‘This used to be a safe house,’ said Cory. ‘It was forgotten. We won’t be disturbed, and it was designed to make escape difficult.’
‘KGB or CIA?’
‘What’s the difference?’
Jem let her head loll against the headrest. Cory placed his gloves on the coffee table and sat opposite, still the priest.
‘Jem, you are in love with Saskia. You think about her. It’s natural. Her body. Her eyes, the way they look green in sunlight. You’d do anything to wake her memory. But is she alive? No, Jem. She is nothing more than cold cuts. However, I would like to hear why you think differently.’
‘Who are you? Is Cory your real name?’
Cory washed his hands and got dressed. He watched the dozing prostitute. His automata made a liquid metaphor of the electrical resistance on her scalp, showed him peaks and troughs. He might drop a word in her ear and see the ripple of its effect. He might wait for the spike that signalled her intention to blink; and he would know that intent before she did.
Then he recalled the newspaper article that Jennifer had shown him. By morning, ‘The Englishman’ would be suspected of Lisandro’s murder. He would also be sought for the murder of a bordello madam, past her prime but fighting fit, found naked on her bed with skull grit in her changing screen. But there would be no bullet. And no powder burns.
Her eyes opened.
‘You think I’m scared of you, Cory the Great?’
The pupils were wide with something home-brewed.
‘Paloma, let’s play a game. I’m thinking of either night or day. I want you to tell me which. If you are correct, I leave and you never see me again.’
‘That’s easy. I have the touch.’
‘I never wanted to kill you,’ Cory said. His words came with enough insouciance for Jem to recognise the lie. The implication was clear: she was in immediate danger. Yet, to her surprise, she did not collapse. ‘I only want information.’
‘I’ll tell you everything. But I need to use the toilet.’
‘Be my guest.’
There was a falling line of red on Cory’s upper lip.
‘Your nose is bleeding,’ she said.
Cory produced a handkerchief and pressed his nostril. Then he walked to the wide fireplace, took a match from the mantel, flicked it alight, and put it to the lattice of paper and wood. Jem paused in the doorway.
‘I heard,’ she said, ‘about Saskia’s apartment.’
‘One is never too old to play with matches,’ he replied, not turning. ‘The bathroom is down the hall.’
Once upon a time, a woman called Catherine had consented to marry Cory over pan-fried bread in a field outside Jesup, Georgia. The ring—the very ring whose undeclared mass had almost ended his mission—had been warmed by his anxious hands that day. Her fingertips were cool as he slid it on. ‘Yes,’ said the soldier’s daughter.
Cory smiled.
Now, in 1947, he rose from the prostitute’s bed and walked towards the door of the attic. Paloma seemed to drift alongside him. Her footsteps were soundless. She stopped in the neon glow beneath the skylight. She was changing colours.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s raining again.’
They stopped and looked at the veins of water on the window. Cory heard the glug-glug of filling gutters. For South America, this was subtle rain.
He looked at her. The neon light gave her no shadow and her quicksilver eyes were translucent opals and her mouth had a lunar shimmer like water whirling colgada into a drain. As Cory reached for her shoulder, the apparition disappeared. His eyes refocused on the bed.
Paloma had turned and kicked when Cory shot her. Her blood had slicked the pillow and the changing screen. Some feathers still fell.
‘I am so sorry. Not my decision.’
Haunted, young Cory closed the door.
Water poured from the basin onto Jem’s bare feet. She closed the tap and waited for the overflow to swallow the excess. Then she immersed her hands to the wrists. The plates of her nails went red. She brought a handful of wetness to her face and enjoyed its cool bite. Then she twisted her skirt clockwise and unfastened the rivets on her hip. There was comfort, almost, in the familiar blood. She inserted the tampon and dropped the applicator into the toilet bowl, covering it with a few wads of paper. As she did so, she looked at the bathroom door. She could almost hear, deep beyond it, the plucked prongs of a music box. It scared her beyond Cory’s coldest promises.
In the larger mirror above the sink, her eyes seemed narrow. They became hawkish.
So she was a con artist. She had conned Saskia. She had even conned Danny. Now her mark was Cory. With the last of the water, she finger-combed her hair with her left hand.
In the lounge, where the fire crackled drily, Cory had slouched in the winged armchair. His eyes moved under their lids. Murmured words were caught in bubbles of reddish spit.
‘Paloma,’ he whispered. ‘Where is it?’ He licked his lips. ‘You know what. The Cullinan Zero.’ He coughed. ‘Tell me.’ His fingertips fluttered and Jem saw the discarded cane twitch. ‘I have Jem.’
She closed the door. The hallway was quiet and empty. This would be like her escape from the apartment in Berlin, easy doing it. She crept down the hallway and touched the keypad. A heartbeat throbbed in her palm. If only she could impart her desperation to the door, beg it to unlock. She remembered Cory’s lips on hers. Death as a suitor whose carriage kindly stopped. Death as Saskia, with full, relaxed lips, wanting her. Her short hair. Yes, Jem had shorn Saskia lock by lock. Wind had played with the clumps of hair.
Ssssss. Saskia.
Calm as, Jem, she thought. Arctic effing calm.
She looked at the door. Her attention snapped to Cory’s reflection in the cold, black finish and she sighed, sagged against the wood.
Chapter Seventeen
Jem made fists and turned towards him. She had never been so scared and ready to fight. She considered the idea that she was standing in the place she would die.
‘I have to go on alone,’ he said, into the distance, perhaps into the reflected world. A ruby tear squeezed from his eye as he smiled.
Con him.
‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you bleeding?’
‘Old wounds reopening, I guess.’
Cory moved closer. One shoulder touched the wall. His expression was regretful as he lifted the cane. With an organic, bloating action, it became a sword.
‘Relaje, Paloma,’ he said.
‘I have a question.’ If Cory was sleepwalking, the girl in his dream—Paloma—might have been his love, to judge by the hope in his eyes. ‘Who is Paloma? Who am I?’
‘Two things, can happen now. Truthfully, I don’t know which. Either I put this sword through your heart or I let you live. From the perspective of five years hence, or fifty, one of those things is history. Perhaps you died here. Perhaps you died a great-grandmother. I could set the event in stone. I could collapse the wave. But I want you to understand that it isn’t really me making the decisions. I’m thinking of night or day. If you can guess which, you will leave and I will never see you again.’