We did not go up the stairs.
We turned left through a heavy door into a long room that ran the width of the seaward side of the house. Three sets of French doors, all of them open onto a terrace. Beyond the terrace, a balustrade of carved stone. Beyond the balustrade, the Mediterranean.
I had never seen it before.
The analyst tried to keep me at work—exits, count, layout—and the analyst lost, briefly, because the sea was so pretty. It was not blue. It was not green. The light came off it in flat hard sheets, making it seem like shifting treasure.
A man sat in a wicker chair facing the sea.
I knew him from the photographs in the file I had built two years ago. I knew him from the courtroom dossier the FBI had let me see only once and only behind glass. I knew him from a video taken at a charity gala in 2018, where he had stood next to a state senator and laughed at something the senator had said and the laugh had not reached his eyes. He had been a tall handsome man then, expensively still, the silver at his temples deliberate. He had been the man who scared me.
He was older now.
The exile had taken something off him. Not the body—he was still lean, still upright, still wearing a linen shirt that cost more than the room I had rented in Pilsen for a month. But the skin at his throat had loosened, and his hair had gone fully grey, and his hands, when he turned them on the arms of the chair to acknowledge me, had the small fine tremor of a man who had been drinking through afternoons that had no purpose.
He did not stand.
That was the first thing I cataloged. He did not stand for me, and he did not turn his head fully toward me, and he did not say my name. He kept his face mostly seaward, and he lifted one hand, and the Frenchman closed the door behind me and was gone, and we were alone in the room with the sea.
“Sit, please,” Enzo Valenti said. “You must be tired.”
The voice was the voice from the dossier transcripts. Soft. Precise. The accent of a man who had been born in Detroit and had spent forty years removing Detroit from his mouth and had succeeded.
I did not sit immediately.
I crossed the room at the pace I had crossed every room in two years and I stopped behind the chair he had indicated and I put my hand on the back of it. I did not look at the sea anymore. I looked at him.
“Mr. Valenti.”
He smiled, faintly. He still had not turned his head.
“I appreciate the use of my name. So many of your colleagues at the firm preferred to refer to me by file number. It was a small dignity I missed.”
“I imagine the exile has cost you a number of dignities.”
The smile sharpened. Now he turned. His eyes were the pale grey of the dossier and they had not aged the way the rest of him had. They were younger than his hands. They went over my face the way a man went over a financial statement he suspected of inaccuracy.
“Please sit, Miss Baggio. I have a chair pulled out for you. It is rude to make me look up.”
I sat.
I sat in the chair he had indicated, which placed me opposite him, the sea over his shoulder. I folded my hands in my lap. I let my breathing slow. I let him have the room.
He let the silence run a beat past comfortable and then he said: “We will not waste each other’s time. I am a tired man. You have had a long flight. I will tell you what I want, and you will tell me what you know, and we will arrive at an arrangement that suits us both. Yes?”
“Tell me what you want.”
“The Halberd testimony. Specifically, the parts of it that did not make it into evidence at trial. There are documents you held back. I know this because the indictment was narrower than the underlying intelligence. I want to know what your government has and has not seen. I want to know which of my structures theyunderstand and which they do not. I want to know, in particular, what you produced on the Maltese question.”
I let him sit with that for a beat.
Then I said, “You’re asking me to tell you which of your shells are safe.”
“In so many words. Yes.”
“Why would I.”
“Because you would like to live.”
