The Blue Place

six

I woke at seven but slid back into the warm depths of sleep before I could make myself move, and then I was drifting through a slow swell of dream images: bullets bursting through flesh, skin opening like heavy silk under a cold razor, a child begging for me to help as her sister went up in flames. I finally heaved myself out of it and woke to a bedroom shimmering with morning, light and luscious as meringue. Sunlight turned the red rug into a patch of raspberry and the old oak dresser to Viking gold.

I got up, automatically began to make the bed. I straightened the ivory linen top sheet, then pulled the quilt up, folded the sheet down, tugged it taut. The quilt had been hand-pieced in the Netherlands sixty years ago and the colours were still as rich and mysterious as a nineteenth century oil painting. I smoothed it, remembering finding it, putting it on the bed for the first time. No one but me had ever seen it. No lover, no friend, no family.

I had breakfast on the deck. Everything was very distinct. Sunshine turned the deck rail into a long, continuous stick of butter. Cardinals appeared in the oak tree, bright and round. My grapefruit juice smelled like another country.

With food before me and sunshine on my skin, the dreams and strange mood faded, as they always did.

I threw a piece of bread down onto the grass. Two shrews came across it at the same time and fought, squeaking and shrilling and single-minded, like two crackheads quarrelling over a dime bag. I threw another piece. The noise stopped.

I wondered what Honeycutt was doing this morning, what he was planning to do about his money problems. He was a deeply stupid man. If you wash money for the Tijuana drug cartel and one of your pipelines is buying and selling art, you don’t draw anyone’s attention by faking that art. He was risking everything by splitting the pipeline in two: real art smuggling, clean money proceeds to the cartel; fake art smuggling, proceeds to his own account. But as far as I knew he lived more or less within his means, did not take drugs, did not gamble, so where was it all going? Some would be funnelled off into a secondary account in the Seychelles, but no one played both ends against the middle unless they were desperate. So what would make a man like Honeycutt desperate?

But that information was not necessary. I knew who had ordered Lusk’s death, and that the Friedrich had indeed been faked after Sweeting had sold it to Honeycutt. I even knew who had provided the fake. That was all I needed because I was working for Julia, and that was all she wanted to know.

There was no proof, but Julia had not asked for the kind of evidence you could take to court. I would turn over what I had to Denneny and let him deal with it. It would be up to him to decide whether or not he tried to get admissible evidence, or just let Lusk’s death go as a drug-related homicide. But there was still the question of all that cocaine.

It was almost ten o’clock. I stood and stretched, imagining the look on Julia’s face when I told her she hadn’t made an error of judgement over the Friedrich. Instead, all I saw was her contempt last night.

The phone rang. I picked it up. “Julia?”

“No. This is Beatriz.”

Peter had invited her out for lunch and she didn’t want me along and was that all right? I listened to her chatter and watched a bee humming around the forsythia bush just below me. Much more interesting than any phone conversation. “Beatriz, just call Philippe. If it’s fine with him, it’s fine with me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” The bee was gone now.

“I…Did I wake you up?”

“No.”

“And you will drive me to my appointment tomorrow?”

“Yes.” I made an effort. “I’ll be there at eight-fifteen tomorrow to pick you up. Enjoy your lunch.”

“And you don’t mind that I won’t be there to help with the flowers?”

I told her I didn’t mind. Eventually she went away. When I dialed Julia’s number, it rang and rang and rang. She had even turned her machine off.

To many Americans, dirt exists only to be eroded with four-wheel drive or mountain bike. The great outdoors with its fragile systems was created for the convenience of fools who tear into the heart of a wilderness area to gawk at the grizzlies, get indignant if one gets too close, and roar off in a cloud of noxious exhaust, trailing Rush Limbaugh at ninety decibels and leaving behind their sewage.

If only they looked, they would see a world in their own back garden.

Gardening, the English vice. Kneeling on the grass, I could see a microcosm in a yard of dirt. Ants, ranging from lone black soldier ants with mandibles the size of my little fingernail, to the pale streams of fire ants like tiny amber necklaces. A glistening pink roll and wriggle of earthworm; beetles like apple seeds. Ladybugs—which the English call ladybirds—sitting like spatters of wet enamel on the underside of leaves. Black wasps with their menacing dangle of legs. A daddy longlegs trundling like some strange Mars Rover over granular soil flecked with specks of mica, then waving front legs at a pecan shell turning soft as rotting cardboard.

