Chapter Twelve
Twelve
The day was chilly, air heavy and damp. Pale sunlight filtered through the canyons of buildings, brushing the aged and crumbling edifices, flaked plaster, rust stains, and graffiti, glinting on the chrome of motorbikes and battered car paint.
The cobblestones were uneven and hard. Slippery.
Bad for running. But Nikki found her footing and raced, dodging traffic and crowds, breathing in diesel fumes, the odors of grease, coffee, fish, and baked bread.
She pounded down narrow alleyways and side streets, past vendors with their racks of clothes; piles of oranges and persimmons and tomatoes and artichokes and peppers; ice-packed Styrofoam boxes overflowing with glistening tentacles, fins, and scales; stacks of purses and plastic toys; grocers and cafés and shoe stores and ateliers and pharmacists.
It was her day off and a rare opportunity to catch up on sleep. But Nikki had spent a restless night, then awakened with the feeling she’d lost something important.
—
Adriano had been in her dreams. His voice, his laugh.
Throughout the night, she’d hunted through a maze of shifting streets, sure he was waiting just around the next corner.
But it wasn’t her brother she found—it was Durant Cole.
The NCIS agent had such a strange sad smile, and she’d shouted, needing to tell him something.
But he vanished into a mass of people, and the crowd dragged her along into Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo, where Claire Sexton’s bloody form lay outstretched beneath the altar.
Nikki hadn’t felt Adriano clearly for years.
He’d faded so completely that in her waking life, she could never quite recall his face.
But running into Sandro yesterday seemed to unlock a door inside, and she remembered the two men swaggering down the street together, talking and laughing.
She’d been only nine years old when her brother graduated the Carabinieri Officers’ College where he and Sandro had become friends, and to her, they had seemed like gods.
Adriano had never ignored her—she was always his little buddy.
But she’d wanted more than his affectionate indulgence.
She’d ached to be part of that exclusive conversation—the laughter of the gods.
In memories, as in dreams, Adriano was always and forever just out of reach.
In that labyrinth of sleep, Adriano had vanished, and she’d found Durant Cole instead.
Why? There was no connective tissue between them.
Adriano had died sixteen years ago, in the seconds before she could reach him.
Durant…well, Durant was different. In the cold of that cave, she’d grappled, fought against an impossible, terrible reality.
That was the difficult thing about remembering Durant.
Her mind couldn’t reconcile those last desperate moments of terror and pain with the warm feelings he’d evoked.
She hadn’t seen him clearly, never suspected the duality of his nature, and even now couldn’t understand the darkness in him well enough to condemn him to it.
—
In her dream, there had also been Claire. Sweet face and shy smile. Soft voice: I reckon I’ve never properly grown up myself, you know?
Are you going to find the people who hurt her? Audrey had asked.
Yes, Nikki had said. I’ll find them.
In the daylight she felt the helplessness of that promise. She was just another person with no insight, no authority, no access, no power to do anything.
—
She picked up the pace, sprinting down one block and then another until her lungs burned, until sweat poured down her face. Blood pounded in her ears, and her legs weakened.
At last, in a narrow alleyway, she slowed and stopped, bending to take in air.
—
Her phone rang.
Aunt Izzy.
“Is this a bad time?” Izzy asked.
“I always have time for you,” said Nikki, realizing it was true. She was homesick for her aunt in a way she’d never let herself feel for her own mother.
“Preston suggested I call,” Izzy said. “You know, he has good days still, and he can be quite sharp. Well, today he reminded me something about your mother.”
Nikki’s heart rate, which had begun to slow, quickened.
She’d told Izzy Durant’s theory about her mother—his suggestion that Beatrice had led a secret life. In the months since, she and her aunt had worn out the topic.
Izzy continued. “Preston remembered the name Violetta. He remembers Beatrice mentioned it.”
Nikki gripped the phone tightly. Violetta, Durant had said. That was her code name.
If he was right and Beatrice had led a secret life, then it meant her mother was a puzzle she could solve.
“Did Preston remember when this was?” Nikki asked.
“He thinks he saw the name on letters.”
“Do you have the letters?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Hope, briefly kindled, was quelled. Preston’s memory wasn’t a reliable source.
Izzy was apologetic. “I’m sorry it isn’t much to go on.”
