19

9:49 p.m.

“What are you doing here?” Alexander asked, startled by Gabriella’s unannounced presence. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you until the morning.” If he was truthful, he hadn’t entirely expected to hear back from her at all. He ran his fingers self-consciously through the short, gentle waves of light-brown hair atop his head, wondering whether he looked as disheveled and unkempt as he suddenly felt.

“Our schedule got bumped up a little.” Gabriella entered fully into the front room of his flat. She’d been here several times before, though almost four years ago, and looked about as though she might be able to elicit the details of Alexander’s life in the intervening period from the decor. Her nose scrunched slightly. She had never liked the scent of stale smoke.

“Your story,” she said, coming quickly to business as he closed the door and switched on more lights, “it’s already causing problems.”

“Not bad considering I haven’t written a word of it,” he replied, trying to inject some levity into the moment.

“Sometimes asking questions is enough.” Gabriella made to sit down in the blue twin-seater sofa with a kind of automatic familiarity, then caught herself mid-bend and rose back to a normal posture. She motioned toward the sofa.

“May I?”

“Make yourself at home.” Alexander waved a hand toward the seat. “Can I offer you a drink?”

“No drinks, Mr. Trecchio.” Her tone was again conspicuously businesslike. “The circumstances may have changed, but this is still a professional visit.”

“I understand.” So the going would not be entirely smooth. But it didn’t have to be entirely uncomfortable, either. We never did anything wrong, he reminded himself. I have nothing to be embarrassed about, except the way I ended it.

“Well I’m halfway through a beer,” he said, walking toward the kitchen, “if you don’t mind.”

There was a slight pause. Then, from the front room, “All right, then, bring me one as well.”

Alexander smiled, his nose in the refrigerator. “You’re not on duty?”

“My shift was up twenty minutes ago.”

Alexander handed her the beer and dropped himself into a tired brown leather recliner facing the sofa from the side of the room. He took a long swill from his own half-empty bottle. He let his teeth rattle against the glass lip, an old habit.

“What’s brought you all the way over here this late at night?”

Gabriella paused to reflect before answering, and Alexander took advantage of the moment to pass his eyes over her for the first time in what suddenly felt like far too long. Her light hair and porcelain skin were just as he remembered them, her figure slender, well-toned and hardly concealed beneath the smart professional suit she always wore. But there was something different about her now. She had gained a confidence that showed through in her demeanor. Her back was a little straighter, her shoulders pulled at just that much more authoritative an angle. She was a woman who had taken possession of herself. Something in that realization brought Alexander a sense of satisfaction. Or at least an ease of conscience. He was glad things had gone well for Gabriella Fierro.

Their introduction, four years ago, had been purely professional. He was still a priest, still in post with the Vatican curia. There had been a string of thefts of church property in local parishes in Rome, and Alexander had been asked to liaise with the police in the investigation. There he’d met her, as junior an officer in the State Police as a woman could be, and yet something had immediately flared up inside him. It wasn’t lust; it wasn’t really carnal at all. He had met this woman, he’d walked with her and talked and worked with her, and he’d experienced the most overwhelming desire for closeness.

Gabriella certainly couldn’t be blamed for enticing him away from the clergy. He’d had been on that outward path for quite some time before he’d met her. That loss of faith had been something deeply interior, private—something he’d only been able to share with his uncle, whose vocation as a cardinal of the Church never overpowered the closeness of their family bond. Alexander had been faltering, falling under the weight of the corruption he encountered in the institution he had been raised to love. In the end, he hadn’t been strong enough to resist that sorrow.

But even if she hadn’t drawn him away from the Church, something about Gabriella had captured him from that first encounter. She was beautiful, with her straw-like golden hair that batted at her shoulders. With eyes that always seemed to radiate warmth. But what really struck him was something far deeper. Unlike so many other people he’d met, Gabriella seemed genuinely to care. To believe. To broadcast sincerity and stability long before she ever opened her mouth.

