Black Rose of Vengeance

Chapter 1

ROSALIE

Four minutes is generous.

I have done this building in three. I have done a harder one in two forty. The sixth floor of a converted seed warehouse with one stairwell, one service lift, and a river on the north side is not a hard building. It is a box with a man in it.

I come up the outside because the outside is unwatched. Sixty one feet of brick, and the mortar between the courses is soft enough to take a toe. My hands are chalked. My hands are always chalked. The tube on my back holds one item and it is not the gun.

The window on the sixth floor is open two inches.

I stop under it and hang there and think about that.

Two inches in November. On a river. A man who has money and a boiler and no reason on this earth to want cold air in his room at ten past one in the morning.

I count the reasons a window is open.

Smoke. Habit. A woman who likes it. A faulty catch. Somebody who wants to hear the street.

I do not count the sixth reason, which is that the window is open because I am outside it.

That is the mistake. I want it in writing. Whatever comes after, the mistake is mine and it happens here, sixty one feet up, with my weight on four fingertips and the whole thing still recoverable.

I go in.

The room is dark and warm and smells of coffee that has gone cold in the cup rather than in the pot.

There is a bed, made. A chair by the window that is not where a chair goes. A door to a bathroom, open, dark. A door to the hall, shut. The floor is boards, and boards talk, so I put my feet where the boards meet the joists and they do not.

Six steps in I have the room. Exits: window behind me, hall door ahead, bathroom with no second way out. Eleven feet by nineteen. Nobody in the bed.

Nobody in the bed.

I have the gun up before the thought finishes.

"You came up the wall."

He is in the chair.

He has been in the chair the whole time. Not asleep, not startled, not reaching. Sitting with his ankle across his knee like a man waiting on a train that he knows is running late, and his voice is low and unhurried, and he does not raise it, and I hear every word.

I put the sight on his chest.

"The wall was the interesting choice," he says. "The lift is faster. Teodoro thought you would take the lift. I said no. I said if it is her, she comes up the outside, because a lift is a room you cannot leave."

Do not answer. Never answer. A voice is a fingerprint.

"Rosalie."

My finger is on the trigger and it does not move and I do not know why.

Nineteen years. Nine of them working. Forty seven contracts and not one of them has ever said my name, because there is nothing to say it from.

There is no file. Hanno does not write things down, there is no roster, there is no photograph of my face anywhere in the world that I know of, and this man is sitting in a chair in the dark saying it the way you say a name you have practised.

"You should shoot me now," he says. "It gets harder in a minute."

I shoot.

The gun does what it is supposed to do, which is nothing, because the round does not chamber, because the magazine in my hand is not the magazine I loaded.

I have three quarters of a second to understand that somebody has been in my kit.

I go for the window.

Two men come out of the bathroom that had nobody in it. One out of the hall. Three, and they are not fast, and they are not good, and it does not matter, because good is not required. Three bodies in eleven feet by nineteen is a wall.

I break the first one's knee sideways and he goes down across the door to the hall and blocks it for the second one, which buys me the corner of the room and one clean step toward the window.

The third has a blade.

I know it before I see it because of how he holds his elbow.

He is slow. He is genuinely slow, and I take his wrist and turn it and put the knife into the wall of his own shoulder, and I am congratulating myself on the wrist when the second man, the one I have written off, the one who is supposed to be stuck behind his friend's knee, comes over the top of him and gets me in the ribs.

It goes in under the left side. It comes out. He is not skilled. It is a bad, shallow, upward push with a folding knife by a man who has never done it before, and it is the single most effective thing anybody does in this room tonight.

I make a sound. It is not loud.

I get the window.

I get one leg over the sill and the cold comes in at me and the river is down there black and moving, and my hands are wet now and chalk does not work on wet.

Sixty one feet.

I look down at all of it, at a wall I can no longer hold, and behind me a man in a chair says, quietly, without getting up:

"Don't."

Not stop her. Not get her. He says it to me. One word, at conversational volume, in a room with four other men bleeding and shouting in it, and I hear it over all of them.

I look back.

He has still not stood up.

That is the part I will think about later, on the floor, in the daylight. Not the magazine. Not the bathroom. The fact that he watched me put a knife through a man's shoulder from nine feet away and did not get out of the chair.

