Standing in the shadow of the doorway, Lang checked the piazza for anyone who didn't seem to belong. Little boys shouted as they kicked a scruffy soccer ball. Crones in black poked and sniffed the produce in a small vegetable stall. Old men sat at tables in front of the taverna across the way and drank coffee or grappa while watching with watery eyes. Those of the median ages between the very young and the very old were, Lang guessed, having lunch inside before returning to work.
As he crossed the square, he was gratified to note the trattoria next to the pensione, the one with the bad food and worse art, had few customers.
As he walked, he was surrounded by cats. The animal most symbolic of Rome wasn't really the she wolf of legend but an ordinary house tabby. They didn't seem to belong to anyone if, indeed, a cat ever does. But they all looked well fed and healthy. Maybe that's why he didn't see any rats. Small fountains, no more than cement bowls with flowing pipes, were placed on almost every block so that the cats, and the occasional dog, wouldn't go thirsty.
The only thing more numerous than cats were Gypsies, dark-haired women extending roses for sale, reaching for palms to read, or suckling infants. Or muttering curses at passersby uninterested in whatever was being offered. Gypsies, Romans believed, made their real living as pickpockets and thieves. True or not, Lang shifted his wallet to his front pocket.
It was a rare piazza that did not have its own unique church, stature or fountain. Likewise, each of those miniature neighborhoods had its own odor. Brewing cappucino might dominate one, while a block away, an open-air market would scent the air with ripe vegetables.
The smell of fresh bread stopped him cold. He was hungry, hadn't eaten since the soggy, unidentifiable mess the airline had proclaimed a meal. He made a right turn down another alley-width street, dodged a Japanese motorcycle under less than complete control by its driver, and arrived at the Osteria den Berlli, a restaurant on the Piazza San Apollonia. He hoped the Osteria still had the quality seafood he remembered.
An hour later, Lang stepped back into the sunshine, the taste of garlic octopus clinging to his palate. He strolled north, just one more Roman letting lunch settle in his stomach, until he reached the traffic-choked Via Della Concilazone, the wide boulevard that leads to the Vatican. Even in April, before the tourist season started, the sidewalks were jammed. Shops displayed religious trinkets, small busts of the Pope, cheap crucifixes. Lang would not have been surprised to see St. Peter's Basilica in a snow globe.
Before leaving Atlanta, he had made one more call to Miles, this time asking about common acquaintances in Rome.
Miles had been guarded. "You're going to Rome for a vacation and just want to renew auld lang syne, right? This doesn't have anything to do with the thermite or your sister's death, right?"
"You're overly suspicious, Miles."
"Comes with the job, remember? Besides, I'd get shit-canned, I told who the Agency people in Rome were. Maybe shot."
"They don't do that anymore," Lang had said. "Just cancel your government pension and benefits."
"Years I put in, that's worse."
"Besides," Lang said reasonably, "I didn't ask who was Agency in Rome, I asked whom we knew in Rome."
"Typical lawyer hairsplitting. Why you wanna know, anyway?" "I need an introduction at the Vatican, figured the Agency'd know whom to contact."
Miles made no effort to even sound as if he believed him. "Vatican, like where the Pope hangs? You want to fill out the forms for future canonization, right?"
"Miles, Miles, you are letting cynicism poison your otherwise bright and cheerful disposition. I simply want a brief conference with one of the Holy Father's art historians"
The phone connection did nothing to diminish the snort of derision. "Right. Like I would engage only in intellectual conversation were I alone on a desert island with Sharon Stone."
Lang sighed theatrically. "Miles, I'm serious. I have a client who is about to spend a fortune on a work of religious art. The world's most renowned expert on the artist is in the Vatican. Would I lie to you?"
"Like I would if my wife found lipstick on my fly. Okay, okay, I can't give you a roster of Rome assets, don't have the clearance to call it up, anyway. Just so happens, though, that I heard Gurt Fuchs is presently assigned to the trade attaché at the Rome embassy."
Lang couldn't remember if he had taken the time to thank Miles before hanging up the phone. There had been a time when Gurtude Fuchs had made him forget everything else.
Lang's first career had been with the Agency, the job he referred to in his mind as being an office-bound James Bond. Like most embryonic spies, he had trained at Camp Perry near Williamsburg, Virginia. Known as the Farm by its graduates, there he had learned the arcane arts of code, surveillance and the use of weapons ranging from firearms and knives to garrote and poison. His performance had been either too good or too poor (depending on the point of view) for a posting to the Fourth Directorate, Ops. Instead, he had been sent to a dreary office across the street from the Frankfurt railway station where he spent his days with the Third Directorate, Intelligence. Rather than cloak and dagger, his tools had consisted of computers, satellite photos, Central European newspapers and equally humdrum equipage.
In 1989, Lang had seen his future in the Agency shrunk by the much-heralded Peace Dividend and changed by shifting priorities. Even the grime-encrusted office with a view of the Bahnhofin Frankfurt would be a source of nostalgia when he was forced to learn Arabic or Farsi and stationed in some place where a hundred-degree day seemed balmy. Dawn, his new bride, had drawn the line at including a floor-length burka in her trousseau.
He had taken his retirement benefits and retreated to law school.
Gurt, an East German refugee, had been a valued linguist, analyst and expert on the German Democratic Republic, who was also stuck in the Agency's Third Directorate.
Gurt and Lang had joined several couples for a ski weekend in Garmish-Partenkirchen. In his mind, Gurt would always be associated with the Post Hotel, Bavarian food, and the slopes of the Zugspitze. The resulting affair had been hot enough to burn out a few months later when he met Dawn on a brief trip back to the States.
To Lang's surprise and chagrin, Gurt had seemed more relieved than jilted. They had shared a friendship ever since, though, a relationship renewed as scheduling and posting allowed: an occasional drink in Frankfurt, a dinner in Lisbon until his resignation. By that time she was due a promotion to management, a result of the Agency's begrudging and Congressionally mandated sexual egalitarianism more than her acknowledged abilities. Her talents were not limited to language but ranged from cryptography on the computer to marksmanship on the firing range.
On mature reflection, perhaps it was just as well Gurt did not take the end of their romance too seriously.
When Saint Peter's was only a couple of blocks away, Michelangelo's dome filling the northern horizon, Lang looked for a pay phone. He was thankful he wasn't in one of those European countries where public phones are hoarded like treasures, available only in branches of the national postal system. In Rome, pay phones were plentiful if functioning ones were not. He had chosen this part of the city from which to phone. A trace of any call made from here would lead to one of the most heavily visited places in the world. Though not impossible, it would be difficult to pinpoint the specific location of anyone phone quickly enough to catch someone involved in a conversation of only a couple of minutes.
If anyone were tracing the call.
He dialed the embassy number and listened to the creaks, groans and buzzing of the system.
When a voice answered in Italian, Lang asked for Ms. Fuchs in the trade section.