POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “A bottle?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “A Château Meaucaillou 2009.”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “You mean, you made him drink it, even though he was already intoxicated?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “No. I swung it at his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes. He didn’t flinch after that.”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “That would explain some of the elements, indeed. So you left Mr. Sheets unconscious in your room at noon?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “Correct.”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “And you didn’t notice, in your room or in the hallway, a black garbage bag or anything that didn’t belong to you? Anything out of the ordinary?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “No.”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “Can you tell me what kind of relationship you had with Mr. Sheets?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “I would hardly call it a relationship. I can’t stand him, and he can’t stand me. But our superiors at the British Broadcasting Corporation, in their great wisdom, decided we were doing a story together. We were working on a documentary about the pyramids of Cheops.”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “You were supposed to fly to Cairo and you changed your mind. You went to London instead. Why is that?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “It’s a complicated story.”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “I am all ears.”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “As part of my documentary, I was interested in the murder of Seth Pryce, you know, the – ”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “Yes, I know.”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “Andrew babbled about things when he was in my room…”
(Silence)
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “ … that someone told him there would be a connection between my ancestors and Seth Pryce.”
(Silence)
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “Miss Mornay?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “I went back to Falmouth Manor to check. I can confirm that Sheets has once again told idiotic stories and my family has nothing to do with Seth Pryce, or his murder, or the pyramids. Can I ask you a question?”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “This conversation is recorded, but it is confidential.”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “Did Sheets tell you about a man named Oxan Aslanian?”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “Yes, he mentioned him several times before his lawyer arrived. He couldn’t remember where he met him or when. We checked it out. There is no one by that name, except – ” FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “-a forger from the 1930s.”
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): “That’s right. Can you tell us more about this individual?”
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: “You should really check with your Egyptian colleagues. A man died in a police station four months ago, his last words were ‘Oxan Aslanian’. Antique dealers and collectors talk about him as if he was a bloody and merciless boogeyman. I’m not sure he really exists, to be honest. Did Sheets describe him to you?
(Computer keyboard clicking.)
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): ‘Fat, tall, bald, skin as strange as a reptile. Eastern focus. Stone smell.’
(Silence)
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: ‘Is our interrogation over? I really have to go.’
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): ‘Yes, thank you. Mr. Sheets will be very grateful to you, you’re his only alibi.’
FLORENCE MORNAY-DEVEREUX: ‘Well, that’s all we need.’
POLICE INSPECTOR (SCOTLAND YARD): ‘But don’t worry. If he gets away with this murder, he still goes down to the hole. They dug and found other things, we raided his house. Assault on a minor, drug and influence trafficking. Your instincts were good, Ms. Mornay.’
19
A few months earlier…
The full moon reflected in a dirty puddle at Jessica’s feet.
Sitting on the roof of a building above Mexico City, with her back pressed against a cracked wall, she watched the city.
She tried to calm her painful breathing and decipher the sounds of the night around her. For the moment, everything was normal.
The lamppost in front of the building next door cast long, still shadows across the street. In a few minutes, she would know if she had to run away again or if she could stay there tonight.
Her knee was scratched, so was the palm of her hand and her clothes were stained with blood. She had slipped while running and fallen hard on the asphalt. Although her hands and knees stung, it was her stomach that hurt the most.
Suddenly, the shadows lengthened, steps echoed nearby.
I hope nothing happened to him, she thought, saying a silent prayer.
Before he came into sight, she knew it was him.
Thaddeus.
He rushed to her side, surveyed the area around him one last time to ensure no one could see the, and crouched down, his back to the wall. His jeans were torn on his thigh, revealing a bloody wound. His haughty profile sculpted by the moon was scratched and glistened with sweat. He too was out of breath.
“Seth? Where is he?” Jessica asked in desperation.
Thaddeus, his eyes still closed, began to smile despite the difficulty of breathing. “He’s safe. For now.”
Jessica let out a brief sigh of relief and rested her head against the low wall. She wanted to curl up, hug her knees with her arms, but the wound on her stomach hurt too much, so she stretched her legs out on the gray asphalt.
A furtive scratching sound made her straighten up. A rat, maybe. Otherwise, there was no one there. Only her and Thaddeus, and between them, the fear of what waited for them.
She glanced down at his leg, blood seeping through his jeans.
“Your leg – ”
“It will be alright,” he said abruptly. “It’s just superficial. I just hope there’s no more running.”
“I take it it’s better to spend the night here?”
Thaddeus nodded and looked at his watch with a weary gesture. “It’s already four o’clock. They won’t have time to send backup. We should be safe here. The coffee shop downstairs opens at seven o’clock. All I need is to make a phone call.
“If you had a phone – ”
“They would have taken it from me, just like they took yours.”
