Chapter 404 — For the King III (Bonus)

Chapter 404: Chapter 404 — For the King III (Bonus)

On either side of the broken stage, the big screens flickered.

One of them had been showing a close-up of the drummer when the music stopped, a frozen frame of his face, mouth open. Now the picture went. The festival logo came up for half a second, the city skyline in green, and broke into lines, and went black.

Both screens went black together.

People near the stage noticed. People who were not on the ground or holding someone looked up, because the screens were the biggest things in the square and they had changed.

White letters came up out of the black.

They were enormous, plain capitals that filled the screen from edge to edge.

**FOR THE KING**

They stayed there. ⅇℓ.

Below them, people stood in the dust and looked up.

Somewhere, sirens had started.

Phones came up. First one, then dozens, held up into the smoke, recording the screens and the words on them above the wrecked stage.

"What does that *mean*?" somebody was shouting. "What does that *mean*?"

"*Who did this?*"

A man with blood down one side of his face was standing on an overturned crate screaming at the screen, just screaming, no words in it.

A woman near him said, quite quietly, "The King. What King? Whose King?"

Nobody answered her. Nobody in that square had any way of knowing who had ordered it, or why, or who the words were for. All they had was the words.

The sirens came closer. The letters stayed white over the smoke and the dust and the people calling names.

---

????

---

The suite was on the eleventh floor of a hotel on St Stephen’s Green, and it had been booked a fortnight ago.

The Minister for Defence had arrived at nine. He had been in Government Buildings when the news about the square came through, and in emergency meetings until after eight. Then he had told his private secretary he needed to go home and rest, and he had come here instead.

He was in his early fifties. He was broad in the shoulders and going soft round the middle, though a good tailor hid most of it. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed precisely, and his face was clean-shaven. He had taken off the jacket of his charcoal suit and hung it on the back of a chair, and pulled his tie loose. He stood at the window with a whiskey, looking out over the lights of the city as though he owned a share in them.

He was used to rooms doing what he wanted. Most of the rooms he walked into did.

The suite was large and warm. The lamps were low. There was a sitting area with a long sofa and two armchairs, and through an open door a bedroom with the curtains already drawn. A small table by the sofa held a bottle of wine and two glasses and an ice bucket. The television was off. He had turned it off when he came in. He had heard enough about the square for one night.

The knock came at twenty past nine.

He put his glass down and opened the door, and his face changed completely.

"There you are."

She came in past him, smiling.

She was in her late twenties, perhaps thirty. She had long dark hair, and striking eyes that took in the room in one look. She wore a fitted evening dress in deep blue with a neckline that was low but not careless, and it followed the line of her figure closely. She had a full bust, a narrow waist and rounded hips. She wore heels, and small silver earrings and a thin chain at her throat, and nothing else that drew attention. She had put herself together with care for the evening, and it showed.

She kissed his cheek and put her bag down on the armchair like someone who had done it before.

"You look tired," she said.

"I am tired."

"You look nice, though. Tired and nice." She ran a finger down his loosened tie. "You didn’t even wait for me to take this off for you."

"I’ve had a day."

"I heard." She went to the table and looked at the wine and then at his whiskey. "You’ve started without me."

"One."

"Liar."

He laughed. He poured her a glass of wine and handed it to her, and she took it and sat down on the end of the sofa with her legs crossed, and looked up at him.

"Sit down," she said. "You’re making the room nervous."

He sat beside her.

"How was your day?" he said.

"Mine? Boring. I had lunch with a woman who only talks about her kitchen extension. I bought shoes I don’t need." She tilted her foot to show him. "These ones."

"They’re very nice."

"They hurt." She drank some wine. "Yours was worse, I expect."

"Mine was a nightmare." He leaned his head back against the sofa. "Everybody wants something from you all day long. Every single person who walks into the room wants you to make a decision for them, and then they want to argue about it. Then the press want to know why you made it. I swear to God, some days I’d give the whole job away for one evening where nobody’s ringing me."

"You’ve turned your phone off."

"I’ve turned my phone off."

"Look at you. A rebel."

He laughed again, and she smiled at him over her glass.

He put his arm along the back of the sofa behind her shoulders. She leaned into it a little. He felt his shoulders come down for the first time all day. Out there the city had a burning square in the middle of it and every news channel in the world was on it. In here it was warm, and quiet, and the door was locked, and nobody knew where he was.

He liked that. He liked rooms where nobody knew where he was.

---

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Mm."

"Do you think people like you ever actually pay for anything?"

He opened one eye. "Pay for what?"

"For decisions. The things you decide in those rooms all day." She was looking at her wine, turning the glass slowly by the stem. "Do they ever come back on you? Personally?"

He laughed, a little. "That’s a very serious question for this time of night."

"I’m a very serious person."

