The blond man was bending over near a large potted fern. His backpack lay on the floor near him, by his right hand. Toad looked for Judith. She was behind a group near the elevators, watching the floor indicators above the stainless-steel doors.
The workman faced the elevators, his submachine gun pressed against his leg.
For the love of …! “Look out!” Toad roared. “He’s got a gun!” Startled faces turned toward him.
Toad pointed. “He’s got a gun!”
Women screamed and the crowd surged away from the gunman.
The elevator door opened.
The blond man had the butt of the weapon braced against his hip, spent cartridges flying out. The sound of shattering glass from the elevator was audible, and a low ripping noise and the screams and shouts of the panicked crowd, some of whom were on the floor and some of whom were trying to flee, shoving and pushing and sprawling over those lying on the carpet. The gunman fired one more burst, picked up his backpack, and ran for the courtyard corridor.
Something hard was pressed against Toad’s back. “Follow him,” Judith ordered, and pushed him toward the archway. Over his shoulder Toad could see a bloody body lying half-in, half-out of the elevator.
The bride stood horrified in the middle of the lobby, staring at the body being crushed by the closing doors of the elevator. A woman somewhere was screaming.
“Quickly,” Judith urged.
They were in the corridor. She pushed him hard. “Run.” She had a pistol in her hand. It had a long, black silencer on the barrel as big as a sausage. Even in the dim light Toad could see the hole in the end pointed at him.
He ran.
At the street entrance to the courtyard, men carrying weapons were racing toward them, at least four of them. A van careened around a corner and screeched to a stop.
As the men piled in the back Judith shouted, “Him, too.” Someone grabbed Toad and hurled him toward the van. He was thrust facedown onto the floor and a heavy foot planted itself on the back of his neck.
The van accelerated at full throttle for fifty feet, then the engine noise dropped. “You asshole,” someone said loudly. “You killed the wrong man. You blew it, fucker!” Three or four of them began talking at once.
“Silence!” It was a command. Judith’s voice.
He could smell the sweat and hear them breathing hard over the street noises and the eternal quacking of automobile and motor-scooter horns. He could hear the distinctive clicks and hisses of a two-way radio conversation, muted, from the front of the vehicle, the voices low and indistinct. He concentrated on the tinny voice from the speaker and concluded it was a foreign language, one he didn’t recognize. Cutting through all the noises was the distant, two-tone panic wail of a siren. Two sirens, moaning out of sync.
He could tell from the road noises, the short accelerations and brake applications, that the van was cruising in traffic. Time passed. How much Toad didn’t know. The sirens eventually became inaudible.
When he felt his legs cramping and he could stand it no longer, he said, in as conversational a tone of voice as he could muster, “Take your foot off my neck, please.”
The pressure increased. He raised his voice, “I asked you nice. Take your fucking foot off my neck!”
“Okay, let him up.” Judith’s voice.
“He’ll see our faces.” It was the flat, American Midwest voice.
“He ought to see yours.” Another male voice. This was a heavy accent, perhaps Eastern European. “You agency assholes want to be included, then you fuck it up.”
“Shut up, everyone,” Judith said. “Let him up.”
He was pulled bodily toward the rear of the van and turned into a sitting position. Hands seized his face. They were Judith’s hands. Her face was only inches from his. “Don’t look around.”
The light came through the back windows of the vehicle — headlight glare and occasional streetlights. Her eyes held his as the lights came and went. They were the most intelligent, understanding eyes he had ever seen.
“Don’t ever tell anyone what you’ve seen or heard. Promise me! Not a word.”
Her eyes held him.
“Oh, Judith! Why you?”
“If you tell, people will die. Not you. Other people. Good people.”
“You?”
“Perhaps.”
“I don’t even know your real name.”
“Don’t tell,” she whispered fiercely and increased the pressure of her hands on his temples.
“I love you.”
The van came to a halt and the rear door opened. “Get out.” As he did so, he heard her say, “I’ll keep the letter.”
The van accelerated into traffic. He was beside a pedestrian island in the middle of a vast piazza. Buses were parked in rows across the street from him. To his right was the central train station, easily recognizable with the black triangles on the low, flat roof. He was in the Piazza Garibaldi.
Then he remembered that he should have looked at the license number on the van. He wildly scanned the traffic, but it was gone. He had been looking at the little rear window when it pulled away. Pedestrians were staring at him.
He put his hand in his pockets and began shuffling along.
Jake and Callie were having dinner in a storefront trattoria on the Via Santa Lucia famous among U.S. Sixth Fleet sailors. Unit patches covered three large mirrors in the crowded dining room. The floor was linoleum and round bulb lamps hung from the ceiling. Pictures of American ships and airplanes in cheap black frames adorned the dingy wallpaper. Two men in their fifties served the noisy customers at the fifteen tables.
An Italian couple at the next table was slaughtering a pizza and demonstrating the proper use of the knife and fork on this delicacy to their daughter, who was about eight. The utensils were used to roll up the triangular slice until it looked like a blintz, then the fork was stabbed through it and the pizza roll raised to the mouth, where one took a delicate bite from one end. The youngster was having her troubles with the technique. Red sauce and gooey cheese dribbled down her chin.
The little brother was peeking at Jake. Jake winked. The boy averted his face, then peeked again. Another wink. The little head jerked away, then inched back around very, very slowly. Jake grinned.
“Kids are great, aren’t they?” Jake remarked.
“Oh, you think so?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Then you won’t mind if we adopt?”
Jake hitched himself up in his chair and stared at his wife. She sipped her wine and gazed innocently around the room with a trace of a smile on her lips, her eyebrows slightly arched, the corners of her eves minutely crinkled. God, she was beautiful!
He grinned. “Anyone specific in mind, or will a generic kid do?”
Her eyes swiveled onto him like two guns in a turret, then her head followed. “She’s ten years old. Her name is Amy Carol. She has black hair and black eyes and a smile that will break your heart.”
“And …”
“She has diabetes. She’s been in four foster homes and she needs a family of her own. She was sexually abused in her first foster home, and the man went to prison. She doesn’t like men.”
Jake’s smile faded. “Well …”
“She needs us, Jake. Both of us. She needs love and understanding and a place of her own and a man who can be a loving father.”
Jake took a deep, deep breath, then exhaled through his nose. Callie had mentioned adoption casually in the months before the United States sailed on this cruise, but it had been so tentative — newspaper clippings left for him to see, occasional dinner conversations, all of it casual and distant, a social phenomenon worthy of a few minutes of notice. And she had been testing the water! He sat now slightly baffled, trying to recall just when and how he had lost sight of the pea. The little girl at the next table caught his eye. She had tomato sauce smeared all over the lower half of her face and running down her fork, which she held like a sword in her right fist.