“I really need a cigarette,” said Wingate.

I

NTERLUDE

He lay on the bed watching her. She moved toward him slowly, shifting her hips from side to side. She knew how beautiful she was, what happened to men when their eyes fell on her. She liked the feeling. It was the one area of her life where she felt like she had complete control.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“Do you like me?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to do to me?”

“Whatever you’ll let me.”

She laughed and crept up onto the bed, catlike. “Maybe I’ll only let you look.”

“That would be enough,” he said, reaching for her.

She collapsed against him and pressed her lips hard against his. It was Reading Week, and they had nine full days in his apartment, the outside world was gone, forgotten. Exams had nearly killed her and she was ready to be coddled. She let Matthieu do all the cooking, he ran her bath, he read to her from Gogol in his rotten Russian, making her laugh, filling her with delight.

“How can you study Russian for as long as you have and still have such an awful accent, Matthieu?”

“It makes you laugh, my darling. If it did not make you laugh, I would do it properly.”

“Your tutor does not approve.”

“My tutor is off this week. This week I tutor the tutor. In other matters.”

They made love in the kitchen, on the floor of his living room, in the bathtub. He fit the cliché of the Frenchman: experienced, fearless, possessed of immense stamina. He wore her out. During the school year she had to be careful: he left her drained and hollow and she hardly had the mind for her schoolwork afterwards. She was in her last year of nursing, and the final exams were in May. She’d kept a high average for all three years of the course, and she hoped that when she finished, she would find a good job in one of the rehab facilities in Lviv. She’d been a runner in high school and had missed a scholarship to the university when she injured herself, tearing a hamstring and blowing out a knee. She’d recovered excellently, and while going back and forth to her physical therapy, she’d met the most wonderful and caring people. They’d nursed her expertly and lovingly back to health. By the end of it all, eight weeks of going twice weekly, she had begun to run again, lightly, knowing she’d never compete.

There were many more patients much worse off than her, though, and it was watching these men and women – victims of car accidents, falls, industrial mishaps, diseases like ALS and Parkinson’s – that gradually convinced her that she could lead another kind of life. She talked it over with her friends, and her boyfriend at the time, and he encouraged her. The next year, she enrolled as a student at the Lviv State University of Physical Culture.

She’d felt bad for her ex, Oleg. She knew they weren’t going to last, and when she met Matthieu through the tutoring program in her second year, she let him down as easily as she could, but he’d been destroyed. Matthieu had helped her deal with the stress of having a depressed ex, and she’d appreciated it, but finally she’d had to be hard on Oleg and tell him she didn’t want to hear from him anymore.

She was thinking of Matthieu as she lay on the hard bed in a motel outside of Kehoe River. She’d doubled back a ways and would have to be more in the open for her final act. She needed to rest again: despite her freedom, it only renewed her to a point. The weeks of mistreatment had worn her down. She didn’t know if the nausea she’d been feeling was psychological – killing was not something that she’d ever imagined herself capable of – or just the fact that she’d eaten real food for the first time in more than two months. She was spent, mentally and physically, and she knew she was going to have to be sharp to get to the end of this. She had figured out where her next destination was, and it was close to here. It had taken forty minutes by car to get there from the rooms, but in this town, she was closer. She was going to have to have an airtight plan, or she was going to get recaptured, either by whatever law was certainly on her by now or, worse, by Bochko. Bochko would kill her slowly. He would hold her up in the air with one arm, as he had done before to her and some of the other girls, and crush the bones in her neck with his thumbs until she died, his inscrutable, curious stare studying her like she was a small, natural phenomenon. She’d get Bochko if she had the chance, but if it didn’t come up before she got away, she’d have to live with it. Maybe one of the girls would get lucky one day and tear the eyes out of his head.

What was troubling her right now was the fact that, at the motel she’d stayed in, she’d finally had a chance to check her email and there was nothing from Matthieu, which confirmed for her the worst fears she’d had. Because, who writes to a dead woman?

How could she have been so blind? Something this ominous she should have been able to pick up in another person. How could she have been so blind with love for so long that he could have done this to her? The idea to come to Canada had been his, and he’d taken care of many of the details. He’d even paid for the trip. Now she wondered how well Bochko had repaid him. Even as she followed these dread thoughts, another arose: what if Matthieu had done nothing? And what if, to cover their tracks, her captors had harmed him? She swung back and forth between rage and anxiety. If he were innocent, his silence was ominous. If he were not, then one day she would confront him and know the truth. Just from the look in his eyes.

Matthieu was a problem for later, however, and she made herself focus on the present. You are Larysa Kirilenko, you are a graduate nursing student from Ukraine. When you go home, you will restart your life, and none of this will have happened. She was glad, for the first time ever, that her mother was dead. The thought that she would have to lie to her about her tribulations here was devastating to think of. Of course, her silence would have told her mother volumes. She imagined the nervous breakdown, and was grateful her mother wouldn’t suffer it. She hadn’t spoken to her father in years: her mother’s death had accelerated his alcoholism, and she had given up on him in her late teens. She would not want to – or need to – rely on him for anything.

It couldn’t have been Matthieu. She knew when she was loved. You don’t spend almost a year with a person, sharing every intimacy, laughing and crying with them, and not notice some small detail that would make them capable of betrayal of the kind she’d suffered. That’s not something that happens behind the scenes, something you hide from a person whose body you’ve treated with such worshipful attention.

A man had been at the airport in Toronto, in the arrivals area, holding a sign with her name on it. She’d been very impressed. “Was this Matthieu’s doing?” she’d asked him in English as he opened the limo door.

“Of course,” the man had said.

“Such a good man Matthieu is,” she said in her still-rudimentary English.

As he drove her away to her fate, she could not have known that the man – whom she would learn to call Earl in the coming weeks – was driving her far from her supposed destination.

She had suffered greatly in the ten weeks she’d spent in the underground rooms, but nothing had preyed on her mind more savagely than not knowing if Matthieu was the person she’d thought he was. And it had been his memory that had kept her going all this time!

She pushed herself off the bed and walked hunched to the bathroom. What wouldn’t she do for a nice bathroom, with a warmed tile floor and a bidet. Oh god, a bidet would be a blessing, better than a cold bottle of rosé, like Matthieu had promised her the first night they were in Paris together.