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“Well, what else would they want him for?” I asked.
“Thank you very much,” Radu told me.
Marlowe said a bad word. “We can speculate all bloody night and get nowhere! There are too many suspects and too many possible motives. We don’t need guesses; we need to know. And there is only one way to do that.”
And suddenly everyone was looking at me again.
Shit.
Chapter Thirty-two
“You want me to go back under, don’t you?” I asked. “To see if I remember anything else.”
It was kind of obvious. It wasn’t like I got invited to these high-level meetings often. I should have known they were leading up to something.
But Mircea surprised me. “Not…precisely.”
He and Louis-Cesare exchanged a glance, and for some reason, it almost looked like Louis-Cesare was the aggressor. His lips tightened, his brows lowered, and he looked…well, he looked pissed. Which was not an expression Mircea was accustomed to getting from many people.
Even weirder, he didn’t object. He just sat there and took it, without saying anything, at least not audibly, and without glaring back. It was bizarre.
But not as much so as when he broke the eye contact to look at me. And his expression then…I’d never seen that expression. Not from Mircea. It was…raw. Pained. Almost…afraid.
Why would Mircea look afraid. Of me?
“There is something your father has to tell you,” Louis-Cesare said forcefully.
Mircea didn’t say anything.
“We discussed this,” Louis-Cesare prompted after a moment.
“Discussed me?” I asked. “When?”
“After your…after the events in the garden,” Louis-Cesare explained. “I was…confused.”
“About what?” I asked harshly. My little descents into madness weren’t my favorite subject. “You’d seen it before.”
“Yes, but you had not. And you were afraid—”
“I was not.”
He just looked at me.
I looked back. I wanted another topic. “If you want me to try to go back to the wharf, to see if I remember anything else—”
“Yes, but not yet,” Mircea said, finally speaking.
“Why? I’m willing to take the risk.” I hadn’t enjoyed the last trip, but Marlowe was right. We needed facts and we needed them now.
“I…am not sure you are.” Mircea got up and went to the bar, but then didn’t fix himself anything. He just turned around, his hands on the polished wood behind him, his face expressionless. And looked at me. “I am not sure that you know what the risk is.”
I glanced at the others, but didn’t get any help. Everyone else was looking at Mircea. Everyone but Louis-Cesare. He was looking at me, but he didn’t say anything.
Obviously, this was Mircea’s story to tell.
And he told it.
“Do you remember when we met for the first time?”
