Chapter 25
Coldwater Point
The hearse came down the coast road at ten to midnight, at a stately twenty miles an hour, with its lamps lit and its engine purring like a very old cat.
It was a long black Cadillac of 1994, with chrome fenders and curtained windows and a plume of black feathers wired to the hood, and the fog parted before it as before the prow of a ship. Marta Szabo drove it herself. She sat bolt upright behind the wheel in a black coat and a black hat with a veil, with her gloved hands at ten and two, and her eyes fixed on the road. She had said nothing for forty minutes. Once she had crossed herself. Once, at a bend, she had murmured a name, very softly, in Hungarian, and Damen, in the back seat, had not asked whose.
He sat beside the coffin.
It lay on a bier in the rear compartment, under a black pall, with a spray of white lilies on the lid. It was a plain oak box with silver handles, empty of everything but a white satin lining, a black ledger, a small walnut music box, and a pillow. He had one hand on the pall. He wore a black suit and a black tie, and a dead man's overcoat, and a pair of Marta's late husband's shoes. In his breast pocket lay a folded paper. In the waistband of his trousers, at the small of his back, under the coat, lay Teddy's Colt. In his boot was the knife. On his left wrist, under the cuff, over the bandage, a purple elastic shone.
He looked at the lilies.
Their scent filled the car, heavy and sweet and funereal, and under it he could smell the sea. They were driving along the edge of the world. The road ran straight and narrow along the top of the headland, between low stone walls, and on his left the ground fell away into a darkness that breathed. He could hear the surf below. It struck the cliffs and drew back, struck and drew back, with a long hollow booming. Far out, in the black, a bell tolled.
"Ten minutes," said Marta.
"Yes."
"The gate is at the bottom of the hill. There will be a guard in a box. He will ask who we are. You will say nothing."
"I know."
"I will say that we have come with a delivery." Her voice was dry. "I will say it in an accent. They always believe an old woman with an accent. It is the only advantage of my profession."
"Marta."
"Yes?"
"If it goes wrong."
"It will go wrong." She did not take her eyes from the road. "It always does. But it will go wrong in the correct direction, Damen, because you will see to it. And I will be sitting in this car with the engine running." A pause. "I have a gun in the glove box. My husband's other one. I am a very good shot."
"I know you are."
"I killed a man in 'seventy-three with a cleaver. He was trying to steal my father's cash box." She turned the wheel. "I did not tell you that."
"No."
"I am telling you now, because I think it may matter." The hearse rounded a bend. "Do not be afraid of what you are. It is not the worst thing. The worst thing is to be nothing."
He said nothing. He looked at the lilies, at the glimmer of silver on the coffin, at his own reflection, pale and ghostly, in the curtained glass.
Through the front windshield, over the black shoulder of the hill, he saw it.
It rose from the mist like a lighthouse in a dream. It was tall and round and white, with a long cone of yellow light streaming from its lantern across the water, and a great clock face glimmering in the top like a second moon. The cannery lay below it, a black sprawl of sheds and walls and cranes, with lamps strung along the quay in beads. The sea behind it was invisible. There was only a vast, dim, breathing darkness, and in it, here and there, a trembling gleam, like the scales of something moving.
Coldwater Point.
It looks, thought Damen, like a place where someone has been very happy.
The gate was a pair of tall iron doors in a brick wall twelve feet high. A guard stepped out of the box as the hearse drew up: a short man in a long black coat, with a flashlight and a submachine gun. He shone the beam in Marta's face. She lowered the window. She said, in a thick Hungarian accent, in a voice quavering with age, "Please. We are late. I have the delivery for Mr. Strand. It is all arranged."
"What delivery?"
"A coffin, young man. What do you think?"
"Who's in the back?"
"My nephew. He is the, how do you say, the pallbearer. He is very upset. His mother died." She sniffed. "It is a hard night."
The beam swung. It lit the dim interior, and the black bulk of the box under its pall, and the face of the tall man beside it, long and gray and grave. Damen did not lift his eyes. He sat with his hands folded and his head bowed, as a mourner does, and the light passed over him, and lingered, and went on to the lilies.
"Open it."
"Please?"
"The coffin. I've got to look."
