The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  “So?”

  “So he didn’t get his information. But we did. We know.”

  Fielding looked at her, astonished. “You’re taking the word of that lunatic? I’m here because of that?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I am.”

  Then she put a hand to the front of her own vest, took hold of the tangle of coloured wires.

  Costa watched in horror. “Emily—”

  “I can show you why, Thornton,” she said, ripping at the wires on her chest, tearing them from the canisters in one rapid, bold movement.

  Fielding cowered, half crouching down on the floor. Nothing happened. She just stood there, making the point. Then she threw off the parka, let it fall to the floor and ripped down the zipper on the vest, got rid of that too.

  Friedricksen turned and fled for the shadows.

  “Get back here!” Leapman yelled at the man, then picked up the vest to look at it. He pulled out the detonator from one of the canisters, upending the contents so sand fell onto the floor in a steady stream. Cocking his head to one side, he took a closer look, scratched at the metal with his finger.

  “Fake,” Leapman said.

  “It’s a Coke can,” Emily said. “Painted yellow, reshaped with putty. Plus a little white spirit to give it the right smell and a detonator that’s as real as they come. Kaspar’s broke. He didn’t have enough for two sets.”

  “Neat,” Leapman conceded. Then he pointed at Fielding’s vest. “And this?”

  “Oh,” Emily said brightly, reaching down for the parka, taking something out of the pocket. “This is the real thing. Absolutely.”

  She grabbed Fielding by the scruff of his jacket. “This can blow us all to pieces, Thornton. And you know something?”

  Emily now held a small plastic device up in her hand, thumb on a button. “It’s not Bill Kaspar who gets to make that choice. It’s me. He trusted me with that. He trusted me with a dummy jacket. Who do you think I believe, Thornton?”

  “Emily,” Nic murmured, “this wasn’t part of the—”

  “It is now,” she said, circling Fielding, holding the remote in front of his ashen face. “Talk to me, Thornton. Or don’t. Because I really don’t care either way. Not anymore. You screwed my dad. He was a good man. You sold him and his people down the river, let them get there, and hoped—what?”

  He was nervous, Costa thought. Just not nervous enough.

  “You’ve got to do something here, Leapman,” Fielding pleaded. “This kid’s as crazy as her old man was.”

  “I guess,” she went on, ignoring his remark, “you hoped that, once they got there, knew it was a case of give in or die, they’d all think the way you did. That this wasn’t their war, not really. All they had to do was put up their hands, go quietly. That was part of the deal. And when it was over—what? Some quiet, secret negotiation with Baghdad. A hand-over at the Syrian border. Everyone comes home. You disappear and get rich. No awkward questions. But Bill Kasper didn’t go quietly, did he?”

  “Sand?” he sneered. She was jabbing a finger into the dark and Fielding knew that. He was growing more confident. She was starting to realize it too. “And Coke cans? That’s what the big man’s up to these days?”

  “Proof,” she murmured. “That’s all anyone wants.”

  Thornton Fielding’s forehead glistened, shiny with sweat, shaking from side to side. “No, Emily. What they want is an end to this shit. That lunatic put away where he belongs. He killed your dad. You’re supposed to want that too.”

  Emily Deacon’s delicate fingers worked their way onto Fielding’s vest, found the topmost canister in the middle row beneath his chin.

  “Don’t move, Thornton,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t want to choose the wrong wire. The rest are wired in parallel and will blow if I tamper with them. Kaspar only showed me this once.”

  He was rigid, uncertain whether this was a bluff or not. She flicked off a set of wires, delicately removed the canister from its webbing holster.

  “He thought you might need convincing,” she said, then flipped the detonator, starting a small, livid spark at its head, and flung it into the darkness near the doors.

  Fielding blinked at her. Leapman and Viale were already flattened on the floor. Emily Deacon placed her arms around Fielding, held him tightly.

  “Remember when you danced with me?” she asked. “When I was just a kid? We’d go round and round, circles and circles, like a couple of human compasses describing pretty patterns on the floor. People like patterns, Thornton. Patterns make you feel comfortable. They make you think the world’s more than just a mess of chaos.”

  A hot, fiery blast roared from somewhere close to the bronze slabs, began to occupy the interior of the building, sending a deafening, screaming roar echoing around the hemisphere. From somewhere outside came the wailing sound of a siren. She clung to him tightly, keeping the two of them upright, struggling against the heat and force of the explosion.

  “That’s what Kaspar’s been looking for,” she said, holding the remote to his cheek, finger on the button, the two of them describing a slow, lazy circle on the stone floor. “Something that restores some order. And maybe it’s not there at all. Maybe I should press this and make us nothing. No more memories. No more guilt. No more hate. Does that sound appealing to you?”

  Fielding was silent, eyes screwed tight, fighting to control himself.

