Chapter 10
KHRISTOFER
The ghost table is what I’m watching when the night goes wrong, ten place settings for Ottavia Greco, paid, confirmed, and empty since the doors opened.
Nobody sits at it. Nobody clears it. The waiters have stopped offering it water, the way staff learn to stop seeing whatever the house wants unseen.
A table for ten sitting empty in the middle of the coast’s biggest evening, and three tables past it Sarto works his room in a mediocre dinner jacket, introducing a wine exporter to a football chairman, building his pipe one handshake at a time while I put faces to invented names.
Four of the eleven ghosts have shown so far, three gray men, one silver widow, all photographing beautifully, just as advertised.
The Greco chairs stay as empty as their donor.
I have been in this ballroom two hours and nine minutes. I have not looked at the press table by the kitchen doors. I know exactly where it is, which is how I know I haven’t looked at it, and if there’s a version of discipline more expensive than this one, Moscow never taught it to me.
Rurik’s voice arrives in my ear at five to ten, and I know before the words arrive, because he’s opened with my name.
“Khristofer. The press table’s empty.”
“Journalists move.”
“Her badge is logged into the building. Her seat’s been cold twenty minutes. Vitya walked the floor twice, she’s not on it.” A pause I can hear him deciding against softening. “And I just tried to raise my four men. They’re in the motor court. All four.”
I set down the glass I’ve been not drinking all night.
“Why,” I say, very quietly, “are they in the motor court?”
“Re-tasked at twenty to ten. Updated brief, came through the event logistics channel, proper format, proper codes. Moved them to cover your exit route.” Rurik’s voice has gone to the flat register he saves for the worst things. “I didn’t send it.”
The ballroom keeps glittering all around me, the tenor starting something from Tosca, and the whole gorgeous room goes thin as paper, because I’ve heard this shape before.
A protection order rerouted through the right channel with the right codes.
A breach comes from outside. This is a hand inside the glove.
“Service corridor,” I say. “Which one feeds the press table?”
“North. Behind the baize door. Khristofer, wait for...”
I don’t wait.
I go through the party the way I’ve learned to move through crowds, unhurried at the shoulders, very fast at the floor. Nobody screams, nobody stares, and by the time I reach the baize door Vitya is holding it open with his face arranged for a funeral.
The corridor is concrete, citrus, cold. Cable runs along the ceiling. Forty meters of nothing, a service elevator at the far end standing open like a pulled tooth, and on the polished floor halfway down, a phone, face up, screen gone to spiderweb.
I crouch over it without touching. The cracked glass is still live, glowing through its broken web. Eleven missed calls. The name on every one of them says ALESSIA.
There’s a notebook two meters further on, fallen open, pages fanned.
Neat handwriting, interrupted. The tenor lies fluently about his diet.
A grandmother’s towels. A note that says Greco, table of ten, no photograph.
And along the polished floor, one long scuff mark where a heel fought for purchase.
She kept her feet. Good girl. Keep your feet.
She was working. She was working right up until the corridor, my corridor, the one her seat backed onto, and something walked in through a door my men were pulled off of eight minutes before.
I stand there in the cold citrus air, and the room I keep behind my walls, the one holding my mother’s laugh, a folded chocolate wrapper, a green dress, blows its door off its hinges. Everything in it comes out at once.
“Get me the cameras,” I say to Vitya, so level it frightens him worse than shouting. “Every camera on this corridor, the ramp, the motor court. Now.”
Hotel security is two men in a room of monitors, and they begin, incredibly, to explain their privacy protocols to me, one of them actually reaching for a laminated card.
Rurik arrives behind me and puts a single sheet of paper on their desk.
Whatever’s on it reorganizes their evening, and then we’re watching the corridor in grainy gray, timestamped, thirteen minutes to ten.