Sometimes I used my fingers, digging down into the rich dirt, feeling it push under my nails. No doubt I’d regret it later, but it was good to feel so much life under my hands. I dug, tapped an impatiens or marigold free of its PVC pot, dropped it in the hole, brushed dirt back around the pale green stem, pressed firmly until the young plant stood on its own. I wondered if there was a group anywhere in the state that planted trees in deforested areas. I could volunteer for that as soon as Beatriz was on her plane and I’d prepared a report for Julia.

I straightened, took a look. Bright, welcoming colour filled about half the beds. The back garden now looked a place for people as well as wildlife. I wondered if Julia liked flowers.

It took a while to clean up enough to eat lunch. I tried Julia again. Ring, ring, ring. I went back to the garden.

Evening. I called Julia. Ring ring ring. What had she found out that she wanted to tell me on Saturday night?

I tried to settle to a book by some philosopher called Roszak who declared ecology and psychology were the same thing. According to his bio he wrote fiction; god knows what it was like.

I had no way of knowing if leaving the answering machine off was one of Julia’s normal habits. Maybe she had found something out and done something stupid.

Her house was in Virginia Highlands, a brick tudor with roses outside. She liked some flowers, then. I parked down the street. There were lights on, one upstairs, one down. Her car was in the drive, and I could hear music. Light jazz. I watched for a while. Eventually the light upstairs went out and another came on in what might be the dining room. I saw the swing of shadow hair against the blinds.

I drove away.

I was running around the corner in Inman Park, only this time she didn’t take the corner wide, we didn’t bump into each other, she went on to the house and had her flesh blown off her bones when it went up, nothing left but a standing skeleton surrounded by chunks of what looked like raw pork.

I got stuck in morning traffic a mile from the Nikko. I tried Julia’s home number. Ring ring ring. I called information, got her office number. Her voice told me to leave a message for Lyon Art.

“Julia? Aud. This morning I’ll be with my client, whom you met Saturday night. I drop her at the airport at midday but will be free after that. I have the information you want. Call me at home or on my cell phone.” I gave her the number.

Beatriz was full of beans when I picked her up. She chattered at me all the way back to the city, and walked into Perrin & Norrander full of confidence. Afterwards, she smiled all the way to the airport.

I parked in a no parking zone and helped her carry her bags to the first-class check-in. “I think they’ll offer me the job,” she said suddenly as the clerk stamped various things and put tags on her luggage.

“Congratulations.”

She looked down at her shoes, suddenly shy. “It means I’ll be back in a month or so. Will you…I mean, you’re probably busy…but…”

“Someone will have to advise me about what flowers to plant.” She gave me a tentative smile, and I found I was smiling back. “Call when you’ve booked your flight.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I think you are a very kind woman.”

I zipped east on I-20. Honeycutt may have given the order, but he was not the one who actually lit the match that was supposed to have burned Julia Lyons-Bennet to a carbon carcass. All of a sudden I wanted that name; a little tidbit for Denneny. Perhaps it was time to have a little chat with Michael Honeycutt.

I was following the hairpin bend of the Moreland exit by the time I got through to his secretary. “I’m Katy Willis, personal assistant to Charles Sweeting,” I told him in a brisk, impersonal voice. “Mr. Sweeting would like an appointment to see Mr. Honeycutt at his earliest convenience.”

“Mr. Honeycutt left very early this morning for a six-day trip to the Seychelles. If it’s urgent, perhaps I could help?”

“No, I believe it’s a personal matter. Perhaps we could go ahead and schedule an hour for, say, next Tuesday?”

“I could manage to squeeze him in for forty minutes on Wednesday at ten.”

“Thank you.” At five minutes past ten next Wednesday morning Michael Honeycutt would go grey under his Indian Ocean tan. By the time I was finished with him, he would want to cancel the rest of his appointments that week, but I would have that name.

When I got home I spent half an hour watering the flowers. The cheerful pinks and yellows and violet in the two front troughs reminded me of something: the window boxes lining the smart Mayfair mews where my mother had lived the last two years. She had never seen my house.

When making a rocking chair it is extremely important for the runners to curve in exact symmetry. I hummed as I checked one against the other; shaved; sanded. Perhaps when it was done, I would ship the chair to my mother. Perhaps I would go visit her for a week this summer.

Birds sang their evening chorus. The harsh screeching of a blue jay drowned them out for a while, then I heard again the trill of a cardinal, liquid as the sunset spreading like cranberry juice along the cloud line between the trees.