Marta sighed. She got out, slowly, with a rustle of black crepe, and went round to the rear of the car. She opened the door. With an air of infinite weariness she pulled back the pall and the lilies, and unfastened the catches, and raised the lid six inches.
The guard bent.
He saw a white satin lining. He saw a black book, as thick as a Bible, with a red cord and brass corners. He saw a small dark box of carved walnut. He stared at them for a moment with an expression of puzzled reverence, as at an infant's relic in a church. Then he glanced at his watch, and at the tall man in the back, and at the old woman in the veil.
"Go on," he said, hoarsely. "Mr. Mercer's expecting you. Straight down to the tower. Don't stop for anything."
"Thank you, young man."
"God rest him."
"Whose?"
"Whoever," said the guard, and crossed himself, and waved them through.
The gates swung open. The hearse rolled into the compound.
It was bigger than he remembered.
He had been there twice, in the old days, for dinners. He had been shown to the dining room by a manservant, past a line of ancestral portraits that Strand had bought at auction. He remembered a gravel drive, and a lawn, and a rose garden. They had all gone. In their place was a vast stretch of rutted concrete, lit by arc lamps and hung with fog, with four black Suburbans drawn up in a line and a ring of men standing beside them. They wore black. They carried rifles. They stood in a rough semicircle round the foot of the tower, not speaking, and as the hearse came slowly into the light, every head turned.
Twelve, he counted. Fourteen.
Two on the roof of the boat shed.
A sniper in the crane.
The lamps on the quay.
Marta stopped the car. She turned off the engine. In the sudden silence the sea seemed enormously loud, and from high above them in the lantern of the tower came the slow, dry, measured tick of a great pendulum, magnified by the stone.
Tick.
Tick.
He opened the door.
He got out.
The air was cold and wet and smelled of tar. Fog drifted across the lamplight in shreds. The cobbles were slick underfoot. He stood in the glare in his black suit and his black overcoat with his hands at his sides and the whole ring of faces turned toward him, and for a long moment nobody spoke.
Then a figure stepped out from the open door of the tower.
He was in a charcoal peacoat, and he was smiling.
"Damen," said Cassian Mercer. "You're on time."
He was exactly as before. Tall, slim, immaculate, with a polished handsome unreadable face. His dark hair was damp with fog. His hands were in his pockets. He came down the three stone steps of the tower, unhurried, and walked across the concrete with a gliding, easy, almost genial step, as though he had come to greet a cousin from out of town.
"I like the hearse," he said. "It's a touch of class. The old man will be delighted." He stopped a yard away. "I must say, I didn't expect you to come at all. I thought you'd go to the Docks. Or to a lawyer. Or to a priest. It's what I'd have done."
"You aren't me."
"No. I'm rather glad of that." The eyes flickered over him, over the suit, the shoes, the bandaged wrist. "You look terrible, you know."
"I've had a long day."
"I heard." A pause. "I'm sorry about Calloway."
Damen said nothing.
"I mean it. He wasn't a bad man." The voice was bland. "He was a weak one. It's not quite the same. I used to think it was." He tilted his head. "I'll have the book now, if you don't mind."
"No."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Mr. Strand said I would hand it to him," said Damen. "On his desk. Between the clocks. That was the agreement."
"The agreement was that you'd hand it to us."
"It was the old man's word."
"The old man," said Mercer, "is in no condition to keep it." He smiled. It was a handsome smile, wide, charming and quite empty. "But as you like. I'm a patient man. Bring it in. I'll walk beside you." He glanced past him, at the hearse. "The lady may wait in the car. We'll look after her."
"Where's my family?"
"Ah." The smile did not change. "Of course. I'd forgotten."
He lifted a hand.
They came out of the tower together.
There were five of them. Two men in black led, with guns. Behind them, in the flood of yellow light that poured from the door, a stretcher came out, borne by two white-coated orderlies, with a gray woman walking beside it holding a bag. On the stretcher, propped against pillows, in a hospital gown, with a bandage round her thigh and her short dark hair standing up in spikes, lay Wren Calder.
She was awake. Her face was gray. There was a bruise the size of a plum on her cheekbone, and her lip was split, and her eyes, enormous and black and fixed on his, burned with a fever. She raised a hand about an inch from the blanket. Her lips moved. He could not hear what she said.
