Page 63 of Antihero

Evan started out.

“Did I go out to your car in the middle of the night?” Anca asked.

He halted. “Yes.”

“What did I say?” The damage was still evident on her face. And behind it. “Everything’s … hazy.”

“It’s not important.”

“Was I rude?”

“No.”

Anca studied him. Her forehead crinkled. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“And … thank you. I haven’t said thank you.”

“You don’t have to say that, either.”

“Yes,” Anca said. “I do.”

Candy watched the exchange, mouth tensed with quiet amusement.

Anca was staring at Evan expectantly.

He wondered why it was hard to say.

He dropped eye contact, cleared his throat. “You’re welcome.”

27Just the Middleman

Tribeca was ideal for ordering forty-five-dollar seared scallops, spotting celebrities swathed in sunglasses and flipped-up hoodies, and marveling at the brick and cast-iron industrial aesthetic of converted historic warehouses.

And fire escapes.

Evan loved fire escapes.

They were like escalators designed for breaking and entering.

He pattered up three flights, the soles of his Original S.W.A.T.s finding easy traction on the mesh latticework of the steel-grated steps. The final rise delivered him to a brief balcony softened with artificial grass and backed by a massive window shedding bleary late-morning light into a soaring architectural loft. A sleek translucent blind the color of aged bamboo dimmed the lazy sun for the man working inside. Facing away, he slouched on a low modern couch aimed at a massive wall flickering with light from a projector, shoulders rippling as he presumably typed on a cordless keyboard in his lap. One foot was propped atop the hardware tower of a high-powered rig as he clacked away at the computer desktop cast upon the giant screen of white paint.

A door of dark-tinted glass, unlocked here seventy feet above the bustling sidewalk, let into the loft. When Evan turned the chunky handle to enter, he could hear screaming music barely muffled by the giant padded headphones clamped around Manny Llorente’s head. Aggressive guitar licks, piercing sync, raw vocals with voiceless uvular fricatives and harsh consonant clusters signaled Neue Deutsche Härte. Evan had heard plenty of the German heavy-metal offshoot when he’d tracked a cell of National Socialist Underground nail-bomb engineers through Eastern European clubs, leaving them garroted in cocaine-dusted toilet stalls.

He swung the door behind him, a moderate slam that went unnoticed. Manny stayed hunched forward over his keyboard, head bopping. Even from behind, it was clear that he’d put on some weight since his driver’s-license picture, his body softened from luxury. His hair had thinned, not enough to turn the side part into a comb-over yet, but it would get there soon enough.

Scattered haphazardly among expensive, soulless furnishings were bizarre props. A latex-lined coffin. Wooden pillories, the holes for head and hands burnished with use. A flattened space-saver vacuum storage bag the width of an upright piano. A black lacquer credenza supported mounds of papers, a cluster of Solventry overnight envelopes, and a metal tray with a jumble of flash drives. Next to it stretched a lineup of industrial-size paper and multimedia shredders. The walls held weighty framed art-ish photographs of orgasmic females, red lips parted wantonly to receive, black-and-white bellies contoured like landscapes, detached torsos buttoned with tight nipples.

The daylight, even muted, turned the wall-high projected desktop into a mirror of golden light. But when Evan eased forward, the glow shifted into clarity, images coming visible.

His breath kept on steady as ever. Instead, he felt the hitch in his heart.

The wall was tiled with living windows, dozens upon dozens arrayed in a video grid, each square writhing and pulsing. His vision glazed to take it in as a unified blob, a squirming bed of sucking and pumping and throbbing and spitting, a barnyard muddle. There was nothing coy or erotic or even sexual about it, just humans burrowed down into debasement, reduced to their barest existential function, base hedonism expressed to the surface and lit with unforgiving brightness. Every imaginable version was on display and some unimaginable ones as well, siblings and stepmoms, frenzied mobs pounding around the nucleus of a nearly obscured form, suffocating girls vacuum-sealed inside storage bags, writhing like gaffed fish. The anatomy was distorted, impossibly swollen and cinched, contorted and defiled, reduced to digital squares and sent roaring algorithmically into the wild.

Evan’s pupils contracted, the vision made horrifyingly specific. For an instant he felt as if he were standing upside down on the ceiling of another world, the shafted projection an inversion of the stained-glass glow of Anca’s church, the mosaicked likenesses a perversion of the icon panels of the ecclesiastical partition.

A horror-image swam into his mind, that pogo-stick depression in the extant patch of carpet in that dingy subterranean fuck pad—one foot of a tripod.