Ruiz rubs his thumb over his lips. They’re nearing the house. He makes a point of parking three blocks away.
“Forgotten where you live?”
“I like the walk.”
The professor senses another reason.
“Are you being followed?”
“Not sure.”
They go through a break in the buildings, past an upholstery shop, a plumbing store and a new childcare centre. Ruiz is watching the cross-streets, noting the cars.
Joe has a question. “You mentioned that Holly Knight could tell when you were lying.”
“Yeah. Is that possible?”
“You’re a former detective. You were pretty good at telling when you were being fed bullshit.”
“Not like she can. Some people sweat too much, or look to the left or start shaking, or mumbling their answers. This girl just knows.”
“Highly unlikely.”
“But not impossible?”
Joe falls silent, unwilling to make such a leap of the imagination.
“What is it?” asks Ruiz.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“I remember once reading about a police officer in Los Angeles who pulled over a sports car late one night in a rough area of the city. As he walked towards the vehicle with his gun drawn, a teenager jumped from the passenger seat and pointed a semi-automatic directly at him. They were yards apart. The officer held fire. For some reason, in that instant, he knew the teenager wasn’t a threat. He called it a hunch. The teenager surrendered.”
“So the guy got lucky?”
“A while later, a team of psychologists tested the officer; showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either lying or telling the truth. One tape showed people talking about their views on the death penalty or smoking in public. The same test had been given to hundreds of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, police sharpshooters and Customs officers. On average they scored fifty per cent.”
“Which means they could have been guessing?”
“Exactly, but this police officer-the same one who had the gun pulled on him-he had a success rate of over ninety per cent.”
“So you’re saying some people are good at spotting liars.”
“Not just good, he was a virtuoso.”
“How did he do it?”
“Nobody knows for certain. I mean, there are studies on face-reading. Some people train themselves to look for micro-expressions, tiny telltale indicators of stress or deceit. There is a university professor in America, Paul Ekman, who has spent his whole career studying face-reading.”
“But you’re not convinced?”
Joe doesn’t respond. There are things about the human brain that he can’t explain: freakish feats of memory, or people with the ability to calculate prime numbers into the trillions. Autistic savants. Geniuses. Brain-injured patients with unique abilities… Neuropsychology is one of the last great frontiers of science.
Inside the house, Ruiz dumps Joe’s suitcase and pulls a tray of ice-cubes from the freezer.
“You going to join me?”
“No.”
The professor’s thumb and forefinger are rubbing together as if rolling a pill between them. He threads his fingers together as if in prayer and the twitching stops. He’s not embarrassed or disappointed. He long ago made his peace with the “other” that inhabits his body. Mr. Parkinson.
“So what do we do now?” he asks.
“We wait.”
“You think she’ll call?”
“Somebody will.”
14
Luca steps gingerly over the debris in his apartment, trying not to break the unbroken. Bottles and plates are shattered on the floor, amid the contents of his pantry. His furniture lies in pieces and water leaks from a toilet cistern, torn from the wall.
On the floor of the bedroom he finds the photograph of Nicola. He picks it up and brushes the broken glass away. Removing it from the frame, he folds the photo and slips it into his shirt pocket.
In the kitchen, he picks up a chair and sits down. Dirty, unshaven and two days without sleep, he drinks bottled water and takes a moment to feel sorry for himself.
Where to now? America seems like a foreign country he visited a long time ago, like a childhood book he remembers reading. Over the years, moving from war to war, from coups to independence struggles, he has come to realize the arbitrary nature of nationality. There are places in Europe where four or five different countries are separated by just a few miles. One man’s country is another man’s prison. One man’s coup is another man’s dispossession. The dead always look the same.
He unhooks a gas cylinder beneath the stove; the lower half twists off to reveal a hidden compartment. A satellite phone is tucked inside. He calls the news desk of the Financial Herald in London and asks for Keith Gooding, the chief reporter.
The two men met in Afghanistan in 2002, which seems like a lifetime ago. They both traveled to Kabul via the Khyber Pass, escorted by forty Afghan fighters, men and boys, crowded into pickup trucks, clutching grenade launchers and belts of ammunition.
Four years later Luca was best man at Gooding’s wedding in Surrey when he married his childhood sweetheart Lucy, whose father worked in the Foreign Office.
Gooding answers the phone abruptly.
“How’s Lucy?”
“She’s still beautiful.”
“Tell me something-how did a man like you get a woman like that to touch your dick?”
“She grabbed it with both hands.”
Luca laughs. His chest hurts. He’s out of practice.
“So tell me, Mr. Terracini, how are things with you?”
“Been better.”
“What have you done this time?”
“I upset the chief of police.”
“Other people fish for minnows, you harpoon whales.”
Luca can hear phones ringing in the background and can picture Gooding at his desk, spinning in his chair, feet off the ground like a child on a roundabout. Luca has never been comfortable in an office environment. Never lingered. Gooding is different, a political animal with eyes on the editorship.
“They’re kicking me out of the country, revoking my visa.”
“Maybe it’s not a bad thing.”
“I’m getting close to something.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Stolen cash smuggled out of Iraq into Syria and possibly Jordan.”
“How much?”
“Tens, maybe hundreds of millions.”
“Reconstruction funds?”
“And banking assets. Mostly US dollars.”
“What can I do?”
“Find out who monitors international currency transfers. There must be some international body that investigates big movements of cash.”
Luca is about to go on, but stops. Someone is at the door. He glances at the intercom. Bare wires hang from a hole in the wall.
“I have to go.”
“Stay in touch.”
Walking to the window, he peers through a crack in the curtains. An SUV is parked out front along with the Skoda, which is now a muddy green color. One of Jimmy Dessai’s mechanics is leaning on the hood.
Jimmy is sweating from the stairs. He’s wearing a cut-off Levi’s jacket, showing off his tattoos. “I got your wheels.”
“I saw. What’s with the color?”
“I had a job lot of green paint. Bought it from a company that paints oil pipelines.”
“I’m not paying extra.”
“I know.”
Jimmy looks at the state of the apartment.
“Some housewarming.”
“I wasn’t even here.”
“Shame.”
Jimmy lifts his stubbly chin. The light from the window shines through the jug-ears, turning them pale pink.
“Hey, that thing you wanted to know about truck driving, I might have found someone. His name is Hamada al-Hayak. He’s been smuggling petrol over the border since the end of the Iraq-Iran war in the late eighties. A few months back he got shot up on a run to Jordan. Lost his arm. Now he works as a cook at a trucking camp outside of Baghdad. He’ll want payment… talking of which, you owe me five grand.”