by Camilla Monk
I registered surprise on his face before his eyes hardened. “We’re not repeating what happened in the club. You’ll tell me what I need to know, and wait for me in Paris with Ilan. Then, once we’re done, I’ll send you back home.”
Kalahari’s words echoed in my head. This was the catch. It wasn’t the fact that he had a cleaning disorder; it wasn’t his job; it wasn’t even the way he did mints to keep his stress-levels in check. It was the damn control issue. March wanted—needed—to control everything and everyone, and this aspect of his personality was pretty much a take-it-or-leave-it.
“I said no. It’s not like you have a choice. I’m the only one who knows who my mom was talking about in her letter, and I’m in no mood to tell you right now,” I snapped.
Ilan shot him a questioning glance, and when March took a menacing step toward me I thought he was going to try to scare me, but that in the end he would bend like he had until now whenever I challenged him. I was no longer afraid of his icy-stare-of-death anyway.
Turned out I needed to learn his body language better.
NINETEEN
The Lion
“Holly didn’t want a good, decent man. She wanted a dangerous man, a mysterious lion who would ravish her and feast on her body in the savannah.”
—Stephanee Dusk, Hunting Holly
I spent the entire ride cursing them both: March, for having dared to put me kicking and screaming in the trunk, and Ilan, for not bothering to slow on speed bumps. The car eventually stopped, and I squinted my eyes when the trunk door opened to reveal Ilan’s face.
“Calmée?” Cooled down?
I shrugged off the wool quilt March had wrapped me in prior to locking me in the cramped space, and held up my handcuffed hands, glaring silently at Ilan. He undid the cuffs and helped me up. I was about to pounce on March for his distinct lack of chivalry, but I realized he was gone.
“Where is he?” I barked, as we made our way out of the garage.
“He had some shopping to do.” Ilan shrugged.
I leaned against the elevator’s wall. “When is he coming back?”
“Soon.”
I shook my head and entered the living room with gritted teeth. There, two men stood in front of Ilan’s apartment’s door, both wearing orange armbands. Great, more fake cops. Ilan gave them a slight nod, and we all entered his living room. To my disappointment Kalahari wasn’t there, and though I wanted to ask when or if she would be back, I was too pissed and exhausted, so I kept quiet. Ilan’s guests looked me up and down, perhaps assessing how much trouble I could cause, and waited for him to speak.
“Island, meet Lieutenants Gomez and Tavares. They’ll keep you company while I’m gone.”
I performed a slow face-palm upon hearing names that had obviously been borrowed from a popular French cop comedy. “Sérieusement . . .” Seriously . . .
One of them, a young Arab man with alert brown eyes and a black leather jacket, winked at me. “On est des vrais flics hein. C’est juste que là c’est un petit extra!” We’re actually real cops. This is just a little extra to our job!
Incredulous, and still pretty depressed over the evening’s bitter conclusion, I let myself fall on Ilan’s long gray couch while he gave them additional instructions in a low voice. I didn’t hear everything, but from what I gathered, I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Ilan locked eyes with me one last time, his piercing green gaze sending me a gentle warning, and he was gone.
Sleep eluded me, so I spent two hours watching brain-melting crap on TV, hovering in a limbo of boredom, regret, and uncertainty regarding the future. Gomez and Tavares seemed pretty bored too, but I have to admit they were very professional about it. The only time I was allowed to remain alone was during a quick shower and a trip to the toilets. Also, one of them always stood by the living room’s bay windows to watch for a while whenever a car could be heard passing down the street. I learned that the happy Arab guy was Tavares, and that he wasn’t Arab at all. His father was Turkish and his mother Italian.
A tall man with dark skin and twisted hair, Gomez was less talkative. He kept stealing glances at me as if he was about to speak and would look away as soon as I caught him doing so. His little game lasted until two in the morning or so, when a fried Camembert sandwich got the better of him. Munching on a bite of the heart-attack snack, he stared at me for the hundredth time, his eyes shining with curiosity.
