(12) The Day the Sun Came Out

The sky was clearing as the sun was about to set.

Tanya looked out from under the tangled sheet and covers. The room was shadowy, with a soft rose color high on the wall opposite the windows.

Sanguineus was sitting half naked in a chair by the desk, his left side rosy, his right side a silhouette. He was smoking reflectively, the wine bottle on the desk in easy reach.

Tanya rolled over and went back to sleep.

She woke up two and a half hours later. The digital clock on the nightstand had 8:57 in bright red. The room was dark. The red glow of the black cheroot was like a firefly moving in front of the window as Sanguineus took a drag, lowered his hand and released from his nostrils the ghost of his thoughts. Or so it seemed to Tanya.

"Well...?" she said, stretching. "Are you going to sit there all night?"

She sensed him looking at her. The red glow went up and down again.

"Later tonight we're going to the house of Gerard MacGalt," he said in a quiet voice. "A post from Estelle informs me he's at home, and Maggie Donegal is with him. The analyst here was given some incentive to pay closer attention. He's hired a private taxi for us. Estelle has put him down as a bootblack squire for the Soothsayer."

In the fainter darkness by the window his brief smile was seen by Tanya. She smiled in return.

"Maggie might be gone when we get there," Sanguineus remarked, "but that won't matter."

"Tell me what you think," Tanya said urgently in her lessening sleepiness. She sat up against the headboard, her arms around her raised and covered knees. "I told you everything I can remember about my abduction. I told you the truth. All of it. Everything. I can see it's upset things, you sitting there for hours."

"No, there was nothing to be upset," he said, taking up the bottle and swishing it to see how much of the wine was left. He held it on his thigh, the bottleneck against his bare stomach.

Up and down went the red glow, a swirl of the greyest smoke drifting across to the bed.

"Here's how I figure it," he said. "A supplier for the Parliament building's foodstuffs and other goods has a security clearance. I can't know whether Whitestone is involved with the supplier or if they use them unawares to smuggle certain items, and drugged victims, to the storage basement, in crates. But I have to think that those few men under the Top Banana who work closely with him in the Whitestone endeavor have been cleared by him, the Lord Advocate, to move freely through the complex. The 'Lusk' is for special occasions only, I should imagine. High level meetings, and for the sort of thing you were put through."

Tanya set her chin on her knee. "I did wonder how I got there, once I was out, and poor Heathcliffe spilled the beans about where it was."

"You say you recall nothing of your actual abduction. The first thing you remember is regaining consciousness in the room where you were to be brainwashed."

"Well, I remember being frightened, or, you know, spooked," she whispered, brows furrowed, "when I was going up the steps to the cottage. I think I might have sensed someone behind me, or inside, but I really don't remember the details."

The red glow brightened. "D'Arc drugged you. My guess is you were put in a large crate, and the authorized suppliers delivered it. Be that as it may," he said, the red glow making a trail across the grey of the window as his hand came down to the armrest, "the procedures you were put through, the electric shocks, the polygraphs, the deprivations, the nudity, the isolation, the invasive recordings, the systematic beatings, the daily threat of death... the aversion therapy, the propaganda against Red Rum, the indoctrination into the lies Whitestone tells its prospects... the shame and the guilt they instilled in you...these things were not just the work of the hooded D'Arc, assuming it was indeed him. He's little more than a go-fer and a lackey, a man with gunpowder for brains, a marionette parroting his superiors. No, there was this other tormentor, this inquisitor in the full-face white plastic mask. D'Arc said this was Gerard MacGalt, in disguise. A man with a deliberately cultivated split-personality."

"Huh," grunted Tanya. She leaned over and lay propped on an elbow.

"But D'Arc told me this about MacGalt after I made him the offer," Sanguineus continued. "D'Arc was covering for someone close to him, dear to him. You say this masked person was slender and had a voice pitched higher than most men. Did this person sound like MacGalt? Did you ever hear his voice when you attended the college?"

