Chapter 17
KHRISTOFER
We leave Ravello at seven, three cars, and the argument about seating happens before she’s finished her tea.
“You’re driving?” Rurik asks me, in the courtyard, in the tone that means the answer already offends him. “We have drivers. We pay them for their reflexes.”
“I’m driving.”
“You’re the principal. The principal rides in the middle car with his hands free.”
“The principal owns the cars.” I take the keys off the hook myself. That’s settled arguments between us since we were fifteen. “You’ll be behind me. Matvei went north with the advance team last night, the house is swept, the route is yours. Plan it with stops.”
That gets me the eyebrow, full elevation. “Stops. Eight hundred kilometers through country I haven’t scrubbed, and you want to pull over to admire it.”
“Every ninety minutes. Somewhere public, somewhere ordinary.” I don’t explain it, because the explanation is one floor up buttoning a linen jacket, and it’s hers to give him, not mine. “Humor me.”
“I’ve been humoring you since the gate log.” He looks at me a moment longer than the logistics require. “You’ve changed a setting somewhere, Khristofer. I can hear it in the engine.”
“Route, Rurik.”
He goes. Alessia is next, at the foot of the steps with her crates already loaded in the Fiat, going south when we go north, back to the Serafina, her linen empire, and unhappy about it in a way she’d deny under torture.
“Feed her every three hours whether she asks or not,” she tells me. “She forgets when she’s working. She’ll tell you she ate.”
“I’ll be personally reviewing the kitchen.”
“And the pillows on the lake will be wrong. Estate pillows are always wrong, nobody fires a housekeeper over pillows, so nobody learns.” She snaps the Fiat’s door open, then stops, and delivers the rest straight up at my collarbone.
“She has my number and a promise, sir. If that lake of yours swallows her, I’ll come north with more than groceries. ”
“Ma’am. If the lake swallows her, I’ll drain it.”
She drives off mid-nod, business concluded.
I stand in the courtyard one more minute with the phone, one call, the hospitality group’s regional man, four sentences.
The Miralago runs shorthanded every season, the season starts now, there’s an events manager on the coast they should be recruiting, no name goes on the recommendation.
Some problems you solve with weapons. Some you solve with staffing.
Naomi comes down, one folder, healing wrists, and gets into my car like it’s a taxi she has doubts about.
“Three cars,” she says, as the gates open. “For one journalist.”
“Two of them are for the journalist’s opinion of the third.”
The first laugh of the drive, surprised out of her before Amalfi. I collect it without comment, like the others, and point us north.
She works for the first two hours, the folder open on her knees, the coast feature growing its last thousand words in the margins in pencil.
I watch the road, listen to the pencil, and find the arrangement close to unbearable in a way I have no history with.
War I can do at any hour. A quiet car with a working woman in it turns out to be new equipment.
It doesn’t help that November sun through a windshield lights the loose hairs at her temple gold, or that she chews the pencil when a sentence fights back, mouth soft around it, unaware, while I invent reasons to check the mirrors. Grown man, two wars running, undone by a pencil.
At the first stop, a motorway service stop outside Caserta, my men learn what she is.
She’s supposed to stay in the car. She’s inside in four minutes, at the counter, ordering something involving pistachio for herself and espressos for both her guards by name.
I employ the names. She knows them. Six armed men drink coffee around her in a ring, pretending to be strangers.
The barista flirts with her, and she lets him down so gently he looks promoted.
“You were supposed to stay in the car,” I say, when she’s back in it.
“Lev said stops. A stop is a noun. It has contents.” She hands me, of all things, a coffee. “The taller one hasn’t eaten since Ravello and was pretending that’s fine. Drink that before it’s a noun too.”
I drink it. Rurik’s voice comes through the earpiece, dry as the Caserta lot. “The principal’s perimeter is drinking pistachio. Noted for the log.”
Somewhere past Rome she closes the folder and starts on me instead.
“Tell me about the house. If I’m going to live in it, I want the brochure.”
“Nineteen rooms. Staff of eleven, vetted twice. The lake at the bottom of the lawn, mountains behind, one road in.”
“That’s a threat assessment. I asked for a brochure.”
I think about it. “There’s a library nobody’s read, a kitchen older than the unification, and a housekeeper who’ll decide about you in her own time regardless of anything I say.