When I had the runners shaped to my satisfaction, I started on the armrests. I wanted them wide and comfortable, but not so wide that they overwhelmed the balance of the piece. I went over to the far wall, ran my fingers over a few pieces of pine, thinking. Eventually I selected one, brought it back to the table vise.

The doorbell chimed. I leaned the wood against the table, knocked my boots against the table leg so I wouldn’t trample sawdust through the house, and went to answer it. It was Julia, lips like sunset, hair like evening shadow.

“Will you let me in?”

I stood aside and gestured her in.

“This place is so quiet.” She looked around, down at the silk Persian rug, then up. “My god. This is beautiful.”

I had removed the ceiling last year and replaced the inadequate two-by-four rafters with antique oak four-by-sixes I had rescued from an old Ponce de Leon mansion and carved myself. A fan turned lazily overhead. “Thank you. Can I get you something? Iced tea? Beer?”

I got us both a beer. She was still standing in the dining room, craning upwards.

I handed her the beer. “The height makes it very practical in hot weather.”

She nodded absently, then recalled her manners. “I’m sorry. It’s just…” She took a sip of the beer, then looked at the bottle. “What is this?”

“Lindeboom. It’s a Dutch lager. Would you like to sit?”

She surprised me by ignoring the couches and folding herself down onto the rug, the way I would if I were alone. “Was she really your client?”

“Her name is Beatriz. The Spanish consulate hired me to protect her while she was in Atlanta for a four-day visit. She needed a babysitter more than a bodyguard, but she was useful as cover. I went to Honeycutt’s party as her utterly anonymous escort.”

“You’re six feet tall and were wearing a dress no bigger than a napkin. How were you anonymous?”

“By acting exactly the way each individual I encountered expected me to act, and by lying.”

She looked at me curiously, at my boots and cut-offs stained with glue and varnish. “Don’t you ever get…lost, pretending to be so many people?”

I shrugged. “It’s just like being an actor.”

“No. No, it’s not. Actors follow other people’s scripts. You follow your own.”

Verbal chi sao. “Call it improvisation, then.”

A beat of silence. “Do you know many actors?”

“None. Some performers.”

“Like Cutter?”

“There’s no one like Cutter.”

She grinned. “You said that before.” Then she stretched and seemed to relax. “And your…Beatriz has gone back to wherever she came from?”

“For a month or so. She met a harmless law intern called Peter at the party and is probably somewhere over the Atlantic even as we speak, dreaming of having his babies. So what was it you were so hot to tell me Saturday night that you drove out here at midnight?”

“The Friedrich provenance is impeccable. There’s a fifteen-year gap not long after it was created, but I talked to a man who is considered to be the foremost Friedrich scholar—you wouldn’t believe my long-distance phone bills—who examined the painting thirty years ago and would stake his reputation on its genuineness. Apart from that, the provenance was perfect. And I found out from a dealer that there was a rumour last year that Honeycutt was trafficking in fake art. Something to do with an Anglo-Saxon armring. After a lot of discreet calls, I’ve discovered there are now two armrings in private collections—one in Argentina, one in Italy—that look exactly the same. I got the owners to fax me pictures late Saturday. So it was Honeycutt, the bastard.”

She took a long, fierce swallow of her beer. Her throat moved once, twice, three times.

“When I thought about those phone calls I made, assuring him there was nothing to worry about, not really, that we were having just a little teeny problem, I got furious. He knew all the time. The asshole knew all the time! But what I want to know is, how does he expect to get away with it? Does he think we’re all fools, that we’ll lie down and take it?”

Her beer was gone. I held out my hand for the empty. She followed me into the kitchen and looked around at the cherry cabinetry, the white counters, pine floor.

“This is nice, too.”

I popped the top off another Lindeboom and handed it to her, reached into the fridge for mine.

“So, anyway, I called him. I told him—”

I paused, hand still in the fridge. “When did you call him?”

“This morning. I told his machine—”

“What time this morning?”

“What does it matter? I said…You look very odd.”

My hand was getting cold inside the fridge. I took it out, closed the door. “Tell me exactly what time you called.”

“Before breakfast. About eight.”

…left very early this morning for a six-day trip…What did that mean? Five? “Tell me what you said in your message. Exactly.”

“Oh, I was careful. I told him that I didn’t want his business anymore, and that I was sure he knew why, that I hoped he would avoid unpleasantness and never try to contact me again or use my name in a business context. I’m sure he got the message.”

“Nothing else?”

“I told you, I was careful. I said nothing actionable.”