“My uncle . . . he says he knows that guy—the Lion, Ilan’s friend.”
My eyes lit up. “Are you talking about March? Why are you calling him a lion?”
He nodded, a crease forming on his brow. “Lions of Nergal—they’re mercenaries, like an old, secret clan . . . mostly South Africans.”
“Are they bad guys?” I asked candidly.
His eyes widened at my question, as if the answer was obvious to whoever had heard about them. “Killing machines. Few people can afford them, and you don’t want to be around when they show up.”
Part of me refused to believe that March had anything to do with a pack of bloodthirsty South African mercenaries, but given his ties to Dries, his questionable professional choices, and, of course, the lion carved on his back, maybe Rislow had been right after all. I had never killed anyone, never been on a battlefield. How could I pretend to understand the depth of the bond between March and Dries?
I tried to back away from that sensitive topic. “Look, I don’t know anything about this—”
Gomez didn’t care about my reluctance to hear the rest of his story, though. Motioning for Tavares to listen as well, he went on. “Before he fled to France, my uncle used to be a general in the army, back in Ivory Coast. He told me that three years ago, after the presidential elections, when the civil war started, two American spies—a man and a woman—got caught by Liberian mercenaries working for President Gbagbo.”
He winced before resuming his story. “They got tortured . . . nasty stuff. They were burned, and they knew too much, so . . . the CIA sent that guy to clean up.”
My throat tightened as he dragged his thumb across his neck in an explicit gesture.
“Hear this: he didn’t just kill the spies. He wiped the entire unit that had captured them. They picked up twenty-five bodies! He vanished right after that, but when my uncle questioned his men, one of them swore on God’s head that he had seen the mark.”
I swallowed painfully. “The mark?”
“On his back, the lion’s head.”
There was a pregnant pause as both men observed my reaction, trying to gauge how much I knew about March. I suppose I wasn’t good at masking my thoughts, because Gomez saw through me almost effortlessly. “You’ve seen it too, right?”
“That doesn’t mean anything. I’m sure there are hundreds of men with a lion on their back.” I didn’t need to look into their inquisitive eyes to know how my voice sounded: hurried, worried . . . guilty.
“You honestly believe that?” Gomez asked mockingly.
The sound of a key turning in a lock diverted Gomez’s attention to the apartment’s entrance door before I found myself forced to answer his question. For the second time in forty-eight hours, Kalahari had saved me.
Both men watched as the door opened, right hands lingering on the guns at their side. Once she had announced herself and stood in the middle of the living room, perched atop precariously high heels, my wardens relaxed, greeting her with goofy smiles. True enough, those white leggings left little to the imagination.
There was a series of sharp noises as her boots hit the dark wenge in a way that had me thinking the expensive wood would never recover, and she flung her arms around me, hugging me tightly. “Oh, baby! Ilan told me what happened. I was so scared!”
Her warm embrace and sweet perfume momentarily quelled the whirl of doubts inside me, and I returned the gesture, burying my nose in the thick brown mane cascading over her shoulders. We stood like this for a moment or so before she pulled back enough to look at my weary eyes. “I’ll lend y
ou a pair of pj’s, and you’re going to tell me everything!” She then turned her gaze to Ilan’s henchmen. “That won’t be a problem, right?”
Both shook their heads, apparently under her spell, just like Ilan and March had been.
Once in the bedroom, I wasted no time in changing into the pair of oh-so-soft pink satin pj’s she had picked for me. Kalahari changed as well, slipping into one of Ilan’s sweatshirts, and we jumped on the bed, eager to hold an emergency meeting under the resident pigeon’s disdainful gaze. She took some time to examine the various bruises visible on my arms and ankles after my recent misadventures. I winced when she trailed concerned fingers over a particular imprint I recognized as March’s own handiwork, when he had tried to prevent me from leaving his car during the ambush.
“Let it all out,” she murmured, shifting closer to me.
