Estabrook watched the smoke drift up over the assassin’s grey eyes, and before he could prevent himself he was telling his story, the rules he’d drawn for this exchange forgotten. Instead of questioning the man closely, concealing his own biography so that the other would have as little hold on him as possible, he spilled the tragedy in every unflattering detail. Several times he almost stopped himself, but it felt so good to be unburdened that he let his tongue defy his better judgement. Not once did the other man interrupt the litany, and it was only when a rapping on the door, announcing Chant’s return, interrupted the flow that Estabrook remembered there was anyone else alive in the world tonight beside himself and his confessor. And by that time the tale was told.
Pie opened the door, but didn’t let Chant in. ‘We’ll wander over to the car when we’ve finished,’ he told the driver. ‘We won’t be long.’ Then he closed the door again and returned to the table. ‘Something more to drink?’ he asked.
Estabrook declined, but accepted a cigarette as they talked on, Pie requesting details of Judith’s whereabouts and movements, Estabrook supplying the answers in a monotone. Finally, the issue of payment. Ten thousand pounds, to be paid in two halves, the first upon agreement of the contract, the second after its completion.
‘Chant has the money,’ Estabrook said.
‘Shall we walk then?’ Pie said.
Before they left the caravan, Estabrook looked into the cot. ‘You have beautiful children,’ he said when they were out in the cold.
‘They’re not mine,’ Pie replied. ‘Their father died a year ago this Christmas.’
‘Tragic,’ Estabrook said.
‘It was quick,’ Pie said, glancing across at Estabrook and confirming in his glance the suspicion that he was the orphan-maker. ‘Are you quite certain you want this woman dead?’ Pie said. ‘Doubt’s bad in a business like this. If there’s any part of you that hesitates-’
‘There’s none,’ Estabrook said. ‘I came here to find a man to kill my wife. You’re that man.’
‘You still love her, don’t you?’ Pie said, once they were out and walking.
‘Of course I love her,’ Estabrook said. ‘That’s why I want her dead.’
‘There’s no Resurrection, Mr Estabrook. Not for you, at least.’
‘It’s not me who’s dying,’ he said.
‘I think it is,’ came the reply. They were at the fire, now untended. ‘A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself. That’s plain, yes?’
‘If I die, I die,’ was Estabrook’s response. ‘As long as she goes first. I’d like it done as quickly as possible.’
‘You said she’s in New York. Do you want me to follow her there?’
‘Are you familiar with the city?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then do it there and do it soon. I’ll have Chant supply extra funds to cover the flight. And that’s that. We shan’t see each other again.
Chant was waiting at the perimeter, and fished the envelope containing the payment from his inside pocket. Pie accepted it without question or thanks, then shook Estabrook’s hand and left the trespassers to return to the safety of their car. As he settled into the comfort of the leather seat, Estabrook realized the palm he’d pressed against Pie’s was trembling. He knitted its fingers with those of his other hand, and there they remained, white-knuckled, for the length of the journey home.
Do this for the women of the world, read the note John Furie Zacharias held. Slit your lying throat.
Beside the note, lying on the bare boards, Vanessa and her cohorts (she had two brothers; it was probably they who’d come with her to empty the house) had left a neat pile of broken glass, in case he was sufficiently moved by her entreaty to end his life there and then. He stared at the note in something of a stupor, reading it over and over, looking - vainly, of course - for some small consolation in it. Beneath the tick and scrawl that made her name the paper was lightly wrinkled. Had tears fallen there while she’d written her goodbye, he wondered? Small comfort if they had, and a smaller likelihood still. Vanessa was not one for crying. Nor could he imagine a woman with the least ambiguity of feeling so comprehensively stripping him of possessions. True, neither the mews house nor any stick of furniture in it had been his by law, but they had chosen many of the items together - she relying upon his artist’s eye, he upon her money to purchase whatever his gaze admired. Now it was gone, to the last Persian rug and Deco lamp. The home they’d made together, and enjoyed for a year and two months, was stripped bare. And so indeed was he. To the nerve, to the bone. He had nothing.
It wasn’t calamitous. Vanessa hadn’t been the first woman to indulge his taste in hand-made shirts and silk waistcoats, nor would she be the last. But she was the first in recent memory - for Gentle the past had a way of evaporating after about ten years - who had conspired to remove everything from him in the space of half a day. His error was plain enough. He’d woken that morning, lying beside Vanessa with a hard-on she’d wanted him to pleasure her with, and had stupidly refused her, knowing he had a liaison with Martine that afternoon. How she’d discovered where he was unloading his balls was academic. She had, and that was that. He’d stepped out of the house at noon believing the woman he’d left was devoted to him, and come home five hours later to find the house as it was now.
He could be sentimental at the strangest times. As now, for instance, wandering through the empty rooms, collecting up the belongings she had felt obliged to leave for him. His address book; the clothes he’d bought with his own money as opposed to hers; his spare spectacles; his cigarettes. He hadn’t loved Vanessa, but he had enjoyed the fourteen months they’d spent together here. She’d left a few more pieces of trash on the dining-room floor: reminders of that time. A cluster of keys which they’d never found doors to fit; instruction documents for a blender he’d burned out making midnight margaritas; a plastic bottle of massage oil. All in all, a pitiful collection, but he wasn’t so self-deceiving as to believe their relationship had been much more than a sum of those parts. The question was - now that it was over—where was he to go, and what was he to do? Martine was a middle-aged married woman, her husband a banker who spent three days of every week in Luxembourg, leaving her time to philander. She professed love for Gentle at intervals, but not with sufficient consistency to make him think he could prise her from her husband, even if he wanted to, which he was by no means certain he did. He’d known her eight months - met her, in fact, at a dinner party hosted by Vanessa’s elder brother William - and they had only argued once, but it had been a telling exchange. She’d accused him of always looking at other women: looking, looking, as though for the next conquest. Perhaps because he didn’t care for her too much, he’d replied honestly, and told her she was right. He was stupid for her sex. Sickened in their absence, blissful in their company; love’s fool. She’d replied that while his obsession might be healthier than her husband’s - which was money and its manipulation - his behaviour was still neurotic. Why this endless hunt, she’d asked him. He’d answered with some folderol about seeking the ideal woman, but he’d known the truth even as he was spinning her this tosh, and it was a bitter thing. Too bitter, in fact, to be put on his tongue. In essence, it came down to this: that he felt meaningless, empty, almost invisible unless one or more of her sex were doting on him. Yes, he knew his face was finely made, his forehead broad, his gaze haunting, his lips sculpted so that even a sneer looked fetching on them, but he needed a living mirror to tell him so. More, he lived in hope that one such mirror would find something behind his looks only another pair of eyes could see: some undiscovered self that would free him from being Gentle.
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