Weiss placed his hand on Ryan’s knee, words soft as air. “What’s it to be, Albert? Are you with me?”
“Yes,” Ryan said.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Lainé said, “No, I won’t.”
“Why not?” Skorzeny asked as he took his seat across the desk.
Lainé couldn’t meet the Austrian’s gaze. He drew deep on one of Skorzeny’s cigarettes. “She is innocent. She has nothing to do with any of this.”
“Celia Hume took the assignment. She willingly involved herself.”
“I don’t care. I won’t help you question her.”
“Come, Célestin, questioning women has never troubled you before.”
Lainé looked up through the smoke. “It troubles me now. Interrogate her yourself. I want nothing more to do with it.”
Skorzeny leaned back in his chair, lips upturned in a mockery of a smile. “I’m beginning to question your loyalty, Célestin. Have I not been generous towards you?”
“You have. And I’m grateful. But I will not torture this woman for you.”
Skorzeny’s face darkened. He went to speak, but the telephone’s clamour stopped his tongue. He lifted the handset, said,
“Yes?”
Lainé watched as Skorzeny’s eyes made tiny quick movements, his lips parted as he listened.
“Very well,” Skorzeny said. “I will expect the minister’s call tomorrow.”
He replaced the receiver and gave Lainé a slithering smile.
“It seems we no longer require Miss Hume’s assistance. That was Charles Haughey’s secretary. Lieutenant Ryan has surfaced. He wishes to debrief the Minister for Justice tomorrow afternoon. After that, I will see to it that I question Lieutenant Ryan myself, in private. Do you object to assisting me in his interrogation?”
Lainé said, “No, I do not.”
CHAPTER FIFTY ONE
A knocking at the hotel room’s door pulled Ryan from the swirling terrors of his dreams. He started awake, cried out at the pain that tore through him. Darkness filled the room. How long had he slept?
“Albert?” she called.
“Celia,” he said.
The door opened, a slash of light, Celia held within it. She found him with her eyes.
“My God, Albert.”
She entered, closed the door behind her.
“Lock it,” he said.
Ryan listened to her fumble with the bolt and chain until they clicked and rattled into place. The light came on, burning from the ceiling. Through the glare, he saw her frozen by the door, one hand on the switch.
“Christ, Albert, what happened to you?”
He lay on top of the bedclothes, naked but for a towel he had draped around his waist. Bruises like maps of foreign lands, purples and browns and yellows, flared across his torso. Dried blood crusted in the folds of his skin, under his arms, around his neck. And the burns, blistered and red, dotted across his chest, his belly, his thighs, his face. The worst of them on his stomach, a scorched cluster by his navel. He could smell his own seared flesh.
Celia came to the bedside and knelt. Fat tears fell from her eyes onto his forearm, warm and heavy.
“Oh God, Albert, what did they do to you?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
Her fingertips skimmed his stomach and chest, circled the charred places. “You need a doctor. We’ll get a taxi to the hospital.”
“No.” Ryan tried to sit up, managed only to lift his head. “No doctor. No hospital.”
“But you must—”
“No.” He took her wrist in his hand. “Help me up.”
Celia slipped an arm under his back and supported him as he hoisted himself up on the bed. He lowered his feet to the floor, fought the nausea and dizziness that swelled in him.
“Are these burns?” she asked. “We need to clean them.”
Celia noticed the pistol resting on the bedside locker. Weiss had returned the Walther to Ryan, along with his car keys and wallet, before they pushed him out of the van. She opened the drawer, set the pistol inside, and pushed it closed.
She sniffed back tears and went to the washbasin in the corner, put the plug in its hole, turned the taps. She came back to him, bent down, put her arms beneath his.
“Come on,” she said. “Up you get.”
Ryan pushed up with his legs, allowing her to take the weight of his torso. They staggered together to the corner. Celia dipped a hand in the water to test the temperature, then shut off the taps.
She soaked a facecloth and reached for the towel at his waist. “Take that off.”
Ryan held it in place. She pulled harder. He resisted.
“I have three brothers and a subscription to National Geographic,” she said, forcing a scolding smile. “There’s nothing under there I haven’t seen before.”
Ryan let her pull the towel away. She dropped it to the floor, brought a hand to her mouth to smother the gasp. He covered the burnt skin of his scrotum with his hands as she sobbed.
“I want to kill them,” Ryan said.
Celia wiped the tears from her cheeks and wrung out the facecloth.
“I know,” she said.
CHAPTER FIFTY TWO
Goren Weiss sat across the table from Carter, studying the Englishman. The stuttering light of the kerosene lamp made him look older, the lines on his face deeper. A bottle of vodka, half empty, sat between them. Weiss lifted it, poured a measure into each of the two shot glasses.
Carter reached for his, brought it to his lips, downed the alcohol, and coughed.
Something rustled and scratched in the darkness around them, some vermin seeking shelter in the old derelict cottage. Gracey and Wallace slept in the room at the other end of the building.
“You think you’re smart,” Carter said, his words dulled by the vodka.
“Yes, I do,” Weiss said.
It was not a lie. Goren Weiss knew he was smarter than just about anybody he’d ever met. Not smart in the way a studious schoolboy is — he’d never passed a real exam in his life — but he possessed an intelligence born of instinct and experience.
His instinct told him Carter was a good soldier, but incapable of pulling off this job on his own. Wallace and Gracey were nothing more than infantrymen, albeit highly-trained infantrymen. MacAuliffe had been the best of Carter’s men. It had made Weiss sad to put a bullet in his head.
Carter sneered at him from across the table. “Not smart enough to set this job up.”
“But smart enough to see it works.”
Weiss had stopped over for a couple of days in West Berlin on his way to Dublin to meet with Thomas de Groot, the South African. Weiss enjoyed Berlin every time he visited. He liked the idea of its suspension, a bubble of Western decadence trapped inside a hostile communist power. The barrier that split the city in two fascinated him. The brutal obscenity of it. He walked long stretches of the construction, wire fence and crude concrete blocks. Dour-faced GDR soldiers watched him as he passed, automatic rifles slung across their stomachs.
Even though he knew the true geography of the land did not allow for it, he imagined the city of his birth lay on the other side of the barrier. Zwickau, where they now made rickety Trabant cars for those East Germans privileged enough to be able to purchase one. Weiss’s father had left for America the moment he sensed the coming storm that would sweep away so many of his kind, and settled in Brooklyn. Benjamin Weiss had left behind two brothers and his wife’s grave to find a new beginning across the Atlantic.
At one time, before the war when Goren Weiss was still a feckless kid bottling pills and potions for his father, he had entertained ideas of socialism. He had even attended a few Communist Party meetings at Brooklyn College. Mostly, he went so he could ogle college girls. Something in their serious and sincere demeanours caused heat in him, the creases in their brows as they listened to the speeches and made astute observations on the cost of capitalism to the American working classes.