“All the more reason to have him found, sir.”
“No police force in Europe could locate him.”
“-if he’s a known assassin-” Marty said, pressing the point. His refusal to let this bone go until he had the marrow from it had begun to irritate the old man. He growled his reply.
“He’s known to me. Perhaps to a few others who have encountered him down the years . . . but that’s all.”
Whitehead crossed from the window to his desk, unlocked it, and brought out something wrapped in cloth. He laid it on the polished desk-top and unwrapped it. It was a gun.
“You’ll carry this with you at all times in future,” he told Marty. “Pick it up. It won’t bite.”
Marty took the gun from the desk. It was cold and heavy.
“Have no hesitation, Strauss. This man is lethal.”
Marty passed the gun from hand to hand; it felt ugly.
“Problem?” Whitehead inquired.
Marty chewed on his words before speaking them. “It’s only . . . well, I’m on parole, sir. I’m supposed to be obeying the letter of the law. Now You give me a gun, and tell me to shoot on sight. I mean, I’m sure you’re right about him being an assassin, but I don’t think he was even armed.”
Whitehead’s expression, hitherto impartial, changed as Marty spoke. His teeth showed yellow as he snapped his reply.
“You’re my property, Strauss. You concern yourself with me, or you get to Hell out of here tomorrow morning. Me!” He jabbed finger at his own chest. “Not yourself. Forget yourself.”
Marty swallowed a throatful of possible retorts: none were polite.
“You want to go back to Wandsworth?” the old man said. All signs of anger had disappeared; the yellow teeth were sheathed. “Do you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“You can go if you want. Just say the word.”
“I said no! . . . Sir.”
“Then you listen,” the old man said. “The man you met last night means me harm. He came here to kill me. If he comes again-and he will-I want you to return the compliment. Then we’ll see, won’t we, boy?”-the teeth showed again, a fox’s smile. “Oh, yes . . . we’ll see.”
Carys woke feeling seedy. At first she remembered nothing of the previous night, but she gradually began to recall the bad trip that she’d undergone: the room like a living thing, the phantom fingertips that had plucked-oh, so gently-at the hairs on the nape of her neck.
She couldn’t remember what had happened when the fingers had delved too deep. Had she lain down, was that it? Yes, now she remembered, she had lain down. It was only then, when her head hit the pillow and sleep claimed her, that the bad times had really begun.
Not dreams: at least not like she’d had before. There’d been no theatrics, no symbols, no fugitive memories weaving between the horrors. There had been nothing at all: and that had been (still was) the terror. She had been delivered into a void.
“Void.”
It was just a dead word when she spoke it aloud: it didn’t begin to describe the place she’d discovered; its emptiness more immaculate, the terrors it awoke more atrocious, the hope of salvation in its deeps more fragile than in any place she had ever guessed at. It was a legendary Nowhere, beside which every other dark was blindingly bright, every other despair she had endured a mere flirtation with the pit, not the pit itself.
Its architect had been there too. She remembered something of his mild physiognomy, which had convinced her not a jot. See how extraordinary this emptiness is, he had boasted; how pure, how absolute? A world of marvels can’t compare, can never hope to compare, with such sublime nothingness.
And when she awoke the boasts remained. It was as if the vision were true, while the reality she now occupied was a fiction. As if color and shape and substance were pretty distractions designed to paste over the fact of this emptiness he had shown her. Now she waited, scarcely aware of time passing, occasionally stroking the sheet or feeling the weave of the carpet under her bare feet, waiting in despair for the moment it all peeled back and the void appeared again to devour her.