“It’s not the girl I’m worried about,” she said with sudden severity. “He’s not the big, invulnerable hulk he looks, or haven’t you noticed?”
“I know.”
“Good. Now you take that coffee to your guest.”
He did as he was told and was unable to suppress slight nervousness when he knocked on the door of the guest room. It was now just before eight. Emily Deacon had slept solidly from the moment they took her back to the farmhouse and probably remembered little about the confused hour or so after she fainted in the Campo. She was going to wake up with plenty of questions. Costa took a deep breath. Then, when there was no response, he entered.
This had been his sister’s room before she went to Milan to work. It had an uninterrupted view back to the old Appian Way. The outline of the tomb of Cecilia Metella sat, a drum-like shape, on the horizon. He placed the tray on the bedside table, coughed loudly and waited as the American woman stirred slowly into consciousness, watching, with no little fascination, the way she was transformed from slumbering innocence back to the taut, alert FBI agent of the day before.
She looked around the room and frowned.
“Where the hell am I?” she demanded, then gulped at the glass of fresh orange juice.
“My house. With the girl. She’s downstairs with Peroni right now. You remember our pathologist?”
“I remember.”
“We got her to take a look at you after you fainted. We were worried you might have been concussed. You banged your head when you went down like that. You were… mumbling.”
“A pathologist? Thanks.”
“She used to be a doctor,” he said.
She felt her head. “You could have taken me home.”
“We didn’t know where home was. Your friend Leapman wasn’t exactly helpful when we spoke to him. He seemed more interested in the man.”
“As was I,” she grumbled.
“I’m sorry. We just didn’t know what else to do. We wanted Laila somewhere safe. It seemed to make sense.”
She swore quietly. “My, won’t I be in his good books now?” Then she looked at him and Costa could see she was remembering something afresh from the previous night. Something she didn’t care to explain just then. “I need to go into the office. Can you drive me?”
“Of course. The bathroom’s through that door. When you’re done, come downstairs. Peroni’s cooking breakfast. You might find it interesting. Also…”
He wanted to laugh. She was looking at herself, still in last night’s clothes, wrapped in the bedsheets, trying to clear her head.
“This is like being a student again,” she complained. “ ”Also“ what?”
“You might be able to forget about the bad books.”
MONICA SAWYER LAY STILL on the floor, arms hugging the coverlet he’d placed around her the previous night, the cord tight in her flesh, chestnut hair strewn around her face. She looked like a shattered doll dressed in a gaudy nightgown, mouth open, blank eyes staring at the ceiling. Purple thumb marks had turned livid on her neck. A line of dried blood stood on her lower lip.
It wasn’t a dream. In truth, he’d known that all along. Kaspar looked at her and felt something approaching regret. It hadn’t been planned. He’d lost control and that was bad. He fetched the bag and automatically, without a conscious thought, turned her over, sliced the scalpel down the back of the nightgown, then the scarlet slip, and stared at her back. Not bad for a woman in her forties. Smooth skin, barely blemished.
He wondered what he would have done if he’d got the chance to lead a life of dissolution. If there’d been the space inside the last thirteen years to do anything but think of survival, a way of getting through the meagre day, then getting even.
“You’d be as fat as a pig, Kaspar.” It was another voice inside him. They just kept getting noisier all the time, all the more so since this last, unexpected misadventure. This was the guy from Alabama, whose name was lost to him now through the mist.
“You’d be wearing pinstripes, working in a bank, screwing your wife once a week just to keep her happy.” Uptight New England WASP, speaking through the back of the nose. There’d been many an officer like that, Kaspar thought. Or maybe it was just a movie. Or Steely Dan Deacon himself. He’d got it. That was his New England whine, brought back from the dead by seeing his girl the night before. And letting her live…
“I’d be me,” he murmured, and that was a voice he only distantly recognized, one that had no accent at all because it was him. As close as it got these days.
“I’d be me, Monica,” he said again, stroking the side of her dead cheek with a single finger. “And you know something? You wouldn’t like me. Because I’m not like Peter O’Malley. Or Harvey. Or anyone you know. I’m just a piece of dry shit blowing on the wind. A part of the elements, like rain or snow, looking for the right place to fall.”
He straddled her buttocks, took the back of her scalp and turned her dead head around.
“You hear me, bitch?”
It was the guy from Alabama again. Maybe this one would hang around a lot today. He’d been a vicious bastard. He could be useful too. Black as hell, muscles like steel, a vocabulary that rarely strayed from A-class obscene.
Monroe. That was the name. Monroe had been the first to catch a bullet when they’d run from the Humvee, got pinned down with no option but to try to make a break to the most obvious place of safety. The shard of burning metal had come clean through the man’s head, tore off most of his lower jaw, left him running round with half his face off till a second shell came and finished the job. The guy was a moron too. Thought he was immortal, could just bark his way through anything, catch a piece of red-hot iron with his fist and fling it to the ground.
Sometimes, when the memories came back, Kaspar wanted to cry, to hold his face in his hands and bawl like a baby. Mostly, though, he could keep that away these days. He’d done enough bawling for one lifetime. He could keep it at bay by thinking of the pattern, the magic pattern in his little black bag, carved into the living, waiting to be complete.
“See, Monica,” he said, back in the old voice, the real one. “They never read Shelley, my dear. Can you believe that?”
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
He did a good Englishman-posh if you please.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
He laid the scalpel on her back, got comfy on her plump ass and called into his head the sacred cut and its magical subset, that shape burned on his consciousness, so set there now he could carve it out of anything without the pattern he had needed to begin with.
Shapes made sense of things, shapes told you there was sanity and truth somewhere in the universe. So he carved the first line, quickly, easily, and it didn’t feel right.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” he whispered, but it was still the old voice. He couldn’t quite find the tone.
Because it didn’t work this time. There were tears in his eyes. He couldn’t just run through the same procedure again. She wasn’t right. She was like Little Emily Deacon, only not so lucky. She didn’t belong there, not at all.
Screeching quietly to himself, the way he’d done when the guards used to come through the door and drag him back to the room with the electric poles and whips, he rocked from side to side, wildly slashing the scalpel across her waxy flesh, back and forth, back and forth, making marks that looked like the talons of a giant, crazy bird.
This went on for a while. How long he didn’t know. He was looking for those voices in him: Dan Deacon, Monroe, the big black sergeant with half a jaw, one of the women even. Anyone, anyone-it didn’t matter who, so long as it didn’t sound like him, the old him.
The voices wouldn’t come and he knew why. He’d offended them. They kept whispering something in his ear, Dan Deacon loudest of all. He’d been a fool. The list was incomplete. One final set of skin remained to be added to the pattern, the most important one, from someone he couldn’t begin to guess. And what did he do when he was supposed to be looking? Get distracted by some horny California gal who couldn’t keep her hands out of his private belongings.