"Bullshit," says Lizzie. The yellow lamps in Red's study cast pools of light around their brassy stands, and the rest is velvet darkness. A perfect backdrop for challenge and accusation.
Red blinks at her, keeping his expression still. "I don't lie to you, Lizzie. I will never lie to you."
She is exhausted, he can see. The energy of last reserve burns in her eyes as she says, "What then? Apart from strangers breaking into my home and attacking my husband, what danger am I supposedly in?"
"Tom Keen is not your husband," Red says. "The attack confirms it. And there's something else, isn't there? Something you found."
She is hostile, defensive, resentful. All perfectly understandable, of course, but time consuming. "Listen to me," Red begins. "I need to see the papers you found. I can find out who made them and that will tell us -"
"There is no us," Lizzie interrupts. "There's me, doing my job, and there's you, worming your way into the FBI for your own purposes. Maybe those papers are what you wanted all along. I don't know. I don't care. But I'm not going to give them to you."
She puts her hands on her hips and glares at him. Red feels her fury, like opening the furnace door after the janitor has told you not to. There is the same blast of fire, the same pull in her gaze: the urge to put your hand in the flame, to see how hot, very hot might be.
The study door opens. Dembe stands there, his muscled frame taut. Warm light from the hallway spills past him onto the rich crimson carpet. "Trouble," he says to Red. He holds out a phone.
Red winces.
Lizzie is watching. The lamplight reflected in her dark eyes reminds Red of home, of guard fires set on poles all around the fragile perimeter, of a tense, crackling crowd of adults at the big table, clinking goblets and tossing meat into their mouths, while Red and the rest of the children raced around the edges, dancing along the flickering border between safety and the night.
'Trouble' is Dembe's shorthand for what all that became.
"Will you excuse me," Red says to Lizzie, and slips into the hall, closing the door behind him.
He takes the phone from Dembe and listens. The hall is chilly and his lungs bother him. He has to suppress a cough as the hole inside his chest squabbles with autumn air.
As the end of the call the line goes dead. Red turns to Dembe, whose perpetual frown nevertheless reveals concern. "It's Berlin," Red says, and coughs, as if the mere name can bring on the old weakness. "He's apparently delighted with the progress being made in my little backwater world, and intends to visit so he can oversee it himself."
Dembe presses his mouth tight shut.
"I know," says Red. "A little too much of a coincidence, isn't it. But it gives me hope that those men sent to maul Tom Keen didn't find out what they wanted to know."
"No," Dembe agrees. "If they did you'd be dead already."
"Ever the ray of sunshine," says Red. But he smiles at Dembe. "We'll be breaking camp again tomorrow. But now I have to break some difficult news to Agent Keen, and I think she's going to be hard to convince."
"As I was," says Dembe.
Red claps Dembe's leather-clad shoulder. "Yes, old friend. Now bring us something comforting to eat, would you? I find war talk is far more productive over a plate of fine food."
But when he opens the study door, the shutters have been unlocked, the window stands open and Lizzie is gone.
Red dreams. He is falling, diving, not purposefully like Superman, but helplessly, grotesquely, his arms flailing, his legs pedalling at nothing. At last he breaks through the crust of the sky and slows, shimmers, slides into a litter-strewn street by Manhattan Bridge just before dawn.
That is not how it happened, how he came here, the first time, but in the dream he has the girl with him, bewildered, and he says, "I know a place you can hide. This is one of my patches."
She is puzzled, turning her face up to him. And instantly she is not four, but thirty, a strong young woman with soft skin and hard eyes, demanding what the hell is going on.
"I work here," Red says. "Sometimes. It's my patch. My place." But this world is nothing to brag about. It is small and mean. Barely worth bothering with. Red treats his assignments here more or less like vacations. But what it lacks in majesty it makes up for in complexity and raw deviousness. In that respect it is ideal.
"I want to go home," says Lizzie. She is wearing a black silk blouse with a bow at the throat.
"This is home now," says Red, as you would to a child. "I saved you. You'll be safe here." He sees his plan in his mind, as it was then - bold and flawless, and as it is now - the foolish lashing-out of a man near ruined.
Lizzie looks up. The New York sky is white, and now silver, and now blazing with vengeful fire. "That's mine," she says, and Red wakes up.
It is morning, the young sun pressing on Red's shutters and curtains with pale insistence. Red sits up and rubs his hand over his hair.
He is not given to dreams. He is not given to sleep. Now that he is so weak, he is vulnerable.
Berlin loves that, of course. The mighty brought low, hilarious.
Red does not want to die. So when Berlin calls him to court and Red goes, a hideous journey on the backs of many charms, and stands sweating with exhaustion in the sparkling fortress and Berlin roars with merriment at Red's diminished state, Red laughs too. And all this jollity almost makes Berlin forget that he still does not know who burned down his house and daughter.
Red knows that that witchhunt is not over. But he hopes the fact that Berlin stole all Red's power makes up for it. Berlin brought it on himself.
With double the power Berlin must be treated carefully. And if Red ever finds a way to steal it back, he will not hesitate.
Red sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the couch. Might as well get up. It is light outside and there is a lot do.
Dembe is stretched out on the hall floor. He often does that when Red falls asleep in the den. Literally guarding the threshold.
Red steps over him saying, "I'll make coffee." This world may lack the strength and majesty of home, but it has many side benefits. Strong coffee is one of them, and Red likes to create, to draw flavour and fragrance from a handful of beans, to distill it into more than a drink, into a glamour cast over the gritty reality of another hard day.
The dream bothers him though. Berlin is coming to this world to work it, claim it, wreck it. Red's patch. He is coming now, which is too much of a coincidence not be suspicious. What does Berlin know?
Red has been looking twenty years and never found the source of Berlin's power, the power ripped from Red's chest during that terrible war. With that power Red could end Berlin, could end all of this, could go home. But Berlin has it still and a battle now will be very uneven.
Red checks the feed from Lizzie's house. She is awake, in a woollen coat and PJs, curled up in a chair on the back porch.
Berlin does not know. She is safe, unknown, which means that Red is also secure. And yet the phone is already in Red's hand, dialling her number.
