by Matthew Dunn
Safa smiled. “I like that. A story. And the information you gave me about her?”
De Guise rested his glass on the table. “She has taken great pains to conceal her real age. Too much makeup and hair that is colored are two of several indicators that betray that fact. But the hair is most telling. Though it has been dyed, the gray roots of her hair on the nape of her neck are visible. Either that means she has dyed her hair herself and has missed parts; or more likely she had it done at a salon and has yet to make an appointment to have it redyed. Perhaps she does not have the money to do so. The jewelry she’s wearing is old. Most of it looks inherited. A woman who is currently wealthy would wear at least one recently purchased item of jewelry. She’s drinking a glass of champagne. Strange to do that on her own. And her expression—she does not register the people around her. They mean nothing to her. She is not here to soak up the vibrant ambience of the bistro. Her thoughts are elsewhere. Most likely they are in a place of memories. You might think she looks sad. I think she looks bitter. I deduce she has lost something, and she commemorates that loss by coming here once a year.”
“Her husband. He used to bring her here.” Safa was starting to think faster. “He has died. Left her with little money. She is sad because she remembers him sitting opposite her at the table she’s now sitting at.”
“You are becoming a fine scholar.” De Guise wagged his finger. “But the story must make sense. Why the bitter expression and why the champagne?”
The combination of the two made no sense to Safa. Monsieur de Guise had previously told him that champagne was a drink that happy people drank to make themselves even happier.
“Think, boy.”
It came to Safa. “Divorce.”
De Guise smiled. “Superb. But who divorced who?”
“She divorced him. That’s why the champagne’s there. She’s celebrating.”
“Precisely. Yet, the bitter expression: What does that represent?”
Though he had no experience of being in a relationship, Safa dug deep and recalled the numerous Greek tragedies and other books that the monsieur had made him read. “It is regret. She regrets what she once had with the man she once loved. Or she never loved him and regrets that she married the wrong man.”
De Guise patted Safa on the shoulder. “Bravo, young man. My own opinion is that she did once love him. Why else make the effort to dress in refined clothes and come here? Perhaps this was their wedding anniversary, or this is the place where he proposed marriage to her. For the sake of our story, I’m going to add that she divorced her husband after she discovered that he’d squandered their money on gambling, or bad investments, or other women, or all of those things.”
Safa giggled. “The story may be completely wrong.”
“But it is more likely to be near the truth than otherwise. And without the story, what do we have?”
“Just a woman, sitting at a table.”
“That’s my boy, Safa.” De Guise pulled out a timepiece from the breast pocket of his waistcoat. “Sadly, our evening is nearly at a close. But we have just enough time for one final task. Imagine that one of the men in this room is a murderer. He is a general in the Israeli Defense Forces, and is personally responsible for ensuring that rivers entering Gaza from Israel are dry of water.”
Safa frowned.
“His actions, and the actions of the men under his command, have killed thousands of your compatriots, including your mother, father, and sister.”
Safa felt like he was in the monsieur’s study, in pitch dark save for one flashlight’s beam striking the fourth mirror. He was light-headed. His mind was outside of his body, and that body wanted to smash the mirror so that the light had nothing to reflect off.
“The man I’ve described is not in this room. But I want you to imagine he is, and identify him.”
Safa scrutinized the room. Men and women were still eating and drinking; most of them were talking, some laughing. All but one man seemed very unlikely to be murderers. Their expressions were too soft, their physiques did not suggest a life of soldiering, they seemed to have no cares in the world. But the man who looked different was one of the solitary diners. He had a strong physique and a serious expression yet one that displayed no signs of regret; he ate his meal carefully, cutting his meat into exact cubes. He was the general, the man who daily committed a holocaust.
“You see him?”
Safa nodded, and beads of sweat ran down his forehead.
