by Nina Berry
But Devin had the church door open in two seconds, ushering her inside to slightly warmer air. The near-total blackness eased as her eyes adjusted to a faint light coming down a set of steep stone stairs. They were at the base of the bell tower.
“How did you get in here so quickly?” Pagan whispered as Devin shut the outer door and led her to another one off to the side.
“My father and I stole some of our best art from churches,” he said, teeth flashing in the dimness. His father had been a top art thief and had trained the youthful Devin to be his accomplice. “I got pretty good with their locks.”
Pagan took Devin’s fingers in hers again as they tiptoed through an empty, wood-paneled office, down a few steps and through an outer door.
The night air was chilly. Fog blurred the tall stone edifices, and for a moment Pagan thought they’d exited onto a narrow city street.
An angel’s wing atop a dome came into focus, and a granite skull leered at her from a lintel. Swirls of vapor whorled past statues shrouded in marble veils. Light from the city bled through the fog enough to see perhaps thirty feet in any direction, but there were no spotlights or safety lights splashed up against the walls, embellished with gargoyles, bats and tearful babies. Crosses decorated plaques and lay clutched in stone hands laid peacefully over unmoving chests.
They were in a different kind of city now. The city of the dead.
Pagan edged closer to Devin as he squinted down a narrow lane between the tombs. “Fancy,” she said, an unexpected tremor in her voice. “It’s like Beverly Hills for the afterlife.”
Devin turned his dark head toward her, smirking. “Are you actually scared?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, and it came out perfectly insouciant, scornful. But his smile widened. She had a tough time fooling him.
“You’ve faced down armed troops, the head of the East German secret police and gangs of reform school girls,” he said. “I didn’t think anything could scare you.”
“The last time I was in a cemetery,” she said, “was for Daddy and Ava’s funeral.”
His eyes were clear, understanding. “They’re not here.”
“But they are,” she said. “They’re with me. Always.”
His smile softened. “That’s why you don’t need to be afraid.”
She tried to smile back, but she could never do enough to make up for what she’d done to her father and sister. It wasn’t possible. She wasn’t sure what to think about heaven and all that, but if it existed, she sure wasn’t headed there.
Devin moved in close and put his arm around her waist, warm and secure. “Well, I love cemeteries,” he said. “They’re a history lesson and a reminder to enjoy life now all in one. Come with me, Pagan Jones. I’ll keep the ghosts at bay.”
She hesitated. The door behind them vibrated with a whomphing sound, as if a portal beyond it had closed.
Devin’s arm tightened. Their pursuer was near.
That should have frightened her more than the cemetery. Instead, it and Devin’s nearness jolted away her fear and replaced it with exhilaration. She wrapped her arm around him and they ran side by side deeper into the misty graveyard.
The vaults rose high on either side of them, engraved with every sort of sorrowful face and weeping figure. As they ran, four-legged forms with fluffy tails scattered before them, meowing.
She and Devin were like the cemetery cats. There was no place for them in the real world, so they found a dark place full of ghosts where they fit right in.
“We need him to know where we are, at least for the moment...” Devin said under his breath. “Run loudly!”
They hammered their heels on the flagstones, angling down a wide avenue lined with two-story mausoleums punctured by narrow gated doorways. They ran noisily past thoughtful Greek gods and vine-covered women clutching sleepy children.
Behind them ran their shadow.
As they came upon a nexus of wide thoroughfares, Devin slowed and softened his footfalls. Pagan did likewise. He drew her into a narrow doorway carved to look like sagging drapery.
They had entered a musty crypt. The darkness coated everything, thick as mud. It struck her that as old as many of the monuments looked, this was still a place where people buried their dead.
Devin put one finger to his lips and pressed her shoulders back into a niche beside the door before taking up a position on the other side of it. It was so dark in here, all she could see of him was the glint in his eyes.
Outside, the fog puffed past. The man following them should walk past them any second now. Pagan needed to get a good look at him, if she was ever to figure out how she knew him.
Deep inside the tomb, something scraped, like bones rasping over stone.
And something—the same thing?—was thrumming. A distant murmur, moving closer, coming at her from the sooty void of the sepulchre.
Pagan froze. There might be more than dusty bones inside this tomb. There might be a fresh body, with plenty of flesh on it, beginning to rot.
Something brushed her hand.
She shot two feet into the air and banged her head on the arch above. Her skull thunked loudly on the stone.
She somehow kept herself from crying out, eyes squinched in pain, rubbing the top of her head with one hand. She looked down to see a large gray tabby, white whiskers fanned wide, a loud purr humming in its throat.
The cat rubbed its cheek against her hand again, and she stroked the rough fur, pain morphing into silent laughter.
“You okay?”
Devin had abandoned his post on the other side of the doorway to check on her.
“The ghosts have found me,” she whispered, pointing at the cat.
“So I see.” Devin stroked the cat’s head and moved in beside her. The cat gave one last trill and wandered back into the dusk of the tomb, which suddenly was a lot less scary.
Light as a pair of dice falling onto felt, footsteps padded on the walk outside.