Jessica tried to relax. They had a plan, so there was a hope of getting out of it.
“And then, once we get out of here? Can Seth follow us?”
“I don’t know, Jessica.”
“He’s lost, isn’t he?” she said in a barely audible voice. She had trouble swallowing.
For an answer, Thaddeus glanced up at the full moon. His silence tortured Jessica to no end and a bitter taste filled her mouth. There was no need to ask questions anymore.
They stayed seated next to each other for a while, catching their breaths and calming their nerves, excited by the terror.
The night was stifling; a dark cage without air.
The roof trembled from the vibrations of a motorcycle, half a dozen stories lower. Little by little, fear gave way to exhaustion, and with it came burning tears. They were on the brink of spilling onto her cheeks and she took a breath to will them away.
Maybe to ward them off entirely, she started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Thaddeus asked, his eyes still closed.
“As a little girl, I dreamt of a beautiful wedding and a dazzling honeymoon. In my imagination, everything was magical. I’ve always had a weakness for fairy tales.”
“What, you mean on this hot night, on this balcony in the moonlight, it’s not magical?” Thaddeus chuckled and motioned to the sky. “Look, even the stars are out.”
Jessica’s sad laughter echoed from the rooftops and was lost in the night.
“Don’t panic, but I think I just heard a rat,” she said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
“W
asn’t Cinderella their friend?”
“I think those were mice.”
“Trust me, there were some rats too.”
She laughed but this time the pain in her stomach made her wince.
“Does it still hurt?” Thaddeus asked worriedly. “Let me take a look at it.”
She lifted her shirt slowly, revealing a plastic film taped to her skin, the black ink still swollen with bloody residue on it. She closed her eyes, but the motif of the cross remained in silhouette under her eyelids. This tattoo had been necessary. To save her own skin.
She felt Thaddeus’s hand delicately rest on her belly. “At least he did a good job. In a few days, you won’t feel anything.”
She relaxed a little, leaned back and looked up at the stars.
They sat in silence for a while until they heard voices coming from the street. Thaddeus and Jessica froze, but luckily a laugh sounded and they realized it was only a young couple coming home from a night at a bar.
After a long silence, Thaddeus whispered, “We have three hours ahead of us, talk to me.”
“About what?”
“What comforts you?”
She raised her knees to her chest, and embraced them with her arms. Finally, the pain became bearable, or maybe she was getting used to it. “The fact that I’m still alive, for one thing. A few hours ago I doubted it very much.”
“Under the circumstances, I also find deep comfort in this situation,” Thaddeus agreed.
Jessica took another deep breath. “That tree over there too, on the corner of the avenue. Do you see it?” she asked, pointing in the direction.
“The jacaranda?”
“Yes, that’s right. The color of its flowers reminds me of springtime. The renewal that returns every year, and I imagine this tree shelters a whole universe, insects, birds. They do not care about us, nor about the future, nor about the past, nor about the meaning of life. They work, guided by the orders of spring. All they have to do is live, to reproduce. To participate in the renewal.”
“Spring orders,” Thaddeus repeated, his voice soft.
When she glanced at him, Jessica’s heart leaped a little and she realized she was the one comforting him. As a child, she always wanted to help others, inspire them, come to their aid. She had a strong sense of justice, but what she preferred was to give comfort to people. If she could improve these hours for Thaddeus, then it would make her happy, too.
She looked around, looking for a little beauty, a little poetry. This quest transformed the landscape. Suddenly there was so much to say.
“The skyscraper over there reminds me of the first time I arrived in Manhattan. It was a winter evening, I wasn’t looking where I was going, I had my nose in the air, absolutely fascinated by all these skyscrapers, this incredible architecture. It was so much bigger than me. I didn’t see I had stepped on a patch of ice, I ended up on my ass on the snow. I was laughing so hard, people thought I was crazy. Several passers-by helped me to get up. They say New Yorkers are not friendly.”
Thaddeus’s smile noticed from the corner of her eye gave her the motivation to continue.
“The building over there,” she continued, “it looks like a little house has been put on its roof, do you see it? If we ignore the whole city around it, if we take away the hustle and bustle of the city and add the tranquility of the ocean, the cliffs, the wind…”
She allowed the silence bring the image to life in her mind. A caress of a feather accompanied this dream for a moment, but then it disappeared within an instant.
“That’s where I come from,” she finally whispered with a weak smile.
Thaddeus looked at her. “It’s important to you, where you come from, right?”
“I didn’t think it was. I always believed that the most important thing, and what defined me, was where I wanted to go, where I would be tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, one day. Obviously elsewhere, and inevitably far away. But since yesterday, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I tell myself that I can go down the wrong path, or I can be forced to follow one that is not mine, but I can never take away from where I came from. I discovered for the first time in my life that it is a strength.”
