“Don’t lose me, Lola!” I shout above the noise of the traffic, the now-driving rain running down my face and into my mouth.
“Just keep running!” she assures me.
We make it across Faenza and then out beyond an area where Nazionale widens, leading to the Piazza Santa Maria Novella to my left, and to the right the Santa Maria Novella train station.
Our destination. Our escape.
Lola and I enter the crowded art deco, Fascist-era station to the sound of locomotives pulling in and out of the many concrete platforms that service the transit hub that Mussolini built. The smell is acrid smoke and diesel fuel. The hum of people and machines is nearly deafening.
To our left is a giant room that houses the ticket booths. The lines are long and slow. I know that the train to Pisa and its international airport run every half hour, the ultimate destination along the route being not Pisa but Lucca, which is located along the coast. I also know that you don’t have to wait in line at the ticket counter for a ticket. You can purchase them at any one of the many newsstands located inside the dark brown and off-white marble-finished building.
It’s exactly what I do. Purchase two tariffa regionale Toscana tickets from the newsstand vendor for ten euros total. Tickets in hand, I peer up at the departures board. Lucca leaves on the hour in seven minutes on track eight.
Seven minutes.
An eternity when you’re being chased by men who want to kill you. Men who are perfectly aware the only quick way out of Florence to Pisa is by train. I’ve been to this city three times now, and I know that taxis don’t go there and buses take forever. That is, if they’re even operating.
“Let’s go,” I tell Lola.
“We’ll take the farthest car from the station,” she suggests. “The one hooked up directly to the engine.”
“All the way down the platform,” I say.
“Let’s just go. Now. Go. Now.”
We move, sidestepping along track eight, steam slowly oozing out of the air brakes beneath the many baby-blue, single- and double-decker cars that make up the long, regional train. When we get to the final car behind the engine, I take a fleeting glance over my right shoulder. Barter and Clyne are nowhere in sight. But I doubt their absence will last forever.
A quick check of my wristwatch.
Four minutes until the train departs.
Four excruciatingly long minutes.
Just a few feet away from us, mounted on the thick pillar that supports the electronic destination marker, is the yellow validation box. All train tickets in Europe must be validated or the bearer will face a stiff fine or, in some cases, expulsion from the train. I slide the tickets into the designated slots, and the machine mechanically validates the tickets by stamping the date and time on them in blue ink. It’s all that’s needed for us to board.
We hop onto the train and depress the wall-mounted trigger that opens the sliding doors. Just a couple of people occupy seats at this hour of the evening. I wish there were more people for us to blend into. But it will have to do.
The doors close behind us.
We take two seats with windows that overlook a second set of tracks parallel to our own, not the concrete platform. We sit and listen to our hearts beat.
We count the seconds until we make our escape from Florence.
We sit in absolute silence until we feel the pull and jolt of the slowly moving train. Lola grabs my hand, squeezes it hard. I look out the window opposite the aisle and watch the platform pillars begin to fly by as the train picks up speed.
When we’re finally away from the station, Lola exhales in relief. “My God,” she whispers. “We did it. We got away from them.”
I squeeze her hand to reassure her. To let her know that I still love her. No matter what.
The car door slides open then, and Barter steps on through.
No time to hide.
I manage to draw my automatic just a split second before Barter, get the jump on him as Clyne steps into the car behind him. Pistol poised before me, I slide out of my seat, stand foursquare in the narrow aisle.
The black man seated four rows up from me is wearing headphones. His eyes go wide when he sees the gun. The middle-aged woman seated in the row behind him, only a few feet away from where Barter is standing, gets a look at my gun and screams.
Barter’s wearing a waist-length black leather coat not unlike my own. He assumes a sly smile, starts sliding his shooting hand into its interior.
“Don’t,” I say, voice low, as even-keeled as possible. Then, focusing my eyes on both the black man and the woman seated behind him. “Go. Vi. Go. Leave!” They don’t wait for me to ask a second time. They stand and exit the car without their bags, squeezing past Barter and Clyne as they do it.
The four of us are alone in the car. Beneath us the train sways along the tracks as it works up toward high-speed. Outside the window, quick visual snippets of the lush, lamp-lit Tuscan countryside. You can’t see them in the dark, but I know that beyond the light are rolling green hills and pastoral landscapes filled with vineyards and fields of olive and fig trees ripe for the picking. You can see why people spend big bucks to spend time here. It’s peaceful, serene, and as far removed from death as one place can possibly get on this earth. Except for me and Lola and the men facing my black gun barrel at the other end of the car, that is.
I thumb back the hammer on the automatic.
“Hands,” I say. “The ceiling…both of you.”
Reaching into my pocket with my free hand, I hand Lola the .22 revolver. It’s not loaded, but they don’t know that. “Hold this on Clyne’s big fat face while I relieve them of their guns,” I say.
I can’t see her face, but somehow, I feel Lola smiling. “Happy to help out,” she says.
