Liat placed two glasses on the table, and filled them both with red wine, not white. She left the bottle.
‘Where did you get this list?’ I asked Epstein.
‘A woman contacted us through an intermediary, a lawyer in our employ,’ said Epstein. ‘She told him that she had been engaged for decades in a process of blackmail, bribery and solicitation. She had hundreds of names, of which this list was just a taster. She said that she had been responsible for the destruction of families, careers, even lives.’
‘On whose behalf?’
‘On behalf of an organization with no true name, although some of those like her termed it the “Army of Night”.’
‘Do we know anything about it?’
‘“We?”’
I realized that there were still guns surrounding me, and my life might well be in the balance here, but I would not give them the satisfaction of yielding to their doubts about me.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, are “we” still playing that game?’
‘You still haven’t explained why your name is on that list,’ said the blond man.
‘And I didn’t catch your name,’ I said.
‘Yonathan,’ he replied.
‘Well, Yonathan, I don’t know you well enough to submit to your questions. Neither do I know you well enough to care if something happens to you when this is all done, so why don’t you just keep quiet and let the grown-ups talk?’
I thought that I caught Liat’s smile, but it was gone before I could be sure. Yonathan bristled, and his face went red. Had Epstein not been present, he might have lunged for me. Even with Epstein’s presence to hold him in check, he still looked like he might take his chances. I was glad Liat had left the wine bottle. I hadn’t touched my glass, but the bottle was close by my right hand. If Yonathan or anyone else tried to lay a hand on me, I planned to shred some skulls before I went down.
‘Enough,’ said Epstein. He scowled at Yonathan before returning his attention to me. ‘The question remains pertinent: why is your name on that list?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘He’s lying,’ said Yonathan. ‘Even if he knew, he would not tell us.’
Yonathan clearly had testosterone issues. The hormones were clouding his brain.
‘Get out,’ said Epstein.
‘But—’ Yonathan began.
‘I told you once to keep quiet, and you did not listen. Go outside and keep Adiv company. You can brood together.’
Yonathan looked like he might be about to start objecting again, but it took only a scowl from Liat to convince him otherwise. He left with as much bad grace as he could muster, even going so far as to nudge me with his shoulder as he passed.
‘You need to organize one of those staff training weekends,’ I said to Epstein. ‘Take them out into the wilderness, then lose them and start all over again.’
‘He is young,’ Epstein replied. ‘They all are. And they’re concerned, as am I. You’ve managed to get too close to us, Mr Parker, and now your very nature is in doubt.’
There was too much tension in the air. I felt like I was taking it in with every breath. I paused for a moment and tried to let myself relax. It was difficult under the circumstances, but somehow I managed.
‘Tate apart, who are the others on this list?’ I asked.
‘Some have been definitely identified: two are members of the Kansas and Texas Houses of Representatives respectively – one liberal, one conservative. Both are tipped for greater things. Another is a corporate lawyer. The rest we’re still working on but they appear to be, for want of a better term, regular people.’
‘Did this woman give any indication as to why she had chosen to provide these particular names?’
‘Our lawyers received a follow-up email from a temporary Yahoo account. It claimed that substantial bribes had been paid to three of those on the list. Two more had been blackmailed: one over hidden homosexual tendencies, the other over a series of affairs with much younger women. Documentary evidence sent as attachments to the email appeared to support her claims.’
‘So that accounts for five of the names. Did she say anything about me?’
I saw the possibility of a lie flicker on Epstein’s face. He tried to hide it, but he couldn’t.
‘She didn’t mention me, did she?’
‘No,’ said Epstein. ‘Not initially.’
‘But when your lawyer passed the list on to you, you instructed him to ask her, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She could not confirm if any approaches had been made to you. She said that she had not put your name on the list, and you had not been her responsibility.’
‘So who added my name to the list?’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘It does to me, because it’s left me under the gun. You know. Who was responsible?’
‘Brightwell,’ said Epstein. ‘She said Brightwell insisted that it should be added.’
‘When?’
‘Shortly before you killed him.’
We were coming close to it now, the point of all this, the nexus of Epstein’s doubts about me.
‘Do you think I killed Brightwell because I knew he put my name on this list?’
‘Well, did you?’
‘No. I killed him because he was a monster, and because he would have killed me otherwise.’
Epstein shook his head. ‘I don’t think that Brightwell wanted to kill you. I suspect he was convinced that you were like him. Brightwell believed you were a fallen angel, a rebel against the Divine. You had forgotten your own nature, or had turned against it, but you might still be convinced to turn again. He saw in you a potential ally.’
‘Or an enemy.’
‘That’s what we’re trying to establish.’
‘Really? It feels like a kangaroo court. All that’s missing is the noose.’
‘You’re being overdramatic.’
‘I don’t think so. There are a lot of guns on show, and none of them belongs to me.’
‘Just a few more questions, Mr Parker. We’re almost done.’
I nodded. What more could I do?
