Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (14 page)

‘Paloma, let’s play a game. I’m thinking of either night or day. I want you to tell me which. If you are correct, I leave and you never see me again.’

‘That’s easy. I have the touch.’

~

‘I never wanted to kill you,’ Cory said. His words came with enough insouciance for Jem to recognise the lie. The implication was clear: she was in immediate danger. Yet, to her surprise, she did not collapse. ‘I only want information.’

‘I’ll tell you everything. But I need to use the toilet.’

‘Be my guest.’

There was a falling line of red on Cory’s upper lip.

‘Your nose is bleeding,’ she said.

Cory produced a handkerchief and pressed his nostril. Then he walked to the wide fireplace, took a match from the mantel, flicked it alight, and put it to the lattice of paper and wood. Jem paused in the doorway.

‘I heard,’ she said, ‘about Saskia’s apartment.’

‘One is never too old to play with matches,’ he replied, not turning. ‘The bathroom is down the hall.’

~

Once upon a time, a woman called Catherine had consented to marry Cory over pan-fried bread in a field outside Jesup, Georgia. The ring – the very ring whose undeclared mass had almost ended his mission – had been warmed by his anxious hands that day. Her fingertips were cool as he slid it on. ‘Yes,’ said the soldier’s daughter.

Cory smiled.

Now, in 1947, he rose from the prostitute’s bed and walked towards the door of the attic. Paloma seemed to drift alongside him. Her footsteps were soundless. She stopped in the neon glow beneath the skylight. She was changing colours.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s raining again.’

They stopped and looked at the veins of water on the window. Cory heard the glug-glug of filling gutters. For South America, this was subtle rain.

He looked at her. The neon light gave her no shadow and her quicksilver eyes were translucent opals and her mouth had a lunar shimmer like water whirling
colgada
into a drain. As Cory reached for her shoulder, the apparition disappeared. His eyes refocused on the bed.

Paloma had turned and kicked when Cory shot her. Her blood had slicked the pillow and the changing screen. Some feathers still fell.

‘I am so sorry. Not my decision.’

Haunted, young Cory closed the door.

~

Water poured from the basin onto Jem’s bare feet. She closed the tap and waited for the overflow to swallow the excess. Then she immersed her hands to the wrists. The plates of her nails went red. She brought a handful of wetness to her face and enjoyed its cool bite. Then she twisted her skirt clockwise and unfastened the rivets on her hip. There was comfort, almost, in the familiar blood. She inserted the tampon and dropped the applicator into the toilet bowl, covering it with a few wads of paper. As she did so, she looked at the bathroom door. She could almost hear, deep beyond it, the plucked prongs of a music box. It scared her beyond Cory’s coldest promises.

In the larger mirror above the sink, her eyes seemed narrow. They became hawkish.

So she was a con artist. She had conned Saskia. She had even conned Danny. Now her mark was Cory. With the last of the water, she finger-combed her hair with her left hand.

~

In the lounge, where the fire crackled drily, Cory had slouched in the winged armchair. His eyes moved under their lids. Murmured words were caught in bubbles of reddish spit.

‘Paloma,’ he whispered. ‘Where is it?’ He licked his lips. ‘You
know
what. The Cullinan Zero.’ He coughed. ‘Tell me.’ His fingertips fluttered and Jem saw the discarded cane twitch. ‘I have Jem.’

She closed the door. The hallway was quiet and empty. This would be like her escape from the apartment in Berlin, easy doing it. She crept down the hallway and touched the keypad. A heartbeat throbbed in her palm. If only she could impart her desperation to the door, beg it to unlock. She remembered Cory’s lips on hers. Death as a suitor whose carriage kindly stopped. Death as Saskia, with full, relaxed lips, wanting her. Her short hair. Yes, Jem had shorn Saskia lock by lock. Wind had played with the clumps of hair.

Ssssss
. Saskia.

Calm as, Jem,
she thought.
Arctic effing calm.

She looked at the door. Her attention snapped to Cory’s reflection in the cold, black finish and she sighed, sagged against the wood.

Chapter Seventeen

Jem made fists and turned towards him. She had never been so scared and ready to fight. She considered the idea that she was standing in the place she would die.

‘I have to go on alone,’ he said, into the distance, perhaps into the reflected world. A ruby tear squeezed from his eye as he smiled.

