Wilted scenes for us who couldn't wait.
"He died in interrogation. Just thought you should know."
Nadir drained the Cordon Bleu from the cut-glass tumbler in hand, not bothering to look around as he heard the announcement his bodyguard, Vivek, had quietly made. The cognac was going to have been served in a chilled bucket of ice on the private plane that should have taken Amira to Colorado. A toast from father to daughter in anticipation of the long, glorious weekend ahead. The weeks of loneliness and fear had left an ashy taste in his mouth, and his mind kept looping back to the last conversation they shared, the cold, twisted knowledge that whoever had taken her had preyed on her complete lack of defences. To the end, he would have her words ringing between his ears, that she only followed the rules and kept the guards close because she loved him. To the end, he would know he had set her up to be so perfectly safe that she never understood the danger was real, and how.
But what was the alternative? Show her first-hand, close enough to the barrel of a gun to smell the residue? Feel the edge of a stranger's knife press the shallowest of lines against her beating carotid? Swallow her own bile in the dark, bound and gagged? The very thought made the room lurch, because that was only the tip of the iceberg of what his enemies were capable of. (What if wasn't his enemy? What if it was a stranger, ripped straight from the pulp papers' headlines? No. It was the Rinaldis. He was the most certain of it. Lorenzo had finally come through on the promise he'd made when they'd first met. Fourteen years too late, he'd delivered his last revenge, slamming the knife exactly where it would cripple Nadir. It would be his 'last' revenge because this was it. Business meant nothing in the face of this. Lorenzo Rinaldi had gone a step too far, and Nadir would tear him open from throat to groin, leaving him half-dead to be clawed apart by the birds of prey in his own house, half-alive to watch his ambitions crumble.)
"Arrey, chutiya, you listening to me?" demanded Vivek, more tetchily this time. With impeccable reflexes, he ducked just in time to avoid being hit by the tumbler that was flung his way. Glass splintered like knives down the wall and on the carpet.
Nadir's eyes were almost black when he looked at Vivek at last. "You have my undivided attention, Mr. Dubey," he said. His voice was low and smooth like tar, capable of trapping and suffocating a person in its depths. "So this informant died. Did he tell you what I want to know, or what he thought you wanted to hear?"
Vivek's insouciance didn't waver. "He told me he'd suck my toes for five dollars, and my cock for free."
Nadir would have had no qualms bodily hanging him upside-down out the window if he hadn't know that beneath the surface, this man was just as invested in finding Amira as any of the members of the staff. They had seen her grow up before their eyes, and Vivek alone had known both her uncle and her mother, had seen Nadir lose them at twenty-three, and lose the only light left in his world at forty-six.
Unfazed, Vivek went on, "They're all like that, man. Weeks on end we've been doing the same shit, and they all die on us. The boys are complaining about how it's getting harder to dump the corpses, they want me to tell you to cut it out. These stupid chutiyas saw nothing. One saw her get grabbed, he died swearing he didn't know more details. I believe him. You were too busy feeding him wax, but I saw him, and he didn't know. The phone records are no good, and we've confirmed that she ran into your old Italian buddy too. There's a laundry list of people she met at the fucking party, but we don't have ears in the wall. Any one of them could have done this, or none of them."
"So what do you suggest? That I sit and wait? Woh bola toh gala phaar duunga tera." Say as much and I'll cut open your throat. "Understand... chutiya?"
Vivek shook his head, just the hint of a smile at the mockery. "Nah. I say we change tactics. We put the squeeze on this Luigi Rinaldi. If he took her, he'll let us know. We'll even phrase the question nicely."
