Chapter Twelve
We ate and took the Sardinian version of a siesta, waking only when the sun was dropping behind the mountains. I joined Mary Alice on the porch to watch the long purple shadows stretch over the landscape, the edges of the mountains turning a softly smudged violet. In the distance, a plume of dust powdered the air in the wake of an approaching car.
“Akiko,” I told her.
She cut her eyes around at me. “Can we trust the driver?”
I nodded. “He’s the son of the man who owns this house.”
She lifted a brow like she had a fishhook in it. “You don’t own it? Sloppy.” I didn’t take offense. Owning a safe house outright was the only guarantee of it being completely secure.
“I’d trust Bernardu with my life. And yours.”
“Bernardu?”
“He’s a shepherd. The sheep you saw coming in belong to him.”
“And how did you meet a Sardinian shepherd?” she asked.
“Where else? On the job,” I answered with a shrug. “The target was a judge who was taking a shit-ton of money to let the Sicilian mafia get a foothold on the island. Sardinians don’t take kindly to that.”
“They don’t have mafia here?”
“Nope. They are suspicious of strangers and they’re just as likely to shoot you as invite you in for coffee. But they steer well clear of anything like the Cosa Nostra. It was my bad luck that when I took out the judge, I got clipped by a shot from one of his bodyguards before I finished him off. I couldn’t make it to the pickup on the coast.” For jobs like that one—sensitive and high-profile—we often avoided airports and large port cities. Sardinia’s coastline offered a few thousand miles of quiet coastline to hitch a ride to Barcelona or Rome, Monaco or Tunis, or any one of a hundred other destinations. But the pickups were tightly arranged and if you missed one, you were on your own. The presumption was that something had gone badly wrong, and it was up to you to find your own way out.
I went on. “I found this house and holed up here because it was deserted. Bernardu’s mother had lived here until her death and he hadn’t gotten around to clearing out her stuff yet.”
“I noticed the wallpaper,” Mary Alice said with a shudder. There was a fashion among the younger Sardinians for gutting the old stone farmhouses that dotted the countryside and finishing them with fresh plaster walls and limestone counters. They kept the stone fireplaces and brought in sofas upholstered in natural duck and scattered goatskin rugs on the chestnut floors and hung copper pots in the kitchen. They pruned the olive trees and shaped the rosemary bushes and made everything tidy until the results were worthy of the cover of Architectural Digest.
This farmhouse…wasn’t. When I had crawled in, bleeding and delirious, it was like falling into a time warp. The house had been wallpapered—probably in the 1950s—in an eye-watering pattern of red and yellow flowers. There was a brown carpet on the floor that smelled like goat, and the refrigerator growled like it needed an exorcism. The towels were more flowers, pink and orange this time, but I hadn’t cared. They’d sopped up the blood I’d left puddled around. Bernardu followed the trail of gore to the bathroom where he found me slumped on the green tiles and unconscious with fever. He’d cut the bullet out and stitched the wound back together before I came to, for which we were both grateful.
“How did he know how to do that?” Mary Alice asked.
“Sardinian shepherds are surprisingly resourceful,” I told her. “He said once you’ve performed a caesarean on a sheep, most things are pretty straightforward. Anyway, he’d heard the news about the judge being shot in Cagliari and put two and two together. They don’t get many visitors out here.”
“You don’t say,” she put in dryly.
“Don’t talk shit about this place, Mary Alice,” I warned her. “It may not be the Ritz, but once a Sardinian decides to trust you, they’ll kill for you.”
She flapped a hand, turning her gaze once more to the approaching car. “Sorry.”
She was testy, but I didn’t need to ask why. This was the first time since our last mission that Akiko’s tolerance for what we did was being tested. It had been a sore point with her that she’d found out Mary Alice’s occupation after they got married— way after, and under challenging circumstances. She’d been a trooper, but I figured Mary Alice was worried about pushing her luck.
“How did she sound on the phone?” I asked, nodding towards the car.
“Stressed,” she said in a clipped voice. “I just hope—”
She broke off and I nudged her with my elbow. “The driver of her car is Micheli, Bernardu’s youngest. He’s a good kid—he’ll make sure they weren’t followed.”
