53
EYEBROW MASTER CLASS
When Mik and Zuzana stepped into the lobby of the St. Regis grand hotel in Rome, several conversations ceased, a bellhop did a double take, and an elegant matron with a silver bob and surgical cheekbones raised a hand to her pearls and scanned the lobby for security.
Backpackers did not stay at the St. Regis.
Ever.
And these backpackers, they looked… well, it wasn’t easy to put into words. Someone extremely insightful might say they looked as though they had been living in caves, and then been through a battle, perhaps even ridden here astride a monster.
In fact, they had flown by private jet from Marrakesh, but one could be excused for not guessing as much; leaving Tamnougalt in such a hurry, they hadn’t had a chance to take advantage of the shower, and they had no clean clothes between them, and it’s likely that neither had ever been quite this unsightly in their entire lives.
It was presumed, by patrons and staff, that they were going to ask to use a restroom—as, every once in a while, this did happen, the underclasses being ill-educated in the rules—and then most likely filth it up by bathing themselves in the sink. Wasn’t that what these people did?
The doorman who had admitted them kept his eyes fixed on the floor, aware that he had committed a cardinal sin in allowing hoi polloi to breach the perimeter. No doubt, in bygone days, guards had been put to death for just this offense. But what could he do? They claimed to be guests.
Behind the reception desk, the clerks exchanged gladiatorial glances. Do you want to take them, or shall I?
A champion stepped forth.
“May I help you?”
The words spoken may have been: May I help you, but the tone was something more along the lines of: It is my unbearable duty to interact with you, and I intend to punish you for it.
Zuzana turned to meet her challenger. She saw before her a young Italian woman, mid-twenties, sleekly attractive and just as sleekly dressed. Unamused. Nay, unamusable. The woman’s eyes did a quick flick up and down, flaring with something like indignation when they arrived at Zuzana’s dust-caked zebra platform sneakers, and her mouth puckered into a little knob of distaste. She looked rather as though she were preparing to remove a live slug from her arugula.
“You know,” observed Zuzana, in English, “you’d probably be a lot prettier if you didn’t make that face.”
The face in question froze in place. A nostril-flare suggested that offense was taken. And then, as though in slow motion, one of the woman’s fine, plucked eyebrows ascended toward her hairline.
Game. On.
Zuzana Nováková was a pretty girl. She’d often been compared to a doll, or to a fairy, not just because of her slight stature but also her fine, small face—a happy blending of angles and arcs set under skin clear as porcelain. Delicate chin, rounded cheeks, wide glossy eyes, and, though she would annihilate anyone for suggesting it, somewhat of a Cupid’s bow mouth. All of this cuteness, it was one of nature’s great bait and switches, because… that wasn’t all there was to Zuzana Nováková. Not even a little bit.
Deciding to take her on was akin to a fish deciding idly to gobble up that pretty light bobbing in the shadows and then—OH GOD THE TEETH THE HORROR!—meeting the anglerfish on the other side.
Zuzana didn’t eat people. She withered them. And there in the sparkling marble, crystal, and gilded lobby of one of Rome’s most exclusive luxury hotels, in just under two seconds, Zuzana’s eyebrow taught a master class. Its rise was something to behold. The sweep of it, the arch. Contempt, amusement, amused contempt, confidence, judgment, mockery, even pity. It was all there, and more. Her eyebrow communicated directly with the Italian woman’s eyebrow, somehow telling it, We have not stumbled in here to bathe in your sink. You have miscalculated. Tread lightly.
And the eyebrow conveyed the message to its owner, whose mouth promptly lost its slug-in-the-arugula pucker, and even before Mik interceded to say, mildly, almost apologetically, “We’re staying in the Royal Suite?” she was tasting the first sour hint of her mortification.
“The… Royal Suite?”
The Royal Suite at the St. Regis had hosted monarchs and rock legends, oil sheiks and opera divas. It cost nearly $20,000 a night during ordinary times, and these were not ordinary times. Rome was currently center of the world’s attention, filled to the rafters with pilgrims, journalists, foreign delegations, curiosity-seekers, and crazies, and there simply were no vacancies. Families were renting out balconies and cellars—even rooftops—at a premium, and the already overtaxed police were having a time breaking up pilgrim camps in the parks.
