David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

He turned away and scanned the rest of the room. Every wall bore some kind of artwork. The room was also divided by wainscoting with glass above. On one side, a stairwell ascended, turning to the right. A short, wide corridor led past a dining room, a bathroom across the hall, and then to a large kitchen that looked out over an inner courtyard on the ground floor.

Bern returned to the front room and went up the stairs, turning on lights as he went. The stairs opened into a spacious third-floor studio scattered about with the paraphernalia of an artist’s craft and smelling of wood and resins and oil paints. A row of windows looked out over the treetops of Parque Mexico.

There was a bedroom off the far side of the studio; it was a long one, with windows on the street end that had the same view of the park as the windows in the studio. The other end of the room opened onto a rooftop terrace. This was Jude’s bedroom. His clothes were in the closets. Bern checked the sizes in the suits and the shirts. Same as his. The styles and colors would suit his own tastes exactly, and they could easily have been found in his own closet.

He went to the bathroom and stood at the sink. Jude’s razor was there on the marble countertop in a green glass bowl, just the right shape for it. There was a tall, cylindrical black-and-gold tin of talcum powder. An amber bottle of cologne. Bern picked it up and swept it under his nose. It was the saddest fragrance he could imagine.

The place was instantly saturated with familiarity, as if he were in his own home after his own death, longing to be alive again, and sad beyond expression to have left so much behind.

Suddenly, he thought he heard the door downstairs. Startled, he held his breath and touched the sink to ground himself, to steady a slight dizziness.

“Jude?” A woman’s voice. “Hey,” she called, “when did you get in?”

He heard the door close and her footsteps crossing the wooden floors of the rooms. She started up the stairs.

Bern froze, looking at himself in the mirror as he listened to her footsteps ascending the stairs and growing nearer. What the hell should he do? Her footsteps hit the landing in the studio.

“Jude? Why did you just step right over your mail?”

He heard her starting across the studio, having seen the light on in the bedroom, he supposed. Turning away from the sink, he hurried out of the bathroom and across the bedroom, reaching the door to the studio while she was still a few feet away.

“Hey,” she said, breaking into a huge smile as he stepped out of the bedroom. She came up to him and kissed him with unexpected gentleness and then embraced him tightly, nuzzling his neck.

He put his arms around her, her shape new and strange to him. He was tense, half-expecting her to recoil at any moment, realizing he wasn’t Jude. But she didn’t.

“It’s been too long,” she whispered, her face still against his neck. He could smell her hair, and he felt the softness of her breasts against him. He recognized her face from the bronze bust, and from two of the nude studies among the drawings downstairs.

There was a moment’s hesitation before she pulled away and looked at him quizzically, her arms still around him, her face just inches from his.

“Are you okay?”

She was Mexican, in her early thirties. Her shoulder-length black hair was thick, parted casually in the center, and framed a noticeably asymmetrical face. Her eyes were large and black, the pigment of the surrounding flesh subtly shaded. Her lips were full and evenly proportioned, with a distinctive philtrum in the upper one that was immediately appealing. There was a very slight upturn at the outside corners of her mouth that did not suggest a smile.

All of this he captured in the brief moment that she had her arms around him, her face so close to his that his first instinct was to bend and kiss her.

“Just tired,” he managed to say, again expecting to see in her eyes a startled reaction to the sound of his voice. But there was none.

“Well, let’s have a drink,” she said, letting her arms slide down along the sides of his body, as though she couldn’t get enough of touching him. “Let’s catch up on what’s been happening.” Her voice was in the lower registers, not husky, but mellow.

She walked across the studio. She was high-hipped and wore a knee-length charcoal skirt and a white blouse.

“I was at Claudio’s all afternoon,” she said wearily as she opened a wooden cabinet near the windows and took out a green bottle of gin. Next to it was a small refrigerator, from which she took ice and then dropped a few cubes into each glass as she closed the door with her hip.

“How was your trip?” she asked, sloshing some gin into each glass. She opened a small paper bag that she must have brought with her and took out a lime, which she sliced. She squeezed the two wedges simultaneously, one with each hand, into the glasses.

She turned around and held out a glass for him, shaking her dark hair out of her face. They looked at each other.

“What,” she said, “is something the matter?”

This felt impossible to him, but he managed to make himself go over to her and take the glass. Who the hell was this? Did she live with Jude? He hadn’t thought to check for women’s clothes in Jude’s bedroom. Why hadn’t Mondragon at least mentioned that Jude was living with someone?

He had to say something, for God’s sake.

“And what were you doing at Claudio’s?” he asked. He was so self-conscious that he thought his voice had changed. He was afraid he would start sweating.

She gave him a strange look. “What was I doing?”

Shit.

Silence. He sipped the gin. What the hell was he going to do? Where was the person who was supposed to be here to prevent this sort of thing from happening until he’d been briefed?

She was studying him.

“The usual,” she said, sipping her gin and looking at him over the rim of the glass, her dark eyes full of suspicion now, alert with caution.

“Tell me about it,” he said, moving to the windows to look out, hoping to cover his discomfort.

Silence. The park was dark except for the glint of lamps visible here and there through the dense canopies of the trees. He could see the tall silhouettes of palms against the city light. Still she hadn’t spoken. He turned around.

She had put down her glass and was pulling out the tail of her blouse, began unbuttoning it, saying nothing as she started toward him.

Bern couldn’t think fast enough.

She slipped off the blouse and, without looking, lay it with gentle unconcern over the corner of a tilted drawing board as she went by, her arm reaching across her bare stomach as she began unbuttoning her skirt. Just as she was about to push it down over her hips, he stopped her.

“Wait a second,” he said softly, but she was already over to him, close enough for him to have leaned down and kissed the soft tops of her breasts.

She stopped.

“Look,” he said, “I…”

But her face was already changing even as they were looking at each other. The anticipation in her eyes grew cold, and her hazy expression of seduction faded into a weary look of impatience.

She turned and stepped over to the drawing board and picked up her blouse, but she didn’t put it on immediately. Instead, she went back her glass of gin and took a drink, holding the blouse down at her side as she swallowed the first sip, looking at him, and then took another.

Bern scrambled for a way to finish his sentence, but nothing came to him.

“You didn’t handle that well at all,” she said. The coy mistress was gone, and an irritable woman had replaced her. “When you came to the bedroom door, you were visibly confused, right from the very first moment. You held me awkwardly. You were speechless. Jude, whatever his other faults, was never speechless.”