Chapter 23 Cypress and the Sea
CYPRESS AND THE SEA
In the backseat, Sasha’s head was spinning.
Nothing could’ve prepared her for this bizarro-world car ride.
Her intoxicated former—something—was sobering up in the front seat.
Her dashing current—something—was cracking open a Malbec for them.
Making matters worse, traffic was horrible, so they were inching along at a snail’s pace.
It was the longest, most emotionally complex ride from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn ever attempted.
There was no precedent for how to behave in such a situation. But her past month had been so topsy-turvy, so unbelievably surreal, she just went with it.
In fact, she channeled her spirit from the flight.
The idea that the world held great mystery and promise; that it was time for her to embrace adventure.
Sasha couldn’t control the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Best to let go and jump, once in a while.
Or she’d end up a prisoner again. Holed up in her apartment, slowly disappearing among the battered remnants of her personality.
This was one of those let-everything-go moments.
Thanks to the partition, she was physically cordoned off from Wes—so it wasn’t that difficult to pretend he wasn’t there.
Especially since she was furious with him.
She couldn’t believe he’d imploded so ridiculously.
After everything, that was how he behaved when it mattered most?
Hurling insane threats at Teo? He’d been all bruised ego and misplaced aggression, and she never saw Wes as the kind of man who’d fall prey to either.
Just another thing to accept at face value. She couldn’t change him. Couldn’t make him speak up when it mattered. What she could do was sink into her conversation with Teo—a man who happened to be one of the kindest, most intriguing people she’d ever met. And so much more than he seemed.
“. . . and I’m ready to leave the hotel inspector world,” he was saying as he poured Sasha a glass of wine. “It’s just too nefarious.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the luxury hospitality industry, I do business with men of extreme wealth. Unchecked men can be dangerous. Just like your friend said about American police. I’m not immune. I’ve taken liberties.”
“That’s quite an admission.” She took the glass from Teo. “Liberties like cold-blooded murder? Or getting funny with your money?”
“The latter,” he admitted. “There’s no way to get to my income bracket without blurring lines.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“Here’s to honesty,” he said, lifting his glass to Sasha. They toasted and each took a drink. “I’ve grown tired of traveling all the time. And living anonymously. All the aliases! I want to be who I really am.”
“Well, what drew you to being a hotel inspector?”
“It sounded exciting. In Gallipoli, there were only a few career possibilities. Tourism, fisherman, or priest. I grew up in the Church.”
“Same,” she said. “But I realized early that Catholicism isn’t for me. I wish I’d found a spirituality to replace it. But it’s hard for me to believe what I don’t see.”
“Pessimist?”
“Realist.”
“You must have faith in something, no?”
She smiled. “Myself.”
“Lonely, no?”
“Maybe. But every time I’ve bet on me, I’ve won.”
Teo met her eyes. “Do you think I can convince you to bet on someone else, for a change?”
“You can try.” She took a sip, not breaking eye contact. “But I’m a tough convert.”
“A challenge,” he pronounced. “As a boy, I thought I might be a priest one day. But no. I’m a bit too much of a . . . what’s the word? Hedonist. At one point, I was hoping there was a way to do both, but no.”
“I see you’re not familiar with American megachurches. It’s certainly possible to be godly and thotty. Ever been to Atlanta?”
He laughed. “I never wanted to have an ordinary life. I wanted to experience everything. Fully. Wealth, experience, and yes, women.”
“La dolce vita.”
“Sì, signora.” He swirled his wine. “My career helped me create an extraordinary life. You must feel the same with your work, no?”
“I do. That’s one of the reasons I love casting. I can create extraordinary moments. Read a director’s mind by finding the perfect people to act out the perfect situations. It’s a rush.”
“Like slotting puzzle pieces together.”
Just then, she was hit with a flashback of Wes in 2022 saying that some moments snap together like two puzzle pieces. He’d clapped his hands together, punctuating the thought.
But Sasha shook her head, sending the thought skittering back into her memory bank. Or up to the passenger seat, where it belonged.
“How did you get into casting?” asked Teo, watching her intensely as she spoke.
“When I was eleven or so, I got an infection after a root canal. I was bedridden for an entire summer, and I watched every age-inappropriate movie on cable. And I just became obsessed with all the actors. I remember seeing Leo in Titanic and The Basketball Diaries, and I was like who knew he could do such drastically opposing roles. Who saw those ripples in his talent? The infinite variations in his personality? That’s how I learned what a casting agent was.
