The Prisoner's Wife (9 page)

He was driving faster now; way too fast for these roads. “There's a thought. What did you do? I mean, in the hotel?”

“I screamed. The door was half open—he'd left it that way. He was a careless man. Darius came in.”

“Then what?”

“It was the first time I met him. The next thing, Lamar is on the floor. On his back.” She flipped a hand. “Just like that. Of course I had no idea, but Darius was a judo brown belt. I think brown, is that right? Lamar didn't know what happened. He was much bigger, much heavier, than Darius. Stronger, too. He stood up and went for him, he was hitting out like this”—she punched the air, a feint more masculine than feminine—“then, bof, he is on the floor again.” She laughed. “Lamar, down on the floor, looking up. Not knowing how it happened. Three times he went down, and I was hurt a little—he had hurt me, bruised me—but I was laughing. At the same time laughing, I couldn't help it. Lamar was so angry—he was humiliated—he ran out the door. Except he misses the doorway. Hit his head on, what do you call? The doorpost.”

Shawn went into a sharp bend, accelerating: the way he'd been taught in the SEALs. “Guess you missed out on your fee.”

“Of course—but I sent round an e-mail to the galleries, saying
La Grenade
was almost certainly a fake. When Lamar tries to sell, that will cost him, I don't know, twenty million? Something like that. Just then, I was thinking of Darius. Strange—it must have been erotic, in a way, what Lamar did. What he tried to do. Or what I imagined my father did. Who knows? Of course I don't want rape but I was, you know, so hot just then. You'll laugh. I wanted to bear his children. Darius's children. Five, six—more maybe.”

“So?”

“Well, that evening I seduced him. Really, I couldn't help myself. Darius, he took my breath away.” She looked at Shawn. “You don't expect great sex. Usually I don't come. Not the first time with a guy.”

He was constantly surprised by the things she said, and didn't say. “It was? You did?”

She nodded.

“Then you married him? Bore his kids?”

“No kids. He didn't want. Marriage? Two years, that took. Great sex is not a reason to marry. You know? I have to feel I trust a man.”

He turned directly toward her, looking away from the road. “Do you trust me?”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “Right now, this moment, with you here, no. Please, just watch the road. I am not sure why I said I will come to England.”

“Your husband,” Shawn said. “Tell me, was he ever in Waziristan?”

For a moment Danielle was silent, her mouth half open.
“Salaud,”
she said. “You son of a bitch. You do think he is a terrorist.”

“It crossed my mind.”

Turning off the highway, he drove up the half-paved lane to Felbourne village. The hamlet. She was silent, looking around her; shifting in her seat, uncomfortable, or uneasy.

“You live here?”

He said, “I do now. It's where my wife bought a house. Why'd she buy this place, you ask? My question, too. She had a grandmother, born here. Left for Ellis Island, hundred years back.”

“Stop a moment.” Danielle was looking from side to side, seeing trees and fields. “Okay, you live here, but why should I come to this place? You said we would look for Darius.”

Shawn pulled the Mercedes onto a grass verge in front of Felbourne Grange, the manorial pile that bordered his own property.

“This country,” he told her, “they have a saying about needles and haystacks. Where in hell do we start looking? Last time I was copied in on classified mail, we had twenty-some black prisons. Seventeen countries, Poland to Pakistan. Your guy could be in any one of those jails. What do you want me to do, Danielle? Toss a coin?”

She leaned back against the door of the car, away from him. “So? What will you do?”

“Only thing I can,” he said. “I'll talk to the lady you heard about in Paris. Ashley Caburn.”

“Why her?”

“Two reasons,” Shawn said. “Number one, she has high-level security clearance. Likely she knows what we want to know. Second reason, she still talks to me. Not so many people do.”

For a while, Danielle didn't speak. Stretching her arms tightened her white cotton shirt against her body. “Your house,” she said finally. “How many bedrooms?”

Shawn glanced at her. “Enough that we don't have to share, if that's what you mean.”

A lean man dressed in knee socks and green tweed knickerbockers emerged from an avenue of lime trees. The flesh of his face had thinned, limning the skull beneath. He carried a Purdey Woodward shotgun, which, Shawn knew, cost roughly the same as a ranch house in California.

