The Assassin Lotus Read online

  “My brother sent it,” I said. I had told her he was traveling in Asia. “He knows about my landlord’s amazing green thumb.”

  Maya stood upright. “Did he only send the one seed?”

  “No, he sent a few.” I poured her a glass. “But we were only able to get one of them to sprout.”

  “Did you keep the rest?”

  “Keep them? No. Why would I do that?”

  “Is there any way to contact him—your brother?”

  “Dan is pretty much off the grid.”

  “Where did he send the seeds from?”

  It took me a moment to remember; over a year had passed. “Srinagar, I think?”

  “That’s in northern India,” she said. “Near Kashmir and Tibet.” She crouched down to take another look at the plant. “I’m curious,” she said. “My family’s estate in India has a very old lotus garden. Been there for generations. Acres of ponds, many different species. I’ve never seen one as beautiful as this.” She fingered the seed pod at the end of a stalk.

  “Well, that calls for a toast.” I set the bottle of grappa on the ledge of the roof, then turned and raised my glass to her. “To rare beauty,” I said.

  She rose and touched her glass to mine. Her eyes grinned as we sipped.

  “This mysterious brother of yours. You really don’t know where he is?”

  I turned to rest my elbows on the ledge and gaze out over the rooftops. Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire droned from an open window. A glazed Mercedes idled on the narrow street below. “I don’t hear from Dan,” I said.

  Maya hugged her purse, peering out at the ominous clouds moving in from the east. “I read something about your… incident.”

  “My what?”

  “On the Greek island, Ogygia. With your brother. What did they call it? ‘Night of the—”

  “Where did you read about that?”

  “You can hardly avoid it,” she said, “—at least when Googling Jack Duran.”

  “You Googled me?”

  “Of course.” She looped her arm through mine. “A professional tour is one thing. An evening out is another.”

  “I see. So you thought I might be Jack the Ripper. Was it something I said on the tour?”

  Maya laughed and snuggled closer. “I loved the tour,” she said. “But a woman has to be cautious.”

  We gazed out over the serpentine streets. Caution was certainly a requirement in Rome. “You’re right,” I said. “I’m surprised you agreed to dinner after finding out all that.”

  “To the contrary,” she said. “It only piqued my interest.”

  Nearly two years had passed since the “incident” occurred, and I had hoped it had all been forgotten. But having blazed its way across the digital globe, the “Night of the Furies,” as it came to be known, would never be more than a few key strokes away.

  The story had been tailor-made for the tabloids. My brother Dan and I, and his Dutch girlfriend Phoebe, had stumbled on an ancient Dionysian cult, alive and secluded in the Cyclades. A friend of Dan’s, the heir to a Turkish shipping empire, quite literally lost his head. A violent, bacchanalian madness ensued. Many of the women in the cult were killed, a Byzantine church was nearly blown to kingdom come, and a long history of murder was uncovered, igniting an international uproar.

  Although we were ultimately acquitted of any wrongdoing, an unwelcome notoriety hounded us. This was especially true with Dan. He had discovered the formula for the legendary elixir that inspired the Eleusinian Mysteries, the greatest religious rite of the ancient pagan world. Consequently besieged by reporters, Greek government officials, Big Pharma recruiters, chronically stoned “psychonauts” and pagan religious fanatics, he ended up running away to Nepal and trekking into the Himalayas.

  I simply headed back to Rome. I’d been promised a job with an American travel packager, leading tours of the Vatican Museum, but given the incident with the Byzantine church, security objected, and the agency declined. Since then I’d been struggling to make a living on my own, working black market in the tour biz.

  “My brother’s the adventurous one,” I said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about with me.”

  “Why haven’t you returned to America?” Maya asked.

  “I will,” I said. “Eventually.”

  “What is it keeps you here?”

  I sighed, then shrugged, “I like the food?”

  Maya laughed. “I imagine there’s something more to it than that.” She considered me for a moment. “What happened to the Dutch woman? The archaeologist—what was her name?”

