Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

  Rounding the corner, I saw it was a short block and Maggie wasn’t on it, and at the end was another busy street teeming with traffic. I raced the thirty or so yards to the intersection, looked to my right and saw no one who looked like her, then looked to my left and saw that elusive mop of blonde hair pushing and pulling through the thronging mob.

  I went to cross the street, but three cars beeped while simultaneously whizzing past. Romans made Boston drivers look like Milwaukeeans—all polite and patient, waving people across the street, calling out “You betcha” for no reason at all. I watched helplessly from the curb as she got farther and farther away. The three jamokes behind me rounded the corner on the short block and were about twenty-five yards away. That’s when I stepped off the curb and got hit in the face.

  It happened like this: There was an opening in the traffic, so I bolted. Along came a moped with two men riding double. The vehicle stopped right beside me, blocking my way, the guy on the rear got off, and kicked me in my proudest parts. I doubled over in obvious agony, and he leaned down and punched me in the face, causing me to straighten back up before I slowly, surely, collapsed to the pavement of the busy street.

  On my descent into darkness—which I assume coincided with my fall to the ground—I remember having hazy regrets that I hadn’t had the chance to have even a forkful of homemade ravioli at my favorite Italian restaurant, Romolo; that I’d yet to have a sip of Chianti, an order of tartufo, a free afternoon to while away in a breezy café near the Spanish Steps. I remember wondering how Baker was doing without me, how American health insurance would work in a foreign land, whether the hotel would know enough to check me out or if they’d bill me—and consequently, Peter Martin—thousands of dollars for a stay that I didn’t really have. Look, I’m not proud of any of these thoughts, but they’re the ones that I had.

  And then I felt a shod foot, a Gucci, I would bet, though you can’t count out Prada either. Anyway, that foot came into hard, intentional contact with my lower chin, and after that, I remembered absolutely nothing at all. A Roman holiday this was not, not for me or for the elusive woman named Maggie Kane.

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday, September 26

  W hen I opened my crusty eyes, I was immediately struck by just how right Vinny Mongillo was in at least one regard—that half of Italy really does look like him. I was thinking this as I dreamily stared at a countenance that was a dead ringer for my old reporter friend, soon to be former reporter, though never former friend. I was lying in a bed at—well, truthfully, I don’t know where the bed was at, nor, consequently, where I was at. Likewise, I don’t know why I was wherever I happened to be, or who this figure was in front of me who looked so much like someone he couldn’t possibly be.

  Then I heard him say into a cell phone that I hadn’t at first seen, “Oh boy, got to run. The damned patient just woke up and I’ve already spent my inheritance money. Get that info I need or I’ll rip your scrotum off and shove it down your throat.” He flicked his phone shut, peered down at me with that sadistically loving look of his and said, “Jesus, Fair Hair, you might have a lot of spirit, but you really do have a glass jaw.”

  I had the odd sensation of an elderly Italian woman with a kerchief around her head and a broom in her hands sweeping thick cobwebs from the far recesses of my mind. I gradually noticed the light flooding into a large window, the rails on the side of my bed, the institutional TV bolted to a far wall, the cheap commercial furniture in the tiny room, and realized quickly enough what I was in—a hospital—though not yet where.

  “Vinny?”

  “You were expecting Marcus Welby?” He paused and added with a wheezy laugh, “Or perhaps Marco Welbino?”

  “Vinny.”

  “Yeah,” he said, the laughter dying and his face growing more serious as he approached the side of my bed. I think it started to dawn on him that I might be in pain.

  When he drew near, I said, “Shut the fuck up. Just stand there and explain to me where I am and what the hell is going on.”

  And he did. He told me how witnesses reported seeing a moped stop on a busy street in old Rome, how the man riding double methodically stepped off the bike, kicked me in the groin, punched me in the face, then, as I lay sprawled on the pavement, kicked me again in the chin. The man, on the slightly younger side of middle age, dressed entirely in black, then got back on the bike. The driver took a left-hand turn and hadn’t been seen since.

