“I promise to do my very best to move into a more combat-ready skin at the earliest opportunity. What options do you have?”

“Plenty.”

“You’ve still got a bullet in your shoulder.”

“I can’t imagine you’ll be in a hurry to take it out.”

“Your own people…”

“I know!” He shouted now, hands slamming into the counter top, hard enough to make my glass jump, loud enough for heads to turn. He shrank down before the stares, seemed to curl in around his own core. “I know,” he murmured. “I know.”

“I can get you to New York.”

“How?”

“I can get you to your sponsor. I won’t hurt him. Have I lied to you? Have I killed?”

“You killed Eugene. In Berlin–you did that.”

“Alice killed Eugene,” I retorted. “She shot him because I was there, but he died and I lived. He’d have lived if you’d left me alone. I can get you to Galileo.”

“I… don’t know. I need to think. You’ve… drugged me. Talked. Jesus, you talk. I need to think.”

I laid my hand gently on top of his.

“That’s great,” I said. “But I’m going to throw up, and we’re all out of time.”

His hand twitched, but he was far, far too late.

Chapter 78

I said, “Hi.”

Coyle opened his eyes, licked his lips and said, “Where am I?”

“Dentist’s.”

His eyes wandered across the low ceiling, the white tiled floor, to me. “Who are you?”

“I am Nehra Beck, married, two kids, loyalty card for the local coffee shop, fastidious–some might say obsessive–collector of receipts.”

“What time is it?”

“Midnight, give or take. I–or rather you–explained that it was an emergency and you’d pay, and when Nehra realised that I had a bullet in my shoulder he became a little distressed and I had to explain that my emergency wasn’t so much about teeth, and then… Well, here we are.”

“Which day?”

“Same day,” I replied. “Only a few hours gone. I’m sorry about just jumping in like that, but you were getting unreasonable and I was really very, very drunk. But once in I realised that this whole stoical thing you’ve been doing was actually secondary to the fact that the bullet has got to come out.” I picked a pair of industrial-sized tweezers off the metal table at my side, clicked them together thoughtfully. “I figured a dentist might have enough happy drugs to ease the experience a little. I, for one, am looking forward to the after-effects.”

Chapter 79

And then Coyle opened his eyes and I said: “I’m Babushka. Actually, I’m almost certainly not Babushka, but all I’ve got in my handbag is eighty euros cash, a set of front-door keys, a half-bottle of vodka, four condoms, a pack of paracetamol, pepper spray and these.”

I tossed the cards on to the bed where Coyle lay. He looked from them to me and back again, and said, “You look… surgical.”

“Do I?” I ran my hands around the expansive shape of my body, my platinum-blonde hair draping down the side of my podgy white neck. “Well, yes, the breasts feel silicone and a bit undercooked, but I’d say that my face was all my own, wouldn’t you?”

Coyle, lying on his back on the cheap hotel bed, scrutinised the copious quantities of bare flesh I sported, and said, “This is some sort of punishment, isn’t it? Divine retribution?”

“Nonsense!” I exclaimed, flopping on to the bed beside him and sliding the cards back into my bag. “Babushka seemed a very pleasant woman. Cheap too. Fifty euros for two hours. You don’t get rates like that in Paris, I can tell you. How are you feeling?”

Flinching with every press of his fingertips, he fumbled around the fresh bandages across his shoulder. “I don’t remember much.”

“That would be because you were stoned!” I sang out brightly, testing the rubbery ends of my bright white fingernails. “I knew you were stoned because I was the one who threw the drugs at you, but it took picking up Babushka here to realise just how high I–you–am. Are. You are. Enjoy it while it lasts. I was only checking in, so actually…” I reached out towards the soft skin of his cheek.

“Wait!”

I waited, eyebrows raised. Babushka had sensational plucked eyebrows, and I enjoyed raising them. Coyle sucked in a long slow breath. “You told me… you wanted a willing body. Someone who wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t run. And cheap though your… your Babushka is, if you take her anywhere outside this hotel room her pimp will come running, and you’ll have more trouble than you want. So you need me, and you need me to cooperate. So just wait.” I waited as Coyle pressed his fists against his forehead and drew in another shuddering breath. “Tell me how you get me to New York.”

“I can walk you through customs,” I replied simply. “I can ignore your boarding pass, stamp your passport, fail to search your bags. I could wear anyone I want to New York, fly first class, stretch my legs. But I’ll get you there, if you let me.”

“And what then? I wake up handcuffed to a radiator?”

“Or in a comfortable hotel room next to a lovely lady.”

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”

“No,” I confessed. “But I took a good long stare at me when I came through the door. I was promising all sorts of wonderful delights–sexual thrills and erotic mysteries. I implied that I was very athletic.” I stretched my legs, feeling the pull beneath my thighs and calves, and, curious, reached down and tried to touch my toes. My fingertips barely made it past my knees before tendons locked, muscles objected, and with a sigh I relaxed again. “Maybe I exaggerated. But I thought I had a tender smile. It laughed, but at itself. I think I am quite wonderful, in my way.”

“Do you do this a lot? You hear about people who establish… relationships with people like you. I was never sure I could believe it.”

“It’s true. I’ve had a few in my time–gofers, if you will. Don’t worry; I was always very well behaved. A cooperative body isn’t something to be taken for granted. I’d never drive dangerously or have unprotected sex in a gofer; it wouldn’t be professional. Never have sex at all, in fact, in a gofer–not without permission. A relationship like that is about someone who’s willing to get you to the next appointment without all the fuss of jumping from waiter to chef to driver and back again. And a good gofer is… can be a friend. If they want to be.”

“Did you love them too?”

“Yes. Of course I did. They knew what I was and trusted me. They trusted me with their naked skin. If that isn’t an act of love, I don’t know what is. I love all my hosts. I loved Josephine.” His eyes glinted in the low tungsten light of the room, and he said not a word. “There was a time when I took everything I wanted by force. You–the actions of your kind–have somewhat resurrected that experience, those memories. But Josephine Cebula knew what she had agreed to. She and I made a bargain in the international departures lounge of Frankfurt airport, once I had proved to her all that I could do. I would wash her body, run my hands through her hair, over her naked flesh. I would dress her in brand-new clothes, stand before a mirror and turn myself this way and that, wonder if my bum looked big in red, small in blue. I would laugh her laugh, fill her belly with food, run her tongue along my teeth, kiss with her lips, caress with her fingertips, pull a stranger down on to her body in the quiet of the night and in her most secret voice whisper tales of romance in my lover’s ears. All this I did, all this she permitted me to do, because I asked and did not take, and I… loved her. There is no giving greater than the gift she gave me, nor that I… meant to give her. A new life. A new her. A chance to be whoever she desired, and all this for a term of time no longer than the jail sentence given to a petty thief. But you killed her, Nathan Coyle. Whoever you are. You killed her.”