Last Line (17 page)

Nothing. Worse than nothing—a pain in his head as if the reaching summons had hit a wall and backlashed inside him. He choked, fighting back the tiny sound it would have made. How fucking stupid of him. Those previous times had been dumb luck, coincidences. In the alleyway below, Eddie Harvey poked the gun muzzle into John’s chest and said, “Do you know how often I got fucked up against a wall in that place, pig? How many big ugly pricks got shoved down my throat?”

John shrugged. Michael saw the tiny, casual move of his shoulders, unconcerned as if he had been in the pub with Harvey, answering the question over a pint. “I’m sure you did your share of the fucking and shoving, Ed.”

“Bastard! I’m not a faggot, not like you and your pansy-arse partner. Did I see him in there as well? I’ll sort him out too, once I’ve finished with—”

“Don’t waste your time. He’s not here.”

“Lying little shit.” Harvey raised the gun muzzle till it was an inch off John’s brow. “Get down on your knees, pig. I’ll show you what it’s like to have to suck cock or choke on it.”

John broke into laughter. Michael, who knew the sound and loved it like fresh water and sunshine, heard the genuine amusement in it and shuddered. “You have to be kidding. I saw a stray bulldog knockin’ round here might have done the job for you, but—”

“I said on your knees!”

“Fuck you, Eddie. Not in a million years.”

“Not even to save your life?”

John shrugged again. “No,” he said tiredly. “Not even to save that precious bloody commodity. No.”

Harvey snapped the safety off the gun. Michael, scanning desperately along the line of the rooftops for any route to a better position, caught—briefly, impossibly—a flash of bright blond hair. A moment later—yes, again. Anzhel Mattvei gracefully broaching the crest of a wall, taking up a good sniper’s position on the flat roof behind it. He had what Michael would have sold his soul for—a line of fire to Harvey—but…

Anzhel, no! It’s too far. You’ll hit John!

A whistling pop tore the night, a silenced gunshot. Down in the alley, Eddie Harvey jerked as if pushed hard in the back. His eyes went wide. Then his knees buckled, and he dropped neatly to the cobbles.

Michael slithered down the wall on John’s side. This time, unprepared, he landed awkwardly. John turned at the crash. “Mikey? What are you doing out here? Did you…” He looked back at Harvey, clearly trying to calculate angles. “Did you knock him off?”

“Nn-nn.” Michael rubbed at his knee. Pain was slicing through it, but it didn’t feel like his own. “I couldn’t get a line to him. I couldn’t…”

“Evening, gentlemen.” Anzhel swung easily down from his refuge and dropped into the alleyway. Tucking the weapon into the back of his jeans, he nodded at John. “All right, zaichik?”

“You know, I’m almost getting used to that,” John said calmly. “Still gonna thump you when I find out what it means. Yes, I’m fine. That was”—he looked up, examining the rooftops, working out where Anzhel must have fired from—“that was a neat shot.”

Michael gasped. It was half outrage, half the pain of trying to lurch to his feet. John put out a hand to help him, and he grasped it tight. “A neat shot?” he demanded, trying not to fold back down again, aware that John took hold of him and propped him. “Half an inch and he’d have fucking killed you. What the hell were you doing, Anzhel? I told you not to—”

“I know, I know,” Anzhel interrupted him. “I heard you. Looked to me like we had nothing to lose.”

“Oh great. What if he’d spasmed on the trigger? What if—”

“Mike, shut up,” John said wearily. “He’s right. Harvey was gonna do it.” He waited until Michael was steady, then let him go. “Thanks, Mattvei. I owe you. Look, we’d better get back inside.”

“Not for the sake of information,” Anzhel said. “I’ll let Mikhaili catch you up on that, but you’re right. Dmitri thinks I’m just out here having a piss. I’ll go in ahead.” He glanced at Harvey’s corpse. “You can leave that there. Dmitri takes a body or two as a compliment at these soirées of his.”

He turned to go, but Michael called him back. The pain was subsiding from his knee with surprising thoroughness. He’d thought he’d broken something. “Tell me one thing. How did you get a silenced H and K in here past Dmitri’s security?”

“Didn’t. Might have borrowed it from one of his heavies. I’d better put it back before he notices it’s gone.” He flashed a bright grin and jogged off soundlessly.

“Mike?”

