“Ofdefeat, Mr. Hope. It is quite powerful. But if you hold it only up here,” she added, touching her temple, “that memory will fade. And you may even convince yourself it did not actually occur because the mind, the ego, does not like to dwell on personal defeat. And thus you forget your failures, your vulnerabilities, and become weaker, not stronger. But I will never forget, because I see this failure of mine every time I look at myself.” She turned her gaze to him. “What do you think of my logic?”
Nash chose his words carefully. “I think it is. . .unique. But I don’t think many people would have the. . .strength to carry this reminder with them so. . .viscerally.”
She ran her hand over the damaged skin on her right arm. “Most people are not me.”
“We are in complete agreement on that.”
“Do you know what I see when I look at you?” she asked, meeting his gaze once more.
“No.”
Steers cocked her head slightly and her disappointment in his rushed response was clear to Nash, as were her subsequent words.
“A quick answer that is wrong, is as wrong as an incorrect answer delivered after substantial delay,” she noted.
He collected his thoughts and an answer occurred to him with startling clarity. It was as though Nash and Steers were suddenly operating on intermingled wavelengths. That could be an advantage in all this, he knew. Yet it also rattled Nash that he could even approach thinking along the same lines as this woman.
He said slowly, and in a measured tone, “Your whole life is about understanding and thus controlling everyone you come into contact with. And yet in me you see only an. . .enigma.”
She studied him for a long moment. “Much better, Mr. Hope.” She glanced at her arm. “You are perhaps repulsed by my injuries?” she said.
“What does it matter what I am? I am nothing to you.”
She stared at him as though he were a fascinating beast behind zoo bars. “If I cannot comprehend you, Mr. Hope, I can at least own you. That is something, is it not? Perhaps more important in the end.”
He left this comment unanswered simply because he wanted to. And in that, at least to Nash’s thinking, was conclusive proof that she didnot ownhim.
“Is that why you brought me here?” he said instead. “To dispose of an. . .unwelcome mystery? So does that mean I’m not going on the trip to free your mother?”
“I have committed to your participation, and I never go back once committed.”
“So where does that leave us?” he asked.
“It leaves me still wondering, Mr. Hope, and it leaves you with this.”
Steers picked up a knife from the floor. She said, “I will not ruin your lovely dragon, as I am partial to them myself.”
She squatted and placed the tip of the knife near his left wrist and proceeded to walk it up his arm, careful not to sink the blade too deeply or hit an artery or a large vein. She kept her focus on her work, but when she was finished, with the end of the incision right below Nash’s shoulder capsule, she moved herself squarely back over his torso and looked him in the eyes, her expression impressed.
“You barely flinched,” she said breathily, from the effort of slicing him. To Nash, her gaze now held the conflicting emotions of disappointment and admiration.
Nash, in truth, had known what she was going to do to him, because the FBI had warned him that Steers sometimes sliced up her underlings, including, probably, Rhett Temple.
While the blade had bitten into him Nash had held the mental image of a painting he had seen in Rhett Temple’s home back in America, depicting a young girl and a dog running in a field. During a conversation Temple had been having with a detective concerning his daughter Maggie’s death, Nash had seized upon the painting as a mental refuge. His friend Shock had told him how Ty Nash, his father, while a POW in Vietnam, had used the memory of himself as a teenager riding a beloved horse in Mississippi where he had grown up, to survive the torture inflicted upon him by his captors. It was all about separating your mind from the present. And if you did that, the pain, while still there, could be managed. Nash was glad that he had practiced this technique over and over. Otherwise, he would have been screaming in pain while Steers carved up his arm.
“Mr. Temple was not nearly as stoic when it was done to him,” she said, confirming what Nash had long suspected.
As his mind left the girl and the dog behind, Nash let out a long breath and felt the spread of blood across his skin.
“What good would that have done?” he said quietly. “If you can’t change something, the waste of energy is unforgivable.”
She wiped the bloody knife off on his bare chest, smearing, perhaps symbolically and intentionally, the tattoo of the scales of justice. “And are you saving your energy for something important, Mr. Hope?” she asked, her expression holding an air of expectation.
“Aren’t we all?” he replied smoothly.
Then Steers leaned down and kissed him on the lips. When she pulled away and looked at him Nash noticed the strange expression on her face, as though she was surprised by her action. Her lips parted and he glimpsed strong, white teeth and a flicker of tongue. She started to lean back down, perhaps for another touch of his lips, but then stopped. The woman rose and was quickly gone.
A few moments after that men were all over him. One injected him with something in his other arm, and Nash fell unconscious once more.