I’d made the safe house arrangements with Bernardu before I’d left Sardinia, six weeks after I’d arrived and twenty pounds lighter. Turns out an infection in the bone is a good way to earn yourself a vacation. I’d had nothing better to do than sit around and learn Sard from Bernardu’s hundred-year-old uncle. I’d taught him poker and we’d played for bullets. He had cleaned me out a dozen times over, but in the process I had become a member of the family, and when I’d asked Bernardu if I could rent his mother’s house, he’d happily agreed. He had arranged the purchase of the car I had left behind the port terminal, and we’d covered every angle of my arrival if I ever called him with the code phrase I’d written down for him. He’d been true to his word. The house was clean, the car had been full of gas, and Micheli and his taxi had been on hand to pick up Akiko from the airport. Bernardu’s wife, Filumena, had even filled the demonic refrigerator with food. I would have worried about imposing on them except I knew how much Filumena loved to cook and how desperately Micheli loved James Bond movies. He drove his taxi like it was an Aston Martin, and when he pulled in to the farmhouse, he performed an elegant handbrake stop that threw Akiko into the dashboard. She opened the door and staggered out, cat carriers in hand.
Mary Alice was watching her warily, chewing on her lower lip. She stepped forwards. “I’m so sorry,” she began.
She might have saved her breath.
Akiko threw her arms wide, causing the cats to screech. “Let’s get this murder reunion started!”
“Jesus, Akiko,” I said, coming to help her with the carriers. “That’s not exactly discreet.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Oh, you mean Micheli? No worries. He’s been talking my ear off for the last two hours about how cool he thinks we assassins are.”
“We?” Mary Alice asked her in a strangled voice.
Akiko gave her a level look. “Yes, Mary Alice. You are an assassin. I married you. By the transitive property, I too am an assassin.”
I started to protest, “That’s not how—” but Mary Alice cut me off with a sharp shake of the head.
“I’m just glad you’re here safe,” she said.
Micheli grabbed Akiko’s backpack and tossed it onto the porch. “Adiosu,” he called. I waved and he pulled a few doughnuts, showering us with gravel and dust before he peeled out of the farmyard.
I shouldered Akiko’s backpack and jerked my thumb towards the house. “Come inside and eat. We have a lot to talk about.”
—
Two hours later, we were stuffed again, this time with more of Taverner’s bread and roast lamb and a dozen other things like olives and roasted peppers and little goat cheese tarts. Natalie was busy topping up everybody’s wine and Mary Alice was mooning over Akiko, choosing the fattest, crispest pastry for her. The cats had been let out of their carriers to roam around, and they had immediately started a mouse hunt. They were diving under rugs and behind furniture to pounce, emerging triumphant almost every time. They busied themselves lining up the tiny corpses in front of the stove.
Taverner shoved a platter of pastries drizzled in honey under my nose and I looked up in surprise. “Where did you get these?”
“Filumena brought them.”
I stared. “You met Filumena?”
“Oh yeah. She was opening up the house when I arrived. I gave her some of my sourdough starter and she brought up the sweets. It’s her own honey. Did you know she keeps bees?”
I shook my head. After all these years, I still hadn’t quite grasped Taverner’s ability to make friends wherever he went—especially if food was involved. He was a nurturer which didn’t make much sense in an assassin. I’d asked him about it during our first trip together. Romantic relationships in the Museum weren’t forbidden, but they did call your judgment into question, particularly if you were a woman. It was easier to keep our affair under wraps and Taverner had been willing to oblige. I never did know how Constance Halliday found out about us, because nobody else ever knew until I told Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie. We’d met for almost a decade in out-of-the-way places, campsites or resorts well off the beaten path. The isolation meant we saw a hundred sunrises in places most other people only read about in National Geographic . It also meant there was nowhere to go when conversations got real, so the trips usually ended in a fight with one of us storming off to the nearest train station or airport. That first vacation had been one of the better ones—a rafting excursion in Costa Rica where Taverner did all the cooking from whatever he found each day in the local market. He’d been late back because one of the market grannies had been teaching him how to pat out the perfect tortilla. Over a plate of beans and rice and roasted redfish, I asked him about the urge to feed people. “It’s a contradiction to what you do for a living,” I’d pointed out. He’d cocked his head to the side and finished a bite of fish before answering.
