Chapter Twenty Seven #2
Gunari.”
“No. A long life—no Stefan, but no doctors either. Is the price
she paid. Her heart is sick for long, long time before the raiders
come. Not your fault, boy.”
“It was! I brought them there. I...”
“Hush. She says the same. No fault. Just her Roma fate, she
says—out in the firelight, under the stars.” Gunari looked with
such contentment at a point across the room that Laurie helplessly
glanced there too. There was nothing—nothing for him anyhow, but
Gunari smiled. “And now she says is time for her stupid son to come
home.”
He was
gone. Laurie watched the loss of him in Sasha’s eyes, the severance
of the link. Laurie’s heart was beating fast, the old weight of
guilt trying to lift: taking off finally when Sasha’s fire-dark
gaze found his, Gunari’s absolution mirrored there. “No fault,”
Sasha whispered. “Just fate.”
Out in
the night, something changed. It was barely a sound, too faint and
far off to have much significance. Just an alteration of the
silence... Elizabeth registered it first. She turned towards the
door. “Agent Kucharski...”
“I hear it,” Kucharski said grimly. “So does Nico—don’t
you?”
Yes.
Nico was grinning wildly. “I hear,” he croaked, new courage
steadying his aim. “The others coming back. Ah, you traitor—I
deliver you and three hostages to Stefan Petrica’s men.”
“For God’s sake. They’re not Stefan’s men any more. They’re a
monster with its head cut off, that’s all.”
“You like to believe this, don’t you? This is why no outsider
will ever bring the Roma warlords down.” Nico took two long bold
strides towards Kucharski, who moved to shield Elizabeth. “Here he
lies, shot by his bitch. His legend starts here, not ends.”
Down on
his knees, half forgotten in the dust beside Gunari’s corpse, Sasha
lifted his head. “Yes,” he said softly. “I understand
that.”
“Be silent, bitti
juk. What would you know?”
Sasha released the dead man’s hand. He laid it down tenderly:
pushed up onto his knees and then his feet before Laurie could stop
him, hands spread wide. “I am
bitti juk. Stefan’s pup. Nobody knows better than
I do what he meant to men like you.”
“I said shut up.”
“I know how he kept you loyal. He hunted me from one side of
Europe to the other. Every little bit of a life I built, he ripped
it down. But I didn’t open my mouth against him until he came after
my lover. Do you know why?”
“You sold him out.”
“Yes, I did.” Nico was starting to listen, and Sasha pressed
on, low and soft. “Every word burned me to say. In my dreams I saw
him every night—being strung up by a lynch mob in the forest
because I’d betrayed him. He was my father. And I remember how he
could be, Nico. I lived with him in the mahala. I remember how he
drew fatherless men to him, how he could be with them. Tender with
them as with children, handing out bread and tocanita stew from his fire. How he
would talk with them, and make each one feel as if their allegiance
to him was the one thing keeping him from despair. Wasn’t it so
with you too?”
“Shut up, you
little bastard.”
That
would do. Sasha had used the fleeting troughs of darkness in the
candles’ dance to get close enough. Nico’s eyes were full of bitter
tears. He gave a twitch of fright when at last he saw how Sasha had
closed the gap: reflexively swung the gun away from Kucharski.
Sasha took his moment. He shoved Nico’s arm up, leapt into the
instant of imbalance. Nico was twice his weight but went down twice
as hard, dragging Sasha with him. Sasha used him as a crash pad,
got hold of his wrist and held tight. The weapon barked once—again,
both shots harmless and high, knocking plasterwork out of the
ceiling. How many in the chamber? Sasha hadn’t seen the make,
couldn’t be sure of a full load. Couldn’t risk the assumption of
anything else—he slammed Nico’s fist off the ground one more time.
Three...
A
fourth, but not from Nico’s gun. The big enraged body jerked and
went still. Sasha rolled away, pounced up onto his hands and knees.
Kucharski was standing a few yards away, both feet planted, the
pistol he’d taken from Elizabeth held squarely in his hands.
“Sorry,” he said, clicking the safety back on. “You
okay?”
Sasha
didn’t know. He didn’t care. His head was filled with reverb and
rage. “You didn’t have to.”
“What?”
“I had him.
You didn’t have to kill him. He was just a footsoldier. You didn’t
have to—”
“Sasha, he did.”
Sasha
twisted round. Laurie was there, half his lovely face daubed in
scarlet. Sasha thought he must have crawled to get to his side.
Sasha forgot about Nico. He crouched to seize Laurie into his arms.
“I tell you what, though,” Laurie said conversationally, addressing
Kucharski over Sasha’s shoulder. “Next time, don’t cut it so bloody
close. You nearly took Sasha out too.”
