Chapter 18 #2
The tremor was small but it was there. He was not the man in the dossier anymore.
He was the man in the dossier eighteen months into a Maltese summer that had no end, with no compound in Chicago and no son in the office and no senator on speed dial, and he was bored and afraid and he had paid a great deal of money to put me in this chair and he needed what I had now because what I had was the last interesting thing left to him.
Good.
Wendell sat at the base of my sternum and I did not let him out, but I let him stay.
“I’ll tell you the Caymans,” I said.
He turned his head back to me.
“The Caymans I’ll give you. Two of the three vehicles you used out of Grand Cayman were documented in my files.
Both were referenced in the FBI intake. Neither was charged.
They sit in a sealed exhibit list. I’ll give you the names of the directors I identified, the correspondent banks I tracked, the months I had clean transaction data.
You can move what you have out of the Caymans tomorrow.
You will be six months ahead of any subpoena. ”
“And in exchange.”
“In exchange you do not ask me about Monaco. Or Malta.”
He smiled. It was not pleasant.
“Why do you think I want Malta, Miss Baggio.”
“Because we are sitting in Malta.”
He laughed, a single dry sound, surprised out of him. The hand with the wine glass made the smallest gesture of acknowledgment. The eyes did not warm.
“You are very clever,” he said. “I had been told. I confess I had not believed it. The girls they put in the trading rooms now, in my experience, are decorative. You were not decorative.”
“No.”
“No.” He set the glass down. “The Caymans you would give me to buy yourself an afternoon. I appreciate the generosity. I am not interested. The Caymans are already cold. The Caymans I have already moved. You knew this when you offered them, which is why you offered them. Try again, please. With something I can use.”
He leaned forward.
“I want to know which of the Maltese structures your government has identified and which it has not. I want to know the names you found and the names you did not find. I want to know whether Anastasia Krol is on a list you produced, or whether her signature lives only in the files of a young analyst who was not believed. I want to know, very specifically, what is in the file you built between yesterday morning and the moment my colleagues called you.”
The skin at the back of my neck went cold.
He knew.
“The file I built yesterday traced Northbridge to Krol to the Bank of Valletta to a trust administered out of Sliema to a holding company holding title on this villa. The file is in Chicago. The file was open on a workstation when your men called me. I assume you know this, because you are asking me about it. What you should be asking yourself is who else now has the file. Because I did not work alone, Mr. Valenti. I worked at a table with the Caruso family. Old friends of yours, so I hear? The file is theirs, now. They will follow it. They are following it. The only question is how long the flight takes.”
His face did not change.
But his hand, on the arm of the chair, went still in the particular way a hand went still when it had been tremoring and the body had decided to stop it.
“You are bluffing,” he said.
“I might be.”
“The Carusos do not have reach in Malta.”
“The Scordatos do.”
He looked at me for a long second.
Then there was a sound. Terrible. A scream.
Far away, beyond the courtyard, beyond the wall with the broken glass, another sound—a small, flat pop.
A suppressed round.
Then a second.
Then a third, no longer suppressed.
Enzo sprung to his feet.
He moved faster than the tremoring hand and the loose throat skin had led me to expect.
The wine glass went off the side table and broke on the tile and he did not look at it.
He crossed the room in four strides and he pulled open the drawer of a low cabinet by the wall, and when his hand came out it had a pistol in it, small, black, the dull matte of a thing that lived in a drawer for daily reach.
A voice from the corridor, French, urgent.
He answered it without looking, in French of his own, three short words.
The voice did not answer back. There were running feet.
Then more running feet. Then a door slamming somewhere deeper in the house, and a man shouting in Maltese, and the shouting cut off in the middle of a syllable.
Enzo turned to me.
His face had done a thing in the last fifteen seconds that I would remember. The patient mask was off. What was under it was not rage. It was the small flat fury of a man who had been pushed and was running out of countermoves. The pale grey eyes were colder than I had thought eyes could be.
“Stand up.”
I stood up.
He walked to me, and his free hand closed on my upper arm, the pistol coming up under my jaw. The barrel was warm from his pocket. He turned me fast, so that my back was to his chest and his arm was across my collarbones and the gun was at the soft place behind my ear.