"It was NOT MacGalt. The whole idea is ridiculous. You saw him at Cooper's Place, didn't you? He is not slender. Who do you think this other inquisitor was?"

"Before I answer that, you answer me this," Sanguineus said, leaning forward, his bulk blocking the grey blush of the window. "D'Arc told me that he allowed you to escape. You say you slipped your cuffs and jumped the hooded man, presumably D'Arc, confiscating his stun gun. He then offered to lead you to the drainage pipe that empties into the loch in Holyrood park. You admit that you found his submissive behavior odd. Out of character. Do you think now that your escape was part of their plan?"

"I was so afraid it was a ruse," Tanya said, giving a theatrical shudder. "I was certain he was going to guide me to a place where I would be killed and my body disposed of, maybe in a sewer line. The masked maniac was so sick of me, so fed up with my resistance, that he was all for snuffing my ass right there. So what choice did I have? I had to go with D'Arc, or whoever he was. But those horrible electric shock sessions made me so scared of anything risky, anything to do with... the life I'd been leading. You just can't know what hell that was. The nightmares I had for weeks after I escaped... or been let out purposefully..."

Her eyes glazed over and her mouth went slack. Slowly she extended her arm along the damp sheet and lay flat on her side, her face half buried in the pillows. "I don't know... Maybe they did want me to think I had escaped on my own. But... why? I was on the verge of giving in to them. I was losing it. I was an animal without a soul. I was just surviving..."

Sanguineus leaned back in the chair. He drank the last of the wine. "Goddamn, there are holes I can't fill," he said in a fatigued voice. "I haven't enough information. Well, when does one ever have enough? But if what you tell me about yourself, your schooldays, your rumbling with the gangs, is true, then I think the masked person was Valentina Vizconde."

Tanya sat up abruptly. She put her head in her hands and ruffled her hair, scratching her scalp. "God..."

"Remember, D'Arc told me that Valentina wants me dead, and he said that before I made him the offer, when he had no hope of getting away alive. The abduction was about breaking your connection, your loyalty, to Red Rum. Suppose Valentina saw me as your strongest connection to Red Rum? Get rid of me, and that strongest connection is gone."

Tanya looked over at his silhouette. "But you said that Valentina tried to take out a contract on D'Arc. That doesn't make sense if they're..."

She breathed a laugh. "Well, maybe it does. Lovers sometimes want to kill each other. He screwed her over big time, some years ago, but he COULD have made it up to her, if he's man enough... and she's woman enough."

"But that's not a reason for wanting you to think you had escaped," Sanguineus said. He crushed out the cheroot stub in a glass ashtray and sat back, his hands linked in his lap. His bare feet tapped the floor. "It has something to do with Valentina, and goddamn it, tell me the truth: have you impersonated Valentina since your escape?"

Tanya fell back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling, biting her bottom lip and sighing through her nose.

"No, no, no," she said. "I knew her a little at college, and we both dropped out and hung with some of the teddy boys in the gangs because we were a couple of square pegs in the round hole thing. We don't look all that much alike, really." She turned her head to frown at him. "You've seen pictures of her, haven't you? Okay, we look like sisters, for sure, but put us side by side and there's a difference. Smitchee never mistook me for Val."

"Roust yourself up," Sanguineus said, taking the bottle from between his legs and slamming it down on the desk. "Make yourself presentable. The private cab will be here shortly. We're off to MacGalt's house."

"Are you going to kill him?" asked Tanya, swinging her legs off the bed. She stood and came naked to him in the darkness.

He rose to meet her. They stood like two facing doors that had never been opened.

"He's the target," Sanguineus said, "and I'm here to fulfill the contract, not to decide who should or shouldn't be killed."

"And suppose he shouldn't? Do you kill him anyway? It's funny, Ricklen, but that rotten ordeal in the Cave had me rethinking everything I had been doing on automatic mode. Why is that? What were they trying to accomplish? You say a leopard can't change its spots. They knew that too, didn't they? What is it they want me to do?"

He said, "I don't know."