“Did the girls come here?”
“What girls?”
“Tracy and Holly,” Bourne said patiently.
Diego looked thoughtful. “Once or twice, I suppose.”
“You don’t remember.”
“Tracy liked to gamble, Holly didn’t.” Diego’s shrug was an attempt to conceal his growing discomfort. “But surely you know this already.”
“Tracy didn’t like to gamble.” Bourne kept any hint of accusation out of his voice. “She hated her job, which caused her to gamble almost every day.”
Diego turned back to him, a look of consternation on his face, or was it fear?
“She worked for Leonid Arkadin,” Bourne continued. “But surely you knew this already.”
Diego licked his lips. “Actually, I had no idea.” He looked as if he wanted to sit down. “But how… how is this possible?”
“Arkadin was blackmailing her,” Bourne said. “He had something on her, what was it?”
“I… I don’t know,” Diego said in a shaky voice.
“You need to tell me, Diego. It’s vitally important.”
“Why? Why is it vitally important? Tracy is dead-she and Holly are both dead. And now Noah, too. Shouldn’t they all be left in peace?”
Bourne took a step toward him. Though he lowered his voice, it was full of menace. “But Arkadin is still alive. He was responsible for Holly’s death. And it was your friend Noah who murdered Holly.”
“No!” Diego stiffened. “You’re wrong, he couldn’t possibly-”
“I was there when it happened, Diego. Noah pushed her off a flight of steps at the top of a temple in East Bali. That, my friend, is fact, not the fiction you’ve been feeding me.”
“Drink,” Diego said in a voice made thin and hoarse by his consternation.
Bourne took him by the elbow and walked him over to the small bar at the rear of the Empire Suite. Diego lurched on stiff legs as if he were already drunk. As soon as he collapsed on a stool he ordered a double whiskey-no refined sherry for him now. He drank the whiskey off in three long gulps, then asked for another. He would have downed all of that, as well, if Bourne hadn’t pulled the glass out of his unsteady hand and set it down on the black granite bartop.
“Noah killed Holly.” Diego was slumped over, staring into the depths of the whiskey, into a past that he’d thought he knew. “What a fucking nightmare.”
Diego did not seem to be a man prone to foul language. He was clearly out of his element, which indicated that he wasn’t privy to his father’s illicit arms trafficking. Neither, apparently, did he know what Noah had done for a living.
Suddenly his head swung around and he looked at Bourne. “Why? Why would he do that?”
“He wanted something she had. Apparently she wouldn’t give it to him voluntarily.”
“So he killed her?” Diego looked incredulous. “What kind of man would do something like that?” He shook his head slowly and sadly. “I can’t conceive of anyone wanting to harm her.”
Bourne noticed that Diego hadn’t said, I can’t conceive of Noah wanting to harm her. “Clearly,” he said, “Noah was not who you thought he was.” He refrained from adding, Neither was Tracy.
Diego grabbed the glass and finished off the second double. “Good God,” he whispered.
Very gently Bourne said, “Tell me about the four of you, Diego.”
“I need another drink.”
Bourne ordered him a single this time. Diego lunged for the glass like a life jacket thrown to a drowning man. At one of the tables a woman in a glittery gown cashed in, rose, and walked out. Her place was taken by a man with the shoulders of a football player. A heavyish older woman with frosted hair, who had apparently just come in, sat down at the middle table. All three tables were full up.
Diego took two convulsive swallows of whiskey, then said in a voice bled dry, “Tracy and I had a thing, nothing serious, we saw other people-at least she did. It was very off-and-on, very casual. We had a few giggles, nothing more. We didn’t want it to disturb our friendship.”
Something in his voice alerted Bourne. “That’s not all of it, is it?”
Diego’s mournful expression deepened, and he looked away. “No,” he said. “I fell in love with her. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t even want to,” he added, as if it had been within his power to choose. “She was so nice about it, so kind. But still…” His voice drifted away on a tide of sad memories.
Bourne thought it time to move on. “And Holly?”
Diego seemed to snap out of his daze. “Noah seduced her. I saw it happening, I thought it was amusing, in a way, that no harm would come of it. Please don’t ask me why.”
“What happened?”
Diego sighed. “As it turned out Noah had a thing for Tracy, a very bad thing. For her part she wanted nothing to do with him, she told him flat-out.” He took another gulp of his whiskey. He was drinking it as if it were water. “The thing she wouldn’t say, even to me, was that she didn’t really like Noah, or at least she didn’t trust him.”
“Which meant?”
“Tracy was very protective of Holly, she saw Noah moving in on Holly because he couldn’t have her. She felt Noah was just being cynical and self-destructive while Holly was taking the liaison far more seriously. She believed it would end in tears-Holly’s tears.”
“Why didn’t she step in, tell Noah to back off?”
“She did. He told her-far too bluntly, if you ask me-to stay out of it.”
“Did you talk to him?”
Diego looked even more miserable than before. “I should have, I know, but I didn’t believe Tracy, or maybe I chose not to believe her because if I did, then the situation had already gotten so messy and I didn’t…”
“What, you didn’t want to get your hands dirty?”
Diego nodded, but he wouldn’t meet Bourne’s eyes.
“You must have had your own suspicions about Noah.”
“I don’t know, perhaps I did. But the fact is I wanted to believe in us, I wanted to believe that everything would work out all right, that we would make it all right because we cared about one another.”
“You cared about one another all right, but not in the right way.”
“Looking back now everything seems twisted, no one was who they said they were, or liked what they said they liked. I don’t even understand what drew us together.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Bourne said, not unkindly. “Each one of you wanted something from someone else in the group; in one way or another all of you used your friendships as leverage.”
“Everything we did together, everything we said or confided to one another was a lie.”
“Not necessarily,” Bourne said. “You knew Tracy was working for Arkadin, didn’t you?”
“I told you I didn’t.”
“When I asked you what Arkadin had on her, do you remember what you said?”
Diego bit his lip, but said nothing.
“You said that Tracy was dead-that she and Holly were both dead, and shouldn’t they be left in peace?” He peered into Diego’s face. “That’s a response of a man who knows exactly what he’s been asked.”
Diego slapped the flat of his hand onto the bartop. “I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“I understand,” Bourne said gently, “but keeping it a secret now doesn’t help her.”
Diego passed a hand across his face, as if trying to wipe away a memory. At the second table from them a man said, “I’m out,” pushed his chair back, rose, and stretched.
“All right.” Diego’s eyes met Bourne’s. “She said that Arkadin had helped get her brother out of terrible trouble and now he was using that against her.”
Bourne almost said, But Tracy didn’t have a brother. He caught himself and said, “What else?”
“Nothing. It was after… before we went to sleep. It was very late, she’d had too much to drink, she’d been depressed all evening and then as soon as we finished she couldn’t stop crying. I asked her if I’d done anything wrong, which only made her cry harder. I held her for a long time. When she calmed down she told me.”