Stiletto (42 page)

“Eventually I found myself, obviously, but it took a while. I opened my eyes to find my face completely shellacked with my own drool, and a huge hulking Irishman standing over me with a machete at my throat.”

“What did you do?”

“I broke his nose,” said Felicity tiredly.

“Wow.”

“Hmm. It’s not as great as it sounds. For one thing, he was the one who’d carried my body to safety, which makes me look pretty ungrateful. And for another, it made everyone think that I’d come back possessed by the vengeful spirit of a whale-monster. I had to talk very fast to persuade them otherwise.”

“And now you have to write up a report for your superiors,” said Alessio.

“Yup.”

“So don’t you think you should stop drinking?”

At this, Felicity opened her eyes. She had a wry, withering remark to make, but then the door slammed open. Leliefeld stalked in, clutching her huge hat. She didn’t look at Alessio or Felicity, just stomped across the suite to the bedroom. They heard two more doors slam, and then the distant sound of the bath running.

“I think now is the perfect time to be drinking,” said Felicity.

*

Odette put the toilet seat down and made a mental note to slap Alessio on the back of the head when next she got the chance. Then she put the lid down, sat, and listened to the roar of water pouring into the tub. The room filled with steam and the smell of jasmine. On the vanity was a photo of her and her friends, all dressed up to attend a wedding. She thought of that white corpse she’d seen in the belly of the beast. All of the memories that she spent every day deliberately not recalling came back to her. The horror, the loss. And then, very carefully, so as not to worsen her wounded skin, she put her face in her hands and began to weep.

When she awoke in the morning, Odette felt plain awful. She levered herself out of the tub, listlessly washed the slime off in the shower, and wandered out into the living room of the suite, only to find Clements engaged in some weaponized version of yoga on the carpet in front of the television. The Pawn looked up from under her own left armpit.

“Oh, you’re up,” said Clements. Odette shrugged. With a grunt, the Pawn unbraided her left arm and right leg from each other and rolled up onto her feet. She peered at Odette. “You weren’t kidding about that stuff in your tub,” she said appreciatively. “You look like you fell asleep on the beach in Tahiti, but that’s it. I don’t suppose the two men who were in the beast with you can use it?”

“You have to have had inoculations for two years and take supplements every day,” said Odette dully. “Otherwise, your skin comes off in big flakes.”

“Figures,” said Clements.

“Where’s Alessio?” The Pawn looked at her oddly. “What?”

“He’s off with the school group,” said Clements. “It’s three in the afternoon.”

“Oh,” said Odette. “What am I supposed to do today?”

“Nothing.” Clements shrugged. “It’s Saturday, so there’re no meetings scheduled. You can just stay in.”

“You don’t have anything to do?”

“I’ve been having fun with room service,” said Clements. “I had a lunch composed entirely of parfaits.”

“Well, I don’t want to stay in today,” said Odette.

“All right,” said Clements, raising an eyebrow. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to do something touristy. From the moment I got off the plane, they’ve been warning us that we couldn’t go out. Well, I have a bodyguard, I should be safe, so I’m going out.”

“You don’t have the best track record when it comes to ‘should be safe,’” pointed out Clements. “You managed to bring down spectral wrath upon yourself whilst sitting in a conference room. But fine, where do you want to go?”

“What’s
your
favorite thing to do in London?” asked Odette.

“It turns out that I really like watching repeats of forensic crime dramas and eating parfaits in a five-star hotel.”

“Let’s go to St. Paul’s Cathedral,” said Odette. “Alessio’s school group got to go there, and I really want to see it.”

“Sure,” said Clements. “I haven’t been there since primary school. It’s very cool. Any particular reason you want to go there?”

“No,” lied Odette.

*

St. Paul’s Cathedral stood before them, looking as if it did not quite belong in the world. It was as if it had been cut-and-pasted into the city just to make the surrounding buildings look tacky. Odette gazed up the steps, ignoring the lounging students, tracing the columns up to more columns, a gorgeously carved pediment, and then, soaring up into an unexpectedly blue sky, the dome.

