“I didn’t offer. You asked. And I’m agreeing to Mama’s place, not mine.”
“Thanks anyway. You think I ought to dress differently to go to the airport—more like Ryan, maybe.”
Vanni choked on his current mouthful of pretzel.
“Hey,” Aiden said, and thumped Vanni on the back. “Are you laughing at something?”
“Yeah.” Vanni controlled his coughing and pulled Aiden against the windows of Azure, the corner delicatessen. The stream of humanity on Third Avenue threatened to bear them both off the sidewalk and into the flow of honking traffic. “Now listen up, Aiden. When you do your Wally bit, you put on a new skin with the weird duds. You hide behind an identity you can convince yourself belongs to someone else, and you’re real comfortable because you’re a genuine actor—you assume the part. That gives you permission to do and be what you never are when you’re yourself. Is that clear?”
“What you mean is clear, Doctor Zanetto, but you’ve got it wrong. I’m not going to waste time with an amateur shrink today, but I am going to tell you to quit analyzing me. And I’m a happy man, remember that. Happy, contented, doing everything I want to do. Got that?”
“Sure.” But Vanni shook his head. “What’s that thing they say about doing a lot of protesting? Do you even see the looks you get from every woman at the precinct? No, of course you don’t. Damned thing about that is I think the strong silent act really turns ’em on. If we held a contest for most wanted male around there—and I don’t mean perps—you’d win hands down. You got a string of women ready to stand in line just to eat you up, buddy. I hear they’ve all got lick-off underwear in their drawers—just in case.”
Aiden laughed and it felt great. “Sure they do. But I only have eyes for Margy and I think my love goes unrequited there, so drop it.” Margy was the chief’s secretary and an unflappable superwoman.
“Margy has children your age,” Vanni pointed out. “Not that she isn’t too good to you. They’re all too good to you.”
“Margy is my hero. End of topic,” Aiden said.
The shriek of several police sirens, accompanied by pulsing dome lights, gave Aiden the pause he needed. Rain began to fall again.
“Okay,” Vanni said when the sirens faded. “You’ve got what you wanted. You can bring the woman to Mama’s. I’ll talk to her before she gets there. I gotta get back, and so do you.”
Aiden finished his pretzel and tossed the paper in a trash can. “Cover for me, okay? Say I’m following a lead. Whatever. I want to get to the airport early. She’s going to need some reassurance when she gets off that plane.”
Vanni managed a look of deep sadness. “You are one thoughtful guy. Some woman’s gonna be lucky to get you. Would you mind trying not to get involved with this particular woman? Her behavior spells buggso. Got it?”
“You don’t know her so you can’t make judgments like that.”
“You don’t know her either.” Vanni draped an arm around Aiden’s shoulders. “And you’re never gonna know her. You can forgive yourself for stepping in as professional greeter because Ryan Hill would have gotten her here if you didn’t. You probably did the right thing. But I don’t envy you trying to explain how her virtual boyfriend is a real pain in the ass and maybe a kook to boot—a twisted, possibly criminal, kook.”
“I’m not laying that on her. I’ll be a good listener and see what I can do to help. I could make contact with her insurance investigator friend and ask him to help her out. Then she’ll go home and avoid getting cozy with Internet pals in the future.”
“And you’ll start by tellin’ her you’re not who she thinks you are.”
“I don’t want to talk about that anymore.”
“You mean you don’t want to face it, Aiden. You’d rather go in disguise as someone else and let him do the talking. Listen, you need a place to take her other than some fleabag hotel where she’ll be all on her own. I’m arranging that, but not if you show up pretending you’re Ryan D. Hill. Got it? Mama wouldn’t understand that, and neither do I.”
Aiden considered before saying, “You want me to meet OliviaFitz and say, “Hi, you think I’m Sam, but I’m really Aiden?”
“Yeah. Don’t let emotion cloud judgment. If you don’t want to risk a kidnapping charge, you’d better make sure she knows who you are. It’s simple. I’m not Sam, I’m Aiden, and Sam isn’t Sam, he’s Ryan. Ryan’s a crook and I’m here to save you from him.’ You can put it in your own words if you like.”
