Tanya chose St Andrew's on 46th, a Scots bar and restaurant in the older canyons of Manhattan.
They took a taxi from the brownstone where she was staying "temporarily," and had a drink at the long red bar where the bartenders wore kilts and her drink of choice was Coco Psycho beer. Sanguineus was subdued. He did not rise to the bait. He had a Budweiser from the tap.
Upstairs was a too comfy cul-de-sac of sofa booths in green plaid grouped in front of a gas fireplace. Sanguineus dismissed this and had the hostess lead them to the round-topped tables in a line on the shiny woodslat floor of a narrow room that was not so brightly lit, where the patrons were far enough away to avoid the illusion of being in your party.
Tanya ordered a barley wine, but again Sanguineus resisted the invitation and went with a vodka tonic. She seemed to enjoy his stubborn act.
Tanya was herself, he observed; erroneously, as it turned out. Dressed casually, she chatted gaily about the traditional haggis dish, which is the innards of a sheep, cooked to look like taco meat, he remarked. She laughed, daring him to try it. But he stuck with the basic steak and lobster, and a baked potato fully loaded. He did reluctantly agree to a Scottish appetizer: smoked haddock rolled in butter and oat flour deep fried. "But only because I am a slave to anything crisp and greasy," he told her as she leaned a little forward with one elbow on the table and shot glances at him from the corners of her resurrected eyes.
Her hair was worn much longer than he had ever seen it, nearly to her shoulders. And it was now a dark red, not the chestnut color he had been accustomed to. "My natural color," she said, flicking a finger through the thick wavy locks.
"Since it wasn't you who Francois Benz killed outside the Moulin Rouge, pray tell who was it?"
"An imposter. And I paid her well." This was vintage Tanya.
But in slow degrees her expression and her attitude morphed into the reverse of a chrysalis, Sanguineus thought, from a dark murderous butterfly with wings as tough as leather and swords for antennae, to a shapely cocoon that hid a wrym, a little dragon, and not a caterpillar. Yes, she was showing a side of herself that he would never have guessed existed in her makeup, a seriously introspective self; but, as he said, "A leopard doesn't change its spots." He was sure she was just acting. She was too philosophical about remorse to really know what it meant.
Their conversation turned to old times when their entrees came. He reached across and forked up a bit of haggis. "Might have to put up with this if I'm ever sent to Scotland," he remarked prophetically. He agreed it was tasty. She returned the favor by spearing a chunk of lobster. They were friends again, that always tenuous friendship teetering from a lack of compatibility. He saw her as a liar who refused to distinguish between the necessary lie and the superfluous one. She made it clear to him, when their oat scones came with coffee and brandy, that she saw him as forever rigidly on guard, as rough in his lovemaking as in his treatment of human obstacles. "What," she said, "is the difference between sex for pleasure and violence for profit? For you, there IS no difference."
Sanguineus tried to change the subject to that of the old Dutchman she had gone to Amsterdam to snuff, the man who had inadvertently led her to the Hysterium cult and the events that followed; the winding road that brought her to a situation in the highlands of Scotland where her soul was apparently turned inside out.
It had begun after Benz killed her double. She simply vanished, and in such a way that Red Rum believed her to be the victim of Benz, and reacted as policy dictated.
"So when you realized," Sanguineus said, dying for a smoke, "that you were presumed dead, and your corpse avenged, you went home to Scotland. I suppose you're trying to tell me that you wanted to start a new life. But things got fucked, thanks to someone who you don't want to tell me about."
Tanya dabbed at her lips with the green plaid napkin and dropped it beside a scone saucer full of crumbs. She sipped from her brandy glass. "I went home to think things out," she said, mimicking holding a cigarette to tease him, "I mean home to Edinburgh where I had spent three years at the Presbyterian College drawing pictures of castles. I had quite a stash holed away, and could live comfortably though modestly. I was just as I was when killing people for the company, but... I don't know, I was looking for that artistic side, something I could be publicly proud of, and not have to keep secret. Then I met... him... and went through the worst hell any woman could go through and survive. And you don't understand a word of that DO you?"
"I understand only what is mechanical," he replied, flagging their waitress and weighing down a hundred dollar bill with his fork handle. "Let's get some fresh air and nicotine."