“Walk,” he said, in my ear. “If you stumble or play games I will shoot you and walk over you. Do you understand.”
“Yes.”
He moved me to the door.
Out in the corridor the light had gone strange—the daylight from the open archway still strong, the interior lamps all dead, the contrast making the dark places darker.
Two of his men were in the hall. One was at the staircase, his weapon up, his eyes on the open arch at the top.
The other was at the far end where the corridor turned.
He saw Enzo and saw me and his face did the small adjustment of a soldier who had not been expecting his employer to come out of the seaward room with a hostage and was adjusting his protocols on the fly.
Enzo barked something in French. The man at the far end nodded and went back around the corner.
We moved.
He walked me down the corridor—fast, not a run, but a fast walk—back the way I had come, past the two closed doors on the right, past the open archway to the lemon-tree courtyard where I now saw a body lying half across the threshold, face down, in the uniform of his gate guard.
Past the staircase where the second of his men was crouched now, weapon up.
He turned me away from the front of the house, then pushed me through a doorway I had not noticed on the walk in—small, narrow, almost invisible in the limestone of the wall. Behind it, a flight of stone stairs going down.
Down was bad.
Down was a cellar. Down was a tunnel to the sea—there had to be a tunnel to the sea, this was a coastal villa, there had to be a boat.
He had a boat at the bottom of these stairs, or a vehicle in a garage cut into the rock, or a passage to a separate building outside the wall.
He was going to put me in something with him and the small flame in my chest understood, very clearly, that if he got me into something I was not coming out of it.
The gun was still at the back of my ear.
I went down two steps. He was going faster than was wise.
I had to do something, I couldn’t let him take me like this. He was a man in his sixties moving fast down a flight of unlit stone stairs in soft leather house shoes, and he had a hostage by the arm and a gun in his hand, and the only thing keeping him upright was the grip on me.
I went limp.
I did not think about it. I let my weight drop, all of it at once, the way you let your weight drop on a man who was using you to balance, and Enzo’s wrist seized at my arm—he held on, he did not lose me—but he stumbled, hard, his lead foot finding a step that was wetter than he had expected, and the gun came off the back of my ear by an inch.
That was the inch.
I drove my elbow up and back. It caught him under the jaw—not hard enough to break a jaw, hard enough to clack his teeth shut on his own tongue.
He made a sound that was not a word, something angry and sharp, and the gun went off.
The round went past my left ear so close that I felt the heat of it on my cheek and the wall beside my head took a punch of stone dust that came back into my eye. My ear went white. The world tipped sideways.
He had me still by the arm.
I drove the elbow back again, lower this time, into his sternum, and this time he let go.
I went down the rest of the stairs.
Not gracefully. The first three steps I took on my feet, and then my socks lost the stone and I went the last six on my hip and shoulder, and I hit the floor of the cellar at the bottom in a tangle that was bruising and bad but that was also faster than walking and away from him.
I rolled. I came up on hands and knees.
The cellar was dim. There was a single window high in the wall that gave a weak grey light, and there was a passage at the far end of the room that opened into deeper dark, and there was—yes—a flight of three steps at that far end going up to a door, and the door had a strip of brilliant blue daylight under it.
Enzo was at the bottom of the stairs.
He had caught the wall with his free hand and saved himself, and the gun was up again and the gun was on me, and his face was wild now, the mask gone all the way off.
“Do not move.”
I did not move.
The flame at the base of my sternum had gone very small and very steady. Wendell sat beside it. Pietro sat beside Wendell.
There were only three meters between us. He would not miss at three meters. There was no chance.
Above us, through the stone of the ceiling, very faint, the sound of a door coming off its hinges, and feet, many feet, coming down the corridor I had just been walked along.
Enzo heard it too.
His eyes flicked, fast, to the ceiling, and back to me. The pistol stayed up. His chest was working hard. The wine and the years and the elbow to the sternum were doing something to his breathing he had not budgeted for.
“Get up,” he said. “Slowly. We are leaving.”
I got up.
Slowly.