“Yet you recognized spoken Italian in the grocery.” His head tilts.
“I mean, I recognize it when Ihearit. And I know the guy who owns Perrotta’s is—obviously—Italian. But it’s not like I could understand what you weresayingwhen you—”
“Okay,” he interrupts. “So you have a sheet of information in Italian, and you want me to translate it for you.”
“Yes.” She forces herself to shut up.
“You do understand that I didn’t realize, before today, that I evenspokeItalian? I don’t know if I’ll be able to read any of the words when they’re written down—”
“Just ... try it,” she suggests.
There’s a long pause, in which Noone tongues his back teeth and Nomi feels the full import of what she’s doing.
“Please,” she blurts, and she does blush then. “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”
His expression doesn’t change. But he holds the door open wider. “Okay, fine. Come on in and show me what you’ve got.”
Noone’s apartment is ... delightful. Larger than her own, high ceilinged and shockingly sunny, with walls painted the palest creamy yellow, so the room is still gleaming even this late in the afternoon. It’s also almost completely open plan, so she can see his staggering lack of furniture: Two chairs, a low double bed, a dresser, a breakfast table—that’s it. A chess set on the dresser looks to be mid-game. He has no wall decorations of any kind, just coat hooks near the door. Lots of books, though, both fiction and nonfiction, including what appears to be a complete set of medical encyclopedias. All the tomes are stacked in piles near three tall, narrow windows; the windows, with white muslin curtains, show views all along Gansevoort. It’s like a little aerie up here.
“Nice,” she says, although she deducts points for the absence of plants. But better to get on with this, so she walks straight over to the round breakfast table, where a copy ofGray’s Anatomy(twentieth edition) lies open at an illustration of the bones of the human hand. Nomi pushes the book aside and smooths the fax page out on the wooden tabletop. “Here’s what I’ve got. Just one page, but I think it’s from the court in Palermo—”
“That’s in Sicily.” Noone stands beside her, buttoning his shirt, eyes on the fax copy. “That’s a pretty terrible copy.”
“I know, sorry.”
He snags a cigarette from a pack on the table, running the finger of his other hand across the top lines of the fax. “This isn’t recent?”
He picked that up quick. “I told my contact I needed whatever she could get. This is what she got.”
“Interesting.” He grimaces at the letters, at her. “Look, I don’t know how this works. I spoke Italian in the grocery without meaning to, it’s very different from reading the words on a page.”
“What if you tried—I don’t know—speaking the words aloud?” This has to work, or she’ll have embarrassed herself for nothing.
He tucks the cigarette behind his ear, grabs the page, and steps back.
“Let me see. Servizio Operativo Centrale ...” His eyes—blue as a jay—suddenly meet Nomi’s; he’s still patently flabbergasted at how this language falls out of his mouth so smoothly. Then he looks down again and continues. “Servizio Operativo Centrale del Ministero della Giustizia Italiano, per ordinanza del Tribunale di Palermo ... That’s, the, uh, Central Operational Service of the Ministry of Justice of Italy, by order of the Palermo Court ...”
They get the bulk of the translation done this way. Noone reads and gives her the basic gist, which Nomi writes down on the legal pad. She gets him to go back and reread some sections, to see if she can get a more accurate sense of certain words.
“So ‘mezzano’ means a pimp.” She makes an underline. Sunlight is fading out the windows. “And ‘fare il mezzano’ means ...”
“It’s like—the manager of a prostitute?” Noone scratches his temple with the end of his own pen. They’re both sitting at the table now, although he still hasn’t put on any shoes. “I mean, that’s not the exact phrasing, more like if you’re the one arranging how someonebecomesa prostitute—”
“Pandering. This is a pandering charge.”
He sits back, snorts. “It’s amazing that I understand the word for something in Italian when I wasn’t even aware such a word existed in English.”
“Your messed-up brain.”
“Tell me about it.” He winces, tosses his pen on the tabletop. “Excuse me for a second.”
He gets up and walks to the bathroom. Nomi thinks he might be in pain—he’s been squinting over the scratchy fax-copy words for a long time—and sure enough, she hears him open his bathroom cabinet, run the faucet. It’s still warm in the apartment; he must have the heating turned up, which makes sense for a guy who’s come from Guatemala.
He emerges into the bathroom doorway, wiping his hands with a white towel. “Sorry. Headache.”
“You get a lot of those?”
“Only every day.” Noone’s smile is humorless. He tosses the towel back into the bathroom as he starts for the kitchen, feet padding on the linoleum. “Coffee? I’m very sorry, I should’ve offered you one before.”
