Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Luca
"Keller's ignoring us," Renzo says, dropping into the chair across from me and tossing his phone onto the desk.
"Three days and nothing. Not a word."
I draw my cigarette and look at the window.
"He's not ignoring us," I reply. "He's buying time."
"Same thing."
"No." I tap ash. "Ignoring us means he doesn't take it seriously. Buying time means he has a plan."
Renzo's phone beeps and he looks down at it and he mumbles a curse. "Our man inside the procurement office confirmed it hits now. Keller has been moving funds to a private SWAT contractor. They plan to attack at the dinner we are attending tonight."
Keller is attempting a rescue in a place where they could take me in for more than just abduction if they succeeded. The dinner Renzo and I were attending tonight was a cover-up for an ammunition trade.
I say nothing. Keller was a man who stopped at nothing to get what he wanted, I knew that because before I agreed to work for him, my father had worked for him.
I was seventeen when my father made the arrangement.
Keller was an upcoming politician then, ambitious and hungry for public sympathy that couldn't be manufactured.
My father had seen the utility in him and had offered a service.
They planned to stage an accident, a close call, to generate headlines, goodwill, and the tenderness that the public reserves for men who have suffered visibly.
I watched my father and his men set up the plan and later I would hear about how a truck that wasn't a part of the plan had l come from nowhere, a blind corner.
Keller had jumped. He had been. After all, jump, because he had known it was coming, and his wife had not jumped because she was not part of the arrangement.
Keller had stood at the roadside and looked at the wreckage and must have understood immediately that what had just happened to him was worth considerably more politically than what had originally been planned.
He cried at the funeral so hard that it made trending news for a week.
Was that what he wanted to do again? With his daughter this time? Sending in a SWAT team and a private one at that was him begging for violence, violence that could harm his daughter directly.
I stub the cigarette out.
"He wants a show," I say. "Then we give him one."
Renzo nods slowly. "This has gone beyond the original disagreement. If you can't contain a threat like Keller, other families will notice. The ones that have been watching and waiting." He looks at me directly. "You know what they'll do with that information."
"I know."
Renzo is quiet for a moment, turning his thoughts over.
Then he asks, "You went to considerable lengths with Keller. What exactly did you need from him that you couldn't get another way?"
I look at the desk.
In eleven years Renzo has never asked me this directly. I have never told anyone.
"There is a national civil registry," I say. "Federal level with sealed personal records and identity documents. Only a sitting mayor can provide access."
"I need Keller to get me access to the registry. I need to find someone."
"Does she mean that much?" he asks.
The way he knew it was a woman without even asking made me wonder if my feelings were not as controlled as I thought they were.
For two years the woman in the car had been the last thing in my head before sleep and the first thing when I woke up and I had turned her over so many times in the dark that the memory of her had worn smooth with only the essential things remaining.
Her hands are on my chest. The certainty of her movements and how she pulled a bullet out of a stranger without being asked.
I had been fighting for two years to be stable and now that I was, I needed to find her. Moreso now that Keller's daughter had come into my life and was making me think of her less and less.
I reach for another cigarette.
"The favor matters less than Keller thinking he can double-cross me," I say. "That can't stand regardless of anything else."
Renzo accepts this with a nod. "When we've handled Keller we can find her some other way. It'll take longer but it's possible." He pauses. "Do you have anything to identify her with?"
I think about her bra hanging in my closet.
"Nothing useful," I reply.
Renzo nods again and doesn't push it and I stand and light the cigarette and walk to the window, staring at the garden below where the roses along the far wall and I think about Nathalie sitting on that stone bench three days ago with her face tipped toward the sky.
I turn from the window. "They are observing us aren't they?"
Renzo nods.
"Have the maids get her ready," I tell Renzo. "She is going with us tonight, as collateral." I draw on the cigarette. "If Keller wants a show, we're going to give him one he wasn't expecting."
Renzo stands and leaves. I stand at the window alone and smoke and I do not think about the guilt that has kept me on a pullout bed in my study for three nights, or about a woman who lost her mother at twelve and has been trying to be seen ever since, or that her father is the same man my family helped put into office over her mother's body.
* * *
The Jeep crawls through the city silently and I look at the back of the driver's headrest and I am acutely aware of Nathalie sitting beside me without looking at me. She has been this way since the maids finished with her and I had appeared in the doorway of the room.
I found her already composed and waiting, hair up, red dress, a deep neckline that had required a moment of recalibration on my part before I could look again. She had looked at me, looked away, and had not asked a single question the entire ride.
I don't know what I had expected. Questions may be resistance. Anything.
She gives me nothing and somehow I feel enraged.
We pull up outside the venue and I get out and Renzo gets out and a guard goes to assist Nathalie and she takes his hand and steps down and smiles at him and I watch this with my hands at my sides and feel irritation tighten in my jaw that has no business being there.
Renzo materializes at my elbow. "You could have helped her down," he murmurs.
I ignore him. He sighs and hands me a mask. It's a masquerade mask made out of metallic material. I slip it into my pockets.
I turn and open my arm to her. She looks at it. Then she looks at Renzo.