I lay down on the pillows and stared at the ceiling, allowing the past days’ tension to ebb away. “He’s an asshole.”
She let me talk without interrupting me for at least half an hour. Grateful for her listening ear and her discreet encouragements to keep going, I provided a comprehensive account of the past thirty-six hours. The mini-hot-dog incident had her laughing to tears, and Kalahari insisted that my claim regarding the size of March’s junk was completely defamatory. I had to cover my ears when she went ahead and provided precise measurements, along with unsolicited details regarding his use of said junk.
Once she was done tormenting me, she turned pensive. “Are you afraid of him?”
I pulled back the bed’s comforter so I could slide underneath. “Not really. I’m not afraid he will hurt me . . . I’m afraid of what he might do to others.”
Kalahari’s tender gaze turned serious. “It’s been ten years since he left the Lions, you know. He’s a very different person now.”
“Gomez says that he was in Ivory Coast three years ago and that he killed twenty-five people. There was even a woman!”
She sat up in the bed and brought her knees against her chest. “It’s not what you think. She was . . . Who’s Gomez anyway?”
“The guy with the twists, Tavares’s friend,” I said, gesturing to the living room on the other side of the wall.
Her lush lips formed a small O of indignation, and she yelled at them through the door. “Hocine, Abdoulaye, vous êtes vraiment deux gros cons!” Hocine, Abdoulaye, you’re a pair of fucking dumbasses!
Okay, that settled it. They weren’t the real Gomez and Tavares, but close enough, obviously. I heard snickers coming from the living room, which had me fearing she would go all Bane on them like she had with Ilan and March when they had dared question her orders. She dropped the issue, however, turning to me with saddened eyes. “Her name was Charlotte Covington. March did . . . He killed her . . . but it’s not what you think. She wasn’t a client. God knows he had negotiated hard enough to ensure that.”
“I don’t understand—”
She let out a deep breath. “Since he started his . . . business, March has often accepted jobs from the CIA. It’s an easy way to stay on the US government’s good side. He gets things done for them, and in exchange, they’ll overlook the rest of his activities as long as he chooses his clients wisely. Of course, they never trusted him much, so a few years ago, this guy called Erwin came up with the idea to try to put one of his agents in March’s bed. That sounded like the best way to keep a close eye on him.”
A chill crept up my spine as I put the pieces together. “Charlotte?”
“Exactly. She had this cover as a humanitarian worker—way over the top, if you ask me. It didn’t matter anyway because, right after they had met, March had one of his contacts screen her, so he knew she was CIA from the start.”
“I don’t get it, if he knew she was a spy, why did he care?”
A heavy sigh accompanied Kalahari’s answer. “Because he’s a moron, and he played with fire. He humored her for a little while until he realized he was completely hooked. That’s when he came clean and told her that he knew about her mission, but that he loved her anyway.”
“But . . . did she love him back?” I wasn’t jealous, more like anxious to understand why March had killed this poor woman.
She shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. I only saw her a couple of times. Judging by the way she looked at him, I’d say maybe a little, but not the way he loved her. March would have jumped off a cliff for her. You know the saying. ‘First cut is the deepest.’”
I massaged the bridge of my nose, battling the first signs of a migraine. “He didn’t get that she wasn’t on the same page?”
“Correct. When he dropped the L bomb, she told him that she couldn’t go on with her mission in these conditions and called it quits.”
I cringed. “Ouch.”
“Exactly. It takes a lot for him to take out a whiskey bottle, and it was one of those times. He nursed his wound for a while, and I thought we’d never hear about her again. Except eight months later, during the first weeks of the civil war, she got caught with another agent, spying on Gbagbo’s Special Forces. Like I said, that NGO cover was complete garbage!”
“March went to her rescue?”
“He struck a deal with Erwin, and the CIA hired him for the cleanup job, with an underlying agreement that he would erase Charlotte from the grid instead of killing her, and no one would ask any questions.”
“Gomez said that they had been tortured, that it was horrible . . .” I murmured.
