by David Hewson
Out of breath, lost for a way inside, he heard a scream, then another.
Then he heard Maggie’s voice. A man’s name, over and over again.
Michael, Michael, Michael …
He knew in an instant where she was: behind the fake adobe wall, just a few short steps away, trapped with the man who’d covered the walls of his bedroom with two decades of her portraits.
Next to the base of the tower was a small window so grubby and littered with cobwebs it was opaque. He searched the trash-filled backyard until he came across an old, discarded sink, hefted it in his arms, stumbled through the rusting junk back to the building, then, with a desperate lurch, threw the thing through the glass. It landed on the far side with a muffled crash. Picking up some rusty piping, Costa roughed out a gap through the shards of glass remaining, wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief, reached inside and pulled himself through. He found himself spread-eagled across an old office desk, reached ahead, gripped the edge of the wood, and dragged himself forward until he was mostly free of the spikes and scattered glass.
There was a bed in there, the sickly sweet smell of sweat, and a misshapen red puddle on the grimy floor.
Some second sense made him turn. A man stood in a doorway at what appeared to be the foot of the stairs of the tower. He had a bloodied face and hands and wore an expression of surprise and contempt.
His right arm held a long, fireman’s axe, which, as Costa scrambled from the desk, began to fly, turning, turning, turning, towards him through the air.
Costa found himself dropping like a sack onto the hard concrete floor. Bells chimed, pain flooded into his temples. Maggie was there, somewhere beyond his assailant, screaming. He’d landed on his right shoulder, which hurt like hell. Maybe something was broken. After a brief, sickening moment of blackness, Costa found himself amidst a sea of shattered glass trying weakly to recover the gun from Gerald Kelly’s leather holster inside his jacket. He rolled and came face-to-face with the axe. The blade had driven itself deep into the wood less than an arm’s length away from his head. The fall, painful as it was, had saved him.
When he got half upright, onto a single knee, gun in hand, with a clear view back towards the tower, he was alone.
Costa staggered towards the tower, his head throbbing, his body convulsed in a single painful ache.
“Police!” he bellowed, stumbling through with the kind of unguarded, careless bravado that would have got him screamed at in the state police academy in Flaminio. “Police!”
Laughter drifted unseen down the rickety staircase.
Maggie cried in an echoing scream, “What do you want?”
There was a noise to one side, down a gloomy corridor, a sound like someone rapping on glass. Costa glanced that way automatically, seeking its source. What he saw sent his mind reeling. At the end of the narrow passage, illuminated by a single swinging bulb, stood an upright glass cabinet. Inside, a naked man was banging weakly against the glass door. Around the trapped man’s bloated, livid body swarmed a thick, angry cloud of buzzing insects.
“No time,” Costa murmured, and pointed the gun at the cabinet. He heard a thin frightened screech from the figure locked inside, then saw him fall, shrieking, arms clasped around his head, to the cabinet floor.
Costa fired twice. The cabinet exploded. Glass, wasps, and finally the bloodied, torn husk of a human being tumbled outwards, into the hot, fetid air.
Costa couldn’t wait to see any more. Maggie had gone ominously silent. Trying to take the stairs two steps at a time, he stumbled and fell, splinters tearing at his fingers, the pain ricocheting through his shoulder. The gun slipped rattling from his grasp. Back at the bottom again, he recovered the weapon and scrabbled up the staircase.
“What do I want?”
Not Maggie’s voice. A man’s voice this time.
Costa staggered ever upward, round and round the twisting corners of the staircase, until, panting, exhausted, he reached some bright, sunny platform, clinging onto the banister for support, aware that, once again, he wasn’t alone.
Maggie crouched in the far corner, clad in an old-fashioned dress the colour of an emerald. Above her stood the bloodied man, a knife in his hand, his face twisted with pain and fury.
“Put down the knife,” Costa snarled. “Stand away from her. Do as I say and no one will get hurt.”
The man across the room didn’t even seem to hear him.
