Run Jane Run

by Maureen Tan

  “What happened then, Jane?”

  His voice was quiet. He was pretending to be nice. But I knew he was angry. Because it was my fault. If I had locked the car door—

  I laced my fingers together, knuckles out, fingers between my palms. Right pinkie, left pinkie. Right ring finger, left ring finger. Right bigman, left bigman. Right pointer, left pointer. Just like in a nursery rhyme Papa had taught me.

  “I asked you a question. Please answer it.”

  I lifted my hands so that they were in front of my nose, stared at my thumbs. Coral pink thumb nails, side by side, pointed upward. I’d painted my fingernails with Mama’s favorite nail polish. She’d laughed when I showed her that we matched.

  “Jane!”

  I kept my hands in front of my face, touched my index fingers together so that they pointed upward, too.

  “Here is the church. Here is the steeple.”

  I spread my thumbs wide.

  “Open the doors.”

  I flipped my hands outward, away from my body, palms upward, fingers stiff.

  “Shoot all the people.”

  Mama and Papa and Stavros. If I thought about them too hard, I would cry. If I thought about them too hard, I would remember.

  I didn’t want to remember.

  Mr. Bennet’s chair scraped loudly as he pushed himself away from the table. He stood, stalked to the other side of the room, stopped in front of the big, wide mirror. He looked at his reflection, then shook his head, frowned, turned his back on the mirror. He dug in his pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes. Lit one.

  “The man in the mask pointed his gun at you, too, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Bennet took a long drag, blew a stream of smoke toward the toes of his brown wing-tip shoes. Mama said cigarettes were bad. Stavros smoked when she wasn’t looking.

  “What did he say?”

  “We leave this life at the whim of Atropos.”

  Mr. Bennet’s chin jerked upward as his eyes focused on me. He took a step, hesitated. His voice was excited.

  “The man in the mask said Atropos ordered the hit?”

  “No. Stavros said it. I told him cigarettes could make him die. He laughed and told me about the Parcae.” I said the word carefully, as Stavros had taught me.

  Mr. Bennet still looked confused.

  “The Fates,” I said patiently. “Clotho holds the wool. Lachesis spins the thread of life. Atropos cuts it.”

  Mr. Bennet’s face cleared. His shoulders drooped.

  “Very good, Jane. Now tell me what the man in the mask said when he pointed the gun at you.”

  I pursed my lips, pitched my voice low. The English accent was familiar, easy to imitate.

  “Sorry, love. You weren’t supposed to be here.”

  “Why didn’t he shoot you?”

  Mr. Bennet said the words slowly, softly.

  My head hurt and my stomach ached, but I thought about it hard.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mr. Bennet blew on the tip of his cigarette until it glowed red. Then he put it back between his lips and looked at me again.

  “When the car caught fire, there must have been smoke. Thick, dark smoke. Did it smell bad? Did you cough very hard?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did you see the car explode, Jane? Or were you already running away? Perhaps you heard only the noise? Did it hurt your ears?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  A tear tickled my cheek. I wiped it away with the back of my hand. Another tear. I wiped it away, too. I was too big to cry.

  Mr. Bennet took another drag on his cigarette, sighed deeply as he exhaled. When he spoke, he seemed to be talking to himself. He sounded tired. Very, very tired.

  “The child is traumatized, Mac. Give her time. Perhaps then—”

  “Intolerable!”

  The shout came from the other side of the mirror.

  I heard noisy footsteps, and the door to the interrogation room was flung open. A man with reddish-blond hair and a pencil-thin mustache burst in, rushed toward the table. A few steps behind him was another man, tall, with very short hair.

  The man with the mustache grabbed the front of my dress, pulled me from the chair, lifted me until my face was level with his.

  I stared into his eyes. They were yellow. Bright. Angry.

  “You were there. Their blood was all over you!”

  He kept shaking me.

  “Your mama. Your papa. Dead. And you. Here. Alive. You must have seen something.”

  The tall man was shouting.