  “Phoebe Auerbach.” I sipped my glass of grappa. Had it really been nearly two years since I’d spoken her name out loud?

  “Is she still with your brother?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Maya kept her eyes on me.

  “Phoebe ran away, too,” I said.

  “From the press?”

  “No.” I thought of her scribbled note, that one-word exit line I chased in the god-blown winds of Dodona. “From love.”

  Maya eyed me a moment, then gazed back at the view. “Then that was her mistake,” she said. “She was far too cautious.”

  “Unlike you?” I asked.

  She continued peering out over the city. “When I decide to do something, I do it resolutely, with all my heart. In India we say the traveler who hesitates…‘only raises dust on the road.’”

  Again she turned her eyes to me. Warm, gleaming amber. I moved close, took her hand, breathed in her perfume. The scent was so bewitching, it seemed to swirl around me. I thought it might just whisk away every trace of Phoebe.

  A sudden shatter of glass startled us. I looked to see if we’d knocked the bottle of grappa off the ledge.

  We hadn’t. The noise had come from the rooms below.

  Maya looked alarmed. “I thought the house was empty?”

  Fear tickled the pit of my belly. “It was,” I said as I headed for the stairs.

  4.

  Rakshasas

  MAYA FOLLOWED BEHIND ME as we came out into the hall. The door to my rooms stood ajar. Someone lurked inside.

  I started toward the door, then hesitated, debating if I should call the police or confront the intruder myself. Roman burglars were known to be brazen, but rarely carried weapons. Still, there was always the chance.

  I groped my pockets for my cell.

  “Wait here,” Maya whispered, stepping out ahead of me. She extracted something from her purse.

  “Maya?” I stared in stunned disbelief as she screwed a silencer onto a handgun. “What are you—?”

  With a finger to her lips, she shushed me. Then she quietly lowered her purse to the floor, turned and slipped inside.

  I clawed open my cell. My heart pounded, out of control. Thoughts sped up, then froze: Carabinieri? Polizia. Nine-one-one—no. One-one-two. No—one-one—

  Maya cried out. The muffled pistol cracked.

  A shock ran through me. I started toward the door. From behind me an arm slipped around my throat. I glimpsed a flare of steel.

  “Drop the phone.” The man’s whisper at my ear smelled of cigarette smoke. He let me feel the edge of the blade. It brought an icy shiver.

  My cell phone clattered on the floor. I could barely breathe.

  “Please,” I said. “Take my wallet. There’s nothing here to steal.”

  He crushed the cell phone under his heel, then shoved me toward the door.

  I turned. The only thing I saw at first was the long blade of the knife he held, curved for cutting throats.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  He was a large man with a dark face, thick black brows and a short-clipped beard. A Romanian immigrant, I thought at first. They committed much of the city’s crime and were much despised by the Romans. But this man wore a tailored suit, elegant and expensive. The haircut looked expensive, too, and the beard looked Middle-Eastern.

  He bent to pick up Maya’s purse and, moving forward with the
knife, gestured toward the door.

  I backed into the room.

  The apartment lay in disarray, drawers dangling, a lamp shattered. In horror I spotted Maya lying twisted on the rug, her gauzy sari dark with blood. Beside her, a black man lay face down, bleeding from his ear. In his ragged hoodie and jeans, he looked like a bum off the street. Both of them appeared to be dead.

  The man with the knife assessed them coolly. Seeing the gun in Maya’s hand, he kicked it spinning across the floor. Then he rolled over the body of the dead man. The dead man wore a black Ché tee.

  This was the immigrant we had seen selling roses on the bridge. He must have followed us home to rob us. But then who was this man in the suit?

  I dropped to my knees beside Maya. The beggar’s switchblade protruded from her chest. Had the blade reached her heart? Her eyes still held some feeble light; blood gurgled in her throat.

  A panicky surge of hope filled me—Maya was still alive. I reached to withdraw the blade, then hesitated, envisioning a fountain of blood. My hand hung over her, trembling.

  The big Middle-Eastern man searched through Maya’s purse.

