Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [222]
“Not me,” says Zenia. “But I know who did.”
She’s lighting another cigarette, she’s practically chain-smoking. The air around her is grey, and Tony is slightly dizzy. “The Israelis,” she says. “Because of Iraq.”
“Not the Israelis,” says Zenia quickly. “That’s a red herring. I was there, I was part of the set-up. I was only what you might call the messenger; but you know what happens to messengers.”
Tony does know. “Oh,” she says. “Oh dear.”
“My best chance,” says Zenia eagerly, “is to tell everything to some newspaper. Absolutely everything! Then there won’t be any point in killing me, right? Also I could make a buck, I won’t say that wouldn’t be welcome. But nobody’s going to believe me without proof. Don’t worry, I’ve got the proof; it’s not in this city but it’s on the way. So I figured I could just hole up with you and West until my proof comes through. I know how it’s coming, I know when. I’d be really quiet, I wouldn’t need more than a sleeping bag, I could stay upstairs, in West’s study.…”
Tony snaps to attention. The word West cracks across her mind: that’s the key, that’s what Zenia really wants, and how does Zenia know that West has a study, and that it’s on the third floor? She’s never seen the inside of Tony’s house. Or has she?
Tony stands up. Her legs are wobbling as if she’s just been pulled back from a crumbling cliff-edge. How nearly she was taken in, again! The whole Gerry Bull story is nothing but a huge lie, a custom-designed whopper. Anyone could have cobbled such a thing together just by reading Jane’s Defence Weekly and The Washington Post, and Zenia – knowing Tony’s weaknesses, her taste for new twists in weapons technology – must have done just that.
There is no vendetta, there is no them, nobody’s after Zenia but the bill collector. What she wants is to break into Tony’s castle, her armoured house, her one safe place, and extract West from it as if he were a snail. She wants him fresh and wriggling, speared on the end of her fork.
“I don’t think that will be possible,” says Tony, trying to keep her voice even. “I think I should go now.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” says Zenia. Her face has gone still. “Well, help yourself to some righteous indignation, you little snot. You always were the most awful two-faced hypocrite, Tony. A smug dog-in-the-manger prune-faced little shit with megalomaniac pretensions. You think you have some kind of an adventurous mind, but spare me! At heart you’re a coward, you hole yourself up in that bourgeois playpen of yours with your warped little battle-scars collection, you sit on poor West as if he’s your very own fresh-laid fucking egg! I bet he’s bored out of his skull, with nobody but you to stick his boring dick into! Jesus, it must be like fucking a gerbil!”
Zenia’s suave velvet cloak has dropped away; underneath is raw brutality. This is what a fist sounds like just as it smashes. Tony stands in the middle of the room, her mouth opening and closing. No sound comes out. The glass walls are closing in on her. Wildly she thinks about the gun in her purse, useless, useless: Zenia is right, she could never pull the trigger. All her wars are hypothetical. She’s incapable of real action.
But Zenia’s expression is changing now, from angry to cunning. “You know, I’ve still got that term paper, the one you forged. The Russian slave trade, wasn’t it? Sounds like your brand of displaced sadism, all those paper dead bodies. You’re an armchair necrophiliac, you know that? You should try a real dead body some time! Maybe I’ll just pop that paper in the mail, send it to your precious History Department, stir up some shit for you, a tiny scandal! I’d like that! What price academic integrity?”
Tony feels the blunt objects whizzing past her head, the ground dissolving under her feet. The History Department would be pleased, it would be more