“It’s not my business, sir. You’re paying for the service, and I provide it. If you wanted to tell me your reasons—”
“As it happens, I don’t.”
“I understand. So it would be useless for me to be curious, yes?”
That was neat enough, Estabrook thought. Not to want what couldn’t be had no doubt took the sting from things. He might need to learn the trick of that before he got too much older; before he wanted time he couldn’t have. Not that he demanded much in the way of satisfactions. He’d not been sexually insistent with Judith, for instance. Indeed, he’d taken as much pleasure in the simple sight of her as he’d taken in the act of love. The sight of her had pierced him, making her the enterer, had she but known it, and him the entered. Perhaps she had known, on reflection. Perhaps she’d fled from his passivity, from his ease beneath the spike of her beauty. If so, he would undo her revulsion with tonight’s business. Here, in the hiring of the assassin, he would prove himself. And, dying, she would realize her error. The thought pleased him. He allowed himself a little smile, which vanished from his face when he felt the car slowing and glimpsed, through the misted window, the place the facilitator had brought him to.
A wall of corrugated iron lay before them, its length daubed with graffiti. Beyond it, visible through gaps where the iron had been torn into ragged wings and beaten back, was a junkyard in which trailers were parked. This was apparently their destination.
“Are you out of your mind?” he said, leaning forward to take hold of Chant’s shoulder. “We’re not safe here.”
“I promised you the best assassin in England, Mr. Esta-brook, and he’s here. Trust me, he’s here.”
Estabrook growled in fury and frustration. He’d expected a clandestine rendezvous—curtained windows, locked doors—not a gypsy encampment. This was altogether too public and too dangerous. Would it not be the perfect irony to be murdered in the middle of an assignation with an assassin?
He leaned back against the creaking leather of his seat and said, “You’ve let me down.”
“I promise you this man is a most extraordinary individual,” Chant said. “Nobody in Europe comes remotely close. I’ve worked with him before.”
“Would you care to name the victims?”
Chant looked around at his employer and, in faintly admonishing tones, said, “I haven’t presumed upon your privacy, Mr. Estabrook. Please don’t presume upon mine.”
Estabrook gave a chastened grunt.
“Would you prefer we go back to Chelsea?” Chant went on. “I can find somebody else for you. Not as good, perhaps, but in more congenial surroundings.”
Chant’s sarcasm wasn’t lost on Estabrook, nor could he resist the recognition that this was not a game he should have entered if he’d hoped to stay lily-white. “No, no,” he said. “We’re here, and I may as well see him. What’s his name?”
“I only know him as Pie,” Chant said.
“Pie? Pie what?”
“Just Pie.”
Chant got out of the car and opened Estabrook’s door.
Icy air swirled in, bearing a few flakes of sleet. Winter was eager this year. Pulling his coat collar up around his nape and plunging his hands into the minty depths of his pockets, Estabrook followed his guide through the nearest gap in the corrugated wall. The wind carried the tang of burning timber from an almost spent bonfire set among the trailers: that, and the smell of rancid fat.
“Keep close,” Chant advised, “walk briskly, and don’t show too much interest. These are very private people.”
“What’s your man doing here?” Estabrook demanded to know. “Is he on the run?”
“You said you wanted somebody who couldn’t be traced. ‘Invisible’ was the word you used. Pie’s that man. He’s on no files of any kind. Not the police, not the Social Security. He’s not even registered as born.”
“I find that unlikely.”
“I specialize in the unlikely,” Chant replied.
Until this exchange the violent turn in Chant’s eye had never unsettled Estabrook, but it did now, preventing him as it did from meeting the other man’s gaze directly. This tale he was telling was surely a lie. Who these days got to adulthood without appearing on a file somewhere? But the thought of meeting a man who even believed himself undocumented intrigued Estabrook. He nodded Chant on, and together they headed over the ill-lit and squalid ground.