“If she dies, so do you,” I said.
“Then by reflex it would be all three of us,” he said in English. “What an idiotic waste that would be. I am an admirer of the captain here, but what a shame if he were the only one of us left standing.”
“I bet you’re an admirer of the captain,” Lucine said.
Cable ignored her. “I don’t particularly care one way or the other about her. If you put your pistol down, I can arrange for her to walk away before you and I have a detailed chat. From which there would even be a possible safe exit for you as well.”
Did he think I’d believe that?
“Selene,” I said. “Our Mr. Cable may suspect something unpleasant has happened to Walter, but he can’t know for sure.”
“Oh, he asked,” Lucine said. “I wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
Cable was staying calm. The gun was steady. His face was placid. But I could see his chest rise and hold and fall. He was trying to control his breathing.
“He’s dead and decomposing in the North Sea,” Lucine said.
He flinched ever so slightly at this.
She knew what I needed. If Cable really thought I would do anything to keep a bullet out of Lucine’s brain — and he was right — he felt safe from me as long as the Kapitän had a gun to her head.
“And you disgusting bastard, Cobb,” Lucine hissed. “What you let Brauer do to you to try to save his life.”
Cable was breathing faster. His chest was moving; he was trying not to let it move his shoulders, move his hand. “Now that is certainly a lie,” he said.
Selene said, “This is no lie. I shot him. It was me. With a pistol from my purse. I shot him in the heart.”
Cable believed this. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. He was thinking about this present balance of power. And I was talking to him in my head: Go ahead, Eddie. If I shoot you, your Hun shoots my woman. So you can look at her. Just start to turn that pistol. I won’t shoot you first because that would kill her too. Just start.
My growing thought was as firmly rooted in the nature of our bodies as Cable’s flexor observations: in the presence of great and sudden lower body pain, a man’s dominant hand will automatically move in that direction.
And Cable’s Luger started to turn — with the deliberateness of restrained fury — toward Lucine.
So I whipped my Luger downward and to the left, my eye fixing instantly on the target, my hand following my eye in thoughtlessly muscled ease, and I squeezed. And that target was the Kapitän’s exposed right knee. And the knee exploded with his shriek and his pistol hand was dropping and Lucine was slipping to her left and from beneath his loosened grasp and I was lifting my pistol, pulling it back toward Cable even as I urged my body to the right even as I leaned away at the hip and at the chest and as my right foot started to slide and my eyes swung toward this pistol that was recently pointing in my direction, the Luger in Cable’s hand was in profile now rushing away from me like a bird breaking cover — he was smart, fast smart, he knew if he shot her I’d have him and he knew I was already coming back to him even as he was in those split seconds of figuring out what just happened and I’d have him anyway so he was getting the hell out — and I was coming around and he was already starting to duck and twist away to the side and I thought now of the Kapitän and how he might struggle through the pain for a shot and I wasn’t ready but I squeezed a round at Cable and the veranda window to the left shattered outward and Cable was ducking low and lunging for the doors and I stopped my slide.
And Lucine cried, “Kit!” and I was swinging back left and the Kapitän was fighting his pain with rage even as he buckled downward on his shattered leg and he was pulling his pistol around toward me and I squeezed a round that went elsewhere beyond him and I was propelling right again and the Kapitän shot and I felt the whisk of his bullet past my left arm, glad that the pain had fogged his eyes and stiffened his shooting hand and he was falling fast now as the leg crumpled, and I stopped my slide and braced into the floor and I shot him in the right shoulder and then in the left chest and he spun away and backward.
And I was circling the desk and then easing out of the open doors, my pistol in both hands before me, expecting Cable to be waiting to try to gun me down as I came out. But he wasn’t there and I figured he was permanently forgoing the gunfight. He was a pro. He was not a man who would seriously risk his own life simply to try to take mine, at least not with that sudden shift in the balance of power.
He would be content to track me later. So I needed to deal with this now.
I was falling behind and I dashed along the veranda and down the steps to the loggia below and he was nowhere before me in the arcade, but the light from the villa was spilling into the yard and I heard a distant panting thump going outward and I looked into the grounds at the back of the house and I saw him vanishing into the dark.
And I ran. Ran hard. Onto concrete and around a fountain and along the turf and into the same shadow where Cable had disappeared, my eyes adjusting to the night. The stars were very bright. I went down the back stairs of the terrace and onto a slope that fell toward the Bosporus, and maybe seventy-five yards away was a boat dock lit by a single electric lamp on a high post, and there was Cable jumping into a twenty-foot two-seat runabout.
I scrambled downward as fast as I could without pitching forward but the runabout’s engine was beginning to spark into life and it was revving now and then fading and revving again and I stopped and I sat down on the slope at once and planted my elbows on my thighs and I held the Luger up before me in both hands and this was about a hundred-foot shot and he was lit just enough by stars and electric spill for me to see him as a dark shape and he was hunched forward working at the throttle and spark but he wasn’t sitting down yet — he still had to cast off — and I sighted between him and the bollard on the dock and I waited, and he rose, crouching a little, but I had enough of his torso as he moved. I had him now, and I squeezed and the pistol barked and he rose up and backed away, toward the portside, and I shifted and sighted and squeezed again and his dark shape veered farther to port and over the gunwale and was gone.
The boat sat there, its engine idling, and I rose and I walked down the slope and along the dock, and the runabout’s engine muttered and muttered and I arrived. And the boat was empty. I stepped in and switched the engine off, and it sputtered and fell silent.
The boat rocked a little.
The night was quiet.
The Bosporus was running past, and Edward Cable was gone. Dead. Carried away by the deep current of history that was bearing us all.
60
I walked back along the dock with the Luger still in my hand, feeling comfortable with it there, and a figure was running down the slope toward me. But before my shooting hand could rise, I heard Arshak’s voice. “Cobb. Are you all right?”
I walked more briskly now. We’d made quite a lot of noise in the last few minutes.
Arshak and I met beneath the electric light at the front end of the dock.
“For the moment,” I said to him. “Let’s get out of here.”
Arshak nodded and we jogged up the slope and across the courtyard and into the loggia.
Lucine was waiting just inside the doors of the grand hall. She was wearing a long, black velvet cape, which she held tightly closed over her chemise.
I stopped before her and we touched for a moment but only with our eyes, and then the three of us hustled across the floor and around the dead guard and out into the front courtyard and things were quiet still. Ahead the two entrance guards were gone, and then I saw them inside the wall, where Arshak had dragged them out of sight.