Page 55 of Antihero

“Why keep praying,” he said, “when our prayers have been answered?”

24Utter Fucking Helplessness

Anca remained statue-frozen outside her apartment door, her hand pinched around the backup key she’d inserted into the lock, her head lowered. She’d been motionless for maybe ten seconds. It was like someone had hit pause. Evan stood behind her, waiting.

“Will you…?” Her voice trailed off.

He waited.

“Will you please go inside and check the closets, beneath the bed?”

He said, “Yes.”

He knew no one was inside but that wasn’t the point.

She glanced nervously over a shoulder up the hall. “I’ll come in with you and wait just inside the door.”

She stepped aside and he entered.

Her sparse apartment was scrupulously kept. Couch and love seat protected by plastic covers, dark wood furniture without a speck, counters wiped clean. Inexpensive furnishings and decor were proudly displayed. Frayed kilim rug, chipped bowl atop tattered tablecloth, profoundly mediocre floral still life, sun-faded and framed in shiny black plastic, everything maintained with the temperance of someone who’d inherited the rigors of communist scarcity. A rickety secretary desk held candles and pictures of family—dour antecedents posing stiffly, a vibrant young woman Evan took to be Anca’s mother, and a host of shots of Anca at various ages with her father, a robust man with a beard, a warm smile, and a scattering of stubble rounding out his balding pate. Young Anca on his knee, atop his shoulders, at his side holding a fishing pole. He was a bear of a man, Anca his cub.

Resting atop a window AC unit were a postcard-size image of Jesus and a photographic portrait of a saint or priest with a soft beard and piercing blue eyes. In the kitchenette nook, an ancient refrigerator hummed and clanked, its door clad with various magnets—a U.S. flag, Michael Jackson, the Statue of Liberty. There were no intruders in the cabinets or dishwasher.

Reversing course, Evan passed Anca by the front door. She was shouldered into a coatrack, face wan, eyes wide with concern. He flashed her an all-clear sign and then moved to safe her bedroom. IKEA bed, battered nightstand, pastel comforter. A decal of flowering ivy stretched along one wall and around a prison-small window, the street view impaired by a skein of telephone wires. A floating shelf held a few tiny succulents, a stuffed-animal penguin from the Bronx Zoo, and a row of novels—Russian, twentieth-century American lit, and some obligatory Mihai Eminescu. A normal young woman’s room. What had he expected, velvet Jesus paintings and bloody crucifixes?

His RoamZone dinged, a text from Joey: yr car out frnt, mercedes, keys on lft rear tire.

Leaning closer to the window, he peered down. Shiny and out of place at the curb, a 450 EQS+ in silver metallic.

He could live with that.

Another ping: still finding a beachhead for vensend systems. gimme til manana + ill have something on yngtl69.

Copy, he texted back. And check databases for goat skull tatt on left pec.

Next he safed the bathroom, raking back the shower curtain. All clear.

The second bedroom was impeccably preserved, the bed made up bounce-a-quarter tight, a wool blanket folded lengthwise across the foot. On a side table rested a plastic bowl filled with painted eggs, each one strikingly unique. A dried sponge on the windowsill acted as a reverse floral frog for Romanian and U.S. toothpick flags, fanned up in a peacock display of patriotism. A wall poster showed peasants in embroidered clothes linked arm in arm in a hora circle dance. The white lettering beneath read, I LOVE AMERICA, THE COUNTRY OF MY FREE ADOPTION. IT EMBODIES ALL THE FREEDOMS. The grateful immigrant, he thought, lifeblood of American democracy.

Evan checked the closet and under the bed and then turned to leave. Beside the door, a weathered cowboy hat hung on a hook over a well-loved jean jacket. Beneath it on the floor rested a pair of worn slippers, stretched in the shape of her father’s feet.

He took a moment with that one.

Anca was where he’d left her, waiting nervously just inside the front door. “No one here,” he said. “You’re safe.”

“They have my keys,” she said.

“My associate arranged for a locksmith to be here in the morning,” Evan said. “I figured you might want the locks changed and a security system put in.”

“I cannot afford a security system.”

“It’s been covered.”

“No,” she said. “Just the locks. I can pay for new dead bolts.”

She eased a few steps into the living room, peering around. “I wasn’t scared to be in here when I first came back. But I’m scared now. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nothing has to make sense right now.”