Forever in Your Service

by Sandra Antonelli

  Mae issued a short, nasal huff of exasperation.

  “Were you threatened, is that what happened? Did Llewelyn mention prosecution for your unwitting involvement in money laundering and the Suisse Global debacle, some kind of trumped-up criminal activity related to the events last July?”

  “No.”

  His expression turned as cold and hard as the diamond on her left hand. “You volunteered to do Llewelyn a bloody favour?”

  “I was not about to sit at home and pine for a dead man.”

  “It’s what you did for Caspar for sixteen years.”

  “It is not. I was productive. I worked.”

  “You worked and pined. It’s all my fault then?”

  Her expression remained as hard as the diamond on her left hand.

  “Yes, it’s all my fault. Now you’re looking after Taittinger’s dog.”

  “No, I’m Taittinger’s butler. Looking after Felix comes with the position.”

  “And?”

  “You think there’s an and?”

  Kitt rubbed at the whiskers sprouting on his neck. “Mae. Llewelyn wanted you somewhere where he could keep an eye on you, there’s an and. The work isn’t simply butlering and dog minding, is it?”

  “Why does he want to keep an eye on me?”

  “Because he’s been keeping an eye on me.”

  Sitting, she rearranged the blankets, tidying the only mess she had control of. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s this business. The and, Mae.”

  Mae straightened thick cotton. “I’m observing Taittinger.”

  Kitt mulled this over for a moment. “Observing him for what?”

  “He’s suspected of counterfeiting wine.”

  “Ah.”

  “Why does that ‘ah’ sound as if you already knew?”

  “Early last year, wines suddenly started appearing at auction, bottles of Bordeaux not seen since WWII, bottles listed on ship manifests before WWI. There was talk of wine fraud amid some wine investment firms in the UK. I wasn’t aware the theory had crossed the Atlantic. Have you found anything to implicate Taittinger?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing that indicates he’s committing fraud. I’ve seen him drink and buy a lot of wine, collect bottles and glass for his mother’s sculptures, and tinker with the sports car he’s restoring in the barn. Does that settle your mind about Llewelyn being nefarious?”

  “No. How long are you supposed to be observing Taittinger?”

  “A year.”

  “A year? Is that how long you thought it would take to get over me?”

  Her snigger was as insipid as her smile. “You expected me to mourn forever and waste away to nothing over you.”

  His gazed travelled over her naked flesh. “You are rather thin. There is so little of you left. Yet I rather like what remains.”

  She pulled the covers to her shoulder. Her lifeless smile faded. “Bryce said your remains were found in a shipping container in Singapore.”

  This time, Kitt exhaled. “Things unfolded in a way that offered me an opportunity to move about with a little more freedom than usual, with no one to answer to except myself. I let myself be declared dead.” Kitt shifted his left hand. “That container was nightmarish. We went back to the port in Singapore ready to find more phony weapons and copies of Chagall prints. Customs led us to containers that had been held up in port, or more likely intended to go astray. Inside those last containers were rolled-up carpets, crated decorator samples of tiles, reproduction artwork, fake handbags, and the bodies of Dr Zora and others who I suspect lost their lives trying to migrate with the help of cold-blooded human-traffickers. We were led back to Singapore and that container on purpose. Eleven innocent people died in a ghastly, sickening way. And I didn’t.”

  Mae looked at him. His ugly-handsome features relaxed, mouth flat, eyes cool and steady, as if he were unaffected by the story he told, by the events he’d survived. “Do you feel guilty about that, Kitt?”

  “Guilty, no. Angry, yes.” He curled his hand into an awkward fist. “They died because I missed something. My mind was not on the work, it was on you. My mind is always on you. So, this really is my fault. I bear the weight of it entirely, my funny Mrs Valentine. I was arrogant and daft enough to think it was necessary to complete an assignment, daft to believe finishing what I started was necessary. Only now it is necessary. My following protocol had the very real potential of endangering lives. I had no choice but to improvise. Improvisation is often part of this work, but sometimes improvisation backfires. I didn’t plan to leave you at home with the Christmas tree. I had every intention of coming home to you for Christmas. I had a service send you postcards so you’d know I was coming home, so you know I wasn’t dead, no matter what you were told. Quando, Quando, Quando, I thought you’d work it out.”

