Chapter 18
Angela
Iwas on my back on a tough mattress. The bag was off my head. My wrists were free. My ankles were free. The drug was a sour film at the back of my tongue and a small steady ache behind my eyes, like the start of a hangover.
I did not open my eyes.
I just listened.
I heard the absence of a city. No traffic.
No el. No furnace cycling. The silence had a shape — a high open silence, the kind that meant air moving over a long distance before it found a wall.
Somewhere very far off, the suggestion of water.
Not a river. A bigger noise, slower, the long low pull of a tide against rock.
There was a fly, buzzing somewhere near the ceiling, working a corner.
Then, a voice. Two voices, actually, on the other side of whatever wall I was inside, speaking a language that was not English and was not French and was not Italian, not quite, though it pulled toward Italian.
The cadence was wrong for Sicilian. The vowels were harder.
Arabic underneath, somewhere—a single throat-sound a man made when he was clearing the end of a sentence.
I opened my eyes.
A strip of light lay across the ceiling above me.
A horizontal line of it, brilliant white, the white of sun on stone and not the white of sun on snow.
The strip came through a wooden shutter that had warped slightly with age, and the warping had left a finger-width of daylight where the slats did not meet.
I was warm.
The analyst came on the way she always did. She did not ask permission. She just sat up in my head and started taking inventory.
Time. The strip of light was almost directly overhead, slightly southern.
Midday, then. Local midday. I had been put on the plane at—I tried to remember—late morning Chicago time, eleven-something.
A Gulfstream out of Lansing could not fly Chicago to anywhere in the Mediterranean in one hop.
They would have staged. Shannon, Rome, somewhere with a friendly customs line.
The drug had been dosed twice that I could remember and possibly more that I could not.
Eighteen hours, conservatively. Maybe twenty.
Place. The shutter was wood, painted a color that had been white once and was now the soft chalk-yellow of paint that had been sun-bleached for thirty summers.
The walls were limestone block, the joints visible, the surfaces washed in a thin layer of plaster that had been redone badly at some point.
The floor was tile—small hexagonal tile in a faded amber, the kind that meant the house was older than the woman who currently kept it.
The ceiling was high and beamed in dark wood.
The bed I was on was iron, the frame painted black, the mattress thin.
The smell was the part I needed.
I closed my eyes again and breathed in through my nose.
Sea. Stone. Hot dust on hot tile. And underneath that, faintly, the resinous bright cut of citrus — not the citrus of a kitchen but the citrus of a tree, the live oil of leaves and rind on a branch, somewhere outside the shutter, close enough that the wind brought it in.
A lemon tree.
The cadence in the hall. The Arabic at the back of the consonants. Italianate vowels. Limestone. Sea. Lemons. Heat in February.
Malta?
The trust was in Sliema. The bank was in Valletta. The signature woman lived three blocks from a bank. I had been working her file when the phone had rung. Of course they had brought me here. Of course Enzo was here.
Oh. A dreadful thought.
Wendell.
The pain, the agony, the hollow, empty nausea.
I made myself open my eyes.
Function, the analyst said. Grief later. Function now.
I stood. My legs were unsteady. I did not let them stay that way. I walked to the shutter and put my face to the warped slat.
A courtyard. Stone. A small lemon tree in a terracotta pot.
A wall beyond it, taller than a man, with broken glass set into the top.
Past the wall, the suggestion of a slope down to water — not visible, but legible in the way the light moved over the far hills.
A man at the gate of the courtyard, standing, not bored, not sharp.
Mid-thirties. Sidearm under a light jacket that he was wearing because the air had cooled half a degree in the shade.
He was not French. He was local, or local-enough — the posture of a man who had grown up in this light.
Two men at least, then. One at the gate. A least one outside this door.
I sat back down on the edge of the bed and I put my hands flat on my knees and I breathed.
Pietro is coming.
He had to be.
The door opened.
A man stood in the gap. Behind him, beyond his shoulder, the corridor opened into more light. Tile, white plaster, a sliver of blue beyond an arch that could only be a sky over a sea.
“Madame,” he said. “He will see you now.”
