Beloved Enemy (23 page)

A moment later, he pushed the lid up, and still with his eyes squeezed shut, climbed out of his would-be coffin.

*   *   *

When Iraj Namazi returned to the hotel suite, Annika was sprawled on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. She wore a sleeveless top and a lightweight pleated skirt. On the other side of the salon, Fareed sat in a chair, surrounded by a pool of his own blood.

“What the fuck?”

“We should leave, Iraj. Now.” Annika let out a stream of smoke. “And you’ll have to grease a few palms before we do.”

After giving his dead driver a cursory examination, he strode over to her. His face was dark, filled with blood and rage. “What the fuck happened here?”

“I warned you about releasing Rolan, didn’t I?”

“Your husband did that?”

“He’s very good at killing, Iraj. An expert.” She gestured with her cigarette. “As you see.”

“And where is he now?”

“Gone. Do you think I was going to question him, the state he was in?”

He slapped the cigarette out of her hand. It rolled, burning, across the marble floor until it came to rest at the pool of blood, where the glowing end died, hissing like a cornered animal.

“Get up! Are the bags packed?”

“I wasn’t idle while you were gone.” She rose off the sofa. “Where did you go, by the way?”

He went into the bedroom, careful to sidestep the bloody wreck of Fareed. In a moment, he reappeared with their suitcases, handed over hers.

“Don’t glare at me like that,” Annika said, following him out of the suite. “You only have yourself to blame for Fareed’s death. Besides,” she added, “Rolan was just protecting me.”

The Syrian stopped in his tracks, then turned to face her. “What did you say?”

Annika, who had deliberately waited until the last minute to drop her bomb, said, “You heard me. Fareed had me pinned against the wall to the bedroom you had him lock Rolan into. Rolan heard my voice and he—”

“The door lock wasn’t broken, Annika. Someone unlocked it from the salon side. I know it wasn’t Fareed. He had strict instructions—”

“Did you give him instructions to molest me?” She put a lot of venom into her voice.

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Why else would he assault me?” Annika had calculated this counterattack while smoking her cigarette, waiting for Iraj to return. “I got the key off him while he was fumbling under my clothes. I pushed him away and unlocked the door. Rolan was already on the other side. He rushed out and, well, you saw for yourself what happened.”

“All I see is a dead man, Annika. The rest is coming out of your mouth, and as I know better than most, you’re an accomplished liar.”

“What can you do, Iraj? We both like lying better than telling the truth. We do what we do until a situation like this comes along and then we’re suddenly in no-man’s-land.”

He appeared to hesitate. “I don’t know what to believe, but now’s not the time to sort it out. One thing you are right about: we need to get out of here.”

They stepped into the elevator together. While she pressed the button for the lobby level, Namazi dug in his pocket. “Luckily, I have more than enough money to cover the baksheesh. Death happens here all the time. Given the right payouts, another one will mean nothing.”

Annika stepped past him and pressed the emergency stop button.

“What are you doing?” Namazi said as the elevator lurched to a halt.

He watched as Annika knelt beside her suitcase, snapped open the metal tabs. Inside, on top of her other clothes, was the skirt she had been wearing earlier, wrapped in a clear plastic dry cleaning bag. She took it out and, standing up, turned the skirt inside out. The silk lining contained a large, thick stain.

“Here,” she said, holding it out to him, “smell it.”

“The fuck?” Namazi took an involuntary step back.

“You know what this is, Iraj. It’s Fareed’s—”

“Shut up,” he said.

“Look at it, Iraj.
Look
.” She waved the skirt like a matador waves his cape in the
corrida
. “This is Fareed’s semen, so you know what he did to me, so you know what he did to me was real.”

Namazi turned his head. “Put that away.”

She did, snapping the suitcase shut.

His head swung back now that the offending garment was out of sight. “Burn it when we get home.”

As she leaned past him to set the elevator in motion again, she was acutely aware that he was looking at her in an entirely different light.

