Kitt pushed her back, slowly, resting atop her, his weight on his forearms, his dirty hands framing her face, his trousers and boxers bunched around the shoes he tried to toe off. He kissed her again, opening his mouth to her tongue.
Mint. He tasted like mint, the chocolate kind the hotel placed on the bedside table. Mae chuckled into his mouth because he’d taken the time to freshen his breath before he’d climbed across a balcony five storeys up to come to her. She slid her hands under his open shirt and up his back, her fingers tracing over the lumpy scar he’d had since his early twenties, when a woman he thought he’d loved had stabbed him. Kitt began to kiss her throat and neck until he reached that little spot that made her breath catch and prickles rose on her skin. Her hands went to his head. “Your hair’s damp,” she said.
“So’s yours.” He moved down to kiss a nipple and bite it, softly. He worked his way down her torso, kissing and nipping, scooting back until he was on his knees between her thighs. He kissed the freckly Southern Cross constellation and moved inward, kissing and sucking and tasting, shoving dirty, rough, scraped hands under her arse, lifting her closer her to his mouth, and she made a sharp, hissing noise that sounded like Jaysus, Hamish, and he lifted his head, a finger to his lips. “Shh! Llewelyn might hear you.”
Mae sat up, shook free from the dressing gown, and grabbed him by his ears. Kitt rose, quickly, and stretched out, half atop her, between her thighs, kicking off shoes, trousers, boxers and one sock as she shifted to her side, dropped a leg over his thigh and pressed into his erection. He had one grimy, rough hand on her arse and she scooted closer, closer, until he was inside her. “Jaysus Mae,” he said, the sound of it deep, low, and slightly sibilant.
He moved slowly at first, rocking up and back, creating a gentle rhythm, watching her fall into the tempo, her eyes on his, pleasure and pressure building. Then she ground into him, both hands pulling his hips and he began thrusting deep, deep, deeper, her breathing quickening, their rhythm quickening as he grunted, and the dog, in his mounded, slightly squashed citadel of pillows, watched, judging him. “Get off,” he said.
“I’m trying,” she half-laughed.
“Not you, Felix,” he said rather breathlessly, the dog jumping off the bed, then Mae twisted and shoved him to the mattress, driving him higher into her. Hands on his chest, fingertips in his hair, she swayed and rose and fell, rose and fell, his goddamned mobile buzz-buzz-buzzing in his jacket on the chair. She met his eyes and her head dropped back and she rose, fell, rose fell, her breath catching. He touched her throat, slid his scratchy hands to her breasts and she leaned over, found his mouth, her damp hair tickling his cheek.
Tongues twisting together, Kitt sat up, kissing her, biting her neck, panting, grunting, moaning while she rocked, delight intensifying, and he turned their bodies, her back to the mattress, her knees bent, She wrapped one calf over his back and he slowed, plunging deep and hard, driving the breath from her with every thrust, until she gripped his arse and the tempo shifted faster. Breasts to chest, gasping and grinding against him, she inhaled sharply, shuddering, head falling back, and ripples of carnal pleasure spread up his spine, exploded, and he cried out.
“Shhh,” she hissed breathlessly, “Llewelyn might hear you.”
Kitt sagged on top of her, crushing her, his heart pounding, his mind awash with delight and astonishing, profound emotion that always arose whether they were making love or outright hedonistically fucking. There, exactly as they were, sweaty, messy, tangled and joined together, he could die a happy man.
“Hamish,” Mae wheezed.
“I like when you call me Hamish,” he said and shifted his weight sideways, gathering her close, kissing her ear. She reached about for the dressing gown and pulled it over them, covering the chill she felt, his heart still pounding in his chest, in his ears. She trailed fingers through the hair on his chest. They lay holding one another, catching their breath, his nose in her still-damp hair, his mobile buzz-buzz-buzzing.
Chapter Fifteen
Rather than climb back over the balcony and cross through the empty suite next door, Kitt gave up stealth and exited Mae’s room via the door. He immediately regretted his choice.