And behind the stretcher, hand in hand, walked a woman and a child.
He had not been ready.
He had told himself, on the road, for forty minutes, that he would look at them calmly, as at the end of a long march; that he would count them, as one counts a flock; that he would give them a small cool nod and wait. It was a plan. It was a sound one. He had rehearsed it in the dark. And then he saw her, in a navy skirt and a gray cardigan, with her hair coming loose from its braid and a smear of blood across her cheek, walking across the lamplit concrete with her chin up and her back straight and her eyes fixed on his face, and every thought he had ever had went out of his head like a candle in a gale.
Naomi.
She was thinner. She was white. She walked as one walks on a deck, a little wide, as though the ground might not be there; but she walked, steadily, with her daughter's hand in hers, and she did not look away. Beside her, in a pink sweater with a rabbit on it, her braids swinging, her yellow boots slapping on the stones, a girl of twelve marched with her head high. A brass compass swung on her chest. She carried a school notebook under her arm. She was counting under her breath.
He knew it from her lips. He had watched them move over a pancake. Fifteen. Sixteen.
"Ivy," he said.
He had meant to say it quietly. It came out as a cracked whisper, no louder than a breath. But the child heard it. She stopped. Her head came up. She looked across thirty feet of wet concrete, in the glare of the lamps, at the tall stooped gray man in the black coat.
And she let go of her mother's hand and ran.
He never forgot it.
He went down on one knee on the concrete as she came, because there was nothing else to do. He opened his arms. She hit him like a small furious missile, with her whole body, with her boots and her elbows and her head, and her arms went round his neck and her face went into his collar and he felt, through all the thick wool and the torn stitches and the cold, the unmistakable warm solid fierce reality of her. She smelled of soap and tar and cold tea. She was trembling. She was holding on so tightly that he could not breathe.
"You came," she said, into his neck.
"Yes."
"I knew you would."
"I know."
"I counted. I counted the whole time. I counted the stairs and the clock and the foghorn and I did the five things, every one, I did them every day." Her voice was muffled and fierce. "I didn't cry. Mama cried once, a little, in the night. But I didn't."
"You don't have to be brave."
"I wasn't brave. I was noticing." She lifted her head. Her face was streaked and dirty and perfectly composed, and her gray eyes, his own, burned at him from a foot away. "Dad. Listen. I have to tell you. It's the most important."
"Tell me."
She put her mouth against his ear.
He felt her breath, hot and quick. He heard her whisper, in a tiny rapid voice, with the precision of a cipher clerk reading out a message: "There are a hundred and ninety steps. Mama counted. At the top is a door. Behind the door is the clock room. It has fifteen clocks. Mr. Strand's at the desk. Mrs. Aldous is with him. There's a man named Vance with a gun who stands on the left." A breath. "Mr. Mercer's going to kill him. Mr. Strand. As soon as the book's on the desk. Eli heard. And then he's going to kill us."
He did not move.
"Mama has a needle," whispered Ivy. "In her sleeve. It's morphine. She says it's for when."
"When what?"
"When you say."
He lifted his head.
Over his daughter's shoulder, across the concrete, he met his wife's eyes.
She had stopped ten feet away. She stood alone in the lamplight, between two men with guns, with her arms at her sides, and her face was white and still. She did not smile. She did not weep. She looked at him as she had looked at him on the dock, steadily, from a great way off, with the whole of her attention, and he saw in her face what he had seen there on the night she had said, Show me.
She had not forgiven him.
She had decided something else.
I'm here, said the look. I'm in my body. I haven't gone away. And whatever you do in the next ten minutes, Damen Knox, I am going to see it.
He rose, with the child in his arms.
"Naomi," he said.
"Hello, Damen."
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Did they—"
"They fed us." Her mouth moved, very slightly. "The cake was good."
He crossed the concrete in four strides. The guards moved to stop him; Mercer lifted a hand. Damen did not look at them. He put his free arm round his wife, and pulled her against his chest, hard, with the child between them, and for a time, with the lamps shining down and the fog drifting and a ring of black-coated men looking on in silence, the three of them stood locked together on the wet cobbles, and breathed.
"I'm sorry," he said into her hair.
"I know."
"I should have told you more."
"Yes."
