The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [100]
After a slight detour to leave the mousse on a rolltop desk, Odelle padded past the bed to the other side of the room, to a wide arched opening flanked by two huge eighteenth-century Spanish chairs with dark tooled-leather seats. Through the arch and a short corridor set with floor-to-ceiling mirrors in aged wood frames, she entered her bathroom—its slanted glazed ceiling now obscured by sliding unbleached linen curtains. Odelle stepped over the slatted teak floor to a sunken rectangular bath of white marble with spidery green veins. She opened the faucet, and a two-foot-wide waterfall arched from a bronze panel on the marble wall. The water temperature would remain constant, recirculating through a thermostatically controlled heater set in the lower floor. When water reached its preset level, a sensor would turn the faucet off.
Odelle straightened and gazed through wafts of steam to the bath’s backdrop—a jungle rising to the ceiling and covering the bathroom’s rear wall. Heliconias, gingers, and bananas wrestled for space next to anthuriums, ficus, ti, aloes, and yuccas intertwined with passionflower vines.
She opened a small wooden door set on the wall to a side of the bath and hefted one of the six Baccarat crystal flasks: her perfume, custom-made by Maison Guerlain at their gorgeous Champs-Elysées shop, a bargain at ninety grand a quart. She poured a generous splash of the Madeira-colored liquid into the hot water, and the air thickened with aromas of musk, sandalwood, and violet. She returned the flask to the darkness of its niche, undressed, and laid her clothes on a chaise longue set to a side of the arch.
Through the passageway, she returned to the bedroom and paused to gaze at the lazily fluttering flimsy netting driven by the carefully positioned jets in the ceiling. Odelle caught her reflection in the mirror. Small breasts, untouched by the knife and still defying gravity, flat stomach, and not a hair on her body below her eyes but for a carefully manicured mound of dark curls.
When a faint peal echoed, she padded to her rolltop desk and slid back its curved slatted lid. A rectangular plasma panel folded upward and stopped at a slight angle. Odelle glanced at the numbers beside the prompt and choked a curse. Not Nikola; Vinson. For a heartbeat she was tempted to turn around and return to her bath, but running away from a confrontation wasn’t her style. She sat on the leather chair facing the desk and ran her hands lightly over the armrests. She’d bought the chair over the phone at a secret auction: one of the chairs from the railway carriage where the French had surrendered in 1940. She didn’t know which buttocks her seat had nursed: Pétain’s, Hitler’s, Keitel’s, Huntziger’s, or Jodl’s. Not that it mattered.
Odelle stared for an instant at the tiny camera over the desk and blinked twice. The camera whirred to focus on her face, and the screen dissolved to reconfigure into an image of Vinson’s face, drawn in an angry grimace.
“Any luck?” Vinson opened.
“Zilch. It’s as if it never happened.”
“How can that be? No way. … What’s the NHS doing? Then there’s the police. … We must …” When nervous, Vinson had the unsettling—and unrelated to syntax—habit of surrounding odd words with pauses, leaving confused listeners wondering if a hidden significance lurked beyond his comments.
“There are two million residents in Washington, D.C., three on workdays. I can neither close down the city nor do a house-to-house search.”
“Have the fugitives left the city?”
Odelle raised one leg and propped her heel on the desk’s edge, then repeated the movement with the other leg, adjusting her foot on the opposite edge. The camera remained focused on her face.
“Yes, they probably have by