I work my way up the aisle until I’m so close to Barter that I can smell the rain drying on his leather. I reach into his coat and pull out his automatic. Then I belt him over the head with it. He drops down into the empty seat directly beside him.
I take Clyne’s weapon from him.
“There’s no need to hit me,” Clyne interjects. “I’ll behave.”
I give his suggestion some serious consideration and decide not to whack him.
“I believe you fucking will behave, Clyne,” I agree, storing both of the weapons in my coat pocket.
“You have my flash drive,” he adds. “I’d like it back.”
“Not a chance.”
“What can you possibly gain by having it?”
“Maybe I want the chance to sell it.”
He smiles. “Not you, Moonlight,” he says. “I pegged you for a bleeding heart right off the bat. You make a lot of wrong choices and decisions, but you wouldn’t ever purposely do something wrong. Not something that would perhaps upset your position with God.”
“You believe in heaven and hell, Clyne?”
He nods.
“Really,” I say. “Interesting. So do I. I know firsthand what heaven looks like because I’ve been there.”
He taps his temple in the spot where my botched suicide’s scar protrudes from my skull. “Seems to me you’ve been to hell too,” he says, that smile growing wider.
I picture myself seated at my kitchen table, a pistol barrel pressed up against my temple.
“Hell is where you find it,” I say.
“Ain’t that the truth,” he says.
Commotion.
Coming from the opposite end of the car, in the space between the engine and the car where the toilet and additional storage is located.
“It’s the ticket taker,” Lola says.
I’m thinking, the ticket taker must have been inside the engine with the conductor. They are still called conductors, right? My gun still planted on Clyne, I quickly shoot a glance over my right shoulder toward the other end of the car. The uniformed man is standing inside the space, talking with someone on his radio. I know it’s only a second or two before he enters the car and asks for our tickets.
“Sure thing, Mr. Moonlight,” he says, not without a sly smile. “A man knows when he’s beaten.”
“Funny, Clyne,” I say, backing to the other end of the car, next to Lola. I take her hand. “Forgot how funny you are. But I also know you don’t want to go to Italian prison. That ticket taker recognizes you, you’re done.”
“Why not just tell the ticket taker who I am and be done with it?”
“Maybe I will,” I fib, pulling Lola with me back up the car to them, slipping with her into the two seats one row up and across from theirs, keeping my pistol aimed at them at all times via the right-hand pocket on my leather jacket. “Just sit still and maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
The door slides open.
“Billeto,” says the small, mustached man to Lola and me.
I see Barter stir, coming to. There’s a fresh pinky-finger-sized gash in his forehead.
I hand the tickets to the ticket taker. He checks to make sure they’re validated and pokes holes in them with his hole puncher.
I turn to Lola.
“Get up,” I say.
She does. I take hold of her hand and pull her back out into the aisle. We hustle rudely past the ticket taker, as he now hovers over Clyne and Barter. He issues a grunt like, Fucking American tourists.
I slap the wall-mounted door opener behind him. When it slides open, we slip out of the car and begin barreling our way car to car, to the opposite end of the high-speed train.
“Why didn’t you tell the ticket man?” Lola says from behind me as we switch cars. “This could be all over right now.”
I’m listening to Lola’s words, but I’m also looking out for the two people I chased out of the car. The black man and old woman who either are too frightened to alert authorities or have by now done so and it’s only matter of time until this thing is all blown to hell.
“The little man carries a ticket punch, not a hand cannon, Lo. What’s he gonna do, arrest them? Hold them at bay with the ticket punch? Take them into custody for us? Besides, you really wanna open up that can of worms?”
“Beats risking our lives.”
“Say ticket guy calls in the Italian lancers, we give those two jerks up. We risk not only giving up the flash drive, but the both of us will be detained for who knows how long. It’s not my business to have them arrested. My business is the flash drive and you. That’s where it ends.”
We keep moving through the brightly lit cars in the center of the train, keeping an eye out all the time for the passengers who fled, or the police or railroad security they might’ve beckoned. Then I feel the train slowing down. We’re making our first stop along the route.
“Let’s move to the coupling,” I say to Lola.
She follows me through the sliding door to the cramped space between cars. There’s no one else standing there. Peering through the glass doors, I see passengers getting off at the stop. Locals mostly, going home from work in Florence. But then I catch sight of two people being forced off the train by two uniformed men. They are railroad security. Ticket man’s cavalry!
It’s Barter and Clyne, and they are illuminated in a wide arc of sodium lamplight. Railroad security have their weapons drawn. No doubt they patted down the two amigos for weapons, but they wouldn’t have found any since I’m carrying them in my coat pocket. I also realize it’s possible that if the two people I chased out of the car earlier have alerted security about me and my gun, Clyne and Barter are likely taking the rap for it now. Maybe they witnessed only one man with a gun, but that doesn’t mean that man didn’t have an accomplice traveling with him.
Peering out the window at Barter and Clyne.