Too loud to be a cat. Too quiet to be a caretaker.
Pagan edged her eye around the lintel of the tomb entrance, hoping no light would glint off her white-blond hair. The fog was opaque as a blanket, but after a moment it yielded a human figure.
He was tall and broad shouldered, wearing a gray trench coat and fedora. He wasn’t walking toward them, but at an angle that showed only his back and the side of his head. Pagan leaned out farther. Beside her, Devin did the same, arm around her shoulders.
A terrible, urgent feeling of déjà vu pitched in her gut. She’d seen this man before. They way he turned his head, the angle of his shoulders, the firm, light walk...she knew them all. Somehow.
He paused with his back still toward them, head down. He was listening. For them.
Pagan realized she was holding her breath and forced herself to exhale slowly, silently. The man in gray held still, listening for another moment, and then glided forward. The fog swallowed him.
Pagan shook her head at Devin. She still hadn’t seen the man’s face. Damn it! She stepped out of the tomb, padding on her sneakers. When Devin didn’t move with her, she stopped, glaring at him.
“You sure?” he said in a noncarrying tone. “Your ankle...”
“Is fine,” she said. “Come on!”
His smile lit up something inside her chest. “Listen,” he said.
Faint footsteps clicked at an angle she hadn’t expected. She held her hand out to Devin, and he took it. This time he followed. They ran on tiptoes, nearly blind in the fog, toward the sound.
Tomb upon tomb flitted past. Once Pagan glimpsed the man’s fedora, but then the vapor eddied around him, and he vanished. Within moments, she was lost. She had a vague feeling they were going in circles, as if the man in gray were a shark, circling as he looked for his prey. He didn’t yet seem
to know that the roles had been reversed.
Until Pagan nearly cannoned into a small statue of a dog and inhaled a gasp loud enough to bounce off the nearby stone gazebo festooned with cherubs.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered.
The footsteps had stopped.
Devin paused, seeming to hover in a murky batch of fog. “No, it’s perfect actually,” he said. “But which way...”
The footsteps took off at a run, away from them.
“That way!” Pagan said, and they sprinted after.
They dashed between crucifixes and urns. Cats scattered through the fog before them. They bumped into the outer wall, too high and smooth to be easily scaled, and pelted alongside it, heading back toward the church.
“It’s the only way out,” Devin said. “If the doors have been relocked, it might stop him long enough.”
But the doors into and out of Nuestra Señora del Pilar stood open. Pagan and Devin left them that way as they snaked through the bell tower and back out the front gate. The mist had thinned enough to see the lone figure of a man dashing over the groomed lawns, heading north.
Pagan didn’t hesitate. How much more fun it was to be the pursuer than the pursued. Together she and Devin negotiated the fog, dodging trees and hopping small fences set up around flower beds, swooping around strolling couples, startling squirrels.
It was a fine summer night for a late supper in Buenos Aires. A perfect time for a nice Malbec with dinner and perhaps some dancing. Several dozen couples were doing exactly that as Pagan and Devin streamed past them in a picturesque plaza while an orquestra tipica ground out a sultry tango. It was exactly the sort of evening she’d had with Nicky back when she was drinking.
Now she was sober and tracking down a spy. Things had changed.
“We’re dancing a different sort of dance,” Devin said breathlessly.
Pagan gave a quick laugh. “With a much faster pace!”
The fog thickened again on the far side of the plaza, and they had to slow down as they approached a wide road. Pagan’s chest heaved as she scanned up and down. Which way could he have gone?
“Hold your breath for two seconds when I say go,” Devin said. “And listen.”
“Over the cars?” Pagan said. There weren’t many engines rumbling up and down the avenue, but there was at least one every few seconds.
“Worth a try,” he said. “Ready?” Off her nod, he drew a very deep breath. “One, two, three—go.”
Pagan sucked in a last bit of air and held it, straining to hear something, anything, over the accordion music in the distance and the crackle of tires on pavement. She wiped impatiently at a trickle of sweat running down her temple.
A faint breeze shook the leaves, twirling the fog around like nebulous ribbons. A taxi growled by. As it drew away, familiar, barely audible treads ricocheted over the pavement.
Devin’s head turned toward it the same moment hers did.
She released all her breath in a whoosh. “Across the street!”
He grabbed her hand, hesitated to let a truck rattle past, and they galloped across, earning a blared horn from a speeding sedan as it swerved around them.
Pagan waved at the driver and leaped up onto the sidewalk. More greenery here, lit with red, yellow and green lights bleeding through the murk from somewhere nearby. Muted carnival music floated over their heads.
“Italpark,” Devin said. “He’s gone into Italpark.”
Before Pagan could ask what he meant, the mist parted to reveal the entrance to an amusement park lit by red and yellow arches of neon light with huge letters spelling out Italpark in loopy script above. Flying saucer–shaped bulbs of glowing red and blue decorated the gates, like friendly invaders from Mars. Beyond, towering loops of metal track and rumbling cars half full of screaming people announced a large roller coaster. Families with petulant children were exiting.
