Spotless (23 page)

My hands flew to cover my mouth. “I’m
so, so
sorry! Is it . . . did it fall off?”

“No.” Ilan chuckled.

“But I’m going to rectify that if you don’t tell me who sent you!” I looked up at March as he said this. His right arm was still wrapped around me, but his eyes were a frighteningly cold blue.

He pushed me aside gently to join Ilan at the man’s side. Crouching on one knee, he reached under his jeans to reveal a black sheath tied to his leg. I watched with increasing worry as he produced a short, incurved knife that looked somehow familiar—maybe because its shape
reminded me of the raptors’ claws in
Jurassic Park
? The guy started writhing in fear, and Ilan pinned him to the ground while March undid his pants and exposed his bloody junk.

“In my country, people still sometimes do this as a means to punish an enemy, or to avenge rape. First, you cut the blood flow—”

He wasn’t seriously going to do this, right? March tugged sharply on a drawstring cord that served to fasten the hood of the guy’s jacket. It snapped, and he tied it around his victim’s balls. I don’t know what happened next, because I squeezed my eyes shut. I suppose the blade made contact with the guy’s nuts, because he started screaming desperately, and I could hear his uninjured leg slam against the floor as he tried to free himself.

“I don’t know anything! I don’t know!”

“Stop lying to me, or I’ll geld you!” March’s roar sent a chill through my body, and I covered my ears. Some logical part of me knew that March wasn’t really mad, and that he was merely raising his voice to increase the guy’s stress and make the interrogation more efficient, but I couldn’t help it. Hearing that booming, intimidating voice affected me almost as much as the man lying on the floor and about to be castrated.

There was some more atrocious howling, and—thank God—that poor goon broke. “Stop! We were supposed to kill you guys and bring him the girl! I swear it’s all I know!”

“Why did that woman kill the notary?” Ilan asked.

“She worked for
him
. She decided to move first. She said she had the intel she needed for her boss, that she’d clean up and leave the rest to us!”

A loud scream suggested that March’s blade had made some dreadful progress. “Him? The man who hired you? Who is he?”

“I swear I don’t know his name! I only heard his voice!”

“All right.”

I didn’t like how calm March suddenly sounded. That didn’t bode well for this man’s already bloody crotch. I cracked an eye open, only to see March’s arm move and Ilan hold the guy tighter.

The guy let out a broken sob. “He was Scottish! Please! Please! It’s all I know!”

March spoke again, and this time his voice sounded normal again, if not a little puzzled. “Did this man tell you this, that he was Scottish?”

A series of short pants preceded the answer. “No! I guessed because he spoke English, but sometimes he rolled the Rs! Please let me go!”

I opened my eyes fully, and there was a long pause, during which all four of us looked at each other like poker players around a table. The mercenary was no doubt trying to figure out whether he would get killed or not, and Ilan and I were staring at March, daring him to bullshit us and pretend that the so-called Scottish villain who had sent men to capture me and rolled his Rs wasn’t actually Dries, the South African. March himself looked like he was struggling with the notion that his former boss was one greedy and unscrupulous son of a bitch.

I thought of the stripper again. She had claimed to have enough intel . . . but those guys had intended to capture me anyway, rather than kill me. That probably meant that Dries couldn’t solve my mother’s riddles without my help.
Good.

I know for sure that March didn’t cut that guy’s nuts . . . entirely. I think he had started to, and the guy talked before losing them for good. Ilan later swore to me that it was only a cut through the skin, and that no permanent damage had been done. It could be a lie crafted to make me feel better. Maybe that guy is alive somewhere, with only one ball left. I read on the Internet that it’s enough to live a normal life.

A few seconds later, a freaked-out bouncer led us out of the club through the rear exit, and I was relieved to see that the couple who had sought shelter in the last booth was shell-shocked but still alive. This was my first brush with actual criminal activities—on the giving end
anyway—and I have to confess I did feel a little thrill of impunity as we walked away in a darkened street and I saw the first police cars arrive at the scene, their sirens blaring on the Champs-Élysées.

We looked like bums. Bums gathered around a Mercedes, but bums nonetheless. Our clothes were wrinkled, covered in dust and some blood, for March and Ilan. While neither had sustained any major injury, there were a good deal of cuts and bruises. Ilan’s left cheek looked like he had been punched by the Undertaker, because he had been blown face-first into a wall when the grenade had exploded. Face-wise, March had only a few cuts, but Ilan kept joking that he would be in for a rough awakening in the morning, since his bulletproof jacket had stopped a couple of bullets—pretty close call—and there were already large, nasty bruises forming on his back and side. Comparatively, I was more or less okay, leaning against the car and sucking on one of March’s extra-strong mints while he stood by my side and munched on a handful of them like a junkie.

When he was done, he gave me a wry smile as Ilan opened the door for me. “Island, Ilan and I need to discuss a few things. Get in the car, please.”

“No. If it has to do with Dries, I want to hear it. That stripper gave him intel, and I bet that letter and the book are already gone by now. We still have the upper hand, though, because he doesn’t know where to look. So that’s settled, I’m going to Japan with you.”

I registered surprise on his face before his eyes hardened. “We’re not repeating what happened in the club. You’ll tell me what I need to know, and wait for me in Paris with Ilan. Then, once we’re done, I’ll send you back home.”

