We didn't get back to the fishing cottage until well after midnight. By then my fists were just about able to unclench. Antony's driving had been inspired, to say the least. The way he'd piloted the Cord, two-wheeling around corners, weaving in and out of traffic, cutting across open fields, I'm surprised my pants were still dry. If Agarias's goons had followed us after all that, they were welcome to us. I was exhausted, brain-weary from trying to think of an out for Schell and at the same time not giving up Morgan. In the morning, I knew I'd have to tell her everything, and that in itself frayed me.
Isabel met me at the door, holding the pistol.
"Don't shoot," I said and put my arms around her. She kissed me and told me it had been a quiet day. She'd gone out to the little market in town to get the things she needed to make dinner. I could smell the rich aroma all over the cottage, the scent of thick potato soup with bacon and onion that took me back to my mother's kitchen in an instant.
"No chiles," she said and shook her head. She served us each-Antony, herself, and I-a bowlful and a wedge of bread. Morgan was asleep in the back room.
While we ate, Antony and I filled her in on what had happened at the ERO. She'd never met Hal, so we had to describe him for her, and then Antony was good for a few stories from the old carny days when they'd worked the same shows. Finally the big man got up from the table.
"That meal's brought me to the conclusion that my cooking stinks," he said. He looked around the tiny cottage and then lifted the gun off the table and told us we could cram onto the couch, he was going to sleep in the car. "If I see anything going on," he said, leaving, "I'll hit the horn. We should've brought a fucking bottle from the house."
Isabel and I quietly cleaned up the dinner table, and when we were done, I sat on the couch and lay my head back. She came over and stretched out, resting her head on a pillow on my thigh. It was the exact position I'd seen Schell and Morgan in the last time I'd spoken to him.
"Morgan told me about her life in the city," Isabel whispered. "Very sad. She ran away from home and ended working for some man. You know, como puta. One day she returned to the place where he kept all his women and found him dead on the floor with a bullet in the back of his head."
"Sounds familiar," I said.
"I think she very much likes Mr. Schell," said Isabel.
"Yeah," I said, "they need each other. But what am I going to do? As it stands now, it's either one or the other."
"Pensarбs en algo; duйrmete," she said.
The imagery of the day ran through my thoughts in a crazy patchwork-Hal running around stark naked, Agarias's smirk, Antony's death-wish driving. It all ended with that dead butterfly on the kitchen table back at home. Suddenly, the wings of the mosaic twitched, and it began to flutter. I continued to stare as it lifted into the air, into the sky where the ceiling had been, and then I knew I was dreaming.
PERFECT
It was late morning, and I sat in the kitchen back at Schell's house. Antony came in from the newsstand but didn't, as usual, throw the paper on the table. He kept it rolled up under his arm as he poured a cup of coffee and then left it facedown on the counter before pulling out a chair and joining me.
"Stintson?" I asked.
He scratched his head and nodded. "Took one the hard way. Back of the head."
"Robbery?"
"That's what they say."
"Agarias is out of control," I said.
Antony gave a sad grunt of a laugh. "Well, think about his plan. From what you told me, he's taking the blood of some mistake of nature and using it to try to clean out the blood of what he considers to be other mistakes of nature. How's that figure?"
"My guess is the thing that attracts him, like a shiny object attracts a cat, is the whiteness of the skin. This is about whiteness."
"That and the blood," said Antony. "Nothing is ever more fucked up than when someone decides they're going to save the human race from itself."
"You mean like me," I said, "thinking Agarias has got to be stopped one way or the other?"
"Boss, make no mistake about it. In case you were thinking otherwise, he's never going to let us live if he can help it. We'll make the exchange with him, and then he's going to plug us all. So as you're dreaming up a plan to save Schell, you better keep that in mind."
I nodded. "My mind's a total blank. I couldn't dream up what to have for lunch."
"He's definitely got us by the short hairs," said Antony.
"We don't even know if Schell's still alive," I said.
From that moment on, for the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, Antony said nothing. He read the race results, picked up around the house where items from the break-in still lay in disarray, and spent hours in the Bugatorium, carefully collecting the fragile corpses of dead butterflies. As for me, I sat at the desk in the office, pencil and paper at the ready, waiting to jot down an agenda that never materialized.
While sitting there, drawing circles, I considered the talk I'd had with Morgan that morning before Antony and I had left the cottage. She'd had a hard time accepting that she was the cause of Schell's kidnapping. I didn't think she'd really understood the implications of the entire thing, the part about Agarias and Merlin and herself. When I'd relayed to her that what they were asking for was an exchange of her for Schell, she'd said she would gladly do it but then dissolved into tears and ran to the back room. I didn't have the heart to pursue it, so I simply asked Isabel to do her best to calm Morgan down, which she said she would. And then we'd left…to do what?
That's the way the entire day went. Nothing but bad thoughts-the grief of Stintson's family; the innocent Kern, wasting away in a jail cell; the Barneses still wondering why their daughter had been killed. Grim reality, like some insatiable spirit, devoured every idea I might possibly have hatched. I bit my nails, banged my fists against my temples, all to no avail. As twilight came on, I called for Antony, and he appeared at the office door.
"I guess we might as well write this one off and head back down to the South Shore," I said.
"Okay, Boss," he said, and my heart sank to see his dejection.
"Maybe something will come tomorrow," I said.
He went to get his coat. I stood up and threw the pencil down on the desk. We met in the living room, and just as we were about to push back the makeshift rug of a door and leave, Antony said, "Oh yeah, I'm definitely getting a bottle for tonight."
"Good idea," I told him.
He reappeared a few minutes later from down the hall with a cloudy bottle holding an amber liquid. "The good stuff," he said. "Something ought to be good."
We left, and the rug fell back into place. As we made for the Cord, I heard, in the distance, the sound of the phone ringing.
"Hey," said Antony, coming to attention, but I was already off, running up the path to the house. I was out of breath when I reached the office and fumbled the receiver before getting it to my ear.
"Hello?" I said.
There was nothing for a second, and then a voice suddenly blared.
"Tommy?" It was Emmet Brogan again.
"He's not here," I said. I wasn't in the mood to explain everything that had gone on.