“It’s not a contradiction,” he had countered. “It’s an affirmation. Food is life.” He’d paused to grin. “So is sex.”
I knew he was remembering that conversation as he passed me one of Filumena’s pastries. We had known each other for almost forty years, but we’d broken things off for nearly thirty of those when he chose marriage and I chose the job. I don’t talk shit about his wife. The truth is, I almost never think of her. She gave him exactly what he wanted—the white picket fence, a couple of kids—but she was unlucky enough to die before she got to grow old with him. I looked at his silver hair, at the lines on the face I’d loved more than half my life, and I made a mental note to send flowers to her grave. It wasn’t fair that she’d had to leave the show without taking a bow, but nothing about life was fair.
Just as Taverner was passing a platter of sliced fruits along with some strong Sardinian cheese, Micheli turned up with another arrival. She burst into the room like a breath of fresh Kievan air, dropping her bag and hurling herself at me with all the force of a small atom bomb. Minka.
“Billie!” She started chattering in Ukrainian and I hugged her back hard, mostly to shut her up. She felt a little thin, and when she pulled back, I saw that her face had matured. Her jawline was sharper, and I could have sliced the Sardinian cheese on those cheekbones.
“How have you been, kid?”
She peered at me. “Better than you. Nobody tries to kill me. How do you like my hair?”
She preened, showing off the fresh piercing in her philtrum and her new haircut—she’d buzzed it short on the sides and dyed the long Mohawk in a cherry ombre effect.
“It’s cute,” I told her honestly. “Hungry?”
“Starving! The flight didn’t have a vegan option,” she said. That was a new development. Half-Ukrainian and half-Polish, the Minka of old could demolish a pork roast in no time flat. New Minka was a tofu queen.
She made the rounds then, hugging everyone else until we settled back around the table. Taverner fixed her a plate of roasted vegetables and bread as she scooped up the smaller cat.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Gary,” Mary Alice told her.
“He is very small,” Minka observed. She was the only person I knew who actually pronounced it like the meme. Smol. Gary settled down onto her lap, cuddling up in her sweater. Akiko reached out to pinch the fabric of it between her fingers.
“This is interesting. Cashmere?”
“Seaweed,” Minka said, digging a fork into the plate Taverner passed her. “Knitted on a 3D printer. Very eco-friendly, see?” She turned back the sleeve to show the zero-waste seams. “I am all about the environment now.”
I decided not to mention the fact that flying around the world to follow a band on tour might damage her eco-warrior street cred.
Now that we were all safe, I allowed myself a minute to be good and pissed. I didn’t know if Naomi had lied or just made a mistake in the briefing about Lazarov’s lack of attachments, but it was a whopper of a screwup—the kind that can get you killed. I breathed in deeply, all the way to the bottom of my belly, and blew it out as slowly as I could. The anger was justified, but I knew how dangerous it was to let fury take over. I had learned a bit of pranayama could be helpful in these situations, so I focused on my breathing until the heat passed. The others chatted about a lot of nothing, the good kind of nothing. The nothing that had filled our days since the last mission and kept us all alive. If I’m honest, that kind of nothing had been giving me a little itch, just a small feeling of restlessness between my shoulder blades. Greece is gorgeous, don’t get me wrong. I lived on an island straight out of Homer, all wine-dark sea and herb-scented hills. The sunsets were the kind that made you believe in the chariot of the gods, winging its way in an arc across the sky. And I had someone to share it with—someone who loved me to my bones and liked to cook. I should have been completely happy.
But as I sat in the safe house, looking around that table at the people I cared most for in the world, trying to figure out who wanted to kill us, I realized that there are some jobs you leave, but they never leave you. I was playing at being retired because the truth was, I would be a killer until the day I died.