by Camilla Monk
The guy nodded fearfully.
Well, that shed a whole new light on our own plans. From the looks of it, Dries—or the Board for that matter—didn’t suspect Mr. Étienne of any kind of foul play. They might not even know about his existence: if his current troubles with some small-time thug named Pizza Tino were any indication, he was a local player, small fry for the Board and their billion dollars’ worth of machinations. The more I learned about my mother, the more I understood her, and this was one smart move: entrusting her little secrets to a guy who appeared too insignificant to show up on the Board’s radar.
I cracked my knuckles. Time to make the scum talk. I lunged at Étienne, nearly sprawling myself on March’s lap to grab the guy’s collar. “What do you know about my mother’s will? Talk, or we—” I exhaled and tried to make my voice sound deep and cool like March’s. “We’ll break every single bone in your body.”
He let out a pitiful moan. “I know nothing!”
That was apparently his favorite line. “Wrong answer!” I roared under Ilan and March’s amused gazes, before extending my arm to grab a few peanuts. To hell with hygiene. “Talk now or I’m shoving these up your nose!”
Mr. Étienne squirmed in Ilan’s iron grip while I inserted the first peanut in his nostril with a wince—his nose was running, and it was disgusting overall. I couldn’t see how guys like Creepy-hat got off on that sort of thing. My victim sneezed out the peanut with a sob. “If it’s the money you want, I’ll give you access to all the accounts, everything! I’ll give you the paperwork. What the hell do you want?”
I paused and looked at March. That guy was right. In my eagerness to be the one tormenting people for once, I had failed to consider the possibility that he might have nothing else to reveal than what Ilan had already learned from his assistant in the morning. I let go of him and noticed that Ilan’s hold had relaxed as well.
“I don’t want the money—”
Mr. Étienne sighed. “Your father said the same back then.”
“I know.”
“He’s an idiot. You should take it.”
“You’re being hunted by a guy who calls himself Pizza Tino; you don’t get to call my dad an idiot.” I grunted. “I just . . . I just want to know if she left anything else for me, anything personal.”
I’ll admit that in this instant I didn’t care much about the Ghost Cullinan. I hoped for a little piece of her, a meaningful souvenir.
Étienne’s eyes softened, and I wondered if maybe he understood. “There was also a book and a letter. They’re still in my office. I can’t go back there until . . . some things have been resolved. But I’ll send them to you if you want me to. Does your family still live in New York?”
“A book?”
“A samurai story, I believe.”
I raised an expectant eyebrow while he seemed to search his memory.
“Across the Night something,” Étienne concluded proudly.
“Across the Nightingale Flooring,” I corrected.
He nodded.
For all his social varnish, March showed limited interest in literature and shifted the topic to more pressing issues. “What was in that letter? Did you read it?”
Étienne looked embarrassed—of course he had, regardless of how personal it might have been. “It was a little long, I don’t remember everything. She said things about your father and what she had decided about him . . . She also wrote that she had made a terrible mistake, and she was trying to make things right. She said that if someone ever came asking for something she had borrowed, you had to go see the man you loved in Tokyo, and that he would give you what you needed.”
Ilan and March shot me a strange look, and I had the good grace to blush. I knew exactly who she meant, but I had no idea how and why Masaharu had agreed to become her messenger.
For the hundredth time since March and I had met, I found myself thinking that I had never truly known her, and it hurt. I gathered that all these lies had been a necessity, a way to protect me, and many things now made perfect sense, like why she had never allowed me to attend school and socialize too much with other kids, for example. These fragments of her truth, however, left me with more questions than answers, and the lingering feeling that she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me everything, to be herself.
I took a deep breath and squeezed March’s jacket for comfort. “I think I know who she was talking about. I have no idea what became of him, though.”
Mr. Étienne watched us silently for a few seconds, and he finally gave me a suspicious look. “Do you . . . work in the same field Léa did?”