I ignored that. “You called his home number?”

“Yes.”

“Was it fuzzy, like a tape, or clear, like digital voice mail?”

“A tape, I think. What’s wrong?”

“Honeycutt is the one who ordered Lusk’s death.” She blinked and held her beer with two hands. “He ordered yours, too. You were supposed to go up along with the painting.” She started twisting the bottle. “Honeycutt left for the Seychelles this morning. With any luck, he left before you called and hasn’t heard the message.”

“Honeycutt was…Honeycutt tried to kill me?”

“Yes. I want you to call the airport and find out what flight he was on.”

Her blink rate went up, and her skin colour greyed to pearl.

“Julia, it’s very important that you call the airport and find out what flight he was on.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to change.”

As I stripped and changed, I heard her voice rise and fall and finally harden as she jousted with the airlines. When I emerged, her colour was back.

“The most likely flight was through Lisbon. It left at eight-fifty. He would have had to check in two hours before departure.” She looked at my charcoal silks and black Kenneth Cole shoes. “I don’t understand.”

“When I break into Honeycutt’s house, I don’t intend to be seen. If I am, I don’t want to be remembered. The best way to be invisible, unmemorable, is to blend in.”

“Do my clothes pass muster?”

“You’re staying here.”

“No. He tried to kill me. I have to do something about that. It’s me he’ll be after if he gets that tape.” She flushed, as though suddenly self-conscious. “I know it’ll be dangerous, but I’m a grown-up. I know what I’m getting into. I can handle myself.”

She stood there with her hair in a chubby braid, makeup so perfect you could hardly tell she wore it, smelling faintly of European beer. What did someone like Julia Lyons-Bennet know about danger? She knew martial arts as an art and self-defence as theory. Hers was a world of board rooms and galleries, auction houses and banks. She had lived her whole life in civilized enclaves and believed the universe to be an essentially civilized place. Danger to her was just another game that her smarts and good looks and privilege would see her through safely, but danger is not a game. Danger is a casually violent Viking. It doesn’t care about motivation or intention or explanations. When it sits opposite and offers you the cup and dice, you either walk away or play full throttle. Danger, with its well-used axe and huge ham hands, is out to take you for all you’re worth. Luck can work for or against you, but danger loads the dice, it cheats, and when it does you have to pin its hand to the boards with a knife, no hesitation. She wasn’t ruthless enough, she didn’t understand enough.

“He tried to kill me,” she said again.

She was a grown-up. She wanted this. “Come, then. But don’t get in my way. Meanwhile, in my office, through there, there’s a pine cabinet. Key is in the kitchen, hanging below the clock. In the cabinet there’s a satchel. Bring it, please.”

How big was that battery? Small enough to have drained in just twenty-four hours? Honeycutt’s house was laid out cleanly enough. I knew where the den was, I knew where the breakers were. Most people put their alarm boxes somewhere easily accessible. Kitchen, probably, or hallway. There should be time.

I went into the office. Julia was holding the thigh harness and holster. She blushed bright red when she saw me. I put a tape in the answering machine, then switched on the fax machine and dialed.

“That’s your number.”

“Yes. Did you find the satchel?”

She lifted it. I nodded. The phone rang, the machine took it, the fax whined and shrilled and beeped. I dialed again, and again, until I had nearly five minutes’ worth of electronic noncommunication on tape. I slipped the tape and a Sony Walkman into the satchel.

“We should go now. Eight in the evening is the best time for breaking and entering.” Our break-in would have to be traceless if Honeycutt’s suspicions were not to be aroused.

I carried the satchel out to the Saab. We took Highway 280 instead of the interstate.

“Take your jewellery off and put it in the glove compartment. You don’t want to lose an earring at Honeycutt’s and have to go back.” She complied silently.

The road surface was just-laid blacktop and we’d left streetlights behind a mile or two back. The drive was smooth; the night rushed by like water. Everything was black and white. We could have been exploring the bottom of the sea. Julia seemed to have withdrawn into herself.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked after a while.

“Jim was my friend.”

“There’s more to it than that. More than his death on your conscience. Most people would mourn and leave it at that. Look at your life. You have money—not as much as you grew up with, I suspect, but you’re more than comfortable. You’re an art dealer, a corporate art dealer. You don’t even deal with the artists direct, just galleries and auction houses and agents. Yet you have studied at least one martial art; at some point you took a self-defence course that you regard seriously enough to make changes in your everyday life; you’ve obviously studied defensive driving. Why?”

