French Kiss, page 48
And down into the water she dropped, the salt shooting up her nostrils, and she was back struggling to stay alive. The intense cold sapped her strength. But now she was tiring, not only physically, but emotionally as well. The panic, combined with the relief of being held—however painfully—in the open air, instead of underwater, had weakened her resolve.
Now, she realized, appalled, he was keeping his hold on her hair, not just to keep her under, but to stop her from sinking too far down.
Drop dead, she had told him, and meant it. Now the thought occurred to her that if he dropped dead she would, without sufficient strength to save herself, sink like a stone into the blackness below her. Absurd as the notion was, it frightened her, which should have given her an inkling as to the desperateness of her plight.
Parkes, an experienced fisherman, sensed that she was at the point of breaking. He drew her up for one ragged gasp of air, before plunging her back into the water.
Then he hauled her back into the boat and ripped off her blindfold, stared into her face.
Diana blinked. She saw a hatchet-faced man in his midforties with the lined, leather face of the outdoorsman. He had prematurely silver hair, which he wore as long as a rock star’s, and a close-cropped, salt-and-pepper beard. She was sure she had never seen him before.
“Welcome to the real world,” he said.
She had already begun to shiver, not only from the cold, but from shock as well.
Parkes nodded. “Now,” he said, “we’re getting somewhere.”
“I’m cold.” She had trouble speaking, her teeth were chattering so hard.
“Who are you?”
She told him her name.
He grunted, pulling hard on her leash, so that she was jerked up and, stumbling, hurled against the railing. He came at her, and she knew he was going to throw her over the side again.
Staring down into the water, she knew she could not bear another moment underwater. She turned, and told him everything—who she was, that she had been on assignment for Seve via Brad Wolff at DEA, that she had discovered the dual identity of Arnold Toth/Marcus Gable. It did not seem like such a terrible thing to do. It was more like a lump of poison she was ready to spit out.
But when she was done, a wave of self-disgust swept over her, and she collapsed, sliding down the railing into a heap. She began to cry, in anger and humiliation, feeling that she had betrayed everything she had ever held in importance.
As for Parkes, he had already turned away. Inside the cabin he was dialing a number on a portable phone.
Diana stared at his back. At that moment the only thing she hated more than herself was Reed Parkes. And it was that hate that gave strength to her exhausted mind and body.
In one motion she rose and hurled herself on top of him. He must have felt her coming, because at the last instant he had begun to turn, and so he hit the deck with his shoulder, not his chin.
Even so, Diana had struck him across the throat before he was fully facing her. He kicked, striking her just above the kidneys, but there was no force behind the blow, and she brought her knee down, her full weight behind it. His ribs gave way, breaking through muscle and skin.
“Bitch!” Parkes screamed at her.
Which was when she slammed the edge of her hand into his throat with such force she broke his windpipe. She watched, panting and shaking all at once with the adrenaline rushing through her, as he died. And it was only after the light faded from his eyes that she became aware of the enormity of what she had done.
Reed Parkes—the only lead—was now literally a dead end. He would never be able to tell her who he really was, or what his involvement in the drug pipeline had been. She had forgotten one of the cardinal rules of any red-zone situation—leave your emotions at home.
Parkes had broken her all right—in more ways than he would ever know. Because of him she had ceased to be an officer of the law. At last she understood what Dominic’s death had done to Seve. Parkes had caused her to become, as Seve had, an agent no longer bound by the law. But the law was sacred, so what did that make her? She did not know. She was only aware that she was now a prisoner of what she had done here. That utter despair that comes only when the human soul is in utter eclipse took hold of her, and she began to shake as if with a high fever.
It was then that she saw the red LED display on the overturned portable telephone unit. Ten sparks of light in the shadows of the cabin. Runes glowing in the darkness.
She crawled over, and stared down at the number that Reed Parkes had dialed.
M. Mabuse sat inside the smoky interior of Desiropolis. He was drinking whiskey, staring at the wall of sound the club had erected all around him.
