Chapter 16
Angela
I made a note in the black leather book. Krol — still signing. Same hand.
The book was getting full. Pietro had bought it for me in a bookshop in River North a lifetime ago. I had not let myself think about how few pages were left.
Behind me, the carriage house was doing its morning.
Tonio was at the stove with the moka and a pan of something that smelled like onions softening in butter.
Olimpo was a heavy warm presence at my feet — he had decided, sometime around six a.m., that I was his shift assignment and had not moved.
Sal had come through twenty minutes ago, said nothing, set a small espresso cup on the corner of the desk away from the keyboard, kissed the crown of my head with a formality that felt Sicilian and almost paternal, and gone out again.
The bruise at his jaw was the color of an old plum now. He had not mentioned it. Neither had I.
Marco had been good to his word. By midnight last night the workstation had three banking feeds I should not have had access to, a redacted DOJ filing I definitely should not have had access to, and a clean pipe into a forensic accounting service whose subscription cost more than my annual salary had at Halberd.
I had cried, briefly, when I saw it. Then I had sat down and started working and had not really stood up since.
It was close. I could feel it the way I used to feel a problem closing — a tightening in the chest, a quiet narrowing of the field.
One or two more correspondent banks. One more routing pattern.
There would be an account somewhere with Enzo Valenti’s tax identifier on it, or his son’s, or a vehicle so clearly his that nobody in the room would argue.
I had been doing this since seven. It was just past ten now. I could have it by lunch.
A hand came down on my shoulder. I knew the weight before I knew the hand.
“Eat something, baby,” Pietro said, low, near my ear.
He set a plate on the corner of the desk Sal had used for the espresso. Bread, soft cheese, slices of pear, a few olives.
“I’m close,” I said.
“All the more reason to eat!”
I turned in the chair. He was in a soft grey crewneck and the dark jeans he wore when he was at home and not expecting to leave.
There was a faint shadow at his jaw from not shaving.
His hair was pushed back from his face. He had not slept much.
Neither had I. We had spent most of the night on opposite sides of the workstation, him quiet in the armchair under the lamp with a book he was not reading, watching me work.
“Two more banks,” I said. “Maybe three. I think there’s a tax ID at the end of it.”
“I believe in you.” He bent and kissed the top of my head, the same place Sal had kissed, but the kiss was not the same kiss at all. “But still, eat.”
I ate. He stayed at my shoulder, one hand at the back of my neck under my hair, his thumb moving in a slow absent circle on the knob of bone at the top of my spine.
The piece of pear was perfectly ripe. I had not had a piece of fruit that ripe in two years.
I tried not to think about that and ate another one.
Across the room, Tonio was singing under his breath in Italian—something off-key and pop and embarrassing.
Olimpo sighed against my ankle. Outside, the courtyard was bright with the hard winter sun that came after a snow, and someone—Tonio, presumably—had cleared the path to the gate at six this morning, because I had heard the scrape of the shovel through my dreams.
I had a family. I had a man. I had work that was mine. I was sitting in a house with three armed men on the perimeter and a fourth somewhere downtown coordinating a fifth, and the only thing required of me was the thing I was good at.
I was safe.
I had not had the word in my mouth in twenty-four months. It tasted strange. It tasted like the pear.
Pietro’s thumb stilled on my neck. “What.”
“Nothing.” I tipped my head back against his hand. “I was just—nothing.”
He smiled. “I’ll leave you to it. But please, eat.”
Three more pages of the Channel Islands trust. The third beneficiary’s name.
The line through to the next correspondent bank, which was—I tapped through, held my breath—in Malta.
Of course it was in Malta. Krol was in Malta.
The signature woman lived three blocks from a bank that fed the trust that fed the Zurich account that fed Northbridge that paid the men in the motel on Mannheim Road.
I reached for the keyboard to pull the Maltese bank’s correspondent file.
My phone buzzed against the desk.
I looked at it. The screen was lit with a number I did not know. A 312 area code. Chicago. No name attached.
“Hello?”
The line was open but for a moment nobody spoke. I heard the inside of a room. A small room. Hard surfaces. Breath that was not mine.
Then a voice.
“Miss Anna.”
I closed my eyes.
There was only one person alive who had ever called me Miss Anna. He had said it like a courtesy, like he was tipping a hat he did not own.
“Wendell. Are you ok?”
“Miss Anna, I’m sorry.” His voice was high and tight and old.
He sounded like a man holding something heavy that he was not strong enough to hold.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t—they came up on me at the bench.
I didn’t have time to—they took my coat and they got the paper out of the pocket. I’m so sorry, Miss Anna, I’m so sorry.”
“Wendell. Where are you?”
“I don’t — I don’t know, I’m in a — “
The phone moved. I heard it move—the small particular sound of a handset being lifted out of an old man’s hand by someone who was not going to ask permission.
A new voice came on the line.
“Madame Ancelotti.” My blood ran cold. She was using my WITSEC name.
French accent. Soft. The kind of softness that was a choice, not a quality.
I did not answer.
“You may call me whatever you like,” the voice said. “It does not matter. I would like you to listen, please, for one minute, and then we will be finished.”
Across the room Pietro was still at the stove with Tonio.
Tonio was laughing about something. Olimpo had gone over to investigate the smell of the pan and was being told, in Italian, that he was a terrible dog and a worse friend.
I held the phone very tightly against my ear and I did not move and I did not speak.
“You will go to an address I am about to give you,” the voice said.
“You will arrive in one hour. You will come on foot from the south. You will be alone. You will not bring a phone. You will not bring a weapon. You will not bring the Sicilian. You will not bring any of his cousins. You will not bring the Caruso brothers. You will not tell them where you have gone. If any of these conditions are not met — if I see one of them on a corner, if I see a car from the family on a side street, if I hear a helicopter, if the old man’s name appears in a single telephone call from your apartment in the next sixty minutes — then I will shoot Mr. Wendell Pierce in the head, and you will hear it on a recording I will send to this number, and then I will leave Chicago, and the next contract on you life will be cheaper because we will not worry about hurting you. Do you understand me, Madame.”
I had not known Wendell’s surname.
It was the thing my mind seized on, stupidly, the small flat horror of it—that this stranger knew Wendell’s surname and I did not.
“Madame. Do you understand me.”
“Yes.”
“Repeat back to me the conditions, please.”
“One hour. South on foot. No phone. No weapon. No one from the family. No call from the apartment. I understand.”
“Very good.” He sounded mildly pleased, the way a teacher sounds when a slow student has finally produced the correct sum. “The address is as follows.”
He gave me an address. South Side. A street I did not know.
“Mr. Pierce would like to say something else to you,” the voice said. “I am giving him the phone for ten seconds. Please do not waste them.”
The phone moved again.
“Miss Anna.” Wendell. Very small. “Don’t come, Miss Anna. Don’t — “
The phone moved a third time.
“Sixty minutes from now,” the voice said. “I will be timing from this moment. Goodbye, Madame Ancelotti.”
The line went dead.
I sat with the phone against my ear for another second after it ended.
The screen had already gone dark. The dial tone that I had been half-expecting did not come; phones did not do that anymore.
There was only the quiet of a closed line and the quiet of the room and, somewhere behind both, my own pulse, doing something very fast in the side of my neck.
I lowered the phone. I set it down, face up, on the corner of the desk next to the half-eaten pear and the espresso cup Sal had left.
Across the room Tonio said something to Pietro and Pietro answered, in Italian, in the slow patient register he used for conversations with his cousin that he was not really paying attention to. He had not looked over at me. Neither of them had. The phone call had taken less than ninety seconds.
The analyst in my head came online the way she always did, the way she had at Halberd, the way she had in the courtroom, the way she had at three a.m. in a Greyhound station in Indianapolis when a man two benches over had reached into a duffel bag and I had not yet decided whether to run.
This is a trap.
This is obviously a trap.
I stood up and the chair pushed back two inches on the wood floor and Olimpo, who had returned from his pan investigation, lifted his head and looked at me with mild dog-curiosity and then put his head back down.
Nobody else turned.
Walk across the room, the analyst said. Walk across the room right now. Pietro is six meters away. Six meters. Walk.
I walked two meters and then I stopped.
I stopped at the edge of the rug, where the work end of the room gave over to the kitchen end, and I stood there in my socks with my hands at my sides and I did the worst thing I had ever done. I thought about it.