Zuzana and Mik didn’t know how much this was costing Karou—or her fake grandmother, Esther, or whoever was footing the bill. Ordinarily, such extravagance would have made them feel awkward and small, peasants in the presence of gentry. Indeed, it would make them feel exactly as this woman had intended them to feel. But not today. In light of recent experience, these insulated, rarified people put Zuzana in mind of expensive shoes kept in their box the three hundred and sixty-two days of the year when they weren’t being worn. Wrapped in tissue, safe from harm, and all they knew of life was gala events and the inside of the box. How dull. How dumb. By contrast, the grime of her journey, the outré inappropriateness of the state of her, it felt like armor.
I earned this dirt.
Respect. The dirt.
“That’s right,” she said. “The Royal Suite. You’ll be expecting us.” She shrugged her backpack off and let it fall to the floor, its pores emitting a satisfying puff of dirt on impact. “It would be great if you could take care of that,” she said, yawning. She raised her arms straight up in the air to stretch out her shoulders, less because they needed it than because this would reveal her pit stains in their full glory. There were, she knew, actual concentric circles stained into them from multiple sweatings. They looked like tree rings and were queerly meaningful to her. She had produced them by living through a dark fairy tale that… that others may not have lived through.
This shirt would never be washed.
“Of course,” said the woman, and her voice was the shed hull of a voice now. It was funny, watching her struggle against her overwhelming facial impulses to purse her lips or frown, wrinkle her nose or practice that half-lidded, steely I judge you and find you wanting look that chic Italian women so excel at. She was diminished. Her amateur eyebrow had slunk back to its resting place, where it stayed during the remainder of their transaction, an apostrophe humbled to a comma. In next to no time, Mik and Zuzana were being led to an elevator. Subsequently elevated. Ushered down a preposterously plush hallway. To be reunited with the rest of their party.
54
FAKE GRANDMOTHER
For practical purposes, they had parted at Ciampino Airport on the outskirts of Rome, where the jet chartered by Esther had set them down. Zuzana and Mik had disembarked from the flight—the only passengers on the manifest—and gone through the Customs and Immigration lines like human beings while the others did a vanishing act right out the door of the plane. They’d headed straight for the hotel as the crow flies, while Mik and Zuze took a cab to meet them there.
In the living room of the suite, awaiting their arrival, Karou was tucked up on a sofa of embroidered lime floral silk. On the gilded table before her rested a map of Vatican City, an open laptop, and a towering sculpture of real fruit, pineapple included—as if you could just pick that up and take a bite. Karou kept eyeing the grapes, but was afraid of touching them and toppling the whole extravaganza.
“Take them if you want them,” said her fake grandmother, Esther Van de Vloet, who sat beside her, stroking, with one bare foot, the muscled back of the massive dog stretched out before her.
Esther, though magnificently wealthy, was not of the breed of magnificently wealthy older women to preserve their youth by way of a doctor’s knife, or keep a joyless diet for the sake of bony elegance, or wear stiff designer clothes better suited to mannequins.
She was dressed in jeans with a tunic dress she’d picked up at a street market, while her white hair was secured in a slightly messy chignon. She was no ascetic, as was evidenced by the pastry in her hand and the comfortable curvature of h*ps and breasts. Her youth—or, more accurately, her seeming age of seventy, when she was, in fact, well into her thirteenth decade—was preserved not by surgery or diet but by way of a wish.
A bruxis, that most powerful of wishes, dearly paid for, and only once in a lifetime. And what most of Brimstone’s traders spent their bruxes on was just this: long life. It was not known precisely how long was long. Karou knew one Malay hunter who had been going on a spry two hundred last she’d seen him. It seemed to come down to a matter of will. Most people grew tired of outliving everyone. For Esther’s part, she said she didn’t know how many more generations of dogs she could bear to bury.
The current iteration were still young and in the prime of health. They were called Traveller and Methuselah, for the horses, respectively, of generals Lee and Grant. All of Esther’s mastiffs were named after warhorses. This was her sixth pair, and she had finally deigned to honor the Americans.
