Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
But in this case, she may be right. I may need something. At the very minimum, I feel a need. Whether that makes it legitimately necessary or not is a different matter.
“I’m off to the dining car. May I ask you to join me?”
“You may ask anything you like.”
Constants in life are comforting. Even when they’re uncomfortable. Eliza being exactly who she is, always, at all times, is one of those constants.
“Will you join me?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, Alec. Why? What the fuck are you up to?”
It’s a more than understandable question. “Honestly?” I ask.
“Is that even a possibility?”
“Honestly, I’d just like to talk with you before we arrive.”
“About what?”
“About everything. I have an instinct that this is the… Just, will you join me in the dining car? Please.”
Yet again, it’s the “please” that makes her pay attention. The surprise turns immediately to skepticism, as I would expect, and so I hold my ground. I attempt to look neither pleading nor charming, kind nor cruel, like myself or like whoever it is I’m attempting to become. I try to make my face as tabula rasa as I possibly can and let her decide on her own.
“They’d better have decent fucking gin,” she says as she walks past me.
We’ve exited the Chunnel. It’s still dark out, but now it’s the dark of the French countryside as opposed to the artificially lit blackness of a man-made carve-out inside the strata of the earth. There’s no moon. It’s overcast outside the windows and the terrain I can see is an amorphous mass of shadow.
We sit across from one another, lit by the amber glow of the dining table lamp. There is a world in which this could possibly be seen as romantic, but in this case it takes on much more the feel of a Bond villain having a tête-à-tête with the famed secret agent. In this case though, I suppose we might both be the villain. One of us by choice and action, the other by having had the grave misfortune of knowing the first.
Eliza pokes at the ice in her Negroni. She’s not really drinking it, just fiddling with it. The butler laaitie keeps stopping by to ask if we’re sure we don’t want anything to eat. I have to imagine that when you’re used to catering to an entire train full of what must be a demanding clientele, you grow used to the art of officiousness. And when there are only four people to whom one must needs attend, you have to find a place to put all that excess desire to serve.
I finally just told him to “fok off like a good laaitie,” and he did. It didn’t seem to faze him. He just smiled, said, “Very good, sir!” and fokked off straight away. And, now that he’s gone, I’m partially wishing I let him keep coming round. Because the filled air between me and Eliza has no place to settle but upon us. She breaks the silence.
“You have no idea who these people are?” she asks. “What they’re after?”
“The ones waiting for us in Vienna?” I ask. She nods. “I have theories.”
“What are they?”
I take a breath, considering how much telling her will help anything or how much it might make her feel worse. More worried.
Not my responsibility. My responsibility is to the truth—as much as I am capable of telling it—and so I embrace that.
“I suppose my dominant theory, the one that makes the most sense, more or less, is that it has to do with the diamond we stole.”
“Which one?” she asks.
“The one I took from my father,” I say. Her eyes focus and become hard and soft all at once. She’s heard the tale before. “The one that caused he and my mother to become my late father and mother.”
I breathe in the train’s perfumed air as Eliza swirls her drink inside the beveled tumbler, waiting for her to speak again before continuing on.
“I thought that was something like seven years ago.”
“Almost eight,” I clarify. “But, recently, or semi-recently—I’m still not sure how long I was at the estate…” At the mention of the estate where I was held, the same one where she and I hid out after my colossal failure to serve Christine and my love for her, Eliza stiffens, but I sally forth in spite of her visceral reaction. “In any case,” I continue, “not that long ago, I came to discover that the diamond still exists. Is still intact. Remains.” I’m not typically partial to redundancy, but it seems necessary in this instance, to drive home the point. “And I now have to wonder if I’m not the only one who has been once again made aware of its existence.”
She breathes in and out heavily through her nose. “Russians?”
“One must imagine.”
“How—?”
“I can’t know exactly, but I’m considering the disturbing possibility that someone has been watching me for much longer than I would like or have been previously aware.”