I shook my head. It was obvious enough that I didn’t belong in this world. Then, all of a sudden, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close to him, our cheeks brushing each other briefly, his lips pressing against my ear. March shoved Étienne away almost at once, rewarding him with the cold killer glare I knew so well. He turned to look at me, concern warming his gaze.
“I’m okay, don’t worry.”
He gave me a little smile before turning to the notary. “Can you explain—”
I bet when March stopped in mid-sentence to pull out his gun, Mr. Étienne thought it was for him, because he raised his hands to shield himself. It wasn’t, though. The lucky winner was an Asian stripper who had slowed down while she walked past our booth.
Things moved fast—two seconds or so during which I thought March had lost his mind and succumbed to acute paranoia; one second for her to slide her hand inside her black panties and produce a tiny gun from them; two shots, and it was over. The girl was dead . . . and so was Étienne. She had shot him straight through the heart, milliseconds before March could lodge his own bullet between her eyes.
The notary’s lifeless body slumped between March and Ilan, his face ashen. I realized that one of his hands was touching my arm, still warm. I jerked away, fighting a wave of nausea. My eyes fell on the stripper and the small dark wound on her forehead, from which blood trickled slowly. How much had she heard before killing Étienne? Did she work for that Dries guy? I felt March’s hand clasp around my wrist; our eyes met. For a brief moment, I caught that same diffuse sadness I had seen in them back at Rislow’s hideout. And despite his earlier claims, I thought that perhaps a tiny part of March, buried in a well-ordered bunker deep inside him, did regret when he had to kill.
There was no time to mourn, though: while March’s gun was well suppressed—all I had heard was a snap, sort of like a door closing—that woman’s wasn’t. The sound of a weapon being fired had created an immediate commotion, which was amplified by the grim spectacle of her lifeless body outside the booth. Clients and girls started leaving their own booths and running down the dark hallway in panic, some shrieking, others calling security. As we tried to blend into that hysterical crowd to escape, I noticed Ilan had pulled out a gun as well—some big and unsuppressed semiautomatic; plus he kept making weird little hand gestures to March. Some sort of L with his thumb and index finger, then three fingers, as if he had been counting.
I had no idea what they were doing, but March seemed to understand, responding with an equally strange little pantomime. He mimicked what I assumed to be a hat over his head, and before I could ask what kind of game they were playing, Ilan pulled me with him into an empty booth. I barely had the time to see March shoot a guy in a black parka standing at the end of the hallway, whom I had previously assumed to be part of the club’s security team.
Things went downhill from there, because Ilan’s hand signals could have translated to “three dudes with automatic rifles and a limited sense of humor at twelve o’clock.” I heard the last handful of people trying to escape scream for help, likely hiding in a booth, and the most terrifying din I had ever heard in my life broke out. I huddled against Ilan’s broad frame as hundreds of bullets were fired into the line of private booths. Silk, glass, and plaster exploded all around us, and Ilan pushed me under a red sofa, where I curled into a ball, praying that the walls would be able to stop at le
ast part of this deluge.
After a while, the shooting stopped, and I watched in horror as Ilan crawled on the floor to leave the booth, perhaps while the men reloaded. I hadn’t seen March enter any of the remaining booths before all that shooting. Was he dead? Maybe not. That same muted clap I had heard when March had shot the stripper resounded again, and a second shooter fell to the ground. I could see the man’s body in front of the booth’s entrance, near the Asian stripper’s, and he had dropped his rifle, which now rested a couple of feet away from me.
I expected the shooting to resume, but the hallway fell silent. I didn’t dare call for either March or Ilan, and I couldn’t see what was going on outside. I waited, every single muscle in my body contracted in fear. After a few seconds or so, I heard the sound of a small object bouncing softly on the hallway’s carpet, and a voice that seemed to be Ilan’s.
“Ah le con . . .” Dumbass . . .