Alexander had been captivated. He’d clumsily ensured their interactions continued as long as possible, expressing his interest with all the grace and tact of a fumbling teenager. There had been an initial phone call, the first not related to work, and then another. They’d grown longer and more personal. Then there had been a café, a restaurant, walks in parks and drives outside the city.

And then, one day, there had been Alexander’s apartment. Gabriella had looked so beautiful, arriving in a sky-blue dress, silky and form-fitting, her hair drawn back and her neck sloping beautifully. Alexander had prepared pasta, the only dish he knew how to cook, together with a decanted bottle of the finest Chianti he could afford. He’d dressed, too, for the first time, without the dog collar.

The next morning he’d awoken, his body next to hers atop his narrow single bed. They had stopped themselves. Or perhaps it was more correct to say that Gabriella had stopped them. Alexander wasn’t sure how far he’d have gone if she hadn’t checked what was for him a new and overwhelming desire. As it was, the night had been spent simply in a locked embrace as they drifted off to sleep. But Alexander’s decision was made. His life in the priesthood was over. He’d notified his uncle the following day. The collar he’d taken off for that meal had never gone back on.

Their relationship had carried on for two months, though it had never approached anything close to normal. His announcement that he was leaving the priesthood hadn’t surprised Gabriella, but even after it had been made formal, there was a barrier imposed by his past that wouldn’t disappear. Outright romance never felt any more right than it had that night, which, slight as it had been, had been the only one of any physicality between them. Alexander didn’t deny he felt something true and real for Gabriella, but he’d gradually begun to fear that it was simply a rebound. A rebound from a life with which he’d been struggling for too long, for other reasons. He was able to go no further. And so he’d called it off, suddenly and dramatically. Gabriella’s shock had led to heated words and an exchange he’d regretted for the four years since. Alexander had gone so far as to accuse her of being his Eve, leading him into temptation—at which point Gabriella had grown red-faced with anger and stormed from the room. Such a stupid comment, but he had been as unprepared to end a relationship as he’d been prepared to begin it.

Their only interaction since that last afternoon had been two years ago, when once again their jobs had brought them to the same place, the same story, at the same time. The case at San Sebastiano had been dramatic for both of them. For Gabriella the long-sought-after beginning to a real career in the force. For Alexander another encounter with corruption in holy places, but one which he was able to write about to a degree of success that had secured his place at the paper for at least a few years to follow. Yet the tension of that encounter had not healed the wounds between them. Gabriella had called him aside at the end, on the last day they’d spoken, and been tragically honest with him.

“I know you, Alex. Too well. I can still see it in your eyes.”

He’d not really needed to question what it was she’d seen, but he’d asked anyway.

“Discontentment. The same unsettled discontentment I saw when we were together.” She’d reached out to touch his wrist as she spoke. “You didn’t know then who you were becoming. Who you were. That’s why it didn’t work out between us. And it’s why it wouldn’t work now.”

And that had been it. She’d smiled kindly, even warmly. She’d looked forgiving, though still hurt. And then she’d simply walked away.

At this moment, however, she looked worried. She arced her head and downed more than half her beer in a single swallow, then reached forward and set the bottle on the squat faux-antique coffee table positioned between the two of them.

“I want you to tell me everything you know about Marcus Crossler, Alex. Everything.”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” he answered honestly.

“What you’ve told me is almost nothing.”

“That’s because I know almost nothing. I’d never met him before this evening, if that counts as a meeting.” He hesitated as shivers came with the memory. “Everything I know about him I gained from the internet—his bio on the Sapienza university website, his interactions on social media and a few online articles here and there that referenced him.”

“You’d never spoken?”

“Only the one phone call, this afternoon, to arrange our meeting.”

“Did you tell anyone about that call?”

“No, but he did. On his Twitter account. Didn’t say it was with me, but he posted about having arranged a meeting with someone from the press.”