"I should have—"
"Later." Her voice was a murmur in his collar, hoarse and steady. "You can say it all later. I'll listen. I'll listen for as long as you like." Her fingers dug into his back. "Now, Damen. Listen to me. There's a man in the guardroom named Eli. He's twenty. If he's alive when this is over, I want him alive."
"All right."
"Promise."
"I promise."
"Good." She drew back. She looked into his face. And she did something he had not expected, so quietly that no one else saw: she took his right hand in hers, and turned it palm up, and pressed into it a small, warm, flat object, wrapped in a handkerchief. A syringe. "You'll need it before I do," she whispered. "Aim for the neck."
"Naomi—"
"I'm a nurse," said his wife. "I know where."
"Charming," said Cassian Mercer.
He had been watching them from the foot of the steps with his hands in his pockets and an air of benign interest. Now he stirred. "I'm sorry to interrupt. It's a sweet scene. I do love a reunion." He glanced at his watch, a slim gold one, and smiled. "It's three minutes to twelve. Mr. Strand is waiting. He'll be so anxious."
"Let them go."
"Presently."
"You said they'd walk out."
"After the book has been presented, Damen. After the box." He spread his hands. "You'll understand, I'm sure. A man in my position has to be sure of the goods before he lets go of the, ah, collateral." He turned. "Vance. Rourke. Take the lady and the child back inside. Mrs. Aldous will see to the girl."
"No," said Damen.
The two men stopped.
"The agreement was at the foot of the stair." He held his daughter against his shoulder. His voice was quite level. "They walk out. You can watch them walk. I'll go up with the book. When I've handed it over, you can do what you like with me."
"And if I decline?"
"Then I put it in the sea."
A silence.
"You wouldn't."
"It's in a coffin. In the back of a hearse. At the top of a hill." His eyes did not move. "There's a drop of three hundred feet. I only have to tell the old lady to take off the brake."
For the first time, something moved in the handsome face.
It was very slight. It was a flicker, a narrowing at the corner of the eye, like the shadow of a wing. But Damen saw it, and he knew it: it was the look of a man who has built a plan of ten thousand parts and has just found one of them to be a living thing.
"Do you know," said Mercer softly, "I think you would."
"Try me."
"I think," said Cassian Mercer, "that I've never liked you so much." He turned his head. "Let them stand at the foot of the steps. Four men. Two on the lady. Two on the child. Nobody touches them." A thin smile. "I want everyone to see this. Mr. Strand has so few opportunities for theater."
"Dad," said Ivy, very quietly, against his collar.
"Yes?"
"It's two minutes to twelve."
"I know."
"The boats are coming at twelve."
He looked down.
She was gazing at him with perfect gravity, her cheek on his shoulder, her eyes half closed against the lamps. There was fog in her braids. She did not smile. She said, in a whisper that no one could hear, "I noticed them in the fog. They're full of baskets. Mama said they were your friends."
"They are."
"Good." The child sighed. "Then you'd better put me down."
He did.
He set her on her feet beside her mother, among the tall gray men, and straightened. He turned. He walked back to the hearse and opened the rear door. With a nod to Marta he drew out the coffin, with its black pall and silver handles and the spray of white lilies, and lifted one end onto his shoulder, with his bandaged arm. Two of Mercer's men, at a nod, took the other.
They carried it up the steps.
At the top, the door of the tower stood open. Beyond it was a stone hall, lit with candles, and a stair that wound upward into the dark. He paused on the threshold. He looked back once.
Across the concrete, among the ring of black-coated men, in the beam of the arc lamps, a woman and a child stood side by side, small and upright, holding hands. Behind them, on the stretcher, a girl in a hospital gown had raised herself on one elbow and was staring at him with an expression he could not read.
Beyond them, in the fog, in the dark, over the water, he heard it.
It was a faint sound. It was a deep, throbbing, rhythmic note, like a heartbeat, coming across the sea. It grew. It came nearer. It was the sound of engines, four of them, throttled back to a mutter, and over it, high above in the lantern of the tower, the slow wrong clock began to strike, four minutes late, exactly as he had told Varga it would; the old man's grief was the only watch the boats had been given.
He counted.
One.
Two.
Three.
At the twelfth stroke the fog on the sea lit up like a burning sheet.