I figured she could either rip my entrails out and eat them, or sit and start talking. Fortunately for me she opted for the latter. Her shadow seemed to fold and contract into one of the armchairs, and now the candle played on her face so I could make out her features. I sat in the other chair and studied her. Everything about her was long and thin, but somehow she made it work. She was attractive and graceful. Her face was long and her cheekbones were high. I couldn’t tell for sure, but her hair seemed to be a deep auburn. Her skin was pale. I asked, “How did you do that?” She didn’t answer and I knew she was waiting for me to fill in the deletion. “Appear in Maria’s house like that?”
Her smile deepened, but it was weird—like she could see irony without feeling humor. She said, “Did I?” Her brogue was soft and insinuating, like the mist outside the window.
I said, “You know you did. That’s why we’re both here.”
“Is it?”
“This could get boring.”
“Could it?”
Then she burst out laughing. It was loud, harsh and shocking, and I had a flash in my mind of a peacock crying out, with its tail in full fan. When she’d finished I said, “Yeah. It could. I don’t know how you did it, Sinead. Maybe you’re David Blaine in disguise. Or maybe you’re testing an app for Apple’s next generation of iPhone, but you called me here and you got me here. I’d like to know how—and why—but if we’re going to play twenty rhetorical questions all evening, I have better things to do.”
She was very quiet for about seven seconds, then, very softly, she asked, “Have you?” I sighed, stuck my cigarette in my mouth and went to stand. She said, “I don’t think you have. I think you are exactly where you want to be.” I relaxed back into my chair and waited. “I didn’t call you, Liam. I just let you know I was here, and let you do what you wanted to do. Find me.”
The last of the dusk light had drained from the room. The light from the candle was steady, but occasionally a hulk of shadow would move across the wall and the flame would dance for a few seconds. I said, “If that’s true, you wanted me to find you.”
“That’s true.”
“What for?”
“I’m curious about you.”
“Were you curious about Pete Strickland too?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill him?”
“How could I?”
“That isn’t a denial. It isn’t even an answer.”
“No.”
My cigarette had burned down to my fingers. I flicked it into the dead fireplace. A snake of mist had crept in through the window. She was waiting. More than that, she was watching. Observing. I said, “What are you curious about?”
There was a deep sigh that reached me through the dark air. It sounded too loud. She shifted her position. I was struck again by how graceful she was. She said, “Mary-Jane said you could help us. I’m curious to know if you can.”
“I’m being paid to find Mary-Jane, Sinead.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Everything is connected, Liam.”
“What? What is that supposed to mean? Quantum entanglement? Jungian synchronicity? The holographic universe? Bullshit!”
“It means that you can only see a tiny part of what this is all about. Practically nothing. If you could see more clearly, you’d see that it is all connected.”
I sighed loudly and stood. “This has been interesting. I’ve enjoyed your parlor tricks. But as we don’t seem to be going anywhere, I think I’ll be running along.”
She curled her feet under her. As I was reaching the door, she said, “All right, Liam. Mary-Jane worked for me. I was her boss. We worked for the same organization.”
I froze. “Keep talking.”
“We became…friends. The organization we worked for didn’t approve of our kind of friendships. So we had a crazy idea. We’d leave.”
“How’s that crazy?”
“Because nobody who is a member of this organization ever leaves. Not alive.”
“What is this organization?”
“It doesn’t concern you, and in any case, you’ve never heard of it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because nobody’s heard of it unless they’re in it. We were in it and we decided to leave.”
“But you couldn’t leave, because if you did, Mr. Big would send you on a deep six holiday.” I went back to my seat and pulled out another cigarette. As I lit it, I said, “So you decided the smart move was to blackmail him to stay off your back.”
She watched me for a while. “Not exactly, no. We took something that was of great value to the organization.”
“You mean to Serafino.”
She paused for just a second. “The name isn’t important. The point is the organization has agreed to a deal. We return the thing of value, and they let us go free.”
“And you believe them?”
She did something that might have been a small laugh. “Believe me, I’m anything but naïve, Liam. I’ve been in the organization long enough to know how they operate.”
“So what do you want from me?”
She leaned forward, looking down at her palms. Suddenly she looked oddly human and I was caught off guard by a need to help her and protect her. She said, “They have agreed to a meeting. They want Mary-Jane to go. I want you to go instead.”
I was having déjà vu. I said, “So they can kill me instead of her? Or so that I can kill them? I’ve been there before. No thanks.”
“They won’t kill you. We… They never kill if they don’t absolutely need to. While you make the delivery, we vanish. You’ll get paid handsomely. Money is truly no object. You’ve no idea…”
“Are we talking about La Hermandad?”
“Yes. If you like. But names—”
“How does Serafino del Roble tie in to all this?”
“Don’t ask questions, Liam. Truly, names are not important.”
“How will you get this thing of value to me?”
“Mary-Jane will be in touch. It’s time for you to go now. You have to go back.”
