Scott Mariani - The Alchemist

Richard strode over to the lad, grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the steps. ‘Look,’ he warned. ‘I’ve been in this job since before you were born. One thing I’ve learned, if you want to stay in work you mind your own business and keep your mouth shut. OK?’

‘OK,’ the boy mumbled. ‘But-’

‘No buts. Now come and help me with this bloody light.’

Paris

For the last four years, Ben had worked alone. He relished the freedom it gave him, the ability to sleep where he wanted, to move as fast and as far and as light as possible, to slip in and out of places alone and inconspicuous. Most important of all, working alone meant that he was responsible for himself and himself only.

But now he was lumbered with this woman, and he was breaking all his own rules.

He took a convoluted route back to the safehouse. Roberta’s puzzled expression deepened as he led her down the cobbled alleyway, through the underground parking lot, and up the back stairway to the armoured door of his hidden apartment.

‘You live here?’

‘Home sweet home.’ He locked the door behind them and punched in the code for the alarm system. He flipped on the lights and she gazed around the apartment. ‘What is this, minimalist neo-Spartan?’

‘You want a coffee? Bite to eat?’

‘Coffee’s good.’

Ben went into the kitchenette and lit the gas ring under his little percolator. After a few minutes it bubbled up and he served the coffee with hot milk out of a saucepan. He opened a tin of cassoulet, heated it up and dumped the steaming sausage-and-ham stew onto a couple of plates. He still had half a dozen bottles of red table wine. He grabbed one and pulled the cork.

‘You should eat something,’ he said as she ignored her plate.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘OK.’ He finished his own plate, then pulled hers across the table and wolfed down the last of the stew with gulps of wine. As he ate, he could see she was shaking, her head in her hands. He got up and put a blanket around her shoulders. She sat in silence for a few minutes. ‘I can’t stop thinking about Michel,’ she whispered.

‘He wasn’t your friend,’ he reminded her.

‘Yeah, I know, but still…’ She sobbed, wiped her eyes and smiled weakly. ‘Pretty stupid.’

‘No, not stupid. You have compassion.’

‘You say that as though it were a rare thing.’

‘It is a rare thing.’

‘Do you have any?’

‘No.’ He poured the last of the wine into his glass. ‘I don’t.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s late. I’ve got work to do in the morning.’ He drained his glass, jumped up from his chair, and grabbed a pile of blankets and an armchair cushion. He chucked them on the floor.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Making up a bed for you.’

‘Call that a bed?’

‘Well, you could have had the Ritz if you’d wanted. I did offer, remember?’ He saw her look. ‘It’s only a one-bedroom flat,’ he added.

‘So you make your guests sleep on the floor?’

‘If it’s any consolation, you’re the first guest I’ve had up here. Now, can I have your bag, please?’

‘What?’

‘Give me your bag,’ he repeated. He snatched it from her and began rifling through it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ She tried to grab it back from him. He pushed her away. ‘I’ll have this,’ he said, pocketing her phone. ‘The rest you can keep.’

‘Why are you taking my phone off me?’

‘Why do you think? I don’t want you making any calls from here behind my back.’

‘Boy, you really have a big problem with trust.’

Roberta couldn’t sleep well that night, couldn’t shut out the memory of the day’s events. What had started out like any other day had turned her whole world upside-down. Maybe she was crazy, hanging on here when she could have taken the money and been on a plane home first thing in the morning.

And what about this Ben Hope? Here she was, locked in a hidden apartment with a guy she’d only met that day and barely knew. Who was he? He was attractive, and he had that winning smile. But there was that coldness, too, the way he could look at her with those pale blue eyes and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

There was another thought that wouldn’t go away. It was the knowledge that someone was interested in her research. Very interested indeed. Interested enough to kill for it. That meant several things. It meant that someone was threatened by what she’d been discovering. Which meant it had real value. She was on the right track, and even if it was a dangerous position she was in, she couldn’t help feeling a tingle of excitement. She had to know more.

She broke off from her thoughts and lifted her head off the cushion, tensed and listening. A voice. She struggled to get her bearings in the dark, unfamiliar room. After a few seconds she orientated herself and it dawned on her that the sound was coming from behind the bedroom door. It was Ben’s voice. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. His voice grew louder, protesting against something. Was he on the phone? She got up from her makeshift bed and crept to his door in the dim moonlight. She pressed her ear softly to the door, careful not to make a noise, and listened.

He wasn’t talking in there, he was moaning- and his voice sounded pained, tortured. He muttered something she didn’t catch, and then he called out more loudly. She was about to open the door when she realized he was dreaming. No, not a dream. A nightmare.

‘Ruth! Don’t go! No! No! Don’t leave me!’ His cries diminished back into a low moan, and then as she stood there in the dark she listened to him for a long time sobbing like a child.

Ever since his impoverished childhood in rural Sardinia, Franco Bozza had enjoyed giving pain. His first victims had been insects and worms, and as a young boy he’d spent many contented hours developing increasingly elaborate ways of slowly dissecting them and watching them writhe and die. Before the age of eight, Franco had progressed to practising his skills on small birds and mammals. Some fledglings in a nest suffered first. Later, local dogs started to disappear. As Franco progressed through his teens he grew into a master torturer and an expert in inflicting agony. He loved it. It was the thing that made him feel most alive.

By the time he’d left school at the age of thirteen he’d become almost equally fascinated with Catholicism. He was entranced by the crueller images of Christian tradition-the crown of thorns, the bleeding stigmata of Christ, the way the nails had been hammered through the hands and feet into the cross. Franco polished the basic literacy skills he’d learned in school just so he could read about the deliciously gruesome history of the Church. One day he came across an old book that described the persecution of heretics by the medieval Inquisition. He read how, after the conquest of a Cathar stronghold in the year 1210, the commander of the Church forces had ordered that a hundred Cathar heretics have their ears, noses and lips cut off, their eyes gouged out, and be paraded before the ramparts of other heretic castles as an example. The boy was deeply inspired by such macabre genius, and he would lie awake at night wishing he could somehow have taken part in it.

Franco fell in love with religious art, and would walk miles to the nearest town to visit the library and drool over historic prints showing grisly images of religious oppression. His favourite painting was The Hay Wagon by Hieronymus Bosch in the 1480s, showing horrible tortures at the hands of demons, bodies pierced by spears and blades, and-most exciting of all-a nude woman. It wasn’t her nudity in itself that provoked such choking feelings of lust in him. Her arms were tied behind her back, and all that covered her nakedness was a black toad clapped to her genitals. She was a witch. She would be burnt. This was what generated such intense, almost frantic, excitement in him.