Blue Moonlight

by Zandri, Vincent

  I feel the solid weight of the pistol against my ribs. “I promise not to make a mess of things,” I say. “Yet.”

  “Your reputation precedes you.” He laughs.

  “That bad, huh?” I say, and begin the long descent down six flights of stairs.

  I make a check on the time.

  Seems like it could be late afternoon. But it’s only ten forty-five in the morning. Italy at this time of year is six hours ahead of the States, and already I’m beginning to feel the effects of jet lag.

  It will only get worse.

  The cure?

  Coffee. Good, strong Italian espresso.

  Out the door of the building I hook a right and follow the narrow cobbled street toward the four corners. All around me fashionably dressed young people are hurrying to and from their art classes, while busy working people go about their lives in the many shops and eateries I pass by.

  I cross the Nazionale and continue down Fienza just like Francesco instructed and proceed to the left before coming to a fork in the road at a local branch bank. When I get to the end of this short stretch of road, I take yet another left and lose my breath at the vision before me.

  It’s a tidal wave of white marble accented in green and red lines. I move toward the tidal wave until the road ends and I enter a square that’s dominated by the Florence Cathedral and its massive dome, or Duomo. How builders were able to construct this marble immensity six hundred years ago is an absolute mystery to me. But just looking up at it from down inside the cobbled square, I can’t help but feel somehow small and insignificant. And maybe I am.

  I decide to take a brisk walk around the entire cathedral, stopping only long enough to get a better look at a detail or a bronze door or at the tourists who have climbed the interior stairs and now occupy the cupola and gaze down upon me from hundreds of feet up. Not a happy place for those people who have a fear of heights or, like me, a sudden and uncontrollable habit of passing out when they least expect it. The structure is so large it takes me ten minutes to walk around the entire perimeter.

  My mortician dad used to purchase headstones from the Italian marble craftsman in downtown Albany. “Leave it to the Italians to build something that lasts and lasts,” he’d always say. “And believe me, Richard, death lasts a real long time.”

  Back where I started.

  I take my first good look at the many cafés that border the Duomo square. All of them are filled with patrons. Tourists, mostly.

  I try to take a close look at the people who occupy the tables and chairs in the outdoor seating areas. But not too closely. The sunglasses help. As I casually stroll past the establishments, I don’t see anyone I recognize. No Clyne, Barter, or Lola. You’d think with all the surveillance the FBI and Interpol have been maintaining on my three amigos, we’d have established which café they hang out at most often. But therein lies the problem. The three amigos don’t frequent one single café for very long. Rather, they tend to switch up a lot. Let’s face it, Barter isn’t stupid. Of all people he would know that he’s being watched. Wasn’t that long ago that he was still under federal employ to be a watcher himself.

  It’s time to plant myself.

  But I need to find a place that will give me a bird’s-eye view of the square. I settle on an empty table set directly in front of the cathedral’s marble steps. I pull out the paper and pencil that Francesco provided for me earlier and pretend to take on the guise of a poet who has come here for inspiration and luck.

  The ruse works too.

  Better than I thought it would.

  Because I haven’t even written down my first word yet when I recognize the voice of my ex-lover.

  I’m careful not to look directly in the direction of her voice.

  Seated at the small table, pencil pressed to paper, I manage to sneak a peek over my left shoulder. I see three people. Two men walking side by side and a woman lagging a step or two behind.

  Lola.

  Like the men, she’s dressed in black.

  Leather boots that rise up to her knees, black jacket over turtleneck sweater. She’s wearing black-rimmed Jackie O’s over her eyes. The men wear black leather jackets over dark trousers and black shoes. They too wear sunglasses. Clyne the larger. Barter the smaller, but wiry and in cross-trainer shape.

  As they pass, I’m able to look directly at their backs. I’m resisting the almost irresistible urge to run up behind them and scream, “Guess who!”

