I reached for the pistol in my waistband but did not draw it. Not yet.
As the square opened up, I could see the base of the column clearly, with its four massive bronze rhinos turned outward as if guarding. A figure was sitting on the steps at the foot of the column itself.
He was slumped over sideways. Unmoving.
A puddle of blood was thickening around him. There was a wound in his chest. One I had seen before.
It was Billy.
CHAPTER
21
HIS EYES WERE OPEN, but when I stooped and touched his throat, I felt no pulse, though the body was still quite warm. I closed his eyes with one hand and sat on the stone flags in front of him in numb shock. I adjusted his jacket, which had rumpled, smoothing the front as I thought he would have liked, and I felt the bulge in his breast pocket.
Two purses and a quarter sheet of newspaper, carefully folded.
I took it all, but did not read the cutting. My mind would not process what had happened. I had doubted him, but he was true, and in trying to help me, he had died. Shock and grief and guilt threatened to overcome me, and I stuffed the newspaper into my pocket without another glance.
Two purses, one for the ring he will never buy …
I heard the footsteps. I don’t know how I had forgotten them, but I had. They were closer now, more careful, but they were the same ones I had heard earlier. I heard the tap of the cane, and suddenly I was sure that whoever was following me had been here already. He had known I was coming and who I was to meet. One half of his job was done. I was the other half.
Morlak hobbling on his stick.
Or Mnenga with his spear?
The thought horrified me, but would not go away. I had seen the Mahweni boy only a few blocks away, in a place he should not be, and armed.…
I spun around, trying to locate the source of the sound in the eerie glow of the gaslit fog, and as I did so, I snatched the heavy pistol from my belt and pointed it into the shadows.
Another careful footstep.
“Who’s there?” I demanded. “Step into the light. I’m armed!”
Silence. Then the distinctive ring of steel: a long knife or sword sliding from its sheath.
I cocked the gun’s hammer and aimed the long barrel into the gently swirling mist, but there was nothing to see. How close might he get before presenting me with a target? Ten yards? Five? The fog seemed to confuse the sound so that I wasn’t sure which way I was facing, and when a distant train blew its whistle, the sound seemed to bounce from all directions.
My gun hand trembled. I had just enough presence of mind not to shoot blindly. Some of the buildings around me were residences. A stray bullet could go through a window.…
I pointed the revolver’s barrel into a patch of exposed dirt where a fractured flagstone had been removed, and fired once.
In the silence, the sound was a cannon blast, and its reverberation slapped around the facades of the square like thunder. My ears rang, and for a moment the world seemed muffled. I heard a window open somewhere to my left, and then the distant but unmistakable shriek of a police whistle.
From my attacker, the man I assumed had already killed Billy before turning his attention on me, there was no sound.
Then there were footsteps again, coming toward me. I turned, seized the lowest bar of the scaffolding, which crisscrossed its uneven way up the column to the bronze pirate on the top, and began to climb, my hair swinging in my face. The pistol was still in my hand, but the last I saw before the fog swallowed the ground beneath me was the shape of a man moving to Billy’s body, hesitating, and looking around as the shrill blast of the police whistle sounded once more.
I could not see who it was.
I climbed higher, faster, hoping against hope that I would not be trapped at the top of the column. The earth fell away beneath me. The fog swallowed me up. And still I climbed. At the top, a set of four gas lamps gave a faint opalescent aura to the bronze figure, but the column itself was utterly dark, so that the statue seemed to float like a specter above the city. It was not till I reached the top that I found what I had hoped for: a slim and rickety bridge made of ladders and cable, which the cleaning crew used to bring supplies from the roof of a nearby building.
It sloped downward, creaking when I put my feet on it, and it had never been designed to be used in the dark, but I could hear voices below, muffled by the fog. The police? Billy’s killer? Perhaps both. I took my first unsteady step onto the slim bridge and felt it wobble under my weight.