Crystal Whisperer (Spotless Series #3)

by Camilla Monk

  Alex had known that the Lions were coming to blow up March’s house . . . did I even want to go there? Not really, but my neurons were already busy laying the first brick of the scenario: Alex pretending to be cool with his father’s death, becoming a frumentarius and some kind of triple spy, all to frame Dries and watch him get destroyed by his own brotherhood. But wouldn’t the Lions have seen him coming a mile away, waving a sign that said disgruntled orphan? Plus, in this scenario, Alex couldn’t ignore that Erwin was at least in part responsible for his parents’ deaths.

  “Enlighten me. What’s in the deal for those guys?” I asked Jan.

  “Often money. Sometimes they have a lot to lose if they don’t play along; some want to join the brotherhood.”

  “Can they?”

  “Rarely. And never on Dries’s watch.”

  I glanced up at the now silent window. “He doesn’t like them, right?”

  “Once burned . . .”

  In the house, two pairs of feet thumped down the old wooden stairs before I had a chance to ask who had “burned” Dries. I immediately dragged my chair back to its initial place while Jan leaned back with an air of innocence that didn’t really suit the lines of experience on his tanned face.

  Dries strolled to the table, self-assured and impenetrable, back to his default mode. March returned to his seat. Next to me, I could feel the tension still thrumming through him, flowing to me. I caressed his forearm in a bid to ease it a little. His skin was warmer than usual, like he had a fever, and the muscles twitched under my palm. He let out a long exhale, relaxing under my touch. It brought me a sense of relief that I was able to accomplish that. Against his own not-in-public rule, and possibly to stick it to Dries, March bent to nuzzle my hair and press a kiss to my temple.

  It worked. I couldn’t stop the lovestruck smile I felt tug at my lips, and Dries looked ready to shoot us both. He clapped his hands, calling the end of the break he had been the cause of, and gulped down the rest of his wine. “Let’s get down to business. We have someone to find.”

  One of March’s eyebrows arced in doubt. “I don’t think Bashir planned the bombing. He’s gone into hiding too, and his future looks quite compromised at the moment.”

  Dries waved his hand dismissively. “I’ll take care of him later. First, I want that girl, the one who didn’t board and Interpol is looking for.”

  My eyebrows jumped. “Sabina Falchi? The engineer? How do you know about her?”

  “Don’t insult me,” he said with a haughty look that was in fact directed at March.

  “So you know she used to work for Novensia?”

  “Who manufactured the glass roof? Yes. Have you seen their commercial?”

  March cleared his throat. “We have.”

  Dries’s mouth pursed in appreciation. “What a fine piece of advertising . . .”

  So, that made at least one mystery solved: Who was the target demographic for an ad that relied on a naked blonde to sell polycrystalline transparent ceramics? Heterosexual men in their fifties.

  Dries clasped his hands. “Let me show you something, rookies.”

  That was Jan’s cue to rise from his chair. He went to fetch a laptop in his living room, which he set on the table, next to the meatballs. A sleek, sexy silvery little thing—I’d have to ask him where he’d bought it. He pressed a key to launch a video. We all moved closer to watch as, on-screen, travelers hurried across a long hall encased between a glass wall overlooking the tarmac and a row of duty-free shops. A red crosshair appeared on a lone figure sitting next to the windows.

  “How did you get your hands on the airport’s surveillance footage?” I asked Dries.

  A lazy smirk revealed what could have just as well been a fang. “Morgan isn’t the only one with a taste for cinematography.” He paused the footage. “That’s her. It’s 9:41; she’s sitting in the boarding area. At that point, she looks perfectly fine.”

  Indeed, on the grainy surveillance tape, Sabina Falchi could be seen reading a magazine as she waited to board the flight.

  “And here’s a guest I want to know more about,” he explained as the tape resumed playing.

