Chapter Four
It’s surprisingly nice up on Three. A skylight lets in warm sun; extra windows give a feeling of airiness.
The door on Nomi’s left seems to be for the apartment directly above her own. Trying not to think too much, she walks over and knocks.
“One second,” a voice says from inside; then the door is pulled open, and Simon Noone is standing in front of her. Again.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” He’s shed some layers and stands at the door barefoot in jeans, black shirt open and brown hair untidy. He looks confused. “Um, didn’t you—”
“I need something translated.” Nomi refuses to blush. She waves the fax copy. “Look, I know what I said, and that still stands. But I received this sheet of information from a contact, and it’s in Italian, which obviously I don’t speak but you do, so—”
“Yet you recognized spoken Italian in the grocery.” His head tilts.
“I mean, I recognize it when I hear it. And I know the guy who owns Perrotta’s is—obviously—Italian. But it’s not like I could understand what you were saying when you—”
“Okay,” he interrupts. “So you have a sheet of information in Italian, and you want me to translate it for you.”
“Yes.” She forces herself to shut up.
“You do understand that I didn’t realize, before today, that I even spoke Italian? I don’t know if I’ll be able to read any of the words when they’re written down—”
“Just . . . try it,” she suggests.
There’s a long pause, in which Noone tongues his back teeth and Nomi feels the full import of what she’s doing.
“Please,” she blurts, and she does blush then. “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”
His expression doesn’t change. But he holds the door open wider. “Okay, fine. Come on in and show me what you’ve got.”
Noone’s apartment is . . . delightful. Larger than her own, high ceilinged and shockingly sunny, with walls painted the palest creamy yellow, so the room is still gleaming even this late in the afternoon.
It’s also almost completely open plan, so she can see his staggering lack of furniture: Two chairs, a low double bed, a dresser, a breakfast table—that’s it.
A chess set on the dresser looks to be mid-game.
He has no wall decorations of any kind, just coat hooks near the door.
Lots of books, though, both fiction and nonfiction, including what appears to be a complete set of medical encyclopedias.
All the tomes are stacked in piles near three tall, narrow windows; the windows, with white muslin curtains, show views all along Gansevoort. It’s like a little aerie up here.
“Nice,” she says, although she deducts points for the absence of plants.
But better to get on with this, so she walks straight over to the round breakfast table, where a copy of Gray’s Anatomy (twentieth edition) lies open at an illustration of the bones of the human hand.
Nomi pushes the book aside and smooths the fax page out on the wooden tabletop.
“Here’s what I’ve got. Just one page, but I think it’s from the court in Palermo—”
“That’s in Sicily.” Noone stands beside her, buttoning his shirt, eyes on the fax copy. “That’s a pretty terrible copy.”
“I know, sorry.”
He snags a cigarette from a pack on the table, running the finger of his other hand across the top lines of the fax. “This isn’t recent?”
He picked that up quick. “I told my contact I needed whatever she could get. This is what she got.”
“Interesting.” He grimaces at the letters, at her. “Look, I don’t know how this works. I spoke Italian in the grocery without meaning to, it’s very different from reading the words on a page.”
“What if you tried—I don’t know—speaking the words aloud?” This has to work, or she’ll have embarrassed herself for nothing.
He tucks the cigarette behind his ear, grabs the page, and steps back.
“Let me see. Servizio Operativo Centrale . . .” His eyes—blue as a jay—suddenly meet Nomi’s; he’s still patently flabbergasted at how this language falls out of his mouth so smoothly.
Then he looks down again and continues. “Servizio Operativo Centrale del Ministero della Giustizia Italiano, per ordinanza del Tribunale di Palermo . . . That’s, the, uh, Central Operational Service of the Ministry of Justice of Italy, by order of the Palermo Court . . .”
They get the bulk of the translation done this way. Noone reads and gives her the basic gist, which Nomi writes down on the legal pad. She gets him to go back and reread some sections, to see if she can get a more accurate sense of certain words.
“So ‘mezzano’ means a pimp.” She makes an underline. Sunlight is fading out the windows. “And ‘fare il mezzano’ means . . .”
“It’s like—the manager of a prostitute?” Noone scratches his temple with the end of his own pen. They’re both sitting at the table now, although he still hasn’t put on any shoes. “I mean, that’s not the exact phrasing, more like if you’re the one arranging how someone becomes a prostitute—”
“Pandering. This is a pandering charge.”