“To be prepared. For violence.”

Not nearly the whole truth. “And are you?”

She looked at me then. In the backwash of the headlights, her eyes were sheened like a Persian cat’s. “I don’t know.”

There is never any way to know. It happens so fast. A snap of your fingers and the world is different. Most encounters are decided in five or six seconds and if you freeze, you can die. I wasn’t sure there was a way to explain.

“Have you ever been in a situation?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been shocked? I mean had terrible news or seen something awful happen right in front of you?”

“Yes.”

There was pain in that answer. “That’s how it feels when everything goes wrong. It’s as though someone with a knife tried to slice your mind free of your body and everything just automatically starts shutting down. Surprise, shock, whatever you want to call it. The trick to surviving is to believe what your body is telling you, instantly, and then act. Don’t stop and think. There simply isn’t time. In the first split second, getting moving, reacting, is what counts.” She was nodding, and I knew she wanted to understand but I didn’t think she did. “Put your hand palm down on my thigh.”

To her credit, after a barely perceptible hesitation, she started to lay her hand on my thigh. Without looking at her, without giving her a hint of what I was about to do, I slapped it, hard.

She whipped the hand away, incredulous.

“Your first reaction is to pull away, and glare, but imagine if I really meant it. You can’t afford to stop and wonder at it, to try work out why, you just have to accept it and take steps to make sure I’m not going to be in any state to do it again.” She sucked at the back of her hand. Her breasts were rising and falling, faster and faster. Now she was angry. Adrenalin. “That slap hurt but it won’t leave a bruise. If I’d given you a black eye that would have hurt, but no permanent damage. A two-by-four across the ribs might crack a few but you would still be able to run or hit someone. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Pain is just pain. It’s a message. You don’t have to listen. Sometimes you can’t afford to listen.”

“The Nike school of martial arts. Just Do It.” Her face was perfectly smooth, unreadable, but then she huffed down her nose, half amusement, half cynicism. “Nike was the winged goddess of victory. How appropriate.”

“We hope.”

“Are you expecting trouble?”

“Not particularly.”

We were driving through Smyrna now. I pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall. “Time to apply some camouflage.”

We walked to a party store, where I bought two bunches of Mylar balloons, then to a wine shop. “What champagne do you like?”

“Why ask me?”

“I could buy something cheap and throw it away, or get something nice and you could drink it afterwards. It’s a legitimate expense, so you’ll end up paying, whichever way.”

She chose a Mumm’s brut. I paid and we bobbed with the bottle and balloons along to a pharmacy. I asked the pharmacist for latex gloves. He gave me, the bottle and Julia a knowing look. Julia blushed very, very slightly, and lifted her chin. She moved like a cheetah as we left.

We put the balloons in the backseat and draped my jacket over them so they wouldn’t float about.

“In a perfect world, how would you hit that pharmacist?”

“Jern,” she said without hesitation. Palm strike. “Right to the nose.”

I like a woman who knows her own mind.

We left the lights of Smyrna behind and once again were whipping through the dark, the Saab following the white line like a tracking dog. The night was alive with scents: jet fuel from Dobbins Air Force Base just over the rise, fading heat of blacktop, the musk of Julia’s hair. There was a sharp, smoky undertone to her scent now; adrenalin was pumping and she was beginning to tense up. My muscles were loose and warm and my heartbeat steady and strong.

“Almost there. Get some gloves on.”

She shook out the gloves and her breathing quickened as the faint aromas of talc and latex filled the car. The sense of smell is the most primitive of all, wired directly into the crocodile brain that knows only the basic urges of sex and survival. It conditions very quickly.

I steered with one hand, punched Honeycutt’s home number into my phone with the other. It rang until the machine picked up. I hung up. No one home, or at least no one was answering the phone. And then we were there, pulling into the driveway, crunching over the gravel. It looked smaller without all the people milling about on the lawn and dim light showing only from the kitchen and one upstairs room. I turned off the car, snapped on gloves, turned to Julia.

“Look happy, in case there are observers.”

She carried one bunch of balloons and the champagne. I had the other bunch in one hand, satchel over my shoulder. I looked around, up at the windows, at the door, as if trying to work out if this was the right address for the party. No neighbours’ lights were flicking on.

The entryway had two steps and was lit with soft yellow, two locks, both at waist height. He had made it very easy.

“Keep close.” The lock gun’s rubber-sheathed handle was slippery against the latex gloves. I had to steady it against my ribs. Using Julia’s body as a shield, I shoved the prongs into the first lock.