  On the screen, a second crosshair blinked, this time to single out a lean, hooded figure. A man, most likely, wearing a pair of jeans and sneakers. He went to sit right next to Falchi, his back to the camera. At first, she didn’t seem to care, but he spoke to her. I watched in perplexity as she let go of her magazine and jumped back in apparent surprise, before her hands flew to her mouth, like she recognized him. She considered him hesitantly, scooted closer, and it seemed they started chatting.

  Around them, passengers were lining up in front of the Delta Air Lines desk, and boarding started while their conversation went on. March fast-forwarded through their exchange, until 9:58.

  “She’s trying to leave,” he said as Falchi got up, only to be stopped by the hooded figure.

  He was gripping her shoulders, not very tight, more like he was imploring her not to go. She tried to free herself; he blocked her. The friendly reunion was taking an unpleasant turn. Near them, the passengers were finished boarding, and a ground attendant spoke into a microphone, presumably calling any remaining passengers. Falchi and the man both turned to the desk. But she didn’t move. She looked back and forth between her mysterious visitor and the ground attendant, in some kind of daze. The man insisted, wouldn’t let go of her hand, and she allowed the flight attendant to leave, without signaling herself.

  It was 10:12, and Sabina Falchi had missed her flight.

  She seemed to get agitated, then angry even, as if she’d just realized that guy had made her do something stupid. She yelled at him, but he just stood there and, after a minute or so, left. He entered the men’s room and never came out. Dammit . . . the footage ended there, and we had no clear shot of his face.

  “So you think she knew what would happen?” I asked. “He warned her?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to panic; she’s not trying to alert anyone,” Dries noted, stroking his chin. “But he popped up from nowhere and made sure she didn’t board. I want to hear more about our mystery man.”

  March frowned at the paused footage. “Where do we start?”

  “Anyone want to finish those?”

  We all turned our heads to stare at Jan, holding the meatball pot. A deep silence fell on the table. He eventually threw the leftovers to Andrea, who raced with surprising agility to eat them in the grass.

  Ignoring both the chewing sounds behind him and my question, Dries got up and motioned for Jan to follow him as he strode toward the house. A few hushed words were exchanged in Afrikaans, and when he came out, he was wearing his suit jacket.

  March cast him a questioning look, and I jumped to my feet to protest. “Where are you going?”

  Dries just waved at me without turning back as the gate creaked open. “I won’t be long. Why don’t you go help Dikkenek with the dishes?”

  A hot wave of patriarchal douchebaggery hit me and made my blood boil; I ran after him, only to be outsped by March, to whom Jan threw his own jacket. I lunged to catch him and demand an explanation, but he slammed the gate closed behind him. “I’m sorry, biscuit,” March called before disappearing in the street. “I’ll be right back.”

  By the time I made it past the gate too, and tumbled in the street, they had vanished around a corner. I balled my fists and yelled, mostly to the attention of the neighborhood, “Well, screw you too!”

  14

  L’Autre

  “Cherchez la femme !”

  Alexandre Dumas, Les Mohicans de Paris

  I paced in the garden, glancing at the gate every five seconds or so. Jan and Andrea lounged together in the grass under a pearly sky. Curls of pungent smoke swirled around them: he was drawing on . . . not a cigarette.

  “Where did you say they were going?” I asked for the second time.

  “Near Santa Lucia Station. They have a guy to see. Jukebox. Guy came here from Bulgaria, ha
s ears and eyes everywhere in Venice. It shouldn’t be more than an hour; don’t get all worked up.” He patted the ground with his free hand, causing Andrea to startle with a grunt. I took the invitation and sat next to him, at a safe distance from the dog.

  He pulled the joint away from his lips and held it up, looking up at me with one eyebrow raised in question.

  I shook my head. “No, thank you. I don’t want to get stoned. And March would bite my head off anyway. Drugs are marginally worse than murder in his book.”

  He guffawed in a cloud of smoke. “Always been like that, broom up his ass and all.”

  “I kinda thought all Lions shared that trait until I met you,” I countered.

  “No, it’s professionalism. It’s not the same. We’re professionals, and we do the job. March, he’s a pro, but he’s also completely gek,” he said, spinning his forefinger against his temple.