Kucharski released an explosive sigh. “I’ll
next time your arse for
you, you little...” He shoved the gun under the belt of his jeans,
strode over to Nico, checked for a pulse then rolled the big body
until he found the pistol. “Six years training with special-forces
weaponry. Six years learning how to shoot the bollocks off a rat
and leave the fucker standing. Neither of you has the smallest
idea...”
“No, I don’t,” Laurie agreed cheerfully. He was enjoying the
tirade—enjoying the sight of John Kucharski generally, his friend
and Sasha’s, returned from the grave. Laurie felt glassy and
unreal, but the sensations weren’t too bad, and the arm which had
been hurting so much had gone numb. “You’re alive.”
Kucharski straightened up. He came and leaned over them,
examining them in the uncertain light. “If I am, it’s in spite of
you two idiots. You’ve got a facial wound, Fitzroy. Are you bright
enough to know that?”
“I’m fine.”
Sasha
reanimated from his stasis of shock. “He’s not. Kucharski, help
him.”
“A nick and some powder burns. He’s okay. Might not be so
pretty any more... Can he walk?”
“Course I can.” Laurie tried for his usual lithe spring to his
feet, and almost made it, Sasha catching him and keeping him
upright. “We have to get out of here, don’t we?”
“Either that or stand them down, and there’s half a dozen of
them. I don’t think we can manage, even with...” Kucharski glanced
at Elizabeth, who was waiting tensely in the corridor, keeping the
watch. At her sharp gesture, he pushed Laurie and Sasha ahead of
him towards the door. “Even with Calamity Kate over there. Right.
My cover’s shattered—I need to call in. I’m guessing out of
everyone in this room, it’s Prince Laurence here who’s managed to
hang on to his mobile...?”
Laurie
dug in his pocket with the hand that still worked, at once pleased
to be of use and embarrassed that he was so predictable. He watched
through a dragonfly-wing haze while Kucharski dialled, waited,
reeled off a brusque string of numbers and letters. “Okay. That was
my bail-out request. I’ll be salvaged if I’m salvageable, but it
could take half an hour for help to get to us.” He paused,
listening. “Not bloody soon enough. Come on.”
***
The
woods were drowned in night. The same great lantern of a moon that
had lit up Laurie’s patch of the Mojave was all that saved him now
from utter blackness, from being the clumsy gajo between the
Interpol agent and the two soft-footed gypsy refugees. He could see
enough to run. He even tried to place his feet carefully still, to
make sure he had space to move into. Not to let the branches whip
back and hit John Kucharski behind him. Elizabeth and Sasha were on
the track up ahead. It seemed to Laurie that they were always
receding, two graceful moon-carved shapes fading out of his view,
and yet each time the panic rose in his chest, the weird heavy
thump and skip of his heart, one of them would stop and wait,
gazing anxiously back down the path until Laurie caught
up.
He
shouldn’t need to be waited for. Kucharski clearly shared this
view. “Come on, son,” he whispered, giving him a none-too-gentle
shove. “What did you do in the states—spend all your time eating
doughnuts and hot dogs?”
“I was a vampire, not a... comedy cop.” Laurie sank a hand into
a patch of nettles and snatched it back. He didn’t mind the pain.
He couldn’t really mind anything Kucharski said to him, either.
“I’m really pleased you’re not dead.”
Kucharski gave a snort. “Well, the night is still
young.”
“How come, though? Gunari said you were, and Constable
Foster.”
“Don’t let her hear you call her that. She’s with Interpol
now—my best agent. A major witness in the Petrica case died, not
me. Even with Sasha’s testimony, there was no way we could hold him
and his gang... Look, can’t I tell you all this once we’re out of
here?”
“Tell me a bit now.” Laurie stumbled. He landed on the numb arm
and had to let Kucharski hoist him back onto his feet. “I dunno
what’s wrong with me. Not doughnuts, I don’t think... Talk to me.
Why didn’t you help protect Sasha, if you were alive?”
“I had to be properly dead first. Another undercover man shot
me with a blank during a raid, and we let the word go out that he’d
killed me. We wanted people like Gunari to know, people with links
to the Roma underworld in London. That prepared the ground for me
to infiltrate Petrica’s setup here. As for your friend...” He
pushed Laurie ahead of him up a steep slope, Sasha reaching down to
grab him from the top. “As for you, Sasha, I’m really sorry. Our
agents were watching you both from a distance—and we did provide
guardianship for Clara—but we needed to draw your father out. To
tempt him into making a move.”
Sasha
nodded grimly. “We were bait.”
