The Remembrance

by Natalie Edwards

  Despite this, though, Santino had a lover: a long-term girlfriend, whom he kept stashed away in a picturesque town along the Colorado River, not far from the Hoover Dam. She’d been an exotic dancer herself, performing five nights a week for a revolving-door crowd of tourists and inebriated convention-goers at a strip club behind The Sahara - though, as Matteo had told Sita one night in the hotel suite they’d adjourned to after dinner, giving up the dancing, and the income it gave her, had been one of the conditions Santino had placed on the girl, when he’d first set her up as his mistress.

  “Such a beautiful girl,” Sita said. “Very distinctive looks. Hers… wasn’t a face one would forget in a hurry. Sapphire, she was calling herself then, though I daresay it wasn’t the name she was given. Sapphire Lawton.”

  “Kerry Lawton’s mother,” El said, the disparate strands of the unwinding narrative beginning to thread together.

  “Yes. And Santino Randazzo is her father. His name doesn’t appear on her birth certificate, which rather tallies with what I remember of him - he certainly never struck me as a man who’d take easily to parental responsibility. But her father he is, nonetheless. John Hertzberg assures me of it.”

  “And he told you more than just that, I’m thinkin’,” Ruby said, after they’d taken a moment to reflect on the revelation. “Judging from the look of you.”

  “He did. Though I don’t believe he intended to.” She paused. “It seems Santino has been stepping out of Matteo’s shadow, of late - financially, at least. Making some rather canny investments - buying stock in certain organisations, and then dumping them at a profit just before their share price takes a tumble. It’s almost as if he sees the dip coming - that was how John put it. Which is rather curious in itself, because if you’ll recall,” she looked Ruby in the eye, “he was not a man you’d trust to hold the purse strings.”

  “You reckon someone’s giving him the inside track. And it’s got something to do with that kid of his.”

  “It’s all speculation, of course. I’ll need to make a few more enquires. But it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn that each of those particular falls in share price were precipitated by the death of someone at a senior executive level - a CEO, for example. Or that the deaths in question occurred in somewhat… unusual circumstances.”

  “He knows they’re going to die,” El said, thinking aloud. “Then he bets on them dying.”

  “Yes. More specifically: I believe he knows they’re going to die because he knows that Madera and Carruthers have been commissioned to kill them. And I believe he knows that because his daughter has been tipping him off about their targets.”

  Ruby let out a long, slow whistle.

  “Bit of a stroke of luck for Santino, having his girl take up with our Dolly,” she said carefully.

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps he helped to broker the relationship to begin with. It would have been a rather clever move, for someone of his intellectual calibre… but it may be that he found a way to plant Lawton in Madera’s circle in the first place. That he’s been using her as… what might you call it? His mole.”

  “I could kill you anyway,” Lawton said. “Leave you choking on your own blood before I go hop on that flight.”

  Sita shrugged.

  “You could. But unless you’re able to teleport, I very much doubt you’d be able to reach those friends of mine in time to stop them passing the news along to Madera. They’re listening to us now, incidentally.” She pulled back a small section of the sari draped over her left shoulder, revealing the outline of the microphone Karen had taped to the inside of the fabric. “Would you care to say hello?”

  Lawton’s eyes flickered down to the microphone, then back to Sita.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “You got nothing.”

  She inched forward, the Ka-Bar in her hand extended like a cutlass.

  Sita smiled.

  “Try me, darling,” she told her, stepping into what space remained between them until the tip of the blade met the soft flesh of her stomach. “Just try me.”

  Chapter 28

  Osterley Park, London, May 1998

  Down the stairs, Ma mouthed to Karen - pointing, for emphasis, to the staircase leading from the ground-floor hallway to the basement games room.

  Karen nodded back at him; pointed a finger of her own to the back door they’d come through.

  I can go? he mouthed.

  She nodded again. He didn’t ask a third time; just turned around and made for the door with nothing but the clothes on his back.