“I didn’t hear you come in.” Llewelyn said from the sitting room. “What were you doing in there, taking my advice?” Chuckling like a dirty old man, he set a teacup on the coffee table beside a blue file folder.
“I got your message.” Kitt crossed the room and sat in a cushioned chair opposite Llewelyn, the coffee table between them. “Valentine said you were ill. You look terrible.”
“I feel terrible. Did you get what you needed from Tanja Goedenacht?”
“We’re well on our way. Seems a portion of the Dankwaerts jewellery is imitation. Jan Vlaming has been selling off his aunt’s family gemstones over the years, piece by piece, and replacing genuine stones with manufactured ones. He’s amassed a small fortune Tanja says is held in Panama. He managed to keep his little endeavour quiet from his Aunt Polly until someone approached Hedison’s and tried to sell the Dankwaerts collection. Tanja said the man who stole the aunt’s freeport key was an old family friend.”
“Is the friend the elusive Giacomo Negroni?”
“No, she said the friend was Aurelio Martini.”
“The dead Sicilian banker from the Mafia money laundering fiasco your butler was involved in last year?”
“Yes.”
“Fascinating how the dead keep being responsible for this escapade.”
“Yes. I think so too. As for the incident at the sex shop, we didn’t get that far. Tanja became unwell,” he looked at Llewelyn’s dull, greyish cast, “perhaps more so than you. It’s going to be a long night. I borrowed a book from Valentine.” Kitt turned about the paperback in his hand, showing the cover of Our Man in Havana.
“Then you’ve moved from lover to nursemaid. That works. I have to say I’m glad Ms Goedenacht is feeling it too. I wondered if I was the only one with food poisoning. I’m pleased someone else is sharing the misery.” Llewelyn pressed fingers into his stomach, grunting softly. “I’ll have Mrs Valentine notify the hotel manager.”
“She already has.”
“How efficient.” Llewelyn had a sip of tea and made a face, wrinkling his nose.
“Yes, she is. Why is Weed watching Valentine, sir?”
“You noticed.”
“I did, yes.” Weed’s dark eyes had followed Mae all evening; it was something meant to be noticed. “Any idea why he wants to speak with me?”
“We’ll get to Mr Weed in a moment.”
“Something is wrong—besides how you feel.”
“Several things are wrong, Major. Hilary resigned, and if it’s not dire enough that my floor manager decided to leave, Night Duty notified me Morland had a massive stroke on his way home from impromptu farewell drinks for Hilary.”
“Good God.”
He put the tea aside and reached for the blue folder on the coffee table. “Desmond Wishaw said Morland left the party early complaining of a headache that made his eyes hurt. The man was forty-two. He’d only been with me for three years, and wasn’t particularly likable, Kitty, but he was damned good at his job, damned good, and now he’s… My Lord, forty-two. You’re not much older.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.”
Llewelyn exhaled, the sound sorrowful and settled, the business of Morland concluding and being shoved into the past. “Yes. It’s a pity about Hilary. An efficient floor manager is valuable, a loyal chief assistant like Morland even more so, but life does go on. Things move on. I’ll find another temporary chief assistant, you perhaps, or your Mrs Valentine. But then, as I said earlier, she’s worked for you longer than Morland worked for me; the woman would do, and has done anything for you. Or perhaps that is not really the case.” With sigh, he opened the folder and sifted through a few pages. “As for Mr Weed…We had one of these,” and held out two sheets, “Arthur sent Mr Weed with the photos this morning. Then, this afternoon, Mr W
eed found this one. I wasn’t certain I wanted to show it to you considering your…respect and obvious affection for your employee, yet Arthur convinced me I should. Major, a loyal assistant is valuable, but dear boy, do you really need a butler?”
Kitt crossed the soft carpeting, took the pages offered, and looked down at a colour photographs of a woman and a man, at copies of two passports. The images were an instant anaesthetic, the kind that killed all sensation, yet left him wholly conscious, his brain wide-awake and utterly cognisant of what the travel documents meant. “If you had this, why did you threaten to institutionalise her brother?” he said, dispassionately.
“She is an asset and a liability.”
“And it’s best to keep such people where you can see them.” He cocked his head.