“Pretend to ring the bell.” The lock clunked, I moved to the second. “Pretend again.” Julia obliged. The second lock thunked back. “When I open the door, follow me in, and smile, just in case. I’ll disable the alarm. You push the door to, and stay just inside. Be very, very quiet.”

I looked at my watch, pushed the door open silently, and stepped inside. The air was cool; he hadn’t even turned the air-conditioning down. I listened for five seconds. Apart from the preliminary warning beep-beep-beep of the alarm, there was nothing except the distant hum of air-conditioning and faint burble of the aquarium. In the light of the entryway, the fish glided ghostly and golden. I put my finger to my lips and pointed at the floor. Julia nodded. I trod softly to the wall by the kitchen where the alarm box sat at chin height. Ten seconds down, twenty to go. I pulled out two lengths of black-jacketed wire, one with crocodile clips, the other with soft-tack connectors. I popped the lid off the box, took one look, clipped on one wire, cut another. The beeping stopped. I looked at my watch. Seventeen seconds. I ran up the beautifully carpeted, silent steps to the guest bedroom, opened the closet door, and opened two breakers. The air-conditioning stopped. If I had done this wrong, I only had eight seconds to find out and cut the phone lines.

From the top of the stairs I saw a faint, very faint light from the aquarium. No noise of bubbles. I relaxed. The battery was almost drained, which meant the alarm system wasn’t getting any power at all. Terrible security.

I padded downstairs, put the screwdriver, wire clippers and extra wire back in the satchel, hung the box cover back on, but loosely, and beckoned to Julia.

The kitchen was clean and empty and shadowy beyond the single dim lamp. A Sony answerphone blinked greenly from a countertop. I flipped up the lid, popped out the tape, and handed it to Julia. She opened her mouth. I put my finger to my lips, then took out the Walkman, and gestured for her to use it to listen to the tape. She nodded. I pointed to myself and the doorway, to her and the floor. She nodded again.

A quick check around the ground floor behind wall hangings, in desk drawers turned up no safe, no cache of interesting papers. I hadn’t expected it to, but it was always best to be certain.

Back in the kitchen, Julia was tugging the earphones out and giving me the thumbs-up. I put one plug in my ear, played the tape back. Some man talking about the lawn; another leaving a message to call Harry; then Julia; then his sister. I wound it back to the very last phrase from Harry, then played it again, timing Julia’s message. I rewound back to Harry and stopped it. I pulled my tape, connector, and a piece of paper from the satchel, scribbled, Record my tape onto his for exactly two minutes and twenty seconds. Listen to check. Wind tape to end of current messages, put back in machine. She had to hold the note up to the light coming through the windows to read it properly. She nodded. I pointed at myself then at the stairs and before I’d finished she rolled her eyes, pointed at herself then at the floor. My turn to nod.

I ran up lightly, listened at the foot of the second flight. Nothing. What I wanted was the inner sanctum, the room where Honeycutt and his cronies had gathered Saturday night. It had to be up there.

The third floor was very dark. A short hallway and four doors. I opened the first. Cold, hard floor, scents of soap and toilet cleaner: bathroom. The second led to a dark space with the empty feel and dead air of a guest room. The next was a storage closet. Then scents of leather, very faint expensive perfume; thick carpet underfoot; utterly dark. I stepped inside, pulled the door to behind me, and Move! shouted my crocodile brain, just as my skin registered the warmth of a body standing to one side, the light swirl of air that was another stepping towards me.

It unfolded like a stop-motion film of a blooming rose: bright, beautiful and blindingly fast. And I wanted to laugh as I ducked and lunged; wanted to sing as I sank my fist wrist deep in an abdomen, whipped an elbow up, up, through a fragile jawbone, slid to the side of a thrusting arm and took it, turning it, levering it, letting the body follow in an ungraceful arc. My heart was a tireless pump, arteries and airways wide. I was unstoppable, lost in the joy of muscle and bone and breath. Axe kick to the central line of the huddled mass on the floor; disappointment at the sad splintering of ribs and not the hard crack of spine. Mewl and haul of body trying to sit; step and slam, hammer fist smearing the bone of his cheek. Latex slipping on sweat. Body under my hands folding to the floor, not moving. Nothing moving but me, feeling vast and brilliant with strength, immeasurable and immortal.

A bellow from downstairs and the world snapped and reformed and I was running, running, taking the steps three at a time, four, and a woman was standing in the hall, bathed in the yellow entry light because the door was wide open. Her head was back and her eyes huge. A woman. Julia.