"You will not make the wall," he says. "You are bleeding into your hand. You will get twelve feet down and you will let go, and I will spend the rest of my life explaining to my grandmother why there is a dead girl on the loading bay."

My vision goes grey at the edges and comes back.

"Come inside."

"No."

It is the first word I have said. It costs me more than the rib did.

"All right," he says.

And he does not send them after me. He does not move at all. He sits in the chair and lets me hang there in the window with my blood running down the brickwork, and he waits, and the cold gets into the hole in my side, and my left hand starts doing a thing that hands do when they are about to stop.

Twenty seconds.

That is all it takes. That is how long it takes a professional to work out the arithmetic of a wall she cannot climb, and he knows it, because he has already done the arithmetic, and he did it before I came in the window.

I come back inside.

They put me on the floor of the landing outside the room and nobody touches me, which is strange enough that I notice it through everything else.

The one with the knee is being carried. The one with his own knife in his shoulder is sitting against the wall with a face like a man reviewing his choices.

A younger one has come up the stairs, dark, quick, talking, and he takes one look at me and says, "That is her?

She is tiny," and then, "Cesare, she is tiny," and nobody answers him.

Cesare.

I put it away where I put things.

My hand is pressed to my side and the blood is coming through it in a rhythm I recognise.

Not arterial. Bad but not urgent. I have about four hours before it becomes urgent and about eleven before it becomes the thing that kills me, and in eleven hours I will either be out of this building or I will not be a problem to anybody.

The floor is cold. I turn my head so I can see the stairwell.

Shoes come and stand where I can see them. Good ones, dark, wet at the toe from somebody else's blood.

Then he crouches.

Up close he is not what the chair suggested. Long, black hair going grey on one side only, a white line through one eyebrow that is old and badly healed and does not match the rest of him. Brown eyes. Ordinary brown. Nothing in his face is doing anything at all.

"What is your name."

Say nothing.

"You said one word to me upstairs," he says. "You can manage two."

Nothing.

"I will start, then." He rests his forearms on his knees.

He is not close enough to touch me and I understand that this is deliberate and I hate how much I notice it.

"My name is Cesare Orsini. That is my brother behind you, who has already said something unforgivable about your height.

The man you put a knife into is called Beppe and he has four daughters and none of them will believe this story.

And you came into my house tonight with a rose in a tube on your back, which means you are the one they send when the invoice is large. "

I look at the ceiling.

"So I do not need your name," he says. "I would just prefer to have it."

"You have my rose," I say.

It comes out flat and wrong and much too honest, the way things do, and I hear it land in the room like a plate going over.

Behind him the younger one stops talking. Actually stops, mid sentence, which I gather is not usual.

Cesare does not move. Something happens at the edge of his mouth and then does not finish happening.

"Yes," he says. "I have your rose."

"Then you know."

"I know what you are." He stands up, and his knees go audibly, and it is the first human noise anyone has made in this building. "I do not know who. Those are different problems and only one of them is urgent."

"Cesare." The younger one, low. "The council."

"I am aware of the council."

"Petar is awake. Petar is always awake."

"I said I am aware."

The temperature of the room changes on that. Not on the knife, not on the blood. On a name.

Then a hand comes down into my eyeline holding a folded cloth, and it does not push it at me, and it does not press it to my side.

It sets it on the floor by my hand and goes away.

I look at it for a long time.

I do not sleep. I lose time, which is different, and I am careful about the difference.

When it comes back it is grey and there is light in the stairwell window the colour of dishwater and I am not on the landing any more.

I am on a floor in a room with a rug in it.

Somebody has cut my shirt away and packed the wound and taped it, badly, competently, the way a man does it who has done it a few times and never been taught.

My boots are gone. My tube is gone. My phone is gone.

I do the inventory the way you do, and then I stop.

There is a low table beside me, and on the table there is a black rose.

Mine. From the tube. Stem cut at the angle I cut them at, because Hanno wants the angle in the photograph, because the angle is how he knows it is me and not somebody selling a rumour.

It is lying on a sheet of clean white paper.

And the paper has been dusted. Grey powder, brushed out from the stem in a fan, and in the powder, clear as a signature, there are four prints where four fingers held it.

Mine.

He has not asked me a single question yet.

He already has the only answer that matters, and he has had it since before I came in the window, and it is sitting on a table in the morning light with my hand written on it.