“When confronted with a man like this, most people with your heritage would convince themselves to do nothing. They take the coward’s route, telling themselves any excuse they can think of to walk away. If I kill this man, they might think, he will be replaced by another, so what’s the point? Perhaps they may take a more holistic stand for inaction. I am a mere speck of dust, just the tiniest flake of skin drifting in the air, they reason. Amid the billions of people who reside on our planet, what difference can I make?”
Safa could hear his guardian’s words clearly, though he kept his eyes on the solitary diner.
“Such thoughts are those of evil people, men and women who are just as bad as the bad man they face, because inaction allows evil to spread and become pervasive. They forget that even a small flake of skin can nestle between a man’s teeth, rot them, and cause poisoned blood from his gums to course into his body and eat it away.”
De Guise looked at Safa’s hand. It was gripping the steak knife. His eyes were intense, and his face was now covered with perspiration as he continued to stare at the man who was eating alone. This was good.
“He is not that man, but he might as well be because everyone in this room—excluding you and me—lets him live while they gorge themselves on rich food. They don’t care about your suffering. They could not give a damn that your family starved to death. They are just as evil as the Israeli soldiers who patrol the Gaza border.”
Safa lifted the knife a few inches off his plate.
William de Guise placed his hand over Safa’s and gently pushed it back down. “Today’s lesson is complete. Tomorrow we will commence your English lessons. We have little time, but you’ve heard me speak the language a lot and you are a fast learner. You don’t need many words. Just enough for you to move through an English city. Or, more likely, an American one.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The twin boys were pushing their food around their plates, but neither of them were making an effort to eat their favorite meal of chicken, fries, and homegrown vegetables. Their faces were pink from crying, their eyes bloodshot and puffy. Katy Koenig knew their physical symptoms were due to grief and that her sons were otherwise healthy. Nevertheless, she decided she’d get them checked out by a doctor in the next day or two. If nothing else, it would give her a purpose in her otherwise dreamlike days.
Since Roger had died, her days would have been considerably worse were it not for the boys. With them in her life, she had to get out of bed in the mornings and do stuff. Because her nearest neighbors were miles away and her closest friends lived in other states, people didn’t pop by to check up on her. Without her kids, she’d probably waste away in bed.
“Come on, boys,” she said in a tone that she wanted to sound sympathetic, but came out weary and exasperated. “Eat your dinner.”
Billy cut through a carrot, his knife banging hard against the china plate. He was angry and made no attempt to lift the bite to his mouth.
Tom had positioned his vegetables in a circle, his fork hovering around and around above them. The action looked wrong, like that of an anguished soul who repeatedly rocks back and forth while cuddling himself.
“If you can manage three mouthfuls of your food, I’ll get you some ice cream.”
“No, thanks,” replied Billy.
Tom shook his head.
“It’s your favorite, strawberry.”
“Don’t want it.”
“Full up.” Billy looked across the room toward a picture of his dad in SEAL combat gear
. “Daddy should have been a farmer.”
“Yes.” Katy’s voice trembled. “Yes, he should have.”
Colonel Rowe had been studying the remote house and its surroundings through binoculars for hours. Nestled in a valley surrounded by hills, the dwelling seemed to him to be that of a man who needed a retreat from the sometimes savage outside world and the work that the owner had to do in it.
He was perched on the branch of a tree, just as he imagined his forefathers had done while on big-game hunts in Queen Victoria’s India. Though back then they’d have been dressed very differently. His shoes, two sizes too big for him, had blue plastic covers, and he wore rubber surgeons’ gloves that stretched to the elbows. Over his clothes he wore a head-to-toe white disposable paper jumpsuit—the type worn by police forensics teams and scientists entering contaminated zones. The house was about two hundred yards away and was quiet. But he knew it was occupied, because he’d seen the owner arrive home two hours ago. Then, it had been dusk. Now, the only source of light was a sickle moon.
