Chapter 6
The bus drove off, puffing out a cloud of fog in its wake. Emily watched it go, then reluctantly glanced at her companion.
Sabato had looked bizarre enough on a bus. On the side of the road at The Elephant, he looked positively out of place.
“You do that every day?” He asked, his tone laced with something Emily didn’t understand.
She blinked up at him and then nodded.
“There is not a faster way to get to the hotel?”
She bit down on her lip and turned towards her home. She started walking and he fell in beside her. “There’s the tube, but I hate it.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Being underground.
And all those people. I like to be able to see. To breathe. To read my book and look out at the city scape.”
His look was scathing. “That took an hour and seventeen minutes.”
“Swiss precision?” She asked, only half-joking. His watch, she knew, was some kind of Rolex.
“Why are you acting as though this doesn’t matter?”
“I’m not saying it’s not annoying,” she responded finally, letting her flippant tone drop. “But it’s not your business.”
He compressed his lips. “You work for me.”
“I work for someone who works for someone who works for someone who works for you. I think.”
He stopped walking, and his dark eyes bore into hers. “Emily …” It was a plaintive sound of frustration.
Emily lifted her chin. “What?”
“This is where you live?” He looked around the area, a few blocks from where the bus had deposited them. It was, admittedly, not the best street, but the rent was cheap and she knew enough of her neighbours to always feel safe.
“What’s wrong with it?” She challenged.
Sabato breathed out loudly and then shook his head. “Let us see.” He waved his hand down the street and commanded, “Lead the way, Emily.”
Emily wondered, later, why she had done as he said. She would have been within her rights to refuse him. Only saying ‘no’ to Sabato wasn’t something that came easily to her. And so she nodded tersely and resumed the well-worn journey to the one-time council flats she called home.
She paused at the door, waiting for Sabato to say something. But his face was thick with thunderclouds. She pulled her keys out of her bag and searched for the security access. Sabato’s angry presence was unnerving though, and her fingers weren’t steady. His silence only added to her stretched nerves. Finally, she clasped her fingers around the brass key and inserted it into the door. It opened with a good heave.
“The building repairman has been meaning to look at that for a while,” she murmured, annoyed that her voice sounded apologetic.
Sabato was a silent figure. He walked beside her, emanating disapproval as they passed overflowing mailboxes and proceeded down a hallway that was illuminated only intermittently, owing to a flickering fluorescent light tube.
She pressed the button for the lift and avoided meeting his eyes. When the doors opened, she went to step in, but his arm crossed against her body. “Is it safe?”
He was only half joking. If the building maintenance was so lax as to leave a door almost immovable and a light bulb unchanged, how regularly was the lift tended to?
Emily smiled at him with false sweetness. “Maybe it isn’t. Perhaps we should say goodbye here.”
He cast her a dark look and then released her, following her into the confines of the elevator.
In the small space, Emily was much more aware of him. Dangerously so. She swallowed past the lump in her throat and stared straight ahead. It was the first time she’d noticed the slight smell of urine in the cramped quarters. Sometimes, vagrants entered the lobby and sheltered in the apartment’s foyer.