  “He was my father, Thornton. He thought you were his friend. I remember you in our house. I remember…”

  This recollection had some force, it was obvious in her eyes. “I remember you hated that music of his. You used to bring those big band tunes, dance tunes, little me, big you, all those years ago. And you murdered him. Long before Kaspar got there. Somehow I knew he had died back then. I just never wanted to see it.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, stared into her face, shook her, hard. “Dan took the money too, Emily! No one made him. No one made any of them, not on his team. If that fool Kaspar hadn’t started shooting, they’d all have been in and out of there and no one the wiser. One team rich, smart and in on the deal. The other poor and heroes and still with their consciences. It’s a dirty world. You’re telling me you never noticed?”

  Costa saw the sudden grief in her face. The way her finger tightened on the button.

  “I don’t believe you,” Emily Deacon insisted.

  Fielding pushed her away. She didn’t protest.

  “Then why did he come back and say nothing?” he asked. “Why didn’t he come back and start asking some questions about what went wrong?”

  “He didn’t know!” she screeched.

  Fielding gripped her shoulders again, peered into her face with glistening eyes. “You’re too smart to believe that,” he said after a while. “Aren’t you?”

  Emily said nothing. She just stood there, shaking her head, staring at him, furious.

  “Think about it,” Fielding continued. “Dan did nothing because he was on the payroll, Emily. Everyone on his team was. Before they even went in. Not that it was the money. In the beginning anyway. The others, yes. Not him. Not me.”

  “Then what, Fielding?” she wondered. “You’re telling me this was all some moral decision too?”

  Thornton Fielding looked, for a moment, as if he’d forgotten the deadly armament strapped to his body. He was mad with her, furious she didn’t get it.

  “You’re so young,” he spat at her. “You really have no idea.”

  “Tell me.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head, clutched the deadly vest to him. “Dan and I had been working together off and on for years. Since Nicaragua. We’d spent all that time throwing all manner of dirty shit at dirty situations. And you know what? It never cured a damn thing. We were just so sick of being part of that machine, deciding who was right, who was wrong. Sick of the fact that so many of yesterday’s friends turned out to be tomorrow’s bad guys. Your dad had this huge sense of duty, but duty has to be ea
rned somehow by the people above you or you start to question it. His got used up in the end. We both felt that way. And that’s the real killer.”

  He looked at Leapman, and there was disgust in his face. “In that kind of situation either you become like him—an automaton who does what he’s told and doesn’t think twice—or you become the enemy. There is no in between. We’d taken the money, but the truth is we’d have done it for free. We didn’t want the war to spread. There were all these lunatics saying it had to go on, all the way to Baghdad. As if we were a liberating army, bringing peace and joy and freedom to the world. Babylon Sisters wasn’t about Kuwait. It was about being there as a forward base once the hawks back home persuaded Bush to go all the way. You get me?”

  She was listening, struggling to take all this in.

  “Emily,” he pleaded, “you have to understand. No one needed to get hurt. Dan had arranged for us to get our guys taken, along with him. They’d all be freed, unharmed, later and no one would be the wiser. A straightforward deal. Except…” He sighed, hung his head, stared at the stone floor. “We didn’t bring Bill Kaspar in. Dan and I talked about it but in the end we just didn’t have the guts. We thought he and the rest of them would lie down once they saw what they were up against. We didn’t think he’d feel the urge to make nine people dead heroes. So Dan and his crew had to watch a bloodbath, knowing they couldn’t do a damn thing to stop what was going on. And then—”

  “Then what?” Emily asked, livid.

  “Then you find yourself facing painful choices. It wasn’t Dan’s fault. Not mine. Not Kaspar’s, really. It was just a stupid idea that began as a good one. A couple of tired spooks dragging out some peacenik idealism we thought might stop the world from tilting even further out of balance. Stupid. Dumb as they come, and when those Iraqis came back to each and every one us after the war, kept calling, kept asking for more, threatening to expose us if we didn’t go along with them, we found out exactly how dumb.”

  She was shaking her head. “Dad wouldn’t—”

  “He did!” Fielding cried. “We all did. There wasn’t any alternative. It was either go along with what they wanted or see every last one of us in jail or worse. Until Kaspar got out, of course. And you know the funny thing?”

  There was a sudden look of bitter hatred on his face. “By then it didn’t matter. If Bill Kaspar hadn’t come a-hunting, all of this would have just slipped out of sight. Except,” he added sourly, “when you started waking up in the middle of the night sweating from the memories.”

  There was activity beyond the big doors. Brisk, bossy Carabinieri voices.

  Fielding nodded at the button and took several steps back. “So you want to press that, Little Em? If it makes you feel good, go ahead.”

  “Oh, Thornton,” she said immediately. “It will make me feel so very, very good.”

  Emily Deacon hit the button and Thornton Fielding’s vest lit up like a string of firecrackers. Costa was over to her in a flash, trying to drag her down to the cold, hard floor.

  She fought him, watching Fielding all the time. “Don’t worry,” she murmured. “Kaspar’s broke. It’s just Coke cans, sand and a few detonators. And a little fertilizer for the one I got to throw. You’d be amazed what I’ve learned over the last couple of hours.”

