Chapter 16 #2
The analyst made her case. She made it fully.
She made it the way I had made cases at the firm, the way I had made my case in the courtroom—a clean linear argument with the evidence stacked and the inferences pulled tight.
The phone call was a trap. The address was a kill box.
Wendell was probably already dead and certainly would be within the hour and my arrival would not change that, because the only currency that bought him another minute of life was my body in the room, and the moment my body was in the room the currency was spent and the transaction was closed.
Going alone did not save him. Going alone killed me and killed him both.
Telling Pietro was the only move with non-zero survival probability for Wendell, and the only move with non-zero survival probability for me, and the only move that was not actively suicidal.
The analyst was correct. The analyst was completely and obviously correct.
But . . .
I had done this before. I had done this exact thing before, in a different language, in a different city.
I had sat in a meeting at Halberd in the spring of the year I left and I had watched a senior analyst — a man named Howell, fifty-two, two kids, a wife who taught third grade — raise a concern about a fund routing and I had watched the principals smile at him and table the question and I had said nothing because I was not ready, because I needed more data, because if I waited maybe someone else would speak up.
Howell had died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Newark four months later.
The coroner had ruled it natural. Maybe it had been.
Maybe it had not. I had spent two years not knowing and I had decided, in the courtroom, that not knowing was itself the verdict.
I was not going to do it to Wendell.
I wasn’t going to act too late. I wasn’t going to put myself first. I was going to try.
I turned and I walked back to the desk and I picked up the phone and I slid it into the pocket of my jeans — not because I would use it, but because leaving it on the desk would draw the eye.
I sat back down at the workstation. I tapped the keyboard.
The screen woke. I opened the Maltese correspondent file as though I had been reading it.
I let my hand rest on the trackpad. I waited until my pulse had come down from where it was.
Then I stood up the way I had stood up a hundred times in the last week — easy, unhurried, the body language of a woman going to the bathroom — and I crossed the room toward the small hallway at the back where the downstairs powder room was.
Pietro looked up.
I stopped at his shoulder. I put my hand at the small of his back the way he put his at mine. I went up on my toes and I kissed the side of his jaw, lightly, the way I had begun to.
“Bathroom,” I said. “Then more coffee. I think I have him by lunch.”
“That’s my girl.”
He did not look at me hard. He had no reason to. I had been getting up for coffee and the bathroom every forty minutes since seven a.m. I had been kissing the side of his jaw all morning. I had built the cover six hours ago without knowing I was building it.
I went down the hallway. I closed the powder room door. I did not turn on the light. I stood in the dark for a count of three.
Then I went out the small side door at the end of the hallway that opened onto the mudroom, and from the mudroom into the narrow service passage between the carriage house and the back of Marco’s townhouse, and from the service passage out through the gap in the hedge that Tonio had walked me past on the way in this morning and that I had clocked, automatically, as an exit — because two years of running had taught my body to clock exits even when my brain was not asking it to.
My coat was on a peg in the mudroom. I took it. I did not take the gloves. The gloves were the new ones, leather, expensive, the wrong gloves for this. My old wool ones were still in the coat pocket. I put them on in the alley.
The cold hit me at the gap in the hedge.
The city was very bright. The sky was the same hard winter sky as the day Pietro had taken me to the glass house. I had not been outside in twenty-four hours.
I started walking south.
The walk took thirty-eight minutes.
I did not run. Running was the thing they would be watching for.
Running was the body language of a woman who knew she was prey.
I walked the way I had walked into the carriage house this morning, measuring it, my hands shoved into the pockets of my coat with the old wool gloves on, my chin tucked into the borrowed scarf that still smelled, faintly, of him.
I let myself think about Pietro for one block.
One block only. From 51st to 52nd. I let myself think about his hand on the back of my neck this morning, the absent slow circle of his thumb.
I let myself think about him saying that’s my girl without looking up.
I let myself think about the kitchen ninety minutes ago and his hand flat on the table and his voice saying I am going to ask her to marry me.
At 52nd I made myself stop. I put him away. I put him in a small box at the back of my head and I closed the lid. He could not come with me into the green door. If he came with me into the green door I would falter.
The address was a low-rise building behind a fence behind a parking lot behind a strip of dead grass under the el tracks.
The kind of building that had been a print shop in 1985 and a body shop in 2002 and now was nothing—the windows boarded with plywood that had been painted black, the front door padlocked, the lot empty except for a single white panel van parked tail-in against the loading bay.
The bay had a small door beside it. The door was painted green.
It was the only green thing in three blocks.
I came at it from the south on foot the way I had been told. My hands were out of my pockets ten meters before the door. I had taken off the gloves. I wanted them to see my hands.
The door opened before I reached it.
A man stood in the gap. Mid-thirties. Dark coat.
Clean-shaven. He was not large. None of them, I would learn, were large.
Largeness was a tell; largeness made you memorable on a street; largeness was the body of an amateur.
He looked at me, then past me, then at me again. He nodded once and stepped aside.
I went in.
The room was a former workshop. Concrete floor. Fluorescent lights overhead, only half the tubes still working. Cold—colder inside than out, because the windows had been broken at some point and patched with plywood and the wind came through the cracks. There were four men in the room.
One of them—Wendell—was in a folding chair in the middle of the room.
He was alive.
His wrists were behind him, zip-tied. His ankles were tied to the legs of the chair. He had been crying. The skin under his eyes was wet and his lower lip was bleeding where someone had hit him, not hard, just enough to start the lip. He was still in the parka. He was still wearing Pietro’s gloves.
When he saw me his whole face broke.
“Oh, Miss Anna. Oh no, Miss Anna. No, no, no, no — “
“Wendell.” I made my voice the way I had made my voice at Halberd, in the rooms where the principals had wanted me afraid. Low, even, useful. “It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay.”
“I told them not to call you. I told them — “
“I know you did.”
The man who had opened the door was now behind me.
Another man had come up on my left. The third was at the back wall with a long coat over his arm and one hand inside the coat in a way that was not subtle and was not meant to be.
The fourth was sitting on the edge of a workbench against the right wall with his ankles crossed and a phone in his hand.
He looked up at me when I stopped walking.
He was the voice from the phone. I knew him before he spoke.
“Madame Ancelotti.” He slid the phone into his pocket. “Thank you. You are six minutes early. That is unusual. We appreciate it.”
“Let him go.”
“Of course.”
He said it so quickly that for one full second I thought he meant it. I thought I had read the situation wrong. I thought—the way a person thinks when she is drowning—that the surface was a few inches closer than I had calculated.
“He walks out the door,” I said. My voice was steady. “He walks out and goes north and you watch him go for two blocks and then I am yours. You have the address of a bench he sits on every afternoon. You can find him again if I do not cooperate. But he walks out now.”
“Of course,” the man said again.
He turned his head a quarter inch toward the man at the back wall with his hand in his coat.
He nodded.
The man at the back wall took the hand out of the coat. The hand had a gun in it. The gun was small and matte and had a tube on the end of it that I understood, with the slow stupid clarity of a person whose brain had stopped working in real time, was a suppressor.
He raised the gun to the back of Wendell’s head.
I lunged.
I lunged the way an animal lunges—without plan, without the body knowing why, the whole organism going forward at once—and the man behind me caught me by both arms above the elbows and lifted me bodily off the floor and the man on my left got an arm across my throat and the lunge ended six inches into its trajectory with my feet off the concrete and my breath gone.
The gun made a small, dry, polite noise.
Wendell’s head went forward.
That was all. There was no theater. There was no last word.
I made a noise. I was agony.