‘Dal le beho’ota,’ Diema said.
Kennedy took the needle, waved it in the girl’s face. ‘Diema, what do you want me to do with this?’ she yelled. ‘In English! I speak English!’
The girl’s eyes swam briefly into focus.
‘Put it in his heart,’ she said.
58
There was a time of pain, and of regrouping, but it was a short time. There was a great deal still to be done.
Nahir’s team of local Elohim, loyal to the People and the oath they’d sworn, took Tillman off Gellert Hill in broad daylight, in the hollow interior of a gurney rigged to look like an ice cream cart. Diema and Kennedy walked beside them, their battered faces hidden behind masks in the likeness of Punchinello, the comical child-murderer and wife-beater from the Italian commedia dell’arte. The bodies of the Elohim who’d died on the hill were also removed, by some other means into which Diema and Kennedy were in no condition to enquire.
In the nearest safe house, behind the boarded-up frontage of a former florist’s shop on Stollár Béla Street, Diema was examined by Elohim medics. Her concussion was mild, and already passing, but she had two cracked ribs, which they bound up, and a broken finger that she didn’t even remember acquiring. She impatiently refused the pain relieving drugs offered to her, and — as soon as she could think straight — asked after the health of her team.
The prisoners, Nahir told her, were in safe keeping. The Englishman would probably die, but the others were in relatively sound condition and ready to be questioned at her convenience.
Diema stood on tip-toe to bring her face as close to Nahir’s as possible, and told him that it would be inconvenient for the Englishman to die. So inconvenient, in fact, that if it happened she would see that Nahir spent the next few years in the main cloaca of Ginat’Dania, cleaning out sewage conduits with his tongue.
‘I am still Kuutma’s emissary,’ she reminded him, with ferocious calm. ‘And as long as I’m here in your city, you answer to me.’
Doctors were summoned and assigned. Leo Tillman’s condition was looked to and addressed.
Next, Diema had them find Ben Rush and bring him. He was in Uzsoci Hospital, serving as a sewing sampler for a nurse with well-muscled arms, several yards of suture and a robust work ethic. Thoroughly worked over by fists, boots and many ad hoc implements, the boy was unrecognisable. He had already had seventy-three stitches put into various wounds in his face, scalp, shoulder and side. The nurse was optimistic about the sight in his left eye, but only in the long term. For now it was swollen shut and ringed with thirty-five of those stitches.
When two strange men turned up at Rush’s bedside and told him that Diema had sent them, Rush assumed they were there to kill him and refused point-blank to go with them, struggling to maintain control of his bladder. ‘She says,’ Shraga added, delivering Diema’s message with scrupulous care, ‘that nobody besides you has ever complained about her breasts, and that a little boy who likes big breasts probably has an unhealthy sexual fixation on his mother.’ Rush changed his mind and agreed to accompany them, although he was still scared of having his throat cut right up to the moment when he saw her.
He told Diema what he’d done, and how he’d survived. The paint bomb had masked his face, or rather it had given his face at least a passing resemblance to the faces of the two dozen other people who were within its effective radius when it went off. And since most of those people were already piling onto him, each of them eager to be the first to push his teeth down his throat, the confusion was compounded. The Messenger sent to kill him, finding himself on the fringes of a spreading mêlée, and with the sound of police sirens already tainting the summer breeze, had quietly withdrawn.
Rush also remembered to thank Diema for the warning she’d given him when the knife-man first appeared. She told him she resented the bullets she’d had to use up, and that on future occasions she wouldn’t waste a second of her precious time on his survival. Privately, she was both surprised and (reluctantly) impressed that the boy had come out of the battle alive — and that he’d done it using the paint bomb she’d offered him as a mark of contempt. She remembered one of her teachers telling her, after she’d fluked a perfect score in a test, that it was better to be lucky than to be good. The boy was probably too stupid to realise that he’d just used up a lifetime’s luck in one go.
By this time, Diema had extorted further concessions from Nahir’s people. Kennedy had been moved to a cell with a bed in it, and Tillman to a thoroughly disinfected room in which a full trauma suite had been painstakingly assembled.
Diema demanded a report and the doctors obediently provided one. The Adamite, they told her, had lost more than two litres of blood — close to the maximum that a human body can shed without shutting down for good. The anti-toxin that Diema had had Kennedy give him had probably prevented, by a hair’s breadth or so, his slipping into clinical shock, and allowed him to survive long enough to be given a transfusion, but his wounds were terrible. The damage to his right arm, particularly, was likely to be irreversible, and they wouldn’t be able to tell whether there’d been any brain damage until he recovered consciousness — for which the doctors could offer no realistic estimate.
She went to see him. A doctor was examining Tillman’s pupillary responses, but he stepped back from the bed when Diema entered the room and waited with his arms at his sides.
‘Go outside,’ Diema told him. ‘Stay there until I call you.’
The doctor inclined his head and retreated.
She went to the bed and looked down at Tillman. He looked old and weak, and more than a little ugly, his skin mottled red and white with broken blood vessels, his cheeks sunken. Tubes for fluid and wiring for diagnostics decorated his flesh or tunnelled into it. A faint smell of sweat and disinfectant rose from him: the smell of bad news delivered in well-lit rooms.
Diema wrestled with the riddle, but she couldn’t solve it without a clue of some kind, and everybody who could have given her the clue was dead. Her mother, Rebecca, who had taken her own life. Kuutma-that-was, who in the end died because he grieved for Rebecca too much. And her father — the father she remembered, lifting her and carrying her away (as she cried and kicked) from her half-finished drawing. The father who lived mostly in the scorched earth between the thickets of her memory, and who had torched most of that ground himself.
Are you him?
The red-and-white thing on the bed, trailing strings and wires like a marionette, couldn’t tell her. She thought of Punchinello. No matter what the question might be, Punchinello’s only answer was to grab his stick, which he cradled like a child in his two folded arms, and commit another murder. And she thought of Wile E. Coyote, whose implacable enmity for the Roadrunner was the core of his being.
She had wanted Tillman to be like that: a cartoon creation, simple and predictable and easy to hate. That was how she had always seen him, even before she knew what cartoons were. She could still see him that way, with only a little effort.
But here was someone else, who had come to her when she needed him instead of trying to save the rhaka who was his friend and ally, who had faced down Hifela, the Face of the Skull, with his arm all but useless, and let his chest be sliced like pork rind while he did what he could to give her a clear shot.