“I’m not,” she said, though she glanced longingly at the bar as they approached the elevators, her ears alive to the clink of glasses and laughter and the music that occasionally bubbled up and over the bacchanal.
They had eaten dinner at a romantic trattoria with brick walls and lit candles in wrought-iron chandeliers where he was friends with the sous chef, and so they ate like royalty for almost nothing, which was about what they had for a budget. She had never had a panzanella salad so good, each tomato a different shade of orange or red. The house wines were excellent, Enrico told her, but Cassie insisted that she wasn’t going to drink, and so Enrico didn’t either. She sat with her back to the wall and sipped sparkling water, and stared at the entrance to the restaurant. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She wasn’t sure who she was looking for. She didn’t honestly believe that Miranda—or someone—would appear in the dining room, but after Fiumicino she wasn’t willing to sit with her back to the door.
It had been a lovely evening, though it had been and (she told herself) would be almost stoic in its denial: no booze, no sex. She was bringing him upstairs to her room so he could hand her the gun. The fact was that she knew more about firearms than he did. But he didn’t dare bring out the Beretta at the restaurant, and so they had agreed they would retreat to her hotel room so he could give it to her there. She’d been clear that they weren’t going to have sex, but she knew that he nevertheless remained hopeful. He was charming beyond his years; he was as unaccustomed to someone saying no as she was to saying it.
* * *
? ?
When they got to her room, she saw that the square red light on the desk phone was blinking. Instantly her anxiety rose. Enrico stood patiently by the window, his back to her as he stood bordered by the drapes, while she picked up the receiver and listened. It turned out that she had two messages.
“Hey, there. It’s Makayla. I’m just checking in. How did I not think to get your cell? I wanted to make sure you’re okay. Do you still want to have that drink? Do you feel up to joining some of us for dinner, maybe? I’m in room seven-thirteen. It’s a little before five.”
She made a mental note of the other flight attendant’s room number and then listened to the second message:
“Hi, Cassie, it’s me again. Makayla. Some of us are meeting in the lobby at seven thirty. Join us if you’d like. No pressure. Maybe text me when you wake up or get back from wherever you are,” she said, and this time she left her cell number. Cassie wrote it down and texted back that she was sorry she hadn’t gotten the messages. She wrote that she had gone for a long walk, but now she was back in her hotel room and she was fine. She was in for the night. She thanked her.
“Everything is okay?” asked Enrico.
“It is. That was just another member of the crew wanting to be reassured that I was safely back in my room.”
“Good.”
He picked up the paperback Tolstoy on the nightstand beside the hotel’s digital clock. “Did you ever read Carlo Levi?”
“No.”
“You should—if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. ‘The future has an ancient heart.’ I think I have that right.”
“Thank you. I don’t expect I’ll find him with the paperbacks at the airport.”
“Look for him—when you’re home,” he said, and somehow his tone made the idea of home sound to her like an unattainable dream: a port she would not see again. Still, Enrico smiled and sat on the foot of the bed. He patted the mattress beside him, beckoning her. The bed was the unmade mess she had left it after her afternoon nap. She joined him there and he pulled out the handgun. He gave it to her and then reached into his front pants pocket for the bullets.
The gun was heavier than she expected, but she liked its simple solidity. Its heft. It actually felt sturdier than a rifle. And the smell—metallic, machinelike—instantly brought her back to the high school classroom those early autumn afternoons when she had taken the hunter safety course and been taught by a retired state trooper the three different types of magazines (tubular, box, floor plate with a hinge), and where the gunpowder sits inside a cartridge. Then she was back in the woods, with a whole other set of memories: the aroma of autumnal cold. Wet leaves as they began to merge with the mud. Decomposing trees. Damp clothes.
She thought of her father’s breath, beery, when he would point out the deer tracks in the soft earth or the deer scat in the midst of the leaves just off the thin path.
The Beretta was a compact 92, all black. She ejected the magazine to make sure it was empty. She racked back the chamber to make sure there was no bullet in there, either.
“The bullets are so little,” Enrico said. He poured four of them into her hand and rolled a fifth between his forefinger and thumb. She took it from him. “The gun will hold all five of them?”
She examined the magazine. “Yes. This magazine probably holds three times that many rounds.”
He shook his head. “I should have stolen more bullets.”
“God, no.”
Loading the magazine, she thought, was like loading a Pez candy dispenser one little sugar brick at a time. When she had the cartridges inside the clip, she used the heel of her hand to tap the clip back into the handle. She hoped she had done everything right. Then she placed it on the nightstand next to the telephone. She didn’t want to get comfortable with the grip while he was there beside her on the bed. She wanted to do that when she was alone.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
They had bought a large metal tin of Perugia chocolates on the way back to the hotel. The plan was that in the morning when she and the rest of the flight crew checked out, she was going to leave the tin for him with a friend of his who was scheduled to be manning the reception desk. The gun would be at the bottom, unloaded, beneath the chocolates.
“I’m going to thank you and escort you to the door.”
“And eat the chocolates?”
She smiled at him. He was adorable. The perfect toy. “I’ll make a dent in the box, maybe. There has to be room for the gun, right?”
“And you’ll try to get some sleep?” he asked.
“I guess. If someone wanted to kill me, they had every chance this afternoon and this evening.”
He took her hand in both of his and gazed at her. His eyes looked sleepy in the hotel room light. “But you’re scared. You wanted a gun.”
“I’m a heck of a lot less scared now.”
“But tomorrow? And the day after tomorrow? And the day after that? What is your plan?”
She lifted his fingers to her mouth and kissed them once. Then she kissed them a second time. “I don’t have a plan,” she answered. “I wish I did, but I don’t.” The truth was, she had been living almost hour to hour since she had woken up in Dubai and found Alex Sokolov dead. First she just wanted to get away from the corpse and the likelihood of prison and reach Charles de Gaulle. Then she just wanted to land in America. Then she just wanted to find a lawyer. Then she just wanted to survive the FBI. Then. Then. Then…
But she couldn’t tell him any of that because Enrico believed—or at least was pretending to believe—that Alex Sokolov had been alive when she had left the hotel room.
“Well, I have a plan,” he said, his eyebrows raised, his face playful.
She shook her head.
“I’m not thinking what you think I am,” he said.
“You’re thinking you’re so handsome that I’m going to fall under your spell. Well, you are that handsome, and I am under your spell. But I’m trying to do better. To be better. So, please don’t tempt me anymore because I’m really not known for my willpower.”
“No. I’m thinking that we turn on the TV and play video games or watch movies. I’m thinking that I call downstairs for a pot of coffee—for me.”
“I can’t allow that. I told you, I don’t want you to take that risk.”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”