Five
Olivia wheeled her bags from the U.S. customs area at Kennedy Airport through double doors to a cordoned-off walkway. Just once, she scanned the crowd of waiting faces on the other side of a black plastic rope. So many excited smiles, so many bunches of flowers and balloons—and signs. Welcome Home Chad. We love you.
She saw no sign with her name on it, but she wouldn’t expect one.
From the moment the aircraft doors had closed at Heathrow, she’d been overwhelmed by a desperate craving to turn back. At least in London she’d only feel afraid. Here she felt afraid and foolish—really foolish.
She kept her eyes downcast and walked through the phalanx of waiting people. They strained forward, looking for their particular passengers. Languages blended together, and Olivia wasn’t sure she heard any English at all. Everything was strange, colorful, yet overlaid with scents of grime. Even the Avis and Hertz car rental desks looked foreign. This was America, New York, and—and she was the only one who knew she was here, except for Sam.
She needed to calm her mind.
Shrinking down as small as she could would be an easy instinct to follow. Perhaps she could book a seat on a plane home—the next possible plane back home.
But she’d always wonder what Sam was like in person. He’d promised to be here to meet her.
She felt light-headed. In fact she might even faint. Clinging to the handle of her luggage cart, she made it to a row of chairs and sat down—and studied her sensible flat brown shoes. Her tan linen jacket had wrinkled badly. She ought to have remembered Penny warning her to avoid linen unless she was certain she wouldn’t have to sit down—or go to the loo. The straight, russet-colored skirt was of different material from the jacket and probably wasn’t quite the thing, but at least it didn’t clash with the jacket.
If Sam wanted to, he’d find her. If he didn’t come at all, she’d have no choice but to return home.
He wasn’t the type not to show up.
A girl’s squeal pierced Olivia’s ears and she shuddered. Toddlers charged around, some pausing to cry for no evident reason. But what did she know about children, other than that they were generally inappropriate but often sweet? There were even some little ones who gave her an urge to pick them up.
Where was he?
She made herself look up again.
She didn’t have to study faces, only buttonholes. The crowd had thinned out, but she couldn’t see a single man with a flower in his buttonhole.
There didn’t seem to be many people who had come on their own to greet the plane. Some lone women and men stood by. Most of the women pressed to the rope. Most of the men hung back.
She hadn’t told him they should meet in baggage claim, had she? Oh, no, she couldn’t have made that mistake when she knew she’d be bringing her luggage through customs. She could go to check the baggage area, but he might come here while she was away.
Now the people waiting had dwindled to a number that allowed a study of each one. Sam wasn’t a woman, so that eliminated more than half of the candidates.
A handsome, dark-haired man let out a whoop and swept a little boy into one arm while he wrapped his other arm around a pretty woman who was clearly his wife.
No one who looked like that would be Sam, anyway. Sam was a nice man, an intelligent man, but he’d be ordinary to look at. Guilt attacked. She’d never been into stereotyping people, and this wasn’t the time to start. Just because a person was smart, he or she didn’t have to be plain. It was just tha
t she didn’t care much about how people looked, although—and this was a form of bigotry—she supposed she didn’t generally trust handsome men.
Four more excited groups came together and moved away. Three of the lone men remained.
Olivia tried to be discreet while she considered and dismissed a man who couldn’t be more than twenty-two. His hair was bright red, that carrot color. White skin and big freckles. A cheerful-looking person, but his T-shirt announced, “Tonight’s The Night.” Not Sam.