She comes through the baize door alone. She puts her back to the wall. She stands there breathing, one hand coming up to rest low on her stomach, a small private gesture with nobody watching, and it goes into me deeper than anything else on the tape, gentle where the rest of this night is teeth.
Beside me Alessia makes a small sound, one syllable of something bitten off, and looks away from the screen for the only time all night. Whatever’s on that tape reaches her harder than the van does. I mark it with everything else I can’t read yet, and I leave it alone.
Then the far door. A man in catering black, no tray.
The second man behind her. Nine seconds.
She fights, and my hands become fists in a security office, watching a woman fight two professionals twenty minutes too late to matter.
She’s quick. She catches one with an elbow hard enough to stagger him, and it isn’t enough, it was never going to be enough.
The phone hits the floor, the doors close, the timestamp rolls one minute over, and the screen has nothing more to give.
“Van on the ramp camera,” Rurik says. “Gray, trade plates, the plates will be nothing. Hold on.” He runs it back, freezes, leans in.
“There. Rear quarter panel, resprayed, but the wheelbase and the roof rig, I know this van. It ran the Ostia route in the spring. It’s theirs, Khristofer. Pushkin’s transport pool.”
Of the three hundred people upstairs, half wear jewelry that could ransom a province. There’s a mayor, a tenor, eleven fake philanthropists with real enemies. And Stepan Pushkin’s van came for the press table, for a travel writer with a press badge and no last name of mine anywhere near her.
Except in a photograph, in a cloud, two months old.
They didn’t take a journalist. They took the woman standing next to me in the one frame I couldn’t burn fast enough.
Somebody pulled that frame before we cleaned the pool, or somebody stood in that club in July with their own eyes.
Either way they’ve done their reading, and their reading says she matters to me.
Their reading is better than mine. I’ve spent two months calling her a closed door.
“Sarto’s still at his table,” Rurik says, reading me the way he reads everything, early. “Say the word.”
“No word. He stays fat and happy through dessert.” Saying it takes something out of me. The correct calls usually do. “Sarto’s a broker, he books rooms, he doesn’t ride in vans. The second Pushkin thinks tonight blew the wash, they move her farther and faster. Let the pipe believe it’s winning.”
“And the men on the re-task order?”
“Who signed it?”
“The event desk. The signature chain checks out top to bottom.” A beat. “Which is the problem.”
“Tomorrow’s problem. Tonight has one job.”
“Boss.” Vitya, at the security office door. “There’s a woman demanding entry. She’s threatened the night manager, two of my men, and Italy.”
Alessia comes through the door with the force of the complaint she is, event blacks, earpiece still in. She takes in the monitors, the frozen frame of the van, Rurik, me, and I watch her do the reading her friend would be proud of, fast, correct, unintimidated.
“You,” she says to me. “The corner cabana. July. The one who cleared the footage.” So much for the advance man’s discretion. “Where is she? What did you people pull her into?”
“Miss di Mauro...”
“Her phone is evidence, put it down.” She doesn’t stop moving, she’s reading the timestamp, the ramp, building her own timeline, and her voice stays a commander’s voice while her hands start to shake.
“I called her eleven times. I was standing sixty meters away pouring prosecco for a tenor while somebody carried her out of my hotel. Mine.” She rounds on me. “What is she to you?”
Rurik glances at me. Vitya finds a monitor to study. And I discover that every answer I own is either a lie or a confession, because civilian, one night, nothing, closed door, all of it burned up on that corridor camera with her hand resting low on her stomach and my men nine minutes gone.
“Mine to get back,” I say.
Alessia stares at me for a long moment, this small furious woman who guards her people like a border dispute. Then she pulls out a chair, sits, and produces from her bag a hardback notebook.
“Then you’ll want this. From the top. A man named Dario, the promoter from the Lido, has been asking my staff about her for two weeks.
Her schedule, her room, press arrival times.
” She opens the book to a page of tidy furious entries.
“Every question, dated. He lost his category tonight at nine and left the floor. Start with him.”