"Can I take your arm instead?" she asks him, pleasantly, as though the question is entirely reasonable.
Renzo blinks. He looks at me with the expression of a man who did not sign up for this situation.
"I—" he begins.
She slides her hand through his arm and says, "Shall we go in?"
Renzo looks at me and I walk ahead.
The venue is one of the older hotels on the east side, the kind that hosts charity galas on the upper floors and moves other kinds of business in the rooms below.
Tonight it is dressed as a private collector's dinner.
The ammunition trade has been running through events like this for three years and the cover is good because the people who attend these things have enough of their own secrets to make discretion a shared interest.
We take champagne from a passing tray and I watch Nathalie lift her glass and drink with unhurried elegance. After all, she was raised in rooms like this and knows exactly how to occupy them. Her back is straight and her chin is level and she has not looked at me since we walked in.
"Men are in place," Renzo says quietly at my shoulder, his eyes moving across the room. "Three at the east entrance, two on the floor above, Costa has the exit corridor."
I nod.
My eyes are on Nathalie. A man with a small bell emerges from a door at the far end of the room and strikes it twice and announces that guests are invited to make their way downstairs to the main event.
I start walking toward Nathalie, then I stop myself.
I turn to Renzo instead and I tell him with my eyes and the slight tilt of my head. "Go with her."
He looks at Nathalie across the room and he walks over to her and says something. She looks up at him and puts her hand through his arm again and they walk toward the door and I follow at a distance.
The cellar room is low-ceilinged and lit. The chairs are arranged in loose rows facing a raised table where three men in suits are already seated behind numbered lots.
The guests go in and find seats and Renzo brings Nathalie to two chairs midway and sits beside her and I take a position to the left where I can see the room.
The auction begins and I watch the door.
Our man comes in seven minutes after the opening lot.
He is in a black suit and unhurried. He takes a seat at the back like a man who arrives late to things as a habit.
He sits and crosses one ankle over his knee and then his hand comes up and taps his chest once.
A signal so small that half the room would miss it.
I find Renzo's eyes across the room and he has already seen it and he gives me the smallest nod.
The man stands.
"Police!"
The room falls into chaos as chairs go over, people scatter, there are stomps on the stairs and the doors burst open.
I slide the mask Renzo gives me out of my pocket and onto my face before pulling my gun out.
The first man through the door takes the barrel across his face and goes down and I put the next one into the wall and there are gunshots from the far end and I hear my men returning them.
I aim and shoot at anyone who isn't one of mine who seems to be fighting back. The goal is to get the room under control. Renzo and my men are doing the same on the other side of the room and it is over faster than it started.
The room settles and three of the private SWAT officers are on their knees.
Four paparazzi were beside them, cameras still around their necks, looking at the bodies on the floor with expressions of disbelief.
After all, they were promised a scoop and had received something considerably more than that.
They and the other SWAT men had blended in with the crowd at the dinner.
I straighten my jacket.
I sit down in the chair closest to me and I look at the kneeling men and I say, "Keller sent you."
"He just wants his daughter back," one of the SWAT men says. His voice is steadier than his hands.
I look at him for a moment. Then I turn and I look at Nathalie. Our eyes meet through the mask.
Then she steps forward. And then she drops to the ground.
Her knees hit the floor and she looks up at me and the tears are there, streaming, and her voice when it comes is desperate.
"Please. Please just let me go. I'm scared, I want to go home, please—"
I look at her face.
I am about to speak when I feel two taps against my leg.
I look at her. She looks at me and the tears are still running, her expression is devastated and her eyes are completely steady.
I turn to the paparazzi.
"You came here for pictures," I say. "Here is your picture. Phillip Keller's daughter, held hostage." I let the pause sit. "And Keller won't pay a single penny to bring her home."
They look at each other. One of them, braver or greedier than the others, raises his camera. The shutter clicks. Then another. Then three more, flashing, and Nathalie wails and grovels and I watch her perform with a detachment I have to work to maintain because she is extraordinary at this.
I raise my hand and the cameras lower.
I take my gun from my jacket and I shoot the first SWAT officer.
Nathalie stops crying and I hear her breath leave her body in the silence that follows and I don't look at her because I don't want to see what is on her face. I shoot the second officer. She screams and the sound of it does something to the base of my throat.
She grabs at me, wailing, and I let her and I put one bullet into the bravest paparazzo and the room smells like fear.
Nathalie is making sounds against my arm that makes me want to finish this quickly.
"Tell Keller," I say to the remaining men, "that next time I won't be polite."
Renzo cocks his gun and the survivors are escorted out. The other men stay with the bodies and the room empties in under two minutes.
The door closes and Nathalie is still wailing.
"I won't hurt you," I tell her, taking off the mask.
She stops crying and she stands up.
She wipes her face with the back of her hand and her shoulders settle and her chin comes up and she looks at me with clear eyes and says, "I know."
I look at her. Her hair is still perfect despite everything. The two dried tear tracks on her face are the only evidence of the last ten minutes.
I look at her and I think about the two taps against my leg and the steadiness behind the devastated eyes and the way she had dropped to her knees without a second of hesitation the moment she understood what was needed.
I had underestimated her.
Again.