Peril Read Free

disintegrate, burst like a vase of air, leaving nothing behind.
    Literally nothing save the few luxurious items he’d purchased because the high craft employed in making them lifted his spirits and took his mind off Marisol.
    But now, as he approached the anniversary of her murder, he realized that the power of a beautifully cut piece of glass or a perfectly woven scarf to change his mood had waned enormously during the preceding twelve months. He suspected that his getting older was part of it, though he was only fifty-three. The rest was loneliness, and the fading hope that there would ever be an end to it while he lived on earth. He’d loved once, and overwhelmingly lost that love in a whirl of violence, then lived on in the aftermath of that explosion, its shattering echo forever in his mind. Now, more than anything, as he admitted to himself this morning, he wanted an end to memory. Beyond life he saw a world of utter stillness and eternal dark, and yet he harbored the hope that somewhere in that darkness the soul of Marisol waited for him patiently. The nurturing of this hope, he knew, was an act of will. But if he abandoned it, Henderson would win, and Lockridge would win, and they could win only at the cost of Marisol.
    Stark shook his head at the morbidity of his thoughts and glanced about the shop, hoping some small, precious thing would catch his eye.
    Over the years, he’d spent almost everything he made because he saw no reason to hold on to anything. He had no wife, no children, no one whose later survival meant anything at all to him. And as for saving for that rainy day when he would be old and sick, he knew that he would never reach such a point. If he got sick beyond recovery, he would simply kill himself. When he got old, when the last small joys were gone, he would tuck the barrel of his nine-millimeter automatic against the roof of his mouth and pull the trigger. There would be no rainy days.
    And so Stark spent whatever he had on clothes and restaurants and obsessive grooming. But more than anything, he spent money on delicately wrought objects, usually of glass or porcelain. They were tremendously expensive, these little statues or figurines, but in the past they’d kept him afloat. In them he’d been able to find something good in life, something done for the love of it, something to which an otherwise ordinary human being had applied the full measure of his skill.
    In the past these things had soothed him like a soft, warm light.
    But no longer.
    â€œBeautiful, isn’t it?”
    Stark faced the dealer, noted the small rosebud in his lapel, thought it foppish.
    â€œIt’s sixteenth century,” the dealer added with a nod toward the fluted glass at which, Stark realized, he must have been gazing.
    â€œNot my thing,” Stark said coolly.
    The dealer looked as if he’d been gently pushed away, perhaps with the nose of a silver derringer. “Well, if I may be of help . . .”
    â€œI’ll let you know,” Stark said.
    â€œOf course,” the dealer said, then vanished.
    Alone again, Stark strolled back down the aisle toward the shop’s front door. Scores of beautiful objects lined his path, but nothing called to him, and because of that he knew that he’d slipped out of the old reality, the one that had held him for so many years. Even though Mortimer would arrive that night with the latest payment, he would never spend another dime on what he now suddenly dismissed as collectibles.
    He walked out of the shop and headed south down Madison Avenue. He knew that dressed as he was, in a fashionably cut black suit, he looked like a successful Manhattan business executive. It was a look he’d cultivated over the years and which he scrupulously maintained. It went with the false and decidedly metaphorical name he’d chosen for himself, and for the secret life he lived, and it was incontestably appropriate for the elegant bars where, if he