” She shrugged. “That was it for me. I started reading Hollywood Reporter and arguing with adults about Oscar nominees in AOL chat rooms.”
Teo looked delighted at this revelation. “Did that get you into trouble?”
“My mom never found out.” She grinned. “But going toe-to-toe with film bros made me a shark.”
“Don’t strike me as a killer.”
“In business only.”
“You must meet so many characters.”
“I do. And you’re one of them.”
They locked eyes. A spark of possibility crackled between them. Moonlight poured over half of Teo’s face, while the other side was bathed in shadow.
“Hearing you say you need a change? So do I. The past five years haven’t been easy.
I’ve been living with anxiety disorder,” she confessed quietly.
Was it too soon to admit? Possibly, but she didn’t care.
She had nothing to hide. “I’ve been spending a lot of time alone.
Which is where I’ve been happiest. I have a dream of just escaping everything.
Moving far away, where no one knows me. Never to be seen again. ”
“If that’s what you really want,” started Teo, “I could make that happen. Easily.”
“What do you mean?”
“I bought a ruined villa in Gallipoli. Years ago. I’ve been fixing it up, slowly but surely. It’s built on a cliff over the sea, isolated from everything. Surrounded by cypress trees.”
Cypress and the sea, thought Sasha, inhaling the scent in her mind.
“You’d never want for anything. And you’d never have to see anyone you didn’t want to. Sì? It’s hidden from the world.”
Who was this man? Teo was like a magician granting her the wish.
Sealing her away from everything that scared her.
She’d been waiting for this. She’d been aching for this.
And in that moment, as the Lower Manhattan night skyline rushed past them, it was all she wanted to do.
Go. Go. Go. Escape. Leave it all behind.
Everything, including all the work she’d done on her anxiety.
Yes, she’d made huge strides. The fact that she’d felt sort of comfortable at a massive gala would’ve been unthinkable a month ago.
But life was short, and the world wasn’t getting any safer.
Go. Go. Go.
Wes and the driver, Jakub, had become fast friends—with their phone translation apps as their lifeline.
Jakub let him play Spotify deejay. He also slipped him a few caffeine pills, which had helped him sober up.
Jakub used the app to ask Wes the best shopping neighborhoods to take his girlfriend, Irina, when she arrived next month.
Wes was more than happy to forge a relationship with him.
Because he couldn’t focus too much on the fact that Sasha, his Sasha, was in the backseat with another man.
Settling her feline gaze on him. Flirting with him.
Touching him, possibly. Ruminating on it would drive him insane.
He didn’t even want Teo to look at her. It was unthinkable.
Also unthinkable? His suggestion that whisking Sasha off to some castle was a good idea.
Didn’t Teo just hear her say she suffered from anxiety?
Why would he feed into it? If he cared about Sasha, wouldn’t he want to help her overcome it, or work through the trauma that brought her there?
No, he offered her a Band-Aid just to impress her.
Wes cared about what scared Sasha, because he cared about her. That villa-on-the-sea bullshit was about Teo only. A soulless flex.
He didn’t even ask why she wanted to hide away.
Perspiration dotted his upper lip. Involuntarily, his hands curled into fists. Seeing him crashing out, Wes’s good buddy Jakub offered him a mini bottle of Aquafina. He downed it, gratefully.
Calm down, he told himself. Relax. Breathe. Listen.
The conversation between Sasha and Teo hadn’t yet revealed much, but Wes could feel a revelation brewing. It was tingling at his fingertips. He could almost touch it. He listened, again.
“. . . so, in Paris, you were staying in the 6th arrondissement?” asked Teo. “So was I. A shame we didn’t meet.”
“Such a missed opportunity,” she said, sipping her wine. “But there’s no playbook for how you act in those situations.”
“Certainly not.”
“Where were you headed?”
“I stayed in Paris a few days, visiting a few friends,” he explained. “Then I traveled about four hours to Luxembourg. A small village called Larochette? It’s a lovely medieval town, built around the ruins of an ancient castle.”
“Sounds glorious. Had you been there before?”
“Sì, sì, I did some business there. So, I was tying up loose ends.”
