Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters [7]
It was the only place I could think of where he wouldn’t follow me. I locked myself into a cubicle and collapsed onto the seat.
My hand was red and sticky. In certain lights, strawberry jelly looks a lot like fresh blood.
John was certainly a reasonable subject for anxiety dreams. He had more deadly enemies than anyone I’d ever met. Sometimes I was one of them.
When I first ran into him I was trying to track down a forger of historic jewels.2 I had no business doing any such thing; it was a combination of curiosity and the desire for a free vacation that took me to Rome, and some people might have said that it served me right when I got in over my head. John got me out. He had been an enthusiastic participant in the swindle until the others decided to eliminate me, but, as he candidly admitted, chivalry had nothing to do with his change of heart. He disapproved of murder on practical grounds. As he put it, ‘the penalties are so much more severe.’
I never meant to get involved with him. He isn’t really my type – only an inch or so taller than I, slightly built, his features (with one or two exceptions) pleasant but unremarkable. I don’t know why I ended up in that little hotel in Trastevere. Gratitude, womanly sympathy for a wounded hero, curiosity – or those exceptional characteristics? It turned out to be a memorable experience, and it may have been the worst mistake I have ever made in my life.
Another brief encounter, in Paris, was both embarrassing and expensive. I woke up one morning to find the police hammering at the door and John gone. Naturally he hadn’t paid the hotel bill.
So why did I respond to that enigmatic message from Stockholm a few months later?3 I told myself it was because I wanted to get back at him for Paris, meeting his challenge and beating him at his own game. (That’s what I told myself.) It was a relatively harmless little scheme to begin with – he needed me to gain access to an innocent old gentleman whose backyard happened to be full of buried treasure – but it turned ugly when a second group of crooks zeroed in on the same treasure. That was my first encounter with the hardcore professionals of the art underworld, and I sincerely hoped it would be my last. John was a professional, but compared to Max and Hans and Rudi and their boss, Leif, he looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy. They disliked John even more than I did, and from my point of view he was definitely the lesser of two evils, so once again we were forced to collaborate in order to escape. My negative opinion of him didn’t change, though, until . . .
It was one of the more lurid incidents in a life that has not been precisely colourless. There we were, trying to row a leaking boat across a very deep, very cold lake during a violent thunderstorm, with an aquatic assassin holding on to the bow and slashing at me with a knife. I had just about resigned myself to dying young when John went over the side of the boat. He was unarmed and outweighed, but he managed to keep Leif occupied until I got to shore. They found Leif’s body later. John never turned up, dead or alive. Everybody except me assumed he had drowned. After eight months without a word I began to wonder myself.
The matter of the Trojan gold4 gave me an excuse to contact John, through the anonymous channels that were the only ones I knew. To be honest, I was surprised when he responded. He had once told me I brought him nothing but bad luck.
His luck didn’t improve. He got me out of trouble a couple of times, and the second rescue resulted in a considerable amount of damage to John himself. This was decidedly against his principles. He had once explained them to me: ‘It is impossible to convince some people of the error of their ways without hitting them as often and as hard as possible. I simply object to people hitting me.’
The Trojan gold affair had ended with another event John undoubtedly resented as much as he hated being hit by people. I had taken ruthless advantage of a man who was battered, bruised, and bloody to