Bear Claus looked up from the thick file he was evaluating, at the intercom on his redwood desk.
Since he was not alone in his office, and because the visitor was not privy to the particulars of on-going operations, Claus put on the headphones before depressing the talk button.
"Yes?"
It was Estelle. "I just received a comment from Tanya Wilde on my Touring Europe blog. She gave me the correct code for the day. She wants to meet with Ricklen. She's in Scotland."
"Give me a minute to mull it over," Claus said, and released the button. He looked across at the therapist, Dr Haight, seated across from him. "You had several sessions with Tanya Wilde a year or so back, Doc, do you recall?"
"God yes I do," the pipe smoker said, loosening his tie and unbuttoning his collar. He noticed this reflex and laughed at himself; a very short man in a cream tussore suit whose feet barely touched the floor. "You will get the devil's own amount of work out of her, believe me. My assessment of her is the stapled pages at the back of the file."
Claus smiled, pushing the file toward the front edge of the desk and depressing the intercom button. "Estelle?"
"Yes, sir."
"Get Tanya's location and pass it on to our man. Tell her to sit tight until he gets there, if she can swing that. And tell her that she is to consider herself under his authority."
"Very good, sir."
It rained heavily on the A1 west to Edinburgh. Wet grey gusts slapped at the fields of kale, rye, and barley, and how meager, though valiant at heart, was the resistance by the Dart's windshield wipers.
Sanguineus put the Nordic back in his jacket pocket and turned around eastward at the first opportunity, back to Lornaglen.
He drove the winding street to the Goose and Hemlock bookstore. The rain and wind slashed at him for the few paces it took to reach the sanctuary of the warm, stuffy, leather-rich little cavern of book stacks.
He put a pound sterling note on the counter by a coffee machine and helped himself to a cup. The girl sitting behind the check-out was shaking a creamer and looking at him like a zoologist observing a new and impressive species of felis catus.
Tanya, in a dark brown sweater and suede jacket, jeans and calf leather boots with tassles, her hair pulled back with a black ribbon, sat on a roundback stool in a lamplit corner, a magazine open on her lap, a steaming cup in hand, smiling at Sanguineus as he walked up to her without the least trace of a smile, though his eyes appraised her with a critical amusement.
"By God," he said. "The analyst was right. Casting a shadow in Scotland."
"I had no idea where you were, I swear it. But I'm pleased as punch that you're here. It's definitely a good omen. Can you explain things? I was told that I'm to bow down and lick your boots. So I expect mutual cooperation."
"Where are you staying?"
"In the castle ruins."
"Liar."
"In a cottage, about a mile out from town. Renting it. But for reasons of my own I don't want you coming around. Are you staying in the city? I could get a room there. I was planning to, anyway."
Sanguineus glanced around at the few customers prowling the stacks. There were upholstered chairs across from him with doilies pinned to the armrests, but it wasn't private enough in the too-quiet enviornment.
"Follow me to Edinburgh," he said. "Do you need to go to your privileged cottage to pack up first?"
"Well hell yes. Wait here, if you will. I'll be back in thirty-forty minutes."
"Make it twenty minutes," he said, and sipped his coffee.
Fortunately the rain squall had passed by the time Tanya pulled up out front in a mud-splattered blue Peugeot. Sanguineus met her at the curb.
"I'm dropping the car off at All Souls," she said, flicking ashes in the gutter. "You don't mind my company do you? We can talk on the way."
A grey-bearded man in a macintosh, his eyebrows a bushy red, stopped outside the bookstore and squinted at her. "Valentina? I say, did you get my message?"
Sanguineus turned and looked at the two of them. He saw Tanya make a face.
She said to the man, "You're mistaking me for my friend, aren't you? Valentina Vizconde? I'm Tanya, I went to school with her."
"Oh, so sorry. A resemblance, you know." He tipped his bomberg hat, nodded to Sanguineus, and went into the Goose and Hemlock.
"Why are you leaving the car at All Souls?"
