Firebird by Mark Powell

Author:Mark Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Haywire Books
Published: 2020-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

THE HOTEL

May 2014

Three days after Erin Horváthová disappeared from her life and world and, more specifically, the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, Susan Logan, wife to that same ambassador, swallowed a Valium and lay on Erin’s bed.

The point was to try to sleep. The point was to try to force the universe into the sort of small still point Susan might find herself capable of examining.

She wasn’t supposed to enter the room. It was, her husband had told her, a crime scene. But the men had already come and gone. The State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, she supposed, or Leviathan’s, whatever difference it made.

They had ransacked her closet. They had taken her clothes for God’s sake.

Susan and her lover, Liam Davies, had stood in the foyer and watched these frighteningly large men in suits and latex gloves carry out tiny objects, Liam at her side, berating the agents who worked indifferently, silently. You could show a little respect. Liam saying this. It made no sense, the respect part—the men were wholly professional, their auras the blue of calm focus—but Susan appreciated it nonetheless. At least he had been there. Where had her husband been?

She’d called him at the embassy and begged him to come home and he had, finally. My God, Erskine, what do they want with her clothes? Her husband—when he finally arrived—looking aggrieved, looking exhausted. Looking many things, but not looking at her. Susan, honey, try to be calm. There was a spot on the floor where he kept his eyes. He shook his head with that resignation he’d carried through thirty-one years of marriage. You have to consider their—

This is Erin we’re talking about. We know her. We trust her. We—

What Susan didn’t say was we love her. Because it wouldn’t have been true. Not we, but I—I love her. Me, Erskine, your wife, I love her. That would have made things clear to her husband or to herself or to whomever it was Susan was actually addressing. But she hadn’t said it. She’d just gone on stammering until her husband finally took her by the wrist.

Susan—

This is her room.

Susan, honey, look at me. Because he was looking at her now, green eyes pinched behind wireless frames. This is not her room anymore. This is a crime scene.

What had she felt then? Anger, yes. Rage, certainly. Shame, too. But shame at what? At loving a girl who had only just entered their life, at loving her completely while failing her completely? A substitute daughter. A handout from her husband, Susan supposed. A consolation prize, awarded for accrued grief.

Yet Susan had been grateful.

Now she was simply desolate.

For two days she had lingered near Erin’s room, as if by keeping vigil she might reappear. On the evening of the third day, Susan took the Valium, opened the door, and lay back on the bed, a heatless light streaming through the windows so that her eyelids pinked. She wasn’t thinking, and in the buoyancy of not-thinking, somewhere between

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