There were a lot of questions I still had. There were too many connections, too many patterns that didn’t make sense—or at least the sense they made didn’t make sense. And I seemed to hear Sinead’s soft, misty voice in my head, saying that meaning was all to do with perspective, and as she said it, she seemed to be awfully far away, across the room, real small, a small snake of shadow curled into a small spiral in a small chair in the shadows.
Then my head jolted. The moon was slipping behind the hills and the horizon was a misty blue-green. One star burned on the dark side of the sky and the frogs were pretending to be cicadas, but their songs had got wet in the streams that ran down through the dark from La Maroma. I was looking through the windscreen darkly at the black silhouette of the peeling blue iron gate, and I knew something was wrong. Something was awfully wrong. I looked at my watch. It was ten-thirty.
A dream. I had dreamed. It was the only perspective that gave it meaning. The only way it made sense.
I climbed out of the car. My legs were like Jell-O. I forced myself to walk to the big iron gate and leaned on it, looking through. The house was dark and dead. The garden was silent. I hadn’t been in there. I had a virus. A fever. I’d blacked out again. I had dreamed. I turned and leaned my back against the gate. I pulled out my fresh pack of Camels, pinched one out and stuck it in my mouth. With the Zippo in my right hand, halfway to the cigarette, I stopped. I looked back at the pack in my left hand and counted how many cigarettes were left in the pack. There were three missing. One was in my mouth. The other two I had smoked inside, talking to Sinead.
I felt suddenly nauseous. My head began to spin. Inch by inch blackness closed in and I felt the world rise up to slam me in the face. As I lay sinking into unconsciousness, I realized that the frogs were not imitating the cicadas. They were laughing. They were laughing at me.
Chapter Eleven
When I woke up, I was on a bed. I had another blunt hatchet wedged in my skull, and the blades of light that were cutting through the slatted blinds were jarring on it and making my brain scream. I tried to lever myself onto one elbow and saw a hazy silhouette hovering close over my face. Slowly it came into focus and I realized it was Catherine Howard. I smiled and flopped back. Then I laughed out loud at the ceiling.
She touched my face and her fingers were real soft. That should have been nice, but somehow it made me mad instead. I could just make out her features in the half light. She said, “Liam. You’re awake. What happened?”
I climbed back to my elbow and rubbed my face. I said, “I need a drink.”
“I have some whiskey.”
“Make it a double.”
While she was filling two plastic tooth mugs, I tried to put together the fragments of my memory. I swung my feet off the bed and she sat opposite me. I stopped massaging my neck and took a glass from her. The whiskey burned in my throat and in my belly. It was good and, after a second, my head began to ease and my thoughts began to assemble and flow in the same direction. I said, “Where am I?”
“You’re in my hotel room.”
I stared at her, trying to choose the most relevant of all the questions I wanted to ask. In the end the best I could do was, “Your hotel room?”
“In Competa. Do you remember where you are?”
“Of course I remember where I am! What the hell are you doing in a hotel in Competa?”
“I don’t know what happened to you, Liam. Do you remember…?”
I finished my drink and stood up. It was a mistake but I saw it through. I took a few steps around the room. Everything ached. I ached. I struggled to get a firmer hold on my memory. There were lots of flashes, pictures, voices. Feelings. I said, “I remember—”
“What?”
“There was a phone call.”
“A phone call?” She watched me, waiting. I struggled, but every picture and every sound seemed to slip through holes in my head. She said, “Who from, Liam?”
Who from? “It was from…” Southern belle, Mary-Jane Carter. It was from Mary-Jane Carter. I said, “Someone you don’t know.”
“What did they say?”
I thought. I struggled to claw back pictures, sounds, smells, meaning. “I went to a house.”
“What house? Can you remember?”
“Yes.” Yes, I could remember. “Sinead’s house.”
“Sinead?”
I blinked. She had stood up and was watching me, holding her glass in both hands, like a votive offering. I said, “You don’t know her,” but I wasn’t sure if I was telling her or asking.
She said, “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was in my car. I don’t remember.”
“A Mustang.”
I looked hard at her. “Yes.”
“I found you by your car.”
“By my car?”
“It was at a junction—a dirt track and the road to Çalares. Your car was parked at the junction. The door was open and you were on the road—lying on the road. It was a miracle I was passing.” She took a step toward me. “I saw you and recognized you. I might not have stopped.”
We were silent a long time, watching each other. Finally I said, “Catherine, what the hell are you doing here?”
She turned away, walked to the window. “Noddy told me where you—”
I cut across her, “Yeah, I’d got that far. I asked you what you were doing here.”
She looked down into her glass. Slats of light slanted across her face, putting her eyes in shadow. It dawned on me that it was day. I waited. Finally, she said, “I’m so sorry I got you into all this.”
“Stop dodging the question, Catherine.”
She ignored me, talking into the whiskey. “If I could turn the clock back, if I could go back—”
“Cut it out. Stop lying! Stop avoiding the truth. What the hell are you doing here?”
