implement. Tony has taken advantage of one of the many tool circulars littering her front lawn to purchase a cordless drill, with screwdriver attachment, at a third off. She has never used one of these before. Also, she’s never used a gun before. But there’s a first time for everything. Her initial idea was that she could use the drill to break into Zenia’s room, if necessary. Unscrew the door hinges, or something. But it occurs to her, sitting here in the lobby, that the drill too is potentially lethal, and might be put to use. If she could murder Zenia with a cordless drill, what policeman would be smart enough to figure it out?
But the actual scenario is unclear in her mind. Maybe she should shoot Zenia first and then finish her off with the drill: the other way around