Of the remaining two candidates, one was tall, with dark blond hair, wavy, well-cut, and streaked by the sun. His charcoal-gray suit was a perfect fit, his shirt collar and cuffs very white. His tie suggested he needed ways to express his individuality. Even at a distance Olivia could identify a rather wild, geometric design done in shades of mauve through purple and red. He had the build of a well-toned athlete—lithe and long-muscled—and the loose stance of a runner. No, not a runner, they were too thin. A hurdler, perhaps—or one of those people she’d seen on the telly once in that violent American game where they wore helmets and a lot of grotesque padding inside their clothes. There was one really attractive person on each team, the one who got to decide everything and throw the ball or run, whatever he wanted. All the other players waited for him to decide, then shout about it. He was muscular but slim— and fast on his feet. You’d think whoever was in charge of getting players would twig to it that those other men they chose, the huge ones who could only run a few feet before they fell in a heap with all the other big ones—well, they ought to figure out that what they needed was a whole lot more like the slim, brainy one.
Wild Tie held a bunch of flowers, but one side of his jacket was pushed back and his other hand sunk into his front pocket. Olivia had always been a leg woman, and this man’s legs certainly made memorable lines in his trousers. Penny would call him “brilliant, a complete knockout.” What a face. And he was tanned.
She flushed and looked at her hands in her lap. That wasn’t Sam, although there had been a strong resemblance to this man in those fabulous dreams she’d had.
Not Sam.
That left a bespectacled man with a pleasant face, straight brown hair, and a really nice smile. She could say, “Sam?” in a loud voice and see what happened.
Olivia hadn’t come.
Aiden identified what he felt as mostly disappointment. Oh, there was a little relief in there, but mostly he was sorry she wasn’t on the plane. Evidently she’d come to her senses and bagged it. Vanni was going to laugh himself sick, not that Aiden cared. He hoped Olivia would be okay, that’s all.
The guy in front of him made a sudden move, hauled up the cordon, and went beneath to throw his arms around a tired-looking woman with three children. They stayed there, hugging and chattering in Spanish before moving slowly off. Aiden watched them go. They made him feel good.
Maybe there were one or two passengers to come yet.
The woman who had struggled through and sat down on a chair opposite was still there. She looked completely lost, but he’d learned not to gather up anyone he saw who appeared needy.
Another passenger, a man, straggled through.
The seated woman wasn’t very old, late twenties maybe.
She had a lot of soft brown curls that made her eyes look huge from a distance. If Olivia really didn’t show, he could offer to help this woman. If she turned him off, at least his conscience would be happy.
She had lovely legs. A faintly baggy brown skirt didn’t reach her knees and even a pair of sensible flat shoes didn’t detract from legs that deserved to be noticed.
Maybe he should go to the TWA desk, use his badge, and try to get his hands on the flight manifest. He could even have missed Olivia altogether.
Damn. This was the kind of thing that reinforced a man’s conviction that women were unpredictable.
He caught the woman’s eye and smiled. She smiled back, and he liked it. She had a sweet face, not flashy, but easy on the eye. When she tossed her hair back, he got a sensation that would only hit a man who didn’t have a life.
Hey, a man ought to be able to laugh at himself. He didn’t have a life in the accepted sense—accepted by other guys. Not anymore. Only it was okay for him to comment on his isolated private life, but it wasn’t okay for Vanni Zanetto and members of his family to have opinions. What they didn’t get, partly because he’d never tried to explain, was that he wanted a woman in his life, wanted her very badly, but he was some kind of throwback who believed there was only one right woman and he’d better be careful not to miss her because he was distracted by anything that looked promising in a skirt. He’d been that route, and it was past time to move on.
The worried-looking lady probably wasn’t tall—just about average. He’d say her looks were better than average. Someone nice lived behind those gentle, sparkling eyes. She was obviously waiting to be met, but each time she looked in his direction she gave a small, vaguely embarrassed smile. Too bad she didn’t have any idea how to put her clothes together, but her figure was good—he could tell that. Nice breasts inside a white blouse buttoned to the throat and secured with some sort of pin. Her jacket looked as if she’d washed it all wrong, then forgotten to iron it.
Average. Brown hair and eyes. Sturdy. A sartorial disaster.
No hat, no flower in the buttonhole, and not what he’d call sturdy exactly. But… holy hell!
He held the bunch of flowers as if he’d forgotten they were there. Olivia thought he might be trying to make up his mind what to do. He should stay where he was. Whoever he’d arranged to meet might be held up somewhere, but she’d get there somehow. No woman would stand this man up.