  Thornton Fielding did a fiery little jig around the heart of the building then, when the detonators fizzled, fell to the ground in a crumpled, sobbing heap.

  Nic Costa looked into Emily’s face and a part of him was convinced he knew what she saw at that moment. An image from a different time. A young girl dancing with her father’s best friend, not knowing what darkness lay beyond the bright white room in which every happy memory seemed to exist, and how difficult it was to see into the mind of another human being, even one you thought you knew and loved.

  “Nic,” she said with a sudden, bright efficiency. “Inspector Falcone. Gianni. Are you ready?”

  “Of course,” Falcone replied, then grimaced at the dejected figure of Thornton Fielding crawling underneath the grey eye of the oculus. “I think,” he said to Leapman, “that belongs to you.”

  There was an expression on Falcone’s face Costa didn’t recognize. Finally, he put a name to it: astonishment.

  They followed her to the bronze slab doors, helped her pull the right one back on its ancient hinges. A flood of policemen poured into the hall, asking questions, waving guns, shrinking back as Falcone barked at them about this being a state police show.

  “Come with me,” Emily said.

  Costa and Peroni walked behind her over to the office. She took out a key, unlocked the door and let them in.

  There was a well-built, craggy-faced man there, in a caretaker’s uniform that was one size too small for him. He was leaning back in a chair, feet on the desk next to a mobile phone and a small radio, laid out in a precise line parallel with the edge of the surface. An old and dusty copy of Dante’s Inferno lay in front of him, open at the page.

  William F. Kaspar took out the radio earpiece, looked at the three of them, nodded to Emily and said, “As I always say, improvisation is the key to everything, Agent Deacon. Nice job. I’m proud of you.”

  He waved the book at them. “Mind if I keep this? I found it in here and, to be honest, I don’t think it’s one of his.”

  He pointed to a figure bundled into the corner, gagged, hands tied behind his back, wearing a grubby vest and underpants. Peroni recognized the florid-faced caretaker and stifled a laugh.

  “Let me tell you,” Kaspar continued, “this guy is a world-class shirker. Plus he has potty mouth you wouldn’t believe. Beats me how they let him look after a place like this.”

  Falcone pushed open the door of the side entrance. There were no Carabinieri there. Only a fresh, light scattering of snow coming down through the growing darkness.

  Costa waved a pair of handcuffs in the air. Emily Deacon forced her way in front of him and peered at Kaspar.

  “How are things?” she asked him.

  He stared through the open interior door, back into the great circular hall, looking as if he were saying good-bye. Then he peered closely at the objects on the table. The book. The radio. The phone. All set in a line.

  “Quiet,” Bill Kaspar said, and shuffled the items in front of him, making a random pattern, like three dominoes rattling aimlessly around a board. “Quieter than they’ve been in a long time.”

  Natale

  TERESA LUPO STOOD AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW, WORKING her way through the mountain of dishes Peroni had left in his wake. He’d now retreated to the living room with Nic and Emily, clutching a bottle of grappa, and begun to talk in that low, concerned way she’d come to recognize. Leo Falcone was outside with Laila, working to put a little life back into the disintegrating snowman before better weather came along and melted it into the hard earth.

  Teresa had been astonished when Falcone accepted the invitation to Christmas lunch. She was a little surprised she’d gone along with the idea too, but the expression on Peroni’s face when Nic Costa floated the idea meant there really was no other option. Peroni wanted to cook a holiday meal. He wanted to sit down at a table with other people. With a kid, more than anything.

  And Falcone… He was a lonely man. He had nothing else to do. So it made sense for him to be outside now, parading around the diminishing white figure, wondering where best to place an old, limp carrot. Laila, who’d been ferried to the farm from the social worker that morning and would be ferried back in the evening, watched with an equal amount of seriousness. The two of them were driving Teresa crazy.

  “Lighten up, for God’s sake,” she muttered. Falcone drove her crazy a lot. She’d always known he was an intense, solitary man. But she’d never realized this was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. Watching him walk slowly around the snowman, carrot in hand, looking as if he were about to enter into the most important decision he’d faced in his entire life, made Teresa Lupo feel uncomfortably sympathetic towa
rds a man she didn’t, in truth, much like.

  Unable to contain herself any longer, she threw open the window and yelled, “The face, Leo. Try putting it on the face.”

  Falcone gazed back at her in despair, sighed, then nodded at Laila.

  “The carrot’s not the problem,” the girl said. “The face is.”

  Teresa looked at the blasted thing. The face was wrong.

  “Well, just do something,” she snapped.

  “But…” Falcone protested.

  She slammed the window shut, not wanting to hear any more or see it either. There were people on this planet for whom time was a stranger. People who took no notice of the passing years, never stopped once to add them up and work out the sums: what was now possible, what would soon disappear from your grasp once that hand ticked past midnight on another New Year’s Eve.