You were so right, Pim,
thought Odette.
It
is
glorious.
She relaxed a little.
All the things in my life are just temporary,
she thought.
This building will be standing long after me and all my ridiculous problems are gone.
It was both a comforting thought and a sort of depressing one.

Inside the cathedral, instead of the hushed sound of reverent visitors, the women heard an orchestra that was either tuning up or playing an extremely modern piece of music. A small notice board advised everyone that the Orchestra and Choir of Greater Juster Norton would be performing that evening and apologized for any disruption caused by the rehearsal. The two women walked down to the nave, beneath the gargantuan arches and the soaring ceilings.

In the center, under the dome, the orchestra sat on a broad platform. The musicians were tootling their horns or frowning as they drew their bows across their strings, making all those little sounds that constitute foreplay in the orchestral world. Singers — Odette and Felicity presumed they were singers — were sitting about reading books or peering at their phones. None of them were staring open-mouthed at the magnificent spectacle above them, which struck Odette as astounding, since that was all she could do.

The dome of the cathedral hung in the air, crowning at a height of sixty-five meters. A ring of windows beneath the dome filled the space with light, and its inner surface had been cunningly painted so that it seemed to be lined with gigantic sculptures.

“Ooh,” she said, despite herself. She nudged Clements and pointed up to the balcony that ringed the base of the dome. “That’s the Whispering Gallery.”

“What?”
asked Clements over the sound of the orchestra.

Oh, for God’s sake.

“That’s the Whispering Gallery,” Odette said, slightly more loudly. “If you go up there and whisper to the wall, the curve carries your voice around so that someone on the other side can hear you.”

“I vaguely recall that.”

“You see the top of the dome?”

“Uh, yes,” said Clements. “It’s right above us.”

“There’s a tiny little window cut there, and if you climb up, you can look down through it to the floor.”

“Is it vomit-proof?” asked Clements. “Because I can imagine nothing that would be more likely to cause vertigo than doing what you just described, and if you throw up on someone from that height, your vomit would literally cut him in half.”

“I — I don’t think that’s the case,” said Odette.

“You want to climb it, don’t you?” asked Clements. Odette nodded. “Why?”

“Because it’s there. And it’s cool.”

“Well, you can’t.” Odette looked at her. “Not unless you tell me the truth about why you wanted to come here.” The Pawn did not give the impression of budging on this point.

“Fine,” said Odette finally. “I like cathedrals. I used to go visit them with someone.”

“Your boyfriend Pim,” said Clements. Odette stared at her in shock. “I read your file.”

“Oh. It’s in my file?”

“And Alessio talked.”

“That little shit!” exclaimed Odette, then looked around guiltily. Even with the orchestra doing their thing, several cathedral-goers had heard her. She made an apologetic face.

“Marcel too,” said Clements. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It sounded like an extremely rehearsed phrase, straight out of
The Pawn’s Handbook for Normal Social Interactions.

Odette resisted the obnoxious urge to say that it wasn’t Clements’s fault. “Thank you,” she said reluctantly. “Anyway, we did all the major cathedrals in Europe and always wanted to go to St. Paul’s together.”
And instead I’m here with
you. “Happy?”

“Fine, we can go up,” said Clements. “But I’m not whispering any sweet nothings to you.”

It was not as if they could have done any whispering to each other anyway. Once they had climbed the spiraling, far-too-broad-and-shallow stairs, they came to the balcony of the Whispering Gallery, where there were a number of visitors. Some were seated on the bench that circled the gallery, staring up at the dome. Some were standing at the iron balustrade (which seemed far too flimsy to Odette), looking down at the orchestra below. Others were walking around gingerly to the exit on the other side of the gallery. One or two could be seen whispering fruitlessly to the wall, their voices drowned out by the sound of the orchestra.

There were also several children trotting fearlessly around, apparently unconcerned that the balustrade could snap away at any moment, allowing gravity to drag them over the edge and send them plummeting, screaming, into the orchestra far below.