"Since when?"

"Since always. You just don’t listen." She smiled, but not quite as much. "I mean it. Do they?"

"No," he said. He shrugged against the back of the sofa. "Not really. Not the way you mean. That’s politics. You make the call, you take the heat in the papers for a week, everybody moves on. Nobody goes to jail for a budget." He reached for his whiskey. "That’s the job."

"Do you think ordinary people would agree with you?"

"About what?"

"That nobody pays."

He looked at her properly.

"Why are we talking about this?"

"I’m just asking."

"Well, stop just asking." He put the glass down. It came down on the table a bit harder than he meant. "I’ve had politics up to here all day. I didn’t come here for more of it. I came here for you." He put his hand on her knee. "Come here."

She did not come.

She did not pull away either. She simply did not move, and the not-moving was different from everything she had done since she walked in. The warmth had gone out of her. He had not seen it go. It was just not there any more.

He took his hand off her knee.

She was looking at him, and her face was cold.

"What’s this?" he said. "What’s wrong with you?"

She did not answer.

"Have I done something? Is it the news? Is that what this—" He sat forward. "What do you want? If this is about money—"

"It isn’t about money."

"Then what is it?"

She looked at him with those striking eyes, and for the first time he could not read anything in them at all.

"I didn’t come here," she said, "just to spend the evening with you."

He opened his mouth to ask what that meant.

She moved.

It was very fast. There was something in her hand that had not been in it a second ago, and her arm came across, and something hit him in the side of the neck. It hit hard, like a punch, and then it went cold.

He went backwards off the sofa.

He did not understand it. He was on his knees on the carpet with one hand at his neck, and his hand was wet, and his shirt was going dark down the front, very fast, faster than anything. He tried to say something. He tried to say her name. Nothing came out except a sound.

He looked up at her.

She was standing over him. She had not moved from where she stood up. She was watching him the way you watch a kettle.

He reached toward her, or toward the door, or toward the phone he had turned off. His arm did not get far.

He went down on his side beside the sofa, on the thick hotel carpet, and the lamps were very warm and very far away. The last thing he understood was that she had planned this, all of it, every evening, and that he had not seen it once.

Then he stopped understanding anything.

---

She stood and looked down at him for a while.

Her breathing had not changed. She stood in her good dress with the stain spreading across the carpet toward her new shoes, and she stepped back from it, neatly, and looked at him for long enough to be sure.

Then she turned to the wall above the sofa.

It was pale, the expensive kind of cream that hotels paint their suites. There was a framed print on it, something abstract in blue. She took the print down and leaned it against the arm of the sofa.

She knelt beside him.

When she stood up again, her right hand was dark to the wrist.

She wrote on the wall in three words, in large uneven capitals. She did not hurry over them. She went back over the last letter of each word to make it darker. Then she went into the bathroom, and the tap ran for some time. ℴℴ𝗺

When she came out her hands were clean. She picked up her bag from the armchair. She looked once more round the suite, at the sofa, the man on the floor, the two glasses on the table, one with whiskey in it and one with wine, and the wall.

She let herself out. The door clicked shut behind her, and the corridor outside was empty.

---

At eleven, the Minister’s private secretary rang the hotel.

The Minister was not answering his phone, which was not unusual, but there had been a bombing, and the Taoiseach’s office had been trying to reach him for an hour. Did the hotel know whether he was in the building?

The desk rang the suite. Nobody picked up.

At quarter past, they rang again.

At half past, the duty manager went up with a member of hotel security. He knocked and called through the door. Then, after a long hesitation, and with the private secretary still on his mobile in his other hand, he used the master key.

He got two steps into the suite and stopped.

The security man behind him walked into his back.

"Oh, Jesus," said the duty manager. "Oh, Jesus Christ."

After that it happened very fast.

The security man was on his radio. The duty manager was saying *Minister* into his phone, *the Minister*, over and over, *it’s the Minister*, and the private secretary on the other end had started shouting. Within six minutes there were Gardaí in the corridor. Within fifteen there were detectives, and men in plain clothes who did not say what they were. Somebody had taped off the lift. Somewhere above all of it, phones were ringing in Government Buildings, and the word *Minister* was going up the chain, and then *murdered*, and then *tonight*. On the night of the square.

A detective inspector came in last.

He was in his late forties, in a raincoat over a suit, and he had been on the square for three hours before this. He still had concrete dust in the creases of his coat. He stood inside the door of the suite and looked at the man on the floor and the two glasses on the table, and then he lifted his eyes to the wall above the sofa.

The print had been taken down, and something had been written where it used to hang.

The letters were big and uneven and dark brown, already drying. They were written in the Minister’s blood, by somebody who had taken her time.

The detective read them, and the room went very quiet behind him.

**FOR THE KING**