At last, the doors reopened and she stepped into the dim-lit corridor.
There was a pop, like the explosion of a light bulb.
Then she felt pain from the spray of wood. The bullet had thudded into the balustrade at the stairs behind her.
She thought of Devereaux: Had he returned to kill her? He had promised twenty-four hours. It was so unfair—
The young blond man stepped out of the shadows. She saw the pistol, the pale blue eyes that were too young.
Some instinct forced her back into the elevator, and the doors hissed shut again just as the second bullet struck them. At the level of her face.
Frantically, she pushed the “L” button. Slowly and reluctantly, the elevator grumbled to the main floor.
She stared at the doors with wide, frightened eyes; her naturally pale face had turned ashen. Yet, a part of her was calm — who had come to kill her? Why?
She knew he was running down the steps that surrounded the elevator shaft, running to meet her in the lobby. To kill her.
The doors groaned open at the lobby; the night concierge, at the desk across the floor from the elevator, looked up, startled.
The blond man emerged from the staircase. She could not see the gun. He smiled to her. “Come here, Elizabeth,” he said.
Slowly, she walked across the lobby toward the desk. “I want a telephone,” she began. The young clerk pushed a telephone towards her. “You can use this, miss, or the telephone booth in—”
“This will be fine,” she said. She turned away from him as she dialed — was zero the number for operator in Britain?
It was. She heard the tired voice at the other end of the line.
“Please. I’m in the Royal Avenue Hotel and there’s a bomb in the lobby. Please notify the police.” She said it calmly and reasonably. Then she put down the telephone and turned back to face the blond man across the lobby floor. She smiled to him, returning his pasted-on smile.
He did not understand; he glanced nervously around him.
She waited, staring at him.
And then he saw the first policemen at the door, pushing into the hotel. The night clerk ran to the door in greeting. And so did Elizabeth. The blond man ran up the stairs as unobtrusively as he could.
Elizabeth hurried past the policemen into the street. “There’s a blond-haired man in there, up the stairs. He told me he hid a bomb in the hotel. He has a gun,” she cried.
The startled police ran for the stairs. There was confusion on the street. No one looked at her. The bartender came out of the lobby bar and stared at the policemen.
And Elizabeth ran.
Down the wet, glistening street. She ran until she felt the stitch in her side traveling up into her back. She kept running until she had no more breath.
Her heels clicked on the pavement. There were no cars, only the ringing bells of the police wagons coming from far away.
A church bell banged the hour of one, solemnly.
Devereaux had not come to kill her.
They had sent someone else.
The Section wanted to kill her. As they wanted to kill Devereaux. The Section was mad; the world was mad; she was going to die.
She stood at the last intersection on Royal Avenue by the ornate city hall and shivered; there was a mist over the city but a kind of calm with it. No rain, no more wind.
She felt utterly alone.
The city waited for her, bleakly; the stupid stones stared at her. She touched the lining of her coat for the money. The lining was ripped; the money was gone. She did not even have her purse. Only the key to her room.
She couldn’t go back. Would they catch him? Would they kill him?
There was no place to run to.
He was responsible; Devereaux was responsible; he had stripped her past from her; he had killed her.
She remembered the photograph she’d left on the dresser. She yearned for it.
The Section wanted to kill her and kill Devereaux.
Devereaux heard her knock; heard her voice at the door.
He was not asleep. He had been sitting in the chair by the window, dressed, staring at the mist from the hills. There was a long open cable on his lap. It confirmed that Elizabeth worked for the CIA and that Free The Prisoners was a CIA front. And it asked, in Hanley’s faintly sarcastic way, what all this had to do with the matter at hand? Now that R Section was too late to uncover the plot against Lord Slough? Or did he ever read the newspapers? All the last had been archly worded, in a kind of jargon code. The cable and the paper had been waiting for him when he returned to the hotel.
Devereaux had read about the assassination attempt on the life of Lord Slough and about the murder of the Irish tutor and of Lord Slough’s English bodyguard. He had read about a man named Toolin. And he had been sitting, wondering about why someone would try to kill him to prevent him learning about an isolated event taking place three thousand miles away.
He had not resolved the question when he heard her knock. Getting out of the chair, Devereaux took his gun from the dresser and went to the door. He heard her voice. He waited.
“Dev,” she said again. “They tried to kill me.”
He let the catch on the door fall; he pulled off the deadlock and twisted the door handle. The door opened inward slowly, of itself and of Elizabeth’s weight against it. She rushed into the room. He stood against the wall with the gun and looked at her.
He pushed the door shut again with his foot and rolled back the deadlock. “Take your coat off and stand away from it.”
She turned to stare at him. She took her coat off and threw it on the floor and backed away.
“Turn around.”
She turned to the window.
He went to the coat, felt it, dropped it. He went to her. He held the gun to her head as he felt along her body. He touched her legs, her breasts, without a feeling of really touching. She stood still and let him search her. Finally, he was through. He walked to the other side of the room.
“They sent someone to kill me after you left.”
He stood and watched her. She did not turn around.
“A man with blond hair. He had a gun. And a silencer, I suppose. He fired but it hit the elevator door and I went back inside and I went down. I called the police and said there was a bomb and then I ran. They tried to kill me. It was your fault. They tried to kill you. I ran here.”
He just stared at her.
“My God, they’re going to kill us,” she said.
Putting the gun in his overcoat, he took it to the closet and hung it up. Slowly, he took off his corduroy jacket, draping it over the back of a chair.
She turned around at last and leaned on the window ledge.
He sat down in a chair without speaking. Then he looked at her. She looked frightened and brave, he thought. But looks lie; eyes lie; words lie. Even bodies do not tell the truth, or affection or lovemaking. Was she lying? Did it matter?
He got up and went to her.
He took her hand. He looked at her.
Does it matter?
“I don’t want to die, Dev,” Elizabeth said.
Devereaux held her then. Felt her tremble. Felt her yielding softness. Felt a little of her fear and all of his own; of his own loneliness and confusion. His thoughts were in anarchy; he did not understand. He could not keep track of the lie or counterlie anymore; he could not tell what had happened or would happen.
Only what was. Now.
What could he tell her? What words would be balm?
He stood, finally, just holding her in the half-darkness of his room, while the mists from the mountains came down into the city and obscured the steeples of the churches beyond his window.
12
They slept together finally, not as lovers — they did not make love — but as tired animals, huddling for warmth against the cold. Holding each other in sleep, the rhythm of their breathing became as twins, waiting for the world beyond in a womb of sleep and dreams. Elizabeth cried out once and Devereaux heard her. He cupped his body around hers, belly to back, arm over arm. He felt her naked body and it was part of his own; she felt him, smelled him, let his arms encircle her shoulders, and fell asleep in a kind of dream of awakeness. She had cried out not when the man shot at her but when David died.