She stopped folding. “Resilient. How is it two people who are related can be so very different when it comes to trauma and resilience?”
“Do you mean my brother and I, or do you mean your brother’s PTSD and your response to trauma, such as your complicated grief with Caspar’s death?”
“Sean and I.” She dropped her arms, the sleeves falling over her hands. “Are you saying that more than a decade of grieving for the dead husband who turned out to be a polygamist really isn’t that different?”
Kitt crossed the room and picked up the envelope from the table where Llewelyn had left it. “If you mean by your intense and persistent longing for Caspar, your detachment and isolation from others, the feeling that life held no meaning or purpose except for your work, then yes.”
“Is that what you saw? Is that how I was?”
“Yes. The processing and recovering from trauma depend on many factors; the characteristics of the individual, the characteristics of developmental processes, the meaning of the trauma, and sociocultural factors, the accessibility of support, coping and life skills, the responses of the larger community in which you live.” He moved to stand in front of her, envelope in hand. “You’ve always been independent. Then there’s your beliefs, the expectations you have of life, and your sense of hope. You’ve always had an underlying sense of hope. I believe whatever trauma your brother experienced resulted in his losing his sense of hope, perhaps even his faith in God, and as a result, life holds no purpose, no meaning and he, like you, grieves for a love, or a faith, lost.”
She chewed her top lip for a moment. “So we’re not so different after all.”
“No, you’re as different from your brother as I am from mine.”
“You and Simon are very different.”
“Yes, he sleeps with women and men, says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and sends rescued Italian greyhounds as gifts to the woman I love.”
She gave him that look that said he was full of shite. “Mm-m. Felix is a nuisance, and I see you when you think I’m not looking, I see you coo and cuddle him. I know you love him.”
“I love you more.” He sat beside her, set the envelope on the bed, and folded up her sleeve, without any protest from her. “We’ve done this before,” he said, moving to the next sleeve.
Mae watched his deft fingers move. “Yes, you did the same thing at the Four Seasons, last year, after I killed Sal Tornatore in your kitchen.” Her moment of amusement faded. “I know I’ve asked you before. I know you don’t dwell on it. I know you move on, but how do you move on?”
“I know my purpose and I never had hope or faith in anything except myself. And then you came along and gave me hope and faith, and love and a future I never considered. You really are a nuisance.” He gave her finished sleeve a pat. “There you go.”
She frowned rather than give him a smile. He’d expected a smile. “How do you process what you do now with this sense of hope and faith and love and a future?” she said.
He tipped his head to the side. “You’re not going to like it.”
“What are you going to say, breathe?”
“Yes. Breathe.”
“Oh, for feck’s sake.”
His smile faint, Kitt reached for the envelope and unwound the old-fashioned string securing it closed. “Let’s have a look at the brief on the situation causing me to regulate my breathing so I remain calm and level-headed.”
She exhaled, finger combing damp hair. “What should I say to Sean about my leaving?”
“Something like your husband is taking you away for a quiet weekend in the country and would he mind terribly looking after my dog.”
Chapter Six
It was half-past four in the morning and dark when Mae went home in a cab, wearing very nice pyjamas. Daylight wouldn’t come for another half an hour. Bypassing her flat on the lower level, she walked around the back of the house and climbed the rear staircase to the home she’d shared with Kitt since February. To keep up appearances, the downstairs flat was still minimally furnished, held clothes and various personal items. Inside, she paused at the butler’s pantry, took shoes and the set of work clothes she kept in the small cupboard, and changed out of the pyjamas into a navy shirt dress and navy stockings. As she had for three and a half years, she tied on an apron, went into the kitchen, turned on the light above the cooker, and began preparations for breakfast, taking out eggs to scramble for Kitt’s breakfast, setting out the frying pan, butter and jam, readying whole-wheat bread for toasting.
When they’d married, they’d had a long discussion pertaining to the dos and don’ts of maintaining a secret marriage, on expectations they had about the institution, and had come to make one very important deal: whichever of them got up first made breakfast for the other. However, whether she scrambled his eggs or he fried hers, Mae always made the coffee. She filled the kettle and readied the Chemex coffee-maker, grinding and spooning out the Tanzanian beans she’d bought the day before yesterday.