Rurik photographs the pages without being asked. “Ballroom cameras,” he tells Vitya. “Find the promoter.”
While they work I pick up the cracked phone from the evidence sleeve Vitya bagged it in, and I put it in my breast pocket, still lit, still hers. Alessia sees it happen, weighs it, and decides, visibly, to allow it. It’s the first time tonight she’s allowed anyone anything.
It takes four minutes. Dario, timestamped through the whole window, sulking at the bar in his shawl collar from a quarter past nine, ordering something amber three minutes before the grab, holding court with two yachting men while the van doors closed.
Alibied by his own vanity, on camera, the entire time.
A pest, not a player. The book was right to exist and right to be boring about him.
“The compound,” Rurik says quietly, already moving on before the last decision cools.
“If that van still runs Ostia logistics, the near hold is the old fish plant north of Salerno. Water access, one road, they’ve used it for transit before.
If they’re moving her toward Spain, it’s tonight, from there. ”
“Then we’re there first.”
“We’re eight men on a party footing. The plant will hold twelve, and it’s a trap the moment they hear a boat.” He says it because saying it is his job. He’s already texting because knowing me is also his job.
Alessia stands. “I’m coming.”
“No,” Rurik and I say together.
“Then I’ll follow in my own car, badly, with my lights on.
” She plants herself in front of me, five foot eight of hotel management against everything I am, and doesn’t blink.
“Listen to me. That woman is the best thing this coast has produced in my lifetime.
She has people, she is loved, she is not some loose thread you people get to cut off a hem.
“Whatever she is to you, mine-to-get-back, fine, I’ll take it, it’s the first honest thing anyone’s said in this room.
But you’ll bring her to me when you have her, wherever you’re hiding her after, or I promise you, this book goes to every newspaper on the coast, and I’ll make your war very, very famous. ”
The room waits to see what I do to her.
What I do is look at this woman who logs insects, pours the wine, answers eleven rings too late, who is offering to fight me with a notebook, and think that Naomi Vale built herself a family out of the very people I’d want in a foxhole.
“You’ll be the first call,” I tell her. “You have my word, for whatever you’ve heard my word is worth.”
“I’ve heard nothing about you at all,” Alessia says. “That’s what frightens me.”
We’re moving then, down through the motor court where my four men stand exactly where somebody’s borrowed codes put them, and Rurik is turning the night over the whole way down.
Two cars. Matvei with the long case. The event channel compromised, which means our own logistics, which means a conversation with a shape I don’t like.
It can’t happen tonight, so I set it aside for a colder hour and take out the only thought with any use in it.
She fought. Nine seconds, two professionals, and she made one of them grunt. She kept her feet as long as physics allowed. Wherever that van is on this coast, whatever it thinks it’s carrying, it’s carrying more than it knows.
In the car Matvei checks the long case twice and says nothing, nineteen years old, learning what the jacket weighs on nights like this.
Rurik runs the plant from memory, one road in, loading ramp on the water side, catwalks over the old salting floor.
Six men go in. Two hold the cars. Nobody shoots anywhere near anything until we know which room breathes.
“Route,” Rurik says from the front, and hands me his phone with the map already lit.
The old fish plant, north of Salerno. One road in. Water at its back.
“Drive,” I say. “And Rurik. Every man hears this before we’re out of the gates. She comes home breathing, or this coast learns what I was like before I got polite. Find her alive, or burn every route the rival owns.”
The gates open. The party glitters on above us, oblivious, a tenor, and somewhere north of Salerno a van is driving through the dark with the only door I never meant to build.
Against my chest, through the breast pocket, her cracked phone buzzes once. I take it out. The broken web lights up over a message it will never deliver. Bianca.
The gold dress won. You promised me a photo of you IN the party, darling. Eat something.
I put the phone away. Somewhere ahead of us in the dark, a van full of trained men thinks it took a journalist.
We drive faster than the van can.