“I came past Piazza del Gesù Nuovo on my way here,” he continued. “It was cordoned off. And there was a police vehicle by the door of the church. What happened?”
“Someone was killed.”
“Nobody would plan a murder in a church,” he said. “Crime of passion, then. Did they catch the killer?”
“I don’t know,” Nikki said.
“They’ll need a quick and quiet investigation, or it will chase away the tourists,” Raoul said, then chuckled to himself. “Maybe it isn’t a bad thing to lose a few tourists….”
He finished his pastry and, looking thoughtful, lit another cigarette.
“Beatrice studied that church, you know?” he mused. “She was convinced there was a hidden message in the facade.”
Nikki inhaled sharply. It had been months since Raoul had mentioned her mother. He never seemed to like it when Nikki talked about her.
“What was the message?” she asked.
He shook his head with a soft smile.
“She never told me. That’s just who she was: a code breaker. Adriano was like her. He saw the patterns. She brought him into her world.”
For a moment he seemed stricken.
Nikki glanced across the piazza, pigeons pecking at the stones.
Only since her mother’s death last year had Nikki begun to realize the extent to which she hadn’t properly known her.
Of course, she knew the family story well enough: Raoul had beena handsome carabinieri officer and Beatrice a beautiful twenty-four-year-old cryptologist translating for the United States Navy. They’d met on a joint operation, and began a love affair that lasted a lifetime. Beatrice left her career to marry Raoul and raise three children.
It was a beautiful fairy tale—but Nikki had spent her life intuiting the shape of her mother’s secrets, and felt certain there was a lie buried in this truth.
Months ago, NCIS agent Durant Cole had talked about Beatrice—had said she was something more…somethingspecial. His words had brought a strange sort of relief, confirming an instinct Nikki had carried since childhood.
Violetta, he’d told her.That was her code name. And what happened on Santo Stefano…
It was possible he’d lied. Everything else had been a lie: the friendship…the trust.
Nikki had asked her father about it, but he’d brushed it off. “There were a lot of things about your mother I didn’t know,” he’d said.
Nikki had investigated as far as she could on her own. She’d filed requests for information from the US government. She and Valerio had also sailedCalypsoto the island of Santo Stefano, hiked around, and talked to the locals. But it was a dead end.
“She brought Adriano into her world,” Nikki repeated back to Raoul now. “What do you mean?”
“Oh,” he sighed. “You know how those two were…like bread and onions.”
Nikki remembered Adriano at the kitchen table while their mother cooked, talking politics and philosophy—the two of them speaking in that secret language they used.
Raoul clinked the small spoon around his empty espresso cup, scraping the remnants of sweet dark foam.
“Maybe I’ll do my own investigation,” he said. “I’ll ask around…see what people say.”
His eyes gleamed with replenished enthusiasm.
“Let the police do their job,” Nikki warned. “They might not like you getting in the way.”
“But the police don’t know this place like I do. Tell me about the murder. What have you heard?”
“I can’t discuss it,” Nikki said.
