“Does my life mean more to you?” Claire asked. She tilted her head back and shoved the barrel of the gun under her own chin. “How about now?”
“Claire! No!” Serena shouted.
Boni looked at his daughter. Serena thought his eyes were filling up with tears. “You’re so beautiful. Just like your mother.”
“Do you think that kind of shit will work on me now?” Claire asked. “What’s next? You’ll tell me how much you love me? That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“I do love you”
‘’Do you think I won’t do it?” Claire demanded, pushing the gun harder against her skin. “Is that it? I’m your child. You know I will.”
“If you thought it would give me enough pain, yes, I know you would.”
“Look at us!” Claire said. “This is the family you’ve built. Look at your son on the wall. That’s what you did to him. And you know damn well what you did to me.”
Boni recoiled as if he had been struck. “Please, Claire, don’t go there.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Am I airing our dirty laundry in public? Am I embarrassing you?”
“Claire,” Boni begged her. “No.”
It was as if Claire smelled a wound and steered for it like a shark. “You knew what that bastard did to me.”
Serena didn’t know who Claire was talking about, but Boni obviously did. He was visibly shaken.
“It was a terrible misunderstanding,” Boni said.
“Misunderstanding? You accused me of being drunk. You said I led him on. You knew that was a lie.”
“I didn’t want to believe what he had done to you.”
Boni raised his arms, reaching out to her, trying to touch her. Claire stepped back and flung the gun into the pool, where it splashed into the opaque water. She screamed, “He raped me!”
“Claire, we can’t talk about this. Not here.”
“Oh, no, no, of course not. It might endanger the empire. It might hurt him. My God, he raped your own daughter, and you covered it up”
“I’m so sorry. So very sorry.”
“You had a choice. Me or him. But that was never a choice, was it? It’s always been him. Everything you’ve ever done, it’s been to protect him.”
Who? Serena wanted to shout.
“We talked about this,” Boni said. “You told me you understood.”
“Of course I understood. I was asking you to expose a lifetime of lies. You would have lost everything. Gone to prison. So I was the good girl, and I shut up. I shut up, even though I had nightmares for years. I shut up, even though I was sick and scared every time I saw his face. I shut up, and I saved you.”
“It was more than ten years ago, Claire,” Boni said. “What can I do? How can I finally make this right?”
“You can never make it right. But just once in your life, you can tell the truth. You can face up to something you’ve done. What happened to Amira?”
Boni looked stricken. “I can’t talk about that.”
“Why not? You say you don’t owe Blake, but you sure as hell owe me.”
“I know I do, but you can’t ask me that, Claire. You can’t.”
Claire looked as if she would explode in frustration. If the gun were still in her hand, Serena thought, she would have killed Boni. Or herself. Or both. She turned away, and her shoulders wrenched as she sobbed.
Boni closed his eyes. His daughter’s pain seemed to stab him and open up old wounds. “It was him, Claire,” he said quietly. “Back then. With Amira.”
Claire swung back in disbelief. “No.”
Boni nodded. “That was when it started between him and me. I made him. Like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Mickey killed Amira?”
Boni’s face contorted as if Claire had thrown open Pandora’s box and all the demons had flown out and scattered. As if, by saying the name, she had taken the gun and shot him.
Serena’s mind raced, and she mouthed the word at Stride. Mickey?
Claire stepped forward and slapped him across the face, so hard that the old man lost his balance. “You knew what kind of monster he was. How could you let him near me? How could you ask me to go out with him?”
“So much time had passed, Claire. I thought he was different. I thought I could trust him.”
“He’s still more important to you than I am, isn’t he? After all these years. Of course he is. This is still about the empire. The Orient. The capstone to your life, and every brick of it built on suffering and violence and death.”
“Stop it, Claire.”
Claire shouted in his face, her lip curling in contempt. “Mickey! That’s our big secret, Daddy. He’s been hung around your neck-and mine-for forty years.”
Boni shook his head. “He’s still there, Claire. This doesn’t change a thing. You know that.”
“Yes, it does. It’s over. There’s going to be a trial. Blake’s trial. It’s all going to come out. Amira. Mickey. You. Everything.”
“I can’t let that happen.”
“It’s out of your control now.”
Boni’s voice was weary. “Nothing is out of my control, Claire.”
He reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out a pack of European cigarettes. He slid one into his hand and then hunted in another pocket and emerged with an oldfashioned Zippo lighter.
“Nothing,” he said.
He flicked the lighter, and even in the wind, it threw up a tiny flame.
A second later, on the ledge, Blake jerked up like a toy dancer jolted with electricity, his eyes growing wide. Serena saw him stagger in confusion. A stain of red opened up on his shirt, dripping in trails down his chest. Another instant later, the sound wave of a distant crack rolled across the terrace. Blake seemed to fold in on himself. He sagged, his face went pale, and he vanished backward on the long fall that led to the parking lot below.
PART FOUR. MICKEY
FIFTY-ONE
Stride knew they had problems when no one took their statements on the roof.
It was a crime scene. Shots had been fired. A man, however evil, however many others he had killed, lay dead on the ground far below them. Deliberately murdered. They should be spilling their guts now, explaining what happened and how it happened for the inevitable investigation and trial to follow.
It didn’t work out that way.
Sawhill arrived and took charge of the crime scene personally, which meant, for the most part, keeping people out. He spent the first twenty minutes talking to Boni Fisso, not his own détectives. The two men hugged like old friends. That was the first bad sign. Then Sawhill asked a uniformed officer to take Claire home to her apartment. Not Serena. Not Stride. Claire looked longingly back at the two of them but allowed herself to be led away.
“You two,” Sawhill finally said. “Why don’t you go get some sleep?”
The next bad sign.
“You need our statements,” Stride protested blandly.
“It can wait until tomorrow. You’ve both had a hell of a night. Job well done. You got a mass murderer off the street. Now get out of here, and we’ll talk in the morning.”
Sawhill smiled at them, trying to act like the proud parent, but Stride knew it was a politician’s smile. He was in damage control mode. The whitewash was coming down, painting over the sins, preparing to detonate them once and for all next week along with the Sheherezade. Stride was too tired to complain. The bandaged flesh wound on his calf was throbbing. He hurt all over. He was happy to leave.
He and Serena went home. They didn’t have the energy to talk. They fell into bed and were soon unconscious, and the only sensation that managed to penetrate Stride’s brain was that the tangled sheets smelled like Claire’s perfume. He drifted away and had erotic dreams that were interrupted by violence, by people falling, by screams of rape.