Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [245]
“Ms. Andrews, you’re the glass of fashion and the mould of form,” says Boyce.
Roz spreads her hands wide, raises her shoulders, pulls down the corners of her mouth. “Tell me,” she says. “What are my options?”
Men in overcoats come to visit. They want to know a lot of things about Zenia. Which of her three passports is real, if any. Where she actually came from. What she was doing.
Tony is informative, Charis vague; Roz is careful, because she doesn’t want Larry involved. But she needn’t have worried, because none of these men seems to be the least interested in Larry. What they are interested in is Zenia’s two packed suitcases, left neatly on the bed, one of them with eleven little plastic bags of white powder in them, or so they say. A twelfth bag was open, beside the phone. Not nose candy either: heroin, and ninety per cent pure. They look out from their immobile faces, their eyes like intelligent pebbles, watching for twinges, for hints of guilty knowledge.
They are also interested in the needle found on the balcony, they continue, and in the fact that Zenia died of an overdose before even hitting the water. Could she have been trying the stuff out, without knowing the unusual strength of what she was buying, or selling? There were track marks on her left arm, although they looked old. According to the overcoats, there have been more and more overdoses like that; someone is flooding the market with high-octane product, and even the experienced aren’t prepared.
There were nobody’s fingerprints on the needle, except Zenia’s, they tell her. As for her swan dive into the fountain, she could have fallen. She was a tall woman, and the sheet-metal balcony railings were really too low for safety; standards should be improved. Such a thing is possible. If she’d been leaning over. On the other hand, the heroin could have been a plant. It might have been murder.
Or it might have been suicide, Tony tells them. She would like them to believe this. She tells them that Zenia may not have been a well person.
Of course, say the men in overcoats politely. We know about that. We found the prescriptions in her suitcase, we traced the doctor. Seems she had a fake health card as well as some fake passports, but the disease itself was real enough. Six months to live: ovarian cancer. But there was no suicide note.
Tony tells them there wouldn’t have been: Zenia was not really the note-writing kind.
The men in overcoats look at her, their small eyes glinting with scepticism. They don’t buy any of these theories, but they don’t have another one, not one that holds water.
Tony sees how it will be: Zenia will prove too smart for the men in overcoats. She will outfox them, just as she’s always outfoxed everyone else. She finds herself being pleased about this, elated even, as if her faith in Zenia – a faith she didn’t realize she had – is being vindicated. Let them sweat! Why should everyone know everything? It’s not as if there are no precedents: history teems with people who died in unclear ways.
Still, she feels honour-bound to report the conversation about Gerry Bull and Project Babylon, although it’s not merely honour that impels her: she hopes very much that if Zenia was murdered it was by professionals, rather than by anyone she knows. The men tell her they are retracing Zenia’s steps, as best they can, via her plane tickets; she has certainly been in some very odd places in the last little while. But there’s nothing conclusive. They shake hands and depart, asking Tony to call them if she hears anything else. She says she will.
She’s left facing the unlikely possibility that all three of Zenia’s most recent stories – or parts of them, at least – may have been true. What if Zenia’s cries for help really were cries for help, this time?
After the police are finished there is a cremation. Roz pays for it, because when she tracks down the lawyer, the one who arranged Zenia’s funeral the first time around, he is quite annoyed. He takes it as a personal slight that Zenia has chosen to be alive all this time without