Creation in Death (In Death #25)(99)

“Absolutely.” Roarke smiled, cold and calm. “An unforeseen event.”

“You know who he is,” Eve said when Pella’s eyes wheeled. “And who I am. Roarke’s cop, that’s what you called me. Believe me when I tell you if you happen to stop breathing, and I lie about how that might’ve happened, he’ll swear to it.”

“On a bloody stack of Bibles,” Roarke confirmed.

“But you’re not ready to die yet, are you, Pella?” Her hand stayed firm on the breather when he batted at it. “It shows in the eyes when someone’s not ready to die yet. So, if you want that next breath, then the one that comes after, you tell me the goddamn truth. You know Robert Lowell. You knew Edwina Spring.”

“Let go of it.” He wheezed in air. “I’ll have you up on charges.”

“You’ll be dead, and the dead don’t scare me. You knew them. Next breath, Pella, say yes.”

“Yes, yes.” He shoved his hand at Eve’s, and the harsh sound of his labored breath eased when she lifted it. “Yes, I knew them. But not to speak to. They were the elite. I was only a soldier. Get the hell away from me.”

“Not a chance. Tell me what you know.”

Pella’s eyes ticked over to Roarke, back to Eve. Then, for a moment, he simply closed them. “He was about my age—a few years younger—but he didn’t serve. Soft.” Pella’s hand trembled a little as it came up, stroked over the breather to be sure it was in the correct position. “Soft look about him, and he had his family money at his back, of course. His type never got dirty, never risked their own skin. She…I need water.”

Eve glanced over, saw the cup with a straw on the bedside table. She picked it up, held it out.

“I can’t hold the damn thing. It’s bad today. Worse since you got here.”

Saying nothing, she angled it down so he could guide the straw with a trembling hand to the opening in the breather.

“What about her?”

“Beautiful. Young, elegant, a voice like an angel. She would come to the base sometimes, sing for us. Opera, almost always Italian opera. She’d break your heart with every note.”

“You have a thing for her, Pella?”

“Bitch,” he muttered. “What would you know of real love? Therese was everything. But I loved what Edwina was, what she brought us. Hope and beauty.”

“She came to the base on Broome?”

“Yes, on Broome.”

“They lived there, didn’t they?”

“No. Before I think, but not during the fighting, not while soldiers were based there. After, who the hell knows, who the hell cares? But when I was assigned there, they didn’t live in the base on Broome. They had another place, another place on the West Side.”

“Where?”

“It was a long time ago. I was never there, not a foot soldier like me. Some of the others went, officers, and you heard things. Yeah, some of the officers, and the Stealths.”

She felt the next click. “The coverts?”

“Yes. You’d hear things. I heard things.” He closed his eyes. “It hurts to go back there.” For the first time, his voice sounded weak. “And I can’t stop going back there.”

“I’m sorry for all you lost, Mr. Pella.” And in that moment she was. “But Ariel Greenfeld is alive, and she needs help. What did you hear back then that might help her?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“It would have to do with her, with Edwina Spring. She died, did she?”

“Everyone dies.” But his hand came to his breather again, and his eyes watched Eve warily over it. “I heard her—Edwina—talking to a soldier I knew. Young first lieutenant, sent down from upstate. Can’t remember his name. They’d slip off when she’d come to sing. Or you could see the way they looked at each other. The way Therese and I looked at each other.”

“They were lovers?”

“Probably. Or wanted to be. She was young, a lot younger than Taker.”

“Who? Taker?”

“That’s what they called Lowell—James Lowell.”

“Because he took the bodies the dead wagon brought in,” Eve said, remembering Dobbins’s comment.

“That’s right. She was half his age, vital, beautiful. He was too damn old for her, and…and there was something in his eyes. In the old man’s, too, his father. Something in their eyes that brought the hair up on the back of the neck.”

“They found out about her and the soldier.”

“Yes. I think they were going to run away. He wouldn’t have been the first to desert, or the last. It was summer. We had the sector secured, temporarily in any case. I went out, just to walk, to remind myself what we were fighting for. I heard them talking, behind one of the supply tents. Her voice, you couldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s. They were talking about going north, up into the mountains. A lot of people had fled the city for the mountains, the country, and he still had family up that way.”

“She was going to leave her husband, run off with this soldier.” And Robert Lowell, Eve calculated, would have been around twenty.

“I didn’t let them know I was there. I wouldn’t have turned him in. I knew what it was to love someone, and be afraid for her.