Giordano Bruno, the philosopher, would have had much to ponder if he could have seen his old neighborhood and the debauchery that took place there nightly. But there wasn’t much old Giordano could do about it, other than roll in his grave for another few hundred years.
There was a taxi sitting down the block from the Zeta Lounge when Susan and Chuck emerged. The cab’s meter was off, the driver with a mobile phone to his ear, talking furtively.
Secrets. Chuck and Susan had plenty of secrets.
First off, it was the secretive nature of their work and the European nightlife Susan and Chuck loved most. That and the risqué thrills. The thump of the clubs late at night, the dancing, the drinking, living for the moment. The lasting friendships among those who worked in the clubs in London, Paris, and Rome. The casual assignations when couples would pair off, including each of them without each other.
Then there was their professional life.
Their current assignments would soon have them in one of the old Soviet republics again where it was even colder and nastier. Oh, well, they were making a good career out of their involvement in this international cloak-and-dagger stuff.
They had money stashed in Switzerland, New York, and the Bahamas. If they weren’t doing it, they reasoned, someone else would be, just not as well. So they continued on. Across the street an American tourist was barking through a souvenir-shop megaphone asking a woman to hike up her skirt, eliciting laughs from his friends and, surprisingly, the woman herself, who was equally soused. Chuck was amused.
The sidewalk was terrible. Ice everywhere. Chuck checked the shadows in the doorways nearby. He was always on his guard. He never knew when someone would step out of such shadows and, from some grievance in a complex past, raise a weapon. He always had an eye out for anyone who might recognize them and know them by their real names. There would be no end to the inconvenience that would cause.
They were partners in a gray world, a world of the political underground, half-formed conspiracies, plots, and counterplots. They thought of themselves as warriors for a good cause. The truth was, they were closer to foot soldiers, and the validity of the cause was open to argument.
Their last work project, the one in Paris, had ended in complete disaster. So they weren’t celebrating this evening. They were trying to forget.
Chuck led Susan to the single waiting cab. He and Susan had a local woman in tow, someone they had met at the club. The woman had called her roommate and left a message, or so she said. She was staying over with “a friend” that night. So as she dropped her own cell phone into her purse, she was at liberty.
Chuck approached the cab. The driver looked up. A face that could have belonged to one of Caesar’s centurions. Drawn, unshaven, and tired.
“Le Grand Hotel,” Chuck said. He spoke good Italian but an American accent was noticeable.
It made perfect sense. A hotel with a French name in the heart of Rome. Back in the 1890s when the hotel had been named, the French motif had suggested elegance, as if the Romans didn’t have enough on their own. Yet the hotel was still the most luxurious in Rome. “Vittorio Orlando Strada, numero tre,” he continued.
The driver replied with a grumble. He was still gabbing into his own cell phone. “Non in servizio,” he answered, pointing to the roof of the cab. “Off duty.”
“I’m never off duty, so why should you be?” Chuck said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
The cabbie looked at him as if he didn’t understand. The Italians were good at that. Chuck dug around his pocket and came up with something the driver would understand.
An American fifty-dollar bill. Nice and crisp. Ulysses S. Grant in one of his sober moments.
“This is yours on top of whatever’s on the meter.”
The cabbie hesitated. Then, “Va bene,” he said.
The cabbie put his hand on the fifty. Chuck eyed the vehicle from end to end, trying to assess any potential danger.
Standard Roman cab. A white Mercedes with a fresh dent in the driver’s side front door. Brand new and it had already collided with the rest of the city.
He dug deeply into the cabbie’s eyes. Standard sorehead Roman cabbie.
“I’m getting cold,” the second woman said, stamping her feet briskly, holding her legs tightly together against a sharp breeze. “Are we going somewhere or not?”
“Okay,” Chuck concluded. He released the fifty. They huddled into the taxi, the three of them in the back seat, Chuck on the far end, Susan in the middle, their new friend on the end. The cabbie pulled away from the curb.
Chuck eyed the hack license that the driver displayed on the dashboard. More bad vibes: The name was Italian but the face was something more Eastern. Still, one saw just about everything these days in the capitals of Western Europe.
Maybe Chuck was growing too paranoid. Maybe he had spent too much time in the back alleys and out of the sunlight for his government. Maybe he was too old for this sort of thing. Sometimes he didn’t even recall what name or identity he was using.
From that point, the ride was over in a few seconds.
It was past 3:15 a.m. The streets that were busy by day were deserted now. On the wet asphalt of the via Piemonte, the driver suddenly took a sharp turn down a narrow dark side street. Chuck saw that there was a larger car a quarter of the way down the street, blocking passage. The cabbie pulled up hard and brought the taxi to an unsteady jolting halt.
Then in the fraction of a second before anything happened, Chuck knew that he was a dead man and Susan wouldn’t fare much better. Another car screeched up behind them. Chuck heard car doors open and slam shut. At the same time, his lateral vision caught the movement of a fourth man emerging from between two parked cars to the side.
Chuck started yelling. Loud, accusatory, and profane.
Chuck and Susan felt the weight of their own cab change as both the driver and the woman, knowing what was happening, bolted and fled, leaving their doors open.
Susan’s voice, high and anguished, “What the-?”
Chuck’s voice followed close, frenzied. “It’s a trap!” he screamed.
With one hand, Chuck worked his door handle. It was locked.
His other hand groped for a gun, the one that he had chosen not to carry that night because so many of the clubs did searches. In his peripheral vision, he saw two men swiftly approaching the car. Dressed in black, they pulled down their ski masks, stealthy and efficient as a pair of urban panthers.
In his last moments, Chuck noticed that one of the men had an obvious nervous tic under the ski mask. And he recognized their weapons, Sig Sauer P226s. But he didn’t have time to think about any of it. All he could think about was how the enemy had known that somehow he was unarmed that night. Then, in a final realization, that came together in his mind also. The woman they had met in the club. She had fixed their execution via her cell phone.
The gunmen lifted their weapons. Silencers.
In a final reflex for life, Chuck smashed his huge body against the car door to his side. It didn’t budge. He swung an elbow and shattered the window. The glass tore into his sleeve and slashed his arm as the rest of the window poured to the asphalt. He groped wildly for the outer door handle and worked it.
No luck. The cab was a high tech roach motel. The door wasn’t going anywhere and neither was Chuck.
The gunmen raised their weapons. Chuck and Susan raised their arms to protect themselves. They heard little past the first shots as their bodies exploded in searing pain.
The first volley of bullets tore into their arms.
Their screams and their blood filled the night. The next volley of shots ripped into their heads and necks. The rear door lock finally gave way when bullets tore apart the locking mechanism.