You don't have to take this shit.
Whatever happens, you don't take this kind of shit.
Fight for your life, Lu, fight for every second you can draw breath. Whatever happens he can't take your spirit away from you.
Spider cradles his left hand in the palm of his right one. Jesus Christ, how did she do that? The flesh is open and he can see inside his own hand. He can see bones and veins, blood and tissue oozing from the crescent-shaped wound caused by her vicious teeth.
He wipes sweat off his head with his right forearm and looks across the basement for something with which to make a tourniquet. His eyes settle on a sink in the far corner and some cotton rags that will be okay if he washes them first.
He turns on the single mixer tap and lets cold water pour over his damaged hand into the deep ceramic trough. The water is red with his blood but it is cool and helps ease the pain that is roaring through him. He soaks one of the rags, the type he usually uses for gags and facial bindings, and squeezes it out as best he can. Spider wraps the sodden cotton around the bite wound, makes a loop and then grips one end of the rag in his teeth so he can pull tight. Further up his forearm he ties a second tourniquet across the veins he suspects may feed blood into the wound.
Lu watches helplessly from the bondage table. She's thinking of when she was a small child watching snowflakes for the first time from the window of her parents' tenement building, thinking of when she was free and innocent, running in the meadows of Gorky Park.
She's thinking of what life with Ramzan might have been like.
She's thinking of anything other than what might happen to her next.
Spider dries his left hand on his trousers and looks straight at her.
'Bad Sugar,' he says, shaking his head from side to side. 'Bad, bad Sugar.'
Lu's eyes are fixed on his hand. Not the hand she's bitten, but his good right hand. In it, gripped tight, is what looks like a large bone saw.
29
San Quirico D'Orcia, Tuscany From a green-shuttered bedroom window of La Casa Strada, Jack looked down on a garden filled with apple, plum and pear trees. The row with Nancy had drained him and made him reflect, but deep down he knew he'd crossed the point of no return. Whatever his wife said, or did, he was going to help Massimo. And if necessary, he was going to help Howie too. Being truthful to himself, he now accepted that he'd never really managed to get BRK out of his system. In fact, because he was so totally removed from the case, it had preyed on his mind more than ever. Now, at least, by getting involved, by trying to do something, the mental anguish would be worthwhile, instead of just pointless.
Jack stared again out of the window. The only guests walking around the garden were an elderly couple; probably about the same age his mother and father would have been if they'd still been alive. They wandered along the stone pathway, holding hands and pausing every now and again to point out various fruits and plants to each other. Jack tried to recall their name: Giggs, or Griggs, something like that. Anyway, Nancy had said that they were here to celebrate his seventieth birthday and her sixtieth, which fell within five days of each other. How beautiful to have reached that age and still be so in love. Jack looked closer at the man, his sunburned face smiling from beneath an ivory-coloured Panama hat. The old guy seemed perfectly happy with his life, content to be slowly pacing it out, hand in hand with his soulmate. The couple stopped beneath the shade of a cherry tree and admired Zack's pet rabbit as it bounded around their legs, before darting off to the far side of the orchard. The old man brushed leaves off a nearby steamer chair and helped his wife into it, before settling in another one alongside her. No sooner was he comfortable than he stretched out his gnarled old arm so they could hold hands again. Jack would have loved to have brought his parents here, to have had them stay for a month or two each summer and watch their grandchild growing up. He would have given almost anything to be looking down from that very window on his own mother and father. They'd seldom travelled out of New York State, let alone America, but Italy was on their 'To Do' list and deep down he was certain they'd have loved the place. It was sad and ironic that it was the money they'd left him that had enabled him and Nancy to buy La Casa Strada, mortgage-free. For a moment he pictured all three generations of Kings walking together, down to the centre of town, to the Piazza della Liberta', where they could sit on long stone steps, while Zack and the grandfather that he had never got to know could choose ice cream from the nearby gelateria. Afterwards, they'd walk through the Renaissance gardens of Horti Leonini and Nancy and his mother would wait while Zack played hide and seek in the miniature maze. Somehow the argument with Nancy and the prospect of distance opening up again between them made him ache once more for his own mother and father.
Jack stepped back from the window, and from all his musings on what might have been. It was time to put Tuscany, and any thoughts of his parents, his wife or his child firmly to the back of his mind.
There was work to do.
He dialled the number of Massimo Albonetti.
30
Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York Spider holds the bone saw in his hand and looks along the blade towards Lu Zagalsky as she thrashes about on the bondage table, desperately trying to break free of her chains. In his hand he holds sixteen inches of brutal steel that had once belonged to his father and for years had been used to butcher sides of beef and pork that the family bought wholesale. In later years, Spider had found more dramatic uses for it. And right now, he's thinking how fitting it would be to repay Lu's violence towards him, by cutting her up, limb by limb – while she's still alive.
But that's not the plan, Spider. Stick to the plan. You have great things in mind for her; don't ruin the bigger picture all because of one small setback.
Spider looks down at his bandaged hand, blood still weeping from where she'd sunk her teeth into the soft flesh. The bones around the thumb still throbbing painfully.
Lu Zagalsky can't hide the fear in her eyes. She tries to mouth words at him, to plead for her life, but nothing comes.
Her vocal cords have been bleached into silence.
'Whorebitch!' he shrieks and smashes the butt of the hardwood saw handle on to the bridge of her nose. 'You think you can hurt me, and get away with it?' he snarls. 'You fucking, arrogant little whorebitch!'
He hits her again with the butt of the saw and the pain from the second blow is so excruciating that she's sure he's broken her nose. Tears sting her eyes but her focus never leaves the blade.
'Look at you!' says Spider disgustedly. 'Look at how filthy and unworthy you are.' He stands back and laughs at her.
It's a spiteful, bullying, degrading laugh and in that split second Lu Zagalsky realizes that she's soiled herself. Something she would never, not even in her darkest nightmares, have dreamt could happen to her. He's right. This fucking crazy lunatic is right, sometime in the last five minutes, at the height of their struggle, she had failed to control herself.
Spider sneers at her. 'You're disgusting. You're no better than the others.'
Lu tries to look away from him and bury her illogical feelings of shame by reminding herself of what this animal has done to her, and to the other tortured and murdered women who have preceded her.
Spider's lips flatten into a thin smile. 'They've all done that. Sooner or later, all you dirty bitches shit and piss yourselves like that. Why did you think I stripped you naked?'
Lu feels like sobbing. Was even this planned? Is everything now so hopeless. She turns her head away from him and tries again to tell herself that it is stupid to feel so childishly humiliated. Forget your stupid pride and dignity – this man is going to gut you like a fish; that saw in his hand is not there for fun, any second now he's going to cut your throat and go slash-crazy over all your sorry little ass.