John’s voice called him back from abstracted distance. “Yes,” he said, focusing with difficulty on his partner’s face. John looked exhausted, bleached out in the lamplight. “Are you okay? You must’ve been scared.”

“Not especially. Are you?”

“What? Yeah, I’m all right. Why would I not be?”

“There’s so many answers to that I don’t know where to start. I…I know you’d have done it if you could.”

Michael closed his eyes for a moment. He hadn’t yet worked out for himself that the acid burning up his throat was bitter failure, cold horror at the thought of John’s life in Anzhel’s hands. “The important thing is that somebody did. Come on.”

“Give me my catch-up first. Did you get something useful in there?”

“Yeah. Anzhel provoked one of Sergeyev’s foot soldiers into a bit of an outburst. He reckons Oriel’s gone to ground in a church in Hounslow.”

“Isn’t that one parish down from—”

“The place where we found Piotr. Yes. I don’t know what’s going on, mate, but I don’t like it.”

“Well, like you always say, we don’t have to.” John eased his foot out from under Harvey’s body. “Poor Eddie,” he said dispassionately. “We really left him in the shit. I’m not surprised he wanted a go. What do we do now?”

“Head to Hounslow, I suppose, and dig in. After…after we’ve sold our drugs, of course. No choice there.”

“No, I know. Dmitri will have tabs on all the runners. Great job, isn’t it?” John stole a glance at Michael. “You don’t have to remind me how much I get paid.”

“I wasn’t going to.” No. Michael had been thinking of an exchange in an empty office—could it only have been four days ago? A moment when he’d said to his partner, “
We could get out
.” And John had said, “
Say the word
.” When not in Anzhel’s immediate physical presence, Michael couldn’t imagine for the life of him how he had come to do the things he had to throw all that away. “We’d better go,” he said, a rough little crack breaking the words.

“In a second. I’m sorry I’ve been cold-shouldering you. Didn’t mean to be a kid. Or a…a bad loser, for that matter.”

You haven’t lost me. Oh, Griff, don’t let me be lost
. “You’ve been fine. You’ve got no reason to be speaking to me now.”

“Well, I’m speaking.” John smiled faintly and put out a hand to steady Michael as he crouched to tuck the Colt away. “We still doing our tacky little hotel routine tonight?”

“Yeah. We’d better.”

“Then come and talk to me there, will you?” John’s brow creased. “Unless you’re gonna be with—”

“No. No, I’m not. I don’t even think he’ll come to the same place.”

Chapter Twelve

The shabby room was oddly peaceful. On either side, and above and below him too, John could hear the other tenants of the house going about their business, but the door was shut and he was alone. He was used to the music of the unceasing traffic outside; it had become a type of silence to him.

Nothing like the peace that reigned in Glastonbury under the stars, though.

John got up from the narrow bunk where he’d been sitting and padded over to the window, as if he could physically avoid the comparison. He wasn’t even sure he’d ever see the farmhouse again, and he wasn’t ready for the wash of homesickness that had accompanied the thought. It hadn’t been his home. It was Mike’s, a place he had visited while they had been on visiting terms.

Well, things changed. Hitching absently at the towel round his waist—no need to scare passersby, even in this wasteland, half-derelict street—John knew there was nothing he could be sure of. Not about the world, not about himself. Had there ever been? Maybe not, but so far it had never bothered him. He’d welcomed his fluid universe, his freedom within it, a powerful swimmer in his element. He’d pushed off from his family home and spent most of his time since on the move. His only experience of peace—a foothold, a place to stop and breathe—had been the farmhouse.

And Michael. It was weird how you could go through life and never need a thing until you fell across it. Then you couldn’t live without it, though of course you never found that out until it was taken away. There were plenty more drugs than the ones he’d hawked around South London tonight, a watcher from Dmitri’s camp close on his tail all the way. If he hadn’t been numbed out anyway, John reckoned he might have felt marginally less sick about that—all those shaking hands, sweat-beaded faces—given his own state of hopeless addiction.

He swung round at a light, cautious tap on the door. It should have been locked. As a responsible agent for Last Line, John should have been standing here with a gun in his hand as well as a towel round his waist, but it didn’t seem crucial anymore, and anyway he knew who it was. Had felt the little inner tug for the last five minutes, another luxury he’d taken for granted till now. He leaned his back against the window frame. “Mike? It’s open.”