They’re both arguing with the security guards, and one more man who has joined them. It’s the little mustached ticket taker. He’s holding up their two paper stubs. I don’t need to hear what they’re arguing about to know that they’re being kicked off the train for not having validated their tickets and possibly for being suspected of brandishing a weapon or weapons.
Barter is holding a hankie to his head where I pistol-whipped it.
Clyne is trying not to look obvious as he scans the windows of the train cars for Lola and me. When a police car pulls up with its rooftop lights going outside the station and two polizia emerge and approach the two wanted men, I feel my body become lighter than air. My theories on why the two amigos have been kicked off the train are both right and wrong.
“They’re being arrested,” Lola observes. “All the time we’ve spent here. All this waiting. All this misery and risk. And it’s not having validated tickets that gets them.”
“Not paying attention to the little details,” I say. “It’ll get you every time. But that’s not why they’re being arrested.”
“Confusion fills my head,” she says.
“Not having validated tickets got them noticed by the ticket taker, but that’s when their faces gave them away.”
She nods, smiles. “He recognized them, didn’t he?”
I nod.
“Interpol must have sent out alerts ages ago to be on the lookout for the two men and possibly even for you, which means that if that ticket taker and security get back on the train, I want you hiding your face for the rest of the journey.”
She grabs hold of my hand, squeezes, like she’s trying to tell me I can count on her.
The train starts moving again.
Slowly we make our way to where Barter and Clyne are being handcuffed by the police officers. As we pass, I catch both their sets of wide, angry eyes. I see Barter’s narrow gash, swelled and stained with fresh blood. Smile painted on my face, I pull one of the two plastic baggies containing a flash drive from the coat pocket that doesn’t house the weapons, waving it at them as we pass.
Arrivederci and fuck you too.
PART IV
Lola and I land at JFK International later the next afternoon after managing to grab the last two available seats on a Delta flight leaving Pisa in the late morning. We slept almost the entire way, not saying much of anything to one another, mostly not wanting to confront the subject of “us” while crossing over the Atlantic.
Funny, but not once throughout the mostly bumpy flight was I concerned about crashing and burning. It was as if the presence of Lola back in my life, even if only a physical presence, seemed to suck the fear right out of me. Or maybe my sudden mastery over my fear of flying had more to do with being out of range of the numerous criminals who wanted to see me dead. They say flying is safer than crossing the street. Statistically speaking. But then, people do die while crossing the street. Even a quiet neighborhood street. It’s just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As Lola and I flew through a crystal-blue sky over an ocean of snow-white clouds, I knew that we were both two people caught up in love at the wrong time. That wrongness nearly cost us our lives.
After we get through customs and immigration, I call Agent Crockett for a pickup.
“Let me get this straight,” she says, noticeable shock in her voice. “You’re in the United States, and you have the flash drive on your person. You say Barter and Clyne have been picked up by local police outside Florence. You’re sure it’s the right flash drive.”
“They were picked up by the local cops, yes,” I confirm, knowing that I have two identical flash drives stored inside my coat pocket. “I have a flash drive. Lola tells me it’s the right one. I have only faith to go on.”
“And Dr. Ross is with you.”
“Affirmative. Why hasn’t Interpol alerted you about Barter and Clyne?”
“Could be they don’t want to alert me yet,” she explains. “Welcome to the world of unshared intelligence.”
Cloak and dagger…
Then she adds, “Stay put. I’m sending Zumbo out to get you. Don’t talk to anyone, and try to avoid crowded areas. Maybe
it will be best to grab a drink or something in a quiet airport bar, since it will take him the better part of an hour to get through traffic and to JFK. You have money, I take it?”
“Yes,” I say. “We have money.”
“Keep your phone handy. Zumbo will call when he’s close.”
“Roger that.”
She hangs up.
I turn to Lola. She brushes back her long hair. We’re both still wearing the same clothes from a couple of days ago. She looks beautiful, but I can see the exhaustion in her eyes and, I think, something else too.
Regret.
She might not be saying anything about it. But my built-in shit detector is picking up the vibes loud and clear enough. Or what the hell, maybe I’m just imagining things. It’s been a long night. A long couple of days. Christ, it’s been a hell of a long year.
“My contact suggests we have a drink together.”
She works up a grin. “Sedation,” Lola says with a resolve that borders on outright depression. “Sounds perfect.”
Per my orders from above, we search for a nice quiet bar to while away the minutes until the Zump arrives.
We take a corner table in the back.
I order a beer. Lola orders a pinot noir.
We sit in heavy silence until the drinks come. When they do, I take a long pull on the beer and Lola carefully sips the pinot.
“I’m sure you’ve been spoiled with Tuscan wines,” I comment. It’s supposed to be an icebreaker.
She cocks her head, exhales. “Let’s get this over with,” she says.
I nod. “OK. Why’d you do it, Lo? Why’d you go with him? Why’d you go back to Barter, knowing what he was capable of?”
“That’s just the point,” she says. “I didn’t have the slightest clue as to what he might be capable of.”
“Trust,” I say. “You trusted him.”
Blue Moonlight Page 15