The index finger was bent immovably at an unnatural angle, and the little finger appeared to have been crushed beyond repair. His hand dripped blood, and the leather upholstery glistered with a slickness of it.

Half of Violet’s face lay in soft shadows, half shone gold in lamplight, but both celadon eyes were bright with interest.

“Once more I ask-who gave you a photograph of Lily?”

“Supposedly the family. It came through my surgeon.”

“Dr. Hobb.”

“Yes.”

“When did you receive the photo?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Sunday morning?”

“Yes. And I saw she was your twin.”

“And then you fled to Denver.”

“First to Las Vegas. Then to Denver.”

“Why there?”

He could not explain Ismay Clemm to himself, let alone to this woman. He said, “You cut me in the parking lot. You invaded my house and covered every trace of how you got in and out. You screwed with the security recordings, opened blind deadbolts-”

“Electromagnets can open blind deadbolts. Did it seem like sorcery?”

“I was scared. I had to go somewhere you couldn’t find me, somewhere I could think.”

“What thoughts did you have in Denver to bring you home again?”

He shook his head, and that was a mistake. A liquid pain sloshed through his cranium.

When the agony passed, he said, “There’s no way to put it into words. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he repeated.

Ryan began to contemplate using the coffee table to turn this situation around. The two glass vessels, if overturned and shattered, might splash burning oil not only on the floor and furniture but also on Violet.

She said, “I didn’t expect you to come here.”

“Yeah. You already said.”

“I thought you would let me kill your father.”

“I didn’t come here just for him.”

“What else did you come here for?”

He did not answer. He didn’t have to answer everything. She would eventually kill him whether he replied to all her questions or not.

Violet said, “Do you wonder who I am-besides being her sister?”

“I’m pretty sure you’re not a schoolteacher.”

“What does that mean?”

“A schoolteacher like she was.”

“Lily was not a schoolteacher.”

Because space had been allowed for the La-Z-Boy to expand to its full length as a recliner, the chair stood farther from the coffee table than Ryan would have liked. If he had been closer, he could have thrust out his legs, kicking the table, tumbling the lamps to shatter on the floor.

“Lily was a seamstress.”

“Why would they lie about what she did?” he asked.

Instead of answering the question, Violet said, “I am a security agent. Government security. But different from the FBI, the CIA. Oh, very different, Mr. Perry. You have never heard of this bureau, and you never will.”

“Secret police.”

“Yes. Essentially. Your bad luck to take the heart of someone with a sister capable of taking it back.”

“I didn’t take anything. You feel the way you feel. I understand why you might feel that way. I really do. But I was on a recipient list, and she was on a donor list, and we matched. If not me, someone else.”

“The list you were on-the United Network for Organ Sharing.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“How long did you wait for a heart, Mr. Perry?”

If she pointed the pistol away from him or if she started to get up from the armchair, or if she was distracted for any reason, he might be able to throw himself off the chair, overturn the table, spill the lamps, and in the flare of flames and chaos somehow avoid being shot. The scene played in his mind, admittedly a Hollywood moment of stuntman choreography, but it might work, just might, because there were moments when life imitated movies. He had to play along with her, keep her talking, and hope she gave him an opportunity.

“Dr. Gupta-he gave me a year to live. A year at the most. But I might have been dead in six months, even less. They didn’t find a match for almost four months.”

“Some people wait a year, two years,” she said. “Many never find a match. You had a perfect match…in one month.”

“No. Four. Four months.”

“One month after coming under Dr. Hobb’s care.”

“Because Dr. Hobb is an exceptional surgeon with a worldwide reputation, licensed to practice in several countries. He can get his patients on the list of the International Network for Organ Sharing.”

Her pale-green eyes widened as if he had told her something she did not know, information that she must now factor into the equation. “The International Network for Organ Sharing.” She nodded thoughtfully, as if absorbing this news, but then her eyes narrowed. “There is no such list, Mr. Perry.”

“Of course there is. I was on it. Your sister was on it. After her accident, they matched us, and Dr. Hobb got the call.”

She rose from the armchair, but because the pistol remained trained on Ryan, he had no clear chance to get from the recliner to the coffee table.

“What accident do you refer to?” she asked.

“The car crash. Her head trauma.”

In the flat, uninflected voice of someone in a trance, Violet said, “Lily was in a car crash.”

Her celadon eyes were hard and cold and glazed. She moved slowly around the coffee table, diminutive but no less the predatory tiger.

“Listen…things happen,” Ryan said. “They just happen. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Things happen,” she said flatly. “Nobody’s fault.”

“If maybe…”

“If maybe?” she asked, pausing by the fireplace.

“If maybe you were driving, you can’t blame yourself.”

“You think I was driving.”

Anything he said could be the wrong thing to say, but silence might itself inspire her to shoot him.

“I don’t know. I just thought maybe that explains…explains the intensity of your feelings. Explains why…we’re here like this.”

If eyes revealed intentions, hers told him that he was a dead man. Her stare felt as sharp as shards of porcelain, shatters of her insane rage borne on her gaze.

“I was not driving, Mr. Perry, because there was no accident. No car crash, no head trauma, no international list. Fully alive, perfectly healthy, Lily was matched to you and then put to death so you could have her heart.”

FIFTY-FOUR

Shaking his battered head made the throbbing pains swell stronger, striking up an internal sound like the repeated hard plucking of the bottom-note string on a bass fiddle, and fired off sharper pangs by the quiverful. Yet he shook his head, shook it, denying what Violet had said.

“Why did you fly to Shanghai for a transplant, Mr. Perry? Why all the way to Shanghai?”

“That’s where the car crash happened. She was on life support, brain-dead, they kept her alive until I could get there with Dr. Hobb and his surgical team.”

“Do you know what Falun Gong is, Mr. Perry?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know. She made it sound like he should, but he didn’t.

“Falun Gong is a spiritual practice expressed through certain exercises and meditations.”

“I never heard of it. Why should I?”

“It was founded in 1992 and banned in 1999 after ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners silently protested the government’s arrest and beating of many people in the city of Tianjin.”

Shaking his head not only exacerbated the pain but also cast his thoughts into a junkshop jumble, as an earthquake dumps the orderly contents of supermarket shelves onto the floor in a seismic potluck. Yet he continually shook his head, as though he didn’t want either the pain to stop or his thoughts to clear.

“A spiritual life is not an approved life. Half the people in my country’s labor-camp prisons are Falun Gong,” she continued. “They are beaten, worked to death, and tortured.”

Judging by the sound of her voice, Violet had moved around the La-Z-Boy, in back of him. He raised his head, and though his vision brightened and dimmed somewhat with the ebb and flow of the pain, he could see well enough to confirm that she was not in the part of the room that lay before him.