Con him.

‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you bleeding?’

‘Old wounds reopening, I guess.’

Cory moved closer. One shoulder touched the wall. His expression was regretful as he lifted the cane. With an organic, bloating action, it became a sword.

‘
Relaje
,
Paloma
,’ he said.

‘I have a question.’ If Cory was sleepwalking, the girl in his dream – Paloma – might have been his love, to judge by the hope in his eyes. ‘Who is Paloma? Who am I?’

‘Two things, can happen now. Truthfully, I don’t know which. Either I put this sword through your heart or I let you live. From the perspective of five years hence, or fifty, one of those things is history. Perhaps you died here. Perhaps you died a great-grandmother. I could set the event in stone. I could collapse the wave. But I want you to understand that it isn’t really me making the decisions. I’m thinking of night or day. If you can guess which, you will leave and I will never see you again.’

Her intellect braced for bodily revolt – tears, a moan, a whisper upon his mercy – but the muscles held. Her eyes did not leave his, though Cory still stared into the deep distance behind her, into the door. She understood that she had been dead the moment the shadows in her train compartment had gathered to form this man.

‘Day,’ she said, surprised by her confidence.

Only his bloodshot eyes moved. Changes crossed his face like the rushing pages of a book. The sword edge shifted.

Arctic
.

‘Do you know what we call people like you where I come from?’ He smiled. There was blood on his teeth. ‘
Archaeology
.’

‘Archaeology.’

‘Never follow me. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘Find your brother and return to England.’

‘I–’

Cool as.

‘–understand.’

‘Do you? Do you really?’

Cory let the sword drop. It transformed into a cane and he tipped his weight upon it like the old man he could be. Jem watched him tap a number on the keypad. Bolts relaxed. He inverted his collar and turned to Jem once more, looked at her, and walked into the snow.

~

Young Cory woke to a wintry Saturday in Buenos Aires. He breakfasted in a café, asked to use their candlestick telephone, and was put through to the Buenos Aires
Herald
. After five minutes’ conversation, he checked his pocket watch. ‘Hello? Repeat that, please.’ He paused. ‘Yes, it must run in the evening edition in the
exact
form I have given you. Do you understand?’

Cory hung up. He slipped a banknote under the telephone and left. He hesitated on the porch and fitted his hat. From where he stood, the grass of the Plaza de Mayo was blotchy with shade. Cory, both hands on his cane, turned to the Casa Rosada. In his first week here, a bar-top philosopher had told him that
la Casa
was pink because it represented a fusion of the red and white flags of the opposing political parties extant during its construction. This explanation was countered by a snort from the man’s older companion, who went on to give his version: gouts of cow blood mixed into the paint helped protect the palace from the humidity.

Cory respected a government honest enough to paint the house of its executive in blood.

His two-colour brogues swished at the tough grass as he crossed the plaza. On the Avenida de Mayo, he found the gates of
el subte
. His cane clicked down the stairs.

~

Jem stepped onto the porch. The snow was an inch deep. She approached the ironwork gate at the front of the concrete forecourt. There was a CCTV camera high on the wall. She pushed through.

Cars were parked either side of the boulevard. Nothing moved. No traffic drove through the slush. No Cory. She walked to the end of the block and found a yellow telephone box. She pushed a euro through the coin slot and dialled a number.

‘Well, it’s me.’

‘Good evening, Jem.’

‘He let me go. I don’t know why. Can you call me back?’

‘Wait a moment, please. There are twenty-nine mobile phones within fifty metres of your location. Nearly all of them are to be found within houses. However, one is near the front wall of the empty lot to your east.’

‘Somebody dropped it?’

‘Probably.’

Jem smiled at her mental picture of Ego, tucked away within
Resources and Parsing
, lonely in a corner of the library on Fasanenstrasse. The little bookmark that could.

She hung up and wandered towards the wreck of a petrol station on the windy side of the street. Her feet scuffed. She was cold and numb, and nausea was beginning to swill in her empty belly. It was a once-removed sensation. Her mind was relatively clear.

A glow: greenish. Jem approached and saw the lost mobile.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me. How are you? Have you eaten? Are you cold?’

‘Fine, no, yes.’

‘Keep moving.’

‘Where?’

‘South, towards the intersection.’