They went out to the front of the establishment, under the dome awning, and standing back from the couples passing up and down the sidewalk in the neon reflections and the checkerboard lights of highrises, they lit up and blew smoke against each other like strangers waiting for a bus in contrary winds.
"What are your plans?" he asked her. "Are you coming by the office?"
"Shit no," she said and barked smoke. "I'm going to take an architectural course, somewhere."
"You've been brainwashed."
"I KNOW what life is about now. YOU know, too, but you're afraid of it."
"You've been lobotomized."
Tanya crushed out her stub against the wall. She stood away from him pretending to look for a taxi. "Thanks for dinner," she said. Her dark green blouse fluttered in the draft coming down the steel and concrete canyon, her tight black jeans and red high heels stout as trees. She looked back at him.
"You will never go through what I went through," she said. "I'm a tomboy, as tough as they come, and what I went through came as close to killing me as God himself. But it wasn't the pain and the horror. It was the aftermath, when I had escaped him. That's what it's about. Escape. Freedom. Time to think outside the boss's little box. Sure, I'm who I am, like you're who YOU are. But what a person experiences gets stuck deep inside and grows outward like a new tooth replacing an old one, or a rotten one. It becomes something a fucking lot more than just a longer shadow."
Hermann Bear Claus cracked his knuckles.
"A day will come when you'll be offered the position of analyst," he said, going to the table to refresh their drinks. "Let me ask you, what is your assessment of Tanya Wilde?"
Sanguineus stretched out his legs. He considered for a moment, wary of being specific. "She went through a bad thing. An evil cause has an evil effect, not a good one. She doesn't know what she wants. She's still in a state of shock, or she WAS, back in November. Maybe she went to Scotland. I'd guess she did. But I have a bad feeling about this. Nothing good will come of it."
"What happened after you took her back to her tenement?" Claus turned and walked over to him with the drink glasses moistening his blunt fingers. "Was it what you would usually expect from a girl like her?"
"No, not hardly. I'm afraid I was disappointed. She had a lot of anger seething under her jolly veneer."
Claus handed him the freshened Tom Collins and stood with the empty hand in a trouser pocket. "The target is a psychology professor at Presbyterian College, Edinburgh. The client wants to remain anonymous. But as always, if you feel your life is endangered unless you know the identity of the client, we'll provide you with that information. It's your call."
Sanguineus stared at his drink. "I can see why the analyst says that Tanya casts a shadow over this assignment. What do we know about her birth, her childhood, her upbringing, her schooling? The basic shit, but what's behind it? Has she ever been someone other than Miss Wilde? Was she born 'Tanya Wilde' or is her history a contrived string of falacies?"
Claus chuckled. He sat back down in his plush chair and shook his head. "Is your real surname 'Cruor'? You know that we deliberately refrain from probing into parental genealogy. We need to know the operative's psyche, but tracing bloodlines complicates the issue with unavoidable speculation. It's what something is, not where something came from. So, the truth is, we don't know anything more about Tanya's family and upbringing beyond what she wrote down on the forms we gave her fourteen years ago, after her psychological and physical tests. She knew then what she knows now: If you fuck Red Rum, you die a death the devil wouldn't think for a moment to inflict on his worst enemy."
Sanguineus smiled. "I was born Ricklen Cruor Hartley," he said. Then a dark sheen shone in his eyes. "The target, what is his name? And if Tanya's shadow has fallen over him, what relation does he have, if any, with the 'person' who twisted her mind around backwards?"
"We're hoping you'll find out, Mr Hartley. His name's Gerard MacGalt. And the reason there's a price on his head is peculiar. Let's go to lunch in the cafeteria and discuss it."
Valentina Vizconde parked her Peugeot at the Church of St Mark in Lornaglen.
It was the hour of vespers, the sun touching the hills west of the Winterfield golf course that overlooked the sea and the bay.
The village had grown just a smidgeon since her schooldays. She knotted the headscarf under her chin, zipped up her coat, and pulling on her gloves she started off on her evening walk past the shops on the curving road that led to the oat fields and the sheep pastures, where, on the nearest hill, the ancient castle stood like a finger insulting the heavens.
No one recognized her. It was as if no one knew that a Vizconde had come home.
She stopped at a bakery and bought a frosted Tipperary biscuit with a raspberry on top. There was a bench in the garden of All Souls where she liked to sit, eat her treat, and have a smoke.
She sat with her cigarette held near her right cheek, leaning slightly forward.
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