Karou eyed the fruit tower. “But it probably took someone hours to build that thing.”
“And we’ve paid well for their labors. Eat.”
Karou took some grapes and was glad that the sculpture didn’t topple.
“You will have to learn to enjoy money now, my dear,” said Esther, as though Karou were an initiate into this life of luxury, and she her guide. In addition to other Karou-related favors Esther had performed for Brimstone over the years—enrolling her in schools, faking identity documents for her, etcetera—she’d been instrumental in setting up her many bank accounts, and surely knew Karou’s net worth better than Karou did herself. “Lesson one: We don’t worry about how our fruit sculptures are built. We just eat them.”
“I won’t have to learn, actually,” said Karou. “I’m not staying here.”
Esther glanced around the room. “You don’t like the St. Regis?”
Karou followed her glance. It was an assault on the senses, as though the designer had been charged to manifest the concept of “opulence” in four or five hundred square feet. High, coved ceiling trimmed in coffered gold. Red velvet drapes that belonged in a vampire’s boudoir, gilded everything, a grand piano with tiered silver dishes of biscotti set out on its gleaming lid. There was even an enormous tapestry of a coronation hanging on the wall, some king or other kneeling to receive his crown. “Well, no,” she admitted. “Not especially. But I mean Earth. I’m not staying.”
Esther favored her with a slow blink, perhaps taking that instant to imagine leaving behind such a fortune as was Karou’s. “Indeed. Well. Considering the piece of paradise in there”—she nodded her head toward the adjacent sitting room—“I can’t say I blame you.” Esther was… impressed… with Akiva. “Oh my,” she’d whispered when Karou had introduced them. She said now, “Not that I would know, but I suppose one would give up a great deal for love.”
Karou had said nothing about love, but she couldn’t say she was surprised to find out it was obvious. “I don’t feel like I’m giving anything up,” she said honestly. Her life in Prague was already as remote as a dream. She knew there would be days when she missed Earth, but for now, her mind and heart were wholly engaged in the affairs of Eretz, its shrouded present—Dear Nitid, or godstars, or anyone, please let our friends live—and its tenuous future. And yes, as Esther intimated, Akiva was a big part of it.
“Well. You can enjoy wealth for now, at least,” said Esther. “Tell me the bath wasn’t lovely.”
Karou conceded that it had been. The bathroom was larger than her entire Prague apartment, and every square inch of it marble. She’d just emerged; her hair was damp and fragrant on her shoulders.
She took up the map, flattening it out on the couch between them. “So,” she said, “where are the angels being housed?”
Karou’s plan was ultimately very simple, so there wasn’t much she needed to know beyond where to find Jael. Vatican City might be small as sovereign nations go, but it made for a hell of a scavenger hunt if you just showed up there and started going through rooms.
Esther stabbed a bitten nail at the Papal Palace. “Here,” she said. “The lap of luxury.” She knew which windows would give the closest access to the Sala Clementina, the grand audience hall Jael had been given for his personal use, and she knew where the guards were likely to be stationed, both the Swiss Guards and the angels’ own contingent. Her finger dragged over to the Vatican Museum, too, where the bulk of the host were quartered in a wing of ancient sculpture where once upon a normal life, Karou had whiled away an afternoon sketching.
“Thanks,” said Karou. “That’s a big help.”
“Of course,” said Esther, settling back into the prissy sofa. “Anything for my favorite fake granddaughter. Now tell me, how is Brimstone, and when is he reopening the portals? I really miss the old monster.”
Me, too, thought Karou, her heart instantly icing over. She’d been dreading this moment the whole journey here. On the phone, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell the truth. The manner of Esther’s greeting had been so unexpectedly effusive—“Oh thank god! Where have you been, child? I’ve been worried sick. Months, and no word from you at all. How could you not call me?”—that it had thrown Karou for a loop. She’d acted like a real grandmother, or at least how Karou imagined a real grandmother might act, spilling emotion willy-nilly, whereas before she’d always seemed to dole it out like allowance: on a schedule, and with some measure of reluctance.