  He concluded with, “Justine”—Steele, the publisher—“and Peter”—Martin, our fearful editor, but not really—“wanted me to extend their best wishes for a full and speedy recovery.” As he said this, he was making an obscene stroking motion with his right hand close to a set of private parts that no right-minded person would ever want to contemplate. Then he added, “I translate that to mean that we can spend anything we want and go wherever we want in this, the world’s greatest city.”

  “Not so fast. First, how’d I get here?”

  “Fair Hair, this is Rome, not Paris. We’re a helping people. Someone called authorities. Police came. They summoned an ambulance. And here you are, at the San Giovanni-Addolorata, one of the greatest medical centers known to man.”

  He remained standing beside my bed. I was getting not only my wits back, but my wit as well, and said, “I thought the safest hospital waiting room in all of Italy was the lounge at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport.” I mean, from the little I had heard of Italy’s state-run health care system, they were probably slaughtering horses halfway down the hall.

  “Well, okay, sure, but have you had a hospital meal yet? They have veal on the damned menu.”

  I put my hand up to my chin and the coarseness of my skin scared the hell out of me, until I realized it was a bandage. By now, that little old lady with the broom was throwing open windows and doors, and thoughts, questions, fears, were rushing into my previously muddled brain.

  With a start, I leaned forward and gave voice to the words as the thoughts rushed through my head, “What’s happened with Maggie Kane?”

  Mongillo took a seat in the plain wooden chair behind him and stayed quiet for a moment too long. My heart sank, and I could feel my entire face fall with it, as if the blood, the life, was flowing from my body. I quickly pictured the worst—me recovering in a hospital while the woman I failed to protect lay somewhere in this city in the public morgue, an identification tag wrapped around her toe, her parents back in Boston inconsolable over the news of losing two daughters in a single week. How could I live with myself? How could I carry on in a business that either I had badly betrayed, or it had badly betrayed me? How could I ever pull the trigger on another important story when the last one caused the deaths of people who should never even have been hurt?

  “Tell me,” I said, more urgently now. At this point, I was leaning on both elbows, and my head was starting to throb.

  Vinny slumped forward in the straight-back chair and simply said, “We got a call.”

  He paused again. By now, I was sitting up and it felt like that once-kindly Italian woman had traded in her gentle broom for a meat cleaver and was swatting me in the front of my skull.

  “Vinny,” I said, the words coming out like a hammer striking a row of nails, “tell me what you know.”

  “That’s the thing, Jack, it’s not much. A call came in to your desk in Boston last night, to your work phone. I was already on my way over here. Martin was having all calls monitored round the clock. It came from Maggie Kane’s cell phone. We traced the number. But it was all muffled. Martin believes he heard someone crying. It could have been a struggle or it could have been a bad connection. We just don’t know, but it’s on tape, and you can hear it for yourself. I just talked to Martin ten minutes ago, and there have been no calls from that phone, or any other unusual calls, since.”

  I fell back into the bed and my head pounded so hard that I thought about summoning a doctor for either a frothy cup of hemlock or a bullet in my brain and take me out of a mis
ery that was unfolding at too many levels to contemplate. But I wasn’t sure if Italians condoned mercy killings, though they’re a warm, generous people, so probably they do.

  Instead, I regarded Mongillo for a long moment. He was sitting beside me in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up a pair of meaty forearms that had the look of butcher’s paper with hair. He seemed worn, no doubt from traveling through the night to get to my bedside. His thick black hair was matted in front against his oily forehead. His deep brown eyes were rimmed with red. He carried the distinctive odor—pepperoni, perhaps—of someone who hadn’t yet showered that day. Then again, he carried that odor when he was still damp from the shower.

  Didn’t matter. I loved the guy. I’d miss him in the newsroom more than I could ever say. I was thrilled that he was here with me now, though maybe thrill is the wrong word. The emotion, more accurately, was relief.

  I said, “We’ve got to find her, Vin. I’ve fucked this story up more than anything else in my life. We’ve got to find her.”