‘The woman said something else about you. She said that your name had recently come up again, that there were those within her organization who considered you to be important. It was why she chose to send that particular list of names to us.’
Epstein reached out and took my hands in his. The pads of his index fingers pressed against the pulses on my wrists. To my right, I felt the intensity of Liat’s regard. It was like being hooked up to some kind of human lie detector, except this one would not be fooled.
‘Did they ever approach you with an offer, or a bribe?’
‘No.’
‘Did they ever threaten you?’
‘People have been threatening me for a decade, Brightwell and his kind among them.’
‘And how have you responded?’
‘You know how I’ve responded. I have their blood on my hands. In some cases, so do you.’
‘Do you belong to this Army of Night?’
‘No.’
I heard a buzzing to my left. A wasp was bouncing against the mirror above my head. From the sluggishness of its movements, it looked like it was dying. The sight of it recalled another meeting with Epstein, one in which he spoke of parasitic wasps that laid their eggs in spiders. The spider carried the larvae as they developed, and they in turn altered its behavior, causing it to change the webs that it spun so that, when the larvae finally erupted from its body, they would have a cushioned web upon which to rest while they fed upon the remains of the arachnid in which they had gestated. Epstein had told me that there were entities who did the same to men, dark passengers on the human soul, carried unawares for years, even decades, until it came time to reveal their true natures, and then they consumed the consciousness of their hosts.
I watched Epstein follow the progress of the dying insect, and I knew that he
was remembering the same conversation.
‘I’d know,’ I said. ‘By now, I would know if I carried one of them inside me.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘There have been too many opportunities for it to emerge, too many times when it could have changed the course of events by doing so. If it dwelled within me, it could have shown itself and saved some of its own, but nothing came to save them. Nothing.’
Again, Epstein’s eyes flicked to Liat, and I understood it was her response that would determine what happened next. The gunmen watched her too, and I saw them ease their fingers beneath the trigger guards in anticipation. A tiny bead of sweat leaked from Epstein’s scalp, like a tear from some hidden eye.
Liat nodded, and I felt myself tense to receive the bullets.
Instead, Epstein released his hold upon my wrists and sat back. The guns vanished, and so did the remaining gunman. Only Liat, Epstein, and I stayed.
‘Let us drink, Mr Parker,’ said Epstein. ‘We are done.’
I stared down at my hands. They were trembling slightly. I stilled them with an effort of will.
‘Go to hell,’ I said, and I left them to their wine.
III
I rage, I melt, I burn,
The feeble God has stab’d me to the Heart.
‘Acis and Galatea’, John Gay
(1685–1732)
19
Darina Flores sat in an armchair, the boy sitting, unmoving, at her feet. She stroked his thinning hair, the scalp damp yet curiously cold against her fingertips. It was the first time she had left her bed since what she now thought of as the ‘incident’. She had insisted that the dosages of pain medication should be decreased, for she hated the wooziness and the loss of control it brought. Instead she was striving for a balance between tolerable pain and a degree of clarity.
The doctor had come again that morning. He had removed the dressings from her face and she had watched him closely as he did so, seeking some clue in his eyes to the damage that had been inflicted upon her, but his expression remained disinterested throughout. He was a slight man in his early fifties, his fingers long and tapering, the nails professionally manicured. He struck her as mildly effeminate, although she knew that he was straight. She knew everything about him: it was the main reason why he had been chosen to treat her. One of the great benefits of having detailed personal knowledge of an individual was the way in which it deprived that person of the ability to decline an invitation.
‘It’s healing as well as can be expected, under the circumstances,’ he told her. ‘How does your eye feel?’
‘Like there are needles sticking in it,’ she replied.
‘You’re keeping it lubricated? That’s important.’
‘Will my sight—?’ Her throat felt very dry, and she had trouble enunciating her words. She thought for a moment that there might have been some damage to her tongue, or her vocal cords, until she realized that she had hardly spoken more than a few words in days. When she tried again, speech came more easily. ‘Will my sight be restored?’
‘I expect so, in time, although I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever have perfect vision in that eye.’ She resisted the urge to lash out at him, so casual was his tone. ‘The cornea is also likely to grow opaque in the long term. We could, of course, examine the possibility of a corneal transplant. It’s a relatively commonplace procedure now, generally done on an outpatient basis. The main issue is securing a suitable cornea from a recently deceased individual.’
‘That won’t be a problem,’ she said.
He smiled indulgently. ‘I didn’t mean that we should do it right now.’
‘Neither did I.’
His smile faded, and she noticed a slight tremor creep into his fingers.
‘I haven’t looked at myself,’ she said. ‘There are no mirrors in the room, and my son has kept the ones in the bathroom covered.’
‘Those were my instructions,’ said the doctor.
‘Why? Am I so terrible now?’
He was good, she gave him that. He did not look away, and he did not betray his true feelings about her.