He sits back, snorts. “It’s amazing that I understand the word for something in Italian when I wasn’t even aware such a word existed in English.”
“Your messed-up brain.”
“Tell me about it.” He winces, tosses his pen on the tabletop. “Excuse me for a second.”
He gets up and walks to the bathroom. Nomi thinks he might be in pain—he’s been squinting over the scratchy fax-copy words for a long time—and sure enough, she hears him open his bathroom cabinet, run the faucet.
It’s still warm in the apartment; he must have the heating turned up, which makes sense for a guy who’s come from Guatemala.
He emerges into the bathroom doorway, wiping his hands with a white towel. “Sorry. Headache.”
“You get a lot of those?”
“Only every day.” Noone’s smile is humorless. He tosses the towel back into the bathroom as he starts for the kitchen, feet padding on the linoleum. “Coffee? I’m very sorry, I should’ve offered you one before.”
“Oh,” she demurs, “that’s okay . . .”
“Hey, you turned me down as a client, but that doesn’t mean you have to turn down my coffee.” He flicks on the kitchen light, raises an espresso pot in one hand. “Let me make it easy. I’m making coffee. Do you want one?”
Her pause is only brief enough to preserve her dignity. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Great. Hold on.”
Nomi watches him go through the process of filling the funnel part with dark, aromatic grounds, adding water, screwing the sections back together. “You even make coffee the Italian way. Have you considered that you might actually be Italian?”
He rinses his own mug, gets out another one. “I don’t think so. I woke up speaking English, with this accent. And there’s my American dental work. Cream?”
He warms half-and-half on the stove. When they both have their mugs back at the table, he finally lights his cigarette, which she suspects he’s been wanting to do for nearly an hour. “This guy with the Italian charge sheet, he’s someone you’re tracking?”
“Something like that.” The espresso is rich and delicious; it’s a long way from her budget Mr. Coffee brew.
“But he’s involved with some case you’re working on. Is this for Solange’s case?”
“It’s for a client,” she concedes. But he’s been poring over the fax-copy information with her; she can give some ground. “Solange is my only client right now, but the case is . . . challenging.”
“So Lamonte is connected to Solange . . .” Noone’s eyes are alert, thoughtful; then they turn sharp. “You should be careful with this guy. He appears to be someone who doesn’t play nice.”
“Oh, he definitely doesn’t play nice.” As she’s already well aware; she’s most concerned about Lamonte’s pandering charge. But best to put that aside right now. Nomi sips her coffee and decides it doesn’t hurt to be a little curious. “So. Guatemala.”
“Yes.”
“Amnesia.”
“Yes.” He gets up to fetch a glass ashtray from the windowsill, returns. “I don’t quite know why you’re hung up on that word.”
“Never met anyone with amnesia before.” She tidies her notes and crosses one knee over the other. “You said you were pulled from the river.”
“Yeah. November, 1982.”
“What happened?”
He draws, exhales. “I mean, if you’re asking how I got in the river, I can’t tell you. A farmer found me on the riverbank. They took me to a village medical clinic.”
She cups her mug. “A village doctor treated your gunshot injury?”
“An Anglo-Mexican, Richard Flores.” Noone sips his coffee, focuses on the ashtray as he taps into it. “He’d trained in London.”
“What the hell is a London-trained doctor doing in the Guatemalan jungle?”
“He was a Marxist.” Noone sits back, watches his cigarette burn.
“He got booted from the medical establishment in London, ended up back in Mexico, then over the border. Guatemala has been in a state of civil war for a long time, he’d done a lot of battlefield medicine.
He patched me up, and I was in recovery for over a year.
I still get headaches, and I sometimes have serious migraines, as well as vision problems.”
His eyes dart away when he mentions the migraines. Something off there. Nomi’s own eyes narrow. “It’s amazing you’re still alive.”
“At least I got a cool scar,” he says brightly.
When he sets down his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and parts the dark hair near his left temple, it takes a second to work out what she’s looking at.
Then she realizes it’s a thick striation of white, like the vein of a mineral deposit on a cave wall, running over a dent in the bone as if someone once pressed their thumb into the wet clay of his skull.
The scar tissue straggles back, dividing behind his ear into a lightning bolt that darts for his crown.
Nomi finds herself reduced to gasping. If there’s one thing she knows, it’s scars, and that is real; that is absolutely real. “Holy shit.”
“There’s still bullet pieces inside there somewhere.” He lets his hair fall back into place, recovers his cigarette. “I avoid metal detectors when I can.”