Chapter 17
Pietro
The pear on her plate had started to brown.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not consciously.
I tried to remember when she had stood up.
She had kissed the side of my jaw and said bathroom, then more coffee.
I had said that’s my girl. The exchange had been so small and so domestic that I had not registered it as a data point.
I had registered it as weather. Sun on a window. Tonio singing badly in the kitchen.
The first prickle came up the back of my neck. Not alarm. Something quieter than alarm. The recognition a body gave a room that had changed shape while it was not looking.
“Angela?”
I said it the way I had said her name a hundred times in the last week—light, easy, the inflection of a man calling across his own home.
Nothing answered.
Tonio looked up from the stove. He had a wooden spoon in one hand and a striped dish towel over his shoulder. He gave me the look he had been giving me all morning, the small affectionate look of a cousin who was glad to have me in his kitchen.
“In the bathroom, cugino,” he said.
“For this long?”
He frowned. The frown was the smallest possible adjustment of his face and I watched it happen.
I walked down the hallway. I made myself walk. The body wanted to run and the mind would not let it because running was the body language of a man who already knew, and I did not know yet. I did not know yet.
The powder room door was not closed. It was an inch off the jamb.
I pushed it.
The light was off. The room was empty. The hand towel on the ring was undisturbed. The water in the bowl was clear. She had not been in here.
I stood in the doorway for one second and the second felt very long.
“Tonio.”
I called it back down the hallway, the way I had called her name. The same register. He came around the corner with the towel still on his shoulder and the spoon still in his hand and his face did the thing his face did when he had read a tone he did not like.
“Where is she?”
He looked past me into the empty bathroom.
“Cazzo.”
I went back into the kitchen. I went to the workstation.
The three monitors were still open the way she had left them.
The cursor blinked on a half-finished line of a Maltese correspondent file.
The notebook lay beside the keyboard, open to a page she had been writing on.
Krol — still signing. Same hand. The pen was uncapped beside it.
The pen was where she had set it down to pick up the phone.
The phone was not on the desk.
The cold came up through me then. Not a drop. A rise. From the soles of my feet up through my legs through my gut into my chest, the way ice came up a windowpane in a Sicilian winter, slow and total and you did not see it happening until the whole pane was white.
“Mudroom,” I said.
The side door was unlatched. Not open — pulled shut behind her, gently, the way a person closed a door they did not want anyone to hear close. But the latch had not caught. I could see the daylight at the seam.
Her coat was off the peg.
“Pietro.”
Sal’s voice. He had come in from the courtyard at some point in the last minute. I had not heard him. He was standing in the doorway from the kitchen with his coat half-off and his eyes already doing the cousin-thing, the read, the calculation, the what.
I did not answer him.
I pushed the side door open and went out into the snow in my socks.
The cold did not register. I went down the service passage between the carriage house and the back of Marco’s townhouse and I came to the gap in the hedge that Tonio had walked her past at seven that morning and I stopped.
There was a single set of footprints.
Small. The tread of her boots. The boots she had worn in from the car the night before, the boots that had been by the door this morning when I had brought her coffee in bed.
The prints went south.
They were already filling with the new snow that had started at some point in the last hour, the small fine snow that came after a clear morning, and the prints at the far end of the alley were already only suggestions of prints, and the prints at this end were already softer than they had been when she made them.
She had not run.
The stride was the stride of a woman walking. Even, measured, the spacing of a person who had wanted not to be noticed leaving.
Behind me, somewhere in the carriage house, Tonio was shouting Sal’s name and Olimpo was barking, the big bark, the bark he kept for strangers and emergencies, and Sal was already on a phone, already moving, already doing the things the cousins did when a thing had gone wrong.
I stood in the alley and I could not move.
She had gone, and she had gone alone, and she had told no one.
The Catania thing came up through me like a sickness coming up through a wound. The warehouse. The dark. The girl who had looked at me.
I had stood still then too.
I had stood very, very still.
Sal was already on the phone when I came back through the side door.
He was speaking Italian, fast, low, the dispatcher voice. He had one hand at the back of his neck and the other holding the phone hard against his ear and his eyes on me the whole time he talked, the way a man kept his eyes on the door of a room he had been told a bomb was in.
