Blood Wine

by John Moss

  “Finish the damned McMuffin, I don’t want crumbs in here. We’re going to pay the Sebastiani family a social call. I’ve got a feeling there’s no such thing as a safe house. You were a guest in their family home, and I use the word guest advisedly. Pressing charges for abduction would not be a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’ve got lawyers, they’ve got lawyers for their lawyers. You could be hanging around New Jersey for the rest of your life. Remember, you’re not in your own jurisdiction.”

  “As I’m constantly reminded.”

  “You’d have to lay charges as a citizen, which you’re not. You’re a foreigner.”

  “So much for the world’s longest undefended border.”

  “New Jersey isn’t a border state. And it’s foreign territory, even for a New Yorker from Queens.”

  “Gotcha. Let’s go.”

  “Do you need to stop for clothes?”

  “Clothes?”

  “Clothes, do you want to change? You’re still wearing your clothes from dinner. Simple skirt, designer T-shirt, very nice, but very last night.”

  “Are you offering to buy? I don’t have any money … do I smell? I washed my underwear. I’m a bit scuffed up, but I’m not dirty, Captain Clancy.”

  “You smell just fine, Detective.”

  “I’d take a pair of new shoes,” she suggested, looking down at the garden mud on her designer sandals. As they drove she rubbed them clean with a couple of tissues. They looked almost new.

  When Clancy pulled through the open gates of the Sebastiani estate, they were surprised at the easy access. He parked close to the steps leading up to the massive front door. Miranda had not seen the house from this angle before, having emerged from her garden burrow around the back into relative darkness and slipped away over a wall into a neighbour’s yard before making her way to the street. The first car that had come along was a taxi, relieved to have a return fare at such an ungodly hour, the driver only a little disconcerted to be told she wanted to go to a police station, where he would be reimbursed, with tip, which he was.

  “Looks quiet,” Miranda said.

  “Looks can be deceiving. Remember, we’re just making a social call.”

  “And if we all pretend, then that’s all it is,” said Miranda. “Let’s do it.”

  There was a long delay after they heard the chimes through the door, then it opened and Carlo Sebastiani smiled broadly in greeting. He was wearing a loose- fitting silk kimono over his clothes.

  “Hey,” he said with forced bonhomie, “good to see you, good to see you. How are you? It’s been a long time.”

  “Carlo,” said Clancy, glancing sideways, curious to see how Sebastiani’s bravado would affect Miranda.

  “You’re a bastard,” said Miranda quietly.

  “Of course. Sorry, I’m busy, now.” Carlo was speaking in an unnaturally loud voice. The scar running down the side of his face was livid.

  “Is Elke here?”

  He turned and called into the house. “Linda, it’s Elizabeth, she wants to talk to you, she’s in a rush, she can’t come in.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Carlo?” His wife’s voice came to them from a long way off.

  “Linda,” he shouted. “Get the fuck out here!”

  There was no question things were wrong.

  Miranda said in a whisper, “Why Elizabeth?”

  “You’re a fucking Canadian, aren’t you? She’s the Queen.”

  “Oh,” said Miranda. “I didn’t make the connection. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. As he spoke, he loosened the belt of his kimono so that it draped open. Around his waist were sticks of dynamite in a webbing and an electronic device at the front.

  “Okay, don’t move,” said Clancy.

  “No shit,” said Carlo Sebastiani.

  “Remote detonator,” Miranda observed.

  “Yeah.” Then, in a loud voice, Carlo summoned his wife again, but she was already just behind him.

  “Now play this very carefully,” he said. “They’ll take us all out if they have to. They don’t want that. But they’ll do it. He will. There’s one of them in here. Now listen,” he said, doing up his robe, “in a minute I’m going to walk back into the living room. The guy there, he’s wired like the Fourth of July. Linda’s going to go with you. He’s not going to like it, but he’s got me, that’s what he wants.”

  “He wants you to speak louder or it’s fireworks,” said Linda. “He’s really pissed off he can’t hear. He can hardly see you, Carlo. Don’t mess up.”