The atmosphere of Desiropolis was self-consciously straight out of film noir. Dark, thick-bladed fans in front of white flood lights turned the air as grainy and colorless as black-and-white cinema from the forties.
Women in short skirts, Robin Hood hats perched atop sinuously elaborate hairdos, paraded legs encased in seamed stockings. Young men in balloon-legged trousers vied with others in American-style baseball jackets for their attention. Current rock music caused hearts to beat faster.
But this prodigious wall of sound was, to M. Mabuse, like white noise, a screen on which to view the noisome remains of his past. When he had returned from what had once been his village, he had thought of nothing save what Van Ngoc’s daughter, Luong, had done to him. He had spat on her, carving out the dead eyes that had sentenced him, the tongue that had convicted him, but he had been unable to break her hold over him. Yet her curse remained intact: an indictment from the collective souls of his people—the tens of thousands who had died, so many because of him. Her curse told him that they knew of his perfidy, and were damning him because of it.
He was now, he knew, like Mahagiri, condemned for his sins to exist outside of samsara, the wheel of life, forever forbidden from being reincarnated.
He was damned to the one thousand hells of the Muy Puan. He was the son of no woman, he would be the sire of no progeny. He was already nonexistent. All that remained was to die.
And yet. And yet, he burned with a fire not recognizable to man. He was aflame with the lust of retribution. His eyes, not Luong’s, were gouged-out pits wherein dwelled the restless, tormented souls that plagued him. His tongue, not Luong’s, crawled with the unspoken epithets of innocents fried in the caldron of the war.
Only in his imprisonment was he visited by angels who, in the utter blackness of the pit, could tolerate his presence. Only in these sublime moments of ecstasy when within merged with without, when past-present-future were fused by the flux of his mind, did he see a reason to keep his life intact.
He had thought that by giving himself up to the enemy, he could break Luong’s curse. If he could not kill himself, let the enemy do it.
But he found to his dismay that he no longer knew who the enemy was. Was it North Vietnam or South? His mind refused to remember what had been, or even to speculate about what was now. And that was when it occurred to M. Mabuse that he could give himself over to either camp, and it would be the same. They were both the enemy.
Passionate bright young things. Takes him away to war—don’t fake it, sang a female voice over the charismatic clangor of massed guitars. A bass line loud enough to jar loose fillings wrapped itself around the room. You’ll love Aladdin Sane.
The lights at Desiropolis possessed great power. They broke down the barriers between reality and fiction. If you danced there, you did so in order to imagine yourself in another time, another place. If you came there at all, it was because the past held out promise as well as secrets.
M. Mabuse’s interrogator, who had, over the months, become Kama-Mara, Love and Death, the magician of Delusion, had interpreted his dream concerning the serpent, though he could not remember telling Kama-Mara that he had dreamed it.
“The serpent,” Kama-Mara had said, “did not cleanse your soul. The serpent is an illusion, but your sins are not. Now you expect me to say that if you tell me everything I want to know, I will cleanse your soul. But I will not lie to you. You and I have become too intimate for that. Have you ever had such a close friend as I am? Someone on whom you can place all your trust? Someone who will care for you, who will never betray you no matter what he learns about you? The truth is, no one can cleanse your soul. You are beyond redemption.”
Motor sensational, Paris or maybe hell—waiting.
“But I can offer you something that no one else will,” Kama-Mara had said. “I can offer you release. I can offer you the end.”
Clutches of sad remains, waits for Aladdin Sane.
Cinema would call for a fade-out here, but M. Mabuse was in no such privileged position. His life, an endless ribbon of smoking flesh and fused glass, went on and on.
The women who came to Desiropolis all wanted something extreme. They were creatures who, it seemed, existed only during the glitter of night. As they were whirled across the dance floor by their self-involved escorts, their faces slipped into a glassy-eyed ecstasy so mindless it turned M. Mabuse’s curiosity into despair. But, of course, this was why he came here. Because all hope had been bred out of its habitues by the modern world, he felt, if not comfortable, at least at home here.