I did not look at him. I went past him into the kitchen and I sat down at her workstation in the chair she had pushed back thirty-nine minutes earlier and I put both hands flat on the wood the way I had put them flat on the table in this same kitchen yesterday.
“Dante is coming,” Sal said.
I nodded.
“Marco is fifteen minutes behind him.”
I nodded again.
Tonio was standing in the middle of the room with the dish towel still on his shoulder. He had not moved. His face had gone the color his face went when he was about to either weep or hit a wall, and I did not know him well enough yet to guess which.
“Cugino,” he said.
“Not now, Toe.”
“Cugino, the perimeter — “
“Not now.”
He shut up.
Olimpo was at the door, the big bark of him gone, replaced by a low continuous whine that the dog did not seem to know he was making. He pushed his head under my hand. I put my hand on his head. I did not feel it.
Marco came through the door at 11:03.
He did not say anything to anyone. He went straight to the workstation.
He moved me out of the chair with one hand on my elbow, gentle, the way you moved a child out of a doorway, and he sat down in front of her three monitors and opened a fourth window I did not know was on the machine and started typing.
“Phone records,” he said, to no one. “Carriage house WiFi went through the router I set up last August. I have the log.”
I watched him work. Sal had come over. Dante was here too now—I had not registered him arriving—and he was standing at my shoulder with his coat still on and his gloves still in his hand and the look on his face I had seen in the kitchen yesterday morning when I had told him what I had done.
“There,” Marco said.
He turned the second monitor.
A 312 number. 10:09 a.m. Duration: one minute, twenty-three seconds. The call had come in. She had taken it. She had stood up.
Marco was already typing again. The 312 spat back through three databases and gave him an address before he had finished the third query—that was Marco, that was how Marco worked—and the address was on the South Side, behind a vacant lot, behind a fence, under the el.
“Santo,” Dante said.
He did not raise his voice. He said it into his own phone, which was already at his ear, and the word was the whole instruction. Santo, who had been at his own house six blocks away, was in a car inside two minutes with four men, and the car was on the Dan Ryan inside four.
I stood up.
“I’m going.”
“No.”
Sal said it. Not Dante. Sal.
He had stepped between me and the door without my noticing him move and his hand was flat on my chest in the center of my sternum and his eyes were on mine in the way I had not seen them since we were sixteen.
“Cugino, listen to me.”
“Get out of my way.”
“You go in that door and they put one in your head before you clear the threshold. You are no good to her dead in a kill box. Let Santo clear it. Let Santo clear it, Pietro.”
I did not move.
His hand did not move.
We stood like that for a second and then for two and then I sat down.
I sat down on the chair he had moved me out of and I put my elbows on my knees and I put my hands over my face and I did not weep, because weeping was not something my body remembered how to do, but I sat with my face in my hands and I breathed.
The minutes did the thing minutes did when there was nothing to do with them.
They stretched. They thickened. Marco kept typing.
Dante kept his phone at his ear. Tonio put a cup of coffee in front of me and I did not drink it and he did not say anything about my not drinking it.
Olimpo lay down on my feet. The cold had come back into my socks now and the dog was warm and I let him be warm.
Santo’s first update came at 11:31.
“Workshop’s empty.”
Dante had the phone on speaker. We all heard it.
“Body in a folding chair. Old Black man, mid-sixties, parka. Single round to the back of the head. Suppressor — there’s a casing on the floor a meter behind the chair, twenty-two, subsonic. Zip ties on his wrists and ankles. He’s been dead maybe forty minutes.”
I closed my eyes.
“Tire tracks in the lot. Two vehicles. Van and a sedan. Both south, then east. The van came in clean and went out heavy, the sedan came in heavy and went out clean. They moved her between them.”
“Where,” Dante said.
“Working on it.”
The line went quiet.
Marco was already on the second monitor.
He had pulled up the city traffic camera grid and he was running plates against a window of the last hour and a half.
His face did the thing it did when he was working at the top of his abilities, which was that it did nothing at all. The face went still. The hands moved.
“There,” he said.