Only one person was entering. A tall man in a gray trench coat.
Devin was already at the ticket booth, shoving money at the weary woman inside, convincing her in excellent Spanish that they didn’t mind if the park was closing in less than thirty minutes, and perhaps he could offer her a little something extra as a thank-you?
The woman perked up and seconds later they were pushing through the turnstile into the park against a tide of sticky, exhausted children and their sunburned parents.
“He’s trying to lose us here,” Devin said, craning his neck to see over the heads of the departing crowds. “Not a bad plan.”
“Except he’s the only one heading into the park instead of out,” Pagan said, pointing at the lone gray figure moving against the tide of brightly dressed park-goers.
“Not the only one!”
They wove past strollers and jumped over dropped ice-cream cones. One girl’s eyes lit up with recognition when she saw Pagan, and she began to say something, to point...but then Pagan had flown past her.
The man in gray looked over his shoulder at them. It was too foggy, and he was too far away, for Pagan to distinguish his features, but the turn of his head, the posture of his body, gave her another jolt of unnamed recognition.
“So close,” she said, and darted forward.
“Pagan, wait!”
Devin ran to catch up as she zoomed around a ride featuring a large octopus, its arms spinning cups full of screaming kids. She was in time to see the man in gray leap the short line in front of the bumper cars. Pagan lost sight of him as he ran across the interior of the ride, ignoring the angry shouts of the operator.
“You go around,” Devin said, pushing her to the right. “I’ll go left.”
Pagan pushed him back. “You go left. I’m going straight.”
Before he could catch her, she wormed past two young men smoking in line, leaped over the low railing and was running across the hard cement of the ride’s floor.
A bumper car screeched past her, showering sparks from the pole scraping along the ceiling above. A very confused girl stared and screamed, heading right for Pagan, her hands frozen on the wheel. Pagan dodged the collision and stepped up on the hood of a young boy’s car jammed against two others so she could vault over the far railing.
A haunted house ride to her left. Dumbo flying cars to her right, and a line of brightly colored gaming stalls straight ahead.
But the man in gray was nowhere to be seen.
A woman screamed, and the yelling of the bumper car operator increased markedly in volume as Devin leaped over the railing to land at her side. “With any luck, we’ll all be arrested together,” he said.
“I don’t see him,” she said. “Should we split up and look?”
His eyes narrowed with calculation. “All right. I’ll find you again in two minutes. Where do you want to look?”
He was asking her instead of telling. He learned fast. “I’ll go straight ahead, into the games. See you in a second.”
She was off before he could say another word. The brief glimpses she’d already had of the man had galvanized her. She had to see his face, remember his name, know she wasn’t crazy.
The game booths were like ones she’d seen at parks and carnivals at home: throw the ball in the basket, shoot the gun at the moving target, race your miniature camel and jockey. Only the cartoons painted on the walls and counters were unfamiliar; the signs in Spanish and the brightly colored stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling were different enough to let her know she wasn’t at the LA County Fair.
There weren’t many people left playing, which made it easier to see that the man in gray wasn’t one of the boys firing water pistols at the clown’s nose, and he wasn’t near the mother helping her crying daughter get cotton candy out of her hair.
Things were pinging, dinging and buzzing at lazy intervals, and several booths were closing their shutters. Pagan
slowed and began checking the narrow spaces between stalls, making sure her man wasn’t using the park’s back alleys. She hunkered down to pull up a muddy cloth skirt ringing the bottom of a cubicle to see if he was crouching under there. But she found only half a moldering sandwich and the still-smiling decapitated head of a pink teddy bear.
She stood up, wiping her hands on her pants, and found him, his back to her, of course, inside a telephone booth.
Using the line of stalls as partial cover, she treaded closer. Don’t get too excited now. It could be some other man in a gray trench coat.
But it was him. She’d know the line of those shoulders anywhere now. He was on the phone, glancing around him. His jaw moved as he spoke, but that’s all she could see. She needed a better angle.
There weren’t many people left in this area. A man in khaki shorts was examining the rubber duckies across the way, and a family was arguing as they walked together with the painful slowness of people who have done nothing but amble in circles for hours.
Pagan darted across the dusty walk between the line of games and weaseled her way in behind the family. The mother was rather wide, and the father rather tall, with three teenagers slumping along beside them. So Pagan pushed in as close as she could, matching their drowsy pace as she got closer to the phone booth.
The man in gray was hanging up the phone. Pagan allowed the family to move away as she focused on his face. He wiped his hand across his upper lip and tipped his hat back, looking away from her, to the left.
Any second now...
Something overhead creaked ominously. She looked up. The metal-framed canvas awning above her swayed.
A winch creaked. Pagan spun to see the man in the khaki shorts releasing a cable holding up the awning. It swung at her head, hard.
She threw herself at the ground. The edge grazed the slightly teased top of her hair and slammed into the wooden frame of the stall beside her. She stared at it for a second, disbelieving. If it had hit her, she’d be out cold. Or dead.
She twisted around to stare at the man in khaki shorts. He was two steps away, a shovel in both hands raised to strike her.