*   *   *

When Redbird was a young boy, long before he had taken on his code name, he had had a younger sister, Angel. As he traveled from Bangkok to Zurich, he entered a part of reality he refused to acknowledge in his waking life. He dreamed of his brief time with Angel, when he’d made her laugh by pushing her high in the swing in their backyard, how he’d make her shriek by pulling grotesque faces on her, how he fed her when his parents were out, put her to bed, read her the stories she liked best, and when those stories were at an end fabricate more stories with her favorite characters. She liked best tales of little girls who found their way into the land of the fairies and had adventures there. She was still too young to understand, but like Redbird she yearned to be far away from her own home, which was sad and desolate even when their parents were present. Some people should never have children. Their parents were such people.

When she was a little older and could read her children’s books on her own, Redbird began to read to her from his favorite book,
Kit
ā
b alf laylah wa-laylah, One Thousand and One Nights
. He was already fascinated by Arabia, and, much to his delight, Angel was, too, from the moment he began to read her the first exotic tale.

Redbird woke once to use the toilet. The terrible thing had not yet happened; returning to his seat, he closed his eyes, praying that it would not happen. But, of course, it did, as it always did when he dreamed of Angel.

He saw her on that late summer day, the lawn sprinklers spraying rainbows and kids on tricycles clattering along the baking sidewalk. She wore a red dress with ruffles here and there like undersea coral, but her face was white even in the speckled sunlight beneath the elms. Red and white, blood and bone, like a frame from a film he was watching in the safety of a dark air-conditioned theater, smelling of popcorn, the concrete floor sticky with spilled Coke.

But this was no film, there was no safety here. There was a peculiar odor about her, like an aura. Years later, the same odor came to him again at his job, and he knew it for the smell of death.

He was in her hospital room, looking down at her, holding her pale hand. She was white as the ghosts in
Kit
ā
b alf laylah wa-laylah
, but far more frightening. The leukemia wasting her body had seemingly drained her of blood. He had asked the doctors and nurses, anyone who would listen to him, whether he could give her his blood. They all shook their heads, looked at him with a pity that further enraged him. He wished he could transform her into an Arabian wraith, put her into a brass lamp, to keep her safe. But all he could do was hold her hand and watch her slowly fade away. When death finally took her from him he had already retreated behind a rock-hard wall that, years later, served as midwife to the birth of Redbird.

He awoke just as the plane landed in Zurich. Looking out at the quintessentially Western buildings he felt, as ever, like an outsider, a nomad who belonged in the desert, a brass lamp hooked to his belt, waiting for a return that would never come.

Somewhere, deep inside him, on the other side of the stone wall inside his mind, he was aware that he had not been able to curtail his attachment to Dandy, that when he looked at her, when he spoke with her, he was with Angel. With Dandy’s death, his sister died a second time. This was something he could not tolerate.

On the way into the city, which was as alien, as malignant to him as a planet without atmosphere, his rage reached fever pitch, boiling like a storm-driven sea against a rocky shore. All thought of money, of loyalty to Dickinson, of following orders, of having a job to do vanished in that dangerous tide.

For the first time since she had died, he wanted to remember Angel, he wanted to remember how helpless he was to save her, he wanted to remember the outrage he had felt at everyone and everything in the world for taking her from him. These memories and the emotions behind them at last burst through the stone wall, obliterating it. They became fuel for the assassin that entered the heart of Zurich, who now had a single focus for the decades-long outrage filling the imaginary brass lamp clipped to his belt like a holstered gun.

*   *   *

“I’m sorry to say I won’t be participating in this charade,” William Rogers said.

Jonatha stared at the national security advisor from across the table in her specially prepared room. He seemed different to her, sterner, more businesslike, though the difference was not readily apparent. The lights in the room were a subtle blue, the scent like that of burning paper. The sounds of faraway traffic, of, now and again, sirens drifted out of the hidden speakers.

“Why do you consider this interview a charade?”

“Call it whatever you like,” Rogers said. “I won’t be a part of it.”

“I don’t believe that’s possible, Bill. You already are a part of it.”

“Only my friends call me Bill, Ms. Midwood.”

“As you wish.”

