“Are you with me so far?” she asked.
“I think so. But what do you want me to do?”
“You’ve done it. I wanted you to listen. I was sort of half-hoping you’d tell me I was crazy.”
“You are crazy. Just not about this.”
“Thank you, Mr. Costa,” she said primly, then closed her eyes and gently let her head slip down onto the back of the sofa. “Jesus, I feel as if I could sleep for a million years. And, maybe, when I wake up all of this could be gone, just a bad dream.”
She was close enough for him to smell her hair. A part of him wanted to reach out and touch a shining, golden strand, know what it felt like under his fingers.
“I don’t know what the hell to do,” she said in a quiet, half-scared voice. “Aside from not dreaming.”
He looked at the wine bottle. It was just about gone.
“I am going to find us something to eat,” he said. “Then…”
It was just a glance, he told himself. Just an expression in her eyes.
“… we sleep on it.”
She’d moved against him, just enough for him to feel her shoulder against his. He hadn’t meant it that way. Not consciously.
The blue eyes fixed him. Nic Costa felt lost in them. She looked grateful. Sharing the burden of doubts had helped her, brought the two of them closer. A brief smile flickered on her face. She was very close. On another occasion, under different circumstances…
He stirred uncomfortably on the sofa, looking for something to divert the way the night was moving.
“So what the hell is the Scarlet Beast, then?” he asked her.
It worked. There was a flash of delight on her face, an expression he was beginning to recognize, beginning to look forward to.
“First,” she said, pushing aside the bottle, “no more wine. We need all the concentration we’ve got. And food, Mr. Costa. This odd bachelor pad does run to food and water, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good. There’s just one more secret. And then”-Emily Deacon made a conscious effort to get the words right-“I’m through.”
LAILA WAS HALF YELLING, half pleading, in another language, a musical one quite foreign to him, though he knew somehow what it was. Her own: Kurdish. He’d heard enough of the street immigrants speaking it to be familiar with the odd cadences, half Western, half oriental.
And in his hurting, confused head, Peroni knew what she was saying too.
Please, please, please.
She was a thin, dark figure dancing on her light, light feet in this shadowy hall, pleading for her life from an unseen stranger while the big, burly cop who was supposed to be keeping her safe curled into a pained ball on the stone floor like a damaged child.
Please, please, please.
He tried to stand and the hammer blow of the pistol came down again, dashing him to the stones under a flurry of obscenities.
Laila screamed, louder this time, a noise that might even filter out into the night air through the open eye of the oculus.
No, no, no, no, no.
Then it came to him, with a sudden grim certainty that made him feel more miserable than ever. She wasn’t arguing for her life. She was begging for his. Trying to bargain with this unseen monster to keep away the hurt and that act of final silence.
“Don’t waste your breath, Laila,” he spluttered through bloody lips. “Run. Let this jerk have his fun.”
Then the world was moving. A strong, firm hand gripped him by the collar of his coat, pushed him hard against the wall, into the faint stream of moonlight falling through the oculus.
A powerful guy, Gianni Peroni thought. That was a big load he was throwing around like a sack of potatoes. A big…
Peroni found himself staring into a face that surprised him. It belonged to a man about his own age, clean-shaven, handsome in a sharp-featured way, keenly alert, devoid of emotion. Not the kind of face you expected of a killer, more like that of an academic or a doctor. He was wearing glasses. Maybe it was the odd silver light of the moon, but his skin seemed to have an unnatural tinge to it. Something in his eyes, the engaged, angular line of his mouth, told Peroni it was worth listening just then. The gun pointing straight at his temple helped, too.
“Let the girl go,” Peroni said once more.
The unfeeling, incisive eyes kept boring into him. “What’s she to you? A Kurd?”
“A kid’s a kid,” Peroni answered, tasting the warm trickle in his mouth again.
The man didn’t say anything. The powerful hands grabbed him again, slammed him hard against the wall.
“Don’t struggle,” the man said. “It only hurts more.”
Then he dangled something familiar in front of Peroni’s face as it mushed up against the stonework: a couple of pairs of plastic handcuffs, the sort the cops kept for special occasions.
“Yeah, yeah,” Peroni grumbled and shoved his hands out behind him, bunched up the way they did in training, holding his palms together as the cuffs came on, cutting tight into his skin.
“You,” the American said, jabbing a finger at Laila.
She held out her hands in front of her, looking meek and obedient.
He nodded. “You’re a smart little cookie, huh? You want some advice? Quit stealing. It just leads to trouble.”
The plastic went round her slender wrists with rather more care than he’d allowed before. Then he bounced Peroni round again, pulled him tight to the girl, withdrew another cuff from his pocket, looped it to join the two of them together through the wrist restraints and tied off the join around the narrow iron support for the altar rail. They couldn’t move. Just to ram home the point, the American reached into Peroni’s pocket, took out his phone, dropped it on the floor, and stomped the thing into pieces.
“I worked with Kurds once,” he said sourly. “They’d call you brother, they’d give you anything, they’d die for you. Then one night they’d see you’d got money in your baggage, and they’d come in and slit your throat, walk out and spend it on a new VCR. You know why?”
Peroni sighed. “I’m a cop, mister. I walk these streets. I do my best. I try to put people like you in jail if I can.”
It was as if the other man didn’t even hear. “I’ll tell you why. Because we taught them how. You think about that the next time she steals something.”
“Yeah,” Peroni replied sourly, without even thinking. “Nobody’s really responsible for anything these days, are they?”
He wondered if he was going to throw up. Or faint. Or both, possibly in the wrong order. “I guess,” he added, “it wasn’t really you who carved that woman up in here the other night. Just someone else wearing the same skin.”
The gun came down again. “You know you could just be right.”
The American drew out a small torch and shone the beam briefly in Peroni’s face. Then he pulled out the wallet, opened it up and took out a couple of old, battered photographs, held them beneath the beam. Two clusters of people, out in the desert somewhere. All were wearing military fatigues and sunglasses, looking as pleased as punch, posing against a couple of those huge jeep things the Americans loved.
He was in the first photo. Younger, happy, in control. The boss maybe, posing with his team, eight or so men and women, all smiling at the camera, all lords of their little universe.
“I got all of them inside me,” the American murmured. “Every one of them. I watched them die and I couldn’t do a damn thing because we were just walking straight into some stupid little turkey shoot, not knowing what was waiting there for us.”
“I guess that picture must be important to you, huh,” Peroni said.
“You could say that.”
He pushed the other photo to the front. A different set of people but the same kind of crowd. One them familiar, Peroni realized. Emily Deacon’s dad, looking a whole lot younger and happier than he had in that formal shot from a few months ago that they’d seen in the embassy. And a couple of women too. One who just might have been the corpse they’d found in this very building two nights before.