“Listening? I don’t hear anything.”
“Oh, there’s a thousand sounds. You hear them too but you don’t know you do.”
“Really?”
“There’s our blood, our heartbeat. There’s our breath. The sound of our clothing against itself and our skin. I can’t hear yours and you can’t hear mine but the sounds are there. A scooter—that one’s hard because it’s an echo of an echo. A tapping. Water, I’d guess. There! That shutter. Somebody took a picture. An old iPhone Four.”
“Wow. You can tell that? And it was so far away. I didn’t hear a thing.”
“You have to allow yourself to hear things. You can hear sounds everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
“Well, not exactly. Not in a vacuum. Not in outer space.” Stefan recalled a movie, Alien (not a bad flick, by any means). And the advertising line was: In space no one can hear you scream.
He told Lilly about this now. And added, “You know in space movies, when you hear ray guns and spaceships colliding and exploding? Well, that’s wrong. They’d be completely silent. All sounds—a gunshot, a scream, a baby’s laugh—need molecules to bump against. That’s what sound is. That’s why the speed of sound varies. At sea level it’s seven hundred sixty miles an hour. At sixty thousand feet, it’s six hundred fifty miles an hour.”
“Wow, that’s way different! Because of the thinner molecules?”
“Right. In space there are no molecules. There’s nothing. So if you opened your mouth and vibrated your vocal cords no one would hear you. But say you were with somebody else and he put his hand on your chest while you were screaming, he’d hear you.”
“Because the molecule in his body would vibrate.”
“Exactly.”
“I like it when people’re excited about their jobs. When you first said ‘sound engineer,’ I thought, hm, pretty dull. But you’re, you know, totally into it. That’s cool.”
Funny when the one thing that makes you crazy keeps you sane.
He was looking over her now, as she turned and walked closer to an inscription in Latin, carved in stone.
Tap, tap, tap.
Her boots.
This isn’t a good idea…
Stefan said to himself: Leave. Tell her goodbye. It’s been fun. Have a nice trip back home.
But Stefan felt Euterpe hovering over him now, looking out, giving him permission to do what he had to do. Anything to keep the Black Screams away. She’d understand.
To the right the cave disappeared into a dim recess.
“Let’s go in the back there.” He pointed that way.
“There? It’s pretty dark.”
Yes, it was. Pretty dark but completely deserted.
Stefan wondered for a moment if he’d have to convince her but apparently Lilly believed she was in no danger. He was a little quirky maybe, he sweated a bit much, he was pudgy, but he was a sound engineer who didn’t mind conversation and who said interesting things.
Women always fell for men who talked.
Oh, and he was an American. How much danger could he be?
“Okay, sure.” A sparkle in her eyes.
They started in the direction he’d indicated.
On the pretense of looking around, he fell slightly behind her.
Hearing her boot soles and heels snapping: Tap, tap, tap…
He looked around. They were completely alone.
Stefan reached into his pocket and closed his hand around the cool metal.
Tap, tap, taptaptaptaptap…
Chapter 38
Carl Sandburg.
“Carl…The poet, right?” Amelia Sachs asked the balding man driving a small, gray Renault.
The associate of Charlotte McKenzie’s, he’d picked her up at Linate Airport, the smaller of the two aerodromes in Milan, closer to the city center. They were in thick traffic.
“That’s right,” Pete Prescott told her. “He wrote ‘Chicago.’” The legal liaison dropped his voice a bit, to sound poetic, Sachs guessed, and recited the opening lines, about the Hog Butcher.
“You from there, Chicago?” Sachs didn’t know where this was going.
“No, Portland. My point is the poem might’ve been about Milan. Milan is the Chicago of Italy.”
Ah. Got it. She’d been wondering.
“Working, busy, not the prettiest city in the country, not by a long shot. But it has energy and a certain charm. Not to mention The Last Supper. The fashion world. And La Scala. Do you like opera?”
“Not really.”
A pause. Its meaning: How could someone with a pulse not like opera?
“Too bad. I could get tickets to La Traviata tonight. Andrea Carelli is singing. It wouldn’t be a date.” He said this as if waiting for her to blurt, “No, no, a date would be wonderful.”
“Sorry. I’ve got to get back tonight, if possible.”
“Charlotte said you’re working on the case. The kidnapper.”
“Right.”
“With the famous detective Lincoln Rhyme. I’ve read some of those books.”
“He doesn’t like them very much.”
“At least people write about him. Nobody’s going to write novels about a legal liaison, I don’t think. Though I’ve had pretty interesting cases.”
He didn’t elaborate—she was pleased about that—but concentrated on his GPS. Traffic grew worse and Prescott swung down a side road. In contrast with this, the trip from Naples to Milan had been lightning-fast. Computer millionaire Mike Hill’s driver, a larger-than-life Italian with thick hair and an infectious smile, had met her outside the hotel, where he’d been waiting with a shiny black Audi. He’d leapt forward to take her bag. In a half hour, after an extensive history lesson on southern Italy, delivered in pretty good English and with more than a little flirt, they had arrived at the private aircraft tarmac in Naples. She’d climbed onto the plane—even nicer than the one they’d flown to Italy on—and soon the sleek aircraft was streaking into the air. She’d had a pleasant conversation with one of Hill’s executives, headed to Switzerland for meetings. Pleasant, yes, though the young man was a super geek and often lost her with his enthusiastic monologues about the state of high technology.
Prescott was now saying, “I prefer Milan, frankly, to other cities here. Not as many tourists. And I like the food better. Too much cheese in the south.”
Having recently been served a piece of mozzarella that must’ve weighed close to a pound, she understood, though was tempted to defend Neapolitan cuisine. An urge she declined.
He added, “But here? Ugh, the traffic.” He grimaced and swung the car onto a new route, past shops and small industrial operations and wholesalers and apartments, many of whose windows were covered with curious shades, metal or mesh, hinged from the top. She tried to figure out from the signage what the many commercial operations manufactured or sold, with limited success.