The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [116]
She didn’t finish cleaning until after sunrise, but still she felt incredible. Her apartment, like the day, was clean and new. It still needed some stuff—nicer window curtains, a paint job—but she knew she could knock these things out in short order, and for now it would certainly serve. This place was only a stopover, as Javier had said, but it didn’t have to be an unpleasant one. She could barely wait for him to see it. Maybe when he did, she thought, he’d feel so at home he’d want to move in, at least until they got new jobs and could afford something better. She wished he could see it right now. She was tempted to go across town to the Pangloss, where it turned out he’d been staying all this time, and drag him back over here to take a look. But he’d told her he had some things to take care of—it was time for him to prepare himself for the future, he said—and they’d made plans for lunch at the hotel in two days. The prospect of the wait disappointed her a little but also made her feel glad, glad to know that he, too, was taking care of things, putting things in order. And soon they could face the world together, look for work together, take Eeven to the zoo and baseball games together, help each other rebuild their lives. She didn’t even care whether they’d be lovers. They could be friends. That would be fine, too. He was a good friend. He hadn’t abandoned her. Just like he’d promised he wouldn’t the morning after they first made love.
She was trying to decide upon the most productive way of spending her day when Couch called and implored her to drop everything and come have lunch with him. He said it was urgent, critical, an absolute emergency. His tone of voice was playfully mock-nervous, purposely undermining the words, as though deriding the very notion that a hardened sophisticate like himself could get worked up about his job. In the end she opted to trust the words rather than the tone and agreed to meet him.
“Earth to Ursula,” Couch says now, passing a hand back and forth in front of her. “Do I assume wrong? I think I do. You haven’t been watching, have you? Ivy’s destroying the money. Destroying it.”
He forks the dark, oily leaves into his mouth, smiling as he chews.
“Sure,” she says. “She lights her cigarettes with twenty-dollar bills.”
“Oh, no no no,” he says with a little laugh. “You haven’t been paying attention lately. That’s just her warm-up routine, now. For her main act she’s making little campfires out of twenty-dollar bills and setting them ablaze with her big gold lighter. She’s making little stacks of twenty-dollar bills to try and see how many she can tear in half at once. And if you tune in at just the right time, you can see her wipe her little behind with twenty-dollar bills and flush them down the toilet!”
“That must be quite entertaining,” Ursula says.
“ ‘Entertaining,’ that it is. It is that,” Couch agrees, dredging a piece of bread through an olive-oil slick on his plate. A woman with jet-black hair wearing a long, blood-red smock takes a seat beside him on a small folding stool and begins rubbing an alcohol pad on his left bicep as he eats. Her nose is rhinoplasted, long but scooped the way only short noses are naturally.
“But it gets better,” he goes on, his mouth full of food. “The other day a couple of FBI agents came by the office. They’re mad as hell!”
Ursula looks up. “FBI agents?”
“They’re threatening to lock Chas up!”
Couch beams at her with delight, and she feels herself returning the smile, a sudden, dizzying lightness taking hold of her.
“They are?” she asks.
He nods.
She can’t believe it. Someone is finally coming to help.
“So they really think what he’s doing to Ivy is illegal?” she asks.
Couch guffaws. “Oh, now, that’s good you think that. That’s so very good of you. But to answer your question, hell no,