Gabriella shook her head, clearly dissatisfied by the scant level of background detail. “That’s all, Alex? You can’t think of anything else?”

“If I could, you’d have it.”

“Then tell me everything you know about the other man you mentioned, Salvatore Tosi.”

Alexander sighed. “I know even less about him. My first encounter with his name was this afternoon online, when I noticed his interactions with Crossler. His profile said ‘Assistant Professor, Pontifical Gregorian University.’ That’s the full extent of what I know.”

“You’re a reporter. You didn’t make a few calls?”

“By the time Tosi had come to my attention, it was already evening. I phoned the university switchboard and asked for his office, but it went straight to voicemail.”

“Did you leave a message?”

He shook his head. Gabriella didn’t say anything more.

It was Alexander’s turn to press for information. “What did you find out at the station? Something’s brought you here. You could have asked me these questions over the phone. Come to think of it, you did.”

Yes, Alexander, be sarcastic. That’s the way to go, he chided himself silently.

Gabriella reached forward, grabbed her beer and downed the remainder.

“I looked into things, Alex, as I said I would. And that’s exactly why I’m here.” Her eyes caught his, holding them a split second longer than normal before darting across the room.

“I went straight to my chief, Deputy Commissioner D’Antonio. The same man you spoke to. Told him everything you’d relayed to me: the link to your story, the online disappearance of a second source earlier in the day.”

Alexander recollected D’Antonio’s behavior toward him at the crime scene. “Hopefully he was willing to listen. I can’t say your boss made the best of impressions on me.”

Gabriella rolled her eyes. “You and the rest of the world.” For a flicker of a moment, she smiled. In the mutual dislike of her superior, they again had something in common.

“What did he say?” Alexander asked.

Her face suddenly turned red. The smile was gone and she looked angrily at him. “He said I shouldn’t put much stock in the stories told to me by an ex-lover.”

“Gabriella, our past was—”

“No,” she cut him off, a hand in the air, “it’s not important. If D’Antonio was just harping over my personal life, that would be one thing. But the manner in which he was acting . . . it was something more.”

Alexander sat silently with the new information.

“He told me in no uncertain terms,” Gabriella continued, “that these leads were non-leads, and that it would be professional suicide for me to look into them any further.”

“I’m sorry I brought you into this.” Alexander leaned slightly forward in his recliner. “I shouldn’t have called you.” He wanted to reach across the coffee table and place a hand on hers. He knew he couldn’t.

“The bastard all but threatened me,” Gabriella blurted out, her eyes angry. Then, recognizing the profanity uttered in company, she instinctively looked embarrassed, crossed herself, then proceeded to look more self-conscious still at the overt show of piety. Alexander knew it was a habit she’d borne since her childhood: every time a swear word escaped her lips, her right hand immediately flung into the motions of the sign of the cross. A swift purification for a poor show of piety. He’d always thought it endearing, the way she seemed to believe it almost physically counteracted the bad language.

“The former nun is embarrassed about her piety in the presence of a former priest?” Alexander asked, a new smile crossing his features.

“Alex, you know I was never a nun.” Gabriella tried to shake off the whole conversation.

“Okay, a novice. But it’s not a far cry.”

“It was a long time ago. I was a girl.” She looked as if she was about to recite a well-worn explanation for the thousandth time in her life, but bit her lip, exhaled deeply through her nose then turned to stare straight into Alexander’s eyes.

“I’m not used to being threatened by my boss for doing my job. And I’m not used to an investigation being mismanaged by a deputy commissioner of the State Police.”

Alexander could feel the sudden intensity in the air.

“What do you intend to do about it?”

She gave him a pointed look.

He smiled. “Okay, what do you intend that we do about it?”

Gabriella’s intensity only increased.

“We’re going to find out everything there is to know about your other man, Salvatore Tosi. We need to—”

She was cut off as Alexander’s doorbell rang.

A moment later his landline began to ring.

Then his mobile.

Then Gabriella’s.

And then, simultaneously, they all stopped.