The intruder stepped into the hallway, moving so quietly that my knowledge of his presence was almost purely intuition. No doubt he saw what I had seen by now, the pale fingers on the rug.
Steady, I told myself, steady. The person took a step closer, and I whirled around the jamb, Beretta at eye level, wrists straight, forearms tensed.
“Don’t move,” I said, slamming the barrel of my gun against the man’s left temple.
EIGHT
The American stopped, frozen except for one muscle in his jaw that flexed and released like a misplaced heartbeat.
Keeping the Beretta steady with his head, I stepped behind him, caught the edge of the open door with my toe, and nudged it closed. “You ran out on me earlier,” I said. “Very impolite.”
He was wearing the raincoat in which I’d first seen him and, beneath it, a sweatshirt and jeans. I ran my free hand up inside the coat, then down along his legs.
“You won’t find anything,” he said, and he was right.
“It’s Brian, isn’t it?” I asked, standing. “I’m not sure I caught your name at the Pub.”
He nodded carefully.
“Well, Brian,” I told him, helping him forward with the barrel of the Beretta. “Why don’t we chat in the living room?”
“Is he dead?” the American asked as we started forward.
“I’m afraid so.”
We crossed into the living room, and I directed him toward the settee. He sat down and looked over at Joshi. “Did you kill him?”
I didn’t answer. If Brian hadn’t killed the little man, I figured any allusion to my own violent tendencies might give me some leverage.
“What were you doing in my room?” I asked.
“It is you, isn’t it?” he said, ignoring my question. “When I first saw you at the terminal, I wasn’t sure, and then in your room that night I thought I was wrong, but I wasn’t.”
I took a step toward him with the Beretta. “Cut the bullshit,” I said, “or you’ll join our little friend here.”
Brian crossed his legs and stretched his arms out along the back of the sofa. He had the body of a swimmer, tall and fluid. “You won’t kill me,” he said, leaning back into the pillows.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “Joshi told me you paid him to keep tabs on me.”
“Who are you?” he retorted. “Marie Lenoir? Hannah Boyle?”
I leaned over him, laying the tip of the Beretta’s barrel just behind his ear. “Who’s Hannah Boyle?”
He moved his head to look up at me. His eyes were as blue as mine, clear and flawless, cold with contempt. “I was hoping you could tell me that,” he said. He made a movement with his right hand as if reaching for something in his coat.
Shaking my head, I nudged him with the Beretta’s barrel.
“My wallet,” he said, glancing toward his chest. “It’s in the left breast pocket.”
“I’ll get it,” I told him. Reaching into his coat with my left hand, I pulled out a worn leather billfold.
“Open it,” he said.
Keeping my eyes and the gun on Brian, I stepped back, pulled one of the wooden chairs out from the little table, and sat down. If he had wanted to kill me, I thought, he could have done it that night in my room at the Continental. And yet, it struck me, death was not the only danger to be aware of.
“Open it,” he repeated.
I laid the wallet on the table and opened it. A handful of dirham notes peered out from the top of the billfold. A half dozen plastic cards were tucked neatly in the leather slots. In the centermost panel, secured behind a piece of clear plastic, was a California driver’s license with Brian’s face on it. Brian Haverman, the license said; 1010 Bridgeway, Sausalito, California.
“There’s a picture,” he told me. “In the fold behind the license.”
I reached in with my left index finger, slid the photograph out, and unfolded it. The print was color, the edges of the paper worn from being handled too much, the image creased where it had been folded to fit into the wallet. It was not risqué, but it was an intimate picture, meant to be tucked away as it was, meant for the person who had taken it. It had been taken on a train; that much was clear. The woman in the photograph had a travel-weary tiredness to her. Her hair was mussed; her eyes were still sleep-swollen. She had her hand out as if to ward off the photographer, but she was smiling nonetheless, a smile I could not remember smiling, though I must have, on a train somewhere, on a trip I could not remember taking.
She was me, and she was not. She was my face, my body, my clothes even. The same North Face jacket I’d been found in was draped over her like a blanket. And yet, whatever had happened to this woman had not happened to me; whatever experiences had shaped that drowsy smile were hers alone.
“I found it in my brother’s apartment,” Brian said. “He wrote me about you, before he disappeared.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that you were the girl of his dreams.”
“What else?”
“Not much. Only that you were an American, that he met you at the pool at the Hotel Ziryab. He used to go there sometimes for a cheap swim.”
“How long had we known each other?”
He hesitated, puzzling over the question, over why I would have to ask.
“How long?” I repeated.
“A month or so.”
I looked down at the picture again, at this ghost of myself. Was this the same woman who’d drunk vodka martinis at Caid’s, who’d left a Beretta and a wad of cash in the safe at the El Minzah? The girl of someone’s dreams?
“And your brother?” I asked. “Do you have a picture of him?”
Brian nodded, and this time I handed him the wallet. He pulled a second photo from the billfold and gave it to me. It showed two men in ties and dress shirts, arms hooked over each other’s shoulders, smiling widely. Their affection for each other was obvious.
“It was taken two years ago. At our sister’s wedding,” Brian explained.
Stifling a shudder, I looked down at the worn photograph, at the darker of the two brothers. Here was a face I knew and knew well. Here were the same pale lids I’d seen closing over and over on themselves, the one bloodstained relic my shattered mind had preserved. The man on the rooftop. The man of my dreams.
“Why did you run from me at the Pub?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I was scared, I guess.” He nodded toward my gun. “Not without reason, it seems.”
I glanced down at Joshi’s body sprawled out on the carpet. I didn’t think Brian had killed him. If he had, it made little sense for him to come back to the apartment. Standing, I backed across the room, pulled the coverlet off the bed, and laid it over Joshi.
“Thank you,” Brian said.
“I didn’t kill him,” I told him.
Brian smiled. “I know.”
I sat down again. “Tell me about your brother.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the one with the gun,” I said. “What was he doing in Morocco?”
Brian sighed. “He was working for All Join Hands.”
I gave him a blank look. “Humor me,” I said. “I know less than you think.”
“They’re a nonprofit group,” he explained. “They work to bring technology to the emerging world.”
“Computers?” I asked, remembering what the English girl at the Pub had said.
He nodded. “You can’t belong to the global marketplace without belonging to the World Wide Web.”
“You seem to know a lot about it,” I remarked.
“I’m in the business, too,” Brian said.
“Another altruist?”
He shrugged.
“Do you think he’s dead?” I asked. It was a terrible question, and as soon as I spoke I wished I hadn’t.