  “William! Put the child down! Put her down, I say!”

  Sir William brought my face close to his.

  “Remember, damn you.”

  His hissing voice was almost a whisper.

  He let me go.

  I scrambled under the table, hid between the legs of the tucked-in chairs.

  “Sod that bloody temper of yours, William. You’ve terrified her.”

  The tall man knelt down near the end of the table, ducked his head to peer in at me.

  “Hello, Janie. My name is Mac. I knew your mama and papa. And I know your grandpa, too. He’s an old friend.”

  His voice was nice. His face was wrinkled but not really old. His eyes were bright blue. He held out his hand, smiled a thin, crooked smile.

  “Come out of there, lass. I’ll keep you safe.”

  A rustling noise made me look over my shoulder.

  Sir William was on his hands and knees, reaching for me. He grabbed my ankle.

  “Got the little bugger!”

  “No! Mama! Papa! Make him go away!”

  I kicked his hand.

  He caught my other foot, dragged me from beneath the table.

  I couldn’t get away.

  I covered my face with my arms, screwed my eyes shut.

  Inside my head, I screamed the words that kept me safe.

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

  Around me, the room was silent.

  * * *

  The drug left my system, sapping my remaining strength as effectively as it had sapped my will. Memory remained vivid. For a time, I lay against my pillows, barely moving, blindly staring at the ceiling.

  Not for long.

  Moving from anguish to anger was easy, really. Similar transformations took place daily, often creating frontpage news. Love turned to hate. Guilt to aggression. Sorrow to rage. I had been trained to consciously manipulate those feelings. In myself and others.

  Anger brought insight.

  I turned my head, looked at Mac. He was back in one of the bedside chairs, smoking his pipe, reading a weekold edition of the London Times by lamplight. We were alone. After apologizing for his boorish behavior of three decades earlier, Sir William had left for London.

  “Why?” I said.

  The word was barely audible and greeted with silence.

  I repeated the question, volume unimproved.

  Mac looked up from his paper, spoke around the stem of his pipe.

  “Later. Sleep first. You’re exhausted.”

  “Now.”

  How could so much fury carry so little volume?

  “Very well.”

  Mac moved his pipe to the ashtray on the table, rested his arms along the overstuffed arms of the chair. Brown age spots stained the pale skin on the backs of his wrists and hands.

  “During debriefing, the medic repeated the business about Hugh killing your parents. John didn’t mention it. It’s unlike him to filter information, but perhaps he felt he was protecting your integrity. Which proves again how dangerous it is for field operatives to form attachments.

  “In any event, I realized that last night’s operation had somehow touched memories from almost thirty years ago. Sooner or later, you’d realize that it was not Hugh but William you remembered. I decided it was in the organization’s best interest to bring you face-to-face with h
im, give you a little guidance, show you what actually happened.”

  “Guidance?” I lifted a fingertip in the direction of the IV. “Bastard.”

  Mac stiffened his back, lifted his chin. He stared at me, lips pursed, frowning, clearly offended.

  “I have never set out to do you harm, Jane.”

  Body language signaled that his declaration was spontaneous, heartfelt. He leaned toward me, shoulders shifting toward his spine, fingers splaying slightly in my direction. As he spoke, he lifted his eyebrows, moved his head fractionally—left, right, left.

  Subtle stuff.

  I lifted my left hand a half inch off the mattress, kept the palm turned toward me, ignored the tug of the IV needle as I raised my middle finger. My declaration was also spontaneous and heartfelt. Unlike Mac’s, it was honest.

  He got the message, retreated to his pipe. He stabbed at the burned tobacco with a pipe nail, tapped out the contents of the bowl, restuffed it with fresh tobacco. He took his time. When he looked at me again, his jaw was relaxed, his voice conciliatory.

  “I’ve regretted that day for a long time. The situation just, well, went out of control. But try to understand our frustration. The only witness to a triple homicide was a little girl with no memory of the incident. And the drugs we had then . . .”

