Silence now lay deeper than any ordinary hush, as deep as though commanded by a sorcerer’s spell. She could not hear her own breathing or the knocking of her heart, and therefore it was a weak odor, faded almost beyond detection, that alerted her. Not a perfume. More subtle than the most diluted and refined product of flowers or spices. It might have been the smell of clean hair rinsed free of the slightest trace of a shampoo’s fragrance, or skin likewise scrubbed of all sweat and soap. Neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant scent, it was as disturbing as it was faint, suggesting a cold, implacable presence.
When Bibi turned, pistol still in a two-hand grip, Solange St. Croix halted only seven or eight feet away. The professor seemed to have resolved out of thin air, until Bibi saw beyond her the entrance to a bathroom with pedestal sink and claw-foot tub. In the interest of perfecting the Victorian décor, the door was integrated seamlessly into its surroundings, the lower portion stained and trimmed with molding to match the wainscoting, the upper section wallpapered.
The woman was dressed as always in a stylish but severe suit that would have served her well had she been a mortician. Graying hair pulled back tighter than ever and captured in a bun, skin paler than before, lips all but bloodless, she seemed to have been born of the fog that licked the lace-curtained windows.
Wary of the pistol but not intimidated, St. Croix came no closer to Bibi, but began slowly to circle her, as if waiting for an opening. Her intentions weren’t obvious, because she carried no weapon, though it would not have been a surprise if a knife had appeared magically from tailoring that seemed too severe to conceal one.
In a mutual strategic silence, the professor circled 360 degrees and Bibi turned in place to follow her. Which of them was the moon and which the planet, it was hard to say. St. Croix chewed on her lower lip as if biting back words, and throughout her revolution, she met her former student’s stare without looking away for an instant. Her blue eyes were two jewels of hatred.
As the professor began a second circling, bumping against the side table, rattling the art and curios upon it, she said, “And now another outrage. What are you doing here, Miss Blair? What did you come to steal? Or is it something other than theft that gets you off, something degenerate, something kinky?”
Instead of answering, Bibi said, “Why were you having breakfast with Chubb Coy?”
Squinting, eyes glittering through her lashes, St. Croix said, “So you still follow me, do you? After all these years?”
“The opposite is true, and you know it.”
“The opposite of what is what?”
“You’re the one who followed me. I was in the restaurant first.”
“You’re the same lying bitch you always were. A sick little lying bitch. But you’re not half as clever as you think you are.”
Although there was nothing cuddly about the woman, she had a feline quality, as intense and merciless as a cat on the hunt.
Bibi said, “What do you have to do with Terezin, with Bobby Faulkner?”
Still circling, perhaps calculating whether she could come in under the pistol, St. Croix said, “Is that someone I’m supposed to know in whatever fantasy or scheme you’re cooking up?”
“Seventeen years ago, he killed his mother in this house and nearly killed his father.”
The professor didn’t dispute that statement. She didn’t react to it at all. “Are you ready to admit what you have done, Miss Blair?”
“I broke in here to find something that might explain how you’re involved with the murderer, Robert Faulkner, with Terezin.”
St. Croix stopped circling. The image that she projected so forcefully to the world was one that she also cherished, which was why she made such an effort to suppress the evidence of her natural beauty, a little of which was always evident nonetheless. At this moment, however, her expression of contempt was so fierce that the last traces of loveliness were purged, and she was the very avatar of animosity, of pure detestation.
“I mean,” she said, “what you did then, the rotten damn thing that got you thrown out of the university.”
“I wasn’t thrown out. I quit.”
On the two previous occasions that she and the professor had a confrontation regarding Bibi’s unknown offense, St. Croix hadn’t been this over-the-top furious. But now she worked herself from rage to fury, too hot for the cool priestess of the written word.
“You quit. Yes, you quit. Because if you hadn’t, I would have seen that you were thrown out on your ass.”
Frustrated, of half a mind to shoot St. Croix in the foot to force her to stop being so enigmatic, Bibi said, “Okay, all right, so tell me what I did.”
“You know damn well what you did.” Her cold eyes were hot now, the gas-flame blue of the fire in a pet-cemetery cremator.
“Pretend I don’t know. Tell me. Spit it out and humiliate me. If it’s so bad, then make me feel like the shit you think I am.”
A man said, “Enough of this.”
Chubb Coy had opened the black-lacquered door and entered the third-floor suite. He wore a black suit, gray shirt, no tie. His pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor.