Chapter 17
seventeen
RODRIGO
I made sure I wasn’t followed.
The hotel I’ve found is called the Hotel Mirador, which means “lookout point,” and the only thing it has a view of is a dumpster and the back of a pharmacy. This seems correct for where my life is at the moment.
The lobby is small— undecorated. There’s a man behind the desk who does not ask me anything, but takes the cash I slide across the counter. He gives me a key attached to a metal circle. Room seven. Top floor. The elevator is occupied by a bicycle, so I take the stairs.
The room has a bed, a window, and a lamp that works on the third try. Old, amber wallpaper lines the entire room like a present wrapped in reverse. The window, when I push it open, gives me a direct line of sight to the pharmacy’s service entrance.
I set my duffel on the chair— the only chair— and sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress makes a sound. I give it a moment. This place may be cheap, but I believe— for the moment— I am safe.
My fingers shake a little as I pull open the zipper on my duffel and tear at the lining— there, I’ve sewn emergency euros into the pack.
I count them. Three hundred euros, folded flat.
It won’t last long in this city, but it will last long enough to get me to the Tuscan countryside.
I put it on the bed beside me and look at my phone.
No response from Billie.
I dial my degenerate cousin, Benny.
He picks up on the second ring, which means he was already holding the phone, waiting for my call.
“Primo!” he says, his voice warm and surprised.
“You are alive! Fantastic news. I had this feeling, you know? I lit a candle for you. At the church here in Tuscany. The little one near the olive trees. I told the priest my cousin might be murdered, possibly with a rope, very suddenly, and he said?—”
“Benny.”
“—he said he would pray, which I thought was nice. I knew about the rope because an old contact called me and I begged him to intervene but of course he would not. I tried to call you but you did not pick up and thank God you are alive?—”
“Benny.”
“Alive!” he says again, as if confirming it a second time settles something for him. “Good. Good. Because I felt responsible?—”
“Benny,” I say, for the fourth time. “I need to get to the house.”
“Yes,” he says, immediately serious. “Yes. Of course. But you can’t come direct.
The Twin Ledger has people watching the road from the north, I think.
I haven’t confirmed this, but I have a feeling, and my feelings have been very accurate since I stopped drinking so much.
The doctor says the two things are related but I don’t see how.
The hit La Diabla took out on you was broadcast to everyone, amigo.
Every assassin in Europe. The Twin Ledger has put quite a high price on your head?—”
“What’s the plan?”
He thinks for a moment. I can hear him thinking, which sounds like the scrape of a chair and then a low, tuneless humming.
“I send someone,” he says finally. “Someone I trust. He can be there tomorrow. He’ll take you through the back roads— through ávila, the long way, but safer. He knows the ground.”
“Who?”
There is a pause. The kind of pause that has something in it.
“A friend,” Benny says.
“Benny.”
“A very trustworthy friend?” he adds, helpfully.
“How trustworthy?”
“Very. Almost completely.” A brief silence. “He has a small— a very minor— connection to the Twin Ledger. Only driving, like me. He drives for them sometimes. Did drive. Past tense. He’s mostly retired now.”
“You’re sending me a Twin Ledger driver,” I say flatly, “to help me escape the Twin Ledger.”
“He only drives!” Benny says, with genuine offense.
“He’s not a— he doesn’t do the other things.
He just drives. He’s the best driver I know.
He drove for the Spanish national rally team for two years before the— the incident— which was not his fault, by the way, it was the co-driver’s fault, everyone knows this?—“
“Fine,” I say.
There is a beat. I fill the silence with the question I can’t escape.
“Benny, do you know where Alana is? Have you heard the name ‘Billie’ mentioned in connection with her?”
Benny clucks his tongue. “No, no no no. Benny has not heard of a man named Billie— is this Alana’s new Rodrigo? Has she moved on so quickly? Good news for you if that is the case?—”
“No,” I say, sighing. “Billie is an American woman.” A very beautiful one, I want to add, but I don’t, because I know Benny would only tease me for it. “Alana has befriended her and, well, we have not heard from her since.”
“Oh, this is very bad news for Billie then, yes? Last I heard, Alana was in Chicago. There has been no mention of La Diabla being on the move, but word travels at first very slow, and then very fast?—”
“I’ll wait for your driver—” I interrupt. Benny can opine on many subjects for hours. Time I do not have. “Tomorrow.”
