“I want you to go to jail.”
Charlie took a measured breath through his nostrils, maybe on the verge of losing his meticulously maintained composure. He glanced around, making sure no one could overhear. It was barely five o’clock, too early for a crowd, but this restaurant was in the middle of their neighborhood, and you never knew. It would be easy to be noticed, and the possibility would make him uncomfortable. Which is exactly why Ariel had chosen this spot. Any advantage.
“Then why are you telling me this? What are we doing here?”
“Because I wanted to see the look on your face when you learned that your life was over.” She grabbed her purse from the bar. “Sadly, it wasn’t worth it. My drink’s on you.”
She moved her feet off the brass rail to the marble floor, shifted her weight, stood.
That’s when he said, “Wait.”
*
Ariel watches the second cop return to the room and exchange a few quick words in Spanish with his colleague, who then says, “Se?ora, there is no answer at the Lisbon police.”
“Well, it’s barely six in the morning.”
She gets no response.
“Listen, what crime is it that you think I committed?”
“I do not think you committed any crime. But you are an unusual traveler. A person who lied to the police. A person who tells a story that is difficult to believe.”
“Exactly: Wouldn’t a criminal have a better story?”
This cop smiles indulgently, as if confronting a child who’s offering an outrageous excuse for the broken lamp. Ariel can almost see his thought: No, not if you’re stupid.
“You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You think I’m a stupid criminal.”
“Please, I do not think you are stupid. I do not think you are a criminal. But surely you can understand why we must verify an unlikely story such as yours?”
*
Griffiths looks out the helicopter window at dawn breaking over the Iberian Peninsula. “Updated ETA?”
“Touchdown at oh-six-fifty-five,” the pilot answers.
“And that’s where? How far from the passenger terminal?”
“About a kilometer.”
“Do we have someone on the ground with a vehicle?”
“You asking me?” the pilot says.
“No,” Jefferson jumps in.
“Then how are we going to get from the landing area to the terminal?”
“Run?”
Antonucci groans. He’s not running a kilometer, not on his goddamned feet.
“Fuck,” Griffiths says. “And her flight is boarding at seven-ten? We’re not going to make it.”
She tries to work out the shortest chain of communication from herself in this helicopter to a gate agent at the Seville airport at six-thirty on a weekday morning. It’s not that short.
This is becoming a real pain in the ass.
*
Pete Wagstaff feels like a hypocrite. For years, he’d been so adamant that digitization of archives was an unethical, immoral, and even illegal infringement on his rights as a journalist. He remembers arguing passionately: None of us ever agreed to this, not the reporters nor the photographers nor the columnists, we never acceded that our employment terms granted such an open-ended, permanent exploitation in media that were not even yet contemplated. This argument with management did not do his career any favors.
But now, thanks to the digitized archives he so vehemently opposed, Wagstaff has discovered that in the months preceding the split between Laurel and Bucky Turner, their lives were documented with a half-dozen society-page photographs from three different parties, with captions naming a total of fifteen individuals. That’s a lot of potential witnesses to the precipitous demise of a marriage. And what’s more, with thanks again to the digital revolution, every single one of those potential witnesses is easily and instantly findable, all of them public figures of varying degrees, or at least the types of figures whose desire to be public makes them easy to contact. Wagstaff already has an email, phone number, or publicly accessible social-media profile for each.
And this photo here? This one is almost too good to be true. It’s six people at a summer party, women in little dresses, men in pastel linens, captioned: FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, MR. AND MRS. BUCKINGHAM TURNER, MR. AND MRS. CHARLIE WOLFE, AND MR. AND MRS. SLADE WASSERMAN. Mrs. Wasserman’s name is Tory. Her phone number and email address and social handles are all right here, on the contact page for her website: A TORY STORY—EXCLUSIVE STYLE CONSULTANT. Whatever that could mean. These days Wagstaff doesn’t understand half the jobs people seem to have.
*
Charlie glanced around the near-empty restaurant, then back to Ariel. “Your phone, please?”
“What? Why?”
He glowered at her. He didn’t want to say it aloud, but she understood why he was asking, and she knew that this was not unreasonable. She placed her Nokia on the bar.
“Unlock it, please.”
She did. He examined the screen, then said, “Remove the battery.” She did that too, but he wasn’t satisfied. Charlie was paranoid about surreptitious recordings long before anyone knew to be worried about that. He was ahead of a lot of curves.
“Danny.” He beckoned the bartender. “We’re going to sit at that table for a few minutes. Could I ask you to keep an eye on my friend’s bag?”
“Of course,” Danny answered without appearing to think twice, though of course he did, you’d have to be an imbecile not to, and imbeciles don’t get to tend bar in establishments such as this. But bartenders here did whatever customers like Charlie Wolfe asked, because these were the types who’d get you fired. They’d say so first: “I’m going to get you fired.” Men like Charlie loved saying this, even more than they loved actually getting people fired. It was the display of dominance that was so enjoyable. The dominance was irrelevant without the display.
Charlie examined Ariel, maybe wondering if she was wearing a wire, and what he could do about it. He definitely couldn’t ask her to accompany him to the bathroom to check.
He strode across the room, slid into a banquette, far from the few other patrons, far from staff, far from her handbag, from any recording devices that might be hidden in there.
“What do you really want?”
“What do I really want?” Ariel feigned confusion, but they both knew what she wanted: to hurt him. She wanted him to suffer; she wanted to watch him suffer.
“Don’t give me that shit.” His voice was quiet but seething. This was something he was good at. “You know what I’m asking.”
She knew that she couldn’t be so punitive that Charlie wouldn’t be able to bear it, that he’d be forced to take his chances in the criminal-justice system. Everyone knows that guilty verdicts are elusive. Ariel’s and Charlie’s interests were aligned in this respect: neither wanted court.
“What do I want? Hmm, let’s see: a minimum of five years. But I’m hoping more like—”
“Oh give me a fucking break.”
“I’m sure—I’m positive—that once word gets out, once this story hits the newspapers, once people start gossiping—at this bar here, at the Colony Club, at the charcuterie counter at Eli’s—”