CHAPTER 44
Thomas left her where she had fallen. She would probably be out for a while yet, and when she woke she’d be without transport. He took her gun and her phone, then made the long walk back to the parking lot, climbed over the gate, and took the rental car.
The fact that Roberta had been ready to kill him had stripped away all he thought he could rely on. Now he knew only three things: first, powerful people were prepared to kill to keep Ed’s death unexamined. Second, he had to get whatever he could out of the old monsignor. Third, he had to get out of Italy as quickly and cleanly as possible. He didn’t know where to go or how he was going to get there, but he had no doubt that Roberta—or whatever her real name was—was not working alone. If he spent another night at the Executive, he was sure, it would be his last.
He drove to the Ercolano station, abandoned the car, resisted the urge to grab a beer from a neighboring bar, and took the train to Garibaldi and a cab to the hotel. On the train he searched Roberta’s phone for any dialed or received numbers, but all the directories had been wiped clean.
“Cops were looking for you, bro,” remarked Brad with a broad grin. He was lounging at the Executive’s bar with a glass of orange juice in his hand and flagged Thomas down before he even collected his key. “What you been up to?”
Thomas stiffened.
Roberta?
Not yet, surely. And she wouldn’t go to the police. This had to be about Satoh.
Thomas smiled weakly and turned to the level gray eyes of the concierge.
“They want you to call them as soon as you return,” the Italian said. “And if you don’t, they want me to call them for you.”
It was almost a question and Thomas thought fast.
“How about I step out,” he began carefully, “to talk to the priest round the corner and then come back and then we have this conversation, you and I?”
The concierge looked at him for a long moment.
“Be quick,” he said, at last.
It was nine o’clock. Giovanni answered the retreat house door and immediately shook his head.
“Pietro is not here,” he said. “He’s at his church. Santa Maria del Carmine.”
“Do you have a phone number for him there?”
“Yes,” said Giovanni, fishing in his pocket and producing the retreat house’s business card. “The second number.”
“Okay,” said Thomas, walking away.
“He will not talk to you,” said Giovanni.
“He has no choice,” said Thomas, still walking. “And neither do I.”
He walked quickly away from the hotel, dialing on Roberta’s phone, scanning the dark but busy street for a cab.
Pietro answered on the third ring, giving the name of the church in a brusque mumble.
“This is Thomas Knight. Eduardo’s brother. Don’t hang up.”
He had no idea how good Pietro’s English was. He paused and, for a moment, there was silence.
“Yes,” said the voice at the other end, sounding far away.
“I’m coming to see you,” said Thomas with force. “Now. Someone just tried to kill me.”
He didn’t know how much of this the old priest was getting, and part of him didn’t care.
“Okay,” said the priest.
Thomas stopped in his tracks. No shouting? No threats? Then the voice came back, slow, careful.
“Tanaka is dead?” it said.
“Tanaka?” asked Thomas.
“The Japanese,” said Pietro.
“He told me his name was Satoh.”
“He is dead?”
“Yes.”
Another long pause, and what might have been a sigh.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?” said Thomas.
“I will show you Eduardo’s papers.”
“You didn’t burn them?”
“No.”
Thomas’s surging triumph was tempered by anger.
“But you deliberately made it look like you had, so that I wouldn’t ask to see them again. Where are they? I want them now.”
“I say messa.”
“Mass?”
“Yes,” said the priest. “You come?”
“Come to mass?” said Thomas, incredulous.
“Yes. Come. Pray for me.”
“No,” said Thomas, brushing away the invitation irritably. He was in no mood for an olive branch, particularly after “Roberta’s” use of the same ruse on Vesuvius.
“Half hour only,” said the priest.
Either the priest was using a short form of the liturgy, or he motored through it. But there would be nobody there and there would be no singing. That would keep it short. This was no scheduled mass he was being invited to. This would be just the two of them.
You could go. Sit at the back, listen, like you used to.
No.
“You go ahead,” said Thomas. “I’ll be there by the time you’re done.”
“Okay,” said the priest, giving in, and then the phone went dead.
Thomas took a cab up past the museum and through a labyrinth of increasingly chaotic streets. Here as elsewhere in the city the churches were joined to the neighboring buildings, and since they lacked spires, they were identifiable only by their ornate doors and the invariably sooty inscriptions above them. Thomas peered out of the window looking for Santa Maria del Carmine as the streets got narrower and poorer, though the buildings themselves had clearly once been opulent. The traffic got heavier, more dominated by tiny cars and scooters, often overburdened with multiple children, all laughing and shouting to each other.
The cobbled roads of the Sanita thronged with foot traffic too, and there were the ends of makeshift markets at intersections where people were clearing away trays of submerged clams, crabs, and mussels. Twice the driver stopped and leaned out the window to ask directions. A young woman in a pink T-shirt and designer sunglasses pointed up the street without speaking and then eased off between the honking cars as if she couldn’t see them or—more likely—as if they were beneath her consideration. They parted before her like the Red Sea and she strode down a street where washing hung like a triumphal arch.
Thomas paid the driver ten euros and he pulled away, apparently glad to head back to more familiar neighborhoods. Thomas couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t felt so out of place since arriving in Italy, maybe for many years before.
Since Japan.
There were no tourists here. He had stepped into the heart of a community where he was a curiosity. He had seen nothing of Naples’s much-touted street crime, but at night in a place like this he felt as if he were wearing a sign around his neck. He felt the frank, interested, and mildly amused eyes of people on him as he strolled through the place where they worked and played and lived, and he felt like apologizing. All he needed was for Pietro to kick him out into the street and he might need more than apologies to get out of the place in one piece.
It was completely dark here now, the streets unlit.
Perfect.
He felt the weight of the gun in his jacket pocket.
“Hi,” said a shirtless kid on a bike. “Hi, American.”
He was perhaps eight. His buddies roared with laughter and echoed his greeting. Someone shouted “Coca-Cola,” and they laughed some more before running off into the night.
Santa Maria del Carmine was pale yellow, trimmed with gray stone, well maintained, but old without being monumental. The road, he noticed with a little chill, was Via Fontanelle alla Sanita. He approached the church door, grasped the ring, and twisted it. The door swung softly open.