The flat was quiet. Felix didn’t come to greet her, there’d been no tippy-tapping of his nails on the polished wood floors or kitchen tiles. The kitchen’s swinging door into the sitting room stood open. The lamp near the big bay window glowed, which indicated Kitt had likely gone for a pre-dawn a run with the dog. Then again, Kitt might have been at his office, Felix next-door with Sean.
Sean had been more than amenable to keeping Felix for the weekend. Perhaps getting him an actual therapy dog might be better than dog-sitting an Italian Greyhound who wore a borrowed therapy dog vest.
As per years of habit, as the coffee brewed, she laid the little table by the big bay window with pieces of Kitt’s gilt-edged blue and white Minton china, then went to the bedroom to make the bed, but the enormous thing hadn’t been slept in.
She returned to the sitting room. The first rays of the orange-toned rising sun reflected off the flat next door, shone through the bay window and hit gilt edges of green and white Coalport Green Dragon china pieces on the bookcase. She sat on the cushions in the window seat and picked up the novel she’d been reading, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana.
Kitt laughed about her ongoing appetite for spy fiction, but Greene had been a spy—as had Ian Fleming and John le Carré and, Jaysus, there had to be some measure of truth in the stories they wrote, even if it was simply the lingo they used. Dead drop, mission, Chief of Station, Honey pot, Asset, Intelligence officer, Backstop, Illegal. From December to January, Kitt had been illegal, working undercover in the US illegally, without any diplomatic cover or overt relationship with the British government, and that was an utterly a reflection of the measure of truth in spy fiction.
Other absurdities included the reality that she’d been extorted into a job with Special Operations Division, an intelligence unit within the British government, that she was in love with and secretly, yet not legally, married to an intelligence officer within that government agency. But most ludicrous were the outlandish bubbles of what she could only call excitement floating in her bloodstream—alongside equally bubbly trepidation, anxiety, over-thinking, and ruminating on things such as a dead woman’s broken face. All of that, along with Sean’s PTSD, did have her wondering about a familial predisposition for mental health issues that affected one’s sense of morality.
Maybe brother and sister both needed therapy dogs.
Book in hand, she looked about the flat. The jacket Kitt had worn yesterday hung from the coat rack above the umbrella stand. A piece of luggage stood in front of the chair near the door, ready for the trip to Amsterdam. On the seat of the chair sat a small, black, zippered case she’d seen once before, last July, in Sicily, in the little spartan studio next door to Fiorella’s house.
Irritated, frightened, and inexplicably thrilled, Mae swung her feet, heels knocking into the box and moulding below the window-seat. It had always been stowed and locked in a combination safe in a space hidden beneath the window-seat. Yet there it was, another piece of spycraft. Or was it trad
ecraft?
She hopped off the cushions, went to the table, and stared down at the canvas or whatever material the damned padded case was made of and traded the book for the case, lifting it to examine the heavy-duty zipper. It had a lock on it.
“Please put that down, Mae.” Kitt said from the kitchen doorway.
“Where were you?” She inspected the lock.
“Downstairs, in your pea-sized bed with Felix. I didn’t hear you come in the front.”
“I came up the back. Shall I scramble your eggs now?”
“Yes, and coffee too, but first, put that down, Mae. Please.”
She held on to the case and watched Felix prance over to her. He looked like a tiny high-stepping horse. “Just how frightened should I be about going to Amsterdam?”
“You should always be afraid. There is always is reason to be afraid,” he crossed the room, took the case from her, and set it back on the chair, “particularly of this.”
“Is your Beretta inside that thing and is it loaded?”
“Yes, the Beretta is in there, no, it’s not loaded.”
“Why were you in my old bed downstairs?” she said, Felix pawing at her hip.