“And for you, it is a benevolent force,” Thaddeus added, “as it is for me.”
“Not for you?”
He sighed. “Life has never given me the chance to forget where I come from. All I’ve done since I was a teenager is to get rid of my name. Then one day, I realized that the further I tried to get away from my origins, the closer life got to them. As if an invisible, unbreakable thread always brought me back to what I didn’t want to be. So finally, I followed the advice of the Stoic philosophers.”
“And what is that?”
“The obstacle is the path. It is only by accepting the fate my birth holds for me before I can truly become myself.”
“And what is this destiny?”
“The thread drawn between the origins and the destination.”
“Okay,” Jessica smiled, “but in your case?”
He turned his head to look at her. “The Blumagia and the von Wär bloodlines. Two bloodlines, one quest. Absolute power. As absolute as possible.”
“That sounds like a dramatic movie trailer,” Sixtine cringed.
“Unfortunately, that’s my life,” Thaddeus sighed, his brow furrowing. “Among my ancestors, there were brilliant minds, thinkers, innovators. Imposters, too, and even some magicians. But the common denominator is power. There was always something, someone to have control over. Right down to the roots of my family tree, I find this terrible rapacity. So that’s it, my roots are set in stone for this need for control.”
“And the destination?”
“To be fair,” he said with unexpected seriousness.
Jessica studied him but he avoided her gaze. In the light of what they had just experienced, it seemed to Jessica her sibylline words sketched out the deep reason for their meeting, although she could not fully understand it.
“In your family, were there no righteous people?” she asked.
“Yes, of course, but they all had tragic endings.”
Jessica tried to breathe lightness into her response with a smile, but a searing pain had passed through her stomach, as if the needles were penetrating her abdomen a second time around. She lowered her hand to her stomach, and noticed the blood stains on her shirt slowly increasing in size, or was it the shadows of that endless night?
Thaddeus turned to her anxiously, but she stopped him. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing. I now understand why you didn’t want to tell me your name when I met you at my engagement party.”
She had spoken to defuse Thaddeus’s anxiety, but at the word “engagement”, the cold in her throat and the burning tears took her by surprise.
Thaddeus’s face was so close to hers he had to notice the flickering in the young woman’s eyes. Sadness and exhaustion invaded his features. Jessica felt the disappointment rising in her throat, as she loved so much to see him smile.
“That day, I found my legacy particularly unbearable,” he said. “And you allowed me to forget it for a moment. You were a breath of fresh air.”
“Did you already know that day?” she whispered in a strangled voice.
“That I loved you?”
“No, I meant – ”
“Yes,” he interrupted her.
A hot wave exploded in Jessica’s chest and suspended her breath.
Silence seized the night as he reached out his hand to her face, wiped a tear with his thumb. Then, slowly, he let his fingertips follow the line of her cheekbones. This tiny caress could have been clumsiness, a mistake, if it had not been highlighted by the gray gaze which did not waver. His body had moved closer to hers.
“Don’t, I’m covered in blood,” she whispered, her eyes immersed in his, her body electrified by a strange electricity.
Without noticing it, she had put her hand on his arm; her fingers felt the tight muscles against her skin, her heart ra
cing faster and faster. “Your blood or mine, what’s the difference?”
He was so close to her she could smell his warm breath with every word, the smell of turpentine, sweat and the unknown flower which had intoxicated her from the first encounter.
“Yours is blue,” she replied weakly, their lips almost touching.
“And yours is pure,” he whispered.
The moment his lips touched hers, Jessica was instantly overwhelmed. A deep vertigo invaded her, the consciousness of her being reduced to the experience of this kiss so delicate, so restrained and yet so absolute. Her lips tasted like Thaddeus’s and as they discovered each other’s mouths, there was no hunger, no thirst, just the need for the other. The entire night of Mexico City was regulated by the warmth of their bodies, and everything around them seemed to conspire with this forbidden embrace. Their breaths mixed, timidly at first, then they suffocated them as their bodies shifted closer, closing the distance between them. A slow explosion of pleasure flowed through Jessica’s insides. Thaddeus raked his fingers through her blond hair and lured her in against him, to make this eternal kiss last.
He was, however, the first to pull away from her and Jessica felt the lack of his warmth shaking her whole being.
“I will never let you go,” Thaddeus whispered. “Never.”
Jessica closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against his. She knew that the promise was impossible. Their embrace resounded with a heartbeat; was it her own, or Thaddeus’s? Or those of this cruel, yet magical city?
She kissed his mouth to ward off the fear that overwhelmed her. She had already lost so much, but she had just found something even more precious.
A truck parked in front of the building and the sudden noise of it separated them. They hid in the shadow of the low wall, and watched for the sounds of the street. Men’s voices rose, then steps.
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