  Then I might simply pull out the .9 mm, hold it on the two big boys point-blank while I demand return of the flash drive I’d stupidly handed to Clyne in the first place, all those months ago when my heart was bleeding for the lonely, newly divorced cop. At the same time I could grab hold of Lola, pull her to me, press the pistol barrel against her right temple, scream something over-the-top dramatic like, “Hand over the flash drive or the girl gets it!”

  But that would just blow the entire mission. It might also get me and Lola killed, or at the very least, arrested by the Italian police while Clyne and Barter make their escape.

  Best to stick to the plan.

  I pack up the pencil and paper and begin to follow the threesome. From a distance.

  I maintain a separation of forty or fifty feet between them and me as we walk across the square to a road that runs perpendicular to the Duomo square. The road is wider than some of the other roadways in the city. We pass an open area that’s home to a large five-star hotel on the left and a cobbled square that sports a couple of expensive cafés along with a brass band and an old-fashioned carousel of colorful wooden horses, tigers, and lions. My ten-year-old boy, Harrison, would have loved that carousel back when he was a toddler. Christ, he’d still love it. I wonder if he gets to ride carousels in sunny LA?

  Up ahead is a series of expensive clothing shops on both sides of the streets. Renaissance-era structures of brick, wood, and tile, now retrofitted with big glass storefront windows bearing the names Chanel, Gap, Prada, Old Navy, and so on. There’s even a Hard Rock Café in Florence now. I might as well be back in Albany at the mall. But then, I don’t go to the mall.

  Not far up ahead, the Ponte Vecchio and its many jewelry shops. The street used to house butcher shops, which made sense, since the butchers could simply toss the discarded bloody carcasses through the openings in the floor and into the river. When they had to relieve themselves, that would go into the Arno too. The residents of this town might have been smart enough to initiate the modern era of architecture, literature, and art, but they didn’t know enough not to drink the putrid river water. Many of them nearly died in a typhoid epidemic of 1696. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but so is protracted death.

  For a moment, I think the three amigos might head on to the bridge, but instead they hook a left down a narrow alley located directly across from the open-air leather market. I keep my distance as they come out upon another major square, this one housing the giant marble Poseidon and the near-perfect replica of Michelangelo’s David that stands guard outside the Palazzo Vecchio entrance. I feel my pulse elevate at the sight of these statues, just like I did when I first laid eyes on them as a kid soon after my mother died, and again later as a slightly-drunk-on-Chianti young adult. But it elevates more when Lola and her companions stop outside one of the half dozen open-air cafés and seat themselves at a table that overlooks the entire square.

  I see that there’s another café right beside theirs, and I take a table that allows me a clear and unobstructed view of their table. I order a tall beer from the neatly dressed waiter. When the beer arrives, along with a small plate of green olives soaked in olive oil and fresh ground pepper, I once more pull out the pencil and paper, settle in for a quiet afternoon of observing my ex-lover and the men who are holding her against her will in a foreign land.

  They order drinks. Or the men order drinks. Beers.

  Lola orders a coffee.

  When it comes, she simply stares down into it, as if the dark, frothy vision is her only
means of escape.

  The men talk. I have no idea what they’re saying. Discussing their next move? Or, more likely, just shooting the shit while they wait for a potential buyer. Stands to reason that they’re remaining in Florence for as long as they have for one reason and one reason only: to meet a buyer. But I can bet the title to Dad’s pride-and-joy 1978 Cadillac funeral hearse that said buyers haven’t arranged a specific time to meet them. Not yet, anyway. They’ve merely told them where they will meet them, and to be in that exact place every day at a specific time. Only when the buyers are ready—if they’re ever ready—will they then come to the sellers.

  It’s the only explanation for their taking the chance on staying in the same city for as long as they have, knowing they’re being watched by both the good guys and a variety of bad guys. Stands to reason that today’s choice of café isn’t indiscriminate either. My guess is that they were instructed to make this move. And if that’s the case, the potential buyers are probably getting closer to meeting their sellers and making a deal.

