The Traveler

3

By the time she reached the Charles Bridge, Maya realized that she was being followed. Thorn once said that eyes projected energy. If you were sensitive enough, you could feel the waves coming toward you. When Maya was growing up in London, her father occasionally hired street thieves to follow her home after school. She had to spot them and hit them with the steel ball bearings she carried in her book bag.

It got darker after she crossed the bridge and turned left onto Saská Street. She decided to go to the Church of Our Lady Beneath the Chain; there was an unlit courtyard there with different ways to escape. Just keep walking, she told herself. Don’t look over your shoulder. Saská Street was narrow and crooked. The occasional streetlamp glowed with a dark yellow light. Maya passed an alleyway, doubled back, and stepped into its shadows. She crouched behind a trash dumpster and waited.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty seconds. Then the little troll taxi driver who had taken her to the hotel came down the sidewalk. Never hesitate. Always react. As he passed the mouth of the alleyway, she pulled out the stiletto and came up behind him, holding his shoulder with her left hand and pressing the knife point against the nape of his neck.

“Don’t move. Don’t run away.” Her voice was soft, almost seductive. “We’re going to step to the right now and I don’t want any trouble.”

She pulled him around, dragged him into the shadows, and pushed him up against the dumpster. Now the blade was pointed at his Adam’s apple.

“Tell me everything. No lies. And perhaps I won’t kill you. Do you understand?”

Terrified, the troll nodded his head slightly.

“Who hired you?”

“An American.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. He was a friend of Police Lieutenant Loutka.”

“And what were your instructions?”

“To follow you. That’s all. Pick you up with the taxi and follow you tonight.”

“Is someone waiting for me at the hotel?”

“I don’t know. I swear that’s true.” He started to whimper. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Thorn would have stabbed him right away, but Maya decided that she wasn’t going to give in to that madness. If she murdered this foolish little man, then her own life would be destroyed.

“I’m going to walk up the street and you’re going to go the other way, back to the bridge. Do you understand?”

The troll nodded quickly. “Yes,” he whispered.

“If I see you again, you’re dead.”

Maya stepped back out onto the sidewalk and headed toward the church, then she remembered her father. Had the troll followed her all the way to Thorn’s apartment? How much did they know?

She hurried back to the alleyway and heard the troll’s voice. Clutching a cell phone, he babbled to his master. As she stepped out of the shadows, he gasped and dropped the phone onto the cobblestones. Maya grabbed his hair, pulled him up straight, and inserted the point of the stiletto into his left ear.

This was the instant when the blade could pause. Maya was aware of the choice she was making and the dark passageway that opened before her. Don’t do this, she thought. You still have a chance. But pride and anger pulled her forward.

“Listen to me,” she said. “This is the last thing you will ever know. A Harlequin killed you.”

He struggled with her, trying to break away, but she drove the knife down the ear canal and into his brain.

MAYA LET GO of the taxi driver and he collapsed in front of her. Blood filled his mouth and trickled from his nose. His eyes were open and he looked surprised, as if someone had just told him unpleasant news.

She wiped off the stiletto and concealed the weapon beneath her sweater. Staying in the shadows, she dragged the dead man to the end of the alleyway and covered him with garbage bags taken from a dumpster. In the morning, someone would find the body and call the police.

Don’t run, Maya told herself. Don’t show that you’re scared. She tried to look calm as she walked back across the river. When she reached Konviktská Street, she climbed a fire escape to the roof of the lingerie shop and jumped over the five-foot gap to Thorn’s building. No skylight or fire door. She’d have to find another way in.

Maya jumped back to the next roof and went down the block of buildings until she discovered a rooftop clothesline stretched between two metal poles. She cut the clothesline with her knife, returned to her father’s building, and lashed the cord around a vent pipe. It was dark except for the glow of a single streetlight and a new moon that looked like a thin yellow line slashed in the sky.

She tested the cord and made sure that it would hold. Carefully, she went over the low wall on the edge of the roof and lowered herself hand over hand to the second-floor window. Peering through the glass, she saw that the apartment was filled with grayish-white smoke. Maya pushed back from the building and kicked in the glass. Smoke poured out of the hole and was absorbed by the night. She kicked again and again, knocking out the sharp edges of glass still held by the window frame.

Too much smoke, she thought. Careful or you’ll be trapped. She pushed back as far as possible, then swung through the hole. Smoke drifted up to the ceiling and flowed out of the shattered window; there were a few feet of clear space above the floor. Maya got down on her hands and knees. She crawled across the living room and found the Russian lying dead beside the glass coffee table. Gunshot. Chest wound. A pool of blood surrounded his upper body.

“Father!” She stood up, staggered around the half wall, and found a pile of books and cushions burning in the middle of the dining-room table. Near the kitchen, she stumbled over another body: a big man with a knife in his throat.

Had they captured her father? Was he a prisoner? She stepped over the big man and walked down a hallway to the next room. A bed and two lampshades were burning. Bloody handprints were smeared on the white walls.

A man lay on his side near the bed. His face was turned away from her, but she recognized her father’s clothes and long hair. Smoke swirled around her body as she went down on her hands and knees and crawled toward him like a child. She was coughing. Crying. “Father!” she kept shouting. “Father!”

And then she saw his face.