A huge detonation suddenly made the booth’s wall tremble. Call it balls of steel, complete stupidity, or a visceral need to win at any cost: the last man standing had unpinned a fricking grenade in the hallway. Certain that March and Ilan were dead, I lost it. Rolling from under the sofa, I grabbed the big black rifle that had landed near me earlier and stepped out of the booth, holding the weapon with shaking hands.
Curls of acrid smoke and plaster danced in the air, and half of the red spotlights were dead. March and Ilan lay motionless behind a large sculpture of a centaur taking a nymph from behind, and through the dust whirling around me, I could make out the third shooter’s silhouette. He was still standing. I pointed the rifle at him and started to sob loudly.
“It’s all right, biscuit. He’s out of ammo. You can put the Famas down.”
A wave of relief washed over me upon hearing these words, so intense, so sweet it was almost painful. Behind me, March’s calm voice was calling me. I was in a state of shock, however, and my brain refused to acknowledge that the guy standing in front of me no longer posed a threat. Both men got up from the floor, pointing their guns as well at the guy in black military attire, who was still holding a rifle similar to mine and seemed to be under an equal amount of stress.
March kept cooing. “Island . . . I need you to push that little button under your finger all the way to the right and put the gun down.”
“No! He’s gonna shoot us!”
Ilan joined his plea. “His magazine is empty. Calm down and push the little button. Don’t touch the trigger, Island.”
I did try to do as I was told and let go of the trigger, but my adversary figured that a chimp would have better chances of handling a Famas properly. I can only assume he decided to die a hero, letting go of his now useless rifle to reach inside his jacket for a gun. Panicked, I pressed the trigger at the same time March fired his own weapon.
They never tell you about the recoil in the movies, you know, that backward momentum that your body is supposed to sustain when a weapon is fired. The one I didn’t sustain and that sent me hurling to the ground while firing an automatic rifle. The guy missed me and collapsed with a horrifying scream while a slew of bullets flew in all directions, including the ceiling. I eventually let go of the rifle, which landed a few feet away from me . . . and I was fricking petrified.
March ran to check on me, his hands roaming all over my body to feel for potential wounds. Satisfied that I would live to see another day, he helped me up. “I told you to put the safety on.”
I wailed in his arms as he patted my head. “Oh my God, I killed him . . . I killed him!”
“No. He’s good, biscuit.”
Walking to the guy, Ilan knelt beside him, pointing a gun at his head. “You scared the little lady. Tell her you’re fine.”
At first the guy just kept moaning, but Ilan poked him with his gun, and he croaked, “I’m . . . fine.”
This proof of life brought me tremendous relief, but I was still worried I had hurt him badly. “How is he?”
“Mmm, let’s see . . . Two in the thigh, one in the hip, and one . . . oh, excellent job, chérie,” Ilan sneered as he examined our assailant.
“What . . . where’s the fourth one?” I asked.
An ear-piercing shriek escaped my victim. “You shot me in the dick, bitch!”
My hands flew to cover my mouth. “I’m so, so sorry! Is it . . . did it fall off?”
“No.” Ilan chuckled.
“But I’m going to rectify that if you don’t tell me who sent you!” I looked up at March as he said this. His right arm was still wrapped around me, but his eyes were a frighteningly cold blue.
He pushed me aside gently to join Ilan at the man’s side. Crouching on one knee, he reached under his jeans to reveal a black sheath tied to his leg. I watched with increasing worry as he produced a short, incurved knife that looked somehow familiar—maybe because its shape reminded me of the raptors’ claws in Jurassic Park? The guy started writhing in fear, and Ilan pinned him to the ground while March undid his pants and exposed his bloody junk.
“In my country, people still sometimes do this as a means to punish an enemy, or to avenge rape. First, you cut the blood flow—”
He wasn’t seriously going to do this, right? March tugged sharply on a drawstring cord that served to fasten the hood of the guy’s jacket. It snapped, and he tied it around his victim’s balls. I don’t know what happened next, because I squeezed my eyes shut. I suppose the blade made contact with the guy’s nuts, because he started screaming desperately, and I could hear his uninjured leg slam against the floor as he tried to free himself.
