She holds my gaze for a minute, searching. For something withheld, for one last drop of blood. Then she heaves a breath and releases it in a sob. She is trembling.
“Devajyoti, full of light,” she says, and briefly closes her eyes. “They nearly shot you at dinner today.” She traces my lips with her fingers. “Don’t leave me for my own good. Don’t hide from me to protect me. You think you owe me anything? If you think you owe me anything, give me yourself. If he had shot you, what do you think I’d have let lie? What peace do you see in me that could survive something … happening…”
The silk of her robe slides against my arms when I lift her, slips askew to bare one breast. The other presses hard against the fabric. Her breath catches in surprise.
“Do you promise?” she asks.
All I say is, “Let’s sleep here tonight.”
On the sooty floor before the fireplace, I slide Pea’s robe from her shoulders. I see for the first time the scar from Maryann West’s bullet. An ugly keloid lump of pink tissue, stretching an inch below her collarbone to the far side of her armpit. She is stoic as I take this in. There are other scars on her beautiful, naked body. But this is the only one I know.
“You told me it didn’t hurt anymore.”
She smiles briefly. “And you let me lie.”
We can be so cruel to one another. So full of love and hate and need and almost nothing of compassion. But this I can give her—this, and my promise. I bend down, kiss her shoulder. My lips slide down its smooth, freckled expanse. I wait for her to relax. I rub my thumb lightly over her left nipple, wrinkled and erect. She arches, very slightly, over my bracing right hand. I kiss, slowly, slowly, down the length of that hideous reminder, until I understand it as part of her. A part of what I love, and of my amends.
She comes against my hand, crying out without thought for Walter and Tamara sleeping upstairs. She grips me and breathes my name over and over. It could just as easily be sweat, the salt on our skins in the dying firelight.
10
The Long Island City address had once been a supply shop for the nearby factories. But the crash had hit all industry hard. No surprise to see it abandoned out here, among the deserted warehouses. At night it seemed two-dimensional. Gray as a photograph.
I jumped the fence. I was athletic and skilled at this particular sport. The razor-topped wire only swayed. I rolled, paused in a crouch. Pressed my hands to the earth and felt for anyone listening. No one near—but faint vibrations told me that someone approached. In back, I found the window Trent had promised behind a row of depilated bushes. Grimy, dirt- and smog-encrusted, it opened barely two inches. Judging by the rusted hinges, I doubted it could be moved from that position. I peered through. About half of the space below was visible. The light had been left on. Cement floor, swept clean. Black walls on which someone had recently chalked two pentagrams. A series of symbols radiated from the points of each one in intersecting curves that reminded me of mandalas.
In front of each pentagram hung one meat hook. It seemed more ominous, somehow, that they were all clean.
“You got him, Red Man?”
Victor’s voice, always higher than I expected. Tonight it seemed reedy, breathless. But Red Man was the one hauling the body. One body, but two hooks. Someone groaned.
“Coming round already?” Victor laughed. “Aren’t you a good one. Should give me plenty. Red Man, lay him under again. I’m going…”
Red Man sighed. “To get it over with.”
Victor barked a laugh. I finally saw him when he descended the stairs to the basement. In and out of my field of vision, he opened crates, placed small objects at the cardinal points beneath each hook. I couldn’t see the objects clearly enough until he passed beneath the window. But that sick feeling in my stomach was recognition, not surprise. They were hands. A dozen shrunken, mummified hands.
Red Man called from the staircase. “He’s coming to again. You ready, Vic?”
“Bring him down.”
Victor was dragging something large and heavy across the floor. A man-shaped bundle, with short legs and hideously elongated arms. A bit of straw and cotton stuffing leaked from where the head had been crudely stitched to the torso with hide thread. The face, however, was finely worked papier-mâché over cotton batting. It had gray eyes and a brown mop of a wig and a wide, grinning mouth. Inside were four or five teeth, firmly affixed.
Even the gap-toothed smile seemed like Victor’s.
He hung the effigy from a metal loop affixed to its back on the hook to the left. The procedure felt practiced. Once hooked, the figure’s arms ended just before the points of the pentagram on the wall behind it. It had no hands.
Red Man thumped heavily down the stairs. He carried their captive like a baby, a lolling head propped against a sturdy chest. A black man, my age or even a bit younger. He had been spiffy before they found him: slicked-back hair and tailored vest. His jacket and shoes were long gone, but the man still had on one of his spats.
“You know I’m not staying for this.”
Victor snorted. He fingered his waistband, where he kept one of his guns. But beneath the posturing I glimpsed something oddly vulnerable.
“God damn, have you got some nerve getting squeamish now.”
“What I do is business. Not hocus-pocus.”
“This hocus-pocus is gonna keep us in business and then richer than ever. You don’t think I know how jumpy our boys at the precinct are getting with old Judge Seabury breathing down their necks? That upstart Valentine and his so-called Confidentials are trying to make everyone turn rat, but we won’t let ’em, now will we?”
“Better ways to hunt down informants,
