The Daily Novel

*    *    *

Fifteen minutes later, DJ came. He walked in with nothing but a small bag and a well-worn brown leather jacket to a hail of greetings.

He came into the kitchen, Tally close behind.

“Junie,” he said, and he smiled warmly, genuinely glad to see me, I think. I hope.

“Hey.”

“Where’s Gwen?”

“The roof.”

“Really.” He smiled. This seemed fine with him.

“Nice to see you, Dru,” Dru said. “Been a long time, Dru. Hope things are well, Dru. Thanks for having us over.”

“So neglected,” he said and hugged her, hard, brought his mouth close to her ear and half kissed, half whispered some kind of secret. She nodded.

DJ threw his bag into a corner. It landed limp and heavy. He popped back and sat on the counter.

“Drusilla,” Tally said. “You. I leave you for a month and you fall apart. What happened to your hair?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Busy,” she said. “With what?”

“Work,” Dru said.

Tally laughed and hugged her, kissed her squarely, though quickly, on the mouth.

“You taste like oranges.”

“How was the former Soviet Union?”

“Eh,” Tally said. “Same as always.”

“I am truly glad we won the Cold War.”

“Not again with the Cold War,” Tally said. She brushed the space between them with the back of her hand. “Am glad you won too, because if it had gone on any longer I would have personally crushed you with the boot of Soviet socialism and oppressed you with glee.” She ruffled Dru’s hair. “Your beautiful hair. So flat.”

It was about that time that a billionaire came rappelling down the face of the building to a hail of laughter and applause. This is a moment not oft enjoyed. “They really are on the roof,” DJ said. “Huh.”

We went to the balcony, DJ and Tally and Dru. A second rope hissed through the air as it fell, and Jim came sliding down on it. He landed lightly on the concrete railing and then pushed off again, down to the streetlevel.

This is where things get a little hazy. I’d been drinking martinis all night and hadn’t had anything to eat except olives, and so when Colin said, “You should try this, Junie,” it seemed like a pretty good idea to me.

“I don’t know how,” I said.

“You just hang on, and let the rope out slowly, and ride it down. I’ll show you.” He worked his way out of the harness.

I think now, in retrospect, that I’m bothered that no one tried to stop me. I’m certain that Dru was making a very suspicious sort of face, and Tally was probably nodding and smiling out of one side of her mouth with that Russian stoicism, like, “She’ll die, and that will teach her a lesson.” And DJ was probably thrilled because I was doing something frankly insane.

What happened was, I put on the harness and put on these gloves, and Colin said, “Now don’t let go of the rope. If you do, you’ll fall an’ die, right?”

“Right.”

He showed me what to do, that hand here, this hand there, that sort of thing.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“Sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Four martinis in quick succession gave me the bottled courage to stand up on the railing and lean back, and then, for about a second and a half I was falling, and also screaming, until I just jerked to a stop, my hand clutching the rope. I don’t know how it happened.

“You let go,” Colin yelled down.

I was screaming.

“You have to let it out slowly.”

Still screaming.

I was level with the floor below. A man and a woman in pajamas stepped out onto their balcony. The woman held a mug of something and sipped it calmly, smiled tersely. I was swinging with my shins even with the concrete railing. I didn’t notice then, through the adrenaline, that I’d cut one badly.

“So, one of Drusilla’s friends, then?” the man asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Huh,” he said. “Nice night.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe,” the woman said, “if you could just turn the music down a smidge.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sorry.”

“What did they say?” Colin said from above.

“Turn the music down a little.”

“Turn the music down,” Colin said. “Right. Is that better?”

The woman nodded and smiled again.

“Well, um. Have a good one,” the man said and they walked back inside.

“Now ease off on the rope,” Colin said. “Slowly.”

I did. Very slowly. Down to the street where Jim was standing, laughing still from watching me nearly plummet to my motherloving death.

*    *    *

It was around midnight when things went quiet, and people were high on pot and cocktails, in various states of jetlag.

Gwen and Jim sat together on one end of the couch, kissing slowly—snogging, as she would have said. Yes. Having a right fine snog.

I stumbled through the back hallway to the bedrooms and heard a little moaning from behind a closed door. I stopped to listen for a second. Maybe two, maybe three. But no more.

I was nearly to the bathroom and heard DJ through another door that wasn’t entirely closed, and heard Dru sounding very serious, and they were talking about the Netherlands. Dru was saying no, and DJ was saying yes, and Tally was telling Dru not to be ridiculous.

Another voice, one I didn’t recognize, with a dense accent, quieted the rest and said, “Lou catched Sergio in Brussels. They look for you safehouse, and now they find. Or kill Serg looking. Got to close up shop for reals. They close for you first if you don’t.”

“We can’t,” Dru said. “We can’t go back to Zandvoort now. Lou is over the edge. He’s a killer on top of it. We need to stay well away from Holland.”

“No,” DJ said. “Lou is dangerous, but he’s also an idiot. If he finds the room, he’ll use it. And anything Lou touches turns to shit. And when they catch him, they’ll flip him, and we’ll be next.”

“Then we need to disappear,” she said.

“We can’t run from this.”

“Watch me.”

Colin Doyle was there too, and I heard him say one thing, which was, “Dru, you can’t run.” And I remember it because it scared me.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I must have been drunk, because I opened the door and walked in.

