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Stumbling and grimacing, he made his way to the single bathroom, turned on the shower’s cold water tap, and hurled himself beneath the spray. At once, he was engulfed in a cloud of smoke, making him choke. Better than having his skin flayed off. Soon enough the smoke turned to steam.
The flames extinguished, he stripped off the remnants of charred underwear, and stepped out of the shower. His body was as lean and long-armed as that of a long-distance swimmer, all rippling muscle, hard and compact beneath taut, sun-burnished skin.
He dared not use a towel on the burns that covered much of his chest, neck, and hands. He used the mirror over the sink to check out the glass shard in his back. It took him a moment because his eyes were watering so profusely. He thought his body would retain scars, especially his neck, but he was too well trained to dwell on that. Instead, he got down to the business at hand, scrutinizing his wound with a surgical precision and thoroughness.
Even though the end of the shard had broken off when he fell on it, there was enough still visible for him to pull it out. Bracing himself against the edge of the sink and looking over his shoulder into his image in the mirror, he grasped the shard just beneath the jagged edge. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and completely. At that instant, he pulled hard, and the shard slid free. The wound began to drool blood, but it was clean and he knew it would soon stop.
Dripping water, still pink with his blood, he returned to the kitchen, opened the back door, and, naked, threw himself facedown into the snow. The cold, he knew, would help minimize the swelling as well as numb the pain. When he’d had enough, he turned on his back, numbing the wound there.
After a few more minutes, he picked himself up and, returning inside, rummaged in the kitchen cupboards until he found a package of baking soda. Shaking out the powder into a bowl he took down from a shelf, he mixed it with water, stirring it into the consistency of a thick paste. Then, breath hissing through clenched teeth, he began to daub this poultice on his burns until they were completely covered in a thick salve that would both protect and begin to heal his wounds.
In the bathroom, he found a full tube of antibacterial cream, plus the remnants of the powerful prescription antibiotics Rebeka had left behind. On the tube’s label were typed both her name and an address in Stockholm. The pain was already fading, the baking soda drawing it out of him. In a while, he’d throw himself into the snow again.
He guzzled down two antibiotic tablets with a beer he found in the refrigerator. Pulling his knife from between the floorboards, he paced back and forth with the silent, ferocious, cruel mind-set of a tiger until he felt his full strength flooding back.
Looking again at the label on the vial of antibiotics, he could not help but smile. Her address in Stockholm. He’d be on them again, and this time, he vowed, they’d all die.
10
DO YOU LIKE films?” Don Fernando asked over breakfast coffee and croissants at Le Fleur en Ile.
“Of course I like films,” Martha Christiana replied. “Who doesn’t?”
After di
“I mean old films. Classics.”
“Even better.” She sipped her coffee, served in a huge, thick cup. Outside the plate-glass windows, the magnificent rounded rear of Notre Dame rose, majestic and delicate, flying buttresses spreading like multiple wings. “But many old films aren’t the classics they’re reported to be. Have you seen Don’t Look Now? When it isn’t being preposterous, it’s incomprehensible.”
“I was thinking of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.”
She shook her head. Her eyes were bright in the spark of morning light. “Never saw it.”
When he’d told her the synopsis, she said, “So everyone in this house is trapped, just as we ourselves are by our lives. They argue, fight, make love, grow weary and bored. Some die.” She snorted. “That isn’t art, it’s existence!”
“True enough.”
“I thought Buñuel was a surrealist.”
“Actually, he was a satirist.”
“Frankly, I don’t see anything in the least bit amusing in the film.”
Don Fernando didn’t either, but that was beside the point. He had thought of the film because Martha Christiana was an exterminating angel. He knew who and what she was. He had been in the company of women of her ilk. More than likely, he would be again. If he survived her.
He knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was a sinister emissary. Nicodemo had commissioned her. This fact heartened him. He was getting close. It meant he had stirred this particular level of hell sufficiently that she had been dispatched to usher him to his death.
Smiling at his exterminating angel, he said, “The first time I saw the film I was sitting next to Salvador Dalí.”
“Really?” She cocked her head. She wore a Chanel rayon suit the color of breaking dawn over a butter-yellow shantung-silk blouse, open at the throat. “What was that like?”
“All I could see were his damnable mustaches.”
Her laugh was as soft and buttery as her blouse. “Did he say anything at all?”
“Dalí never said anything that wasn’t for shock effect. Not in public, anyway.”
Her hand crossed an invisible barrier, her fingers taking his. “You’ve led such a fascinating life.”
He shrugged. “More than some, I suppose. Less than others.”
The slanted sunlight, caught in her eyes, made them glitter like hand-cut gems. “I’d like to know you better, Don Fernando. Much better.”
He allowed his smile to widen. She was good, he thought. Better than most. But he would scarcely expect anything less from Nicodemo.
“I’d like that,” he replied. “More than you know.”
Delia was waiting for Charles Thorne at Admitting.
She had been watching people come and go through the imposing front entrance of the Virginia Hospital Center for ten minutes. She was sipping very bad coffee she had unadvisedly purchased from a vending machine on the same floor where Soraya was still in surgery.
Delia had met Soraya nine years ago, when Soraya was still working for the late Martin Lindros at CI. At that time, Delia was alone, unsure of who she was, let alone what her sexual orientation might be, which was the one area of life that frightened her. For a time, she had thought she was asexual. Soraya had changed all that.
Delia had been sent into the field to disarm a bomb that had been found in the vicinity of the Supreme Court building. Soraya was there along with several FBI agents in an attempt to determine who had set the device and whether he was a foreign or homegrown terrorist. Either possibility was frightening.
The bomb’s mechanism proved to be difficult to neutralize, which pointed to a professional terrorist. Everyone, save Soraya, had backed away to a safe distance while Delia worked on defusing it.
“You ought to get clear of here,” Delia remembered saying. “No one ought to be alone,” Soraya answered her.
“If I fail, if this thing goes off—”
Soraya had engaged her eyes for the briefest moment. “Especially at the end.” Then she had produced the most disarming grin. “But you won’t fail.”
Thorne, striding into Admitting, rudely shattered her reverie. Recognizing the anxious expression on his face as he came up to her, she said, “She had the procedure and passed a quiet night. That’s all I know.”
As he followed her down a linoleum-floored corridor to the bank of oversized elevators, he said, “What you told me over the phone.”