“Saenz.” Enzo held out his hand. “Enzo Saenz.”
Her skin was cold from the outdoors, her fingers hard and lean. The rings were gone, consigned, doubtless, to the safe in the suite her husband had reserved for the week.
“You’ll have to excuse me.” Anna Carson dropped his hand and looked down at her leggings and shoes. “I’ve just come in from a run.” She made an effort to laugh. “Stupid, isn’t it? But it helps me relax. All this with Kristin, it’s so— My husband is up in the room,” she added. “If you’ve found something I should call him—”
Enzo shook his head. “I’m not here about Kristin,” he said. “Exactly.”
“Then—” Her eyes widened, and again Enzo registered the fact that, like her skin tone, they didn’t match her hair.
“I came to see you.” He nodded toward the uncomfortable settee were he’d been sitting. “I wondered if we could talk a minute.”
Anna Carson opened her mouth. Then she shook her head and smiled again, if anything more stiffly.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m rather damp. If I don’t get out of these things, I’m going to get cold. And we have a lunch reservation. With the consul. So I’m late already. Really, Mr. Saenz, if this isn’t urgent, it would be better if my husband—”
“Signora Carson.”
She stopped talking.
“It’s about the man,” Enzo said. “In the photograph.”
“The man?”
Enzo nodded. “The man Kristin was getting into the car with.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes.” As if she remembered, but only vaguely.
She was fiddling with the sunglasses now, turning them over and over, her fingers running like a rat on a wheel. Enzo resisted the impulse to reach out and cover her hand with his own.
“I wondered,” he said, “if there was anything you could tell me. About him?”
“Tell you?” Her hands stopped moving.
Enzo nodded.
“Me?” She shook her head, the smile widening. “Why would I be able to tell you anything about him?”
“Because you recognized him.”
She tried and almost succeeded, but Enzo saw the shot hit home.
“You recognized him,” he said again. “The man in the picture, on the phone. I was standing beside you. I saw you.”
“That’s ridiculous.” The smile froze. “Ridiculous.”
“I don’t think so.” Enzo waited a moment, then he added, “I think you know who he is.”
“Why on earth would I know who he is?”
“I don’t know.” Enzo didn’t take his eyes off hers. “I was hoping,” he said, “that you’d tell me.”
Voices and footsteps clattered around them. Enzo could sense the concierge and the young woman at the reception desk making an effort not to watch them.
“Signora Carson.” He dropped his voice, wishing now that he had found somewhere else, somewhere more private to talk to her. “If you’re in trouble—” He reached out, his fingers brushing her arm. “I can help you. And I will. But only if you talk to me.”
Anna Carson’s eyes seemed to darken, to turn the color of moss and earth. She stared at him, still as an animal in a beam of light.
Enzo let a heartbeat go by. Then two, then three. He was about to try again when she put the sunglasses on.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I really have no idea what you’re talking about. Now.” She moved her arm deliberately out of his reach. “If there’s nothing else, Mr. Saenz, I really do have to get going.”
Anna Carson smiled. Then she turned on her heel, and walked away.
* * *
“I can’t do that! For Christ’s sake, Enzo.”
James MacCready leaned back in his chair. Carefully. In the last few days the rollers had taken on a life of their own. He’d asked for maintenance, or a new chair, but neither had been forthcoming. He shook his head. “I can’t just go around digging up dirt on American citizens.”
“Yes, you can.”
Enzo was standing in the doorway of MacCready’s office where he’d appeared without warning, like something conjured out of a lamp. James MacCready looked at him and sighed.
“All right,” he said. “All right, yes. Strictly speaking, I can. I’m the federal government. Better than that, I’m the State Department. I can do whatever the fuck I want. Or at least find out whatever the fuck I want. You’re right. You. Are. Right. Score one for you.” James laced his hands behind his head. “Why do you want to know anyway?”
Enzo shrugged.
“A hunch.”
“A hunch?” MacCready laughed. “Oh, come on. Drop the enigmatic cop routine. You don’t have hunches, Enzo. I know you.”