It was Thales’s idea for Rowe to be here. No doubt de Guise knew exactly what he was doing, though Rowe took no pleasure from the task in hand. Nor did he dislike it. He was ambivalent. Having Cochrane actually in his sights would be a wholly different experience.
Katy told her boys to get out of their bath, and helped them get dry and into their pajamas. Normally, bath time was a raucous and chaotic affair, with her kids splashing each other, giggles of delight, water on the bathroom floor, bubbles brimming over the bath’s edge, and Roger or Katy trying not to break their necks as they skidded on the floor and yelled at their boys to clean up. But tonight, like this week’s preceding nights, the twins had bathed in silence, the bathwater was as flat as a tranquil lake, and the waterproof toys in the adjacent box were untouched. Bath time was no longer fun for them. Tonight, Katy wondered if her children even knew they’d been in a bath.
“You want me to tell you a story?” she asked them after she tucked them into their beds. She looked at the shelves containing their favorite novels and tried to establish which of the tales didn’t contain scenes of death. How odd, she realized, that in children’s books at least one person always seemed to die.
She was relieved when her sons shook their heads. She kissed them good night and stared at them for a moment, recalling how she would normally cherish these moments before returning downstairs to drink a cup of coffee or glass of wine with her husband. Everything was different now.
Rowe decided it was time to get this over with, and jumped down from the branch. Walking to the house, he withdrew a knife with a long, razor-sharp blade. It was designed to fillet huge sport fish such as tuna and marlin—strong and sharp enough to slice through big swaths of flesh, yet nimble enough to circumvent bones and ensure every ounce of meat was separated from the skeleton. He had respect for the blade, but in general had distaste for knives. Though he had used them many times, he preferred his beloved handcrafted rifles. In the right hands, they were so clean, so precise. But today de Guise had wanted a point to be made, so here Rowe was, gripping the weapon of Thales’s choice.
Katy cleared away the dishes from the dining room table, scraping uneaten food into the trash. Perhaps they should get a dog, she thought. The dog could eat the leftover scraps. There’d be no waste to make Katy feel guilty. Maybe a dog would also be a welcome distraction for Billy and Tom. She knew she was kidding herself. Dogs, other pets, anything similar, would simply be a Band-Aid stuck over a gaping wound. She and her boys had no choice other than to walk the path of grief, a hellish journey that no one could help them with and with nothing that could alleviate their misery. Her boys had youth on their side. They’d reach the other side. She didn’t know if she would. A lifetime of grief probably awaited her. Like widows of days gone by, she’d figuratively wear black until she was placed in a coffin.
As Rowe drew nearer to the house, he could hear a human voice. Perhaps it belonged to the owner who was speaking to someone on the phone, or maybe it was coming from a TV. He trod carefully as he reached the graveled driveway. A station wagon was parked here, the same one the homeowner had used two hours ago. He stuck the knife into each of the tires—it was as easy as piercing butter—and heard them rapidly deflate while he watched the house.
He walked around the house, ducking low whenever he reached windows, and carefully tried opening each door. Most of them were locked. One of them was not. That was a bonus, though he’d brought tools to force entry in case of need.
Very slowly, he turned the door handle and eased the door open inch by inch. He entered the house, paused to listen, and walked slowly down a carpeted hallway, making no sound. There was no human voice to be heard now, only the sound of running water and dishes banging against each other coming from a room at the end of the hallway. As he passed two other doorways, he glanced in them, saw no one, and continued.
Katy’s whole body felt like lead as she washed the dishes. The symptoms were real, and yet she knew they were a result of her brain going into meltdown. Why did the mind fail in times like these? It seemed to serve no purpose other than to tell the body that it might as well curl into a ball and die. She lowered her head, weeping over the hopelessness of her circumstances; the tips of her hair dipped into the frothy sink water.
