Thriller (31 page)

excused herself for a moment, leaving Frank Millay in the living-room section while she went, ostensibly, to use the bathroom.

One of her cameras that looked like a pen she had arranged on

the dresser—it would automatically snap a picture every minute

until she turned it off. The video camera was her cell phone,

which she arranged and propped on one of the bed tables.

In the bathroom, she flushed the toilet for verisimilitude’s

sake, then stepped out into the bedroom, undoing her blouse

now, taking it off, laying it on the bed. “Frank,” she said, “aren’t

you going to come in here?”

“Sure.”

He appeared in the doorway and stopped, taking her in.

She saw the hesitation now. He still had his coat and tie on.

And it was one of her inviolable rules—she would give each of

her victims one last chance to save themselves, to prove to her

that they were better than they appeared. Even Frank Millay

might still escape, although she didn’t want that to happen.

She gave him what she knew was her finest smile. Winsome

and seductive at once, playful but with a serious edge of promised passion underneath. “Are you sure you’re comfortable with

this?” she asked him. “I don’t want to force you to do anything

you don’t want to do.”

He broke a small smile that seemed to mock himself. “If you

hadn’t wanted to force me,” he said, “you would have left your

shirt on.”

She unclasped the hook on her skirt and let it drop to the floor.

“Well, then,” she said, stepping out of it, sitting on the bed where

she knew the cameras would capture everything. She patted the

mattress next to her. “Why don’t you come over here?”

Still, he seemed to hesitate for one last moment before he

started moving toward her. When he got in front of her, she

reached for his zipper, traced her finger down the bulge in the

front. “Oh, my,” she said.

She felt his hands in her hair, traveling down the sides of her

head to cup her face, which he lifted so that she looked up at him.

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“I’m so sorry,” he said as his hands slipped lower.

“No. You don’t need—” But suddenly she felt the hands pushing down on her shoulders, holding her where she sat, then

slowly, almost as though he were caressing her, closing around

her neck.

“Don’t you see?” His face suddenly inches from hers. “I can’t

take the risk. Someday you might tell.”

“But no, I—”

And then there was no way to make any more sound. She tried

to call out, to straighten up off the bed, to kick at him, but he

was nearly twice her size and now seized with an irresistible

power. He pushed her back onto the bed and fell upon her, his

hands closing tighter and tighter around her windpipe.

Her vision exploded into yellows and purples and greens and

then they all blended to a muddy blue, then a darker, colder blue.

And then no colors at all. Only black.

I hadn’t heard from Lucy for two weeks when I turned on the

news late one night and watched her face appear on the screen

while a reporter described the brutal murder that had taken

place in San Francisco.

“The killing was recorded on Lucy Delrey’s cell-phone camera, which the police discovered at the scene.”

Immediately in the hours, days and weeks afterward, Millay’s

PR machine went into action and it was clear that by the time the

case went to trial, his attorneys would have spun it so that the

world at large would perceive Lucy Delrey as a psychotic nymphomaniac who got pleasure from setting up men sexually in order

to destroy them. Frank Millay had been her hapless victim.

The sympathy would be with him by then, but I’ve got to believe that even in San Francisco, if you strangle a woman on

videotape, you’re looking at some kind of a stretch in prison. Millay’s career—his entire life—would be ruined. It could never be

the same.

And the strange thing was, just as I had asked her to, Lucy had

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found the complicated truth. No matter what had happened in

those final minutes, she had gone out there to destroy him and

she’d done it.

David Liss’s first novel,
A Conspiracy of Paper
began with what

may have been an unlikely inspiration for a thriller: his ongoing doctoral work on the 18th century British novel and

its relationship to emerging modes of finance. Liss succeeded

by showing how the rise of paper currency was surrounded by

an air of mystery, danger, urgency and cultural paranoia, but

he also succeeded because of his intrepid protagonist, Benjamin Weaver, a daring and reckless thief-taker—roughly a

combination of modern-day private eye, police-officer-forhire and hired muscle. Weaver’s fearlessness on the lawless

streets of 18th century London, and his willingness to meet

danger head-on, won the character many fans, and he returned in
A Spectacle of Corruption
and will be back again in

The Devil’s Company.

Liss has stated in interviews that he tremendously enjoys

writing about Weaver and the violent and colorful world he

inhabits, but he feels the need to divide his time between that

character and his stand-alone thrillers,
The Coffee Trader
and

The Ethical Assassin
. Unfortunately, between writing more

tales of Weaver and the time required to explore other interests, Liss has had no time to pursue a project that has in-
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terested him since completing
Conspiracy
—a story set in the

same world inhabited by Weaver but focusing on other characters—with Weaver occupying the role of secondary figure.

Until now, that is.

The Double Dealer
has at its center an aging highwayman

who wants to tell one last story before he dies, the story of

an encounter years ago with the young Benjamin Weaver,

once a highwayman himself. The fun in a project like this,

according to Liss, is to rethink some of the most basic ideas

of a recurring character in order to see him anew. Liss enjoys

writing about flawed protagonists and sympathetic villains

because in real life no one is perfect or perfectly bad, and

everyone is the hero of his or her own story.

The Double Dealer
has given Liss the chance to present his

ongoing hero as the villain of someone else’s story.

I’m old and like to die soon, and no one will care when I do, and

that’s the truth. But I’ve a story to tell before I go, and I’ve paid

this here gaunt scholar fellow with a face of a rotten apple to write

it down. I aim to make him read it back, too, as I don’t trust him

and I’ll not pay a penny until I like what I hear.

