Secret Santa Page 10

  Lussi approached Rachael, who was watching the snow fall through one of the picture windows. The iron bars cast long shadows on the woman’s face. “Have you seen Stanley this morning?” Lussi asked. Since Rachael was the designer, she was the one who worked closest with the art director.

  Rachael shrugged. “Haven’t seen him. Bet he’s driving separately. He lives out on Long Island. Hates public transportation. Says he’d rather die in a car crash than set foot in a subway car.”

  “Seems rather extreme.”

  “Can you blame him, though?” Rachael said, turning to her. “Whenever I take the train, the smell follows me around the rest of the day. Perspiration and motor oil, with undertones of warm urine.”

  That was how the whole of Manhattan smelled, Lussi thought. There wasn’t any way to avoid it getting in your hair. She felt a tap at her shoulder. The Raven. “Could I have a word with you, Lussi?”

  People were beginning to file out the door. A rented bus was sitting outside, idling now. Lussi was in her winter boots. She had to run up to her office to change and then return before the bus left. “Can it wait?” she asked.

  “Actually, no,” The Raven said. “I have a box of galleys arriving from FedEx today at around ten. I need somebody to stay back to sign for the package. You can’t just leave a package on the steps in this neighborhood, not with those…well, those people out there. Besides, you didn’t know Mr. Blackwood. You’d be doing me a huge favor.”

  Lussi was speechless. Half the staff was already out the door, including Gail, whose job it was to sign for packages. She watched Cal hobble his way toward the door, the rubber stoppers on his crutches squeaking on the tile. The venue would be packed with hundreds of publishing celebrities—authors, editors, agents. Everyone from Andrew Wylie to Sterling Lord. A few of her old colleagues. Definitely some agents who’d been avoiding her calls. If she stayed here until midmorning, she would miss the entire service. And possibly the reception. The Raven sounded sincere, though. Perhaps there was a way for Lussi to turn this to her advantage.

  “So I’ve got this smoking-hot manuscript I’d like to get your take on,” Lussi said. “Like, Chernobyl hot. If you promise to look at it when you return, I’ll wait here until your package arrives. What do you say?”

  The Raven put a hand on Lussi’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “You’re such a doll.”

  Lussi held the door as the last of her colleagues filed out, then locked every one of its thirteen locks by hand. She took off her boots and climbed the stairs, barefoot, to change into her flats. If The Raven refused to pass Fabien’s book along to Digby, that would be it. She would walk out the door. Never look back. Leave the Blackwood Building in the past, where it belonged. Transylvanian Dirt was a triumph. Lussi needed to start acquisitions talks now, before his agent started shopping it around town.

  * * *

  —

  Lussi’s office door was locked. Just as she’d left it. She went to the break room to check the coffee situation. Not only was the coffeemaker unplugged but the Folgers can was empty. There was a Russian deli on the corner. All she needed was a little jump start to her day. She threw her jacket on and headed outside. She’d be gone all of five minutes.

  An inch of snow had fallen this morning; today it was sticking. Tompkins Square Park looked more like a real park now that it had snow cover. The number of people who called the park home hadn’t diminished. According to Sloppy Joe, the city routinely cleared the tents. Health and safety regulations. Within hours, a new encampment sprung up from the ashes. It wasn’t solely the homeless who bothered the mayor, though. The park was also ground zero for protests. Lussi could read some of the signs when the protestors lined the sidewalk, shouting at passing cars. FIGHT AIDS NOT GAYS. JUST SAY NO TO TRUMP CITY. When the police cracked down, they didn’t differentiate between protestors and the homeless, between the gutter punks in their studded denim jackets and the beatniks reading poetry through megaphones. They wanted blood any way they could get it.

  So, too, did the weather today. It was twenty degrees, even colder with the windchill. It was supposed to fall into the single digits overnight, according to Good Morning America. Not that Lussi entirely trusted meteorologists. She regarded their methods as iffy. They were only slightly more reliable than astrologists.

  She paid for her coffee and headed back. A panhandler started following her, shouting something unintelligible. He had wandered across Avenue A to Blackwood-Patterson’s side of the street. If she had anything to give the crusty-looking man with frost in his eyebrows, she would have. She owed her roommate for the past two months’ rent, and her first paycheck wouldn’t be cut until Friday. Her wallet was running on fumes until then. This would be her last coffee of the week. It was a lot to explain, so she just mumbled an apology and kept moving.

  The man eventually stopped tailing her.

  The Blackwood Building’s steps were bare except for salt to melt the ice. No note on the door. FedEx hadn’t come yet. She punched in her code on the keypad and slipped into the black brownstone, which seemed to swallow her up.

  * * *

  —

  The door to the art department was shut. Natural light filtered underneath it into the hall from the window inside. Now was her chance to get in and out without any fear of walking in on Stanley. She set her coffee on the carpet. She pressed her ear to the door, listened. She didn’t know who or what she was listening for because Stanley wasn’t here. It never hurt to be cautious, though. When she was satisfied that the quietude was for real, she tried the knob.

  The door opened easily.

