“I’m a bartender. I make people drinks. I make love to beautiful flight attendants—”
“You mean I’m not the first?” she asked, cutting him off to tease him.
“You are the first and the only.”
“You’re a pretty good liar, too.”
“All I mean is that I have no enemies,” he said.
“No, but I do. Or I might.”
“Here in Rome?”
“Apparently. Maybe.”
“So, you want protection, is that it?”
“Yes.”
He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her into him. “Then I will protect you.”
“I’m not sure you can.”
“But I will try.”
She shook her head. “Nope. The best thing you can do is bring me to your uncle’s.”
“If he’s home, he might not let me have his gun. His Beretta.”
“Just for one night?”
“He’d be afraid I would get myself into trouble.”
“And if he’s not home?”
“You mean I just take it?”
“I mean we just borrow it.”
“I have a better idea,” said Enrico, his voice mischievous.
She waited.
“Spend the night at my apartment. With me. No one would have any idea you were there. And if somehow someone did? You would have two strong, young waiters and one strong, young bartender to protect you.”
She thought about this as she walked, occasionally glancing around at the vendors with their gelato and the couples on their rented bikes or the tourists photographing the Roman temple beside the small pond. She saw two American boys in baseball henleys, the pair almost but not quite teenagers, running a little ahead of their parents. She saw a young man in shades standing beside a lusterless silver bike, and he looked back at her when she passed him.
She breathed in the air, lush now with the promise of twilight, and recalled Alex Sokolov’s cold body beside her in bed and his blood in her hair. She thought of his neck and the white pillow sodden like a sponge with his blood. She envisioned the decomposition Ani had alluded to on the phone. After her conversation with her lawyer, she knew that she couldn’t endanger Enrico that way. Moreover, she understood in the deep reptilian part of her brain, the core that controlled her body’s most vital functions, that something inside her had been heat-blasted and now begun to harden. It was why she wanted that gun.
“Let me think about it,” she said. “Let’s go have a drink.”
27
Elena stood before the hotel room mirror, appraising herself with her new black hair. She liked the look, she really did. Then she glanced down at her phone on the dresser and watched the blue dot on the app that was Cassandra Bowden. The flight attendant was strolling past the Temple of Asclepius in the Villa Borghese. Either she didn’t believe she was in danger or she didn’t give a damn. Knowing Bowden, it could be either. Elena doubted the woman was alone.
She drizzled a little honey onto the pecorino cheese she had ordered from room service, savored the sweet-and-saltiness of the combination, and then dabbed at her mouth with the napkin. She already had a room at the flight attendant’s hotel. She would, exactly as she had in Dubai, be upstairs well before her prey returned. This time, however, she would be waiting for Bowden—and the bartender or whomever—in the woman’s own room. If it looked like Bowden was spending the night elsewhere? Well, Elena would simply go there, too.
Unless she heard back from her handler, instructing her otherwise.
After she had climbed into the black dress, she brushed her teeth and filled her purse. They had sent her a package at the hotel with the tools she had requested: Two dozen pentobarbital tabs. One bottle of Stoli. A Beretta with a silencer and a clip. A dry-erase marker with an Arduino circuit board in the barrel to trip the hotel-room door lock. Wrist restraints that were lined with faux fur—a sex toy, but they wouldn’t leave marks on the woman’s skin the way handcuffs or even duct tape would. A stun gun built into a flashlight. And—just in case—a knife with a four-inch titanium blade that folded like a Boy Scout jackknife into the handle. It was, she thought, very similar to the one she had used on Alex Sokolov. She hoped this wouldn’t actually be one of those just-in-case moments when she’d need it.
Everything fit snugly into her shoulder bag, along with her wallet, her compact, her lipstick, her sunglasses, and her phone.
She checked the app and saw the blue dot had stopped in a structure on a side street near the British School. She checked the building’s address. It was—and this surprised Elena not at all—a bar.
28
Cassie was warm from her walk through the park, and she craved a Bellini. She thought of the tray of them she had seen at the bar in Enrico’s hotel. But she didn’t order one. She took a breath and ordered sparkling water instead. And then, because this was Rome, she asked for a cappuccino, too. She expected withdrawal—not physical, emotional—but she knew if there had ever been a moment in her life when she needed her wits about her, it was probably today. Tonight. Enrico, however, as if he had been put on the earth for no other reason than to tempt her, did order a Bellini. The two of them had a table in the bar’s courtyard that an hour earlier would have been in the sun, but now it was shade and the air felt about as perfect as the air ever could feel in August in Rome. When their drinks arrived, she watched Enrico sample it.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He seemed to take the question more seriously than she had meant it. “I make a better one, but it’s hard to screw up Prosecco and peach juice. But they should have pureed fresh peaches, not just opened a bottle of juice. It makes a world of difference.” Then he leaned across the small, round table, his elbows on the wrought iron: “What kind of trouble are you in, mio amore? If you tell me, it might be easier for me to get you that gun.”
She reached into her purse for her phone, planning to show him the article from the New York Post. She wasn’t sure how much she would share after that. But before she had done anything, she saw that she had a text from Buckley. He wanted to know the difference between a Cart Tart and a Pop Tart, but admitted that he clearly had a fondness for both. The text was playful and perfect, and she found herself smiling. It was a relief to hear from him; she was a little undone by how happy his brief text had made her.
“Good news?” he asked.
“Yes. As a matter of fact, it is.”
“So you no longer need that gun?”
She looked across the table at his Bellini for a long moment. It was so beautiful. Alcohol was so beautiful. The colors, the bottles, the labels, the glasses. The rituals. This bar served the Bellini in a highball glass with a red and green swirl at the lip. It was still almost full. She imagined Buckley reading the newspaper—the inky paper itself, a surviving dinosaur from the days before the digital asteroid had obliterated so many of its genetic cousins—at a coffee shop in the West Village.
Was it only ninety minutes ago, at the bar in her hotel, that she was fantasizing taking this young man back to her room? It was.
She opened the app on her phone for the web and found the story about her in the newspaper. Then she handed him the phone. “Happy reading,” she said.
* * *
? ?
When he was done, he placed the phone on the table and sat back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “So they think you killed this man?” he asked, his tone almost prosecutorial.
“They do,” she answered, though she wasn’t completely sure whom she meant by they. The media? The FBI? The Dubai police? Really, it could be any of them or all of them.
“But you didn’t.”
She almost told him the truth. She almost said that she had worried at first that she had, but she hoped that she hadn’t—and now she was sure that she hadn’t. But she needed to keep her stories straight. And so she answered, “When I left the hotel room, he was still alive. He was about to get dressed and get ready for his meetings in Dubai.”
“So someone killed him after you left.”
“That’s right.”
“And now you are asking me for a gun.”