“Justin,” he said, “how are you, my man? How's Piglet?”

Justin pointed the engraved gun toward his neighbor in the car. His voice, when he spoke, was husky, close to a whisper. The voice, Shawn thought, of a throat cancer patient. “We need to talk,” he said. “About your war.”

“At this range,” Shawn said, considering the shotgun, “that thing could do some damage. You mind pointing it away from us?”

“Not loaded,” said Justin. Turning away, he demonstrated, touching the gun's bob-weight trigger. Pellets scattered new leaves from a weeping lime on the far side of the lane. Birds flew yelling in the air. Danielle dived downward, her forehead touching Shawn's knee.

“
Now
it's not loaded,” Shawn said. Gently he lifted Danielle's head. “Let me introduce you guys. Danielle Baptiste, Justin Roxburgh Hallam Fox. Piglet's his wife. Did I get that right, Justin? What exactly do you want to talk about?”

Justin peered briefly into the car, considering Danielle. “Bit soon after your wife, I would have thought,” he said. “Afghanistan. Durand Line. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”

“You are both quite crazy,” said Danielle.

Shawn restarted the car. “Here's the deal,” he told Justin. “You stop shooting my pheasants, we'll get together, sort out the war.”

“Pheasants in this village are mine,” said Justin. He was reloading his shotgun. He pointed it beyond the churchyard. “My gamekeeper breeds them.”

Shawn put the car in gear. “Justin,” he said, “your gamekeeper's dead. Buried next to Martha.”

Justin raised the weapon in salute. Danielle lowered her head below the level of the car's shotgun seat. Shawn drove slowly past the churchyard and made a right into his own driveway.

He reached across Danielle to open her door.

“This is it,” he said. “We're home.”

 

13

WEST SUSSEX, 23 MAY 2004

Late that night, in his own house, under a full moon, Shawn woke, naked. It was four in the morning—that was a guess. On his bed, Martha's little cat stood, arching its back, hissing at something unseen, in the moonlit dark.

Shawn listened. Somewhere in the house, someone was moving. He pulled on sweatpants. From under a pillow he took the loaded Makarov that, when he was still in the business, he'd managed to carry out of Peshawar. Without switching on lights he walked barefoot down the upper hall of his house. Behind him, the cat mewed. He was alert, waiting for sounds from the floor below, when hands grasped him from behind.

Danielle whispered, “Shawn? What is happening?”

“Jesus,” Shawn said, “don't ever do that to me. Don't ever grab me in the dark. Could have put a bullet in you.” She was wearing one of his T-shirts with a towel tied around her waist. “What are you doing out here?”

She held his unclothed arm. He could feel her shivering. “Someone came in my room. The door—it has opened—”

He slipped off the safety on his pistol. “You saw this person?”

“Just the door. It opened.”

“Draft,” he said. “Gust of wind.”

“Feel,” she said. “There is no wind. Someone stood watching me. After a time, the door closed. You think the wind does that? Opens and closes?”

He led her back toward her room. “Could have been Martha. This is her house. I feel she's still around. Checking you out, maybe.”

“Martha?” she asked. “Martha, your wife?”

“She loved this place. Hard for her to leave, someone said.”

Danielle stopped still. Moonlight fell through high windows, blanching her tanned skin. She nodded toward her room. “I can't,” she said. “Can't go back there.”

Shawn shrugged. “It was your choice, that room.”

“I know. Now, not.”

“Okay,” he said. “There's two beds in my room. How's that sound?”

“Better,” she said. “First, please, unload the pistol.” Moments later, at the bedroom door, she said, “One more thing. Don't try making love with me.”

*   *   *

The next time Shawn woke, it was morning. A depression in the single bed showed where Danielle had lain. For a moment he pictured her sleeping, then the image went.

Shawn lay a while, drowsing. He was slipping back into sleep when he heard his wife's voice in the room. As ever, it was nothing profound. Martha just said, “What about the sheep?”

Shawn looked around what had been her bedroom. Through an eastern window, rays of the rising sun came over the hills, dazzling him. Even without the sun, he doubted he'd see Martha. Since her death he never had, though, in his mind, he'd heard her voice several times reminding him of things he hadn't done.

