The Kill Artist

representative of an occupying power, then led him down a long carpeted hallway.
    "She's been speaking quite a bit more this month," Avery said. "We've actually had a meaningful conversation on a couple of occasions."
    Gabriel managed a tense smile. In all these years she had never spoken to him. "And her physical health?" he asked.
    "No change, really. She's as fit as can be expected."
    Avery used a magnetic card to pass through a secure door. On the other side was another hall, terra-cotta tiling instead of carpet. Avery discussed her medication as they walked. He had increased the dosage of one drug, reduced another, taken her off a third altogether. There was a new drug, an experimental, that was showing some promising results in patients suffering from a similar combination of acute post-traumatic stress syndrome and psychotic depression.
    "If you think it will help."
    "We'll never know unless we try."
    Clinical psychiatry, Gabriel thought, was rather like intelligence work.
    The terra-cotta hall ended in a small room. It was filled with gardening tools-pruning sheers, hand shovels, trowels-and bags of flower seed and fertilizer. At the other end of the cutting room was a pair of double doors with circular portholes.
    "She's in her usual place. She's expecting you. Please don't keep her long. I should think a half hour would be appropriate. I'll come for you when it's time."
    A solarium, oppressively hot and moist. Leah in the corner, seated in a straight-backed garden chair of wrought iron, young potted roses at her feet. She wore white. The white rollneck sweater Gabriel had given her for her last birthday. The white trousers he had bought for her during a summer holiday in Crete. Gabriel tried to remember the year but couldn't. There seemed to be only Leah before Vienna and Leah after Vienna. She sat with a schoolgirl's primness, looking away across the expanse of the lawn. Her hair had been cut institutionally short. Her feet were bare.
    She turned her head as Gabriel stepped forward. For the first time he could see the swath of scarring on the right side of her face. As always it made him feel violently cold. Then he saw her hands, or what was left of her hands. The hard white scar tissue reminded him of the exposed canvas of a damaged painting. He wished he could simply mix a bit of pigment on his palette and put her back to normal.
    He kissed her forehead, smelled her hair for the familiar traces of lavender and lemon, but instead there was only the oppressive moisture of the solarium and the stench of plants in an enclosed space. Avery had left a second chair, which Gabriel pulled a few inches closer. Leah flinched as the wrought-iron legs scraped over the floor. He murmured an apology and sat down. Leah looked away.
    It was always like this. It wasn't Leah sitting next to him, only a monument to Leah. A gravestone. He used to try to talk to her, but now he was content to just sit in her presence. He followed her gaze across the misty landscape and wondered what she was looking at. There were days, according to Avery, when she just sat and relived it over and over again in excruciatingly vivid detail, unable, or unwilling, to make it stop. Gabriel couldn't imagine her suffering. He had been permitted to carry on with some semblance of his life, but Leah had been stripped of everything-her child, her body, her sanity. Everything but her memory. Gabriel feared that her grip on life, however tenuous, was somehow linked to his continued fidelity. If he allowed himself to fall in love with someone else, Leah would die.
    After forty-five minutes he stood and pulled on his jacket; then he crouched at her feet with his hands resting on her knees. She looked over his head for a few seconds before lowering her eyes and meeting his gaze. "I have to go," he said. Leah made no movement.
    He was about to stand when suddenly she reached out and touched the side of his face. Gabriel tried not to recoil at the sensation of the scar tissue sliding along the skin at the corner of his eye. She smiled sadly and lowered her hand. She placed it in her lap, covered it with the other, resumed the frozen pose Gabriel had found her in.
    He stood and walked away. Avery was waiting for him outside. He walked Gabriel to his car. Gabriel sat behind the wheel for a long time before starting the engine, thinking about her hand on his face. So unlike Leah, touching him like that. What did she see there? The strain of the operation? Or