She turns to him again. “How much do you pay the coiffeuse to cut your hair?”
She wishes to define him as a shallow elitist, and he refuses to be that person, for he is not that person, not of that class, not of her class, either, not of any class, above all concepts of class, caste, and echelon. He says nothing.
In an instant, she goes from ice to fire, her face contorted by rage and flushed with hatred. With sudden fury she snarls, “What do you pay for a haircut, asshole?” As she speaks, her right hand arcs high and then down, driving the scissors into the two-inch-thick vinyl-covered mattress, so close to his face that he startles in spite of himself. Vinyl and dense-foam padding split as flesh might, and the points of the blades rap against the steel substrate as if against bone.
She wants him to believe that the death of her husband and the peril in which her child lives and these long months on the run have driven her to the edge of sanity, that she might snap, butchering him before she quite realizes what she’s done. But he knows her too well to be conned by this performance. He has reviewed in detail the cases she solved while an agent of the FBI—a record of brilliant deduction, wise strategies, and smart techniques. For months, she has eluded capture even though the combined resources of federal, state, and local law enforcement have been committed to the search for her. Her sanity is a stone that can’t be cracked.
Nevertheless, as the scissors flash past his face and gouge the mattress, he glances at the iPhone, attempting by an act of sheer willpower to summon the SWAT teams that surely must be en route.
She leans toward him, her rage gone as abruptly as it came, her unblemished face serene and exquisitely erotic in its serenity. Her lips are eight or ten inches from his when she presses the closed blades of the scissors against the lower lid of his left eye. The steel is cold and the point pricking.
In almost a whisper, she says, “Do you know why I put the phone on the table, Boo? Hmmm? To give you hope. So that when you hoped, I could take your hope away from you. Like you’ve taken hope from so many people. I hammered a screwdriver blade into the charging port of that phone, Boo. Split the battery. No juice. No locater signal. No one’s tracking it. No one’s coming to save you.”
Her eyes are at least three shades of blue alternating in the striations of the irises, those thin circular layers of muscle like the folds of Japanese fans, the kitchen fluorescents treating each grade of pigment differently, so that her stare seems radiant not by reflection, but because of some internal light. Her pupils are black holes, their gravity alarming.
She still speaks softly, but now as tenderly as a lover. “Tell me, Booth, what else must I take away from you in order to make you talk? Your eyes—so you can see no evil? What a terrible, terrible loss, considering the delight you take in seeing the evil you do.”
She moved the scissors to his lips.
“Your lying tongue? Then you’d have to answer all my questions in writing while swallowing so much blood.”
She takes the scissors away from his lips but doesn’t press them to another part of him. Instead, she startles him by reaching back with her left hand and caressing his crotch, fondling his package through his suit pants.
“Do you go to Aspasia, Booth?”
The elegant and highly secret houses of pleasure, reserved for the wealthiest supporters of the Techno Arcadian mission, are called Aspasia, named after the mistress of Pericles, the famous statesman and mayor of Athens, circa 400 B.C. Booth is disquieted to learn that she knows about Aspasia, as closely guarded a secret as any the Arcadians keep.
“There are four of them,” she whispers. “Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington. Have you tried them all, Booth? I’ve spent a little time touring the Aspasia in Los Angeles.”
The revelation that she has been in one of these highly secure palaces of Eros alarms him, and he tells himself that she is lying.
“The twin colonnades of magnificent phoenix palms that flank the long driveway,” she says, “the courtyard with its swimming pool as big as a lake. Tens of millions of dollars of art and antiques. So much marble and granite and gilding. It’s all so classy that dirty little perpetual adolescents can go there and feel like big important men.”
She is not lying. She has been to Aspasia. The truth of her mood is not in the softness with which she speaks and the tenderness with which she teases him through his pants; the truth is in her stare, her eyes now radiant with fury. What she saw at Aspasia has not merely outraged her; she clearly found it an abomination, for she is filled now with loathing, and the light in her eyes is the light of abhorrence.
“One of the girls in Aspasia is a gorgeous Eurasian, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Her name is LuLing. Well, you know, that’s her whore name, given to her. She doesn’t remember her real name or what she once was, doesn’t remember her family, nothing of her past. She doesn’t even possess the concept of a past or a future. All that and more has been scrubbed from her mind. She lives only in the moment, Boo. Smiling and attentive, without any inhibitions. You might call her a blithe spirit if there was any spirit left in her. She lives only to submit to those who use her, to satisfy their every desire. Cool, huh? Just thinking about it should fill out the pouch in your briefs, Boo.”
He dares not speak. He believes now that he has misjudged her capacity for…cruelty.
Her soft voice fades to a breathless whisper. “Do you have extreme desires, Booth? Do you like rough sex? Rougher than rough? Do you like to hear them cry?”
Bravado and ostentatious assertion of his superiority have in the past always gotten Booth through tight passages. His mind races now as he considers what to say and do.
Her face six inches from his. Her hand still moving sensuously over the crotch of his pants. Her warm breath on his face. “Mama’s boy is terrified of me, isn’t he? If he wasn’t, there’d be at least some stiffening of his little man, but there’s none at all. Terror is a good thing if it makes you face the truth. Agree to tell me everything I want to know about the Arcadians, because if you don’t, not even your mind is dark enough to imagine what I’ll do to you.”
If he rats out the Arcadians, they will surely torture and kill him as a turncoat. His fellow conspirators are infinitely more bloody-minded than this bitch, who is still more of a straight arrow than not. In the past few months, she’s given him lots of headaches, some of them as fierce as migraines. Maybe she’s capable of greater cruelty than he thought, but she will not—unlike certain of his associates—cut out his tongue or cut off his balls. She terrifies him, yes, but bravado and reliance on his superiority are, now as always, his best hope.
Fear has flooded his mouth with saliva, and he puts it to good use, spitting copiously in her face from a distance of six inches.
He expects her contained fury to erupt, expects to be slapped and clawed, but her face is still serene, and she doesn’t touch him.
She remains bent over him for a moment and then slowly rises to her full height. She stands in silence, staring down at him without expression.
Perhaps a minute passes, during which she does not wipe her face. Pearls of spittle glimmer on her cheeks, her chin, and a slimy silvery string depends from the tip of her perfect nose.
She turns away from him and goes to the sink, but she doesn’t pull a paper towel from the holder and blot herself or turn on the water. She stares out the window.
Her reaction is so unexpected that Booth’s dread grows with the continued silence. He is reluctant to look away from her, but then he rolls his head to the right on the gurney and regards the thug in the black suit, who stares back with eyes as black as those holes in desert sand from which tarantulas burst forth.
Jane Hawk turns from the sink and says to her companion, “I’m going to use the bathroom. Quiet him for me while I’m gone.”