She looked away, and her throat constricted. “March was too late. The Liberians were done with them. They were burned alive. By the time he reached the camp, there was . . . nothing left to do.”
Bile rose in my throat. “You mean, he killed her . . . to end it?”
I couldn’t imagine how it had felt for him, or how he had even been able to do it, for that matter. I could rationalize the fact that beyond a certain point, death was preferable to hopeless attempts at prolonging a life of agony. Yet the horror of the act was all I could think of. Had she asked? Had he made the decision for her? Had she been aware that he was killing her? The memory of my mother’s body being left to burn inside our car filled my mind, and I felt a wave of nausea sweep through me.
I was in for another migraine.
TWENTY
The Prune
“The sexy doctor growled in barely contained desire as he examined Leigh’s mouth. Soon, it would no longer be the depressor keeping her tongue down like this.”
—Rayna Kissings, Love Clinic #5: Doctoring Leigh
Abdoulaye and Hocine might have been prone to picking ridiculous code names, but they were indeed real cops, which allowed them to obtain a box of anti-migraine meds from a drugstore down the block with badges in lieu of a prescription. Their superpowers weren’t enough to escape being swindled, though: they came back with not only the precious drug, but also a bunch of useless vitamins and some moisturizing cream. Trust a French pharmacist to always bullshit you into buying additional “treatments.”
After I had taken the pills, I slept for a couple of hours. Around six a.m., a muffled noise woke me up. Kalahari had fallen asleep too, at some point; she was sleeping soundly by my side. I crept out of the bed as silently as possible and tiptoed to the bedroom door to better listen to the voices coming from the living room.
“Tu veux du café?” Do you want some coffee?
Ilan was back, and there was no mistaking the deep voice that answered him with an English accent. March had returned from his little excursion as well. A third voice mumbled a few words in French, which seemed directed to him. I held my breath, straining my ears.
“How much have you slept in the past three days?” the elderly male voice asked—a doctor maybe?
“Eleven hours,” March replied. My eyes widened at this. Come to think of it, I had never caught March sleeping since the beginning of our trip.
“Taking anything to help? Drugs, meds?” the voice asked with a hint of suspicion.
“Coffee, mints, amphe
tamines, sixty milligrams,” he recited matter-of-factly.
The doctor and I seemed to have the same reaction upon hearing that March was taking speed to stay awake. “Humpf . . . do you often take stimulants?” I could almost picture the disapproving frown that came with that little grunt.
“Only on rare occasions, when my job doesn’t allow for much sleep.”
The man’s voice softened a little. “All right . . . I’m probably wasting my time here, but I’d recommend that you go to bed and sleep for eight hours straight, rather than munch on speed and mints to stay sharp.”
“Thank you, I’ll keep it in mind.” March’s tone was as polite as ever, but having experienced myself his various flavors of civility, I gathered it basically meant, “Screw you; you’re not my mom.”
“As for this, you’re still in excellent physical condition. It should heal well, but you’ll feel it for a while.” I figured he was talking about those large bruises Ilan had joked about earlier, and I wondered how bad they were. “Let me tell you something, though. Your body no longer heals like it did when you were twenty. You’re reaching an age where you need to become more careful—”
March was no longer replying. Maybe he didn’t like to hear that old French doctor call him washed-up.
“You still have a few good years left, but it’s becoming tougher. You can feel it, right?” Damn, that guy lacked tact! “Family, kids?” he probed on.
“No,” March said flatly.
“Then go make some. Only thing that gets guys like you to retire in time,” the doctor concluded with a little laugh.
I felt bad for March, like when I had watched Sean Connery play an aging James Bond in Never Say Never Again. March wasn’t that old, after all. Granted, he might have pushed his body further than most, but that preachy grandpa was practically telling him to go sit in a wheelchair and do crosswords! Feeling that someone needed to stand up for the truth and remind that mean old prune that Sir Sean Connery had still been performing his own stunts at the ripe age of fifty-three, I pushed the door with careful movements.