Page 9 of Bitter Burn
I’ll leave. They’re safe here, they have each other, and they need not worry that I’ll come drag them out of their idyll just for the sake of my pride or my revenge. I’ll have revenge enough without them.
But…hopelessly, selfishly…I want one last piece of them. Something I can hold on to.
So I take Isolde’s knife.
Deftly but silently, I reach over her sleeping form and replace the knife with the one I brought with me, a blade made of matte black nylon and glass fiber, sharp enough to cut paper. I leave the letter underneath it.
I don’t dare to kiss them, so I let myself imagine it, a brush of my lips over a cheek or along a jaw. I imagine crawling between them and pulling them both into my arms and sleeping until the late, gray daybreak of December comes and I can afflict them with myself as I so love to do.
And then I leave the lovers sleeping at Morois House, my knife between them and the truth too, and I accept that my heart—as hard and pointed and resistant to light as the blade now on the bed—is left there too.
I find my coat and my shoes in the laundry room, and I see myself out, careful not to leave tracks in the snow-splotched yard. They don’t need to know how I got in.
A husband should have some secrets yet.
Five
Mark
Once I reach my car, I make a call with the burner I picked up once I got to the country. Afterward, the phone gets knocked back to factory settings and dropped in an electronics recycling box in Exeter, where I also leave the rented car and walk to a station to board a train bound for London. I have a stocking hat pulled over my head and the collar of a battered secondhand coat turned up, and there’s a pebble in my right shoe to hobble my usual lengthy stride.
It’s not a perfect disguise—nothing is in a place as surveilled as England—but it’s enough to make someone work to find me when they comb through the CCTV footage. That’s as much as I need at the moment.
The London clockmaker has a shop behind a shit-splattered sidewalk in Croydon, and she’s expecting me when I walk in. Clockmakers aren’t a chatty bunch, so I’m not surprised when she wordlessly disappears into the back before I can even reach the counter.
I poke around the cases of watches and tabletop timepieces, watch the clocks on the wall tick in perfect concord. Behind the desk, a neat row of clocks shows the times across the globe.
The shop is cluttered but sparkling, unlike the battered storefront outside, and when the clockmaker emerges from the back, I get a glimpse of a well-ordered room with stacks of notepads, a shelf of atlases, and a fax machine made of yellowing plastic.
The clockmaker hands me a piece of paper. The clockmaker in Singapore is fond of coordinates, but here in London, things are a little quainter, and I just get a name. Place Seffarine.
I look up at the clockmaker. Her expression tells me that she knows exactly what I’m about to ask and that I’d better not. But Fez? I might as well search for a needle in a haystack in the dark. With gloves on.
I glance up at the clocks on the wall and mentally triangulate how long this little detour might take and then decide it doesn’t matter. It might be yet another dead end, one more wasted trip, but I’ll regret it if I don’t try to find this man.
“They said he was a priest,” the clockmaker says unexpectedly, dipping her head toward the paper in my hand. Even though we’re alone in the shop, I’m a little surprised. Getting anything approaching context or detail or explanation from a clockmaker is almost unheard of. An SIS relic from the Cold War, the clockmakers operate on an older set of rules, the chief rule being that the less everyone knows, the better. A rule that’s kept the clockmaking operation ticking through the decades, as counterterrorism overtook all other concerns, as private actors slowly started filtering into the business of intelligence and covert action. The clockmakers will work with almost anyone for the right price—provided Vauxhall Cross doesn’t consider them a threat—but there’s a difference between the SIS titrating out tidbits of information and them handing over everything they know about a subject.
“He was,” I say and fold the paper into a crisp square. “He worked in the archives of the Vatican.”
Professional interest flickers in the clockmaker’s eyes. I know she’s imagining what she could do with only a day in those archives, the secrets she could find to write on little pieces of paper for ridiculous sums.
“He’s been hopping cities every few months,” she says. “He knows how to hide, and now he’s in Fez. In the medina.”
In other words, he’s in one of the easiest places to hide in the world.
She seems to come to some kind of decision. “You should know that someone else was asking after him. Three days ago.”
Fuck.
“Who were they?” I ask, knowing she won’t answer, and she doesn’t. Clockmakers don’t stay in business by revealing the identities of their customers.
“Best of luck,” she says, and then she disappears into the back.
Fez is hectic but picturesque as I navigate the medina—an eight-hundred-acre warren of souks, mosques, and dead-end lanes. The streets are packed with stalls, vendors, and pack mules; fountains gurgle from hidden corners and unseen courtyards; cats dart everywhere. When I hear the din of hammers against copper, I slow my gait and stroll into Place Seffarine, one hand in the pocket of my tan suit. I become the picture of a tourist at leisure. I stop at the shops and chat with the coppersmiths in British-accented French, and I gradually piece together a sense of the square.
Most of the nearby buildings are low, two or three stories at most, with shuttered windows and cafés wedged onto rooftops. There’s a madrasa on one side, with the occasional clump of students entering or leaving via the horseshoe arch, and vendors have spread out their wares on the steps rising up to the far end of the square, calling out to locals and tourists alike.
It’s a noisy, busy place. A place where you can pass through without standing out.