The cinematic light revealed previously dark corners of his past; the sinuous movements of the dancers, more erotic than kinetic, exposed sudden, startling nuances.
He could say that in all probability he had come to love Kama-Mara, if one expanded the definition of love to include absolute dependency.
In the black hole of the South Vietnamese prison-hell, M. Mabuse had come to master time so that his captors could not break him with the utter solitude that made other prisoners throw themselves against the walls. But, in the end, he had come to cherish the time he spent with his interrogator. He never saw his face, or even his full silhouette. In the minuscule interstice between light and dark afforded him during his sessions with Kama-Mara, M. Mabuse glimpsed only a rare curve, a partial outline at best. All he had to go on, to cling to, eventually, was the voice.
And it was the moment when he realized that the voice was his lifeline that he snuffed it out.
“Your mistake is in contemplating your escape from this camp,” Kama-Mara said. “You assume that you are a prisoner here. But the reality is that it is your own filthy, inert body within which you are imprisoned.”
It was Kama-Mara’s habit to circle M. Mabuse during the interrogation sessions. When he paused, as he often did, behind where M. Mabuse sat naked on an upright cane chair, he clamped M. Mabuse’s shoulders between his fingers. “It is only logical. The body is subject to maiming, to disease, and to death.” As he spoke in this manner, he began to knead M. Mabuse’s flesh. “Your body is impure, and this impurity contaminates your mind until it, too, is impure. To achieve Nirvana you must disgorge your body. The first step on this enlightened path is to empty your mind of all its stored feculence.”
That day—or night, he never knew which, let alone the actual time—M. Mabuse reached upward and back, clamping his hands over Kama-Mara’s face, plunging his thumbs into the soft eyes as he felt his interrogator react.
Slowly, he brought Kama-Mara’s head down to his level while the body jerked and spasmed as if exposed to an electric current. Covered in blood, his hands full of the flesh, he kissed those cool lips.
Then, dressed in his interrogator’s uniform, he walked out of the prison. But, as if in retribution for killing the man he loved or depended on completely (whichever your point of view), his eyes were never the same. Without dark glasses sunlight burned his brain, and spotlights blinded him.
“Forgive me if I’m late.”
M. Mabuse turned his head slightly as the figure slid into a chair at his small table.
“There is nothing to forgive.”
The man, deep in shadow, gave a slight bow with his head. Red and purple light struck him obliquely, delineating his handsome features, his glossy skin, shiny and poreless as wax. “Are you well?”
M. Mabuse stared through the monument to plastic surgery at the Magician, seeing the man as he used to be. “Well enough. And you?”
“Me? I’m doing what I love doing,” the Magician said. “Breaking balls.” He gave the waitress his drink order without asking M. Mabuse if he wanted a refill. “Which is what you should be doing,” he continued when they were alone. “A question has begun to concern me. I keep asking myself why you haven’t killed Christopher Haye yet.”
“I have to find him first.”
“I thought you would have killed him in New York as I ordered. I thought, failing that, you would have killed him in Tourrette. Isn’t that what you indicated to me when you called me from the airport in Nice?”
“Yes. But circumstances changed. He had La Porte à la Nuit.”
“I trust you got it from him.”
“Yes.”
“You could have killed him, then.” Light fell on the Magician’s face as it would upon granite, illuminating sculpted ridges and hollows that under close scrutiny had little to do with natural human anatomy.
M. Mabuse shook his head. “He would have destroyed it had I killed Soutane Sirik or attacked him. We made an exchange.”
“You should have killed him then.”
“I gave my word.”
“Your word?” The Magician’s laugh echoed, bleeding into the rock music, turning it discordant, as unpleasant as the look on his handsome face. “Since when has your word been worth a damn?”