“To catch a shark who was gonna hunt you through the water all
your lives. You would have been bait anyway. You complicated all
this for us by buggering off to America, but... Laurie?”
Laurie
was listening. He wanted to tell him so. The night air had flooded
his lungs, though, so cold he couldn’t get a word out. The
moon-dappled path made a jump at him, its pebbles leaping like a
shoal of silver fish. Once more he made the mistake of breaking his
fall with his left arm.
“Laurie! Christ, what’s wrong?”
That was
Sasha. For Sasha only, Laurie got his head up. He couldn’t have
moved a muscle for anyone else in the world. Then there was no need
for even that small effort: Sash was doing everything. Scooping him
up out of the dirt, turning the moon so that she shone in her
proper place again, high above the floating late-summer leaves.
Sasha cradled him. Laurie could pick out oak leaves, the delicate
scrolls of their edges. Ash, too, each frondy lobe edged in silver
light. Beneath them all, Sasha, whose wild foreign beauty was made
for the night, for streetlight and moonlight and stars. Laurie felt
he had come home.
Hands
underneath him. Kucharski ordering Sasha to lift him, lift him
higher so he could see. “He’s hurt. It’s not just the face wound,
he’s... Fuck. He’s got a bullet in his back.”
Laurie
heard Sasha’s gut-punched little cry. That was the sound he would
make if you sprang fear or pleasure on him, his first response
before he got control. Laurie would have given anything to tell him
not to worry, but someone—Kucharski or Elizabeth, both of them
crouched at his side now—was turning him, probing under his coat.
The shielding numbness that had let him run this far evaporated. He
jerked in Sasha’s arms, spine arching.
“Here. It’s here, up under his shoulder.” That was Elizabeth.
Through hot bolts of pain, Laurie wondered what war zones she had
lived in, to sound calm for the first time now. Her hands were
brutally competent. “He mustn’t lose too much more blood. I need to
pack this out, get pressure on it. One of you give me your jumper
or something...” A pause. Frantic movement around him, then
Elizabeth continuing, the faintest rasp of laughter in her voice:
“One of you. John,
yours is fine. Alexandru, hold him. Keep him silent.”
There
was no need. Laurie would keep silence for himself. Then there came
a tugging at his shoulder, and a pain like nothing he had dreamed
could exist in this world burst up out of his nerves. Sasha’s hand
went into the hair at his nape, lifting, helping him stifle the
oncoming yell against his shoulder. Sasha’s voice, low and hot
against his ear: “Hush, love. Quiet as the fox in the woods for me
now.” A half-swallowed sob. “Oh, Laurie. Laurie...”
“There. That’s the best I can do.”
“Can we move him on? If Sasha and I carry him, and
you...”
“I don’t think so. The trajectory of the bullet—it’s gone up
under his shoulder blade. Could be somewhere near his
heart.”
Kucharski swore fiercely. “How was he walking
around?”
“I don’t know. If it severed a nerve, he might not have felt
it.”
A song
of sirens drifted through the night. In the listening silence that
followed, only Laurie’s harsh breathing scraped the air. “Can’t be
a response to my call,” Kucharski said. “It’s too soon.”
“Laurie talked to someone at Interpol earlier. I think they
knew where he was heading.”
“Too late for us anyway. I can hear Stefan’s lot—they’ll be on
us soon. I’ll have to stand them down here.”
Laurie hung on tight to Sasha. Quiet
as the fox, Sash had told him, and so he
would be. His mouth was pressed against the fabric of the parka,
the old coat he’d hated so much and now loved because it was
helping him do the thing Sasha wanted. The hardest thing of all.
Someone had harpooned him in the lung and a thousand screams were
bottlenecking under his larynx. He rationed out breath through his
nose. He stared into the spaces beyond Sasha’s shoulder and tried
to gather words out of the pain, enough to say what he had to
without sounding like a dying cowboy in a Western.
I’m finished. You go on and save
yourselves. That was the kind of line
Douglas Brett would have given him. Through flickering shadows in
his mind, Laurie tried to rewrite it, but that was the essence, the
thing he had to tell the people around him, the brave agent and the
woman who’d come here to save her son, and... “Sasha.
Sasha.”
“I’ve got you. What is it, love?”
They
were closer to the edge of the woods than Laurie had thought. He
gazed through the tangle of branches to the place where a mixture
of moonlight and streetlamp orange was shifting on...
Yes.
Metal and glass, barely thirty yards away up by the road. Laurie
banged a palm off Sasha’s shoulder. Hot copper salt was blocking
his throat. He cleared it with a drowning effort, and Sasha cried
out in fear as the blood spilled, mercurial black in the moonlight.
“Sash, over there. The car. The Merc.”