be in touch with you. I’ll tell you what you need to know to find the baby. You can have him. Just say you never saw me, okay?”
“Is the baby all right?”
“He’s safe, Sam.” She glanced up at me. “A healthy, beautiful boy. We made us a good one.” She stood and I saw a swallow work her throat. A silencer capped her gun. “I really need to go. Now. So here’s what we’re going to do. I am going to leave. You are going to be quiet and not make a sound. Edward and I will be on our way. Eventually the police will come and you will have to answer questions. You keep my name out of it-and I’ll know if you do or not-and then I’ll let you know where the baby is. Mention me and you’ll never, ever see him.”
“Why would you let me live?”
“I stole three years of your life. This is restitution.” Her voice was unsteady. The spouse always knows. August had said that, so had Howell. The spouse always knows when treason is in the house. I hadn’t.
“That’s not reason enough. Why?” She had to have another motivation. One based on her own advantage.
“Don’t be an ingrate,” Lucy said.
I thought of our three years together, how every word, every action, had been choreographed to protect her.
“Did you ever love me?” I asked. I hated asking; it didn’t matter. She didn’t love me now. Any question was sentiment. I’d lost years of my life as surely as if I’d been stranded on an island or walled in a prison. The only thing that could matter was my child, not my ego.
“I must have. You’re still breathing.”
She looked past my shoulder. Out the window. And I heard the blast of gunfire. She slammed the door, locked it. I staggered to the door. I started kicking the lock, trying to break it.
The gunfire stopped. I looked out the window. A van roared into the parking lot, spilling three men out onto the pavement.
One of them was Howell.
74
Piet had parked his van on a side street and stumbled along the Prinsengracht. He remembered walking along the grand canals with his mother, hand in hand, before Mama would go to her job, kneeling before the disgusting strangers. He’d dreamed of living in one of these nice homes, with the canal glistening in the morning light. He’d become a great artist and have a studio along the Prinsengracht or the Herengracht. It had never happened, and now it never would.
Most of the windows were dark, but the apartment immediately above the Rode Prins had every light blazing.
He staggered to the Rode Prins’s front door. What was the barman’s name? Henrik. He could ask for Henrik. Maybe Henrik was the manager; maybe he lived above the bar.
The job had gotten too messy. Information on Edward could buy him passage. He’d go someplace quiet like Panama or Honduras. Warm, under bright skies and slack laws. Lots of girls there that could be shipped up to brothels in the States and Canada. He’d start over. You could always start over when you had good people skills.
Heavy velvet curtains covered both the front windows and the door. He knocked on the door. Once, almost timidly. He didn’t want to attract police attention. He didn’t see that a small camera, hidden in the doorway, watched his moves. He knocked again, slightly louder, and was very surprised when the curtain on the front door slid slowly open. A woman stared at him through the glass, and to his surprise he felt a shiver. Odd, the night wasn’t cold. Maybe he was losing blood.
“Samson sent me. He needs help. Please.”
The woman seemed to study him. She was a nice little number, maybe thirty, but a bit older wasn’t always a drawback. Blond hair, petite. Through the pain he assessed her, out of habit, as though she might bring him value. He remembered her now; he’d seen her in the bar before, when he drank beer with Sam. A prime little number, he’d joked.
“I don’t know who Samson is and the bar is closed.” She spoke with the very slightest muddle of some eastern European and British accent. Her words were hard and precise. He liked the accent. He’d developed a taste for hearing broken English with Slavic pronunciations, usually in a begging scream. He knew how to deal with Slavic girls.
“I don’t care if it’s closed. I want to see Henrik or whoever runs the place. I got information to sell.” He remembered the name Samson had used at Taverne Chevalier in Brussels. “Roger Cadet. That’s who I want to see, whoever works with Roger Cadet.”
“What sort of information?”
“On who Peter Samson is chasing.”
“His name’s not Peter Samson,” the woman said. Now he really didn’t like her tone, a bit clipped and impatient. Bitch needed a lesson in respect, he thought. “It’s just Sam,” she said.
“Well, Sam what-the-hell-ever. He works with you, right? You and the people in Brussels with the same bar? Can you make me a deal or not, bitch?”
She smiled at him. “Yes, I think I have a deal for you.”
He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Your boy is fighting some badasses right now. He needs help.”
“And you want protection from those same people. Your type, it is very predictable to me.”
He didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t care. “I got stuff of value.”
She looked hard at him. “I am Sam’s… superior. Come inside.”
She opened the door and he stumbled in. She closed the door behind him and shut the curtains. “Christ. Thank you. Can I get a drink?”
She went to the bar, poured a stiff shot of jenever. He eased onto a stool and drank it down. The alcohol seared his lacerated gums. “Sam kicked my teeth out.” He sounded like a whiny child.
She stayed on the other side of the bar and poured him another. “Yet you are here.”
“Sam had backing. You don’t just show up at a bar and leave armed to the teeth.” He slammed the second one down. Warmth seeped through him.
“My name is Mila,” she said. “And I’m not offering anything in trade. You will simply tell me where Sam is.”
Piet spat blood onto the bar, feeling nauseous. “Nothing’s free in this world.” He poured himself a refill and gulped the jenever again.
“Pain is.” She raised a small black stick. A baton. It telescoped out to an arm’s length. And she lashed it hard across his nose and mouth. He screeched in agony as the jenever glass shattered in his face. He swung blindly toward her and missed. She vaulted over the bar and began to hit him with a precision that rivaled a surgeon’s, delving past nerve and blood vessel to diseased tissue. He felt his nose break on her second blow. He lunged, trying to close his massive arms around her pixie’s frame, and she shattered his knee with a blow. Air vacated his lungs.
Her fist closed around his testicles, and agony replaced breathing. Then she hammered her forehead against his broken nose and he lay flat on the floor.
He opened his eyes. A lock of her blond hair, daubed with his blood, lay between her eyes. She was breathing hard.
“Do not move,” Mila said. “Do not raise your hands. Do not do anything except breathe and listen.”
He gasped and he listened.
“I know what you did to the women in the machinists’ shop,” she whispered. “I know. I know what you are. In the old days, Piet, you would have been the captain of a slave ship. Or a Nazi commandant, whipping laborers to death. You are cut from the same foul fabric. I know what you are. I know every inch of what you are.”
He moaned and writhed. His knee. The thought that he might never ever walk right again scratched past the pain in his brain.