“I hit someone.”

“Yes.” I stopped four feet away.

She shook her hand at her side, lifted it, looked at it. “I hit him. He came down the stairs and I hit him. I really hit him. I’ve spent years wondering if I could, wondering what I’d do if it happened to me, if I’d been the one in front of that theatre….” She looked at her hand again, fascinated. “I hit him, and he ran away.”

The realization of what she had done, the exhilaration of her own strength rushed into her, like champagne rushing to fill lead crystal. She shimmered with it, she fizzed. I wanted to lift her in both hands, drink her down, drain her, feel the foam inside me, curling around heart, lungs, stomach.

I stepped closer. She lifted her chin. Closer still.

“Wolf eyes,” she whispered, and I could feel her breath on my throat, “so pale and hungry.”

A car roared into life behind the house and headlights sliced through the window and doorway, then away and towards the road. She turned slowly, blinking in their light, their undeniably real light, and the exaltation faded. My left wrist ached slightly and breath was harsh in my throat. Just under the ribs on my left side, my shirt was cut and wet.

“The tape?”

She shook her head.

“Finish it.”

I ran back up the steps. The den door was open. I closed the curtains and found the light switch: thick green carpet; two men, both in dark clothes, one still holding his stained knife; a desk, under which lay the other knife and on top of which sat a computer, screen blank and dead. A drawer hung broken and empty from the middle. I knelt, felt for a pulse in the first body, found it. The second one was breathing audibly so I didn’t bother. I checked them over. Gloves, clothes with brand labels cut out. In one jacket pocket a small sheaf of papers covered in strange-shaped letters. I tucked them inside my own jacket to examine later. No scars or other identifying marks. Both knives were broad-bladed, serrated on the upper edge, black composite handle: standard manufacture, available in any catalogue. I wiped the thin thread of my blood from the blade still in one man’s hand.

Something bleeped, and bleeped again. The computer. A red light on the minitower flickered. I felt around for the screen switch and pushed. The cursor blinked by the c: prompt and the cheery message Reformatting complete. Hoping it didn’t mean what I thought it meant, I tapped in dir /p. Nothing. All gone, wiped in the hard drive reformat. No sign of any diskettes.

I searched the rest of the room quickly but methodically. No safe. Filing cabinets full of personal papers, each hanging file carefully labelled in blue ink, presumably by Honeycutt. Two hanging files labelled BANK and INVESTMENTS were empty. Honeycutt’s doing, or the man who got away? I pulled off the first one’s gloves, dabbed his hand on the arm of a chair upholstered in leather, put the glove back on. Took off the gloves of the second man, pressed his hands, one at a time, against the broken drawer.

The door creaked. I whirled. Julia, swaying. “Are they…?”

“No.”

She watched in silence as I put his gloves back on. “The tape’s clean.”

“Back in the machine?”

“Yes.”

I finished and stood. “Get the Walkman, the balloons and champagne, and wait by the door.” She straightened. Her march down the hall was wooden but not wobbly. She’d make it.

I turned the light off and stood at the top of the steps. When she was by the door, balloons bobbing, I went back into the spare room and reconnected the battery to the alarm, checked my watch, then closed the breakers and ran downstairs. Six seconds. I stripped the wires from the alarm box, clipped the cover back on, accepted the Walkman from Julia and put everything back in the satchel. Nineteen seconds. “Out,” I said. She stood there, balloons bobbing, as I closed the door behind us and relocked it. Twenty-seven seconds. Free and clear, with no sign of our passage but the two unconscious men in the third-floor study.

She was shaking by the time we got to the car. I opened her door, gave her the balloons. “Hold on to those.” I pulled my jacket from the backseat and settled it over her shoulders.

I drove for about five miles. She was still shaking, though not as badly. One eye on the road, I handed her the satchel. “Use something in here to burst the balloons.” She looked at me as though I were crazy. “It will be easier to dispose of them.” And it would give her something to do. “There’s a brown paper grocery bag in there, too. When you’re done with the balloons, put them in it.”

It took her a while.

“Now your gloves. Carefully.”

She complied, peeling the left right down to the fingertips, then using the left to peel down the right, and dumping the whole lot into the bag. She flexed her bare hands, studied them. Graceful, clean hands. Made for holding, not hitting. After a while, she said, “How about you?”

“One more thing to do first.”