  “He’s not like that. He’s just a little different. But so is everyone else, in some way.”

  He stubbed his joint in the fresh grass and stared at it pensively. “Ah, young love. You know this is driving your pa crazy, right?”

  “You mean Dries?”

  “Got another one?”

  “Yeah, actually.”

  He coughed a laugh. “Complicated family.”

  It was. While Dries wasn’t exactly my “dad,” the more I discovered about him, the more I thought of him as a second father in a weird, instinctive way. Even worse, I was tempted to trust him, when every rational fiber of my being told me I shouldn’t.

  Jan looked up at me. “When Dries showed up and told me what was going on, honestly, I thought, He just called March so he can kill him faster. He’s still raw about that diamond thing too. What a mess . . .”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sorry for him. Dries made it clear I don’t have his consent. But I made it clear I don’t need it.”

  The corners of his lips tugged down in disapproval, which made me wonder if every man possessed a secret dad mode, regardless of whether he had kids or not. “Well, I’d say he’s right. But I remember the time when he was the one losing his mind over a girl, and anyone who had anything to say about it, they could go fuck themselves—but only if they ran fast enough for him not to kill them first.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Did he mean my mom? Back in Tokyo, Dries had claimed without flinching to have never loved her. Yet he had later admitted that he wished she would have told him about me, given him the choice to stay in the picture or not. Until now, I had always thought of their relationship as a destructive and one-sided passion, a fifteen-year-long storm that eventually led my mother to her death, because she couldn’t resist Dries’s pull or think straight around him. It was an odd epiphany to figure out that I now stood in the exact same place. I trusted March. Needed him, even when we fought. Would I ever be able to leave him if I had to?

  “Come here; I’ll show you something.”

  Jan had gotten to his feet. He dusted blades of grass from his shorts and bent down to pat Andrea on the back. When I didn’t get on my feet and looked at him in question instead, he flashed me a conspiratorial smile and jerked his head toward the second floor’s window. “Come, get up. Wouldn’t want to get caught by Dries showing you.”

  I scrambled to my feet. He led me up a flight of creaky stairs and to a dark hallway. Here too, there was a lot of work, but the original hexadecimal tiling and some of the paneling had been preserved. I caressed the smooth wood carvings, amazed at the idea that centuries ago, corseted ladies had walked on that same floor.

  We passed two closed doors. The third one looked like a library turned storage room. Bookshelves lined the bare stone walls, and approximately a million plastic boxes were stacked on top of each other, containing magazines, linens, dishes . . . A mattress and a sleeping bag lay in a corner of the room, next to a threadbare dog bed.

  Jan rummaged through a specific box. After some struggling with a handful of postcards that kept slipping from his carbon fiber hand, he retrieved a large leather album. “I’m not really supposed to have this. He doesn’t like that kind of trace.”

  We sat together on the mattress, and when he opened the album and started flipping through the yellowish pages, I held my breath. He had kept pictures. And not just that: there were also newspaper cuttings, most of them announcing either the murder or “accidental” death of various officials. Like a seventeen-year-old Justin Bieber fan, over the years Jan had put together an album of his favorite kills and many travels.

  He skimmed past entire sections, and I tried to ignore some of the worst pictures, like the one where he could be seen posing next to a dead crocodile still holding a dismembered leg in its mouth, or that polaroid selfie with a black guy I was pretty sure was Idi Amin Dada. He eventually paused to point at a specific page. 1988, Monte Carlo.

  My pulse picked up as I scanned the page. A cut from The Monaco Times recounted the gruesome execution of a Colombian drug lord and his entire escort in a suite at the Hôtel Métropole. Next to the article, Jan had pasted a single Polaroid, taken on a road overlooking a turquoise sea. My fingertips instinctively moved to caress the plastic film protecting the picture.

