LITMIR.BIZ

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he felt a familiar stirring in his loins that confirmed to him the true reason she’d come back, which had nothing to do with his so-called disorder. At least, it had everything to do with it, but not in a way her professional association would approve.

      She composed herself again, turned back to him, flint in her eyes, wanting pay-back. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you want to tell me what really happened that night?’

      ‘I already told you what happened.’

      ‘The real story.’

      ‘Oh, the real story.’

      ‘You want to, you know. In the end, men like you always boast about their…exploits.’

      Mikhail nodded at the guard still standing by the door. ‘And men like him send us to the chair for it.’

      She turned to the guard. ‘Leave us, please.’

      The guard glowered at Mikhail. ‘You sure about that, ma’am? This one’s a mean son-of-a-bitch.’

      ‘I asked you to leave us alone.’

      They both watched him out. Mikhail could tell she was pleased with herself; demonstrating courage and trust, just like they counselled in the textbooks. The steel shutter in the door shrieked open, and the guard put his eye to the viewing window, his face magnified and made even uglier by the glass.

      ‘What if he can lip-read?’ asked Mikhail.

      ‘You want to trade seats?’ she asked. ‘So as he can’t see your face?’

      ‘I want him not to watch at all.’

      She went to the door, held a murmured but intense conversation. The door closed, then the shutter over the viewing window. She sat back down. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Ready to talk now?’

      ‘With your tape recorder on?’

      ‘This session is confidential. I assure you, nothing will be used against you.’

      He snorted and raised an eyebrow. She sighed and switched off her machine. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know. But I want something from you first.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I want to know why you’re so interested in me.’

      She studied him a moment, as if to assess him for sincerity. It always amazed him how credulous these people were: she seemed to have forgotten her checklist already. He kept his expression impassive, knowing she wanted to tell him, her own cleverness bottled like champagne bubbles inside her, pressing for release. When she began to talk, she quickly grew excited. She stood up, began walking back and forth across the narrow room, gesturing grandly. She was working on a paper for the journals, it transpired. Her subject matter was narcissistic sociopaths. That Mikhail was one would be obvious to any first-year student, of course; but most people with narcissistic personality disorder were either cerebral or somatic, which was to say arrogant because of their intelligence or because of their physique and athletic prowess respectively. He was both. That in itself made him a curiosity. But there was more. Most narcissists were, at heart, self-loathing. It was their very hatred for themselves that drove their desperate need for adulation and worship from the people around them, their need for what she called narcissistic supply, and which she talked of as though it were a drug. When they were deprived of that supply, their fantasies about themselves collapsed, they fell into depression and despair. But he, while displaying all the signs of classic narcissism, seemed immune to depression and despair, even when his narcissistic supply was denied him, and she wanted to know why. Criminal narcissism was her thing, and she sensed in Mikhail an opportunity for a real advance, because if she could find his secret, maybe it would offer a way to palliate self-loathing in others and so break the narcissistic cycle altogether. She got all excited and earnest, wobbling a little on her heels as she walked, red patches glowing on her throat and cheeks, like a litter of kittens seen through a night-sight. Finally she stopped and gave him one of those well, there it is shrugs, expecting him to honour his part of the deal, tell her how he’d raped and murdered that innocent little thirteen-year-old Lolita.

       Innocent! Hah!

      He stood and pushed back his chair, its feet growling over the bare cement floor. Then he started walking towards her. She produced a nervous smile, her pupils flickered, and she backed away until she was up against the wall by the door. He kept advancing, slowly, fixing his best unthreatening smile in place, as though she were some lapdog yapping at him, and he didn’t want to spook it, or he’d lose his chance to kick it.

      She balled her fist up to pound on the door and summon the guard. She tensed her arm twice in preparation, but Mikhail kept advancing and in the end she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. Self-knowledge at last. She put both her arms down by her side, fingers splayed like sunbursts. He was standing right in front of her now, their bodies almost touching face, chest, knee, toe. He could hear her breathing patterns change until they were in synchrony with his. He rewarded her with a smile. He placed one hand on her left shoulder, the other, on her hip, began to gather up the charged fabric of her skirt. They stared each other in the eye. She neither stopped him, nor encouraged him, but when he slipped his hand beneath the skirt and up her thigh over her knickers to her pudenda, she gave an almost inaudible exhalation, like some pre-packaged grocery product being punctured, allowing that preservative air to escape. A moment of almost pure silence, except that he could hear the saliva washing around her mouth and throat, while a pulse flickered in her pussy, like some terrified rodent cowering in his palm. ‘Mr Nergadze,’ she croaked, in her best schoolmarm tone, as though to reprimand him. He waited, but she said nothing else, so he gave her a gentle encouraging squeeze and smiled more broadly at her. She smiled weakly back, a smile of complete concession, an invitation to do whatever he wanted.

      He let go of her, stepped away, returned to his chair, sat back down and folded his hands once more in his lap. ‘Narcissistic, am I?’ he asked. ‘Or is it simply that I am beautiful?’

       TWO

      I

       The Kastelli Hotel, Athens, Greece, two weeks later

      The three of them were laughing hard at the sheer awfulness of Knox’s joke when Augustin swiped his hotel key-card through the lock outside his room and pushed his door open with his foot. But the laughter died at once.

      It was the smell that did it for Knox: not that it was overpowering, just sour and ugly, but it provoked an immediate and visceral disgust, so that he knew something was badly wrong. He looked over Augustin’s shoulder and saw gouts of blood and vomit on the fibrous blue carpet, and then a naked elderly man lying on his back in the narrow aisle between the double and single beds, his right arm thrown out above his head. There were stains around his waist, where his bladder and bowels had vented. There was a great gash in his forehead, too, from which copious amounts of blood had spilled, and there was a look of such stark terror on his face that Knox instantly assumed that not only was he dead, but that he’d sensed his fate in the very moment it had overtaken him.

      It was a real shock, then, when the man convulsed upon the carpet, a spasm that ran up his body like a flapped-out sheet. It was Claire who moved first, trained medic that she was. She pushed past Augustin and knelt down beside him. ‘Ambulance,’ she said succinctly. Augustin nodded and hurried around the single bed, then knelt on it to grab the bedside phone and dial the operator.

      The man opened his eyes and gave a little croak, trying to speak, blood-frothed saliva leaking from the side of his mouth. Claire wiped it away with a corner of the bedspread. He spoke again. She shook her head to indicate that he should preserve his strength, but he kept persisting, so Knox pushed aside the bed to make room for himself on his other side, then knelt down and put his ear close to his lips. But the man’s voice was so weak that it was almost impossible to make out anything much more than the shape and thrust of the syllables. He

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