She said, “I’m absolutely divine, make no mistake. Have you felt my skin? It’s brushed silk, and my complexion! Do you know I don’t wear any make-up? I don’t need to! It’s just sensational.”
Her skin was indeed very smooth, and though she had to be the only woman in downtown Chicago who wasn’t adorning her features with the garish colours of the decade, yet the absence of paint only served to draw the eye, novelty in a crowd.
“There’s just one problem,” she murmured, head tilted away from the lone proprietor and his eager ears. “When I picked this skin up, I thought she looked just radiant. It was at the bus stop, and she was heading north anyway, and I thought… why not? It’s obvious no one’s interested in the girl, except for the usual, so a few months, a few years, it could be delightful. Only the problem…” A conspiratorial palm pressed gently into her own belly. “I know,” she whispered, her voice quivering with delight at its conspiratorial outlay, “why I had to leave in the first place, and I reckon it’s only five months more until I pop.”
I pushed my bourbon to one side, rested my elbow on the bar, pulled a slim black notebook from my inside jacket pocket and a stub of pencil. “What precisely are you looking for?”
Janus sucked in her lips judiciously. “Male, unmarried, twenty-five, I think–although I can go with younger so long as he looks like he can hold his own, I won’t be having boys–thirty-two at the maximum, any older just isn’t worth the effort. Unmarried, naturally. I’m not interested in excessive body hair. I don’t mind the regular shave, but the all-over carpeted look is very 1880s. I’d love it if he has a place to live already, no further west than Princeton; if there’s a mortgage that’s fine, but I don’t want to handle the paperwork on an initial purchase.”
I licked the end of my pencil-scrubbed fingertip, turned the page of my notebook. “Any academic qualifications, career prospects?”
“Absolutely. I’m looking at a long-term investment. I want to start a company, I want to have a family, I want… what do you want, Mr Patterjones Wynne?”
The question came so suddenly, at first I wasn’t sure I’d heard it. “Me?”
“You. What do you want?”
I hesitated, pencil balanced on the edge of the page. “Is that relevant?”
“First time we met you wanted… whatever her name was.”
“Ayesha,” I murmured, and was surprised how quickly the name was on my lips. “Ayesha bint Kamal. She was… but I had to go.”
“A woman,” she concluded with a twitch of a shoulder. “A wife. A normal life. What do you want now?”
I considered, then laid my notebook down, looked her in the eye and said, “I want what everyone wants–something better.”
“Better than what?”
“Better than whatever life it is I happen to be living right now. ”
A moment which could have gone any way at all.
Then Janus grinned, slapped me on the shoulder and exclaimed, “You’re gonna be really busy with that. Good luck!”
I sighed and picked up my notebook. “What else were you looking for? Acceptable health issues, inoculations…?”
She shrugged, shoulders swelling, elbows tucked in. “OK,” she said. “You want to talk shop, that’s fine. No fallen arches.” She jammed her finger into my thigh with each vital word. “You may call it petty, but I have no time for them. I don’t mind spectacles–lend a certain dignity–but tinnitus, eczema–any sort of sense or skin disorder–absolutely out, and I don’t want any surprises in the sexual area again, thank you very much.”
“Height?”
“Over five foot six, but I don’t want to be a freak. At six two you’re respectable, at six five people start to wonder.”
I made a note. “I take it we’re looking at years, not months?”
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“Any goals I should be made aware of?”
She considered. “Well,” she said at last, “I wanna build a life, marry a girl, find a house and have a baby. If you can get me someone who’s been to Harvard, that’d be just peachy.”
Chapter 32
Fifty years later I walked through the pre-dawn streets of Bratislava, bag over my shoulder, handcuffs in my pocket, and I was angry.
It was that blue-grey hour of deepest cold when any heat from yesterday has finally dissolved in the night, nothing to replace it but the hope of sunrise yet to come. In the doorway of a supermarket, shutter down over the windows, slept a beggar man, dead to the world, blue bag pulled up around his head. From the slumbering square of Mileticova a garbage truck roared and grumbled as it scooped up and crushed the tatty remnants of market day, its yellow lights spinning off the grey-white walls. On the Danube a cargo ship of orange paint and rusting sides, riding high in the water, chugged and churned its way towards Vienna. I headed towards the swooping arch of Apollo Bridge and saw beneath it a single street sweeper sitting on a bench, his trolley resting while he had a fag, his eyes gummy and bags full of fallen leaves.
He glanced up as I approached, but saw no threat in me. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the handcuffs, snapped them round my wrists, pinning them in front. At the sound, he looked up again in time for me to put my hands across his shoulder, press my fingers into the soft skin where collarbone met neck and switch.
Nathan Coyle swayed as I rose to my feet, and before he could move I punched him, not particularly hard, but hard enough, in the shoulder. He stumbled and tripped over his own retreating feet, tried to brace his fall, found his hands cuffed and landed badly. I knelt on top of him, my right knee cracking, my body sticky and warm beneath its protective jacket, and before he could speak I laid my arm across his throat, pressed one hand against his cheek and hissed: “Who are you working for?”
I wanted to shout, but the river caught all sound, spun it outwards, bright and clear for all to hear, so I pressed harder against his neck and snarled, “Why did you kill Josephine? Who are you working for?!”
I’d caught one of his arms beneath my knee; now he tried to break free of my weight, rolling to the side, but I drove my fist across his face, pressed the full weight of my body on to his chest and screamed without screaming, roared without the lion’s lungs, “What do you want?!”
“Kepler…” The word barely made it out through my weight on his throat, rattling like sand down a mountain. “Galileo.”
“Who’s Galileo? What’s Galileo?”
“Santa Rosa.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Santa Rosa. Milli Vra. Alexandra.”
“What are these? What does it mean?”
He tried to move again, and at the curl of my lip he desisted before that mistake could go any further. “He kills because he likes it,” he whispered. “He kills because he can.”
“Who? Galileo?”
He didn’t answer, and he didn’t deny. I pressed my elbow against his trachea until his eyes boggled. “I am not a killer,” I hissed. “All I want is to live.”
He tried to speak, tongue waggling, and for a moment I thought about it. This face that had looked back at me from the mirror, now animated with someone else’s fear. This face had killed Josephine Cebula.
His cheeks were flushing swollen red, now heading for purple blue.
I pulled back with a snarl, letting him gasp for air, head bouncing in an effort to inhale. “Who are you working for?” I breathed, pressing my fingers into fists inside their heavy, smelly gloves. “Who’s coming for me?”
He lay and wheezed, and said nothing.