“You got it anyway,” the man said.
She drew back to slam the door in his face. The wood hit something along the way. She heard a yelp of pain but he was through, and there was no way of getting him outside again. A glancing blow struck her cheek and she stumbled toward the living room and grabbed the wooden inner door, sending it flying behind her.
He got struck hard in the face a second time and yelled again. Anger. Hurt. She liked both of them.
She propped herself against the sofa, trying to think, trying to locate something that might pass as a weapon.
“Hey,” he said.
He had his hands up and looked offended. His right eye had gone purple from where the door had caught him.
“We just want to talk,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Who wants to talk?” she asked, still looking, feeling behind the sofa with her right hand.
“Some big guys. They don’t mean you no harm. They told me that. They just want you to visit.”
“There are nicer ways to ask.”
He reached into his jacket with his free hand and took out a handgun.
“There are nastier ones too. Alive isn’t the same as undamaged. You choose, little girl. One way or another you’re coming with me.”
Szeryng was playing one of her most cherished passages. Felicia Kaminski hated this anonymous man for ruining it.
She looked him in the eye and said, “They won’t hurt me? That’s a promise?”
“A promise.”
He still had the iPhone in his left hand. She watched the way he held it. The obvious affection he had for the thing.
She put a hand to her head and let down her long brown hair she had fastened for practice. He watched her, smiling again.
“Isn’t that, like, the new version?” she asked, pointing at the phone. “The one with GPS or something?”
They all loved them. Sometimes it seemed there was nothing more precious on the planet.
“Yeah… ” He held it a little higher and pressed a button. A video of MIA began to play on the screen. “I got… ”
She was wearing the pointed leather boots she’d bought in a Gucci outlet place near San Giovanni. Those needle-like toes were going out of fashion but she liked them. She took one strong step forward, let her right leg fall back a little to gain momentum, then let loose with a kick, as hard as she could manage-right where it hurt most.
He screamed. The gun went sideways. She took his wrist and punched it back against the sharp edge of the wardrobe that contained Harold Middleton’s armory. The weapon clattered to the floor. The iPhone he held on to, but not after the second kick. By then he was on the ground, squirming, looking madder than ever.
If he gets up, I’m dead, she thought.
Her hand strayed to the nearest available object. She felt it and wanted to cry. It was the precious Bela Szepessy that Harold Middleton had bought for her. The finest musical instrument Felicia Kaminski had ever owned.
She smashed the bone-hard composite chin rest hard into his face. The bottom of the fiddle tore away from the body immediately. It was gone and she knew it. So she took the neck in both hands swung the century-old instrument round like a mallet, dashing the jagged wood into his head until he fell once more to the floor, his nose a bloody mess, his eyes filling with pain and fear.
There was an old vase, big and heavy within reach. She let go of the ruined violin, picked up the vase and threw it at his head, hitting him square on the temple.
He went quiet.
Quickly, efficiently, she snatched a set of spare metal strings from her fiddle case, kicked him over onto his chest, put one knee on his spine and bound his hands behind, then his feet.
By the time she’d finished he was coming to again. He wasn’t moving anywhere. She was thorough. Just in case, she bent down, retrieved his gun and held the weapon tightly in her right hand, hating the feel of the thing.
With tears beginning to well in her eyes, she looked at the ruined remnants of her fiddle and then the crushed man on the floor and said, “I am not little. And I am not a girl.”
A noise made her look up. The front door was still open. She could see it from the living room and cursed herself for being so stupid. A tall, gangly man with exceptionally pale skin and an ugly face was marching through the door, looking both scared and determined at the same time.
Felicia Kaminski wanted to say something but at that moment her mind locked. Szeryng’s luscious rendition of the Bach Partita was reaching its final note, a delicious D played double stringed, one open, one fingered with vibrato, then dying into silence. She loved that touch and had wished for so long that one day she might emulate it. Tonight, maybe, in the Wigmore Hall. Tonight…
It took Pierre Crane one strike to knock the weapon out of the fingers of the slender, pretty-plain young woman, and a second to render her unconscious as she stood dumb-founded over a man who lay bound on the floor, face swollen yet still visibly terrified. She crashed down in a heap next to him. Crane’s eyes strayed around the room. There was no one else in the little house. He could sense this.
Crane made a fast search of the flat-which belonged to Harold Middleton, the American that the driver of the car outside of Paris had warned him about. He found what looked like a gun safe and scanned through a number of documents and notes on the desk.
“Find anything helpful, Pierre?” said a female voice behind him, one so calm and unflustered it made his blood turn cold, sent his hand dashing for the gun in the holster beneath his jacket.
Something stabbed into his shoulder before his fingers got halfway.
“Don’t be foolish,” she said.
He turned and saw the woman he now knew as Jana. She held a long black handgun with a lengthy silencer. A professional weapon. She looked at him carefully, her gaze reminiscent of what had passed between them on that deserted two-lane road outside of Paris not long before. “We meet again, Pierre.”
Crane gave a faint laugh, though he shivered at the memory of the bullets snapping against the windows of the limo. “You know me?”
“You do your background work as a reporter,” Jana shrugged. “I do the same in my line.”
Which told Crane that she had indeed followed him to the meeting outside of Paris with the man posing as the Scorpion.
“Where’s Middleton?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“The woman he works with? Tesla?”
Crane shook his head. “I don’t know her.”
In the distance, the urgent bray of a police siren grew closer. Had someone reported a disturbance? Seen a weapon? She grimaced, looking at the flat and apparently realized she had no time for a thorough search.
Jana ordered, “Take the girl outside. There’s a van there.” She hesitated. “Go with her. I will join you in a moment.”
“You don’t think I’ll run?”
A smile. “No.”
“Why?” he asked, trying to see some window of attack, realizing, from her careful stance and the steady gaze in her eye, this was impossible. Nor was he sure he wanted to; something-the journalist within him? Or the man?-told him to simply go with what was happening.
“Because you’re after the truth, aren’t you, Pierre?”
Jana reached out and removed the weapon from his jacket. Then she watched as he picked up the unconscious young woman in his arms and walked outside.
There was a Mercedes van with opaque windows by the front door and a driver in a black uniform, gloves and a cap, sliding open the rear door.
As Crane reached the gate with the girl in his arms he heard the sound from behind, and recognized immediately what it was. The low, explosive growl of a silenced weapon, followed by a curt, agonized shriek of pain, one that lasted a second, no more.