  Stanley was seated on a tall black stool at the easel with the Yates cover. His back was toward her. The door continued to swing inward, and she reached for the knob to pull it closed but it was too late.

  There was a dull thud as the door hit something solid, a bookshelf or a desk that had been placed too close behind it. Lussi stood there, exposed, waiting for Stanley to turn around and chase her out.

  Except something curious happened: he didn’t swing around. In fact, he didn’t acknowledge her at all. His left hand was down by his side, twitching.

  “Stanley?”

  No answer. She tiptoed toward him. She didn’t think he was baiting her. Something was seriously wrong here.

  She touched his shoulder. He didn’t seem to register her touch, but it set him spinning around in the chair, inch by inch, until he was facing her. His pupils were large as basketballs. He was staring at her like an infant. Curious, uncomprehending. Both his chin and white button-down were dotted with a reddish-brown spray. Dried blood. He’d had a nosebleed—a bad one. Wouldn’t be the first art director to get coked out of his gourd at the office.

  She looked around the office for some tissues and saw the Percht where she’d left it. Right there, untouched, on his desk. Perky could only grin at her with its carved, dagger-like teeth.

  “Let’s get you cleaned up, Stanley.”

  Stanley coughed hard, misting her face with blood. She recoiled and quickly wiped it out of her eyes with her shirt. He issued a guttural moan, like a wailing ghost. She got the impression he wasn’t actually seeing her—he was far away, maybe in some Asian jungle. Must have scored some really bad shit.

  The sunlight caught something in his left nostril. A glint of chrome, poking out of his nose, barely visible through the dried blood.

  Her stomach dropped out like a soldier kicked out of a plane without a chute.

  There wasn’t something sticking out of his nose.

  There was something sticking into his nose.

  Norma.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Zelda Fitzgerald had once phoned the fire department to report a fire. When the firefighters arrived at her hotel room, she greeted them at the door. They couldn’t see or smell any smoke. Where’s the fire? they asked.

  Here, Zelda sa
id, tapping her chest emphatically. Right here.

  Zelda Fitzgerald was, in fact, clinically insane, but her confidence was inspiring. Lussi wished she could have summoned some of the woman’s chutzpah to help her deal with the Stanley situation. She’d felt faintly embarrassed to dial 9-1-1, struggling to describe “the nature of her emergency” (as the operator kept repeating). She’d led the police officers upstairs to the art department, at which point her ability to form words—let alone sentences—left her completely. Unable to articulate herself, she’d simply pointed at the zombie on the swivel chair. He was alive and not alive. It wasn’t until she stepped outside for some fresh air that she realized she’d been crying the entire time. The tears on her cheeks turned to ice slicks. They melted at her touch.

  Lussi waited outside on the sidewalk in the cold. Emergency personnel were weaving in and out of the building through the propped door. None of her coworkers had returned. She’d left a message on an answering machine at the Carnegie box office but doubted anyone would get it. Lussi’s teeth were chattering like an express train on a straightaway. There was no way she was going back inside that building, though. Not after what she’d seen.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she heard a friendly voice say from behind her.

  She turned. It was Fabien with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. He was dressed in so many layers that his arms floated beside him at forty-five-degree angles. She couldn’t smell his cologne, at least; her nostrils were frozen shut.

  “I wish I’d seen a ghost,” Lussi said. “I could probably handle that.”

  They watched as the paramedics hauled Stanley down the stairs on a gurney, his long legs bent, his shirt unbuttoned. His face pale as a sheet of typing paper. The tip of the mechanical pencil was still poking out of his nostril.

  Lussi filled Fabien in on what had happened, even though what had happened was still a little foggy to her. All signs pointed to Stanley shoving the pencil up his own nose. Nobody had accused Lussi of being involved, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it had something to do with her. “I said I was going to ‘stick it where the sun doesn’t shine,’ or something like that. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. I keep asking God to smite my enemies. Does He listen?” He shook his head.

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  “Not until I see some smiting.” Fabien patted his bag. “I came by to see if I could pick my book up—need to get it to my agent this afternoon. Although this appears to be a bad time.”

  A fire truck rolled to a gentle stop, parking alongside the ambulance and trio of police cruisers. Two firemen, bulked up in their yellow-and-gray jackets, hopped off. The looks on their faces told her they knew they were late to the party. With the situation under control, they’d gotten dressed up for nothing. She knew the feeling.

  Lussi turned back to Fabien. “I don’t know how much longer I can take all of…this. Not just what’s happened today, but what’s been happening.”

  “What else did I miss?”

  She filled him in on Cal’s injury, and the hazing. For the first time, she wondered if whoever was targeting her hadn’t also targeted Cal. What if his accident wasn’t an accident? He had no memory of what preceded the incident, due to his concussion. “And I forgot to tell you the night of the party, but we have a mystery shitter.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s exactly what it sounds like,” she said. “Supposedly, it’s a raccoon. But honestly, who knows? When you’re dealing with somebody devious enough to steal a fruitcake, all bets are off. At least I can safely cross Stanley off the list of possible pranksters.”