“Yes.” Llewelyn pressed a fist into his sternum and swallowed the way one did when one had bad taste in one’s mouth.
Kitt again looked at the photocopies in his hand.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“There was always a chance. Where did you get it?”
“The brother had it. Hired someone who’s clearly done a better job than us. Regardless of the concealment, her previous contributions, what she ascertained and experienced in those activities last year and early this year make her ideal to join in this action, and despite your reservations and protests, you understand that.”
Kitt shook his head ever so slightly. “Everyone is a resource, a means to an end, and use whomever you must to reach that end,” he said, hating that he still held the same ideology.
“You do know your job well. I’m very glad to see that, Kitty.”
Kitty. Llewelyn’s odd moment of affection struck the numbness, catapulting it from his chest. Kitt barely refrained from biting his molars together and kept hostility, horror, pain, and disbelief buried. “Thank you, sir,” he said as his brain tripped over dismay to land on cold fact. “Then it’s what, Direzione Investigativa Antimafia or Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna or the Guarda di Finanzia?”
“Yes, the AISE, but the DIA has a renewed interest since this has come to light.” Llewelyn glanced at the photocopy images. “We passed along our information to Croatia’s USKOK, Malta’s Central Immigration Office in Valetta, and Italy’s new Minister of Economy and Finance. Interesting you’ve uncovered a connection to Aurelio Martini, especially since the Italians have asked us to sit on our hands for a bit.”
“You mean Ministra Seraffimo’s asked that I sit on my hands.”
“Yes. They’ve asked the Dutch as well. Is that request clear, Major?”
“It is.”
“Whether it genuinely comes to anything is another matter. In the meantime, your butler is here where we can see her, she’s familiar with the players, so let the game continue.”
Let the game continue… Dear God, what had he done? Confessed everything, given in to emotion, succumbed to a disadvantage that exposed far too much, surrendered to a basic human need he never wanted to need because he understood the responsibility, knew the cost. Rankled, Kitt turned, headed for door. “Excuse me, sir. I’ve kept Weed waiting quite a while,” he said, and clenched his back molars together.
“Do you think the secretary will pan out, Kitty?”
“I’ll let you know in the morning.” Kitt looked over his shoulder at the older man who was cold analysis, calculation, strategy, all traits he’d once admired. He curbed the desire to rush the man, to throttle his superior and toss him through the open balcony door, making sure to miss the canal below, and went with the only option he had: pettiness. “You look peaked, your skin’s a bit ashy, bags under your eyes. You know you’re not a young man. Perhaps it’s best you lay off the spicy food and st—”
“Oh, do stop your whining, Major. You can always find another butler. You’ve done it before. Perhaps you can persuade your Scotsman to come back.” Llewelyn dropped the open folder onto the coffee table, sat on the sofa and reached for his cup of tea. “Go on back to Ms Goedenacht. We’ll discuss this again in the morning, say…seven sharp. You can join me for breakfast. I hear your butler makes excellent scrambled eggs.”
Two minutes later, Kitt was outside. He walked past an orange Renault hatchback parked in a commercial zone, a delivery van with a logo of lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots on its white doors in the space ahead of it. He went to the corner, turned left at the wine shop, and followed the cobbled laneway to the canal beside the hotel, just where the red-light district began. He waited ten seconds, looking at tourists and drunks in football jerseys, gaping at the scantily clad window girls before Hans Weed stopped beside him.
“Last year,” Weed said, “British football hooligans smashed a few of the windows you see there. A number of girls were injured, which prompted the mayor to make plans to close down De Wallen and the Singel permanently. She says the injury and humiliation of sex workers by tourists is unacceptable.”
“It’s a dangerous profession. What do you want, Hans? I need to get back upstairs and finish what I started.”
In a long and rambling answer that covered international laws, local customs, and criminal prosecution, Weed outlined what he wanted. “You see the sense in it, don’t you? Even if it’s only for a short time.”
Kitt very nearly shoved the man into the canal. “I think it’s best that we discuss what you’re suggesting with Llewelyn. Right now,” he said, giving Hans a broad, deadly smile.