  I’m familiar with this kind of thing from my days in the APD. Drug dealers use the wait-and-observe tactic all the time. They ask a potential client to meet them at a specific place. But they don’t offer up a specific time of the meet. For two good reasons. It gives the buyer a chance to spy on the would-be client, make sure they’re not the police in disguise. And two, constantly showing up every day, day after day, displays serious intention on the part of the client. Means they’re not about to jerk the buyer’s chain and waste his or her time. If one were to require a third reason for making their seller wait, it would be to make certain that the buyer isn’t about to walk into an ambush. Conversely, it allows for the buyer to at least prepare for the worst should a buy go bad. That is, if the lead starts to fly, the buyer will already have his gunners and sharpshooters in place in and around the square, from the windows and rooftops.

  Something happens.

  Lola says something to the men. Whatever she says causes Barter to lean in tight to her, his mouth so close to her face she can probably smell his halitosis. He clamps his hand around hers on the table and says something back. Something with a little heat sprinkled on top. She yanks her hand away. Hard. I hear the distinct cry of “Go! To! Hell!”

  He tries to grab her hand again.

  It’s all I can do to remain seated and anonymous. But I have no choice.

  Lola, however, gets up from the table.

  She walks away.

  Barter starts to laugh. “Don’t get lost, Lo!” he barks. “I might not see you with my eyes. But I fucking see you, all right.”

  She raises up her right hand, flips him off over her shoulder.

  Fuck you, Barter.

  I couldn’t agree more.

  Lola is going to pass my table, within three feet of where I’m sitting.

  As if it were scripted this way. The perfect time to get reacquainted. I make certain she sees my face by raising up my aviators.

  She stops dead in her tracks.

  Stares at me.

  Her mouth hangs open.

  “Just keep walking,” I tell her. “Around the corner.”

  She walks on. I give her a long minute or so while my stomach muscles tighten and I lose all the moisture in my mouth. Then I follow.

  She’s waiting for me across the street and a few doors down, in a shop doorway. I cross to her.

  I know her so well. Her touch, her smell, her taste. But I have no idea who this woman before me is. I only know that I love her. No matter what’s happened these past few months. I still love her.

  “How are you, Lola?” I say.

  She steals a quick gaze over my shoulder. The color has drained from her face. She drills her eyes into me. “You shouldn’t be here, Richard,” she warns. “It’s not safe.”

  “Look who’s talking,” I say. “Word up is that the relationship isn’t working out.”

  She works up a hint of a smile, despite the shock of running into me here in Florence of all the places on God’s earth.

  “Do you know where Harry’s Bar is?”

  “I know it. It’s across from the Vespucci bridge.”

  “Meet me there tomorrow, five o’clock. Please don’t try to contact me until then.”

  “I’ll be there,” I assure her.

  “Get away from here as soon as I’m gone,” she insists. “They see you, they will kill you.”

  She steals another anxious glance over her shoulder, as if she can see Barter and Clyne from where we’re standing.

  “Tomorrow,” she says, turning back to me.

  And then she’s gone.

  I pass by the square on my way back to the guesthouse. Clyne and Barter are still sitting at the table, making small talk, obviously waiting for someone to show who seems not to be showing. I see their faces as I pass them by, but it’s Lola’s face that’s implanted in my head directly beside that hollow-point bullet fragment. My heart is beating so fast, I feel like I might pass out. Not an unusual situation for me even during the best, most stress free of times.

  Heading back toward Il Ghiro, I can’t help but feel lighter than air on one hand and full of fear on the other.

  I’m meeting Lola for a drink tomorrow.

  If I want to recover that flash drive, and if I want to stay out of prison, and if I want my IRS problem to go away, I have to make her trust me. If I want to rescue her from Barter, I’ll have to steal her away. I have a job to do, and I have a broken heart that’s bleeding all over again at the sight of Lola.