  Quite where he’d go, El wasn’t sure: none of his erased identities had been restored, as far as she was aware, and if Fergus had done his job properly - and there was no doubt that he had, since he was doing it for Karen - then the guy’s travel documents would be apt to raise a lot of red flags at passport control, if he even made it to the airport.

  Wherever he ended up, though, she hoped he’d learned enough to disappear completely - to keep himself from showing up on their radar for the remainder of his days.

  At the top of the stairs, Karen paused; ran a hand down her hip until it reached the holster strapped to her thigh and pulled out a handgun. A semi-automatic Glock, that was - unlike the other models she’d had occasion to use on the job over the years - not only real, but loaded with seventeen rounds of live ammunition.

  The others followed suit, retrieving firearms of their own from the limbs on which the guns were holstered. All of them but Ruby.

  Ruby, who’d declined - over the protests of all of them, even Hannah - to go up against Madera armed with anything at all.

  They descended the stairs in silence, two-by-two, their feet as quiet on the carpeted steps as they’d been traversing the hallway above: Karen and Ruby at the front, El and Rose in the middle, Sita and Hannah at the rear.

  The games room was long and wide, the length and breadth - or so it seemed to El, as the full scope of it came into view - of the farmhouse itself. Spotlights shone from the low-hanging ceiling, illuminating the pool table, the drinks cabinet and breakfast bar, the open fireplace beside the widescreen television hooked up to Ma’s beloved video games console; the high-backed, oversized swivel chair in which, she imagined, Ma had spent many happy hours since arriving in London angled away from the stairs, facing the screen.

  And Madera and Carruthers: one on either side of the pool table, their guns levelled at Ruby and Karen.

  “She won’t hurt me,” Ruby had insisted, when El had pressed her - privately - on her refusal to carry a gun. “Our Dolly - whatever she’s done, whatever choices she might’ve made… she wouldn’t do that. Wouldn’t look me in the face and pull no trigger.”

  El hadn’t known what to say - Ruby’s absolute conviction at odds with everything she knew about Madera and the way the woman operated.

  “And Carruthers?” she’d asked. “No reason for him to hold back, is there?”

  Ruby had hauled her backpack onto her shoulders.

  “He’ll be out the way before we need to worry about that,” she’d said, pulling up the zipper on her bulletproof vest. “You mark my words.”

  When neither Madera nor Carruthers pulled their triggers immediately, El let herself relax - just a fraction, but enough to convince the panicked sinews of her hips and calves to propel her down the remaining stairs.

  If she was going to kill us now, she told herself, with an illogical certainty, then she’d have done it before Karen’s foot touched the basement floor. We’d be dead already, all of us.

  She wants something from us. Wants to find out something.

  Or maybe, a more treacherous voice in her head put in, she just wants to talk a little first. Wants to catch up with her baby sister before she puts a bullet in her head. And then in yours.

  “We don’t want no trouble, Doll,” Ruby said, speaking softly. “That’s not why we’ve come.”

  She stepped further into the room, disrupting the bottleneck of bodies that had formed behind her and makin
g space for the other women to follow, until the six of them were spread out in a single-line formation, facing Madera and Carruthers and their guns like kids against a playground wall.

  Or prisoners up against a firing squad, the treacherous voice added.

  It was a curious experience, seeing both the sisters together: Madera’s face a perfect replica of Ruby’s, but cast - as Hannah had suggested - in smoother and more decadent materials.

  Carruthers, by contrast, could have been cut from stone, the rock-hard protuberances of his muscles sheathed by a blue sports jacket and open-neck shirt. His expression, like Madera’s, was impassive, as inscrutable as any El had seen, and his grip on the gun in his hand solid and unwavering.

  He’d kill us, she thought. All of us, where we stand. Wouldn’t even blink.

  “You’ve been very talkative, for someone who isn’t looking for trouble,” Madera said, in the strange, clipped Katherine Hepburn-Transatlantic Hannah had described. “Spending a lot of time with the police, the way I heard it.”