He did not need to say who.
The hall was cooler than the room. It ran along the inside of the courtyard, shaded by an arcade of low arches, and the tile underfoot was the same faded amber as the bedroom but worn smoother by feet.
The man walked behind me, not touching me.
There was no need to touch me. There was nowhere to go.
I counted as I walked. Two doors on the left, both closed.
One open archway on the right that gave onto the courtyard with the lemon tree.
A staircase rising at the far end, dark wood, no runner.
At the top of the staircase, another arch, and through the arch a wash of sea-light so bright it made the inside of my eyes water.
We did not go up the stairs.
We turned left through a heavy door into a long room that ran the width of the seaward side of the house. Three sets of French doors, all of them open onto a terrace. Beyond the terrace, a balustrade of carved stone. Beyond the balustrade, the Mediterranean.
I had never seen it before.
The analyst tried to keep me at work—exits, count, layout—and the analyst lost, briefly, because the sea was so pretty. It was not blue. It was not green. The light came off it in flat hard sheets, making it seem like shifting treasure.
A man sat in a wicker chair facing the sea.
I knew him from the photographs in the file I had built two years ago.
I knew him from the courtroom dossier the FBI had let me see only once and only behind glass.
I knew him from a video taken at a charity gala in 2018, where he had stood next to a state senator and laughed at something the senator had said and the laugh had not reached his eyes.
He had been a tall handsome man then, expensively still, the silver at his temples deliberate. He had been the man who scared me.
He was older now.
The exile had taken something off him. Not the body—he was still lean, still upright, still wearing a linen shirt that cost more than the room I had rented in Pilsen for a month.
But the skin at his throat had loosened, and his hair had gone fully grey, and his hands, when he turned them on the arms of the chair to acknowledge me, had the small fine tremor of a man who had been drinking through afternoons that had no purpose.
He did not stand.
That was the first thing I cataloged. He did not stand for me, and he did not turn his head fully toward me, and he did not say my name. He kept his face mostly seaward, and he lifted one hand, and the Frenchman closed the door behind me and was gone, and we were alone in the room with the sea.
“Sit, please,” Enzo Valenti said. “You must be tired.”
The voice was the voice from the dossier transcripts. Soft. Precise. The accent of a man who had been born in Detroit and had spent forty years removing Detroit from his mouth and had succeeded.
I did not sit immediately.
I crossed the room at the pace I had crossed every room in two years and I stopped behind the chair he had indicated and I put my hand on the back of it. I did not look at the sea anymore. I looked at him.
“Mr. Valenti.”
He smiled, faintly. He still had not turned his head.
“I appreciate the use of my name. So many of your colleagues at the firm preferred to refer to me by file number. It was a small dignity I missed.”
“I imagine the exile has cost you a number of dignities.”
The smile sharpened. Now he turned. His eyes were the pale grey of the dossier and they had not aged the way the rest of him had. They were younger than his hands. They went over my face the way a man went over a financial statement he suspected of inaccuracy.
“Please sit, Miss Baggio. I have a chair pulled out for you. It is rude to make me look up.”
I sat.
I sat in the chair he had indicated, which placed me opposite him, the sea over his shoulder. I folded my hands in my lap. I let my breathing slow. I let him have the room.
He let the silence run a beat past comfortable and then he said: “We will not waste each other’s time. I am a tired man. You have had a long flight. I will tell you what I want, and you will tell me what you know, and we will arrive at an arrangement that suits us both. Yes?”
“Tell me what you want.”
“The Halberd testimony. Specifically, the parts of it that did not make it into evidence at trial. There are documents you held back. I know this because the indictment was narrower than the underlying intelligence. I want to know what your government has and has not seen. I want to know which of my structures they understand and which they do not. I want to know, in particular, what you produced on the Maltese question.”
I let him sit with that for a beat.
Then I said, “You’re asking me to tell you which of your shells are safe.”
“In so many words. Yes.”
“Why would I.”
“Because you would like to live.”
He turned his face a quarter back toward the sea, and he picked up a small glass of pale yellow wine from the table at his elbow, and he sipped it.
I watched his hand.