Remember,
Odette told herself,
you may be able to imagine the falls with exquisite, painful detail, but you can cope with heights. You climbed the outside of the Cologne Cathedral.
Still, she took a seat on the bench, very close to the entrance. Clements walked along a little ways and then sat herself down. Odette leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.

Then, delightfully, the noise of the orchestra below faded away. Presumably, they were all tuned up. The natural sounds of a cathedral appeared — the footsteps of visitors, the hushed voices, the breath of the building. After a few moments, the tourists realized their opportunity, and a susurrus of whispers curved around the gallery. Odette could half catch words from the other side of the balcony.

“— ello?”

“Can you hear —”

“— ispering to the —”

“Shall we go up —”

“Odette.”

She opened her eyes and looked to the left. Clements was still sitting there, but she was leaning forward, looking at her phone, and very definitely not whispering to the wall.
Did I imagine it?
she wondered. She looked about the gallery. There were many people of all ages with their faces by the wall, but from the little she could see, none were familiar. Certainly, they all looked perfectly normal, not a white, rubbery-skinned bald person among them. She leaned back carefully.

“Odette, you can hear me.”
The voice sighed in her ear. It wasn’t a question, but despite herself, she nodded slightly.
“We’ve been watching you. We saw you through that secretary’s eyes.”
She felt her mouth twist at the memory of Anabella, possessed at that meeting.
“We are coming for you. Not today, but soon.”

Odette felt a tremor in her heart, and even she didn’t know what emotion she felt. Fear? Rage? Sorrow? She looked down to see that her spurs had slid out of her wrists without her realizing it. Thankfully, no one had noticed, and with an effort, she retracted them. Then, slowly, she turned her head and put her cheek against the wall. She had no idea if her words would get lost in all the murmurs of the visitors or if the owner of that voice could pluck her utterances out as easily as he had cast his message into her ear.

“I warn you,” she whispered to the wall, sending her words out to mingle in the dome, “that is a very bad idea. We don’t want war. You should leave this place, leave this country. Run away.”

If the voice came back with an answer, she didn’t hear it, because below them, the orchestra and choir chose that moment to burst into “O Fortuna” from
Carmina Burana,
and all the whispers were obliterated.

What do I do now?
she thought.
Should I call Marie?
She shied away from the idea.
Should I try and identify them, maybe get a picture?

“Miss Leliefeld?” a voice next to her asked, and Odette jumped. It was, of course, Clements. The Pawn jerked her thumb in the direction of the exit and raised her eyebrows questioningly. Odette nodded, and they headed over. Odette, taking care to keep a hand on the balustrade, examined every person they passed. It was useless. Not only were there no people with paper-white skin or nodule-concealing hats that she could see, but there was still half of the gallery that she didn’t get a look at.
I can’t very well insist we make a full circuit,
thought Odette.
Plus, the whisperer may have left already.

“Miss Leliefeld, did you want to climb to the top of the dome?” Clements asked just outside the gallery exit. Odette didn’t answer for several moments. She stood with her eyes closed, ignoring the put-upon sigh and the presumably rolled eyes of the Pawn. She had caught the telltale smell of oranges. It was faint — so faint that no one without exquisitely hand-tuned olfactory senses could have caught it — but unmistakable, and it went down the stairs.

“Let’s go,” said Odette firmly, opening her eyes. “I’m a bit hungry.” The Pawn looked surprised but agreed. Odette led the way, scurrying down the stairs far more quickly than was safe. The startled Clements hurried behind her, obviously too proud to tell her to slow down. They dodged past cautiously slow groups of descending tourists, and Odette mentally cursed her heeled shoes, which were exactly the wrong shape for running down spiraling staircases.

They burst onto the main floor of the cathedral, where crowds of people were meandering about, listening to the music and peering at the curiosities of the cathedral. Odette looked around wildly and saw nothing that stood out. No man in all-enshrouding clothes hurrying away. No civilians staring bewildered in the direction of someone who’d just shoved through them. The scent of oranges was still there in the air, but fainter, rapidly getting washed out by the maelstrom of odors that seeped out of a couple hundred tourists at the end of the day.