“Primo,” he says, and his voice raises to the timber he used when we were twelve and playing football in the grass, “I’m glad you’re not dead. I mean that sincerely. You are my favorite cousin and also the only one who has never asked to borrow money.”
“That’s because I know you don’t have any.”
“This is true,” he agrees. “Rest. I’ll send you his number. Don’t tell him about your paintings. He’ll try to sell them.”
“Noted,” I say.
We hang up.
I set the phone on the nightstand and look at the wallpaper for a while. I try not to worry. It’s impossible.
Alana is not the type to disappear. So many hours and not a word from her.
What has she done with Billie? My stomach seems to flip in place.
Is it possible Alana noticed the way I looked at Billie, and has chosen to eliminate her?
The idea that my attraction to Billie might have gotten her killed is something I cannot live with.
I check my phone. Still no response from Billie.
I think about what I know: Alana posted a photo— at Tilly’s, the two of them laughing, drinks raised. Alana sent me that photo on purpose, to show me the vision board was still working. Billie was there. Billie was smiling. Billie did not know, in that photograph, what was standing next to her.
I think about Billie’s face at Melissa’s shower.
The enormous dark eyes with the gold in them— I keep returning to the gold, which annoys me, because it is a very specific detail to have retained about a woman I met only once.
I think about the way she stood her ground when I was cold to her, the way she absorbed it and came back sideways with humor instead of resentment.
Her joke about the baby picture game sheet.
Were you this unhappy when you were a baby, or did it develop over time?
I think about her saying that, showing me the sheet, and how it was genuinely funny, and that I almost laughed, and that I spent the rest of the shower reminding myself not to.
She has a boyfriend. I remember this now.
Melissa said it on the phone at the airport— Tyler, she called him, with a tone that did not suggest high regard.
Tyler, who texted twice and went to sleep.
I file this information away in the section of my brain labeled: not relevant, and then I notice that the section labeled not relevant has gotten very crowded lately and most of it is about the same woman.
I look at my sent messages. The last one reads: I’m in Barcelona. I need you to tell me you’re okay. My heart will not rest until I know. Please.
I read it back. It is, by reasonable measure, too emotional. It is the kind of thing that a man says when he has stopped pretending that what he feels is ordinary concern. I decide that I am not embarrassed by it, because there is no room left in me for embarrassment on top of everything else.
My phone buzzes.
I read the message faster than I intend to, because the name on the screen is one I cannot stop thinking about: Billie Harper.
She’s answered me.
I sit up straight. I breathe. I open the message.
Billie
Alana is my best friend and you barely know me. Stop texting me. Stay away from both of us.
I read it once. I read it again. I set the phone face-down on the bed, and look at the water stain on the ceiling.
I pick the phone back up and read it a third time, because I am a man who likes to be thorough, and also because some part of me is hoping the meaning changes on the third pass. It does not. The message is exactly what it appears to be: short, cold, final. A door closing.
I notice that it stings. I am mildly annoyed that it stings, given that I have spent a more-than-average amount of tonight evading a murder attempt, and this— a brief text from a woman I’ve met once— is the thing that feels truly unfortunate. I put the phone down again.
I lay down on my back— the bed’s firm coils digging into my shoulders— and stare up at the pockmarked ceiling. This is what you get for thinking with the wrong part of your body, Rodrigo.
I don’t know Billie, this is true. And I am nothing if not a romantic— a prisoner of love.
I fall too fast, always pressing the woman I want, the one in my imagination, onto the woman in front of me.
But Billie— she was what I want. Am I doing it again?
Am I projecting a personality onto someone I do not really know?
And yet– I sit up on the bed, as I realize:
I do not believe Billie wrote that message.
Billie Harper— the doe-like creature I met— is someone who cannot tell a lie with ease. It is in her face. It is in the way she talks.
That woman did not write this text.
I am as certain of this as I am of anything. The cadence is wrong. The register is wrong.
And, perhaps, I do not truly know Billie— yet— but I do know Alana. Alana, who writes in short, conclusive sentences when she is being strategic— I have received enough of them to recognize the pattern. Stop texting me. That phrase. It sounds like Alana in that it lacks tact, or gentleness.