But . . .
I had done this before. I had done this exact thing before, in a different language, in a different city. I had sat in a meeting at Halberd in the spring of the year I left and I had watched a senior analyst — a man named Howell, fifty-two, two kids, a wife who taught third grade — raise a concern about a fund routing and I had watched the principals smile at him and table the question and I had said nothing because I was not ready, because I needed more data, because if I waited maybe someone else would speak up. Howell had died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Newark four months later. The coroner had ruled it natural. Maybe it had been. Maybe it had not. I had spent two years not knowing and I had decided, in the courtroom, that not knowing was itself the verdict.
I was not going to do it to Wendell.
I wasn’t going to act too late. I wasn’t going to put myself first. I was going to try.
I turned and I walked back to the desk and I picked up the phone and I slid it into the pocket of my jeans — not because I would use it, but because leaving it on the desk would draw the eye. I sat back down at the workstation. I tapped the keyboard. The screen woke. I opened the Maltese correspondent file as though I had been reading it. I let my hand rest on the trackpad. I waited until my pulse had come down from where it was.
Then I stood up the way I had stood up a hundred times in the last week — easy, unhurried, the body language of a woman going to the bathroom — and I crossed the room toward the small hallway at the back where the downstairs powder room was.
Pietro looked up.
I stopped at his shoulder. I put my hand at the small of his back the way he put his at mine. I went up on my toes and I kissed the side of his jaw, lightly, the way I had begun to.
“Bathroom,” I said. “Then more coffee. I think I have him by lunch.”
“That’s my girl.”
He did not look at me hard. He had no reason to. I had been getting up for coffee and the bathroom every forty minutes since seven a.m. I had been kissing the side of his jaw all morning. I had built the cover six hours ago without knowing I was building it.
I went down the hallway. I closed the powder room door. I did not turn on the light. I stood in the dark for a count of three.
Then I went out the small side door at the end of the hallway that opened onto the mudroom, and from the mudroom into the narrow service passage between the carriage house and the back of Marco’s townhouse, and from the service passage out through the gap in the hedge that Tonio had walked me past on the way in this morning and that I had clocked, automatically, as an exit — because two years of running had taught my body to clock exits even when my brain was not asking it to.
My coat was on a peg in the mudroom. I took it. I did not take the gloves. The gloves were the new ones, leather, expensive, the wrong gloves for this. My old wool ones were still in the coat pocket. I put them on in the alley.
The cold hit me at the gap in the hedge.
The city was very bright. The sky was the same hard winter sky as the day Pietro had taken me to the glass house. I had not been outside in twenty-four hours.
I started walking south.
Thewalktookthirty-eightminutes.
I did not run. Running was the thing they would be watching for. Running was the body language of a woman who knew she was prey. I walked the way I had walked into the carriage house this morning, measuring it, my hands shoved into the pockets of my coat with the old wool gloves on, my chin tucked into the borrowed scarf that still smelled, faintly, of him.
I let myself think about Pietro for one block.
One block only. From 51st to 52nd. I let myself think about his hand on the back of my neck this morning, the absent slow circle of his thumb. I let myself think about him sayingthat’s my girlwithout looking up. I let myself think about the kitchen ninety minutes ago and his hand flat on the table and his voice sayingI am going to ask her to marry me.
At 52nd I made myself stop. I put him away. I put him in a small box at the back of my head and I closed the lid. He could not come with me into the green door. If he came with me into the green door I would falter.
The address was a low-rise building behind a fence behind a parking lot behind a strip of dead grass under the el tracks. The kind of building that had been a print shop in 1985 and a body shop in 2002 and now was nothing—the windows boarded with plywood that had been painted black, the front door padlocked, the lot empty except for a single white panel van parked tail-in against the loading bay. The bay had a small door beside it. The door was painted green. It was the only green thing in three blocks.
I came at it from the south on foot the way I had been told. My hands were out of my pockets ten meters before the door. I had taken off the gloves. I wanted them to see my hands.
The door opened before I reached it.
A man stood in the gap. Mid-thirties. Dark coat. Clean-shaven. He was not large. None of them, I would learn, were large.Largeness was a tell; largeness made you memorable on a street; largeness was the body of an amateur. He looked at me, then past me, then at me again. He nodded once and stepped aside.
I went in.
The room was a former workshop. Concrete floor. Fluorescent lights overhead, only half the tubes still working. Cold—colder inside than out, because the windows had been broken at some point and patched with plywood and the wind came through the cracks. There were four men in the room.
One of them—Wendell—was in a folding chair in the middle of the room.
He was alive.