You don’t know me, Enzo wanted to say. We’ve drunk beer together; it isn’t the same thing. Then he wondered if it was. He stepped into the room and closed the door.
“She knows him.”
The deputy consul frowned. “What do you mean, she knows him? Who knows who?”
“The man her stepdaughter was getting into the car with. Anna Carson knows him.”
“Uh-huh. And how do you figure that?”
Enzo looked at him.
MacCready rolled his eyes.
“Oh, I see. She told you, did she?”
“No. She didn’t tell me. That’s why I want you to run a background check on her.”
James MacCready made a face. “Run one yourself.”
“I will,” Enzo said. “But it could take weeks.”
James sighed. It was true. As far as official channels in the United States went, background checks from foreign law enforcement might be dealt with in a day. Or in a week, or in two months, or not at all. Plainly speaking, it was a crapshoot. James swung his feet onto his desk and crossed his ankles.
“So,” he said, “you’re saying you really think Mrs. Perfect Doctor Wife knows this guy? The fifty-year-old Lover Boy in the phone picture?”
Enzo nodded.
“So why wouldn’t she tell you who he was?”
“I don’t know.” Enzo crossed to the window and looked through the venetian blind. “I can think of a number of reasons,” he said, moving the slats aside. “But all they’d be is guesses.”
“What if you’re wrong, and she doesn’t know anyone?”
“Then I’m wrong and she doesn’t know anyone. What is it you say? No harm, no foul?” Enzo dropped the blind. “I’m not asking you to dig for dirt, Jim. I’m just asking you to run her details, a routine check, see if anything comes up. Any criminal record other than a parking ticket.”
“Oh, well. I’m glad you don’t want those.”
“When a kid disappears family are the number-one choice.”
James rolled his eyes. “The ‘kid’ hasn’t ‘disappeared.’ She’s gone off on a little screw-fest to annoy her daddy. And even if she hasn’t—which fifty bucks says she has—the woman was four thousand miles away. What do you think she is? A time traveler?”
Enzo shrugged. With the light behind him, James MacCready couldn’t see his eyes, but he remembered they were an odd color. A brown so light it was almost golden. Very weird. Kind of like Enzo. Who, despite the fact that he had the irritating habit of being right all the time, James liked. He swung his feet off the desk.
“How long has she been seeing him?” he asked. “The girl? Kristin Carson, I mean. This guy? Do we know how long she’s been with him?”
“Not really. Certainly the whole time she’s been here. The other girl, the roommate, thinks Kristin might have known him before she got here. It’s hard to tell because she didn’t talk about him.”
MacCready’s eyebrows jumped, disappearing momentarily under his thatch of blond hair.
“I thought seventeen-year-old girls talked about everything.”
Enzo nodded. “Exactly.”
James picked up an elastic band, pinged it at the mug that held his pens, and said, “So what do you think this is? I mean, what are you suggesting
? The guy has a thing with the stepmother? You think we’re talking kidnapping, extortion? Some weird sex thing? What?”
“I don’t know.” Enzo smiled. “That,” he said, “is what I’m hoping you can get a line on.”
James sighed.
“OK,” he said after a minute. “So we have a seventeen-year-old girl maybe missing. Maybe. Personally, like I said—I think that’s horseshit, especially since she’s done it before. But I guess you’re right, we can’t dick around with it. If I do this officially—” MacCready jerked his head in the vague direction of the upper floor where the consul had his offices. “Put in a request to run a criminal background check on the stepmother, he’ll hear about it.”
“Which means the Carsons will hear about it.”
“Bingo,” James agreed. “They’re tight as ticks. The Carsons’ll pitch a fit, and he’ll ride my ass—start screaming about privacy and sovereignty and due process. He’s really into due process these days.”
Enzo started to point out that that was ironic, given extraordinary rendition and all. But in the interest of transatlantic cooperation—and getting what he wanted—he decided to leave it alone. Instead he asked, “Can you call someone?”
James MacCready’s handsome face creased into a frown. “So you really think this is something? I mean, something more than a teenage girl running off with somebody old enough to be her father because, well, she wants to freak out her father?”
