“I can use the company,” he said.
Alex sat. “Why am I a pariah?” she asked.
Mike Gamburian looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Don’t play games, Mike. You’re my boss. If my access to information has been curtailed, you would know about it. If you know about it, you would also know why. That’s why I’m in your office right now, and that’s why I’m going to present you with my resignation in one minute.”
He sighed. “Let’s go downstairs for a smoke,” he said.
“Neither of us smoke,” she said.
“I just started,” he said. “Bad habit, I know. I need to quit. So let’s go have a cigarette.”
At the same time he made a gesture with his hand, pointing to the two of them and the doorway. She got it. They went down the elevator together in silence, not a single cigarette between them.
Then they stood on the outside of the front entrance of Treasury, standing a careful distance away from those who really were smoking.
They talked around the issue for several minutes.
“Look,” Gamburian finally said, “the first thing… I’m your friend. You’re a great woman and a fantastic employee. If you need to leave, I don’t blame you, but I want you to know I’d hire you back in a flash any day of the week.”
“I can’t do my job if I can’t access information, Mike. And I resent being excluded from an investigation of an incident that cost Robert his life. I want answers and I’m not getting them here.”
“Okay,” he said. “I understand. There’s been some talk. Crap I can’t do anything about. No one in the Western Hemisphere has a single negative thing to say about you. The way you handled things in Ukraine was beyond reproach. The first thing I need to tell you is that you can stay here. There’d be a promotion coming your way, added pay, the works.”
“In a job with no responsibility, right? Where someone’s going to be looking over my shoulder the whole time, right?”
He blew past her point.
“The second thing is that if you wanted to take more time off, with pay, that option is open to you too. No one’s going to hold it against you.” He paused. “I had a talk with the big boss. You could take up to a year if you wanted without a problem.”
“You’re talking in circles, Mike. If everything is hearts and flowers, what is the problem?”
“They think you know something,” he said. “Something more than you’re telling them.”
“Why would I conceal anything?”
“That’s what I asked them also.”
“Who’s ‘them’?” she snapped. “Who are we talking about?”
“The powers that be.”
“CIA? NSA? White House? Secret Service?”
He blinked twice. “I honestly can’t answer that.”
“You don’t know or you can’t answer?”
“I can’t answer,” he said crisply.
She seethed and stifled a profanity. “I’ve told them everything I know. Probably about three times with every detail I can remember.”
“I’m sure you have,” he said. “Thing is, they think you might know something that you’re not even aware of.”
“Have they questioned you?”
“Quite a bit.”
She sighed. She nodded. “Okay,” she finally said. “Then I want to clear out of here. I’ll accept that leave of absence.”
“Where will you go?”
“I received a message from Joseph Collins after Kiev. The businessman. You know who he is.”
“Everyone knows who he is,” Gamburian said. “He’s like Donald Trump but without the funny hair.”
“Mr. Collins has contacted me three times since Kiev.”
“How do you know him?”
“I worked for him several years ago. He mentored me in a way. Summer of 2001.”
Gamburian nodded.
“He’s a decent man and a good employer. He has an offer he wants to make to me. A job. I don’t know anything about it, but somehow he knew I might want to take leave of here.”
“He’s savvy to the ways of the world, Collins is, which is why he’s so wealthy. He also knows how the government works.”
“The job would take me back to New York. I should listen to what he has to say.”
“You’d be a fool not to.” Gamburian nodded sadly. “What type of job? Do you have any idea?”
“Mr. Collins is in his seventies now. He’s been using a lot of his fortune to help the Christian churches fight poverty and disease in the Third World,” she said. “That has its appeal to me right now. So I’m going to listen to what he has to offer, do some soul searching, look for some divine guidance if I can get some, and then see where I am.”
Gamburian followed.
“Hopefully at the end of the day I’ll be in the right place,” she said.
“I have no doubt you will. No doubt at all.”
He embraced her.
“I’m sorry it turned out like this here,” he said. “Really, I am.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
FIFTY-FOUR
Lt. Rizzo finally was making progress. Or at least he thought he was.
He remained visibly furious that people from the US Embassy had removed the two bodies from the morgue and sent them back to America. But he was not about to let that stop his investigation. Inside, he didn’t care much what they did with those corpses, but he was not shy about vocalizing his stated displeasure.
Allora bene, he thought to himself. Very well. If they wanted to block his direct access to resolving four murders by blockading his route to two of the bodies, he would pursue the matter from a different direction. Over the last decade, the Americans had been directed by a bunch of know-nothings who lacked the sophistication to understand how other countries, other governments, worked. He would fly under their radar, he told everyone he worked with, then bored everyone with another rant about American duplicity and interference.
Accordingly, his people had tracked down the drug-addled musician by going through pay receipts in the apartment where he had lived. Rizzo personally had interviewed the dead guitarist’s disgusting band mates and the owners of the club where he had played. He had even found the marriage license of the girl who had died with him in the apartment and now knew her name was Lana Bissoni and she was indeed from Toronto.
From there he had the location of the wife’s family back in Canada. Rizzo was not surprised to learn that they hadn’t heard from her in five years. Nonetheless, Rizzo allowed her body to be shipped to Ontario.
Rizzo and his other detectives spent hours canvassing the building where the couple died and the club where the musicians had played. He knew that the key to any criminal investigation was talking to the day-to-day people who are in the same place every day. The people who see things and eventually tell you something.
From there he accessed some of the girl’s friends and people who knew the couple from the nearby cafés. Apparently, Lana and her husband had had some fallings out of late. She hadn’t been in the habit of showing up in the clubs where he was playing. In turn, she seemed to have fallen in with some of the Eastern European underworld that populated Rome.
Well, no wonder she “woke up one day and was dead,” as Rizzo liked to say. You can’t sleep with a dog without waking up with fleas. And certainly, in his opinion, many of these Eastern Europeans from the old Soviet republics were packs of mutts.
Now at least he had a direction to send his investigators.
He called another special meeting at his headquarters. He assembled all four of his newly acquired homicide people. They were each allowed to select one top assistant. So now he had eight people on this case, in addition to the ragazzi in the computer rooms, the interns, who acted as wild cards and who knew when they were going to come up with something good.