Kitt slid an arm around her waist. “Last night, the dog and I went downstairs to pack you a bag. Felix hopped onto the bed, burrowed right under the bedclothes. I wound up joining him because I realised that without you, I was all at sea in our large bed, and I forgot about packing my own things. Very careless of me to leave the Beretta out, but then, you know you make me so sloppy. Will the eggs take long? I’m rather hungry.”
“M-m. I best get to it. I see the seriousness of the matter of making your breakfast. I know how you get when you miss your breakfast.” She put her hand over the top of his and turned around. Kitt started to take her in his arms, but Felix pushed in between them, wanting to share the love. Mae rubbed the dog’s slightly floppy ears and looked over to the kitchen door, where Kitt had left her smallest suitcase, the wheels of it touching the edge of the green and cream Persian rug. She looked up at him, at dark, gingery blonde hair sticking up in little tufts, at an ugly-handsome face creased by bedsheets and sleep. “If you didn’t hear me come in, perhaps it’s time you showed me how to shoot the thing in the case.” She turned about and went into the kitchen.
Kitt followed her, stood in the doorway, and watched her cook his eggs in silence. She placed slices of whole-wheat toast on gilt-edged blue and white Minton china plates, and spooned up steaming, pale-yellow clouds of simple, elegant scrambled eggs that were perfect, absolute bites of joy that he always relished eating. Then she waited for him to move out of the way, carried the dishes into the sitting room, and set them on the table she’d laid earlier.
He sat across from her and she ate breakfast while he stared down at his, the simple, elegant, tiny bites of absolute joy before him growing cold.
He’d lost his appetite because he had seen a glimmer in her eyes, an undercurrent of what looked a hell of lot like what he prayed wasn’t eagerness. Praying. What a joke it was, for him to pray, but he did just that because something about her was different, not unlike lost innocence mixed with a newfound sense of reckless invincibility. He’d caught a glimpse of it yesterday, after he’d helped her wash the blood from her hair, and thought it fleeting, thought it a result of heightened adrenaline and cortisol levels in her bloodstream, but her body’s adrenal system remained mobilised, ready for a fight or a flight, releasing the hormones that prepared her, physiologically and psychologically, to deal with a threat. At least, again, he prayed that’s what it was. He’d once told her that intelligence work was a game, and now, after one experience as a pawn, another moving across the board, and the fluke of winning like a Grand Champion, she thought she knew the rules of the game. And she was keen to play again, like some goddamned gambling addict.
Christ almighty, wasn’t that fundamentally what he was, a gambling addict? What had he done to her? What had he been thinking by believing an ordinary, average, everyday mundane life with her was viable? “This is impossible,” he murmured.
She smiled at him softly, absently stroking Felix. “What was that?”
“Did I say something?”
She shrugged. “I’m thinking about doing restoration,” she said.
“Sorry?”
“A restoration. I’m think I’d like the challenge of a restoration. I’ve done a number of renovations, like this flat, the one downstairs, and two next-door, but I’ve been looking at a few places. I think I’d like to buy one of them and restore it. Would you like to see some photos? There’s a place in Oxfordshire and another in Surrey. Expensive locations, I know, but negotiating a price is a challenge I’m up to. I’ve had a good deal of experience negotiating.”
“Stop it.” Kitt stood, moved, and latched onto her elbow. “You have not developed a taste for this work, Mae.” Suddenly angry, suddenly afraid, suddenly ravenous for the scrambled eggs that gave his life a bizarre sense of normalcy that he’d deeply embraced, suddenly queasy and deadly serious, he drew her to her feet and pulled her so close she had look up to meet his eyes, and he peered down at her, not caring that it was domineering, patriarchal, or bullying. “Now. This is what’s going to happen. This what you’re going to do. We will not be discussing this in any way. You do as I say, when I say. Am I clear?”
She gazed back at him, irritation and contrariness in her squint. “Eat your scrambled eggs, you bloody big bully.”