  “No,” Ruby said. “No, that ain’t true. Is it?”

  This last question she directed at Hannah, standing now at the end of the horizontal chain of bodies.

  “I may have been… misinformed,” Hannah told Madera, sounding chastened, almost timid. “The information I gave you may have been… not entirely accurate, after all.”

  “And how’s that?” Madera asked her.

  “She lied to you, Doll,” Ruby said. “She wanted us out the picture ‘cause of what we did to her old man, and she thought you’d get the job done for her, if she spun you the right yarn.”

  “Is that so?” Madera raised one, sculpted eyebrow. “You have a rebuttal, Mrs. D’Amboise?”

  “Well…,” Hannah began.

  The shot rang out so suddenly, the noise of it alone knocked El sideways, sending her flying into Rose, who caught her before she fell to the ground.

  Hannah cried out, once; staggered backwards, then crumpled to the carpet, eyes wide and leaking blood from the hole Carruthers’ gun had made in the centre of her forehead.

  Madera turned her head to him, her own gun still pointed at Ruby.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I never said to shoot her.”

  “Did it need saying?” he answered, coolly.

  “Yes, it needed saying. Needed me to say so.”

  He twisted the broad, corded flesh of his neck clockwise, until he was looking back at her.

  “Maybe I’m capable of making a decision on my own, for once. You ever consider that?”

  I could shoot, El thought. Put a bullet in one of them now, while they’re talking. And while I’m doing that, someone else could take a shot at the other one. We could put them both down, together.

  Except… however fast I could shoot, they’re probably faster. They’d know, before I pulled the trigger. And they’d react, maybe even before they thought too hard about it.

  And then I’d be nothing but meat on the floor, like Hannah.

  She chanced a look at Rose, to her left; at Karen, beside Rose. Both of them were frozen to the spot, just like she was, both sets of their eyes trained on Carruthers and Madera.

  They’re thinking the same, she thought. They want to risk it, to take the shot - but neither one of them believes they’d be able to do it soon enough.

  “Now’s not the time for this, Lucian,” Madera said.

  “It never is, Thea. It never is.” The finger he had pressed against the trigger of his pistol twitched, very slightly; the thumb he’d locked around the grip shifted, and the tendons in his wrist with it. “But it’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about for a while.”

  He’s going to quit, El thought. To tell her he’s leaving - that he wants to go off on his own, whether she wants him to or not.

  And if she doesn’t… what’s left for him to do but blast his way upstairs and out the door?

  The bait they’d laid for him - that Kate Zhou had laid for him, with Karen’s suitcase full of silver - seemed, suddenly, like a misstep. A very serious error of judgement.

  “Later,” Madera told him. “After.”

  “No.” He licked his lips; the thumb on the pistol grip shifted position again. “It’s not gonna wait. I…”

  Carruthers had been quick, when he’d shot Hannah; so quick he’d managed to catch them all off-guard. But Madera moved like lightning: unloading two rounds into his throat and another into his gut before he’d even squeezed his trigger.

  He went down hard - the gargantuan weight of him crashing to the floor like a boulder, his own bright red, iron-reeking blood soaking his shirt and spurting in rapid, arterial spritzes from his throat and neck.

  Her gun-hand steady and her eyes never leaving Ruby and Karen, Madera bent to a crouch, snatched his pistol out from his stained fingers and, bringing herself back upright, pointed that weapon, too, in their direction.

  On the floor, immobile but with strength enough left to vocalise his agony, Carruthers screamed - whatever words he intended to speak emerging from his caved-in throat as nothing but a wet and gurgling incoherence.

  He’ll die, El thought. Probably soon. But it won’t be quick, and it definitely won’t be painless.

  I doubt it ever is, when she kills.

  “Still want to talk, do you, girl?” Madera asked Ruby - her voice changing even as she spoke, morphing into a mirror-image of her sister’s.