Michael came in cautiously, checking the corridor behind him. “You should lock this,” he said, snapping the elderly Yale latch shut for himself. “I got tailed all the way to the front steps.”

“Me too. I wouldn’t worry. I’m fairly sure we’ve been convincing.”

“Yeah, horribly. But still.”

John surveyed him. Michael didn’t look as if he’d enjoyed his evening’s pushing any more than he had done himself. He looked as rough as he ever could—merely mortal, shadowed and made gaunt by his acts. In their old shared world, John would have gone to him. Thrown an arm round his shoulders, delivered a bruising, comforting squeeze, and made him sit down. But now his joints felt full of ice and rust. “Is he worth it, then?” he asked, not moving. “This Oriel?”

“I don’t know much more about him than Mattvei told you. But—yes, I suppose so. If you think war criminals are worth the hunt.”

“You know I do.” Last Line had been instrumental in bringing in Conrad Eber, one-time SS commandant, then almost ninety years old and minding his business on his Lambeth allotment, another job no one else had wanted to do. A dirtier one than this, though John had never flinched from it. “I want to know what he means to you, Mike. What catching him would mean.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Okay. Let’s start lower. What does Anzhel Mattvei mean?”

“Jesus. You—you
saw
what he means. Wasn’t that enough?”

John looked at the faded carpet. He was dripping on it, still wet from the shower he’d taken in the B&B’s sordid facilities down the corridor. If he didn’t comb his hair through soon, it would tangle irretrievably. “I
saw
,” he said carefully, “someone you hadn’t seen for years fucking you bareback. Cutting you. I saw you letting him. I saw him make you think you were tied up, and there was—nothing.”

“
What
?”

“Shut up for a second. I know there can’t be anything between us, Mikey, but there used to be a hell of a lot that had nothing to do with sex. We looked out for one another. Tell me why Mattvei can do that to you.”

“Why… I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Michael sat on the bed and looked up with an expression half disgusted, half comical John would normally have found irresistible. “
Bareback
, Griff?”

“Without a condom,” John clarified for him coldly. “Like you don’t know.”

“He didn’t. That is…I wouldn’t have let him. I’m sorry you burst in on us, but you couldn’t have seen that clearly. And as the tying and cutting…” Michael’s shadow of a smile faded out. “Okay. Yes. I need that. I haven’t hidden that from you.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“For God’s sake,” Michael breathed. He got up with feverish energy and came to stand in front of John. “It was a rope. Not much, just a…a symbol. You mustn’t have seen it, that’s all.”

“Where did it come from? Your odds-and-sods drawer? Or did Mattvei have one handy in his pocket?”

“John,
stop
.”

“I will. I’ll back off and leave the pair of you alone the second you tell me he’s not harming you.”

“The pair of… There isn’t any
pair of us
. It’s sex, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then what the hell did it mean with me?”

John hadn’t meant that demand to escape him at all, let alone with such passion. He was relieved when Michael looked down, as if he hadn’t heard—and an instant later horrified when the strong fist fastened on the knot of the towel round his hips. “If I was to try and tell you that,” Michael said softly, “we’d be here all night. Griff, come on. If I’ve hurt you, let me make it up.”

“And how are you planning to do that?”

“Any way you like. But starting here.”

Michael sank to his knees. For a moment—long enough for Michael to jerk open the towel and dispense with it—John allowed it. In some skewed way, it felt quite normal. Most of his encounters with other men began like this, and Mike was so familiar to him. His solid grace, his warmth. The inside of his mouth, familiar too, the culmination of a hundred erotic reveries.

John grabbed his shoulders. “Pack it in.”

“Why? You’re ready for it.”

“Technicality.” Easing away, evading Michael’s restraining grip on his backside, John made a grab for the towel. “All you have to do is look at me to give me a hard-on. You know that. You must’ve known for years. And God knows, if you’re doling out meaningless sex, I don’t see why I shouldn’t”—his throat seized up—“I don’t see why I shouldn’t benefit. But this isn’t you, Mikey. It hasn’t been you for a fortnight, not—not even when you were fucking me.” John stumbled away from him. His discarded clothes were on the bed. He scrambled into them, frail shields as they were. Michael had subsided against the wall and was sitting staring at him, his eyes bleak and lost. “Now are you going to talk to me, or…”