  That night I lie in bed staring at the plaster ceiling and at the Casablanca fan, its wide metal blades spinning slowly around, circulating the warm, humid air. Outside the open french windows, people walk past, the soles of their shoes clapping against the cobbles, their liquor- and wine-soaked laughs bouncing off the four-hundred-year-old plaster and brick walls.

  I lie naked, smoking a cigarette, the cloud of blue smoke rising up to the spinning fan blades. I’m here to do a job. No, correction—I’m here to right a wrong that’s all my fault. Funny that it should take a head case like me to start this trouble, and now to end it. But I can’t do it without Lola’s help. I can only hope she will trust me enough to reveal the location of the flash drive. Assuming she knows of its location. Only when that happens will I have the upper hand and the business of separating Lola from Barter and Clyne can begin.

  I smoke the last of the cigarette, crush it out in the ashtray set beside the bed. Listening to the occasional man or woman pass by my window on the cobbled street below, I feel a slight breeze entering in through the open window. My mind drifts off. I’m not asleep, exactly, but I’m not fully awake either, as the events that came to shape my life and death almost one year ago replay themselves in my head…

  I’m lying on my back inside a narrow downtown Albany alley.

  Three faces stare down at me. All the same face. The face of the president. President Obama. He always seemed like such a nice guy to me. Way too nice for the office. But now here are three nice-guy presidents kicking me in the ribs, kidneys, and stomach with their steel-toed boot tips. One of them kicks me in the face, loosens my back teeth. The one in the middle steps away, presses a handheld voice synthesizer to his throat, tells me, “You should have stayed away from Peter Czech!”

  Then I’m floating above a bed inside the Albany Medical Center ICU. My sig other Lola is standing by my side looking sad and forlorn at the death of her boyfriend, but also looking choice in tight white jeans and a silk black blouse, Jackie O sunglasses covering tear-swelled eyes and long, lush dark hair draping her chiseled face. I’m sad for her on one hand, but on the other, it lightens the heart to know that Lola is true blue. That she is standing by my side even in death.

  But then something happens.

  A man enters the room.

  Some young guy.

  He brushes up against her, runs his right hand over her ass. It almost looks like they’re about to make out over my dead body.<
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  Suddenly I’m trying to jump back into my beat-up body. Suddenly I want my life back so I can beat the life out of Some Young Guy…

  The scene shifts. But the setting remains the same—the hospital room, me in the bed. I’m alive again. Barely. Lola and Some Young Guy are gone. But the Obama-masked men are back. They surround my hospital bed. The one on my left is jabbing me with a scalpel. He’s using the sharp tip to pry out one of my surgical staples. The pain is so intense, I see red.

  “Where is fleshy box?” the chief Obama standing at the foot of the bed demands in a Russian-accented voice.

  “I. Don’t. Know,” I choke out.

  I feel the flick of the scalpel once more, and then POP goes the staple.

  I hear the ping of the steel staple hitting the hard floor. Then I pass out…

  The scene shifts once more to the top floor of the old Montgomery Ward building in North Albany. The space is big and wide, like the giant warehouse it once was. Set in the middle of the big room is a room within a room: a room created out of translucent plastic, with an attached ventilation and respiration system. An operating room.

  On the operating table, facedown, is Peter Czech. There’s a team of doctors working on him. Standing off to the side is Lola and Some Young Guy, who, it turns out, is really not so young after all. His name is Christian Barter, and he’s an agent for the FBI. He and Lola are the biological childhood parents of Peter Czech, and now that they have found their long-lost son in adulthood, they have also rediscovered one another.

  Suddenly a commotion coming from the operating table and the alarm of a flatlined heart. Lights flash on and off, buzzers buzz, and bells chime. The doctors toss down their scalpels and suction tubes. They rip off their masks.

  “He’s dead,” they lament to Lola. “We are so very sorry. But your son, he is dead.”

  Lola bursts into tears, presses her face into Barter’s chest…