  Mac’s eyes darted to the bag of saline solution hanging from the IV stand. He cleared his throat, took a drag on his pipe, continued talking.

  “Suffice to say, one couldn’t use such drugs on a child. We hoped that, under questioning, you’d give us something. Instead, we compounded your trauma. When William pulled you from under that table . . . I carried you to the infirmary, Jane. You lay in my arms, clammy and unresponsive. I was afraid that your mind . . . But within a few hours, you’d snapped out of it and seemed quite normal. Except that your memory loss had extended to include much of the interrogation, too.”

  “You didn’t hesitate to use drugs today. Why not ask what happened the day my parents were killed?”

  “Because anything you remembered would be irrelevant.”

  He lifted a hand to stop my objection and continued speaking.

  “Not to you, perhaps. But certainly to anyone else. I’m sorry, but assuming you saw anything, how would we pursue it? The incident is decades in the past. It took place on foreign soil. And accusations based solely on recovered memory are rarely taken seriously. Either here or in Greece.”

  I didn’t like it, but he made sense. That left only one reason for today’s session. Anger flared again.

  “You dragged me through hell to protect Sir William?”

  Mac nodded.

  “And you. I feared you would seek revenge unless you were convinced of his innocence. And I can’t have that, Jane. Not twice. This time, I would have been compelled to protect an important ally.”

  I should have been shocked that he would speak so casually of ordering my death. I wasn’t. It was self-deception to believe that anything more than duty drove our relationship. And, in fact, I felt more betrayed by his use of drugs than by his willingness to kill me.

  “Why not just tell me he was innocent?”

  He stared down at his pipe, puffed out his cheeks and lips as he exhaled, then lifted his eyes to mine.

  “Would you have believed me, Jane?”

  He already knew the answer.

  I replied anyway, anger gone, my regret mirroring his.

  “No, I wouldn’t have. You taught me better than that.”

  12

  For two days, I tossed and turned, shivered and perspired.

  Two days of infection and fever, of drug reaction.

  Two days. Flashbacks assaulted reality. Nightmares fragmented the boundary between waking and sleeping. Hands crept from beneath the bed, grabbed my ankles. Alex held me, kept me safe. Red gelatin cooled my throat. Kitty-mou slept on my pillow. John’s voice. Brian’s gentle touch. Lovely Lady Jane. Sips of warm soup. Mac calling my name. Twin coffins. Bloody bodies. You weren’t supposed to be here. Greek curses. Clawing branches. Yellow eyes. Yellow eyes. Yellow eyes.

  Then the fever broke, left me weak, aching. And lucid.

  I ate.

  I slept.

  I rested.

  I recovered.

  A few days later, I sat on the edge of my bed, fully dressed, my IV removed only because I’d threatened to remove it myself. My head throbbed an interesting counterpoint to my throbbing arm.

  I was leaving. Against doctor’s orders, which was easy. More difficult to get beyond the electric fence topped by razor wire and the armed guards who patrolled the perimeter. Almost impossible to arrange transportation from the remote location. I needed a car and, for safety’s sake, a driver.

  Bottom line, I needed Mac’s permission to leave.

  I lifted the phone, dialed his number, got Miss Marston. I said good morning and asked for Mac. Please.

  She was cool, polite, and clearly had no intention of letting him know I was on the phone.

  “I’m sorry. He’s reading the mail. I’ll let him know you called and have him ring you back when it’s convenient.”

  I wasn’t waiting. I gave up on civility and simply pulled rank, rattling off a formula that assured immediate access. Day or night.

  “Now,” I added. “Or it’ll be your job.”

  A click, a pause, and then Mac was on the line.

  “Hello, Jane. How are you?”

  “Well enough to leave here.”

  “I think you’re being premature. I just talked with Dr. Bowers. She recommended against releasing you. And you know that it’s always inadvisable for operatives to leave before they’re fully fit. I’d suggest you spend some time using the facilities.”