“I’ve been dying to ask. What were some of your aliases? Did you ever use funny ones? I read somewhere that Elton John makes reservations under the name Binky Poodle Clip.”
“I know Sir Elton! Perfect alias for him,” he divulged. “Hmm. Some of my names. Mo Hanly. A. J. Lhuellah. Ted Nanoi.”
Wes scribbled the names down. And then he stopped, his pen freezing on the page. Where had he heard those names before? They were odd. A tad . . . off. Just weird enough to be memorable. Quickly, he riffled through his notebook, stopping on the page where he’d jotted down Teo’s banking information:
Seat F shares a checking account with four other people. Genders and whereabouts undisclosed. But are they real people? Or pseudonyms for Seat F? Investigate—
Mo Hanly
AJ Lhuellah
Ted Nanoi
Sam Canter
Well, well, well. Proof from Teo’s own mouth. So they weren’t other people. They were all aliases. But he’d only named the first three. Why not the fourth?
And then Wes remembered the name of the person, Teo’s associate, who ran Two Tunics.
Sam Canter. He was Teo as well. That’s his charity.
His gala. Why all the secrecy? What were the reasons someone would start a charity under a pseudonym?
An urge to remain anonymous due to grace and humility?
Eavesdropping on this braggy jackass for fifteen minutes negated that possibility.
Wes paused a moment, peering out the window at the Hudson River, as slow-moving barges floated to New Jersey docks.
With what budget could Teo operate a charity that large, roping in important leaders of industry, entertainment, and business?
How did he pull off such a feat? Unless it was a scam.
(If Anna Delvey could do it, anyone could.) Maybe he was laundering cash.
Wes combed through his conversations over the last few weeks.
Recently, he’d had a conversation with someone about laundering money. When was it? Who was the person?
He racked his brain to remember.
Imani. It was Imani, telling him about the exposé she was writing. Something about nuns and priests stealing from churches.
“Did I tell you they launder the stolen church money by funneling it into fake businesses?” she’d asked. “If you were a shady priest, where would you put your cash?”
Wes continued staring at the highway, mind racing.
The subjects in Imani’s piece were clergy, who went through the trouble of getting hired at churches, only to rob them blind, disappear, change their identities, and live extravagant secular lives full of fucking, eating, drinking, carousing, and spending—and then, months later, they start over.
New church, new name, new European location.
He remembered Imani saying that the villages were always conspicuously small, with few resources to launch a criminal investigation.
Wes’s wheels were turning. The name of Teo’s charity was from a Bible verse. True, but a charity steeped in biblical lore wasn’t unique. Was it?
Wes took another look at the names, wondering where they’d come from. There had to be a pattern.
Unconsciously, he let his eyes unfocus a bit.
In his mind, the letters floated around and reassembled into different configurations.
New words. This was his Wordle strategy.
(This skill also made him dangerous at Scrabble and Jeopardy!) He simply softened his gaze a bit, until the right word rose to the surface.
For several minutes, he scrambled, unscrambled, and then tried again.
The answers evaded him—until, suddenly, they didn’t.
The words came together, one by one.
Mo Hanly = Holy Man
AJ Lhuellah = Hallelujah
Ted Nanoi = Anointed
Sam Canter = Sacrament
His jaw dropped. Jakub looked at him. Concerned, the driver gave him a hopeful thumbs-up.
Wes returned the gesture and then went back to his notebook.
Was the Catholic slant of these names a coincidence?
Clearly not. These aliases were dreamed up by someone tickled by word puzzles—and who knew their way around a church.
Just then, he remembered another detail from his conversation with Imani. One of the church grifters’ last sightings was in Luxembourg. And then a flurry of rapid-fire thoughts flew through his mind.
Teo just visited Luxembourg.
He said his “associate” ran Two Tunics, but it’s actually him.
He’s lying to Sasha.
He’s definitely not a hotel inspector.
What the hell is he, then?
His name, Wes told himself. Look at his name.
Teo D. Scera
Wes scrambled the letters in every way possible. Sarecdeto, Tedosacer, Dostaceer. Sacerdote. Nonsense words. They didn’t make sense. Well, they didn’t make sense—in English.
Lightning-fast, he clicked on his translator app and chose “Italian->English.” He entered the first three words. None had an English translation.
Finally, he typed in “sacerdote.”
When he saw the translation, he almost laughed.
Priest. It meant priest.