  My mother must have been twenty-two. She looked so young . . . I couldn’t remember ever having seen any pics of her before my birth. The oversized top and wild red curls held by combs on the sides were indeed typical of the era. She was leaning next to an equally young Dries against the hood of a black BMW, caught off guard by whoever had taken the pic, it seemed. Her smile was gentle, part amusement and part exasperation. Clad in a pair of jeans and T-shirt that were a far call from the perfectly cut three-piece suits I knew, Dries was scowling at the camera. A third figure stood away from the car with his arms crossed. The short brown hair and thick eyebrows were familiar. Kind of aristocratic but with something unpleasant in his sharp features: perhaps the cheekbones, too high, or the nose, a bit too long. Someone who looked a lot like Dries but wasn’t Dries.

  He wasn’t looking at the camera. His eyes were set on my mother.

  My forefinger lingered on his gray dress shirt. “Is that Anies?”

  Jan gave a noncommittal grunt.

  “What’s he like?”

  He rubbed his thumb against his lips. “I don’t really know. He was already our boss back then, so I never talked that much with him. Anies, he was the quiet type. Most of the time you couldn’t tell what he was thinking.”

  I thought of my mother’s last letter, of the way she had tried to warn me against I2000009, Anies’s code number. “And my mother? Did she know him well?”

  He suppressed a smile. “It was complicated.”

  “Define complicated.”

  He mumbled in his beard. “Broers delen alles.” Brothers share everything.

  I considered asking him to repeat that. I didn’t understand Flemish that well; I could have misinterpreted his words. It had to be that. Because I didn’t want to consider the possibility that Anies . . . No. It was bad enough that my biological father was Dries—no need to envision a worse scenario. My fingers drummed on the album’s page. “You’re wrong; my mom didn’t like Anies. She didn’t . . .” I hesitated. Could I tell him this? He seemed to know a lot about the three of them already anyway. “I think she was afraid of him.”

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  Our eyes met. I tried to decipher the conflict lurking in those washed-out blue irises. After several seconds, he finally spoke. “I said brothers share everything . . . I didn’t say Dries wanted to share.”

  Oh. I looked down at the picture again, at Anies’s dark gaze focused on my mother and at Dries’s left hand resting possessively on the small of her back. “So it was a problem between them, Dries’s relationship with my mom?”

  He scratched his beard. “Not so much when she was alive. Like I told you, Anies wasn’t the kind to say anything. But honestly, another man guesses those things. I remember times when you could have cut the tension between the two of them wit
h a knife.”

  “And after she was killed?” I prodded.

  “It changed everything. Dries was mad, because of the frumentarii. After that, he and Anies both rose in the ranks, and they took over the brotherhood together, but it was the one thing they could never agree on.”

  “What do the frumentarii have to do with this?”

  Jan’s eyes darted toward the door as if he was worried Dries and March would show up any moment. “The ’tarii, they’ve always been Anies’s playthings. He used them for everything, recruited dozens, then hundreds. Dries didn’t like it, because he thought we shouldn’t trust them. The day your mother died, your father didn’t even know his sniper was one of them: Anies had assigned that guy to his team without telling him.”

  My stomach heaved. The man who had shot my mother wasn’t a Lion, as I had first been led to believe, but a spy working for Anies. Dries hadn’t lied when telling me in Tokyo that the sniper had disobeyed his orders.

  Was it Anies’s orders he had followed instead? Because even after all this time, Anies still resented my mother for choosing Dries over him? I found it hard to believe that the commander of the Lions would have wasted any amount of time and resources over a petty grief. Frumentarii could, after all, be double agents: that guy could have been working for anyone who held a grudge against my mother.

  Taking in my distress, Jan went on in a lower voice. “There was nothing left to do, since Dries had already killed the guy, but after that, he made a point to always get rid of his ’tarii as soon as he was done with them, even if it pissed Anies off.”

  I chewed on one of my nails as I took in this new information. Whether Anies was responsible or not for my mother’s assassination, one thing was sure: Dries had retaliated the only way he could, by making all frumentarii pay for the crime of a single one. And among those unfortunate men had been Alex’s father. Yet another life wasted in a vicious circle. Once again, it struck me that Dries and Alex had, in fact, a lot in common.