Enzo looked at him.
“Right,” MacCready said. “Right. OK.” He looked at his watch. “Give me a couple of hours. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call you. Who knows?” he added, shaking his head. “Maybe Mrs. Doctor Perfect is one of those low fliers with ten warrants out on her.”
Enzo smiled, but neither of them laughed.
* * *
Enzo Saenz listened for the soft sound of the bolts dropping into place. When he was satisfied that the combination lock had reset itself, he turned and surveyed the room, performing the nightly ritual of taking inventory, listing the objects that summed up his life.
A pair of brown leather sofas faced one another, their arms creased and dented from supporting either his head or feet. There was no television and no sound system in the loft, just piles of books, stacked more or less neatly on the bare chestnut floor. Stainless steel and marble let off a shimmery, almost ectoplasmic glow in the kitchen area. A blue plate hovered on the glass dining table. At the far end of the room, the futon bed was covered in a red quilt.
Spidery arms of reading lights threw webs of shadow across a collection of framed photographs—most of them landscapes—that hung on the far wall. Several were by the same photographer, Seraphina Benvoglio, and several others by friends of hers. One, a study she had called The Winter Line, took pride of place above the bed. In it, a gravel road headed by gateposts stretched away between the snow-crusted ridges of plowed fields.
The photograph had cost Enzo more than he had wanted to spend, but he hadn’t hesitated, knowing the moment he saw it that he needed it. Much as he had felt, from the first moment he saw her, that he needed Saffy herself. Which was stupid, and pointless, and therefore entirely safe. A coward’s passion if ever there was one. Because Seraphina Benvoglio was not only happily married with a young son, she was also Pallioti’s sister.
He slid out of his jacket, hung it up, and flipped on the lights. The loft took up the top floor of what had once been a medieval warehouse at the edge of the Oltrarno. Now it was an apartment building, one of several in the city owned by his grandparents. When he joined the police, Enzo had told them that he intended to live, not off of their generosity, but off his salary. They had bridled a bit, then accepted his terms. With one exception. His grandmother had convinced him, finally, to let her give him a home. It would, she had insisted, be doing them a favor—save them the fuss of converting, dealing with a management company, leasing to potentially awkward tenants. She’d had the good grace to attempt sincerity, but both she and Enzo knew that was rubbish. Their only child, his mother, had drifted, bumping up against Florence and floating off again, all her life. His grandmother was simply trying to break the pattern, give her only grandchild an anchor. Finally it had seemed not only unkind, but stupid and churlish not to accept the gift.
It was past ten p.m. Enzo crossed the room and raised the blinds. The night roofs of the city stretched beyond the glass that made up the east wall. On the opposite bank of the river, the Duomo and Santa Croce glowed like spaceships fallen to earth. An outdoor table sat on the terrace, icicles hanging from its rim, surrounded by a skeletal set of metal chairs. The cat sat on one, looking cross. She jumped down as Enzo slid the door open and came pattering in, making her bird noise, demanding to know where he’d been, and when, exactly, he was planning on feeding her.
“I told you,” he said. “You wanted to stay out. It snows, don’t blame me.”
She switched her tail. He’d left food in her hutch on the terrace, but she considered the hutch down-market, a doss house of last resort. Which Enzo thought a little unfair. The hutch wasn’t any old upturned box. It had cost him a small fortune. He’d even had it insulated. She stalked into the kitchen, throwing him an evil look. Her eyes, a paleish golden brown, were almost the same color as his. Sometimes he wondered if they were twins.
The cat had arrived almost a year ago. She had come over the roofs, dropped down onto his terrace, and informed him that she was home. He really should, he thought as he went to refrigerator, give her a name. He couldn’t just go on calling her “the cat” forever. Or perhaps, actually, he could.