  “I think she’s still alive,” I told him. “She needs an ambulance, fast.”

  He found her passport in the bag, briefly flipped through it, and slipped it into his jacket. Then his eyes alit on something else. He gingerly lifted it out of the purse.

  The seed pod from the lotus plant.

  He held it out to me. “Where did she get this?”

  “I don’t—” I stared at the wrinkly pod, confused. Had Maya actually filched it? Slipped it into her purse?

  “Tell me where,” he repeated. The man loomed over me, clenching the crooked dagger. The exotic blade looked menacing, as if designed for fright. Arcing from the hilt, the crescent straightened toward the tip, a piercing point for jabbing. Swirling patterns streaked the steel. The polished bone grip glimmered. The particular way the man held the knife—his thumb on the blunt edge of the blade—told me he knew very well how to use it.

  “Upstairs,” I answered, my voice shaking. “There’s a garden on the roof.”

  “Show me.”

  I looked down at Maya. “She’ll die if we don’t get her help.”

  “Then you will be wise to—”

  A humming noise interrupted him.

  He looked down at the black man’s corpse, then searched the man’s pockets until he found the vibrating phone. He hit “answer” and raised it to his ear. “Your flower boy has stained the rug,” he said. “Better call the housemaid.”

  I stared at him in confusion as he crunched the phone underfoot.

  [IN PERSIAN:]

  THE THIRD FLOOR LIGHT WENT OUT. Shortly after, my cell vibrated. The caller ID showed the number from Ali Mahbood.

  I hesitated. Arshan had asked me to stay off the phone. And I despised Mahbood. But he ran our intelligence and might have info on the Hindi. I answered in a whisper, said I couldn’t talk for long.

  “You tremble like a woman,” he scoffed. He asked me to describe the flower boy we had followed to Duran’s.

  “Deep black. Five-ten. One…sixty. I’d guess…early-20’s?”

  “Flowers, that’s cute. My money he’s Tunisian.”

  “Another dealer then?” I asked.

  “North Africa’s their Refah. Heard the news from Mali? They’re not just chewing khat.”

  “Anything on the Hindi?”

  “Mule for his brother, most likely.”

  “So you don’t really know,” I said.

  “I told you, we’re looking into it. Why are you so jumpy?”

  “Arshan suspects the roach might be a floater for the RAW. Or even the CIA.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He thinks Duran’s phone got tapped by the woman he met last night.”

  Mahbood went silent. “You calling from the car?”

  “He asked me to wait.”

  “Call back later—from elsewhere. They might’ve boxed the street.” (Click.)

  THE MAN FOLLOWED ME as I scrambled up the stairwell to the roof. I stumbled, my mind racing faster than my feet. Was the lotus the source of some illegal drug? Had I been caught in a gang war? There had been nothing unusual about the seeds Dan had sent. And his note stated only that the plant was very rare. “See if your landlord can grow it,” he wrote. “The lotus is truly divine.”

  Now I was standing with a knife at my back, pointing in terror at the plant. Its delicate red and yellow flower looked threatening, as if the little flame might engulf us. The seed pod, I noticed, had indeed been removed—Maya had surreptitiously snatched it off the stem.

  The man with the knife approached the plant in awe, a modern bearded Moses before a miniature burning bush. He slowly lowered the blade to his side and stood there, silent and still. For a second I considered making a run for it: if I beat him down the stairs, I might lose him on the streets. He was big, but I figured I was faster.

  The man turned and glared at me as if he’d read my thoughts. Grabbing a fistful of my hair, he hauled my head back and rested the edge of the blade against my windpipe. I could barely croak out a word. “Please—”

  “Tell me where are the rest.”

  “No…more—”

  “You lie. Where are the seeds?”

  “Gone,” I rasped.

  “You lie again.” He lowered his gaze to the blade at my throat. “I will ask you one last question. You will tell me the truth.” His probing eyes fixed on mine. “Where,” he asked, “is your brother?”

