CHAPTER TWENTY
Cassius
The seventeenth day is a Tuesday, and it's been fourteen days since her wrist, and I can feel it in my teeth.
Mrs. Ocampo lets me in.
That's not an exaggeration and it isn't a small thing. She opens the door in her dressing gown at nine in the evening, looks up at me for a long moment, says something in Tagalog that Marisol refuses to translate for a week — and then steps back and says, "Come in, then. Wipe your feet."
I stand in the hall of a threshold I have been invited across, in a house with a rosary on the newel post and salt on the step, and I have to put my hand on the wall for a second.
"She's in the kitchen," Mrs. Ocampo says. "There's pandesal. You won't want it."
"No."
"Sit down anyway. People sit down."
So I sit down at a Formica table in a small kitchen in South Ashmoor while a woman in a dressing gown makes a pot of coffee she has no intention of drinking either, and this, of everything that happens to me this year, is the part that undoes me.
Wren comes in from the yard in dungarees with her hair scraped back and stops dead.
"You're in the kitchen."
"Your friend's mother let me in."
"Nanay," Mari says from the doorway, delighted and appalled.
"He looked cold," Mrs. Ocampo says, and takes her coffee upstairs, and closes a door somewhere that everyone in the house hears.
◆ ◆ ◆
Wren sits down opposite me. There's a smear of something on her jaw and she's been working — a real job, an ordinary one, because "the money doesn't stop being a problem just because your life gets stupid."
"Fourteen days," she says.
"Yes."
"Is it bad?"
"It's manageable."
"Cassius."
"It's bad," I say.
She nods. Turns her hands over on the table. And then, without any fuss at all: "Do you want to do it here or upstairs? Only my back's ruined and if it's the wrist again I'd rather be sitting down."
"Not the wrist."
Her eyes come up.
"The wrist's for a stranger," I say. "It takes longer, which means more of you, and the bruise doesn't clear for three weeks.
The throat is thirty seconds and you'll heal in four days.
" My hands are flat on the table. "I've been putting it off for a week and it's costing you blood, and I'm telling you that because I promised you the disgusting version. "
The kitchen clock ticks.
"Okay," Wren says.
"You can say no. There's a claim on the table in thirteen days and every single time you say yes to me makes it harder for you to say no in that room, and I want you to know that I know that."
"Cassius."
"I'm being careful—"
"You're being exhausting," she says, and stands up, and comes round the table, and sits down sideways in the chair next to mine with her hand on my shoulder and her hair pushed off her neck. "Come here."
Her pulse is right there.
Fourteen days of grey has made my hands unreliable, and I put one on the back of the chair instead of on her and hold it there hard enough to mark the wood.
"Talk to me while you do it," she says. "Not — I don't mean talk, obviously you can't, I mean after. Straight after. Say something normal so I know you're still in there."
"Why?"
"Because last time you made a noise like a man drowning," Wren says, "and I've thought about it every night for two weeks, and I'd like something else in the file."
I put my mouth to her throat.
It's thirty seconds. It's the fastest, cleanest feed I've taken in four centuries and it is the closest I have ever come to not stopping.
She goes very still against me, and then her hand comes up into my hair and closes, and the small sound she makes goes through me like a wire, and rain, bread, green, warmth, hers, and there is a moment — one, maybe two seconds long — where I am not a man with four hundred years of discipline. I'm just a mouth.
Then I come off her.
Both of us are breathing. Only one of us should be.
"Normal thing," she says, unsteady, her hand still in my hair. "Say a normal thing."
"There is a list in my coat with four names crossed out," I say, "and I've eaten nothing but you for a fortnight, and I think I might be in love with your friend's mother."
Wren laughs so hard she has to put her head down on the kitchen table.
Then she stops.
She sits up, very slowly, with her hand still on my shoulder and her face about nine inches from mine, and I watch her go back over the sentence like a woman rewinding a tape.
"What list," she says.
◆ ◆ ◆
It takes eleven minutes to tell them and about ninety seconds for it to go wrong.
"So you had it before the court," Mari says.
She's in the doorway with her arms folded and she has not come further in.
"You had it on the Wednesday. And on the Thursday night you sat at that table on the cliff with a legal pad and briefed me on a Matriarch and a nightclub and a Ferrow attaché, and you didn't mention that somebody had a list with feeders' names on it. "
"No."
"Why?"
"Because you'd have told her to run," I say, "and she'd have gone, and she'd have had a year."
"That's not your—" Mari stops. Starts again, quieter, which is worse. "You think I'd have told her to run."
"I think you love her."
"Yeah, well, so do you, apparently," Mari says, "and it's making you stupid."
Wren hasn't said anything.
That's the part I cannot get round. She's still sitting sideways in the chair with her hand off my shoulder now, looking at the table, and I would rather she shouted.
"Wren."
"Give me a minute."
"You can be angry—"
"I'm not angry, that's what I'm sitting here trying to work out." She looks up. "That's the problem. You did the same thing I'd have done."
"That isn't—"
"No, listen, because this is the thing." She puts both hands flat on the Formica.
"When my mother got her diagnosis they told me first, in a corridor, because I was the one who'd driven her.
And I sat on it for nine days. Nine days, Cassius.
I let her go to a wedding. I made her a cup of tea every morning and I looked at her over the table and I had it in my pocket, and I told myself it was because she needed the wedding, and it was actually because the second I said it out loud it would be true. "
The kitchen is very quiet.
"So no, I'm not angry," Wren says. "I'm frightened. Because I've just found out that you and me have the same fault, and there's nobody in this arrangement who's going to catch it."
Mari says, from the doorway: "There's me."
We both look at her.
"There's me," she says again. "That's what I'm for.
That's what I have been for, for four years, and I'd like the two of you to write it down somewhere because you have both got a habit of forgetting there's a third person in the building.
" She comes over and sits at the table and pulls the legal pad towards her.
"Right. Everything. From the top. Every single thing either of you knows and hasn't said, and I'm going to write it on this pad, and then nobody in this house gets to protect anybody by editing. "
It takes two hours.
At the end of it there is a page of Marisol Ocampo's handwriting on a Formica table in South Ashmoor with a list of six names, four dates, a bus station locker, a fledgling with no name, a photograph taken in July, and a copperplate apology.
And a woman in a dressing gown standing at the bottom of the stairs in the dark, who has been there, I discover, for about forty minutes.
"You should have started with the mark," Mrs. Ocampo says. "The one on the table in the penthouse."
"Nanay—"
"August," she says. "Every August, my mother-in-law, on the frame.
And in 1974 a man stood outside that door and talked to her all night.
" She comes into the kitchen and puts her hand flat on the doorframe, the way you'd touch a horse.
"So. Somebody in this city is using our sign to leave messages. That means somebody knows what it is."
"It's a warding mark," Wren says. "That's what my grandmother—"
"It is a keep-out," Mrs. Ocampo says. "And I would like to know who is putting a keep-out under a dead man's table, because in my experience you do not draw that unless you are afraid of something."