The Killer in My Eyes (39 page)

Lying under that blue ceiling, which was part of the real world like everything else around her, at last and without warning, the flash arrived. She found herself sitting up on the bed, with the sensation that the mattress beneath her had unexpectedly sent up a huge burst of heat.

It was as if she had been carrying a fragmented image inside her – an image she had so far been unable to complete. Now, suddenly, the full picture was there, as clear as could be. Maureen felt like an idiot for not having seen it before.

Although she still didn’t understand why, she knew who had killed Gerald Marsalis and Chandelle Stuart, and caused the death of Alex Campbell.

The darkness and the waiting were the same colour.

Sitting in the dark, Maureen had had enough of both to be scared of them. She had learned the hard way that sometimes sight isn’t exclusively physical, it’s also mental. Beyond the curtains in the place where she waited, beyond the windows, in the yellow glare of 1,000 lights, the dazzle of 1,000 neon signs, lay the madness they called New York.

On the low table next to her chair, there was a Beretta 92 SBM – a gun with a slightly smaller handle than usual, expressly designed for women.

It belonged to her mother.

She knew her mother had one, and had taken it from the drawer where it was kept, just before leaving the apartment.

She had cocked it before putting it down on the glass tabletop, and the noise of the bolt had echoed in the silence of the room like the sound of a bone cracking.

Gradually, her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness and she had gained some idea of the place where she was, even with the lights off. She was staring at the wall in front of her, sensing rather than seeing, the dark patch of a door.

Once, at school, she had learned that when you look intensely at a coloured surface and then take your eyes away, there remains imprinted on your pupils a bright patch of colour exactly complementary to the one you have just been staring at.

This cannot happen in the dark, however, since darkness generates only more darkness.

When the person she was waiting for arrived, light would suddenly flood the room.

After an apparently endless road travelled, after a long journey down a tunnel where only a few paltry lamps showed the way, two people would finally emerge into the light. The only two people in possession of the truth.

A woman scared by the knowledge that she had it.

And the man she was waiting for.

The killer.

As soon as she had realized who he was, Maureen had called Jordan but his cellphone was off. Jordan was the only person to whom she could have explained how she had got to the truth. The only other person who knew what was happening to her was his brother, but Mayor Christopher Marsalis was too anxious for revenge on his son’s killer to accept a far-fetched theory that might refute the overwhelming evidence against Julius Wong.

Any other person involved in the case, starting with Burroni, would have told her not to worry and to stay where she was, and then have shown up with nurses and a straitjacket.

She had looked in the phone book for a name and had found a telephone number and an address in Brooklyn Heights. She had called, let it ring for a long time, then hung up.

As she was leaving the apartment, her mother had come in, looking as beautiful and impeccable at the end of the day as if she had only just left home. Maureen embraced her, taking care not to let Mary Ann feel the solid bulk of the gun in the belt of her jeans, then kissed her on the cheek and looked her in the eyes. ‘You were right, Mother.’

A moment later, she had already closed the door behind her, leaving Mary Ann Levallier standing in the entrance, looking after her daughter as if she was possessed by an alien will.

Throughout the taxi ride, Maureen continued without success to call Jordan. Finally she made up her mind to leave him a message, explaining what had happened, where she was going, and what she was planning to do.

The driver dropped her at the address she had given him, on the corner of Henry and Pierrepont Streets. As soon as she got out of the taxi, Maureen had tried to take stock of the situation. Henry Street was lit for most of its length by round streetlamps with a soft, creamy light, but along the last stretch, for some reason, they were out. The first lamp on Pierrepont Street was about thirty feet from the corner, and the traffic at that hour was practically non-existent.

Good.

She couldn’t have arranged it better herself.

She had stood there for a while, protected by the cocoon of the dark, looking at the front of the large two-storey redbrick house, made gloomy by the darkness and its heavy imitation Gothic architecture. At any other moment, Maureen would have thought it excessive. Now, the external appearance of the building seemed wholly in line with this whole succession of absurd events.

The entrance was situated beneath a rectangular canopy, sufficiently wide to offer shelter from even the most violent storm. A small flight of steps led up to the wooden door, the upper part of which was a rectangle of frosted glass with stained-glass inserts.

Moving her hands over it, Maureen discovered that it had a purely aesthetic function and was not shatterproof. This greatly simplified things. The door presumably opened on a hall that led to the rest of the house. It was rather unlikely that it was protected by an alarm, because any idiot throwing a stone at the glass as a joke would have set it off.

Maureen had taken a leather case from the back pocket of her jeans. It was a gift from Alfredo Martini, a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman with unusually long fingers, who had nothing in common with her apart from the surname and the fact that they periodically met at the police station, after he had been caught entering apartments where he had not been invited. When he was dying of cancer, Maureen had made sure he didn’t get sent to prison for the umpteenth time. As a mark of gratitude, he had given her his tools and taught her how to use them.

She usually kept them in a pocket in the lid of her dressing-case, but by a stroke of luck, when she had left Italy, the person who had packed her bags had unwittingly left them there.

Taking out the tools she needed, she carefully picked the lock of the front door, which was much stronger to look at than it turned out to be. She kept telling herself that what she was doing was neither logical nor legal. But she didn’t care: all that mattered, now that she knew
who
, was to find out
why
. She had held her breath as she opened the door but, as she had predicted, no alarm had been set off.