He was smiling again.
Olivia smiled back. The first time, she’d been afraid he wasn’t smiling at her at all; then she’d have felt a fool. But he was smiling at her—a conspiratorial smile because they were both waiting and both feeling undecided about their next moves.
Whew, he had the kind of smile a woman might see in her dreams. She looked away and checked that her passport and tickets were safe. There hadn’t been time to change any pounds into dollars, but that couldn’t be difficult to do.
Why did this country feel more foreign than, say, France, or Italy? It did, very foreign.
If she stayed where she was, how long would it be before someone noticed?
Oh, no, she’d forgotten her own flower. Now look at it. She had taken a daisy from a vase at home and when it had started to droop on the plane, she’d wrapped it in a damp tissue and put it in her bag. Now, since she’d forgotten it was there, it was mangled, rusty-looking, and missing most of its petals.
She managed to pull the stem through the buttonhole on her lapel. Not that it mattered anymore.
The thing to do was find a hotel that wasn’t too dear and spend the night there. For a fee she’d be able to change the date on her return ticket. She hadn’t known how long to plan on staying, so she’d finally chosen two weeks.
There would be an information desk somewhere.
He was still there, she could feel him, and see his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers when she glanced in that direction. Poor man.
Once on her feet and as organized as she was ever going to be, she caught his eye again and smiled—and stood still. He had a rose in his buttonhole.
If he was Sam, he’d have said something by now.
“Olivia?”
Six
The shop bell chimed, and Rupert Fish gripped the handle tightly. He eased the door open slowly and entered on tiptoe, hoping Winston might be too engrossed in whatever to notice that his partner had finally returned to Bloomsbury.
Winston Moody had noticed. Over the tops of rimless halflenses, his watery blue eyes sought out Rupert. Reproach. Yes, Winston invariably attacked passively—silently—at first, and with baleful, “how could you do this to me?” stares.
Rupert salivated. He could taste the satisfaction of squeezing Winston’s fat neck until those rheumy eyes p
opped out. But Rupert must continue to wait.
In the fifteen years they had been in business together running Moody and Fish Antiques, first in less salubrious quarters in Shepherd’s Bush, and for the past ten years, in London’s exclusive Bloomsbury, Museum Street to be exact, Rupert had learned to dislike Winston more with each day. But Winston had the upper hand and he knew it. He owned the controlling share of the business and had uncomfortable knowledge about Rupert’s humble beginnings—and about a lucrative endeavor that went wrong. By handing over certain papers to the authorities, Winston could send Rupert to jail for a long, long time. Rupert knew a thing or two about Winston, too—Winston had unusual sexual preferences—but Rupert didn’t have the kind of solid evidence he needed to turn the tables.
Fortunately a tiny, blue-haired woman stood before Winston and gestured extravagantly while she discussed a Michel-Robert Hallet snuff box in a heavy French accent. The box was a valuable gold and enamelled piece and nothing, not even the opportunity to torment Rupert, would divert Winston if he got the whiff of a pending sale.
“Preposterous,” Winston told the woman. “A third? You insult me, madam.”
“I offer you ’alf then,” she said. “We both know this is not one of ’is best pieces. I only consider it at all because I ’ave so many better examples and this is a curiosity.”
Rupert smiled. This could continue for some time, and afterward Winston would need to vent his opinions of “bargain-hunting charlatans.” He might even forget to interrogate Rupert at all. “Not bloody likely,” Rupert muttered. Not given the importance of what he’d been supposed to accomplish in Hampstead.
He flexed his hands. The fine tremor that shook him would be obvious to some. Rupert didn’t care. He wanted the FitzDurham woman dead. Dead she wouldn’t be a threat anymore; there wouldn’t be a reason to wonder just what she knew and what she might do with the knowledge.
It wasn’t his fault that another female in an ugly red hat and raincoat had tricked him into thinking she was the one he wanted. Too bad that bleeding heart meddler stopped her from dying. And then he’d had to bide a little time and pay, actually pay for the negatives he had in his pocket.
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