“As long as we understand each other,” I said.
“Fine. Now, Dr. Corsini said that you have been suffering from occasional fainting spells, that once in a while your heart races seemingly without reason.”
“Correct.”
“I want to take a full history. Maybe a Holter monitor, maybe a stress-thallium test, we’ll see. But first I want you to tell me in your own words what brings you in here.”
I turned around to face him and said, “Dr. Pasqualucci, my sources tell me that you also treat a certain Vladimir Orlov, formerly of the Soviet Union, and that concerns me.”
He sputtered, “I said-as I say-you are free to see another cardiologist. I can even recommend one to you-”
“I am merely saying, Doctor, that it worries me that Mr. Orlov’s files, or charts, or whatever they’re called, are here in your office. If ever there’s a break-in because of… shall we say, interest in him on the part of any intelligence agency, then aren’t my files, too, vulnerable? I want to know what security precautions you take.”
Dr. Pasqualucci looked at me hawkishly, angrily, his face reddening, and I began to receive his thoughts with an astonishing clarity.
An hour or so later I maneuvered the Lancia through the loud, crazed, snarling traffic toward the outskirts of Rome, to the via del Trullo, and then turned right down the via S. Guiliano, a modern and rather desolate section of the city. A few yards up on the right I located the bar and pulled over.
It was one of those all-purpose bars-cum-everything-else, a little white-painted stucco building with a striped yellow awning, white plastic outdoor furniture neatly stacked in front. A Lavazza coffee sign bore the inscription: ROSTICCERIA-PIZZERIA-PANINOTECA-SPAGHETTERIA.
It was twenty minutes before ten o’clock, and the place swarmed with teenagers in leather jackets, jostling with gray-haired laborers drinking at the bar. A jukebox blasted out an old American song I recognized: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Whitney Houston, I decided.
My CIA contact, Charles Van Aver-the man who had called me at the hotel earlier in the day-wasn’t there. It was too early, and in any case he would probably be in his car in the parking lot out back. I settled on a plastic stool at the bar, ordered an Averna, and watched the crowd. One of the teenagers was playing a card game that seemed to involve a lot of slapping of cards against the deck. A large family gathered around a too-small table, toasting one another. No trace of Van Aver, and-with the sole exception of me-no one seemed to be there who didn’t belong.
In the cardiologist’s out-patient office, I was able to confirm what I had first observed with Dr. Mehta, that a bilingual person thinks in two languages, a peculiar sort of melange. Dr. Pasqualucci’s thoughts were an odd twisting, blending of Italian and English.
My Italian was sufficiently workable to enable me to make out the sense of what he was thinking.
Concealed in the floor of his supply closet, a small room that evidently held cleaning substances, mops and brooms, photocopy paper, computer disks, typewriter ribbons, and the like, was a concrete-reinforced safe. It held samples of controlled substances, the files of an unpleasant malpractice case he had been involved in over ten years ago, and several patient files. These patients included several prominent Italian politicians of rival parties; the chief executive of one of Europe’s largest automotive empires; and Vladimir Orlov.
As Dr. Pasqualucci placed a cold stethoscope on my chest and listened for a long, long time, I agonized over how I could possibly get him to think the combination to the safe, how I could ever get to it, when all of a sudden I heard something, an almost-but-not-quite-distinct buzz, like a shortwave radio coming into and out of tune, the words:
Volte-Basse…
and Castelbianco
And again: Volte-Basse… Castelbianco.… and Orlov…
And I knew then as much as I had to know.
Still Van Aver hadn’t appeared. I had memorized his photograph: a large, flush-faced man, a hard-drinking southerner of sixty-eight. He wore his thick white hair so long that it curled over the collar at the back of his neck, at least in the most recent Agency file photo. His nose was large and webbed with the broken veins of an alcoholic. An alcoholic, Hal Sinclair used to say, is a person you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.
At quarter after ten I paid the bill and slipped quietly out the restaurant-bar’s front door. The parking lot was dark, but I could make out the usual assortment of Fiat Pandas, Fiat Ritmos, Ford Fiestas, Peugeots, and a black Porsche. After the din of the bar, I enjoyed the quiet of the dark lot, inhaling the cold air that somehow, in this part of Rome, seemed cleaner and crisper. A moped buzzed by, its flat, high-pitched whine piercing.
In the farthest row of cars was a gleaming olive Mercedes, license plate ROMA 17017. And there he was, asleep in the driver’s seat, in an old man’s slouch. I suppose I had expected that he’d have the motor running, impatient to set out for the three-hours-plus drive north to Tuscany, but the car was dark. Neither was the interior light on; Van Aver was, I figured, sleeping off the vast quantities of booze he regularly consumed, according to his personnel file. An alcoholic, yes, but a man who’d been around, who knew everyone, and so his peccadilloes were tolerated.
The windshield was partially fogged. As I approached, I considered whether I should insist that I drive, whether that would offend Van Aver’s overendowed ego. I slipped into the car and found myself automatically straining to hear his thoughts, or at least those fragments I’d found I could perceive when someone is sleeping.
But there was nothing. A complete silence. I found it peculiar, illogical-
– and in a moment I was seized by a dizzy, vertiginous rush of adrenaline.
I could see Van Aver’s long white hair curling at the back of his neck, against his navy blue turtleneck sweater, mouth open in what appeared to be a snore, and beneath it the old man’s throat gaped grotesquely wide open. A terrible deep red stain crept down his jacket lapels, down his sweater, his pale, wrinkled neck a steaming, still-flowing lake of blood that my eyes at first refused to accept. I could see at once that Van Aver was dead, and I bolted from the car.
THIRTY-TWO
I ran out into the via del Trullo, my heart pounding, and found the rented car. I fumbled for a few moments with the key until I was finally able to unlock the door and sank into the front seat. Exhaling and inhaling slowly, measuredly, I managed to get a grip on myself.
You see, I had all of a sudden been plunged back into that nightmarish time in Paris, I found myself flashing back persistently, almost kaleidoscopically, on that hallway in the rue Jacob, on the sight of the two bodies, one of them my beloved Laura…
Whatever the mystique of clandestine intelligence work, it usually does not include murder and mayhem. That is by far the exception, not the rule, and although we were all trained to deal with the eventualities of bloodshed in the theater of the Cold War, rarely did such a thing actually intrude upon one’s life.
Most clandestine operatives in fact see very little violence during their careers-a great deal of stress and anxiety, but very little outright violence. And when they encounter carnage, they customarily react the way anyone would: they are repelled and sickened; a fight-or-flight instinct takes over. Most operatives who are unlucky enough to face much bloodshed in their work will burn out early and retire.
But with me, something different happened. Exposure to blood and mayhem deadened me, tamped something down inside me. It switched something off: the essential human horror of violence. Instead, I became enraged, focused, tranquil. It was as if I’d been injected intravenously with a sedative.