He turned his face a quarter back toward the sea, and he picked up a small glass of pale yellow wine from the table at his elbow, and he sipped it.
I watched his hand.
The tremor was small but it was there. He was not the man in the dossier anymore. He was the man in the dossier eighteen months into a Maltese summer that had no end, with no compound in Chicago and no son in the office and no senator on speed dial, and he was bored and afraid and he had paid a great deal of money to put me in this chair and he needed what I had now because what I had was the last interesting thing left to him.
Good.
Wendell sat at the base of my sternum and I did not let him out, but I let him stay.
“I’ll tell you the Caymans,” I said.
He turned his head back to me.
“The Caymans I’ll give you. Two of the three vehicles you used out of Grand Cayman were documented in my files. Both were referenced in the FBI intake. Neither was charged. They sit in a sealed exhibit list. I’ll give you the names of the directors I identified, the correspondent banks I tracked, the months I had clean transaction data. You can move what you have out of the Caymans tomorrow. You will be six months ahead of any subpoena.”
“And in exchange.”
“In exchange you do not ask me about Monaco. Or Malta.”
He smiled. It was not pleasant.
“Why do you think I want Malta, Miss Baggio.”
“Because we are sitting in Malta.”
He laughed, a single dry sound, surprised out of him. The hand with the wine glass made the smallest gesture of acknowledgment. The eyes did not warm.
“You are very clever,” he said. “I had been told. I confess I had not believed it. The girls they put in the trading rooms now, in my experience, are decorative. You were not decorative.”
“No.”
“No.” He set the glass down. “The Caymans you would give me to buy yourself an afternoon. I appreciate the generosity. I am not interested. The Caymans are already cold. The Caymans I have already moved. You knew this when you offered them, which is why you offered them. Try again, please. With something I can use.”
He leaned forward.
“I want to know which of the Maltese structures your government has identified and which it has not. I want to know the names you found and the names you did not find. I want to know whether Anastasia Krol is on a list you produced, or whether her signature lives only in the files of a young analyst who was not believed. I want to know, very specifically, what is in the file you built between yesterday morning and the moment my colleagues called you.”
The skin at the back of my neck went cold.
He knew.
“The file I built yesterday traced Northbridge to Krol to the Bank of Valletta to a trust administered out of Sliema to a holding company holding title on this villa. The file is in Chicago. The file was open on a workstation when your men called me. I assume you know this, because you are asking me about it.What you should be asking yourself is who else now has the file. Because I did not work alone, Mr. Valenti. I worked at a table with the Caruso family. Old friends of yours, so I hear? The file is theirs, now. They will follow it. They are following it. The only question is how long the flight takes.”
His face did not change.
But his hand, on the arm of the chair, went still in the particular way a hand went still when it had been tremoring and the body had decided to stop it.
“You are bluffing,” he said.
“I might be.”
“The Carusos do not have reach in Malta.”
“The Scordatos do.”
He looked at me for a long second.
Then there was a sound. Terrible. A scream.
