“I think your poor sister will be awfully upset if you disappear.”
A spike of fear, honed with guilt, stabbed him through. He hadn’t reached out to her, first because he wanted to get out of this mess himself. She wouldn’t have to sneak him dinner this time. Then, when it was too late, he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to tar her with his own treachery, his own failings. Well, she’d been splashed with that brush anyway, and now it was too late to warn her.
“Better than if I’d been hanged for treason,” he said, with sour humor dredged up from somewhere in his cramping gut. “It’d wreck her diplomatic career.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you leaked confidential documents to a black market profiteer.”
Cyril snorted. A dizzying trickle of blood made its way from somewhere high in his nose and slipped over his lip, into his mouth. “I haven’t even confessed.”
“I think we can both agree your attempted flight was confession enough.”
“So you’re gonna bag me and tag me?” Van der Joost’s bland face assumed an expression of distaste at Cyril’s purposefully coarse language. “I’m a little disappointed in your—”
The blow to the back of his head wasn’t really a surprise. He’d been expecting it since he sat down, with the thin man lurking behind him. Pinpricks of white and purple-black sparked across his field of vision. He forced a smile and felt his swollen lip crack.
“There,” he said, tossing a bit of bloody, displaced hair out of his eyes. “That’s more like it.”
“Some things have come to light,” said Van der Joost, “regarding Aristide Makricosta’s involvement with a certain employee of the FOCIS. One Finn Lourdes. A friend of yours, I think?”
Cyril turned his face away. The thin man pushed it back.
“I knew him.”
“‘Knew’?”
Cyril didn’t say anything. A slash of movement in the corner of his eye gave him half a second’s warning. The fist in his hair hurt, but he managed to angle his chin so he hit the table with the meat of his cheek and not his nose.
“Hmm.” Van der Joost watched him as he recovered from the blow. “I was hoping we could make this quick. I have a lunchtime meeting. However…” He looked over Cyril’s shoulder. “Rehimov, will you see to him? I’ll be back in a few hours to check on your progress.”
Whatever motion the thin man made, it must have satisfied Van der Joost. He gathered his leather datebook and pen and set his hat on his head. “I’ll be seeing you, Mr. DePaul.”
“See me? Sure.” Grinning hurt his face. The satisfaction was worth the pain. “But you won’t hear a thing.”
*
Cordelia stayed in Malcolm’s flat overnight. It wasn’t like she wanted to, but it was wet out on the street. Besides, if they weren’t after her yet, they would be soon. She needed to keep hidden. And more than that, she needed a day or two to lick her wounds.
So she closed the bedroom door and shoved a blanket underneath it, trying to keep out the stink of blood and shit. Raiding Mal’s drawers gave her enough white cotton for a bandage. Nauseous to the bottom of her stomach, she used her teeth to unwrap the grimy cloth from her cut-up fingers. Dried blood made the fabric stiff, and flaked off in rusty crumbs as she peeled the layers away. As she got closer to the skin, the blood was fresher, sticky and bitter. She gagged, but kept pulling cloth away.
The wounds were clean, at least, and she meant to keep them that way. She took Malcolm’s good belt from its peg on the door and put it between her teeth. In the washroom, she turned the taps to hot and bathed the stubs of her fingers with lye soap. By the time she was done, she’d bitten straight through the leather.
Like a dead woman, she slept flat on her back without a twitch. When she woke, it was light out—the middle of the morning, from Malcolm’s clock, but it probably needed winding. She lay in his bed, smelling him: sweat and hair tonic and cheap cologne. If she closed her eyes, it almost seemed like …
No. She sat up, gasping at the grinding pain in her chest, and put her feet over the edge of the bed. She wouldn’t close her eyes, and she couldn’t play pretend.
She’d always kept a compact in Malcolm’s bedside drawer, and it was still there (next to a wad of cash she wasn’t too proud to snatch). The bed of powder was cracked, but the makeup covered the worst of her bruises. There would be plenty of people walking around the city with rammed-in faces today, anyhow. The fingers were easy, too. She hauled Malcolm’s khaki overcoat from its hook; the pockets were deep. Her eye-catching hair she twisted up and covered with Malcolm’s brown felt hat. Pulling it low to hide her face, she made for the door.