  Mae’s sniff of disdain was milder than Kitt expected. “A phone call would have been better.”

  “It’s a cock-up. I admit it.” He let out a quiet breath. “The less you know about me, the better it is for you, the safer you are. But the less you know about me, the worse it is for us. Bryce didn’t lie about finding remains.” Kitt held up his left hand. “I left something of myself behind in that container, more than blood.”

  Mae stared at the lopsided remnants of his ring finger and pinkie. “Oh, feck.”

  “A bit dramatic of me, I know.”

  “Does it hurt?” She touched two truncated fingers.

  “Not anymore. At one point, it was it was badly infected, swollen like a balloon. I was a mess, Mrs Valentine. Battered, bruised, and out of my mind.”

  She exhaled, with more than a little exasperation. “I want to hate you. I don’t want to care. I must be out of my mind to care.”

  “Goodness me, you care.”

  “Why do you get all the good lines here? Why do I have to be the straight man?”

  “It’s much more difficult to be the straight man.”

  She pressed her lips together for a moment and huffed peevishly. “Don’t think losing a knuckle’s worth of finger means I’ve gone all soft and mushy and forgiven you for you dying.”

  “Fingers. I lost knuckles’ worth of fingers. Intelligence officers avoid drawing attention to themselves. Distinctive marks, like scars or missing fingertips, draw attention.”

  “Oh, that’s what the cowboy hat’s for, to distract from missing finger bits.”

  “Did you say you’re thinking about forgiving me?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. It depends on how well you hold me while I sleep.”

  He gave her a soft smile, and pulled her into his arms, settling with her onto the mattress. “As much as you want me here to hold you while you sleep, I want to wake up in the morning and open my eyes to find you beside me instead of the phantom of fetid, rotting corpses.”

  “God in heaven.” She rose up, hand going to his cheek. “Right, now I feel sorry for ya.”

  The glint in her eyes pacified the demonic images that slithered at the back of his mind. “I believe you do.” Kitt kissed the inside her palm, below her left thumb.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “I just did.” He drew her down again.

  She snuggled into his neck, saying, “Impotence, missing fingers, a waking nightmare. Not exactly spy material anymore, are you? Maybe you should retire.”

  “Oh, so you do know the plan? Why do I need to tell you anything more?”

  Mae groped for the bed linens. “There’s something else I want to know.”

  “What?” A heavy blanket fell down over his naked skin.

  “How did you end up here?”

  “Reed. It’s the second time the old twat’s saved my life. When I didn’t respond to his messages, he sent his mate, Cureo, to the port in Singapore. I’d be dead if he hadn’t.”

  Chapter 9

  “What time is it?” Dalton whispered.

  Kitt looked at his watch. “Nine-fifteen,” he said, his voice thick, as if his
mouth was full of pasty, lumpy porridge he couldn’t swallow. Everything around him, the air, the walls, his own skin were all as thick and pasty and sweaty as porridge in a pot.

  The lock fell, the container doors swung open, and the dockers, who could have been from the Philippines, South or Central America, elbowed each other, arguing, pointing, Chichiltic.

  A rotten stench assaulted his senses.

  The NCB officer backpedalled and vomited. Bodies, four of them lay in between open crates of counterfeit handbags and reproduction artwork. A knockoff Prada handbag hanging from his wrist, Molony floated in over the dead, his words warbling as he cast aside a Persian rug, “Excellent craftsmanship, but what we have here are higher quality knockoffs.” His hand passed through a mosaic, fingers ghostly caressing a garland of grapes.

  “To-long! To-long!”

  The shorter docker flicked his long plait over a shoulder and smiled. “Chichiltic.”

  “What time is it?” Dalton whispered.

  Someone screamed in Malay, “Teedak! Teedak!”

  A rocket of blood shot from the thin NCB officer’s throat and turned to a ruby fountain that flooded the container. Kitt began to drown in the bloody, soupy heat. Corpses floated around him.