The tomatoes are from the garden. The wine cellar is wasted on me.
In the mornings the lake steams like a bath somebody ran and forgot. ”
Silence from the passenger seat. When I glance over she’s watching me instead of the road.
“What?”
“You love it,” she says, with open delight, like she’s caught me shoplifting. “The warlord has a favorite house.”
“I have a defensible house.”
“Nineteen rooms. I want the one with a desk and a wooden door that closes. I’m done being kept behind steel.”
“Done,” I say. The desk in the study nobody uses has the best light on the water. I’ll have it moved tonight and never mention which room it was.
North of Milan the country changes, flat gives way to the first blue suggestion of mountains.
She puts the pencil down and starts watching the water signs.
Lecco. Como. Bellagio. I watch her read them and want, with a force that embarrasses me, for her to like it.
I’ve owned the estate nine years and this is the first time I’ve wanted it to like someone back.
Rurik’s voice arrives flat in my ear on the lake road, and flat from Rurik is a fire alarm.
“Gray Audi, three back. He’s held that gap through two roundabouts and a tractor. Professional spacing.”
I look once in the mirror. There, patient, half hidden behind a delivery van, exactly where I’d be if I were him. Something in me goes over to the old settings, quiet, wide, slow. My hands come down the wheel to nine and three.
“Confirm not ours.”
“Not ours. Not police. Copy the plate, it’s a Lugano rental gone dark two days ago.” A beat. “Instructions.”
Nothing at speed unless someone’s shooting, Lev said, in my own study, with his glasses off. I run the sentence once and rule on it. A professional tail on a lake road with one way in is the sentence before shooting.
“Naomi.” She looks over, reads my face, and her whole body changes registers, the ballroom stillness, the fish-plant economy.
God help me, she’s better at this than half the men on my gates.
“Hand on the grab handle. Feet flat. There’s a car following us, and in about forty seconds he’s going to find out whose road this is. ”
“How well do you know it?”
“I’ve driven this road nine years.” I let the van between us drift ahead. “He’s had it two days.”
“Then don’t be gentle on my account.” Her hand closes on the handle, knuckles already going pale. “Go.”
I take the old funicular underpass at Blevio, the one the commune closed to through traffic three summers ago, chained on the south end.
The chain is down because Matvei’s advance team swept the route at dawn with orders to leave every door I might need open.
Stone wall on the left, drop to the water on the right, one car wide, and the Audi can’t follow without confessing what he is.
He confesses. He commits to the underpass.
Behind him Rurik’s second car arrives across the mouth of it like a delivery truck with bad timing, and mine is already gone, up two switchbacks the map thinks are private driveways, out onto the high road with the lake laid out below us, my heart running clean, slow, the way it only runs when something is finally simple.
Four minutes, gate to gate. She doesn’t scream once. I look over at the second switchback. She’s white-knuckled, furious, watching the mirrors like crew, calling the gap for me. “He’s off. There’s a truck across the tunnel, your man’s out of it walking back. Nobody behind us.”
“You’re reading my mirrors.”
“Somebody in this car should be reading something that isn’t the scenery.” Her voice has a shake under it, fury riding on top, and under both, unmistakable, a thrill she’d deny to a tribunal. “Was that necessary?”
“The tunnel? No. There were three softer ways.” I let the truth out plainly, because she collects it. “The tunnel was the one where the wall stayed on my side of the car.”
She doesn’t answer that. Her hand comes off the grab handle one finger at a time. She looks at the lake for a kilometer, and when she speaks again the shake is gone. “Find out who rented the Audi.”
“My second is already unhappy about it in three languages.”
Rurik’s report catches up with us before the gates do.
The car sat empty when the follow team opened it, plates gone, rental papers gone, wiped to the door handles.
A professional who walked into the hills rather than answer questions, which tells me the employer buys silence in bulk.
Stepan has been quiet since the fish plant burned.
Quiet was never going to be the end of it.
Then the gates, the estate, and I watch her meet the place I’ve never shown anyone I wasn’t ordered to.
The house sits back from the water behind a hundred meters of lawn, pale stone gone gold at the edges of the afternoon, three floors of shutters the green of old bottles.
The lake is everywhere before you can see it, a dampness in the air, cool on the back of the neck, cut grass and cedar underneath it.