Someone Else's Shoes(51)

“I wasn’t talking about the guests.” He smiles at her, and puts out his cigarette.

She stares at him. “I should keep calling him, shouldn’t I?”

“I think it’s the only way you can sort this out.”

“Fuck it. I’m going to do it.” She starts to tap in Carl’s number.

“No,” says Aleks. “Use my phone. You do not want him to know where you are.”

She sees the sense in it, takes his phone and starts to type again.

“You want me to leave?” he says.

Without knowing what she is doing, she grabs his sleeve. “No. No, please. Stay.” The phone rings. She realizes she is trembling. And then Carl answers.

“Finally,” she says, trying not to let her voice shake.

“Nisha! How are you, my love?” Only the faintest hint of surprise in his voice. Carl is calm, in control. Like he has just come back from a short business trip.

“Oh, just great. Wonderful . . . How the fuck do you think I am, Carl? You shut down my whole life.”

“That’s a little dramatic, darling.”

“It’s been pretty fucking dramatic, Carl. What are you doing? What the hell is going on?”

“Darling . . . darling. Let’s just have a civilized discussion.”

“Don’t ‘darling’ me. You ejected me—your wife—from my house, my clothes, my life. You cut me off without a penny. For all you know I could have been sleeping on the damn streets.”

“Where are you? I’ll send Ari to pick you up. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

She freezes. Aleks is watching her.

“I’m using . . . a friend’s phone. Just send me some money. Okay? I’ll get a lawyer and we can sort this out.”

“No no no. We should meet.”

“Okay.” She takes a breath. “Where?”

“I thought we could meet at the warehouse. I have a new building. In Dover, Kent.”

“You want me to come to a warehouse in Kent?”

Aleks is shaking his head.

“No,” she says. “At the hotel. We meet at the hotel. Downstairs in the lobby.”

His tone changes, just infinitesimally. “If you like.”

“Today,” she adds.

“I’ll reschedule my meetings and be there in an hour.”

“Fine.”

He sounds vaguely irritated. He is not used to her dictating terms.

“And no Ari,” she adds. “No Charlotte. No lawyers. No anyone else. Just you and me.”

He ends the call. As she puts down the phone and stares at Aleks, she feels almost dizzy.

“Are you okay?” Aleks is watching her carefully.

“I think I need another cigarette,” she says, looking down at her uniform. “No. No. What I need is something to wear.”



* * *



? ? ?

The walls of the laundry room are obscured by floor-to-ceiling rails with plastic-covered clothes. Viktor and Jasmine stand shoulder to shoulder in the tiny dark chemically infused space and rifle through them, checking sizes or when they are due back in a guest’s room, Jasmine shaking her head or holding up hangers for Nisha’s approval. They settle on a black suit from Sandro and a pale silk blouse that Viktor says he can re-clean before the guests want it back on Friday. There are no shoes—apparently nobody leaves their shoes out for cleaning any more—which means she will have to wear the terrible pumps she has had to wear since this thing started. It sucks. But, then, compared to everything else in her life that is going on, it isn’t the worst. While Viktor gets one of the porters to polish them, she does her hair in the Ladies and Jasmine curls the ends with heated tongs borrowed from one of the executive rooms and lends her some mascara and lipstick. The person Nisha sees in the mirror, for the first time in more than two weeks, looks a little like someone she might actually recognize.

“You look like a boss,” says Jasmine, who has offered to buy her the time by cleaning one of her rooms. “Ready?”

“Ready,” says Nisha. But she’s not sure that she is.



* * *



? ? ?

Carl rises to his feet as she crosses the foyer of the hotel. It’s strange to look at him at this distance: she notices suddenly how jowly he has become, the way his belly bulges over his belt, like dough bursting out of a bread pan. Everything about him, from his well-cut suit to his perma-tan, his chunky watch, Italian shoes, screams money. He looks, she realizes with a start, like a stranger. How can eighteen years be wiped away so easily? He is smiling warmly, as if he is genuinely pleased to see her, and she is so taken aback when he goes to kiss her cheek that she lets him. He is wearing a cologne she doesn’t recognize and she feels a brief, residual flash of anger. Who is buying you different cologne?

“Two coffees,” he says to the waiter, who appears out of nowhere as they sit down. “Double espresso for me, an Americano for the lady. Cream?”

She shakes her head.

She is trying not to tremble. She has imagined this moment so many times over the past days, pictured everything from his abject apology to stoving in his head with a blood-spattered pickaxe. And now here he is, the genuine article, acting, weirdly, as if nothing has happened and this is just another lunchtime coffee together.