He slid a burnished calfskin briefcase onto the table and pulled out a slender folio, opened it up in front of him. “Your lover’s name is Lale, isn’t that right?”

Jonatha turned gimlet-eyed. “My partner.”

Rogers appeared to ignore her. “Lale Serezo.”

“We’re not actually going down that road, are we, Bill?”

“A Moroccan Jew, isn’t she?”

“An even worse path.”

He looked up sharply. “I told you—”

“I don’t give a fuck what you told me,” she said softly, pronouncing each word precisely and violently.

Rogers nodded. “Now that the gloves have come off, I have no qualms about showing you this.” He spun the top sheet from the folio over to her.

Jonatha’s gaze dropped to the police report.

“We’re going to go down a path not quite of your imagining.” Leaning over the table, he tapped the sheet. “Did you know about this?”

Jonatha said nothing; she had no intention of admitting to Rogers that Lale had never told her that she had committed grand larceny—that she had stolen a car, taking it on a three-state joyride before abandoning it in western Pennsylvania.

“She stated she went to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater,” Jonatha read from the arrest report. “She was sixteen.”

“Under the legal age to drive without an adult, besides all the other offenses she committed.”

“She was a minor.”

“And now a convicted felon,” Rogers said. He took back possession of the police report. “How do you think this would play with Director Krofft?”

Jonatha stared at him, saying nothing.

Rogers smirked. “So let’s stop playing games,
Jonatha
. This isn’t about your sexual orientation, it isn’t about your lover being a Jew, it’s about you cohabiting with a criminal.”

Jonatha spent the next small silence setting aside the fact that Rogers had sandbagged her, instead calming herself and, like a professional pool player, calculating the array of bank shots open to her.

“So we have reached the end of this particular path, a short though painful one.” Rogers placed his hands atop the folio. “You write up your report on me as if I took all your psych evals, and I bury this police report so deep no one will ever find it.” His pearly teeth appeared between his pulled back lips. “Does this agreement meet with your approval?”

Half-numb, she nodded.

“Excellent.” Rogers checked his watch, stowed the folio in his briefcase, and stood up. “It’s almost time for my four o’clock.” He gave her an ironic mock-bow. “So I bid you adieu.”

At the door, he turned back. “Oh, and Midwood, don’t fucking contact me again.”

*   *   *

Deep underground, Jack stumbled to the doorway of the tanning salon, holding on to the frame, his head hanging down, chin against his chest. When he cracked open his swollen lids, everything looked hazed, and for a moment he panicked that the UV lamps had done him some permanent damage. Then he realized his slitted eyes were overflowing with tears.

He started to blink rapidly, wanting to clear his vision, then realized the longer he kept his eyes bathed in tears, the more quickly he’d be able to shake off the effects of the UV lamps. He didn’t know who he wanted to find first, Legere or Hanna. Remembering that Hanna had said Legere was in the tanning bed opposite him, he went back into the salon and lifted the bed’s lid. Not surprisingly, it was empty, as was every other one in the salon. For a moment, he had to hang on to the lid as a powerful wave of vertigo swept through him. Taking deep breaths, he began to stalk forward again, slowly at first.

Out in the corridor and moving like a man half blind, using one outstretched hand on the wall to guide him, he found the lounge he had passed coming in, drank deeply from the pitcher of ice water, then dumped the remaining contents over himself. Kneeling, he gathered two handfuls of ice cubes off the floor and lowered his face into them.

He sat for another moment, his back against the mini-fridge, gratefully feeling the coldness stealing through his clothes and into his flesh. Then he rose and, checking to make sure the spa corridor was still clear, began to make his way back to the elevator bank. His senses were on high alert—surely someone, the concierge or Hanna—would be returning shortly to check on him. He needed to be out of the hotel before then. With the hotel now a red zone, he was ill-equipped to locate Legere. His best course was to withdraw to a safe place where he could keep the hotel under surveillance in hopes of catching up to Legere as he exited.

The elevator was in sight when the vertigo hit him again. His legs gave way and he half fell, sliding down the wall in a heap. He sat like that for a time, his head lolling, consciousness spinning.