No, not a stranger, the guy who had saved her. The civilian in the room on the top floor. She could see him clearly now, as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes.
‘Where am I?’ asked Caitlin, her voice cracking in her dry throat.
‘London,’ replied the man. ‘A special hospital. They had to operate on you.’
‘My friend the tumour,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me he’s gone.’
The man shrugged. ‘I’m not a doctor so I don’t know. Or a relative, so they won’t tell me.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Name’s Melton,’ he said. ‘Bret Melton.’
Caitlin tried to lever herself up but found she had no strength in her arms at all.
‘Well, Bret Melton, thank you for saving my sorry ass. And to think I might have popped a cap in yours.’
He seemed to take that without offence.
‘You probably saved mine, Miss Mercure. I holed up in that joint after my vehicle got hit by an RPG. I was pretty much out of it, just trying to get as far away from the street as possible. If those guys had been even half competent they’d have checked and found me unconscious up top. Probably would have cut my head off.’
‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘And my name’s not Cathy Mercure, by the way. That’s a cover. I’m sorry they felt the need to tell you that. My name is Caitlin.’
Melton took that without obvious concern, too.
‘In my experience,’ he said with a half-smile, ‘ladies who sneak into snake pits and twist the heads off vipers can pretty well call themselves whatever they feel like. You should know, by the way, that I’m a reporter. I’m not going to write about you. Not even going to ask what went down in that house. They made me sign a piece of paper that says I lose my nuts if I do. But I just wanted to get that out there for you.’
Caitlin felt a wave of lassitude steal through her body. She was aware of great damage that had been done. ‘Thank you, Bret,’ she said weakly. ‘But it’s all right. I’m retired now, a lady of leisure, as of two minutes ago.’
‘Okay then.’ He nodded and they lapsed into silence.
Her eyelids fluttered heavily, and she felt herself drifting back towards sleep. ‘Bret,’ she said, ‘did they get him? Did they get my guy?’
His voice seemed to come from far away. ‘I don’t know, Caitlin. They got a lot of guys.’
She forced her eyes open. For the first time she noticed the window off to the side of her bed. It opened onto a garden scene, although the trees were leafless and the grass had all died off.
‘What are you going to do, Bret?’ she asked. ‘Will you go home?’
He shrugged again. ‘What’s home?’
‘I don’t know.’
She started to fade out again. ‘I don’t know.’
ONE WEEK
They buried their dead according to whatever beliefs the departed had lived by. Gathered on the heavily damaged boat deck at the stern of the Aussie Rides, the surviving passengers and crew said their prayers or quiet goodbyes for friends and loved ones who hadn’t made it.
Julianne had never known Fifi or Pete to be in the slightest way religious, but while tidying Fifi’s quarters in the days after the last battle, she found an old Gideon’s bible, stolen from a motel somewhere, annotated by her lost friend’s large, childlike script. The story of Noah and his ark had come in for a lot of attention. That’s just like us, except for all the animals, she had written. Elsewhere, Please Lord, smite that asshole Larry Zood was followed in a different-coloured ink by: Damn! This prayer shit really works!
It was evidence of a secret, inner life that Jules would never have imagined of Fifi Lamont, and she asked Miguel to add a few Hail Mary’s to the endless rosaries his extended family were sending skyward for old Adolfo, the only casualty their party suffered. Dead of a heart attack a full day after the gunfight.
‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus…’
Grandma Ana smiled and nodded sadly at Jules and then at the two bundles that had been her friends, and she realised that Miguel’s family, who had been praying in Spanish, had changed to English without her noticing. The Mexican matriarch waved a thin brown hand at Pete and Fifi’s bodies, indicating that the change was for their sake. Out of reflex, an earlier, more cynical Julianne Balwyn would have smirked and rolled her eyes at the idea of an omniscient God needing a translation, but now, on this bright and cold morning, Jules let the tears come freely as the age-old prayer to the mother of Jesus was whipped away on a freshening southerly breeze.
The sea state had dropped down to a long, rolling swell and only a few wisps of cirrus cloud spoiled an otherwise perfect sky. Time at last for a burial. Eight bodies lay wrapped in sheets and blankets on the large, bullet-pocked diving platform at the stern. Fifi and Pete, the last two bundles on the starboard side, she had placed there herself with a lot of help from Shah and Mr Lee. The gravity and sorrow of the moment was undercut somewhat by the frozen stiffness of Pete’s remains. He’d been lying in the largest of the galley freezers for over a month, and Jules wasn’t sure she’d have been able to contemplate moving him had Shah and Lee not helped.
‘Mr Pete, he would have loved this,’ said the old Chinaman, as they struggled with his body. ‘Would have laughed his giveilo anus right off, yes.’
And he would have, thought Jules, with a private smile and an involuntary hitching sob.
Fifi, though, she would’ve been really pissed off. Of all of them, Jules thought, her Oregonian friend had most easily dealt with everything that had happened. Perhaps because she’d been alone and fighting for herself most of her life. Mute and numb, staring at the inert swaddle of sheets in which the redneck princess was wrapped, Julianne could not help indulging in a small, bitter moment of self-loathing. If she had been smarter, if she had in any way been worthy of the trust everyone had placed in her, Fifi would still have been with them. Still grinning and shining and lighting up the face of everybody who encountered her.
‘… Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen… Hail Mary, full of grace…’
She was shaking – a slight tremor at first, something she didn’t really notice until it had spread through most of her body. She shivered inside her thick, dark oilskins, and her throat felt so tight she could not swallow. Beside her, the three surviving Gurkhas quietly sang a funeral song for their fallen comrades. Thapa and Birendra, which seemed to magnify the power of the Mexicans’ rosary chant. Her American passengers mumbled along, all of them having made it through except for Denby Moorhouse, who lay next to Birendra on the diving platform, shot down after saving her life during the battle. His mistress – ‘the boob job’, as Fifi had once called her – had found a black cocktail dress somewhere for her mourning outfit, creating an incongruous effect under a yellow rain slicker. The young woman dabbed at dramatically running mascara, but, regarding her from within the depths of her own misery, Jules thought she was going through the motions of grief, rather than its reality. The presence of Jason St John’s hand massaging her arse did detract somewhat from the air of decorous remembrance she was trying so hard to create. Moorhouse’s former squeeze had already moved cabins to take up with the trust-fund delinquent, much to the chagrin of his sister Phoebe, who was now refusing to talk to him.