  The clinic housed a full gym, a swimming pool, and a shooting range. And even midwinter drizzle failed to diminish the beauty of its grounds—walking paths, park benches, manicured lawns and low hedgerows. But I still felt more an inmate than a patient.

  I shook my head. Pointless, because Mac couldn’t see me. Foolish, because it worsened my headache.

  “I’m fit enough to return to my flat,” I said. “I doubt that any of my neighbors will attack me. And I promise to stay out of the pubs. Please, Mac. Don’t force me to break out of here and hitchhike back to London.”

  * * *

  I didn’t have to thumb a ride.

  I was home by mid-afternoon and immediately noticed two things.

  The message light on my answering machine was flashing—someone had called my unlisted number. My telltales were disturbed—someone had been in my flat.

  Awkwardly, I used my left hand to take my automatic from the webbing holster beneath my left arm. Then I walked through my flat, checking every room. No one was there.

  Which left the question, who had been there?

  I thought about it as I hit the button on the answering machine. A moment later, Joey’s voice had my complete attention.

  “Jane. It’s December twenty-ninth. Around eight A.M. I thought maybe you’d be home. Tommy gave me your number. Alex doesn’t know I have it. There’s a problem here. Please call me back at home. Or the office.” She rattled off both phone numbers, complete with area codes.

  The next message was from Joey, too. It had been left earlier this morning.

  “It’s Joey again. Maybe you’re out of town. Otherwise, I’m sure you would have called. Tommy says I shouldn’t keep bothering you. But I know you care about Alex. Please, please call me.”

  I hit the Erase button, consulted the clock and dialed the real estate office she owned as I swallowed against the cold lump of fear that made my throat ache. A month had passed since I’d left Savannah. A month without phone calls. This certainly wasn’t mere matchmaking on Joey’s part. But in a real emergency, Tommy would have made the call himself.

  I got her answering machine, cursed under my breath. Where the hell was she?

  Emergency room, I thought immediately. Then I told myself I was being stupid. She was probably wi
th a client. I spoke to her machine.

  “Jane, here. Sorry I didn’t call sooner. I’ve been on holiday and just received your message. I’ll wait here until I hear from you.”

  Then I dialed her home number and left the same message.

  I hung up, then stood for a moment staring at the phone and feeling anxious. A waste of time. I refocused on my intruder problem.

  I fixed myself a pot of tea, pulled a chair up to the window, rested my aching head on a pillow, waited for the phone to ring, and watched the world go by. Watched for patterns of movement on the busy sidewalk four stories below. Watched for odd breaks in those patterns.

  Two hours later, the phone hadn’t rung. But I’d picked out the spotters among the pedestrians and was willing to lay odds that Mac had ordered my flat transformed into a first-class fishbowl. Time to test the theory.

  I went into the living room, walked over to the fireplace, put my foot against the cast-iron set of tools, and sent them crashing against the stone hearth. I cried out. Then I waited.

  Within minutes, footsteps pounded up the steps.

  I opened the door before they broke it down.

  They stood, weapons in hand, shaking with exertion and adrenaline. A male. A female. Both dressed in black and neon. Both with pale, narrow faces topped by short, spiky hair. Multiple silver rings through both pairs of ears, an eyebrow, and one nostril. In London, the look was as unremarkable as city suits. Or blue jeans. And the point was to blend with the environment.

  Neither operative was a day over twenty-five.

  I doubted they were happy about baby-sitting.

  I tried to remember how young I had once been.

  “The trick is to focus on the sequence, to keep the sounds in context,” I said mildly.

  He looked at his feet, murmured, “Sorry.”

  She met my eyes.

  “You might try being more careful, what with your injury and all.”

  Nothing solicitous about her tone.

  She’d last longer.

  * * *

  Joey called just after ten.

  I wasn’t asleep.

  “Alex’s acting peculiar,” she said. “You know he doesn’t scare easily. But something’s definitely scaring him. I’m sure of it. So is Tommy. But he won’t talk to either of us.”