It ain’t often I like what I hear. Them newspapers are full

three, four, maybe five times a year of the great deeds of that

worthless Jew, Benjamin Weaver—that great man, what done this

favor for the ministry, or that for the mighty Duke or Arse-Wipe

or good Squire Milksop. Old as he is, he’s still at it. They forget,

they do, but old Fisher don’t forget. I recollect it all, as I crossed

with him when we was both young and he was no better than

me—maybe worse, for his being a Jew withal.

It ain’t no secret, but not oft spoke of neither, that time was

this hero, a “thief-taker,” claims to make streets safe for the likes

of what calls themselves ordinary man. No better than one of my

number, a prig and one of the highway, and he’d have been at

ease with the shitten likes of any blackguard cutpurse.

The world remembers that he was once a pugilist, and lived

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by his fists. They know him now as some kind of do-gooder, but

there was a time between that, when his fighting days was done,

and he ain’t yet figured out this thief-taking lay. I know all about

it, and I aim to make it public.

So, I begin with a piss-rainy autumn day, maybe 1717 or ’18—

maybe ’19 or ’20. Can’t say as I quite recall, being as I said old

and having blood come out both me lungs and me arse. But that

ain’t your concern. Yours is that when I was young I come ’pon

a handsomely dressed spark finishing his business with a mighty

fine-looking equipage—lonely all of them, on a nice, ripe deserted stretch of highway. He had in his hands a sack full of coins

and jewels and mighty pretty things, and then said his farewells

to a pair of ugly bitches, past thirty, and so good for nothing. He

charmed them, though, as he called himself Gentleman Ben,

and they blushed and bat their eyelashes like he were a spark at

a dance and not the man what bound up their coachman and

took their precious dainties. His partner, a fellow called Thomas

Lane, were some twenty feet down the road, keeping his eye

sharp for trouble.

These two were like brothers, never thinking to do a lay, one

without the other. They even looked alike, with their dark hair,

tall stature and wide backs, both. And that’s the thing, ain’t it?

You don’t want to mess with these sorts of prigs, these coves what

are never one without the other, these sparks what come to be

like blood, for you do wrong by the one, you must surely face

the other.

So it was that I rode close to Thomas Lane (though I didn’t

hear his name ’til later). The other one, what I learned was

Weaver, was at the equipage, making pretty talk to the ladies. The

sun, peeking through them clouds, were before me, and I

couldn’t see Lane’s face all clear, but I could see it crumpled well

enough and I knew he’d had enough and more of Weaver’s fripperies with these hags. He were looking back ’pon Weaver and

not forward to me, so that he never heard me nor saw me neither, and I rode real quiet, as I trained my horse to do, and snuck

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up to him all silent like and pummeled him hard in his head. He

fell over but not down, and so I struck him in the head again,

and once again in that very same pate to make certain he stayed

quiet, and this plan worked well enough, for this last blow, I later

heard, quite killed him, but I didn’t think so then. All I knowed

was that he made not a sound more, and that contented me.

I had no plan to kill him. He weren’t no friend of mine, but

he was a brother prig, and I meant no more but his silence. Still,

once it were done, there could be no helping it. No tears will

squeeze the breath back into him, will it?

Now, coming from the other way were my friend and partner

in these affairs, a spark called Ruddy Dick. There were some three

or four fellows I regularly engaged with for my adventures, but

none were more trusted by me than old Dick, an aged fellow, as

I thought then, though some twenty years my junior to where I

am now. So, I catch old Dick’s eye, and we know at once the lay,

for we were longtime friends, like I said.

This Weaver might have not been keeping his wits about him,

but those what he robbed were, and they saw the freaks I played

’pon Thomas Lane. They pointed and cried out, as though these

two highwaymen were friends and I the enemy. Never once did

they presume I come to save them, but that’s the curse of this here

face, even more terrible when I was young, if you’ll credit that.

With the hags crying out and then taking shelter in their

coach, I turn to this gentleman bandit, and I shout to him. I say,

“Ho, my spark, I’m afeard I’ve quite bludgeoned your fellow, and

I’m afeard you’re next.”

Weaver—though, as I says, I knew not yet his name—turns

to me and stares not with surprise or horror or sadness, but with

a rage burning in those dark eyes, clear enough through the

misty rain. In the time it takes between you cut yourself and the

blood starts its flowing, he understood all. He observed the

scene, observed what I intended, and I knew then that I’d made

an enemy.

That were the bad news, as they say. The good news were that

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I didn’t expect he’d live long, not with Ruddy Dick coming down

’pon him hard. He’d spurred his horse to a good gallop and drew

his blade, ready to take off the distracted Jew’s head as though it

were the foreskin ’pon a privy portion.

Now, there’s Weaver, staring at me with those hateful eyes, and

there’s me, holding his gaze, keeping him distracted while Dick

rides hard. It’s but a tick of the clock, or less even, before this

angry fellow is a headless angry fellow, but all at once, like he’s

got eyes peeking through them locks behind him, he turns. He

drops his sack of goodies, and in an instant his blade is out and

swinging, and it’s at Dick before Dick’s blade is on him. Nothing

quite so colorful as a beheading, but the blade swings and opens

Dick’s throat, and the blood’s all ruddy fountainish. That was it,

then. The death of Dick.

Right tragic it was, a good friend such as he, who I shared my

victuals and coin and whores with. Still, life must march forward,

and Weaver weren’t the only one who could see all clear and easy

in the blink of a rat’s eye. I spurred my horse, and make like I’m

like to take a swipe at Weaver, all revenge-ish, but instead I reach

down, grab the sack of plunder as was dropped, and I speed away,