Now she turned to look at me and the slats of light were like a halo around her head, but her eyes were still in darkness. “I didn’t want to lie to you, Liam. You don’t have to believe me. I don’t blame you if you don’t. There is so much at stake.”
“You’re right. I don’t have to believe anything you say. All you’ve done is lie to me and tell me how sorry you are that you lied. Do you remember what the truth is, Catherine? Can you tell anymore?”
She seemed to shift in the shadows and I realized she had sat on the windowsill. Now the light caught her eye. I was exhausted and mad as hell. A few days earlier she had been the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Now I was looking at her and comparing, thinking of the simple honesty and courage I had seen in Maria, and I felt a pit in my stomach when I thought how we’d left things.
Her eyes flicked at me, like she’d heard my thoughts. Her face seemed to shape a hundred small expressions before she finally said, “Mary-Jane Carter is my sister.” I sat slowly on the bed and stared at her. She went on, “We were separated when we were very young. My father—our father—was a gambler. He was sick, when I was practically too young to remember. Only I do remember we lost everything in one of his games.”
“Where did this happen?”
She glanced at me and said very quietly, “South Carolina. Near Savannah. He didn’t just gamble our home. He gambled all our money. Everything we owned. Everything.”
“What happened?”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
I found my pack. There were still three missing. I pulled two and lit them, then passed her one. While she smoked, I refilled our glasses. When she spoke, it was almost a hiss. “They sold me.”
I stared at her.
“They sold me to an English family in London.” Suddenly she laughed. It was harsh. “I don’t think you can get much farther from South Carolina and stay on the planet, can you?” I didn’t answer, but she was demanding, not laughing anymore. “Well, can you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think so.” She looked away. “They were good people. Mary-Jane stayed with…them. I was sent to the best schools money could buy. I went to Oxford. They couldn’t have children, so they adored me—doted on me. I never lacked for love or care. I lived on the cover of a Christmas chocolate box, but I was always empty. And I never forgot my sister.”
“What happened to her?”
“They moved west, to some dive called Auxilio, where she met Pete Strickland and they both moved on to LA. He pimped and she was a high-class hooker.”
“That was her, not you—the story you told me at Noddy’s.”
She sighed. “Yes, that was her. It was all her, not me. Eventually she ran into this man, Serafino del Roble. He seemed different. He was a Jesuit who worked for the Opus Dei and consulted for the Vatican. How much more straight and narrow can you get, right?”
I snorted, “Quite a lot, I would think.”
“Anyway, he was nonjudgmental, charismatic and powerful, and he promised her the Earth in exchange for some favors.”
“Favors?”
She turned to me and her face was savage. “You know! He would entertain powerful men—captains of industry, generals, judges, politicians. And he would introduce them to Mary-Jane. She was not only beautiful, but intelligent, funny, charming. But above all, she was infinitely adaptable. She could be anything and anyone he—or they—wanted her to be. And when he needed a man to be broken and harnessed, she would seduce him, then he would film them, photograph them, record them… It was dehumanizing. She lost her soul, her identity, herself.” She looked down into her glass. “Anyway, from that point on, del Roble would own that man.”
“So how does Rupert fit into this?”
“Not Rupert, his uncle. And his uncle’s friends.”
“The fusion reactor.”
“Yes. Serafino needed to control that reactor. Its impact on the world’s energy resources—on the price of oil, on the balance of power of the entire
globe—would be immeasurable.”
“And he needed it delayed until Andalusia had made its bid for independence.”
She nodded, then shrugged. “I suppose so, yes. I don’t know why owning Andalusia is so important to him, but it is.”
“Catherine?”
She turned to face me. “Yes, Liam?”
“Did you kill Strickland?”
She smiled. “I would have done so quite happily, Liam, but I didn’t. No.”
“Who did?”
She looked away to her right, as though listening to some voice. After a moment, she said, “Serafino.” Then she gave a small laugh. “Not him. Serafino never does anything for himself. He had his baboons do it.”
I heard Sinead’s voice in my head. ‘We… They never kill if they don’t absolutely need to.’ I said, “Why?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps he’d become a liability.”
“Tell me what happened with Rupert.”
“Serafino arranged for her to meet Rupert and seduce him. What Rupert didn’t know was that she had also seduced his uncle.”
“It was her that persuaded him to leave all his stuff to the Hermandad.”
“Yes…partly.”
“So she was here?”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “She spent some time at the Abbey.”
“The Abbey of Thelema.”
“Yes, but she was mainly in London. That’s where she was most useful.”
“And Uncle Hugo didn’t object to her engagement to his nephew? That’s hard to swallow, Catherine.”
She gave a sad, wry smile. “By then he was spending most of his time here, at the abbey. The poor bastard was so out of it on mescal, salvia and ritual orgies that he didn’t know if he was coming or going. He had no idea.”
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