—
Nearby, a woman in an oversize coat was tending to a votive shrine affixed to the plaster and concrete on the side of a building.
Like the hundreds of similar aediculae—street memorials—in the city, this shrine was made of a glass-fronted cabinet, set against white tiles, an arching piece of corrugated metal to protect it from the rain.
The cabinet housed gold-framed prints of Jesus and the Madonna, and a painted wooden icon of San Gennaro, two bare light bulbs, candles, and a cluster of red plastic tulips.
Nikki recognized the bleached blonde curls and bright scarves, the fortune teller’s cart with its baubles and ribbons.
“Signora Dorotea!”
Startled, the fortune teller stared wide-eyed, then made a show of reasserting control. She returned to her task, adjusting the items in the glass cabinet, locking it with a key that she kept on a wristband among the clinking bracelets.
“Ah, seeker. I knew you would find me,” she said. “You wish for my guidance.”
“I wasn’t looking for you,” said Nikki. “Just a coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences,” said Dorotea. “Your life is part of a greater dance. Look for the pattern. What wisdom do you seek?”
“I don’t have money to pay for your wisdom today,” Nikki said.
A flash of annoyance crossed Dorotea’s face. She turned her back, arranging the items in her cart.
“Betrayal is the seed at the root of your rage,” she intoned. “The pain of betrayal lives on in the heart of the child.”
Nikki strode rapidly away.
—
She was approaching the end of her street when she spotted Enzo: a familiar figure seated at the same table at the same café where he used to wait for her after her shift.
The well-groomed hair and beard, muscular build, and polished style was a sort of looping backwards, skipping to an earlier track. Her breath stopped.
She seemed suddenly to be constructed of many parts, not all in agreement about how to feel.
Anger surged—a hot, unpredictable hostility that had built its home inside her.
But alongside this was a peculiar longing.
She’d been with Enzo, his passion, his companionship, affection, for three years.
She’d loved him. At the end of a long night shift, her heart would thrill to see him here, waiting for her.
They would talk, and he’d come up to her flat and make love to her in the early morning light.
She remembered his arms around her, the smell of his sweat and cologne, listening to him breathe as she fell asleep.
She hated herself for this weakness: sentimentality that urged her to hold him again, and pretend that the end of their relationship hadn’t been so completely catastrophic.
She considered jogging past without a word. But that would be too much like hiding, and he obviously needed reminding to never come back.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she demanded, her back to the sunlight so that he squinted.
“Ah, Nikki, there you are.”
He smiled, showing white teeth. Then he saw her face, and adjusted to a serious expression.
“My father said he’d spoken with you,” he said. “I’m glad.”
Nikki thought about Vincente Di Pavola, that same smile as he greeted her from his yacht, his kind empathy a pretext for the transaction he’d wanted—the NDA he needed her to sign.
“Why the fuck should you be glad?” she demanded. “What makes you think I would ever want to see you?”
She continued towards her building. Enzo pushed back from the table and followed.
“Listen…just listen,” he said. “We were good together…you used to care about me.”
She stopped and glared.
“I did. And then you fucked Carmela; you gave Raffaele Barile a key to my home so he could beat the shit out of me; you refused to help when I needed you—when they were going to kill Gianni and Francesca and the kids. There’s no coming back from that, Enzo.
This is when you leave and I never have to see you, never have to think about you ever again. ”
The cold words burned her throat, a scouring pain to remove any vestigial remnant of love or loyalty. She struggled to breathe.
“I need you to sign an NDA,” he said. “Sign it, and I’ll be out of your life.”
“No,” Nikki said, and continued walking.
Enzo followed. “I need this. My father needs me protected before he lets me take over operations.”
Not long ago, she would have given anything to heal Enzo’s desperate need for Vincente’s approval. It was a bitter irony that father and son should unite around this.
“I can’t think of a single reason why I should help you,” she said.
She opened the gate to her building and stepped through, closing it behind her with a clang.
“He’ll pay you,” Enzo continued. “Anything you ask. I know things are difficult for you financially. You need help with the apartment…with Calypso…he can help.”
She took the stairs two at a time.
Enzo called out, “Carmela is pregnant…. I need this, Nikki.”
She hated the way her heart raced, how it ached…how her eyes burned.