Chapter Sixteen
Writing more in her not-quite-a-journal hadn’t helped. The sex hadn’t helped. The dog beside her and pillows shrinking the width of the bed didn’t help either. Mae couldn’t sleep. She’d close her eyes and see the face of a woman whose name was Eva Eaton or Jill Charteris. She’d close her eyes and see a man whose bearded face was bloodied and distorted by the plastic wrapped around his head, the way supermarkets that weren’t eco-smart wrapped a head of lettuce. She’d close her eyes and see a man with a knife protruding from his neck, another with a knife in his throat and strands of spaghetti stuck to his cheek, and one more man, Russell Grant, a butler like her, lying in the snow, a bloody hole where his nose should have been. She’d close her eyes and see and blood bubbling from the mouth of a Sicilian banker named Martini.
When she didn’t close her eyes, her mind led her on a convoluted path of the past year’s events, from almost being murdered in her employer’s kitchen, to a bloody hand roasting in an oven, Kitt’s confession of his love for her, followed by his ‘death’ and resurrection in blood-soaked, snowy New Mexico.
If Kitt had been there, they would have talked, they would have argued, they would have laughed and held each other, and her anxiety would have settled, but he was carrying on with an activity characteristic of his occupation. She knew how to get bloodstains out of fabric, off wool carpets, off skin, and out of hair, but there was no way to remove bloodstains from her memory. The only method she had to calm her mind was to carry out an activity characteristic of her occupation, a methodical task—like scrub bloodstains from a carpet, or iron, or bake Chelsea buns for tomorrow morning’s breakfast.
Mae sat up and reached for the phone beside the bed. She rang the front desk, and made arrangements to have yeast, flour, butter, sugar, dried fruit and spices sent up to the suite. Then she climbed out of bed and tied an apron over her dressing gown.
With Felix tagging along, she left her room and headed for the suite’s small but well-appointed kitchen, passing through the sitting room where the teapot and saucer sat on the coffee table, the teacup atop papers and a blue folder. The dog hopped onto the sofa, his tail knocking against an empty water glass and crystal clock on the side table. He pushed throw pillows with his snout and curled into a ball beneath one.
In the kitchen, Mae filled the sink with soapy water. She found a baking tray, mixing bowls, and a rolling pin in a cupboard, along with a wooden tea tray. Tray in hand, she returned to the sitting room to collect the tea things, taking the water glass from the side table with the clock and p
hone, putting it on the tray with the teapot and saucer. As she lifted the teacup from the coffee table, she saw the photos spread across the blue folder, and her hand sagged. Lukewarm, sweetly spiced chai spilled over colour photocopies, over two people, a man and a woman, seated in an outdoor café in Sicily, volcanic ash dusting the tables. First bewildered, then angry she put the tray and tea service on a chair, leaving the tray’s edge sticking out. She lifted the pages, shook tea from the dappled paper, and then looked at images, at passport photos discoloured by tawny, sweet-smelling milk. “Skawly feckin’ bastards!” she mumbled.
“Did you really think you could keep this from us, Mrs Valentine?” Llewelyn said, his voice a luscious, Shakespearian baritone.
Startled, she jerked around to find the wretched man looking haggard, ashen-faced. “You people stop at nothing,” she said, tossing the photocopies and pictures onto the coffee table, the paper absorbing chai from a puddle, further discolouring the photos.
“This is not nothing.” He moved closer to her, an arm’s length away, his tone honey, the smell of sick on his breath. “This is everything. How long have you two been hiding things, how many years? You almost, almost had me believing your stories.” He sighed, head shaking. “I told you I wouldn’t follow through with your brother; an innocent, broken man like him deserves so much better, far better than a sister like you, but I have no qualms over prosecuting you or a man like your…” he smiled, Cheshire Cat-like, all teeth and cleverness, “…husband.” He took a step toward her, doing his best to be intimidating.
Mae crossed her arms and glared at him, doing her best to not be intimidated by the mouldy fecker, doing her best not to slap the shite hawk smirk from his dark, ashen face.
True to Your Service Page 21