She didn't make a big deal of it. In death she seemed amused by his domestic troubles.

“Are you surprised?” Shawn asked. “I was raised in Alabama. Hogs we had. Sheep, never.”

She had started life among the pinewoods of Coaling County. It was true, though: He'd been meaning to check the sheep—their hooves. Till he came here, he hadn't even known sheep had hooves that needed tending.

Martha's voice was gone. Mornings, Shawn found, she never stayed long. He checked the time, then called Ashley in London. Her phone was off. Not surprising, really, given the hour and her nighttime habits. She was the one of his circle who could still drink like she did at twenty. Suffered the same way.

Shawn swung his legs off the bed and sat for a while, shivering a little. The bedroom was huge and cold. He'd learned that Brits don't believe in heating. If he stayed here—he wasn't sure he would, but if he did—he'd rework the system, with the balance of Abbasi's cash.

The initial installment was already gone.

Shawn asked himself, not for the first time, why would he stay? He thought about places he'd lived: Turkey Forge, Tuscaloosa, Peshawar, Queens, Manhattan, D.C. Who knew what came next? Paris, maybe, with Danielle. That was his kind of town. What the fuck was he doing here: a hamlet with twenty-three inhabitants? Twenty-two, with the gamekeeper dead.

It was about Martha, mainly, staying in Sussex. If he turned around and looked through the sash window, Shawn could see St. Perpetua's churchyard; could see her grave. Besides, she was still here, still in the house, still talking to him. He still heard her voice, at times she chose. The only woman he'd loved, really. If he moved to Manhattan, how would she take his going? Leaving her grave?

He had unfinished business here.

*   *   *

Right now, Shawn wasn't ready to think of leaving. He stripped off his sweatpants, dumped them on the floor, and went naked to the shower. That was another thing he'd learned: Brits know shit about showers. The tall Victorian contraption in this vast chilly bathroom had only two settings:
COLD
and
TEPID
. Shawn had laughed out loud when he first saw that
TEPID
. He wasn't laughing now. When he moved to the rectory and started using the shower, he found tepid was right on the money. Tepid was good as it got. He decided, for this morning, to take a bath—something he hadn't done since he left Turkey Forge and found the pleasures of showering.

The bath here was a standalone cast-iron claw-footed Victorian monstrosity; its water supply—though meager—seemed, for some reason, hotter than the lukewarm trickle from the shower. While water ran in the tub, Shawn stood naked at the window, stretching muscle, considering the tended expanse of his garden. Amy, the gardener's daughter, was out there, stocking a bird feeder in a steeply listing pear tree. Henry, her father, once tried teaching Shawn the names of English birds: mistle thrush, jackdaw, jay, fieldfare, greenfinch, bullfinch, warbler, woodpecker, blackbird, robin, wren. Some he got. The little colorless guys—linnet, dunnock, siskin—those were beyond him.

Shawn climbed into his half-full bath and lay back, his body adjusting to the switch from chill to lukewarm. Growing up, he'd had to follow his daddy into the family bath, pretending not to stare at the sturdy apparatus between his daddy's legs. In time, he'd watch the evolution of his own cock as it floated on the surface of a cooling bath. Which took him back to Turkey Forge—to teenage boys, talking sex. They knew then, sure as you could know anything, that true happiness came with a Hollywood model. It took Shawn two marriages—both to beautiful women—before he began doubting that truth.

For some moments, in cooling water, memories enmeshed him: the first time he came inside his first girlfriend, on a narrow bed in a shotgun shack—a climax so long and hard Shawn expected his body to deflate, like a spent balloon. Thinking now of Danielle's body, he climbed from the tub, toweling dry his own softening torso.

Shawn dressed fast. Needing air, wondering about his guest, he left the house. Minutes later he was in his field, running, breathing hard, jumping fallen trees, chasing Wallace, his Shetland ram.

Shawn wasn't in great shape for speed. These days it was hard, even for him, to believe he'd once been a Crimson Tide quarterback. Wallace, on the other hand, was quick: a goaty little beast, dark, curly fleeced, ill-natured, with short sharp horns. Fast on his feet.