Jem began to walk. ‘What’s south? Is this south?’

‘Yes.’

‘I feel sick.’

‘It’s Cory’s saliva.’

‘What?’

‘Coming up is a right turn onto Karl Marx Strasser. Please take it. Do you see a silver Volkswagen Golf? It should have a large blue logo along one side that reads interRENT. It will be parked near a hotel called the Gasthaus Edelweiss.’

‘Wait a minute. What do you mean, Cory’s saliva? Did he put a drug in his mouth and pass it to me?’

‘Do you see the car?’

‘Answer my question.’

The smallest of pauses. Jem kneaded her stomach.

‘Cory’s blood contains experimental nanoparticles in suspension. They are subject to his conscious control. The technology was developed by a group of industrialists building upon the work of a cancelled US military project. Dubbed ‘intelligent core’ or ‘I-Core’, it is known colloquially as ‘ichor’. Leaked documents suggest that the I-Core nanoparticles can build ad hoc structures within the host’s body, including electromagnetic transmitter-receivers, and chemical factories. Primarily, the nanoparticles function as a medical adjunct. Secondly, they optimise performance.’

‘Ichor, right.’ She steadied herself against a thin tree and saw the Gasthaus Edelweiss. It was dark but for a porch light near its sign. ‘Does Saskia have ichor?’

‘No.’

‘I see the car.’

‘Reach under the front bumper and retrieve a magnetised box. It contains a key. Tell me when you have entered the car.’

The interior of the Golf was chill. She sat on the passenger side, feeling stupid, one seat away from where she needed to be. She remembered the green eyes of a German woman in a café who had known nothing of an English stranger but who had, nonetheless, offered help in the recovery of a stolen passport. A series of older memories covered this one like dealt cards: Wolfgang smoking in bed; Wolfgang planning to turn Robin Hood and steal from the rich, which was to say Saskia Dorfer, to give to the poor, which was to say Wolfgang and Jem.

Jem watched her breath grey the windscreen.

Never follow me. Understand?

‘He asked about a ‘Cullinan Zero’. What did he mean?’

‘Just a moment. The term refers to a mythical counterpart to the Cullinan diamond, which is the world’s largest rough gem-quality diamond. The first polished gem made from the diamond was called the Cullinan I, or the Great Star of Africa, and was presented to King Edward VII in 1905 on his sixty-fourth birthday. The Cullinan II was a smaller cut from the remainder, the Cullinan III smaller still, and so on, until we reach the Cullinan IX. Rumours of a larger diamond began to circulate after the geologist who first examined the uncut Cullinan indicated that it was likely to comprise less than half of a larger, distorted octahedral crystal. However, the existence of the so-called ‘Cullinan Zero’ has never been independently established.’

Jem tried to put this into focus. ‘So he thinks I’ve stolen a diamond?’

‘Or know its whereabouts.’

‘Do you think Saskia knew?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What
do
you know?’

‘Saskia may still be alive.’

Jem looked at the driver’s seat and felt the absence of her once lover.

‘Are you serious?’

‘You don’t need to believe me. Not yet.’

She looked for Cory on the white, blank street.

‘What if he let me leave, knowing I’d contact you? What if he’s watching me?’

Slowly, she turned to the back seat.

It was empty.

‘Ego?’ she continued. ‘What do you think?’

‘Jem, press the red button next to the satellite navigation device. This will connect you to a response specialist. Pretend that you’ve lost your swipe card. Try a Latvian accent. He or she will give a code that you must enter into the navigation device. This will start the car.’

Chapter Eighteen

Near Regensburg

Hrafn Óskarson lifted the peak of his yellow baseball cap and looked at the wall of the school’s assembly room. On it, Little Red Riding Hood fled through a paper forest. Hrafn turned away from the display and crossed the hall. He wondered why the memories of his childhood in Iceland quickened as he entered middle age. He could remember a morning in his tenth year when he and his younger brother Ragnar had raced to their aunt’s farm near Akureyri hoping to dissuade her from making their beloved rabbits into gloves. She had laughed at their naïvety, at the last of their childhood. This was not news. The rabbits had been born for gloves. Ragnar had cried all the long trip home while Hrafn had framed the experience as his first dose of adult medicine. Children petted rabbits; men wore rabbit gloves.