She didn’t look up from her contemplation of her poisons. “No, we won’t,” she said quietly. “You aren’t going with me, Val. This is something I do on my own.”
Something flinty and cold clicked into place inside him.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “We are in this together now.”
“When it comes to Georg and Novak, certainly,” she said. “But not with Stengl or Ana. That’s my business, my past, my nightmare. You stay out of it. It makes more sense.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “And you can’t go until I get back with a decent vehicle anyway. You can’t ride up to the Santarinis’ door on a Vespino. Even Ana has enough of a brain to smell something strange.”
“Hmm.” She broke eye contact, fussed with her vials.
It made him nervous. She seemed most dangerous in this state of quiet passive retreat, somehow out of his reach. Plotting whatever the fuck she pleased, no matter what he said or thought to the contrary.
It made him frantic.
He clamped down on the urge to drag her with him to San Vito. He could not. There was still that fucking video footage to send off.
“Do not go anywhere without me,” he reiterated more sharply. “I still have not figured out how they found us yesterday. Or at the airport in Seattle, either, for that matter. Until I do—”
“Yeah. Do you actually think it’s best I sit here on my ass alone and wait for them? A sitting duck?”
“Do you want the car, or not?” he snarled.
“Of course I do.” Her voice was cool and remote.
They carefully left it at that, but he was still uneasy when he took off on the Vespino some twenty minutes later. The thing buzzed along, whining like a mosquito at a maddening fifty kilometers an hour, sixty on the downhill slopes. His first stop would be the car rental place in San Vito. He was fast running through available identities, having compromised two of them in the past three days already. It galled him that they had caught them in San Vito. Not even Henry had known the hotel.
He took some time to approach the car rental place, studying the hillside above for parked cars or loiterers. No one seemed to be watching. After a half hour, he gritted his teeth and risked it.
He chose a sleek, low-slung silver Opel Tigra sportscar. Not quite worthy of a femme fatale like Tamara Steele, but more appropriate than the Vespino.
The next project was to send that three-times-cursed footage to Novak. Today was the second deadline day—this evening, to be precise, but since God alone knew what would be happening by this evening, he would do well to get it over with. He found a place to park down on the deserted beach on the north side of La Roccia, the enormous rock formation that divided San Vito into halves, San Vito Nord and San Vito Sud. The rock that housed the smuggler’s caves.
It was close enough to the cluster of tourist hotels that clung to the slopes over the beach to have wi-fi. He booted up and established the connection.
He ignored the heaviness in his chest, sent it, and sat there, leaden and cold. Might as well wait for those filthy pigs to have their grunting, snorting fun before he connected to Skype.
He didn’t want to listen to them watching it this time.
Imre dangled between the grasping hands of the two men who dragged him down the corridors. He’d learned to his cost that there was no point trying to stay on his feet. The effort seemed to irritate them even more. His toes bumped over the carpet runner, painfully.
They had told him nothing, but he assumed it was time for another videoconference with Vajda, who must have provided more erotic footage to fuel Novak’s evil machine. What bizarre coin the poor boy paid, for the meager comfort of seeing his foster father alive. Barely alive. But soon Vajda would be free. To save his soul.
Not that Imre even wanted to think about souls, or the saving or the losing of them. He was not ready to do this desperate thing, in spite of having spent all his dark, quiet hours working himself into a state of readiness, over and over. Only to have doubt assail him afresh every time.
He had picked open the inner seam of his shabby trousers, and pinpointed the exact location of his femoral artery, contemplating the sudden puncture wound that he had to inflict upon himself in order to bleed out fast enough. Fortunately, he was so emaciated, his veins and arteries were easy to find. His skeletal body could function as an anatomy poster for bones and blood vessels, if not for muscle tissue.
He would have one chance to get it right. The femoral artery was the fastest way. Opening it could kill a man in less than two minutes. He was not sure where he had learned this fact—no doubt some foolish detective novel read in a moment of weakness, but his brain had seized on the fact. He hoped to God it was true.
A wave of faintness came over him, making him sag lower in the grip of the two gorillas dragging him. Faint with pain and with fear that this was a sin that might lose him his chance to join Ilona and Tina where they waited with the angels.
Of course, in the bitter darkness of the night in his stinking cell, even the possibility of joining Ilona and Tina had seemed naive and stupid. Heaven could not be so easily reached after death.
But still, in his loneliness, he hoped.
His blood pressure was too low. Not good, for bleeding out quickly. He barely felt like he had anything inside to bleed. He felt like a pithy, dry orange, a desiccated lemon. All stringy pulp, no juice.
Forgive me, Ilona, Tina, he repeated, eyes closed. The shard of glass from the lens of his eyeglasses was tucked inside his cheek. He fiddled at it with his tongue, feeling the sharp edge, tasting blood. I am not doing this for myself, but for Vajda, he pleaded, to the demons of doubt, swarming around him like buzzing insects. And after all, he was only anticipating his own inevitable death, no?
Was it really for Vajda? Was it just fear of pain? Could any man be blamed for a mortal sin in such circumstances? In their rambling, one-sided conversations, Novak had detailed his favorite techniques for inflicting maximum agony to Imre. Death was preferable. Nausea gripped him. He could not faint. Must not. One chance. Only one.
They dragged him into Novak’s library, over lurid colors cast by the stained glass, through the warm glow of wood paneling. They flung him into a seat in front of the computer with a force that jarred his degenerating bones and made him drag in dry gasps of pain.
Novak was there, waiting for him. He sat down next to Imre, grinning. “We have another juicy treat from your little friend. You would enjoy seeing him in action once again? For old times’ sake? So talented, our Vajda. Watch this, my friend, watch this. Gregor, play it for him.”
Gregor clicked with the mouse until the video image filled the large screen.
Imre watched, his jaw set, having learned the futility of trying not to look the last time. He still had hematomas in his arm, from Novak’s hideously strong fingers, his thick, yellowed nails.
A bedroom, dimly lit with pale morning light. A man and a woman, moving slowly together on the bed in the classic rhythm of love, her astride. The camera clearly showed the woman’s lovely profile, her graceful back, the gentleness in her hands as she cupped Vajda’s face.
Vajda’s face had a look upon it that Imre had never imagined seeing. He clasped the woman’s hands in his, lifted them to his lips.
Imre watched, in growing amazement. This was not pornography.
In truth, the other one had not been either, but this one was still less so. It was imbued with tenderness. Imre saw it in every gesture. A concert pianist, he had trained intensively all his life in the art of imparting real emotion, true tenderness with every gesture, every phrase. He knew the real thing when he saw it. He felt it in his chest, his gut. This was real intimacy. Intimacy that