  “I ain’t scared of you, Doll,” Ruby told her. She took a step in towards Madera, then another, shaking off Karen as the younger woman moved to grab her by the biceps to stop her. “Never have been. Think I care what you did to that boy of yours, after what he done to God knows who many else?”

  She glanced down at Carruthers, twitching and writhing in death-seizures where he’d fallen, the carpet around him stained purple and brown with his blood.

  Rose looked too, El saw. First at Carruthers, and then across at Hannah, now entirely still.

  She was her sister, El reminded herself, trying to read a reaction in Rose’s face but finding nothing there but a cool, placid emptiness. Whatever else she was, she was her sister.

  The sister who tried to have Sophie killed, the other voice reminded her. Twice, if you remember. So I wouldn’t shed too many tears for her, if I were you.

  “I reckon maybe you should be scared,” Madera said, “after what you done.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” Ruby replied. “Not one of us did. Her, there,” she pointed the toes of one of her boots at Hannah’s body, “she were lying to you. Trying to stitch us up.”

  “You sure about that, are you?”

  There was no tell in that voice, El thought. No sense at all of what Madera thought; of what she’d do.

  And the hand with the gun stayed just where it was, the muzzle of it barely a foot from Ruby’s chest. Didn’t waver, not by a millimetre.

  “Think, Doll. Bleedin’ think about it. Even if you reckon I’m trying to get one over on you now - think about her down there. You’re not daft - you never were, even when we were kids. A girl like that, with her head screwed on that loose… you honestly tellin’ me you trust a single word she told you?”

  Madera hesitated.

  “No,” she said, after a moment. “No, I can’t say I did. Which is why I did a little detective work of my own. Why I…”

  “On Gerry Adler, you mean,” Ruby interrupted. “You heard we knew him, heard we’d been talking to him… so you put it all together with what that Hannah told you, and thought you’d worked out we’d been grassing you up to the Bill. That about the size of it?”

  “James Marchant. Killed him, didn’t you?”

  Rose did flinch, at this; and Sita too, El saw.

  Ruby, though, was calm - still wholly in control of herself.

  “Yeah, I did it.” She shook her head, regretfully. “Wish I hadn’t had to, but I did it. But I ain’t a grass, Doll. And I reckon you know that.”

  Madera lowered the gun half
an inch, until the muzzle pointed at her sister’s stomach, and not her heart.

  “You listening to this?” she said, raising her voice - speaking, it seemed to El, not to Ruby or the rest of them, but to someone else. Another person in the room.

  Next to the fireplace, the high-backed chair opposite the television spun ninety degrees on its wheels.

  And there was Kat: feet tucked under her body in a modified lotus position and a gun – another pistol, the barrel long as something carried by a cowboy in a Spaghetti Western - resting firmly in her hands.

  “Yeah,” she told Madera, nudging the gun left, until El and Rose were directly in her line of fire. “But I wouldn’t go believing what they’re telling you, if I were you. Take it from me - this lot, they’ll say just about anything.”

  Chapter 29

  The Strand, London, May 1998

  Sitting opposite Madera, so close she might’ve felt the murdering old bag’s breath on her face if she’d leaned in any further, Kat found herself unexpectedly lost for words.

  “My sister sent you after me, I expect,” Madera said, filling the silence. Her tone was conversational; casually inquiring.

  Kat cleared her throat; tried again to speak.

  “She did, yeah.”

  “Couldn’t be bothered to come herself, though?”

  “She wasn’t sure how you’d react to seeing her, after all this time.”

  Madera paused, thoughtful.

  “And she wants to cut a deal, does she?”

  Kat nodded; knocked back a slug of her cappuccino, wishing to God she’d thought to lace it with something stronger.

  “She’s asked me to tell you… to ask you, really… to stop what you’re doing, coming after us.”

  Just tell her the truth, Ruby had said. That’s all we got left to offer, ain’t it? The truth.

  Madera bared her teeth in what she probably intended as a smile - the sort of smile, Kat thought, she probably gave her targets, just before she slid a blade between their ribs or snapped their hyoid bone with a length of chicken-wire.