  Laughing, knee deep in a sea of crimson, the Malay customs broker patted her barely out-of-his-teens Chinese assistant. “He’s stone, lah.” Her long locks fanned out as she spun around and hit the crate. Eyes peered out through a cascade of grapes and leaves.

  “What time is it?” Dalton murmured.

  “No! Amo, am—” words became a gurgle, a shaft of sunlight glinted off the stainless-steel shaft of a slashing blade, and Molony stumbled, fumbling uselessly with a tiny Swiss Army knife.

  Dalton, teeth blood-smeared, raised his arms in a defensive move. “What time is it?” he hissed, Rolex strapped on his wrist.

  The ocean of blood drained away, Kitt snagged the edge of the wire with two fingers before it bit into his neck. The metal twine sliced into flesh and bone, forcing the heel of his hand to his throat. He was asphyxiating himself and laughter spun in circles around him, the docker’s plait swayed like a pendulum. “Chichiltic.”

  The woman screamed and screamed and screamed.

  “What time is it?” Dalton laughed. The boy, nineteen at most, fell without a sound and Kitt basted in his own blood, the heat stole his breath, and the universe closed in until there was black, starless nothing.

  Kitt opened his eyes, heart pounding, mouth dry.

  The stink of death vanished. Mae’s soft slumbering body welcomed him. He’d dreamt of stifling heat, yet it was freezing in the bedroom. He’d kicked off the bedclothes.

  Shivering with a chill, with lingering, obstinate apprehension, he reached for the blankets and Mae, gathering her close. His heart slowed. Incrementally, dismay and horror sloughed off as he held her. Sleep was a necessity, a restorative requirement of body and brain. Nightmares were his mind’s attempt to process past and present stress and trauma, and he wasn’t afraid of them, but he did resent them robbing him of the rest he needed. It had been idiotic to hope that sleeping beside Mae would settle or reveal the provocation of his nightmares, and it had been wrong to think they could ever be together in a customary way afforded to other couples. The green-glowing bedside clock indicated he’d slept a little less than two hours.

  What the hell was it, what principles had driven him to lead the life he had and spurn a tradition he’d never known he’d want? He looked at the woman asleep in his arms, a truthful melancholy enveloping him as he enveloped her. How hard would it be? How hard would it be to give up the ethics he’d lived by and quit without finishing a job that had nearly finished him? How hard would it be to wake Mae and simply vanish together? They could go to Sicily, to Australia, Belize or someplace where it was always summer...

  A few minutes fantasising about a different life was enough. Kitt didn’t try to fool himself into believing quitting or disappearing would miraculously alter reality. However appealing the idea of quitting, of vanishing, there were reasons, responsibilities, promises he’d made that prevented that being an option.

  Reluctantly he shifted from the bed, leaving Mae to sleep. He crept into the sitting room and found his shoes. He sat and tied on his joggers. The dog on the sofa lifted his head and slid off the couch, wandering over with a prancing step, plopping his chin on Kitt’s knee, gaze expectant. “All right. All right.” For a moment, Kitt ran a hand over sleek fur, stroking the dog’s soft ears. Then he jerked his chin toward the bedroom. “Go on.” The slim-bodied animal went into the room with Mae.

  Kitt let himself out of the apartment, exiting through the laundry, onto the patio. He zipped his dark, thermal running jacket to the neck, drew on a knit cap, pulling it down over his ears to keep out the chill of early morning air. Sunrise was more than an hour away.

  He retraced the same path he’d taken earlier in the night, following the perimeter of the house to search the garage again. He left footprints, as he had last night, but wind and drifting snow would cover them the way it would have covered Grant in front of Lady Evelyn’s studio. He dug under the seats of a Jeep and old British convertibles, rummaged through car boots, and found nothing more than an empty packet of chewing gum. In an instant, Kitt’s mind flashed upon a dead man’s mangled face. He smelled violets that turned into a nightmare of fetid flesh, the stench clawing at him again, harder and more viciously than when he’d been asleep.