Kalahari’s words echoed in my head. This was the catch. It wasn’t the fact that he had a cleaning disorder; it wasn’t his job; it wasn’t even the
way he did mints to keep his stress-levels in check. It was the damn control issue. March wanted—needed—to control everything and everyone, and this aspect of his personality was pretty much a take-it-or-leave-it.

“I said
no
. It’s not like you have a choice. I’m the only one who knows who my mom was talking about in her letter, and I’m in
no mood
to tell you right now,” I snapped.

Ilan shot him a questioning glance, and when March took a menacing step toward me I thought he was going to try to scare me, but that in the end he would bend like he had until now whenever I challenged him. I was no longer afraid of his icy-stare-of-death anyway.

Turned out I needed to learn his body language better.

NINETEEN

The Lion

“Holly didn’t want a good, decent man. She wanted a dangerous man, a mysterious lion who would ravish her and feast on her body in the savannah.”

—Stephanee Dusk,
Hunting Holly

I spent the entire ride cursing them both: March, for having dared to put me kicking and screaming in the trunk, and Ilan, for not bothering to slow on speed bumps. The car eventually stopped, and I squinted my eyes when the trunk door opened to reveal Ilan’s face.

“Calmée?”
Cooled down?

I shrugged off the wool quilt March had wrapped me in prior to locking me in the cramped space, and held up my handcuffed hands, glaring silently at Ilan. He undid the cuffs and helped me up. I was about to pounce on March for his distinct lack of chivalry, but I realized he was gone.

“Where is he?” I barked, as we made our way out of the garage.

“He had some shopping to do.” Ilan shrugged.

I leaned against the elevator’s wall. “When is he coming back?”

“Soon.”

I shook my head and entered the living room with gritted teeth. There, two men stood in front of Ilan’s apartment’s door, both wearing orange armbands. Great, more fake cops. Ilan gave them a slight nod, and we all entered his living room. To my disappointment Kalahari wasn’t there, and though I wanted to ask when or if she would be back, I was too pissed and exhausted, so I kept quiet. Ilan’s guests looked me up and down, perhaps assessing how much trouble I could cause, and waited for him to speak.

“Island, meet Lieutenants Gomez and Tavares. They’ll keep you company while I’m gone.”

I performed a slow face-palm upon hearing names that had obviously been borrowed from a popular French cop comedy. “Sérieusement . . .”
Seriously . . .

One of them, a young Arab man with alert brown eyes and a black leather jacket, winked at me. “On est des vrais flics hein. C’est juste que là c’est un petit extra!”
We’re actually real cops. This is just a little extra to our job!

Incredulous, and still pretty depressed over the evening’s bitter conclusion, I let myself fall on Ilan’s long gray couch while he gave them additional instructions in a low voice. I didn’t hear everything, but from what I gathered, I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Ilan locked eyes with me one last time, his piercing green gaze sending me a gentle warning, and he was gone.

Sleep eluded me, so I spent two hours watching brain-melting crap on TV, hovering in a limbo of boredom, regret, and uncertainty regarding the future. Gomez and Tavares seemed pretty bored too, but I have to admit they were very professional about it. The only time I was allowed to remain alone was during a quick shower and a trip to the toilets. Also, one of them always stood by the living room’s bay windows
to watch for a while whenever a car could be heard passing down the street. I learned that the happy Arab guy was Tavares, and that he wasn’t Arab at all. His father was Turkish and his mother Italian.

A tall man with dark skin and twisted hair, Gomez was less talkative. He kept stealing glances at me as if he was about to speak and would look away as soon as I caught him doing so. His little game lasted until two in the morning or so, when a fried Camembert sandwich got the better of him. Munching on a bite of the heart-attack snack, he stared at me for the hundredth time, his eyes shining with curiosity.

“My uncle . . . he says he knows that guy—the
Lion
, Ilan’s friend.”

My eyes lit up. “Are you talking about March? Why are you calling him a lion?”

He nodded, a crease forming on his brow. “Lions of Nergal—they’re mercenaries, like an old, secret clan . . . mostly South Africans.”

“Are they bad guys?” I asked candidly.

His eyes widened at my question, as if the answer was obvious to whoever had heard about them. “Killing machines. Few people can afford them, and you don’t want to be around when they show up.”

Part of me refused to believe that March had anything to do with a pack of bloodthirsty South African mercenaries, but given his ties to Dries, his questionable professional choices, and, of course, the lion carved on his back, maybe Rislow had been right after all. I had never killed anyone, never been on a battlefield. How could I pretend to understand the depth of the bond between March and Dries?

I tried to back away from that sensitive topic. “Look, I don’t know anything about this—”

Gomez didn’t care about my reluctance to hear the rest of his story, though. Motioning for Tavares to listen as well, he went on. “Before he fled to France, my uncle used to be a general in the army, back in Ivory Coast. He told me that three years ago, after the presidential elections, when the civil war started, two American spies—a man and a woman—got caught by Liberian mercenaries working for President Gbagbo.”

He winced before resuming his story. “They got tortured . . . nasty stuff. They were burned, and they knew too much, so . . . the CIA sent that guy to clean up.”

My throat tightened as he dragged his thumb across his neck in an explicit gesture.

“Hear this: he didn’t just kill the spies. He wiped the entire unit that had captured them. They picked up twenty-five bodies! He vanished right after that, but when my uncle questioned his men, one of them swore on God’s head that he had seen the mark.”