The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [20]
Charlotte slid a fifty under her glass. “I wish I could see it that way, Anna. I really do. But my clients aren’t half as generous or interesting as yours.” Cajoling Anna off her stool, she pointed towards the door. “And now it’s time for bed, my friend. For both of us.”
Picking her way through the group of raucous smokers who stood on the sidewalk outside, Charlotte hailed a cab. Opening the door, she protected Anna’s head with her hand and guided her, gently, into the backseat. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said.
“Si cara, domani!” Anna replied with a stiff little wave of her wrist as Charlotte turned and began to walk briskly home. She’d had three martinis with Anna. Two was her usual limit. But sometimes she had to bend the rules. The cold, harsh air slowly sobered her up. She even stopped on Grand Street and raised her eyes towards the full moon. Like most New Yorkers, Charlotte never looked up. She focused on what was ahead or beneath her.
All great bars cast a spell, she thought, searching vaguely for a star. And it wasn’t just the alcohol. At the Temple, it was the comfort of darkness, the satiny gleam of polished woods, the glitter of glass bottles lined up like little soldiers against the bar. It was the illusion of order, she decided. That and the captivatingly odd but seductive combination of intimacy and anonymity. This is what had almost bewitched Charlotte into telling Anna about her missions.
The minute she walked into her apartment, she rushed over to her answering machine. No blinking red light. What did it mean if the doctor hadn’t called? Was he still waiting for results from the lab? Part of her wasn’t sure that she wanted to know what had been found on the sonogram. She’d lived with the pain this long, she figured, and it hadn’t killed her. But she had no appetite, no energy. All she wanted to do was to crawl into bed and sleep.
Hauling herself towards the bedroom, she grabbed a washcloth from the bathroom, soaked it in ice-cold water, and climbed in between the fresh, cool sheets. Worrying was useless. She’d have to think about something else. She’d think about Pavel.
Anna had seated her next to him at one of her dinners at home. “I’m not matchmaking, cara. I just know you’ll like him.”
Her friend was right. The two of them had talked nonstop, right through dessert. Charlotte liked everything about Pavel. He was stunning: tall and all muscle, the only man who had ever picked her straight up off the ground when he hugged her goodbye. Charlotte was not accustomed to being hugged. With a head of disheveled white hair and eyes as blue as anti-freeze, he wore a dark wool Brioni suit that fit so impeccably, it looked as if it had been born on him.
Unlike Paul, Pavel wasn’t just a nice piece of arm candy. Charlotte was in awe of the Russian’s recklessness, his resilience. The story of his success, or the story he chose to tell her, was full of gaping holes and mystery, of exaggerations that seemed almost as ridiculous as his realities and truths.
According to Pavel, since the Iron Curtain had come down in 1991, he had survived a burning building (his own), a sinking ship (also his own), the threat of being shot down over Uzbekistan, and other disasters too numerous to name. “This is why I have white hair, Charlotte. My white hair is the history of all of Russia since Glasnost.” But no one laughed more uproariously at his own disasters than Pavel. And she admired him for that, too. Everything about Pavel, including his physical size, made other people’s lives seem puny, insignificant.
“I’m warning you, Charlotte,” Anna had said to her later as they washed up the dishes in her tiny kitchen. “The