“I don’t know anything! I don’t know!”
“Stop lying to me, or I’ll geld you!” March’s roar sent a chill through my body, and I covered my ears. Some logical part of me knew that March wasn’t really mad, and that he was merely raising his voice to increase the guy’s stress and make the interrogation more efficient, but I couldn’t help it. Hearing that booming, intimidating voice affected me almost as much as the man lying on the floor and about to be castrated.
There was some more atrocious howling, and—thank God—that poor goon broke. “Stop! We were supposed to kill you guys and bring him the girl! I swear it’s all I know!”
“Why did that woman kill the notary?” Ilan asked.
“She worked for him. She decided to move first. She said she had the intel she needed for her boss, that she’d clean up and leave the rest to us!”
A loud scream suggested that March’s blade had made some dreadful progress. “Him? The man who hired you? Who is he?”
“I swear I don’t know his name! I only heard his voice!”
“All right.”
I didn’t like how calm March suddenly sounded. That didn’t bode well for this man’s already bloody crotch. I cracked an eye open, only to see March’s arm move and Ilan hold the guy tighter.
The guy let out a broken sob. “He was Scottish! Please! Please! It’s all I know!”
March spoke again, and this time his voice sounded normal again, if not a little puzzled. “Did this man tell you this, that he was Scottish?”
A series of short pants preceded the answer. “No! I guessed because he spoke English, but sometimes he rolled the Rs! Please let me go!”
I opened my eyes fully, and there was a long pause, during which all four of us looked at each other like poker players around a table. The mercenary was no doubt trying to figure out whether he would get killed or not, and Ilan and I were staring at March, daring him to bullshit us and pretend that the so-called Scottish villain who had sent men to capture me and rolled his Rs wasn’t actually Dries, the South African. March himself looked like he was struggling with the notion that his former boss was one greedy and unscrupulous son of a bitch.
I thought of the stripper again. She had claimed to have enough intel . . . but those guys had intended to capture me anyway, rather than kill me. That probably meant that Dries couldn’t solve my mother’s riddles without my help. Good.
I know for sure th
at March didn’t cut that guy’s nuts . . . entirely. I think he had started to, and the guy talked before losing them for good. Ilan later swore to me that it was only a cut through the skin, and that no permanent damage had been done. It could be a lie crafted to make me feel better. Maybe that guy is alive somewhere, with only one ball left. I read on the Internet that it’s enough to live a normal life.
A few seconds later, a freaked-out bouncer led us out of the club through the rear exit, and I was relieved to see that the couple who had sought shelter in the last booth was shell-shocked but still alive. This was my first brush with actual criminal activities—on the giving end anyway—and I have to confess I did feel a little thrill of impunity as we walked away in a darkened street and I saw the first police cars arrive at the scene, their sirens blaring on the Champs-Élysées.
We looked like bums. Bums gathered around a Mercedes, but bums nonetheless. Our clothes were wrinkled, covered in dust and some blood, for March and Ilan. While neither had sustained any major injury, there were a good deal of cuts and bruises. Ilan’s left cheek looked like he had been punched by the Undertaker, because he had been blown face-first into a wall when the grenade had exploded. Face-wise, March had only a few cuts, but Ilan kept joking that he would be in for a rough awakening in the morning, since his bulletproof jacket had stopped a couple of bullets—pretty close call—and there were already large, nasty bruises forming on his back and side. Comparatively, I was more or less okay, leaning against the car and sucking on one of March’s extra-strong mints while he stood by my side and munched on a handful of them like a junkie.
When he was done, he gave me a wry smile as Ilan opened the door for me. “Island, Ilan and I need to discuss a few things. Get in the car, please.”
“No. If it has to do with Dries, I want to hear it. That stripper gave him intel, and I bet that letter and the book are already gone by now. We still have the upper hand, though, because he doesn’t know where to look. So that’s settled, I’m going to Japan with you.”