‘It’s too early. The burns are still raw. Once they begin to heal, we’ll have options. Sometimes, patients will look at themselves in the immediate aftermath of an . . . accident like yours, and they will despair. That’s true of any serious injury or illness. The early days and weeks are always the hardest. Patients feel that they can’t go on, or don’t want to go on. In your case, time will heal your wounds, and, as I’ve told you, what time can’t heal, surgeons can. We’ve come a long way in our ability to treat burn victims.’
He patted her on the arm, a gesture of comfort and assurance that he had probably made to his patients a thousand times before, and she hated him for it, hated him for his lies, and his blank visage, and for even thinking he could get away with patronizing her. He sensed that he had overstepped some mark, so he turned his back on her and began putting away his equipment and dressings. Still, her obvious antagonism seemed to have goaded him, and he could not resist attempting to assert his superiority over her.
‘You should have gone to a hospital, though,’ he said. ‘I warned you at the beginning: had you submitted to proper care, I might be more optimistic about any possible outcomes. Now we’ll just have to do our best with what we have.’
The boy appeared beside him. The doctor had not even heard him enter the room, and so it seemed to the older man that he had somehow materialized out of the shadows, drawing black atoms from the ether to reconstitute himself in the gloomy room. In his hand the boy held a photograph of a girl aged sixteen, perhaps a little younger. Her hairstyle and mode of dress indicated that the picture had not been taken recently. He turned the photograph so that it faced the doctor, like a conjuror displaying the crucial card in a sleight-of-hand trick. The doctor paled visibly.
‘Remember your manners, Doctor,’ said Darina. ‘Don’t forget who disposed of the evidence of your last botched procedure. Use that tone with me again, and we’ll bury you next to that girl and her fetus.’
The doctor said nothing more, and left the room without looking back.
Now here she was, out of bed for the first time since that bitch had scarred her. She wore a loose, open-necked shirt over a pair of sweat pants, and her feet were bare. It was hardly elegant, but wearing a buttoned shirt meant that she did not have to pull anything on over her head, and the sweats were comfortable and nothing more. The boy had brought her a glass of brandy at her request. She sipped it through a straw in order to avoid stinging her damaged lips with liquor. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to mix alcohol and painkillers, but it was only a small glass, and she had been thirsting for a proper drink for days.
The boy began playing with his toy soldiers in their big wooden fort. They were knights on foot and on horseback, made from tin and carefully painted. She had bought them for him at a booth in Prague’s Old Town Square. The artisan who sold them also made imitation medieval weapons, and heavy gauntlets and helms, but it was the soldiers that had caught her eye. She bought hundreds of dollars worth of them: sixty or seventy in total. The boy was only a year old then. She had left him in the care of a nanny in Boston, the first time she had been separated from him since his birth, and had traveled to the Czech Republic to retrace his steps. All she knew was that this was the country to which he had departed in his final days, the last place in which he had drawn breath before that stage of his existence was ended, and a new one begun. He had no memory of it, and so could not recall the trauma of his dying. It would come as he grew older, but she had hoped to unearth some clue as to what had occurred there. She found nothing: those responsible had covered their tracks too well.
But she was patient, and the boy would have his revenge.
It surprised her how the old and the new could co-exist inside him. He was so like a regular child now, lost in games of war, but this was the same boy who had helped her to torture Barbara Kelly to death. At times like that his old
er nature took over, and he seemed almost surprised at the damage that his hands could wreak.
She checked email on her laptop, and began listening to the messages that had been left on her various phones. There was nothing of consequence on the main numbers, and it was with some surprise that she found a message waiting for her at one of the oldest of the numbers, the one that had been earmarked for a very particular cause, and on which she had almost given up by now.
The message began haltingly, the voice slightly slurred. Alcohol, and more: a little toke, possibly, to take the edge off.
‘Uh, hey, this is a message for, um, Darina Flores. You don’t know me, but a while back you came to Falls End, Maine asking about a plane . . .’
She put down the glass while she listened to the rest of the message. No name left, only a number, but unless the caller had acquired a throwaway phone for the express purpose of calling her, his identity would be easy to establish. She played the message again, concentrating on every word, registering hesitations, emphases, intonation. There had been a lot of pointless calls in the early days, a lot of frustrated men with fantasies of getting her in the sack, and a couple of drunken, anonymous calls from women expressing the opinion that she was a bitch and a slut, and worse. She had responded to none, but recalled them all. She had an extraordinary memory for voices, but she could not remember ever having heard this one on the system before.
And there were details in this message, fragments of knowledge and description, that told her this was worth pursuing, that this would not be a wasted journey. There was truth here, small details that could only have come from someone who had actually seen the plane, and one in particular that made her gasp.
A passenger: the caller mentioned a passenger.
She rose and headed for the bathroom. A small nightlight burned in the outlet by the toilet, far from the big mirror which the boy had covered with a towel, but Darina turned on the main bathroom light as she entered. She reached for the towel, and felt the boy’s hand on her arm. She looked down at him, and was touched by the expression of concern on his face.