She thrust her hands angrily into the water and shook the stack of dishes. These feelings had to stop. Grief was one thing; allowing her mind and body to give in to it and let her children down was another thing altogether. She had to be strong for them. They needed that. Tomorrow would be a new beginning. She’d cook them a hearty breakfast, and no one would leave the table until the plates were empty. Then she’d take them for a hike in the countryside. She’d talk openly to Tom and Billy about their father, tell them good stories about him, make Roger become real again, no longer let his memory be one of pain.
Roger had to be remembered for who he was—not as a form who’d transformed into a void but as a loving father and husband who could still guide his family through life.
Yes. That’s how it would be. For the first time since she’d learned of Roger’s death, she smiled, though a tear trickled down her cheek. Utter sorrow and renewed purpose would be symbiotic companions for a while, she decided. That was fine. But at least now her body no longer felt like a dead weight. She’d sleep well tonight. In the morning, Mrs. Koenig and her sons would hold hands and walk.
Rowe moved into the living room, adjacent to the small kitchen. From one of the armchairs, he grabbed a small cushion and walked fast into the kitchen.
Where he found a woman by the sink.
She had her back to him.
Her name was Katy Koenig.
Rowe thrust the cushion onto her mouth, pulled her back to him so she was unable to escape, pressed harder on the cushion to suppress her muffled cries, and thrust his knife into her lower back. Her body immediately went limp. Rowe held her upright and stabbed her in her belly before slicing her windpipe.
He let the dead body slump to the ground, stood motionless, listening in case there were any other noises in the house. He couldn’t hear anything, save a gentle wind rustling trees. After wiping the knife clean with the same towel Katy had been using to clean her dishes, he exited the kitchen and walked upstairs. All of the rooms were empty except for one that contained two sleeping boys.
He stood between the beds, looking at each boy. They were twins, perhaps seven or eight years old. Thales hadn’t told Rowe that his victim was a mother. That didn’t matter. The colonel had anticipated the possibility, given Katy Koenig’s age. What did matter was what he did next. He was deep in thought for a while, then decided that he would leave the boys unharmed. Thales had told him to kill the mother. Rowe had done that. He was perfectly within his rights not to deviate from that instruction.
After walking downstairs and stepping out of the door he’d used to enter the house, Rowe hesitated. He didn’t know how close the nearest neighbors were, though in his drive h
ere he hadn’t seen another house for miles around. The boys would probably sleep for another seven or eight hours. And when they came down for breakfast, they’d find their mother. Fully competent adults can freeze in such moments. Boys of the twins’ age would fall apart. They could die out here. He decided to make an anonymous 911 call when he was sufficiently far away, telling emergency services that he knew two boys who had been abandoned by an irresponsible mother.
TWENTY-SIX
I was on the verge of throwing my rental car’s GPS out of the window, because the woman’s voice kept telling me she was recalculating. Her complete and utter uselessness had come at the worst possible time, because I was inside West Virginia’s vast George Washington National Forest. Road signs were few and far between, and even though I’m a proficient map reader, a study of my map wasn’t helping because whoever had made it had omitted certain useful data such as road names and numbers and topographical features. Had I a proper hiking or military map with grid references, I would have stood a good chance of pinpointing where I was.
I decided to pull over on the side of a deserted road and turn the GPS off to give the confused thing a rest. Forests and hills were all around me. I opened my cell phone and withdrew the SIM card that was in my false name, Richard Oaks. From the concealed lining under my pants’ waistband, I extracted the SIM card that was registered in my real name and inserted it into the phone. After a few seconds, the cell started beeping with SMS’s welcoming me to Virginia’s roaming services, plus other crap. But there was one voice message from my neighbor David. His voice sounded wobbly as he asked me to give him a call. I checked my watch. It was evening London time, so hopefully he’d be home from work unless his mortuary had called him back out because fresh bodies had arrived.
He answered on the third ring. “Will, thanks for calling.”
“Everything okay? The major all right?”
David’s words were rushed as he answered, “Yes, yes. He’s fine. We’re feeding him. It’s . . .”