“I question whether he knows anything that could damage us,” M. Mabuse said. “I question whether he should be killed.”
The Magician cocked his head, looking at him quizzically. “Since when is it your place to question what you are ordered to do? I threatened Terry. Maybe that was a mistake—it gave him time to formulate a plan. Certainly your killing Terry before he could tell us where the real Doorway to Night is was a serious miscalculation. But because of these events, we must assume that Christopher Haye has become involved. How much he knows will be of no concern to me once he is dead. I trust that is clear enough for you.”
“I will kill him,” M. Mabuse said. He was sitting stiffly.
“Do that,” the Magician said, downing his drink in one great swallow. “And then get the Prey Dauw away from that idiot Milhaud. Now that you’ve retrieved the long-lost dagger, I want it all.”
“That has been our purpose all along.”
“But it has become so much fun to torture Monsieur Milhaud,” the Magician said. “I had LoGrazie order him to kill Soutane. Don’t you find that funny?” He peered at M. Mabuse’s stony face, then said, “Something happened to you in America. You lost your sense of humor.”
“Milhaud told me to bring the Sirik woman to him. He told me to make it look like she had died—but not to kill her.”
“A charade for my benefit, no doubt,” the Magician said. “I see that he still has a bit of imagination left.”
“I don’t understand,” M. Mabuse said, “why you ordered Milhaud to kill Soutane Sirik when you knew he could not possibly do it.”
The Magician gave an unpleasant laugh. “Like a worm on a hook, I wanted to see him squirm.”
M. Mabuse stirred. “Should I do as he asks?”
The Magician smiled. “Yes,” he said, “and no.” His smile widened into a grin. It was like a tiger baring its teeth at its prey. “Do the faked death as he suggests. Bring Soutane to Milhaud. And then kill her in front of him.”
M. Mabuse was stunned. “That will mean the end of me with Milhaud. He will know that you have ordered this; he will know I have been secretly working for you all the time he has employed me.”
“Oh, yes.” The Magician nodded. “His understanding of how thoroughly I have controlled him is part of what I have planned for him. Before that happens, though, there will be more surprises for him. Milhaud needs to be educated. Morphée is first to die. Then Soutane. Only when everyone he holds dear has been destroyed will the end come.”
“I would have thought that you would want to kill him yourself,” M. Mabuse said.
“What I require from you now,” the Magician said, “is an act of loyalty. Killing Milhaud is it.”
“But Milhaud can still be useful to us,” M. Mabuse said.
“Not anymore.” The Magician rolled his glass between the palms of his hands. “We have suffered something of a setback in the States. That end of the pipeline will have to be reinvented. I am in the process of sealing off loose ends. And Milhaud’s end will be the most entertaining one.”
M. Mabuse watched the Magician weave his way through the crowded club, thinking he had learned to walk with the kind of ominous swagger filmic cowboys employed. He closed his eyes briefly, as if to rest them from having too long stared into a fierce light.
Who’ll love Aladdin Sane
Millions weep a fountain
Just in case of sunrise
Who’ll love Aladdin Sane…
M. Mabuse, watching the dancers leaning on one another’s hips as sad songs drifted like dreams through the loudspeakers, thought again of his brief encounter with Christopher Haye. You could have
killed him. He had meant to kill him, as he had killed his brother. What had stayed him?
Some dark force had trapped him as it had deep in the prison pit in Vietnam. Some savage instinct for survival within himself had responded to a current eddying in the center of Christopher Haye’s eyes. M. Mabuse imagined himself locked there, tried to break away, and failing, surrendered to it.
And when he did, he understood in a moment of revelation so powerful he shuddered, that he was not considering merely the promise of survival.
When he was with Christopher Haye, he had been in the presence of freedom.
“I don’t know,” Seve said over an indifferent dinner at La Coupole, “maybe I’m too stupid, but I didn’t get any of it.”
Soutane, who had been pushing her andouille sausage around her plate, said, “Get what?”
“The art.”