  “No, baby, I’m not gonna mess up,” he said, then in a loud voice, he declared, “it’s good you dropped by. Take care, I’ll tell Tony you called in. I’ve gotta go now. We’re pretty busy.”

  “Is Tony in there?” Miranda whispered. “Where’s Elke?”

  “Tony’s with the blond, he’s gone for the day,” he responded so his captor could hear.

  “Is he with Elke?” said Miranda, projecting her voice.

  “Yeah, you know those two, they could be anywhere.”

  “No,” said Miranda in a whisper, “I don’t think I do.”

  “You take care then,” he said loudly. “Go on, get outta here.”

  Leaning forward, he whispered to Miranda, “The Chateau Mouton ’45, you liked it. It was good, right? It was a fake. You think about that.”

  Carlo bent down and kissed his wife, just brushing her lips with his own, then he pushed her out through the door. She tried to resist but Miranda and Clancy grabbed her by the arms and walked her down the flagstone steps to the car as the door shut with a dull thud behind them.

  Inside the car, with Linda in the back seat, the three of them sat for a moment in stunned silence. Linda seemed shaken, not at all the controlled and controlling executive wife of the night before.

  “What’s happening?” Clancy asked her.

  “Let’s roll,” said Miranda in a voice that did not seem quite her own, as if she were a character caught up in pulp fiction.

  “No, you can’t leave him,” said the other woman. “They’ll kill him.”

  “What do they want?” Clancy asked. “What’s it all about?”

  “He wants a meeting?”

  “Who?”

  “The man in there.”

  “Is it Mr. Savage?” Miranda asked.

  “Mr. Savage? No. I think he works for Savage. That’s who wants the meeting set up.”

  “Savage wants to meet with Carlo’s associates?” said Clancy.

  “The bosses,” said Linda. “He wants to meet with all the bosses.”

  “And you think Carlo’s going to cooperate.”

  “No. Carlo is a dead man,” said his wife.

  “How so? Won’t he —”

  “Don’t you see, the man knows I’ll call and warn them. That’s what he’s thinking right now.”

  “What Carlo is thinking?”

  “And the man, they both are.”

  “And will you?” Miranda asked, realizing that a warning to his friends would guarantee her husband’s execution.

  “Yes,” she said. “Carlo would want that.”

  “Where’s Tony?” asked Miranda. “Is he downstairs with Elke?”

  “Yes, I think so. He went down, came up to tell us you’d escaped — gone, I should say — and he went downstairs again to be with Elke. But he must have heard the man come in. He came back up. He came down the corridor, the man shot him. I think in the leg. He staggered backwards, we could hear him fall down the stairs. The man went down and came up again. Either Tony was dead and he didn’t find Elke, or Elke dragged Tony into the secure room and bolted it from the inside.”

  “They could have climbed out my rat hole,” said Miranda. Mole hole, she thought.

  “No, Tony was hit for sure. I saw him go down. They’re still in there. Please, we’ve got to do something.”

  “Like what?” said Clancy. Turning to Miranda, he asked, “Any sug
gestions?”

  “The longer we’re parked here in the open, the more dangerous it is for Carlo,” said Miranda. “The man is going to get spooked. Pull out of sight, then we call for reinforcements.”

  “I don’t know,” said Clancy as he started the car. “More troops and the guy knows we’re the enemy, for sure. Boom! He turns failure into modified success.”

  “And that won’t be pretty,” said Miranda. “But if we stay here much longer, he’s going to figure we’re the enemy anyway. I suggest a strategic retreat.”

  As Clancy shifted into drive, every pane of glass on the car suddenly crazed into shattered opacity, a split second before the tremendous thud that reverberated in a deafening explosion as the house surged into fire and flame, smashing them violently against the inside of the car as it lifted from the blast and skidded over onto its side.

