“I don’t want to know anything about him,” Rizzo said, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. “Nothing would make me dislike Americans more than I already do.”
There was no disputing that part by anyone who had listened to Rizzo over the last several years. But Sophie would not shut up. There might have been something to those rumors that he, Billy-O, danced at the other end of the ballroom, as the English would say. In fact, Sophie had been treated wretchedly in Monte Carlo and said she wouldn’t mind at all if Gian Antonio could pull a few police strings and make life miserable for that Hollywood punk while he was on the continent.
“What can I do?” Rizzo scoffed. “What authority do I have? These Hollywood types have all the money and know all the right people. Who do I know? The minister of justice and he can’t stand me.”
In fact, Rizzo had a good idea that he might want to get out of town, lay low for a short while. He had some other things to attend to, a side business as it were. His bosses told him that he could take a week off if he wished. He wished. He had the time coming and his juice within the Roman police department was diminishing day by day, even with the recently approved sixty-day extension of his duties.
He thought about the whole situation. Sophie. The actor. The minister. What he could use, he decided, was a good reason for being out of town.
So he asked Sophie if she might want to accompany him on a business trip. He would be busy for much of the time. There was some highly confidential stuff in a neighboring European capital. She would need to let him go there for a few days, then join him. He had some work to accomplish, some people to meet. But thereafter they could get reacquainted, let bygones be bygones, and he might even be able to let the memory of that American musical nuisance fade away.
Sophie took the bait. She said yes.
So a trip to Paris for two was on, Rizzo to go ahead first, Sophie to join him in three days. They would relax and get to know each other again. Billy-O had given an entirely new meaning to the term “one hit wonder.”
Rizzo’s peers in the police department in Rome all envied him for so flagrantly going off to patch things up with his lady friend in the middle of the week. Some guys had all the luck, as Rod Stewart might have sung.
Meanwhile, Rizzo made a few phone calls to some people he knew. They would arrange for Billy-O to eventually draw the receipt he deserved.
SEVENTY-SIX
Alex and Michael Cerny flew to Miami via American Airlines, then connected to New York. They stayed overnight in the city.
That evening, Alex met with Collins for an hour at his home, giving him her grave in-person account of what had transpired at Barranco Lajoya. She gave him all the photographs and notes she had taken. He listened quietly and seemed overcome by a great sadness.
Then he stood from behind a desk. They were in his study, a room that was high-ceilinged and elegantly furnished. With a stiff walk Collins crossed the room to a wide plate glass window that looked down upon Fifth Avenue. He stared downward for several seconds in silence, as if the view might give him some explanation of the craziness and brutality of the contemporary world.
There was no indication that it did.
The silence continued. There was a sag to Collins’ shoulders, one she had not seen before. She wondered what he might be thinking. “Presumably the Ukrainians had no intention to harm Barranco Lajoya before I sent you there,” Collins said softly. “So it seems my best of intentions have contributed to a tragedy, a catastrophe. There’s blood on my hands.”
“No one could have foreseen this, Mr. Collins,” she said. “No one.”
“Generous of you to say so, Alex,” he said, turning back toward her. “But I can draw my own conclusions and I’ll have to live with them.” He paused. “Call me a foolish old man,” he said, “but I feel I will now have a debt to those people from that village for as long as I live. I don’t consider the books closed on that place.”
“If it’s not presumptuous,” she said, “I feel much the same way.”
“You do?”
“At the appropriate time,” Alex said. “I’d like to return. Unfinished business.”
An ironic smile crossed his face. “Unfinished business,” he said. “Yes, we agree. You seem drawn to unfinished business, don’t you, Alex? Venezuela. Ukraine…”
“That does seem to be the path that’s before me right now,” she said. “It’s not where I thought I’d be right now, but it’s where I am.”
He nodded.
“I know how that works,” he said. “Show me someone for whom that isn’t the case, and I’ll show you someone who sat back in life and never took chances, never tried to do the right thing. I admire you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Be careful in Ukraine,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s a godless place.” “
I’ll do my best,” she said.
“I know that,” he answered. “Just while you’re doing your best, be careful also.” He moved back to his desk. “I have a check for you for your work in South America. I’ve rounded it up to fifty thousand dollars. Don’t protest. Try to find some time to enjoy it and a place to relax with it,” he said.
She accepted it in an unmarked envelope, which she wouldn’t open till later in the day when she would mail it to her bank in Washington.
“I’ll do my best,” she said again.
A few minutes later, she was out of his apartment and back down on Fifth Avenue, walking home slowly, enjoying the anonymity that a crowded New York sidewalk always afforded her.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
The next morning, Alex and Michael Cerny were on an Air France flight from New York to Paris. Two hours into the flight, sitting side by side in business class, Cerny took out his Palm Pilot. He applied his fingerprint to the security section and powered it up.
“I want you to read some files,” Cerny said. “CIA and NSA stuff. They’ll tell you more about why we’re going to Paris.”
“Full disclosure?” she asked with an edge.
“Call it what you want,” Cerny said. “You need to know some backstory.”
He handed the Palm Pilot to Alex. She began with a CIA file that was, as much as anything, a continuation of what she had read on Yuri Federov back in January. But it added to her knowledge.
Federov had been on a CIA list for several months as a foreign national in whom the Agency had taken a “special interest.” At the same time, Federov had developed a long list of enemies in the underworlds of North America, South America, and Europe. So many, that fear of his enemies had impeded his movements for years. Thus from time to time, Federov had been in the habit of traveling through Europe in the guise of a priest.
But within the last eighteen months, Federov had taken the guise one step further. He had hired a double, a retired actor from the National Theater of Hungary. The double was a friend named Daniel Katzman. Katzman bore a resemblance to him. Hence Katzman traveled as Father Daniel, a Federov decoy-within-a-decoy so that Federov himself could move about the world more freely.
Daniel turned out to be in the role of a lifetime, or, more accurately, the last role of his lifetime. A pair of assassins shot him to death in a French café named L’etincelle during the first days of the new year. Alex noted the date. January 2. The French police were still working on the case, the file said, the one of the man in priestly garb shot dead over a cognac and a cigar at a café in the Marais.
From the shooting, a triple riddle posed itself:
Q1: When is a dead priest not really a dead priest?
A1: When the dead Russian mobster is not a Russian mobster either.