I pulled up at a phone box. Dialed 911. When they asked whether I wanted fire, police, or ambulance, I just said, “4731 Fallgood Road, Marietta,” and hung up.

Back in the car, I stripped off my gloves and dropped them in the paper sack. We drove in silence for a while. The wet patch on my shirt was spreading and with it a cold ache.

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know.”

“It might be important.”

“I’m sure it is, to them. Not to you. You have the information you wanted. You know who ordered Lusk killed. You know you didn’t make a mistake brokering the painting. Now that we’ve fixed the phone tape, no one knows you know.”

Her face was pale and set. “Can you find out who they were?”

“It’s over, Julia. Done.”

“Can you?”

She looked small and fragile and alone. I wanted to take her hand, tell her everything would be all right, that no one would ever hurt her again because I would track them all down, tie up the loose ends, make the world safe. But there is no perfect safety. “Jim Lusk is dead. He’ll stay dead whatever you do. You are not to blame. The police will take it from here. Let it go.”

She looked at me as though from a great distance, then turned away.

She stared out of the window all the way back. When I pulled up outside her house, she thanked me nicely, smiled at me gently and without depth, and said she would be by to pick her car up in the morning. Just as though we had been carpooling from the PTA meeting. Partially shock, partially a need to distance herself from blood, and burglary, and attacks by strange men dressed in dark clothes. I would have gone in with her, made her something hot and sweet to drink, but I belonged to that world she didn’t want to think about right now, not in her nice little house in Virginia Highlands with roses climbing up the trellis.

I drove myself and the bottle of Mumm’s champagne back to Lake Claire. I put it in the pantry, not the fridge. I had a feeling it would be a long time before I drank it.

The knife wound was not too bad, a shallow four-inch gash across a lower rib. I cleaned it, pulled the edges together with butterfly Band-Aids, covered it with gauze, then started wrapping a crepe bandage round my torso. If it hadn’t crusted over by the morning, I’d get it seen to. The emergency room staff would believe the fake name and a story about a mad, jealous husband with a steak knife, and a terrified wife who didn’t want to face the truth and call the police. Happened all the time. As usual, the bandage finished in the small of my back, where I couldn’t reach to pin it. I had to fold it back and pin it at my right side.

I swallowed some ibuprofen and broad-spectrum antibiotics, then took the papers from Honeycutt’s house into my office. They were stained with my blood but in clear halogen light their nature was plain: blackmail notes. They were photocopies of messages made by cutting out words and phrases from magazines, with careful annotations—in the same blue ink, the same handwriting, I’d seen on Honeycutt’s files—in the top right hand corner: date, time, and method of arrival. All but one had come by U. S. mail.

The first was from March last year. It was straightforward:

Interesting. No problem saying “I.” No problem with grammar: the colon had actually been written in using a black marker. Obviously not stupid: a photocopy meant no saliva, no magazine subscriptions to trace.

I assumed whoever it was had called. The next one was dated May last year:

The next dated just a week later:

What had Honeycutt tried? Whatever it was, the blackmailer didn’t seem too perturbed. They obviously thought of themself as rational, reasonable, and aimed to keep Honeycutt controlled by simultaneously reassuring him and laying down simple rules. The next note was two words:

I had a sudden flash of a networking cynic. Grip and grin. Be nice. Say the right thing….

After that, the notes came regularly, every month; identical copies of the Same place, same method, same amount note, followed a week later by the Thank you. Until January.

January, just when Honeycutt had shown interest in the Friedrich. Say two weeks to track down someone to commission the fake, another few to paint it…. But obviously no outward complaint from Honeycutt; the usual Thank you note followed on schedule. More Same place notes followed by more Thank yous. Until an April date two days after Lusk’s death.

I would love to have listened in on that one. The blackmailer obviously didn’t care for Honeycutt’s creative solution to the rate hike, and seemed to understand that if the drug cartel found out about Honeycutt’s playing both ends against the middle, the source of extorted cash would dry up. You can’t blackmail a corpse.

That was the last note. I put them all back in order and read through them again. A smart, cynical blackmailer, apparently in it for the long haul and willing to play by clear rules. Someone who liked rules and order, liked to plan ahead but could act swiftly. What would you have done if I hadn’t cleaned up for you? But it had been Honeycutt who had ordered the burn, so what had been taken care of?

The ibuprofen wasn’t working. My ribs flared every time I moved. I put the notes in the folder labelled LYONS-BENNET, found some codeine in the bathroom, and took myself off to the bedroom of raspberry and Viking gold.