“Sure.”
Cain took the glass and moved toward the center of the room. There was a single light above the piano. Then Lucy came down the steps. She paused on the landing, looking at the crowd. She wore a simple dress made of black jersey, and she was barefoot. She had tied her hair into a knot at the back of her head, and wore no makeup and no jewelry. The room went still when she appeared, thirty pairs of eyes on her. She nodded at the crowd, and then she came the rest of the way down the steps and crossed to the piano.
“—it was in 2010,” the desk clerk was whispering to a group behind Cain. “At the Royal Albert Hall, in London. That was the last time. Until tonight.”
Lucy pulled out the piano bench, sat down, and ran her fingers silently along the tops of the keys. She had no sheet music, but that didn’t matter. She drew a breath and the crowd went silent, and then she bent toward the keyboard, her eyes closed.
“Liszt,” the desk clerk whispered, when Lucy had made it through the first few bars.
“Oh my god,” an old man breathed, as Lucy took off into a long run of notes, right hand only, her left hand curled in her lap.
And then there was nothing, except for the music.
They ate dinner at a low table set up in front of their fireplace.
“I’m always this way, after,” she said. Their plates were empty now, and Cain was finishing his beer. The waiter had brought a glass of mineral water for her, but she hadn’t touched it.
“What way?”
“Rattled,” she said. “Quiet.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not because it was the first time back. It’s because it was like any other time.”
“That’s good,” Cain said.
“You probably know the feeling even better than I do,” she answered. “You’re under the lights all the time. Every eye in the house on you, waiting for you to make a mistake. And if you do, it really matters. So that when you’re done for the day, you’re quiet. It takes you a while to decide that you’re okay. That you didn’t make any mistakes.”
He took a sip of his beer and watched her in the firelight.
“But you’re not going to do that,” she said. “Make mistakes.”
“No,” he answered.
At eleven the next morning, he checked her into the Marriott at Union Square. He went with her up to the eighth floor, watching the lobby shrink away as the glass elevator rose upward. There were people in the third-floor bar, but no one was watching the elevators. No one had followed them back from Mendocino, either. In the room, he slipped off his shoulder holster and locked his gun in the safe.
“Will you be okay?” he asked.
“I still have my book.”
“They’ll probably take my phone at the consulate. If you need me—”
“I’ll be okay,” Lucy said. She wrapped her arms around herself and looked out the arched window. “What do you think he wants to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have a hunch,” she said. “You always do.”
He looked at the gray sky, at the traffic moving down Post Street toward the square.
“He sounded like a man who wanted to confess.”
“Confess what?”
“I don’t know,” Cain said. “But he feels guilty about something. I’m sure about that.”
“And you think it’s safe to meet him?”
“It’s in a consulate. And they must know I told people—”
“Fischer, you mean. You told her.”
“—so they’d be crazy to do anything.”
“All right,” she said.
They both knew there were plenty of crazy people. Neither of them had to say it to the other. But there were a thousand times as many people who were perfectly decent. The odds were with him on this.
The day had been getting darker since dawn, and the next wave of rain was almost here. He stood in a thinning lunch-hour crowd near the corner of Sansome and Sutter. The consulate’s marble columns were stained dark with water. Nearby, a young tourist couple held their cell phones at arm’s length, taking a few last photos of themselves before they fled the weather.
“You look just like your picture,” a man said. “Maybe we should go inside before the rain comes, eh?”
Cain turned around. The man facing him was a few years into his seventies. He wore a dark cashmere overcoat that was unbuttoned enough to show the crimson knot of his tie. His brimmed black hat was pulled low over his brow.
“Too conspicuous to do this on the street?” Cain asked him.
“Obviously,” the man said, and Cain knew his voice. It was the refined baritone he’d heard on the first call. “And the weather. Mostly the weather.”
They looked together up the street. A wall of storm clouds was advancing along Sutter, a cold whiteout. Everything behind it was already gone.
“You didn’t fly here just to give me all the answers,” Cain said. “You have your own agenda. Tell me about that first.”