"Because it needs work," Tanya said, sighing, a certain nervousness showing, "and the pastor doesn't mind if people park in the lot while they're out shopping or sightseeing. I can rent a wreck or something in the city if I need to. Shall we be going? I've a bunch of shit to tell you."
The sun seemed to be pushing the clouds apart as Sanguineus motored along the westbound A1.
Tanya smoked and looked out at the patchwork of fields spotlighted with roving sunbeams turning the greenness a sparkling gold for moments at a time.
Sanguineus let her ruminate on what she was promising to tell him. It wasn't difficult knowing what was gripping her. It was the mystery man and the wringer he had put her through before she finally escaped him. She would want to identify him and get her revenge. Sanguineus supposed she had some clue about who the man was. She wanted professional assistance in nailing him, or in exacting her vengeance in the most gratifying way, an assistance that she could at least partly trust.
Sanguineus was curious about this, but uppermost in his mind was his determination to meet with the client, Professor Maggie Donegal, and ascertain if she might have heard of him from the negotiator and had inadvertantly warned the target. That MacGalt appeared to recognize him was the worst thing that could happen at the start of an operation.
"We couldn't find any bank accounts traceable to you," he remarked, to break the tense silence. Why wasn't she talking? he wondered. "You must have your loot stashed in one of those secret underground banks."
Tanya breathed a laugh. "Same one as you, I'd bet. La Societe de la Mongouste."
Sanguineus smiled wryly. Looking at a flock of sheep in a cone of sunlight, he said, "You better hope that the international community doesn't legalize illicit drugs and child porn, or there goes your fifteen cents on the dollar from the Mongoose."
"Fat chance. Those things are illegal and will stay that way so the politicians can funnel their gains in Mongoose and the others, make a killing, and have a nice leverage on the central banks. I've tripled my money since depositing with la societe. I want some ice cream. Where's your pad?"
"The Holyrood Hotel."
"There's an ice cream parlor on Nicolson, near the Blind Poet bar. That's not far from your place."
"Alright, but tell me about Valentina Vizconde."
This didn't help to loosen her jaw regarding the 'bunch of shit' she would sooner or later be coughing up, he noticed. He slowed to seventy kilometers an hour on the sunwashed road. "A college friend?"
"We took architectural classes together," she said with a strained nostalgia. "I dropped out after three semesters and got, you know, mixed up with the Tollcross Rebels. That's where I met Smitchee from the Gillie Team, or that was his cover anyway. It was Smitchee who... Well, ha, you know Smitchee a tad. I wouldn't be sitting here next to the Master Sanguineus if it wasn't for him."
"Fuck Smitchee, I want to know about Valentina."
"She's just a girl I knew in school. Why are you so hellbent about Valentina?"
Sanguineus followed the slack turn of the highway past a group of cows looking over at them from a split-log fence.
"We keep a close watch on the Shadow Web hit-man scams," he said as a preamble, "looking for prospective clients who seem to have a legitimate beef and plenty of funds. Those who look good we contact. Well, a Valentina Vizconde was contacted by one of our negotiators. It wasn't Rolgo. I forget who, but I remember that she wanted a man named Anthony D'Arc, a French hoodlum, killed for a reason I don't recall. It's in a file, I suppose. She put up the money. But shortly into the operation-- I was in it-- we found out that the money she gave us wasn't hers. She had been scamming on the Shadow Web herself. Long story. This was while you were going through orientation, in Wyoming. So we dropped the case but kept the money, of course. We knew Vizconde was in Scotland, or thought we knew. Claus was sort of impressed with her and considered recruiting her, but she disappeared. Ten years ago. I mean vanished without a trace, like she never existed. And now here she is, apparently, back in Scotland. And you, too."
He looked at her profile, the smoke of her cigarette putting a woozy halo over her head and ghostly jewelry on her neck and ear. She was staring ahead at nothing, her thoughts hanging suspended by some stunning revelation, or so Sanguineus saw it, by that certain dark light in her eye. He knew the look. Something he said had struck her with a force that unearthed a long lost, or suppressed, memory.
Then she turned her face to him.
"D'Arc," she said.
"What about him?"
"The mystery man."
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