An hour later, stiff and sore, Mae climbed into the back of a white Jag. Brusque and distant since eating his breakfast, Kitt placed the luggage into the boot and slid beside her, behind the driver who had crisscrossing red scars running down his hairless head to the back of his neck, an intricate overlay of burns and slices and stitches disappearing into the collar of a black jacket. Half-turning, the driver handed Kitt something from the front seat. “Kitt,” he said.
“Connery,” Kitt nodded civilly and sat back, a fat folder bound with ribbon on his knees. He took off his ink-blue jacket, tossed it over the seat in front of him. He loosened his sky-blue tie, pulled on his seatbelt, untied the ribbon, and began reading. He glanced at her once, his face devoid of expression.
She took Our Man in Havana from her handbag. Book in her lap, she shifted the purse, placing it on the seat, long strap drooping over the edge of the leather upholstery. “Something wrong?” she asked.
“Everything.” Stone-faced, Kitt lay his left hand flat beside her right thigh, the two shortened fingers absently caressing as he sifted through pages of documents and photos.
The trip from Maresfield Gardens to City Airport took a little over fifteen minutes. Soon, they were airborne on a small private jet. The flight lasted a little over an hour with no conversation of any sort. His demeanour remained focused, silent, his face a mask of nothingness. Kitt read through the information contained in the files. When he was finished, he dropped the folder into his battered leather satchel and looked out the window beside his wide seat.
After seventy minutes of stony silence, they began flying over patchwork fields of green and tulips, the vivid colours separated by straight lines of waterways and homes. The Dutch landscape was neatly organised, designed to the last detail. In a land so densely populated, this was order in its purest form, and Mae liked the order of the man-made, tidy landscape. She knew the urban districts and traffic plans were organised in a similar, ordered uniformity, the neatly attached brick row houses running along the vast network of canals, broken up by buildings with experimental architectural designs.
The jet touched down at Amsterdam-Schiphol. A humourless, grey-haired female customs agent met them as they disembarked the little jet. Just as humourless, Kitt said, “Goedemorgen,” and handed over their passports.
With a grunt, the woman nodded curtly and led them to a golf buggy with a yellow light flashing on the top. They climbed into the rear and the woman drove them across the airport, passing planes, petrol tanks, trolleys full of luggage, heading t
oward a security booth and a high, razor-wire-topped white wall that butted up against a terminal. She stopped the buggy and jerked her head to the booth.
“Dank u wel,” Kitt said, climbing from the rear seat, the officer taking their luggage.
The customs officer grunted again and another customs officer, a thin man with bushy eyebrows, opened the heavy door to the booth, motioning for Kitt and Mae to come inside. The woman rolled the bags across the floor, lifted them onto a conveyor. The man shifted to look at a computer screen, his heavy brows knit together and moved like a millipede above his eyes. He inspected Kitt’s little black weapons case, his documentation, Mae’s passport, and checked the information on his computer. When he was satisfied, he pointed to a door and pressed a button. There was a buzz and the door slid open, and then they were in a short hallway that ended in a heavy glass door reinforced with steel, a CCTV camera above it. The door rolled open and they exited into the terminal, outside the customs and immigration check.
So, this was how all the cloak and dagger spy shite worked, how diplomats with guns passed through customs. Mae watched Kitt as they headed to the exit. He, quite impassively, watched the people in the terminal, his cold blue-grey eyes shifting, watching, passing over a man or woman here, a group of men there, scanning the crowd, maintaining ‘situational awareness.’ Watching him watching was the stuff of…well, spy novels.
“Wait here, right here. Do not move. Am I clear?” he said.
She nodded once, curtly.
Kitt crossed in front of a woman wheeling a trolley loaded with luggage, walking into the men’s lav, probably, she thought, to meet a contact who’d give him an untraceable, disposable satellite-connected mobile or a tiny little camera inside a pair of spectacles. Mae waited. Right. There.
When Kitt came out of the gents’, he gave Mae a very faint nod, her cue to walk ahead of him so he could keep an eye on her, but she stood there looking at him, lips pressed together. “You have a bit of sick on your shirt sleeve,” she said, reached for her bag, pulled up the handle, and began walking.
True to Your Service Page 7