  Staring into the slits of his eyes, I suddenly knew for certain he would kill me. Not because I didn’t have an answer to his question, and not because I wouldn’t be believed. The reason he would kill me was because of what I’d seen: the break-in, the bodies, the lotus, his face. Everything that had happened now inhabited my head. He could lop it off as easily as a flower.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  He stretched my throat beneath the blade. I felt a sting and a trickle.

  “You will tell me—”

  Crack!

  He gasped, arching his back in pain. A second shot blew a bolt of blood out of his neck. He staggered, turning, terrified.

  Maya had crawled to the top of the stairs. She blasted one more bullet into his chest, then lowered the gun in her outstretched hands and collapsed on the floor in exhaustion.

  The man, bleeding profusely, pulled out his cell and thumbed two keys. He gazed at me glassily, then toppled onto his clattering knife.

  I scrambled over to Maya. She clung on, barely alive.

  A phone was ringing. I glanced at the dying killer. But the sound was not coming from the cell in his fist; it was coming from down on the street.

  I hurriedly peered over the edge of the roof. In the darkness below, a driver in a suit stepped out of the Mercedes, holding a cell to his ear. I could hear his voice crackle in the killer’s phone behind me. He shut his cell and ran his eyes quickly up the building, where he spotted me staring down at him. For a moment we both stood frozen—until he broke it off and strode toward the door.

  I stepped back, shaking, flooded with adrenalin. I ran over and crouched beside Maya. She had pulled the switchblade out of her chest, and blood now pulsed from the open wound. Slowly losing consciousness, she struggled desperately to breathe.

  I slipped my arm under her shoulders and lifted her into my lap, trying to straighten her windpipe. She gagged.

  “Maya—”

  Words gurgled in her throat.“Destroy…the lotus—”

  “What is it? Who are they?”

  She strained with all her might to be heard. I lowered my ear to listen.

  “They’ll kill you,” she whispered. “Your brother, too.”

  I watched in horror as her eyes went cold.

  5.

  See Jack Run

  I COULD HEAR HIM spiraling up the stairs, leather soles on creaking wood. I yanked the lotus plant out of the pot, then ripped it up and
tossed it over the side of the building. Then I went to the dead man, found the seed pod in his pocket and threw it over, too.

  The door to the roof only locked from the inside. I hid behind the entryway. Barely had I gotten there when I heard his voice at the door.

  “Arshan?”

  Maya’s corpse lay at the man’s feet. He bent to examine her briefly, then he ventured into the garden. Spying him dimly through a shimmer of bamboo, I could just make out the dark figure of the man and the glint of his knife in the moonlight.

  “Arshan!” he cried, suddenly racing forward and dropping to his knees.

  I stepped out from behind the bamboo and slipped into the stairwell. The man turned abruptly as I shut and bolted the door. Seconds later, as I flew down the steps, the stairwell resounded with a violent battering. By the time I reached the bottom he had broken through the lock.

  I ran for my life. The sound of the man’s voice had sent a cold chill up my spine. Though he had spoken only a name, it was clear that “Arshan” had been more than a cohort or a friend. There had been blood in his voice.

  Footsteps echoed in the alleyway behind me. I turned up the Via della Paglia and ran alongside the Santa Maria church. It was late, but I hoped there would be people in the piazza. There were none. The moonlit fountain gushed in isolation. I dashed past it, sprinting to the far side. As I spun into an alley I caught a glimpse of my pursuer, pausing as he rushed into the square.

  I turned and ran.

  Except for solitary whores and drunks, the streets were largely vacant. I darted down the shadowy lanes, zigzagging corners at a full tilt, until by turn I stood before the Garibaldi bridge. No more footsteps clattered in my wake. If he followed, he ran without shoes. I sprinted over the Tiber.

  That pained cry—Arshan!—still echoed in my ears. Surely he must have gone back, I thought. Returned to retrieve the body before the polizia arrived.

  That is, if someone were to notify the police. Believe it or not, despite all the murder, I dreaded making that call. My stay permit had not been renewed, and my business was illegal—not to mention the lotus plant, which I now assumed had to be a drug my brother was smuggling.