It was not the chill of death — although at first Geoffrey thought it might be, given the circumstances — but was instead the chill of a refrigerated compartment. He followed the attendant and Santorini into a vast cool room, listened to them haggling over which unidentified female Santorini wanted to see — apparently there were three such stiffs, as the attendant called them, in residence at the moment — and was relieved, he guessed, when they finally settled on the woman who’d been brought in this past Monday.
The attendant opened a small door and rolled out a tray.
The woman on the tray was naked and blond.
Part of her face and most of her skull were entirely gone.
Geoffrey wanted to throw up.
“Take a look at the left tit,” Santorini said.
Geoffrey looked.
Tattooed just below the nipple was what appeared to be the silhouette of a sword:
A tiny green sword.
He was just coming out of the shower that Thursday morning when Elita noticed the tattoo.
At 6:25 last night they’d boarded the Lake Shore Limited in Chicago, and were already eating dinner when the train passed South Bend, Indiana. She drank a single scotch before dinner — no one asked her for identification — and two glasses of white wine during dinner, and then they went back to his bedroom again. And while the rest of Indiana, and then all of Michigan and Ohio, flashed by outside in the darkness of the night, she gave herself to him as she had the night before and the night before that, again and again and again, mindlessly and completely. By dawn, when the train entered New York State, she was utterly exhausted.
It was now a little past nine in the morning.
They planned to eat a late breakfast before the train pulled into the Albany-Rensselaer station. They were scheduled to arrive in Penn Station at twenty minutes to two that afternoon, and she was hoping he would take her to lunch in New York, although he’d made no mention of it thus far.
She was lying naked on the wide lower berth where all last night they’d made love, a faint, pleased smile on her face, her long blond hair fanned out over the pillow, her head turned toward the closed bathroom door. The train was still heading eastward, it would not begin its true southern descent until they left Albany. The compartment’s picture window was facing north, it splashed a cold clear light into the room, broken occasionally by the dappling of infrequent trees along the track. The bathroom door opened.
He came out into the sharpness of sunlight streaming through the window, materialized like some dusty pagan god wearing only a white towel around his waist, his brown hair wet and plastered to his head, his grey-green eyes reflecting the light, his face breaking into a grin when he realized she was observing him solemnly and silently and — well, reverentially, she supposed, and felt suddenly embarrassed.
There was another glint of green, echoing the green of his eyes, darker in hue, curling like a misplaced eyebrow on his left pectoral, just below the nipple. She realized all at once that it was a tattoo, and further realized that it was a sword... well, some sort of sword... one of those swords you saw in the waistbands of guys wearing turbans and baggy pants... that kind of sword.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
“Is what what you think it is?” he said, drying himself now, the towel in his hands and no longer around his waist, his cock — he had taught her to call it a cock, and not a dick or a prick — his cock faintly tumescent even in repose. Her first boyfriend... well, the first boyfriend she’d known intimately — had called it a dick. That was when she was sixteen. The other two had called it a prick. That was when she was respectively seventeen and just nineteen. Last night, when she stopped being a teenager altogether, Sonny had informed her that a prick was what you called a son of a bitch. A cock was what he was about to put in her mouth.
“It is a tattoo, isn’t it?”
“Oh,” he said. “This.”
And looked down at his chest as if discovering it for the first time.
“A samovar, right?” she said.
He burst out laughing.
“No,” he said. “Not a samovar.”
“Well, what do you call that kind of sword?”
“A scimitar,” he said.
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” she said, and felt suddenly childish, suddenly the teenage girl again and not the woman she’d become, the woman he’d miraculously caused her to become. Still drying himself. The towel behind his back, an end in either hand, working the towel. His cock hanging there. Moving slightly with the movement of the towel. Like a pendulum. Hanging there. Moving. Waiting to be touched. By the woman, not the girl, not the child. She had a sudden desire to take him in her mouth again.
“Where’d you get it? The tattoo, I mean.”
Her eyes on his cock.
“In San Francisco,” he said.
“When?”
“I was still very young. Just out of medical school.”
“Why a sword? A scimitar.”
“Why not? The other new residents were getting mermaids and hearts and such. I figured a scimitar would be more original.”
“Why green? To match your eyes?”
“No, it was St. Patrick’s Day. We’d gone up there for the weekend. I thought green would be appropriate.”
“Bring it closer,” she said.
He walked to the bed. She reached out to touch the tattoo.
“Cute,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“This, too,” she said.
Geoffrey placed the call to Nepal at 1:00 P.M. sharp, New York time. He had eaten a hamburger and french fries at his desk, washing his lunch down with a Diet Coke, waiting for the appropriate time to call. By his calculation, it was now 10:40 P.M. in Kathmandu. Alison should be in her apartment and in bed at this hour, with nowhere to rush off to and plenty of time to talk. The phone rang once, twice, three times...
“Hello?”
A man’s voice. A brusque tone even in that single word. Had they put him through to the wrong number? Halfway across the bloody world?
“Yes, hello,” he said, “excuse me, I’m trying to reach...”
“Who’s calling, please?”
Same brusque tone, more impatient now.
And then, somewhere in the background, “Who is it, Spence?”
Alison’s voice. But who...?
“Is Miss Haywood there, please?” he said.
“Who is this?”
The voice thoroughly impatient now, virtually rude.
“Geoffrey Turner. May I please speak to Miss Haywood?”
“Moment.”
And off the line.
Muted voices in the background.
Spence who?
“Hello?”
Alison again. On the phone this time.
“Who was that?” he asked at once.
“Spence,” she said.
“Who’s Spence?”
“You know very well who Spence is.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. Who in bloody...?”
“Sherwood Spencer Hughes,” she said.
Sounding every bit as impatient as Spence himself had a moment earlier. Sherwood Spencer Hughes, Her Majesty’s Consul-General, familiarly known as Snuffy, except apparently to a certain female Grade-9 who called him Spence and in whose rooms he happened to be at — what the hell time was it?