“Look, you son of a bitch.” She leaned over him. “Twenty-five women are dead, and another is in dire straits. She may be dying.”
“I am dying! I fought for this city. I bled for it. I lost the only thing in the world that mattered, and nothing has mattered since. What do I care about some women?”
“Her name’s Ariel. She bakes for a living. She has a neighbor across the hall from her pretty little apartment. Seems like a nice guy. She doesn’t know he’s in love with her, doesn’t know he came to me today desperate and scared, pleading with me to find her. Her name is Ariel, and you’re going to tell me what you know.”
Pella turned his head away, stared toward the draped windows. “I don’t know anything.”
“You lying fucker.” She grabbed hold of his breather, saw his eyes go wide. She wouldn’t actually rip it off-probably wouldn’t-but he didn’t know that. “You want to take another breath?”
“The droids know you’re in here. If anything happens to me-”
“What? Like you just-oops-fall over dead when I happen to be talking to you? An officer of the law, sworn to protect and serve. And with a witness to back me up?”
“What witness?”
Eve glanced over, jerked her head so that Roarke stepped into Pella’s view. “If this fucker just happened to kick it when I was duly questioning him about his knowledge of a suspect, it would be an accident, right?”
“Absolutely.” Roarke smiled, cold and calm. “An unforeseen event.”
“You know who he is,” Eve said when Pella’s eyes wheeled. “And who I am. Roarke’s cop, that’s what you called me. Believe me when I tell you if you happen to stop breathing, and I lie about how that might’ve happened, he’ll swear to it.”
“On a bloody stack of Bibles,” Roarke confirmed.
“But you’re not ready to die yet, are you, Pella?” Her hand stayed firm on the breather when he batted at it. “It shows in the eyes when someone’s not ready to die yet. So, if you want that next breath, then the one that comes after, you tell me the goddamn truth. You know Robert Lowell. You knew Edwina Spring.”
“Let go of it.” He wheezed in air. “I’ll have you up on charges.”
“You’ll be dead, and the dead don’t scare me. You knew them. Next breath, Pella, say yes.”
“Yes, yes.” He shoved his hand at Eve’s, and the harsh sound of his labored breath eased when she lifted it. “Yes, I knew them. But not to speak to. They were the elite. I was only a soldier. Get the hell away from me.”
“Not a chance. Tell me what you know.”
Pella’s eyes ticked over to Roarke, back to Eve. Then, for a moment, he simply closed them. “He was about my age-a few years younger-but he didn’t serve. Soft.” Pella’s hand trembled a little as it came up, stroked over the breather to be sure it was in the correct position. “Soft look about him, and he had his family money at his back, of course. His type never got dirty, never risked their own skin. She…I need water.”
Eve glanced over, saw the cup with a straw on the bedside table. She picked it up, held it out.
“I can’t hold the damn thing. It’s bad today. Worse since you got here.”
Saying nothing, she angled it down so he could guide the straw with a trembling hand to the opening in the breather.
“What about her?”
“Beautiful. Young, elegant, a voice like an angel. She would come to the base sometimes, sing for us. Opera, almost always Italian opera. She’d break your heart with every note.”
“You have a thing for her, Pella?”
“Bitch,” he muttered. “What would you know of real love? Therese was everything. But I loved what Edwina was, what she brought us. Hope and beauty.”
“She came to the base on Broome?”
“Yes, on Broome.”
“They lived there, didn’t they?”
“No. Before I think, but not during the fighting, not while soldiers were based there. After, who the hell knows, who the hell cares? But when I was assigned there, they didn’t live in the base on Broome. They had another place, another place on the West Side.”
“Where?”
“It was a long time ago. I was never there, not a foot soldier like me. Some of the others went, officers, and you heard things. Yeah, some of the officers, and the Stealths.”
She felt the next click. “The coverts?”
“Yes. You’d hear things. I heard things.” He closed his eyes. “It hurts to go back there.” For the first time, his voice sounded weak. “And I can’t stop going back there.”
“I’m sorry for all you lost, Mr. Pella.” And in that moment she was. “But Ariel Greenfeld is alive, and she needs help. What did you hear back then that might help her?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“It would have to do with her, with Edwina Spring. She died, did she?”
“Everyone dies.” But his hand came to his breather again, and his eyes watched Eve warily over it. “I heard her-Edwina-talking to a soldier I knew. Young first lieutenant, sent down from upstate. Can’t remember his name. They’d slip off when she’d come to sing. Or you could see the way they looked at each other. The way Therese and I looked at each other.”
“They were lovers?”
“Probably. Or wanted to be. She was young, a lot younger than Taker.”
“Who? Taker?”
“That’s what they called Lowell-James Lowell.”
“Because he took the bodies the dead wagon brought in,” Eve said, remembering Dobbins’s comment.
“That’s right. She was half his age, vital, beautiful. He was too damn old for her, and…and there was something in his eyes. In the old man’s, too, his father. Something in their eyes that brought the hair up on the back of the neck.”
“They found out about her and the soldier.”
“Yes. I think they were going to run away. He wouldn’t have been the first to desert, or the last. It was summer. We had the sector secured, temporarily in any case. I went out, just to walk, to remind myself what we were fighting for. I heard them talking, behind one of the supply tents. Her voice, you couldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s. They were talking about going north, up into the mountains. A lot of people had fled the city for the mountains, the country, and he still had family up that way.”
“She was going to leave her husband, run off with this soldier.” And Robert Lowell, Eve calculated, would have been around twenty.
“I didn’t let them know I was there. I wouldn’t have turned him in. I knew what it was to love someone, and be afraid for her.
“I backtracked a little, then crossed the street so they wouldn’t know I’d been close. Give them privacy, you know. Fucking little privacy back then. And I saw him, on the other side of the tent, listening to them.”
“Lowell,” Eve realized. “The younger one.”
“He looked like he was in a trance. I’d heard he had a mental condition. There were whispers, but I thought it was just the excuse they used to keep him out of the fight. But when I looked across the street, when I looked at him, there was something not right. No, not right at all. I need water.”
Once again, Eve lifted the cup and straw to his mouth.
“He turned them in.”
“He must have. There was nothing I could do, not with him there. I was going to warn them later, warn the lieutenant about the kid. But I never got the chance. I went up the block, debating with myself on what I should or shouldn’t do-wanted to talk to Therese about it first. They were gone when I came back. The soldier off on assignment, and Edwina back home. I never saw either of them alive again.”
“What happened to them?”
“It was more than a week later.” His voice was tiring, genuinely, she judged. She wouldn’t get much more. “The soldier was listed as AWOL, and she hadn’t been back. I thought they’d gotten away. Then one night, I went out for sentry duty. She was on the sidewalk. No one would ever say how whoever had tossed her there had gotten through the posts. She was dead.”