The men at the guardposts stared at him as he stumbled out into the frigid night. He had left his coat behind. Snow brushed his battered face. It felt good against inflamed flesh. The water in his hair and shirt promptly froze solid. He shuffled aimlessly through ankle deep slush. Whoever saw his blood-spattered face scurried away, unnerved.
So they should. He was soiled, corrupt. Sent out to play roles he could not shake, despite all his desperate effort. Whore, liar, betrayer.
Killer. Worse. Delivering Steele alive to Novak was more cruel than the swift mercy of a bullet through the nape. Far worse than delivering her into Georg Luksch’s hands. Killing her outright would be kinder.
And he had to make her trust him. Hah. If not for Imre, he would not know the meaning of the word. But if he could not do it…
He seemed to stumble and shuffle for hours through the pelting snow. He stopped on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, and stared up at the pitiless, implacable stone face of one of the lions. Wind whipped his breath from his mouth. He saw Imre, hunched in his cramped kitchen, frying egg-soaked bread for him as he lectured on Socrates, Descartes.
Imre, with blood streaming from his nose and mouth, his eyes full of mute suffering. Imre, with mutilated hands, dripping blood.
Val lurched to the side, and vomited up his guts. The heaving went on long after his stomach was empty. His eyes streamed, his nose ran. The dark water of the Danube roiled sluggishly below. He longed for the icy, airless darkness of it. Not for the first time. He thought of his mother.
No. It was not his nature. Fuck them. He was too angry to give in.
He straightened, wiping his face with a sleeve stiff with ice, and resumed his shambling way to the hotel, the jewelry case and file of photos clamped beneath his arm. The conversation with Hegel flashed through his mind. It seemed so long ago.
He began to laugh. At least he no longer had to worry about Hegel hurting Imre. His friend could only be savaged by one villain at a time.
Laughter hurt his cracked ribs. He stopped it.
At least Novak did not know about the child. He clung to that.
He was still clutching the ampule in his hand, he realized, though his numb fingers barely felt it. His hand tightened on the hard cylinder. He broke off the tip and inhaled deeply.
It was a sample vial of a new scent, blended exclusively for him by his personal parfumeur in Provence. An extravagant affectation, but fuck it, he had the money. Why not? He liked good smells.
The scent was voluptuous, hints of sweet wood, fleshy depths of forest mushrooms, the warm, spicy tang of pine, lavender and sage. A pathetically small victory in the face of the leverage that Novak wielded on him, but he would cling to any minor triumph.
Three more days of safety for Imre’s finger, for a vial of perfume.
He rubbed some on his skin, inhaled. His body was too cold to release the scent, and the inside of his nose felt frozen solid, but still, he smelled it, just barely, and the earthy, sensual essence warmed him.
It made him think of Tamara Steele. The way her red lips curved in that secret smile in the evening gown photograph. The picture of her in the black dress, wildflowers in her outstretched hand. Lavender and daisies. Her pale, beautiful face, filled with ancient sadness.
But the image of Imre’s mutilated hands battered at him.
He was unaccustomed to the sensation of fear after years of cultivating detachment. It was intensely unpleasant.
If they killed Imre, that was it. There was no other reason for Val to remain even remotely human.
You are a whining dog begging for scraps.
True. His stock portfolio had a net worth in the millions now, and look at him, still living on scraps. A chess game every few years. Distant memories of egg and bread fried in butter, Socrates and Descartes, Bach inventions played on the grand piano. That lumpy, dusty old divan.
And soon enough, a mossy grave in the cemetery with Imre’s name carved on it.
Scraps. All that he would ever be allowed to have.
Chapter
5
Tam muttered something foul in some half-remembered language as she tore off her goggles. She wiped her hair back off her sweaty forehead and flung down the troublesome pendant with disgust.
She hated it. The colors weren’t melding. She had envisioned a tangle of bronze and green-tinged copper clockwork bits layered with delicate filigreed gold to hide the mechanism that housed the little hypodermic, but it wasn’t fitting together right, and the semi-precious stones she’d chosen looked dull and blah. The piece didn’t throb or hum, or whisper seductive, ominous things; it had no menace, no driving intensity, no sex appeal. It was a necklace that a funky college girl with a pierced nose might buy from a pothead vendor in a Seattle open-air market for fifteen bucks. Not Deadly Beauty.
She was losing her touch, her eye, her concentration. In a word, everything. Lack of sleep, maybe. Not that she’d ever slept much.
The light over the door strobed. Rosalia was intercomming her. She pulled off the earphones, thinking wistfully of the twelve-hour-long trances she used to go into to work. Absolute concentration, no distractions. Miles inside the sweet privacy of her own twisted mind.
Those days were gone. And she had no one to blame but herself.
She stabbed the button that stopped the savagely melancholy Spanish gypsy lament howled out by broken wine-and-cigarette-roughened voices. A sentimental choice. Unusual for her. Usually she went for hard rock. Something feverish and raucous, to burn out the fog in her head and help her get to the faraway place where the images of the jewelry came to her, glowing and glittering and
twisting in her mind.
She hit the intercom. “Yes, Rosalia? What is it?”
“A visitor,” Rosalia replied, in her native Brazilian Portuguese. “The red Volkswagen. I think it is the dark lady with the boy baby.”
Tam dropped her face into her hands. No. Please. Not Erin again.
It had only been a week since the last concerned visit, full of great examples of beatific madonna-style mothering and tit-sucking and cooing and crooning and gentle, well-meant, incredibly irritating advice.
She tossed down the goggles and punched up the security program onto her studio computer monitor. Sure enough. There was Erin’s red Volkswagen Bug, parked outside the outermost line of defense. Waiting to be beckoned in. Tam switched to another camera angle, and made out the car seat in the back, with Kev’s chubby, heavy-cheeked profile. Probably already hungry for his liquid lunch. She was in for it.
Her sigh felt almost like a growl as she deactivated the various devices. Time to brace herself for the irritating questions. Had she done a fucking blood test to check for anemia? Was she taking a fucking multivitamin and mineral supplement? Did she want to do another fucking barbecue lunch on Sunday with the McCloud Crowd? To which the answers were always no, no, no, and leave me alone, already.
But Erin was tough. Thick-skinned. She didn’t back down easily.
Erin’s car started up again, and Tam watched it glumly as it advanced up the road. The McClouds made big fun of all her security doodads, but she could care less. Daddy Novak would probably love to kill Connor and Erin and their spawn too, for their part in Kurt Novak’s death. But if they wanted to paint targets on their asses and hang them out in the breeze, that was their affair. She wanted