They stopped, dead silent, and DJ was the only one to smile. They sat on the floor, all but Colin, who sat at a desk chair. The room looked like an office, but Dru hadn’t given me a tour or anything. She stood and walked out. She looked at me once as she brushed past, and I know she was trying to tell me something, some notion, a bit of advice, but it was lost on me and my head of many cocktails.

“Is your leg all right?” DJ said.

“Yes. I think it’s fine.”

“You should change your bandage,” Tally said. “It is bleeding through.”

“Maybe we should go to the hospital,” DJ said.

“No,” Colin said. “I’ve seen worse and I’ve had worse than that. They’d just give her stitches she doesn’t need and charge her five hundred dollars. It’s a racket.”

“You have a billion dollars in the bank, Colin,” DJ said. “What’s five hundred? You pay and she won’t have a scar.”

“I have six billion five or more. And I got that way because I’m cheap where it counts. And scars are good for the soul.”

“What were you guys talking about?”

“Taking a trip maybe,” Tally said.

“Definitely taking a trip,” DJ said.

“Where?”

“Don’t know yet,” Colin said.

“When?”

“We do not know when,” Tally said.

“O.K.”

I went across the hall to the bathroom, and when I came back they’d scattered back to the living room.

I didn’t smoke as a habit, but I did sometimes after, during, and before drinking. I went to the balcony, stood next to Dru, and without asking she tapped one out of her pack and lit it for me. I started smoking in college, to lose weight and make new friends, and thought that if it weren’t for the cancer, cigarettes would be great.

“Where were you talking about going?”

She looked at me, blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. “Somewhere else,” she said.

“What’s in Zandvoort?”

She looked at me with a twitch of her head. She didn’t answer.

“You people keep a lot of secrets,” I said.

She shrugged. “Too many to keep track of, Junie.”

“Why?”

“Another secret.”

“What are you into? What am I into, for chrissake? Tell me.”

And she would have. She was about to, I could see it in her eyes, lips parted, no more secrets between us.

But DJ slid the door open and stepped out.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. She flicked the cigarette out into the dark.

“So soon?” He leaned against the railing next to me.

“I’m tired. I’m just tired. Happy birthday, Junie.”

“It’s not my birthday yet.”

She shook her head and went inside. She stepped over a sleeping Dutch hippy and disappeared into the back hall.

“Nice of Dru to have us all over,” he said.

“I don’t think she meant for so many people to show up.”

“I suppose not. But she needs a little excitement in her life.”

“Elephant Jumping isn’t enough?”

“Sometimes, no.”

He moved closer to me, put himself between me and the wind. “You didn’t happen to bring your passport, did you?”

I had. At the last moment, I thought it might be a good idea. Flying to see a group of international travel junkies, it just seemed like common sense.”

“I did,” I said. “Funny you should mention it.”

“Imagine that.”

“It has exactly one stamp in it, from the time I went to Canada.” Once, a long time ago, when I was in college, I ordered a passport because I thought it would be cosmopolitan to have one. But a passport with a single Canadian stamp is, in my opinion, actually quite pitiful. Your friends will only laugh at you.

“You look tired,” he said. “But beautiful. Don’t get me wrong.”

“Flirt.”

He moved closer, and we looked at each other for a while. Surface tension, initial friction. Why is it so hard? I knew what he wanted, and I wanted it too. So why?

It went on forever, then a little longer, until he leaned in and we kissed. He was just that little bit taller, so he had to bend his neck, you know what I mean? That sexy move from old movies. He took me by the chin and tipped his head and kissed me. Just the right amount of pressure, just the right amount of lip contact, then we parted, and when we came back together after looking at each other and verifying the green light to proceed, just the right amount of tongue.

Now I’m going to read this paragraph again. Hold on….

O.K. On second glance, I don’t mean for it to sound so mechanical. That’s just a straight description of what happened. What I was thinking was entirely different. What I was thinking was something like, Take me into the bedroom and get me naked and let’s get wet!

Raunchy though it may be, that was my first instinct.

But it was my second instinct that won over that night. It was the second wave of passion and feeling that came over me. It was something like a warm hum, and then a burn and it was something like love.

We went inside, hand in hand, and went to an empty couch by the mock fireplace and we sat, and I cuddled into him, and we fit perfectly I might add, and I kissed his neck and he kissed mine, and that was as far as it went. Our lips together in the night, hot breath between us, his arms around me, and if that isn’t love, then I don’t care what love is, because I want this instead. We slept together that way, and his skin smelled of leather and mint, and it was sweet.

And that was as far as it went.

*    *    *

“Get up,” Dru said. She was rocking me. I was stuffed into the corner of the couch and alone. “Never made it to bed last night?” She clicked. Tsk-tsk.

“No.”

“You’d better do him up soon, Junie, or his blue balls’ll fall straight off.”

I laughed. That was nice. It was the first time in my entire history that I woke up laughing.

“Now listen to me.” She sat next to me, took my hand, and played with it as she spoke, touching my fingertips to hers. It’s a nervous habit, I think. “You have to choose.”

“Choose what.”

“You know what.”

“I don’t.”

“They want you to come. But you don’t have to. You can walk away. Take Gwen and go home.”

“I don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Does it matter?”

I didn’t need to think long. Through a fuzzy head and the persistence of gin I suppose I’d already made up my mind.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Because you’d follow him anywhere,” she said, like it was old hat, like she’d been through all of this before. “Fine.” She kissed my hand.

“But where are we going?”

“The Dam,” she said.