Free Stay by Nicola Griffith Page B

building, a shop front, Anderly Flowers, and six steps with no railing leading up to a metal door, with a keyhole beside it. It took me a moment to recognize it as an elevator door, the kind that goes straight up to a loft. My scalp felt tight. I put my gloves on and pushed the buzzer. No response. I waited a minute, then pushed it again. Nothing. Again. Just like fishing. I had all day.
    “Who is it?” A woman’s voice. Tammy’s, though it was hard to be sure over the hiss of the intercom.
    “Mr. Karp?”
    “He’s not here.” Definitely Tammy’s.
    I made my accent warm and Hispanic. “No, no. I’m
from
Mr. Karp. I have a delivery.”
    Silence, then: “I’m not expecting anything.” Her voice sounded thick, as though she’d been crying, and with a questioning lilt, oddly hopeful, like a child’s.
    “Well, I have a special delivery here for someone called Tammy. From Prada. They’re paid for. I’m just dropping them off.” Silence. “A present maybe, I don’t know.”
    “A present?” Her voice was uncharacteristically tentative. “You could just put everything in the elevator.”
    “No, no, I have to come up. You have to sign.”
    “Wait, two minutes.”
    I waited. After a while the doors opened. There were two old-fashioned Perspex buttons, UP and DOWN. No key slot to override instructions from upstairs. A perfect trap. But I knew Tammy. She would never cry or sound childish in front of a man. I stepped in and pushed UP. The doors closed and the cage rose.
    The doors opened to brick and blond wood, soaring spaces lit by bright halogen light, and there was Tammy, elevator key dangling from the thin chain she’d wrapped around her wrist, standing straight, and well dressed, but looking destroyed, torn up by the roots. She had just washed her face, but the lids were still puffy and she breathed through her mouth because her sinuses were still blocked from weeping.
    I stepped from the cage. “Hello, Tammy.”
    “Aud?”
    She looked behind me, as though expecting to see a young Hispanic woman dead on a pile of Prada couture on the elevator floor. The elevator doors closed. “Aud?” Then her hand went to her heart, as though someone had punched her, and her face turned a dirty gray. “Is Dornan here too?”
    “No.”
    I’m not sure she heard me. She seemed about to topple with fear.
    I took her by the elbow and considered. To the right, the stainless steel of a chef’s kitchen; ahead, a short corridor with three closed doors; to the left, a vast living room with ivory leather furniture, a brilliant kilim worth more than a luxury car, and a minimalist audiovisual system flanked by two large plinths that supported what looked like nineteenth-century French bronzes. I steered her towards the living room. “Dornan doesn’t know where you are. I didn’t tell him. No one knows except me. Come and sit down.”
    She moved like an ill person, not drugged but docile, and unconfidently, as though the world were a dangerous place. Perhaps it was, or at least this part of it. I led her around a brick support pillar to a couch.
    “Sit.” She sat. The features were the same as Tammy’s but this wasn’t the Tammy I’d known. “Dornan is worried—” She began to blink rapidly. She couldn’t be afraid of Dornan. Afraid of him seeing her like this? “He doesn’t know where you are, and I won’t tell him unless you want me to. He doesn’t have to know about—” Distinct pallor. What had she done? “—any of this. But he’s worried, so he asked me to find you and make sure you’re all right. Are you? All right?”
    Her eyes filled with tears but she made no move to reply. It was clear that she was very far from all right.
    “I have a cab waiting downstairs. We can go to my hotel. We can talk. We’ll drink tea. You can tell me what’s going on. After that, you can come back here if you—”
    “No!” That seemed clear enough, so I stood, took her hand, helped her to her feet, and headed for