  He went outside, breathing in frigid air. There was one way and only one way to dig down to find the things he needed, and that was to accept everything and anything his brain threw at him, however chaotic, and try to see something he’d overlooked.

  Dalton asked the time and Kitt glanced down at his watch. “Nine-fifteen,” he murmured and breathed in an icy phantom odour, letting it wash over his mind, acknowledging the sensation.

  In seconds, splintered images skittered across his line of sight and Kitt tried to look beyond recalling the spraying blood, to look past the glint of flashing blade. He saw Molony falling backwards, Dalton’s bloodied teeth, the customs broker’s fingers clutching at a torn throat, long, dark hair fanned out against tattered bubble wrapping that flapped over tiles. The corpses at the front of the crate, the woman, the shiny handbags, coloured decorator sample mosaic tiles of a face, of cascading grapes framed by wooden slats, Kitt drew his eyes through the memory, searching the moving picture inside the container laid out in his mind. Chichiltic, he heard the word over and over, but what couldn’t he see?

  He’d been through war zones, the aftermath of natural disasters, had been exposed to appalling instances of finding and recovering the dead, but this had been the first time a traumatic event had altered his ability to clearly recall an incident.

  “God damn it,” he muttered beneath the early-morning stars. He took a deep breath and began to run. Frigid air stung his nostrils, burned his eyes. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he took off toward the front of the house. It would be easy to tell himself the icy nature of a light wind caused his tears, but there was no wind, and he didn’t believe in self-deception. It was relief, it was fear, it was frustration, it was the need to make sense when he knew there was no sense to be made. In the dark, Kitt sprinted for the driveway, running down the long length to the gate at the main road, and out, following the twisting, hilly topography. He ran and ran and ran until the mechanical muscle memory of running took over and his mind went blank and then he simply ran and ran and ran, until his clothes were soaked with sweat and his throat and lungs burned.

  The setting bright moon drooped towards the mountains to the west, the sky a star-dotted deep purple scattered with darker clouds. In the quasi-dark, Kitt walked back up the long driveway to Taittinger’s home. He took his time, catching his breath, letting his body cool down in the winter chill. His unhurried pace took him along high mounds of snow, aspen trees bare of leaves, the old barn where Taittinger’s head bobbed past small, bar-covered rectangular wi
ndows.

  Kitt moved by the double-garage door and around to the side entrance, where a security touchpad glowed on the wall. The touchpad was very much like the one he had at home. Despite the bars and the security system, the lights burning inside made it easy for Kitt to watch the activity indoors. He moved closer to a window, skirting the exterior, staying in shadow. Inside sat a tractor, a car covered by a cloth, and gardening paraphernalia. Along one wall, beneath the windows at the rear, sat firewood and a row of rectangular, hip-high wooden crates, the sort often used inside shipping containers. Taittinger ferried bottles from one wooden crate to another. He sorted the bottles by colour or size, held them up to a lamp to inspect them, and tossed them into a third wooden crate lined with heavy canvas.

  When he’d searched the house, garage, and guest rooms last night he’d found nothing unusual, and he witnessed nothing unusual as he observed Taittinger through the window. Nothing odd or illegal took place, but why would a barn filled with firewood, crates full of bottles, a tractor, and an old car under restoration need security? Taittinger’s guests were collectors. Collectors often had an interest in more than one thing. Interest in a vintage car was not uncommon. It was possible Taittinger was counterfeiting wine, but in the ten minutes Kitt watched, as his sweat evaporated in the dry, bitter air, his host did nothing but sort bottles. Then the man paused. He lit up a joint and began to smoke it, never going near the shrouded car.

  Winter’s frostiness began to prickle Kitt’s hands. The remaining knuckles of the third finger and pinkie on his left hand ached dully. He flexed his fingers, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jogging bottoms, and moved off to the curving house. What a foolish arse he was to have climbed out of a warm bed leaving behind a woman he loved. Why—how had he ever left Mae behind in the last few months?

  Kitt went inside, shut the door, leaving the cold and his foolishness outside where it belonged. He went to his room and showered, the water as hot as he could stand. Then he dressed and went downstairs, cowboy hat in place. Basil met him at the bottom of the staircase.