Suddenly there was surprise on her face, as if she’d seen something unexpected.
“Nic. For a moment there you stopped staring at me as if I’m the cleverest kid in the class. I don’t like that. I am the cleverest kid in the class. Aren’t I?”
“Of course you are, Little Em.”
“Don’t call me that,” she said coldly, drawing back from him. “Don’t ever call me that.”
“I’m sorry. It was stupid of me.”
“Yes…” She was almost pouting now. She was young and old in the same body. Costa wanted to laugh. More than that, though, he wanted to kiss her.
Instead, he reached over and messed with the computer.
“What are you doing?” she asked nervously.
“Looking for something. Here: ”Honor his memory.“ And here. In the original memo: ”The Scarlet Beast was a generous Beast.“ ”
She blinked. “So?”
“You’re right about the place, Emily. I don’t doubt it. But listen to the words. It’s more than that.”
He read the two sentences aloud again. She listened carefully. Costa watched her lively intelligent eyes, saw them glitter when she understood.
“Christ,” she murmured. “How could I have been that stupid?”
“It’s a riddle. It’s meant to be obscure. Besides, there’s no saying my interpretation’s the right one.”
She waved away his doubts. “Of course it is. I was just reading into it what I wanted to see. This is a place and a person, isn’t it? The Scarlet Beast’s the paymaster. He’s the man even Kaspar was ultimately beholden to.”
“I think so.”
“Is he the bad guy, then?” she asked. “Does Kaspar blame him for this? He thinks he was betrayed somehow?”
Costa threw up his hands in desperation. “It’s just guesswork.”
“Then who the hell was he? If it wasn’t Kaspar?”
Costa searched for the memo on the computer, found the sentence, highlighted it with the cursor.
“It’s just a guess. That’s all.”
They looked at the sentence from the document: Let it be known that I, William F. Kaspar, the Lizard King, the Holy Owl, Grand Master of the Universe, etcetera, etcetera, shall be attending the court of the Scarlet Beast presently.
She screwed up her face in bewilderment. “Someone in Rome? Does that make sense?”
“What was that you said about ”need to know“?”
“OK. OK. Point taken. Distance does makes sense. So maybe even Bill Kaspar doesn’t know who’s really in charge. Maybe he’s guessing right now…”
Emily was thinking hard. She looked at him with scared eyes. They both knew where this was going.
“Or maybe he does,” Costa finished quietly. He scrolled through some of the sentences in the original memo, pointing them out.
The Scarlet Beast-where do they get these names, Danboy? This one of yours or what?… We possess a God-given duty to deliver and it is a mighty relief to old Bill K this faceless bastard has volunteered you already. Though I cannot help but wonder, dear friend, whether you didn’t understand that all along. NTK, huh?
“No, no, no, no, no!” she said with conviction. “My dad was lots of things but he wasn’t a traitor. That just isn’t a possibility.”
“Kaspar could be wrong.” Costa suggested it without much enthusiasm.
“So what are you saying?” she asked brusquely. “Kaspar thought my dad was taking part in his own escapade? Funding it and playing along, too?”
“Can you rule that out?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Emily was going to stick up for her old man, but not in face of the facts. “Theoretically I guess so. The way these operations were funded was pretty secretive. Someone just dropped a bag of money out of nowhere and let the team get on with it. You had to have someone running finance, logistics. Dad was big time here in Rome. But…”
She leaned back on the sofa and, for a full minute, covered her face with her hands. When she took her fingers away from her cheeks there were tearstains there and naked fury in her eyes.
“I still don’t get it. I’m awful at this crap. I can’t believe my dad was too, and that’s not just family talking. He was so damned organized, Nic. If you knew him you’d know he couldn’t just screw it all up in the desert, get away with his own hide, then leave that poor bastard to go crazy in some Iraqi cell putting one and one together all the time over the years, working out who to blame. My father was a good man. He wouldn’t…”
She couldn’t go on. Costa wondered whether he could bring himself to say it, then realized he’d be selling her short if he didn’t.
“They thought Kaspar was a good man at the time, Emily. Now look… You said it yourself. Something changed.”
“No,” she insisted. “You didn’t know him. Maybe you can believe that’s a possible answer. But listen to me, it isn’t. Not for one moment.”
“I can’t think straight this late,” he sighed. “Let’s open this out a little in the morning.”
Her eyes scanned his face, searching for the doubts and prevarication. “What do you mean by that? You call your boss, I call mine? We tell them what we think, then walk away and hope it’ll turn out right?”
“No. I don’t think it’s that simple. Also, I don’t walk away from things, not until they’re done. It’s a family flaw.”
She let out a low, spontaneous burst of laughter. “You are so not the Roman cop I thought I’d meet.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It’s meant that way.”
“Good. And you…” He had to say this because it was true. “It’s odd. You don’t know it but you could pass for Italian. Most of the time anyway. When you’re not around Agent Leapman. I never did believe that line about people spitting at you on buses.”
“It happened once,” she confessed with a shrug. “People like preconceptions. They’re compartments you can use so that everyone feels safe and comfortable for a while. They mean you don’t have to think too hard.”
“One more reason to avoid them.”
“Well, I’m certainly getting lots of preconceptions shaken straight out of me right now,” she said, smiling, looking around the old, airy room, with its dusty corners and faded paintings. “This is a beautiful place. If I lived here I don’t think I’d ever go beyond that front gate. You could just stay here and never get touched by the crap.”
“Or anything,” Costa said quietly. “I’ve been there.”
“Really.” Americans had an astonishing, unnerving frankness sometimes. She’d turned to stare straight into his face, trying to work out what to make of that last statement. “I guess we all get there sometime. When I was a kid I thought we’d never leave Rome, you know. It was how life was supposed to be. Safe. Happy. Secure from all those big, black surprises you never learn about till you’re older.”
“You’d rather not know about the surprises?”
“No.” Her smile dropped. “But I can try to understand why it all fell apart. I can… Oh shit.”
Her hands were covering her face again. He wondered if she was crying. But it was exhaustion probably, nothing more.
Emily Deacon slowly rolled herself sideways, over towards his shoulder, let her head fall softly onto him, didn’t move as his fingers took on a life of their own, reaching automatically for her long, soft hair.
Eyes closed, in the shy way strangers use when they kiss for the first time, he tasted her damp, supple mouth, felt her lips close on his, slowly working, until that moment of self-realization came and they both broke off, wondering, embarrassed.
She kept her head on his shoulder. He stared at the dying embers of the fire.
“I’m making a hell of a mess of this professional relationship, Mr. Costa,” Emily Deacon murmured into his ear. “Are you OK with that?”
He closed his eyes and wished to God he didn’t feel so exhausted. “I’ll think about it.”
She brushed his cheek briefly with her lips once more, then said, “Give me a moment.”