“What do I want?” he asked again. “To be happy, Maggie. Is that so freaking much, huh?”
The blade was high over her, frozen, gleaming. A spiralling swarm of wasps rising from below was beginning to work its way into the room.
“You’re sick, Michael. I’m sorry, so sorry. Please, please, listen to me …” She was weeping, choking, and there was more than fear in her voice, Costa thought; there was regret there, some kind of recrimination and self-hate. “Let me help. Let me help you …”
Costa snatched a frenzied glance around him. Ahead was a single arch the height of the room, open to the blue sky, with a ledge outside so narrow only a bird could stand on it.
“How can you possibly help me?” the man with the knife demanded.
Maggie, crouched in the grime on the floor, knees bunched before her, arms around them, was a tight, terrified ball of misery.
“I’ll do whatever’s needed,” she said in a low, weak voice. “Whatever …”
Costa raised his gun. He aimed straight through the shaft of bright sun that separated them. A cloud of yellow and black insects danced in the dusty golden air.
“Move away from her,” he ordered. “Do as I say.”
“He’s sick …” Maggie whispered. “Please, Nic, can’t you see he’s …”
A voice came into Costa’s head, and it was Emily’s, repeating the words she’d uttered moments before his hesitation ended her life by the side of a crumbling monument that stank of cats and the homeless, a rank, pungent stink that would never leave him.
“Don’t beg,” he said, so quietly he knew this was for himself, not her. “Never beg. It’s the worst thing you can do. The worst …”
The knife didn’t move. The weapon in Costa’s grip didn’t waver, not even when something small and dry crawled across his extended hand, paused, and thrust its sting into the soft, taut flesh between his index finger and thumb as he gripped the gun.
A hot, sharp spike of pain that he barely noticed.
The man ahead moved, just a fraction, turning to look at Costa, something new, a look of doubt maybe, in his eyes. Another vicious yellow and black creature crawled across Costa’s forehead, stabbed its poison into him, got crushed in an instant as he swept its carapace into his skin with the back of his hand.
“You know …” The voice didn’t match the tortured face of the figure with the knife. It was anonymous, anybody’s, nobody’s. It drifted dreamily around the bell tower. “I was thinking …”
Costa’s first bullet struck him in the left arm, near the elbow. The shattered limb jerked like that of a rag doll. The jumping man screamed. So did Maggie Flavier.
The second shot flung his body hard against the rotting wall and, for a moment, Costa didn’t know where he’d hit him. So he kept on firing, jerking on the sweaty trigger constantly, desperate to empty the weapon into this husk of a man as the pained shape jerked and shrieked across the room until he came to block the searing California sun at the long bright archway, still upright, just, still holding the knife.
“He’s sick …” Maggie screeched through her hands, beseeching someone, him, the wounded man.
Costa scarcely heard her. All he heard at that moment was his dead wife’s voice and the buzzing of a million tiny wings.
“Drop the knife.”
It was spoken quietly, calmly, and he didn’t wait for a reaction.
He pointed the gun across the room, dead straight, hand steady, and pulled the trigger. The shot caught the man who called himself John Ferguson in one life, and Carlotta Valdes in another,
full in the chest. The impact blew him out of the tower, backwards into the unforgiving brilliance of the day.
The room went quiet. He could hear her weeping and knew, in a sudden revelatory instant, there would never be anything he could say to heal the hurt.
Costa crossed the room. He walked out onto the narrow ledge three storeys above the tiny garden that sat among the junk and debris in the shadow of the bell tower of the Marina Odeon.
Heights didn’t scare him. Nothing scared him much anymore. Only the big unknowable things, life and closeness and the fragile bond of family. He stood in the high open arch of the counterfeit campanario of an imaginary Spanish mission house and peered down over the dizzying, exposed edge.
Below, on the bright grass, next to a shattered grey urn strewn with scarlet roses, a broken body lay exposed before the headstone of Carlotta Valdes, like a corpse that had worked its way out of the grave below.
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