  For an interminable instant, everything seemed quiet, as if the billowing smoke and the flames shooting through the broken windows and fissured walls of the house were images in a documentary film with the sound suppressed for dramatic effect. Like watching war on CNN with the volume turned off. The car rocked gently on its side. Miranda opened her eyes. She was dangling awkwardly, suspended by her seat belt and shoulder harness, hovering above Clancy, who was ominously still. She could hear a strangled moan like an animal dying coming from the rumpled shadows in the back seat.

  She snapped open the seat belt clasp with one hand, grasping the armrest of the door over her head, but she could not stop herself sliding down onto Clancy’s inert body.

  The car was not on fire, but they were close to the house. Once it burst completely into flames they would be roasted alive. She rolled sideways and reached into the back seat, feeling around, trying to orient the tumbled limbs and body of Linda Sebastiani into a coherent form. Her fingers found the woman’s face, and her fingertips slipped across her lips, touching her, feeling for a response.

  “Linda, Linda?”

  There was no answer. She could feel movement beneath her. She looked down and could see Clancy’s eyes open. He was looking straight upwards, Miranda was standing, scrunched over him. He was staring up her skirt.

  She remembered what Morgan once said about hoping on his deathbed the hormones were stirring enough to appreciate the femaleness of his nurses.

  As she shifted about, trying to help Clancy, the lines of the schoolyard rhyme pounded through her mind, the lines Morgan had declaimed inside the wine vat with Elke climbing over his face.

  As she struggled to extricate Clancy from between her legs, she kicked off her sandals and reached down to check for breaks in his body, protruding bones or rips in his flesh, knowing there was not the option to wait for help, that she had to try moving him, removing them both from the car even if it meant risking spinal cord injury.

  Neither of the other two spoke. Miranda changed tactics. She hoisted herself upwards, stripped off her T-shirt, wrapped it around her arm, and jammed her shielded elbow upwards, breaking through the shattered window sagging above her. She struggled back into her T-shirt, aware in such a confined space of how absurd was her impulse to modesty.

  She clambered out and was shifting herself around to reach back down for Clancy, who seemed mobile, although he had yet to utter a sound. The car rocked as she moved. Again, shifting tactics, she slid down to the ground. Putting her shoulder to the chassis, she set the car rocking back and forth until gravity yielded and it rolled slowly over onto its back.

  It was fairly easy, then, to sit back on the ground and kick out the remaining glass that was hanging in place like cheap plastic. She dragged out Clancy, and together they reached in and withdrew Linda through the back window opening. She was still whimpering in shock as the three of them struggled down the driveway, away from the house that was roaring now like a blast-furnace inferno, with a cloud of black smoke spiralling high into the blue of the morning sky.

  At a safe distance they settled onto the ground beside the drive. Sirens wailed in the distance, reminding them they were not the last people left in the world.

  Clancy still said nothing. But he seemed fully aware of what was happening and tried to comfort Linda, whose agonized cries seemed to be not from the pain of the explosion itself but from knowing her husband’s body had been shredded and scattered with the blast.

  As the sirens closed in, Miranda suddenly remembered Elke and Tony. She started running up the drive, back toward the raging fire, the pavement tearing at her bare feet — she did not remember when she lost her sandals; they must be in the car, which was now engulfed in flames.

  She raced around to the back. The walls showed gaping cracks and smoke billowed through, but no flames. A trickle of smoke rose from the hole in the garden earth where she had crawled out.

  She lay down on her stomach and called into the darkness.

  There was no answer.

  She listened for the sirens, trying to judge how far away they were. Too far.

  Looking frantically around her, as if trying to embed the bright blue of the sky in her mind, Miranda swung about and slid feet first down into the hole, and darkness closed around her.

  At least she knew the room. As her eyes adjusted to the murky gloom she could see a body on the bed, two bodies. She shook the one closest to her. It was Elke.

  Miranda tried to lift her, but she was a dead weight.

  She felt for a pulse at her neck. She was alive. She rolled her over part way, pressed her lips to her mouth, and exhaled, feeling the other woman’s lungs expand, fall, expand.

  Elke choked. “Miranda?” she murmured.