She found herself in a fairly large, high-ceilinged, soberly furnished entrance hall. There were a few ornamental plants, and some paintings on the walls, which she could barely make out in the darkness. On the wall facing the door she glimpsed a low table between two chairs, and immediately next to it a curtain of indeterminate colour. In the walls to right and left, two solid-looking doors led to the rest of the house.

She went over to the chair and sat down to wait. She had with her all the weapons she needed: the gun, the element of surprise, and the truth.

The only thing missing now was him.

Time passed.

Announced by a glow in the glass in front of her, a car pulled up on the street just outside. There came the noise of a door slamming, followed by the light of the headlamps moving away, and then the sound of feet climbing the steps to the front door. She heard a key being inserted in the keyhole, then the click of the lock. By chance, another car passed at that moment, and through the frosted glass Maureen saw a man’s figure silhouetted against the light. That was how she had always seen him in her imagination – a vague shape to which she had been unable to give a face or a name until the door in her mind had opened.

Calmly, she reached out her hand and picked up the gun from the low table, stiffening her arm muscles to support the weight. Having the weapon reassured her: it was only an inert piece of metal, it was neither good nor bad, but it was something tangible, which was what she needed at that moment, after all her forced journeys into the unreal.

Another car passed in the street just as the glass door opened noiselessly, drawing the shadow of a man in the square of light projected on the floor by the headlamps. The light lapped at Maureen’s feet like a wave, then receded as the man came in and closed the door behind him.

He did not switch on the light straight away, and when he did, he had his back to her and did not immediately notice the woman sitting on the chair against the wall facing the door. Maureen was glad of that momentary gap, which allowed her eyes to become accustomed to the change in light.

When the man turned and saw her sitting facing him with a gun in her hand, for a second or two the surprise of it froze him. But then Maureen saw his face and body relax, as if this was a moment he had somehow expected and for which he was prepared.

He was a killer, yet Maureen could not help but admire his sangfroid. That simple reaction was enough to confirm to her that her suppositions had been correct.

The man nodded towards the gun and said one incredulous word. ‘Why?’

Maureen, with the same simplicity and in the same calm voice, replied, ‘That’s what I came to ask
you
.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Gerald Marsalis, Chandelle Stuart, Alex Campbell.’

The man made a series of brief nods with his head to confirm that he had understood. Then he shrugged. ‘What does it matter now?’

‘It matters to me.’

‘What does any of this have to do with you anyway?’

‘You’d never believe it.’

The man smiled. His eyes were on her but Maureen sensed that he was not seeing her. ‘You have no idea of the things I’m willing to believe . . .’

Maureen also sensed that he had said these last words more for himself than for her. Then, whatever image the man had had in his mind vanished as quickly as it had come and he was back in the room, facing her.

‘Where would you like me to begin?’

‘It’s usually best to begin at the beginning.’

‘All right. Let’s go over there. We’ll be more comfortable.’

Still aiming her gun at him, Maureen stood up – and felt an episode about to begin. There came the long shudder she knew well, and then that familiar sensation of something coming at her, rolling fast towards her from a distance, and she heard the noise of the gun falling to the floor and . . .

. . .
I’m standing in the middle of a large room full of light coming from high windows, and I’m walking towards the wall at the back and looking down at my feet, which are red against the clear tiles on the floor – and in the meantime I’m moving closer to the door that leads to the stairs and
. . .

. . .
I’m in a bedroom where Julius is lying on top of Chandelle and slapping her as he fucks her, and there’s Alex with his pants down waiting his turn and jerking off, and I’m also masturbating and
. . .

. . .
I’m outside another door that opens slightly and there’s the beautiful, incredulous face of Thelma Ross appearing in the crack and immediately afterwards she’s pushed inside and falls on the floor screaming, and a hand holding a gun enters my field of vision and
. . .

. . .
I’m again in front of the half-open door of this light-filled room and I open it and there’s a figure in the shadow of the landing who advances towards me. He’s wearing a tracksuit and I finally manage to see his face and I realize he’s speaking to me although I can’t take my eyes off the gun he’s holding. He’s smiling and
. . .

Maureen found herself lying on the floor, her strength gone, just like all the other times that the personal ghosts of Gerald Marsalis had assailed her. Gasping for breath, she pressed down on her arms and lifted herself until she was on all fours on the floor. She stayed in that position for a moment, head bowed, hair falling like weeping willows at the sides of her face, trying to get her heartbeat, which she could hear throbbing in her ears, back to a normal rhythm.

In that final vision, Maureen had at last seen the face of the person who had killed Jerry Ko, at the exact moment he had entered his loft, aiming a gun at him.

Maureen slowly raised her head.

There in front of her was the same man, standing looking at her with his head tilted slightly to one side and a puzzled expression on his face. He was dressed differently but, just as in that vision, he was holding a gun, aimed directly at her.

Harmon Fowley of Codex Security was standing in front of the main entrance of the Stuart Building, waiting for Jordan. When Harmon realized that Jordan was the man on the saddle of the red motorbike that was pulling up at the sidewalk, he waited for him to put it on the kick-stand and switch off the engine.

He looked admiringly at the Ducati as Jordan got off. ‘Italian, eh? Nice machine.’

Jordan removed his helmet, and shook the hand Fowley held out to him. ‘Yes. A very nice machine.’