  “You have a list.”

  “It’s not written down.” She tapped her temple. “It’s all up here.”

  Fabien rubbed his mittens together and blew into them. “This whole conspiracy might all be up there. You’re the sanest person I know, but this city was bound to grind you down at some point. You’re also, what, in your mid-twenties? Statistically speaking, that’s when schizophrenics develop their first symptoms.”

  Fabien Nightingale wasn’t somebody you went to for a pep talk. If you told him you felt fat, he’d tell you that you looked fat, too.

  “I don’t think I’m imagining things,” she said. “I think this is all connected to my Secret Santa. You saw Perky. You saw the doll my Secret Santa gave me. Somebody was trying to send me a message.”

  “Perhaps,” Fabien said. “They may also have given it to you for protection. Didn’t you say these Perchten have special properties? Maybe you should write that list down. Could help you narrow down the suspects.”

  It was an idea. She could find some way to ask Gail who else might have been in the Blackwood-Patterson offices over the past two weeks. The OSHA inspector had said she was in danger. Could he have somehow gained access to the building and dropped the gift off for her?

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, without the same conviction she might have had yesterday. Now that the seriousness of what had happened to Stanley was setting in, her own problems suddenly didn’t seem all that terrible. Not when compared to a self-administered lobotomy. “About your book…”

  She wanted to tell him to have his agent hold off on sending it out wide, that she wanted to make an offer…except she couldn’t say that. She was in no position to make promises. There were the internal politics she’d have to maneuver, not to mention the company’s finances. Blackwood-Patterson was on the cusp of ruin. Had been for its entire existence. Even if she could make a sizeable offer on Transylvanian Dirt, there was a chance the financing Digby was seeking would fall through. Digby had seemed so confident in their early discussions, she hadn’t questioned his ability to deliver. After the other night—seeing him blitzed in the basement, hallucinating his dead father—doubt had begun to creep into her mind.

  She was staring off into the distance at nothing in particular when she saw him. A trench-coat-clad figure in a fedora on the opposite sidewalk. Peter Faber.

  “I’ve got to go,” she told Fabien, breaking away into the street. Lussi snaked through the parked emergency vehicles and idling cars, following Peter. Traffic was being rerouted, but it was slow going. Horns honking, sirens blaring. Shouts in every direction, Fabien’s voice among them.

  Lussi weaved her way through the chaos. Fabien’s shouts grew farther and farther away. At the park’s entrance, Peter disappeared down a snow-covered pathway. She followed and the park denizens parted like the sea for Moses. She couldn’t run very fast on account of the snow, but she didn’t have to. He was deliberately walking slowly enough for her to keep pace. They were in a slow-motion chase. Lussi rounded a thatch of fallen trees and saw where he was headed. He was leading her to the deepest recesses of the park, where the fires burned brightest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lussi entered a communal area where the junkies, homeless, and gutter punks mixed in the center of Tompkins Square Park. She moved among them, a ghost in their tent city. They ignored her except for brief glances. She scanned the park for the man who called himself Peter Faber, but had lost sight of him. Fires roared in the rusted trash cans, the same fires she’d watched burn from her office window. They had never looked this inviting before, but now she’d passed the point of being cold—a bad sign. Her thin jacket was no match for the falling temperature.

  A group of men made space for her at a barrel. Just walking past any one of these men in their muddied clothes on the street would have had her picking up her pace, but here she was. She warmed her hands at the flames. Somebody wrapped a blanket around her like a cloak. Did any of them recognize her from the third-floor window across the street? Did they sense she was an outcast herself, albeit of a different variety? They were all broken toys here, like on that island in the Rudolph special, the one Fabien had once tried to convince her was an allegory for homosex
uality. (It was hardly an allegory, she’d argued—the dentist elf was as queer as Boy George.) Many of the park’s permanent residents sipped from airplane bottles of liquor; several openly sucked foul-smelling smoke from what she could only assume were crack pipes.

  “So,” Peter said, joining her at the barrel. “Believe me now?”

  * * *

  —

  Lussi felt for the man’s business card in her pocket. The two of them were alone at the fire. They’d been given space. Lussi didn’t know what sort of power this man wielded around here. He walked in more than one world, though. Her fingers had just enough feeling that she could grasp the card. “Fred Munson,” she read. “Religion editor, Random House.” She paused. “This is you?”

  “I have some fake OSHA cards but I handed you one of my real ones. Thought for sure you’d figured me out and would’ve called by now.”

  “I’ve kind of been busy. But I’m sure you know all about that.”

  He shook his head. “I have a full-time job uptown. I don’t have all day to watch over you and make sure you’re safe.”

  “I never asked you to.”

  “You didn’t trail me into the park to tell me to fuck off.”

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  He laughed. “Fair enough. I deserve that. I should have been up-front with you, but I didn’t know if I could trust you. Full disclosure, I used to be an associate editor at Blackwood-Patterson. I doubt anyone remembers me—”

  “You’re Frederick.”

  He glanced at her. The flames danced in his wide eyes. “They still talk about me, huh?”