Iwander around the side of the crowd, keeping both Finch and the IFF agent in view. The agent hasn’t picked up Finch again, judging by the way he’s pushing past people. He’s chasing down plague doctors, but there are a lot of them.
I head for the staircase to the east. Once I get up to the mezzanine, I plan to walk right around it to the western side, and La Contessa’s room, to speak to her guards. But my passage is barred abruptly by a very large man in a well-cut frock coat. “Excuse me, sir,” he says in very polite Italian, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder.
I smile and respond in his language. “If you want to keep your fingers, you should remove them from my person.”
The hand withdraws, although the man does not. I recognize him as one of La Contessa’s bodyguards. His white porcelain half-mask leaves his mouth visible, and I watch it pull into a sneer. “Get out of here.”
“I don’t think so,” I say softly, and move past him. He grabs me by the arm, and that’s the last mistake he makes. I move toward him instead of away, pressing him back into a dark corner behind a statue of Venus. While we move, I put my hand over his, bending his middle finger back until it snaps, and use my other palm to smother his scream of pain.
I shove him up against the wall and lean in to his ear. “I did warn you. Now, I suspect the woman for whom you work wouldnotlike a scene, so…” Slowly, I take my hand from his mouth and release his fingers.
He doesn’t cry out or call for help.
He does let out a stream of profanity in a soft whisper as he nurses his fingers with his good hand, staring at me with death in his eyes.
“All I want is one private conversation with her,” I tell him.
“You won’t be leaving here alive,” he snarls back.
I sigh, glancing over my shoulder to locate the IFF agent again. He’s looking around the room, the white mask moving back and forth quickly. “Listen,” I say. “I was like you, once. Just a low-level soldier, trying to make good. You and I, we could be friends. Your mistress will reward you once she hears what I have to say.”
“Fuck you,” he says in English.
“I’m afraid you’re not my type. So stop flirting,” I say, dropping all amusement from my voice, “andlisten to me.” I pull off his mask so I can see his face properly. “There’s an assassin here tonight, and he’s after La Contessa.”
He begins to speak, but then pauses. Thinks.
“He’s wearing abautacostume,” I supply helpfully. The guy cranes over my shoulder, glancing suspiciously back at me between scanning the ballroom.
“There are a hundredbautahere tonight,” he mutters.
“Escort me up to the balcony and I’ll point him out to you,” I offer. The guard gives me a skeptical look from beneath his pain-drawn brows.
I cast my mind back to when Frank and I were just small-time crooks doing all the grunt work. It’s a different mindset to being the Boss, that’s for sure. I think about how I felt when my Capo, Sam Fuscone, gave me the shittiest, most dangerous jobs to do, like this poor bastard right here who got sent down to deal with me.
Fuscone always half-hoped I wouldn’t come back.
I lean in and drop my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You could make a name for yourself tonight. Be the hero. Or I can take the assassin out myself, and leave you to explain to La Contessa why I had to do your job for you.” I nod up toward the mezzanine level, where the rest of her guards are standing, some looking over the railings at the party below. “Why not prove yourself to them?”
I’ve pushed the right button. “I’ll take you upstairs,” he grunts. “You point him out. But if this is some trick, you should know I have a new blade that needs blooding.”
I grin at that. “Deal.”
* * *
There are somany plague doctors in the crowd that once the IFF agent lost sight of Finch, it has been hard for him to distinguish between the lookalikes. From the mezzanine balcony it’s easy to see him moving this way and that, glancing back toward where he last saw me, and only getting pushier. He treads on the toes of a bosomy, corseted Columbina, rudely shoves past a pink-haired Harlequin dressed in white and fuchsia silks, and seizes another plague doctor by the shoulder, whirling them around.
It’s not Finch, and this particular plague doctor, who pulls off his mask to reveal himself as an aging English rock star, makes quite a fuss about the disrespectful grabbing. Thebautabacks off immediately, his cloak opening around him as he whirls around.
“Motherfucker,” my new friends breathes. “He has agun.”
I’msoglad he noticed. It would have been irritating to have to point that out to him as well.
The IFF agent backs off, looking around the room again, and then up. We lock eyes behind our masks. He knows I’ve made him, but he begins to force his way through the crowd toward the western staircase, the one closest to his side of the room—and closest to La Contessa’s private room.
The IFF agent is not stupid; it’s reasonable for him to assume that Finch will make his way back to me, sooner or later. Or perhaps he’s just cutting his losses with Finch for the night, going for the kill rather than the capture: if he can’t grab Finch, he’ll settle for slitting my throat.