Enzo spooned her some rabbit, apologizing that it was not something more interesting, put the bowl on her mat, and poured her some milk. Then he retrieved a beer. As he reached for the bottle, he registered the fact that there were several things alongside it that could be turned into something enticing. He wasn’t entirely undomesticated, and in the ordinary course of things found cooking—the chopping and measuring as well as the eating—a pleasant punctuation, a sort of formal end to the day. But tonight the idea wasn’t even tempting. He wasn’t hungry. He was worried about Kristin Carson.
She hadn’t turned up—at her parents’ hotel, or at her apartment or, as far as the police could tell, anywhere else. Hospitals, clinics, jails, and now morgues were being checked. As the hours had ticked by with no sign of her, Enzo had sensed Pallioti becoming as uneasy as he was. When, having finally decided he’d done all he could, Enzo had dropped in to announce that he was on his way home, he’d found Pallioti standing at his window, staring morosely down onto the snow-sodden piazza. Leaning in the doorway, Enzo had started to say something about the girl’s stepmother, then decided against it. What he had—or rather didn’t have—was so vague that it would just make him sound as if he was clutching at straws. Besides, it was Pallioti who believed in hunches, who seemed sometimes to stare into thin air and pluck solutions out of it, not Enzo. Enzo believed in evidence. Facts. All the boring little concrete bits and pieces. And as far as Kristin Carson’s stepmother was concerned, there weren’t any.
“She’s only a little girl,” Pallioti had said finally, not turning around. “She’s really not more than a child.”
The statement hadn’t required an answer, so Enzo hadn’t offered one, just watched his own reflection nod in the glass. Now he opened the beer and a bag of almonds and slid a copy of the photo Ken Carson had provided of his daughter out of the file he’d brought home. Pallioti was right, she was a child. A very pretty one and, from the looks of her, one drifting in that dangerous place—a girl inhabiting a woman’s body and all too eager to put it to use.
As was standard procedure in a missing-persons case, the photo had gone out that morning to all police stations, customs points, hospitals, and transit authorities. After hearing what Mary Louise had to say, the alert had been widened to include clinics, dentists, and even veterinary offices—Enzo shuddered at the thought, but it had been known to happen. Europol had been updated. The g
eek squad, after taking its sweet time with her computer, had finally called and told him they had come up with nothing. Having combed Kristin’s files, hacked her email and dismantled her Facebook page, they had found no trace of a boyfriend, elderly or otherwise, and no clue as to where she might be. The police didn’t have Kristin Carson’s cell phone records yet—the Americans were a pain in the ass on that front. They’d done better with the banks. Her credit card history, unfortunately, offered little reassurance.
Enzo dropped the files he’d brought home on the counter, opened the top one, and pulled a copy of credit card printouts from the papers. Kristin’s parents had thoughtfully provided her with both a MasterCard and a Visa, neither of which had been used since Tuesday, January 26. That afternoon, however, she had, as the Americans would say, gone hog wild. Basically, as soon as she’d finished her morning of declining Italian verbs and listening to a lecture on the symbolism in Piero della Francesca’s late works, Kristin Carson had gone out and spent the better part of twenty-five hundred euros. Which seemed like a lot for a girl worried about getting a cash advance.
Her first charge had been made in the department store Coin. Visiting, Enzo had confirmed that she had purchased a black cashmere coat, a pair of leather boots, and a large amount of lingerie. He had then trailed her back across the river to a boutique in the Borgo San Jacopo. There she had bought a black dress, a pair of black wool trousers, a black sweater, and two pairs of very expensive and very high-heeled shoes. The final charge, made just after five p.m., had been from somewhere called Carlo Bay Diffusion, which turned out not to be the surf shop or music emporium its name suggested, but a hairdresser, where she had a cut, a deep pampering conditioner, and something called double depth highlights. All of which took the better part of three hours and had been booked by telephone on the previous Friday.
Enzo ate another handful of nuts. In his humble opinion, Kristin Carson’s purchases read like the checklist for a dirty weekend. All that was missing was a stop at one of the sex shops behind Santa Maria Novella. Certainly none of the purchases sounded like they’d been chosen by a girl about to slink off and terminate a pregnancy. Who took a black lace garter belt and three pairs of black stockings to have an abortion?
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