  “Get up, Elke, get up. The house is on fire.”

  “Miranda, I can’t.”

  “What?”

  “I’m handcuffed.”

  “You’re what?

  “Tony, he’s dead.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “He bled to death.”

  “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

  “He handcuffed us together.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Miranda. Something crashed over their heads. A fissure opened in the ceiling and molten light dazzled from the fire upstairs. The heat surrounding them was becoming overwhelming, and the air was depleted of oxygen as it was sucked up into the flames and out through the burrow into the outside.

  “‘Get me out, or we die together,’ he told me. But I couldn’t move him, Miranda, and I think he’s dead.”

  Miranda felt for Tony’s carotid artery. A scrambled image of herself in bed with a corpse flashed through her mind. There was a pulse.

  “The bastard’s alive. What did he do with the key?”

  “I don’t know!” Elke said frantically. “Miranda, you go. Get out of here. Go, go.”

  Miranda wheeled away, leaving Elke shaking beside Tony on the bed. Miranda raced into the bathroom, felt in the darkness for a towel, wrapped it around her arm, and in a familiar gesture smashed the mirror with her elbow. She grasped a clam-sized shard of glass in the towel. Back in the bedroom, she felt around through the murky light, choking as she moved, and found the steel bar.

  Back beside Elke, she spoke, then slapped Elke on the face until the other woman responded. Then she dragged her around onto the floor so that Elke screamed from the pain as the steel of the cuffs embedded in her wrist. With Elke’s arm outstretched and Tony’s arm draped across the bed, Miranda found a ragged slab of cement and jammed it under between his elbow and wrist. She braced her legs firmly as the fiery light danced from the overhead veins of flame, and she brought down the steel bar against Tony’s arm with all the force she could muster.

  Elke screamed as Tony’s arm quivered in spasm. Miranda swung again and again until she had shattered the bones in his forearm. It would have been more efficient at the wrist, but then she would have smashed Elke’s wrist as well. She picked up the shard of glass with the towel wrapped across one edge to protect her hand, and she carved into the flesh of his arm, sawing through bone fragments and sin
ews.

  Suddenly, she felt Elke fall away. She was free. Miranda hauled her to her feet, Tony’s battered arm still hanging from her wrist.

  There were voices at the hole in the wall.

  “I’m coming down,” a man’s voice shouted into the thick darkness.

  “Stay there,” Miranda screamed at him. “I’m passing her up. Grab hold, grab her.”

  Miranda got her arms under Elke, around her thighs, and heaved. The bloodied stump of Tony’s severed arm slapped against Miranda’s face as Elke’s weight pulled away and she was drawn out through the hole.

  “There’s another one,” Miranda shouted.

  “Get out of there, lady,” a fireman ordered in a shrill but resounding voice.

  “Yeah, yeah, ” she mumbled to herself as she crossed back over to Tony’s inert body. “Yeah, yeah, lady, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone.”

  Miranda hauled on Tony, who she imagined was still alive.

  A fireman in breathing gear appeared beside her. He held out his mask to give her a breath. She wrenched it away.

  “I told you not to come in,” she screamed into his face.

  “Lady, it’s okay.” He forced a mask at her again and she took in a deep breath of pure oxygen, and another, and more as he walked her through the rubble to the hole.

  “Now, you stay here,” he shouted at her. “Don’t move a frickin’ muscle, lady. We don’t want anyone else down here, having to haul us both out, we don’t want to die.”

  Miranda shuddered, suddenly exhausted.

  “Stay!” he yelled, but with affection, like giving an order to a unruly and beloved old dog. “You! Stay!”

  In no time he was back with Tony and had him secured in a harness. He called up and Tony was hauled out through the burrow, momentarily eliminating all light from the room except the dazzle of flames licking down from upstairs.

  Then Miranda was pulled out, and the fireman followed.

  Away from the house, she leaned against the fireman like they were spent lovers.

  “You’re gonna be all right, lady,” he said through a wheezing cough.