“Most of their activities were classified. But I was able to find out through an old friend of my father’s that they gathered data on Smiley for over seven years.”
“Why? For whom?”
“It had come to the attention of the CIA that Max Smiley had some questionable relationships overseas and they were interested in knowing more about his activities. Interpol agreed to watch him when he was in Europe and Africa. My parents were two of the agents assigned to the task.”
He released a long breath here. I kept my eyes on his profile, watching him as I’d felt him watching me for signs that he might be telling the truth. But what did I know about honesty? I probably wouldn’t have recognized it if it kicked me in the teeth.
“There aren’t many pictures of my mother, you know. I have one from when she was a girl. But mostly she avoided the camera. She couldn’t afford to have her image floating around-it was so important for her to be invisible in her work. But she was stunning-jet-black hair and eyes so dark they were almost purple. Her skin was this nearly translucent white. She used to keep her hair back and wear these thick dark glasses, because when she didn’t, everyone stared at her. My father used to call her the Showstopper. When she walked into a room, everyone turned to look at her, men and women.”
I could see some of this beauty in him. It resided in the gray of his eyes, in the fullness of his lips, in the strength of his jaw, in the blue-black shine to his hair. But there was something to him that kept him from being easy on the eyes, something about his aura maybe, that made me want to turn away.
“She went alone to Paris. My paternal grandmother was ill-near death. My father stayed behind to care for her.
“There should have been no risk to her. The maitre d’ was a supposed Interpol ally and had arranged for a microphone to be placed at the table where Smiley would be dining. Nobody knows how she was discovered. She wasn’t a careless person; she was highly trained. Nobody knows how she wound up dying such a horrible death, her body discarded in the alley behind a grand hotel. She suffered, died slowly. We know that much. The maitre d’ was killed as well. Interpol suspected that he had betrayed her and then was killed for what he knew.”
I let a moment pass in respect for his mother, for how she died and how much it must have pained him to discuss it. Then: “How do you know Max killed her?”
I saw his grip tighten on the wheel. A small muscle started working in his jaw. “Because beating women to death with his bare hands was Max Smiley’s signature. That’s what he did to get his rocks off, or haven’t you figured that out yet?”
His tone was so sharp and the words so harsh that I physically shifted away from him in my seat.
“Wake up, Ridley. Wake the fuck up. Your father, your beloved Max, hated women. He murdered them. Prostitutes, call girls, escorts, women he picked up in bars. Discarded them in hotel rooms and alleyways, in Dumpsters, in abandoned cars. In addition to Project Rescue and his involvement with the lowest scum on the planet there’s a swath of brutally murdered women in his path. Women who he murdered with his own bare hands.”
He pulled the car over so suddenly that I was jerked about unpleasantly, nearly knocking my head against the side window; my seat belt locked. He turned to me. His face had gone pale with anger. A blue vein throbbed in his temple.
“He liked to feel their bones collapse beneath his fists,” he said, lifting and clenching his own hand. “He liked to hear them scream and then whimper and sob as he choked and beat the life out of them.”
He was yelling now and I found myself covering my face and leaning against the cool glass until he went silent. I listened to him breathing hard, listened to the cars race by us, their wheels whispering on wet concrete, felt the Peugeot shake with the speed of their passing. When I lowered my hands, I could see that his eyes were wet and rimmed red. There was a grim intensity to the way he was watching me. I could already see regret in the line of his mouth. I stared back at him, mesmerized by what I saw. His was the face of the ugly truth; I recognized it in every pore. That’s what had kept me turning away from him. I realized that I’d never seen it before, the face of someone who had no secrets to hide, no more lies to tell. I hated him for it.
I reached into the back of the car and grabbed my bag, flung the door open, got out, and started walking. The cold air, the now-driving rain, felt wonderful. I heard his door slam and the sound of his feet on the concrete.
“Ridley,” he called after me. “Ridley, please.”
There was so much sorrow in his voice that I almost stopped but kept going instead. I thought I could hitch a ride, go to the police and get myself arrested or deported or murdered or whatever. It didn’t matter.
When I felt his hand on my arm, I spun around and started pummeling him pathetically with my fists. I was so weak, so messed up, that instead of warding me off, he just pulled me into him, effectively pinning me against him. Eventually I stopped struggling. His body was shaking slightly, from cold or emotion, I didn’t know. I could hear the beating of his heart fast and strong in his chest. I let myself sob, standing there on the highway in the pouring rain.
“I’m so sorry,” he said into my ear. “I’m so sorry. You were right. I am an asshole. You didn’t deserve that.” He tightened his arms around me and I wrapped mine around his waist. “You didn’t deserve any of this.”
I looked up at him and saw all the pain in the world in the gray of his eyes.
“Neither did you,” I said. There was a flash of something on his face. I think it was gratitude. And then his mouth was on mine. In his hunger and his passion, I tasted his honesty. I opened myself to it and took it all in-this man, his truth, and his kiss. In that moment, I knew one thing for sure. That Dylan Grace had been right all along. He was the only friend I had.
I FOUND THAT I had about two thousand pounds sterling in my bag, close to four thousand dollars. How it got there, I had no idea. We parked the Peugot in a public lot and then checked into a run-down hotel near Charing Cross Road. The room was ugly but clean and comfortable enough, and Dylan insisted we chill there for a while, wait for the sun to go down. He washed and rebandaged my wound with great tenderness. I let him, though I could have done it myself. Since our kiss on the road, there’d been a charged silence between us. We spoke to each other politely or not at all.
I was eager to get to an Internet cafe but saw the wisdom in waiting for dark. Plus, I was feeling worse and weaker by the minute. I lay down on the queen-size bed, which smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Dylan took the chair beside me and turned on the “telly.” After an hour of watching the news, we still hadn’t seen anything about ourselves. A check of the morning papers in the lobby on the way in showed that we hadn’t made the print media, either.
“It’s weird,” said Dylan, looking at me from the chair. “I’d have thought our pictures would be all over the place after a mess like that.”
“Maybe they want to keep it quiet.”
“No way. Two cops and a nurse dead? Whoever I killed lying on the hospital room floor? You missing? No way to keep that quiet. They should be using every resource at their disposal to find us.”
“But they did keep it quiet. Obviously.”
He had his head in his hand and rubbed his temples.
“You can lie down if you want,” I said. I thought he must be tired, every muscle in his body aching from driving and sitting up all night.
He looked up at me. “Yeah?”
I nodded. He rose from his chair and lay down beside me. The bed squealed beneath his weight. I moved into him and let him fold his arms around me. I heard him release a long, slow breath, felt the muscles in his chest and shoulders relax. I just wanted to feel safe for a minute. And I did. I drifted off like that. When I woke again, the sky outside our window was darkening.
He was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and even. My head was on his shoulder and he had one arm curled around me, one flung over his head. I flashed on how his face had looked in the car when he talked about Max, about the things he’d said. How the pain of it had brought tears to his eyes. I hated what he had told me. I felt as if the knowledge was a cancer growing inside me, something black and deadly that would eventually take over and shut all my systems down. I would die from it; I was sure of that.
I remembered Max’s parade of call girls, women I had always naively thought were his girlfriends. A man like that, so damaged inside, my mother had said once of him, can’t really love. At least he was smart enough to know it. Did she know how much worse it really was? She couldn’t have. She couldn’t.