  He shook his head casually and replied, “Naw, you’ve fucked things up worse than this.” He smiled at me, that big toothy smile, and I just stared back at him. Then he added, “And Martin’s panic-stricken. This Vermeer story is bigger than you can imagine. He wants me to bring you stateside as soon as you can walk onto a plane.”

  I thought that over for a brief moment, the almost unthinkable concept that I was going to fly back home while a desperate Maggie Kane traversed the foreign cultures of Europe with a group of killers following closely behind her.

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said. “I ain’t leaving without the woman.”

  “Sounds like a line in a Meg Ryan movie,” Mongillo replied.

  I ignored that and instead asked, “By the way, am I all right?”

  He stood up, picked up a clipboard adhered to the end of my bed, and said, “Well, the chart here says that you have a strain of sexually transmitted disease indigenous to apes in southwestern Africa and a commune of female midgets in Tibet. Public health officials are very curious as to how you contracted it. Other than that, there’s a lot of fancy Italian talk that says you have a bruised chin and a mild concussion, the latter from when you hit the street.”

  He read for a moment longer, put the chart back into the slot, and said, “You’re fine, Fair Hair.”

  I didn’t quite feel it, but knowing I was made me feel better, if that makes any sense. I was convalescing in a hospital four thousand miles from home. My wife was dead. My girlfriend didn’t give an apparent damn. My newspaper career was in shambles. My best friend was leaving the paper. My head hurt to its brainy core. I was lonely, I was tired, I was for all practical purposes, defeated.

  I hesitated and asked, “Did you tell Elizabeth I was here?”

  He hesitated as well and replied, “I did.” Another pause, then, cryptically, “She told me to send you her very best.”

  Like a distant cousin, a loose acquaintance. Send along my best. My life, in the last second, had just grown a shade darker.

  So I did what I always do at such depressing times, and believe me, they’ve been many. I devised a plan of action, not necessarily full of thought, but something to get me going. Better to move than wallow, which was my guiding philosophy when I spent a year jetting around America in pursuit of news right after my wife had died in childbirth.

  I swung my bare legs over the side of the bed and sat up for the first time in what must have been nearly a day. My head throbbed so bad that I had to squint through the pain. I leaned down, my elbows on my knees, facing Mongillo, who had sat back down on the chair, and I asked the most pertinent question you can ask him, which was, “What else do you have?” Mongillo, as I’ve noted, always has something else.

  He reached into the case of his laptop computer, pulled out a folded-up newspaper and unfurled the front page on my lap. It was the prior day’s Boston Record, and the banner headline read as follows: “Stolen Treasure Returned.” The subhead said, “Priceless Vermeer painting taken in Gardner Museum heist anonymously delivered to Record.” Right beneath it, the left side of the upper half of the paper contained a giant photograph of The Concert, with none of the obvious obscenity that Mongillo had described. Beside it, on the right side, the top of my story unfolded in two wide columns.

  I looked it over for a long moment. I should have been somewhere far beyond ecstatic. I mean, seriously, I had a front page, above-the-fold newsbreak about a painting that had gone missing for more than a decade personally delivered to me at the Record newsroom, as a possible prelude of more to come. The story was undoubtedly the talk of the city, maybe of America. It was probably even in the pages of the Herald Tribune. They love art, those Europeans.

  And yet, I felt precious little of the adrenaline rush that comes with such a huge hit. Yeah, sure, it was pretty, this front page; I love telling people—namely, readers—that which they wouldn’t otherwise know. But this story had the feeling of a distraction at best, a decoy a worst, like hush money, something good that is supposed to overcome something uniquely awful. I tossed it on the bed beside me and said to Mongillo, “What’s the reaction back home?”

  “Bedlam. You haven’t been this sought-out since you got stuck in the ribs out at Congressional Country Club that morning. Every TV news crew is parked in our front lot. Every network has flown an A-list correspondent to Boston. Every expectation is that there’s more on the way.

  “And the FBI is livid. The case has gotten completely away from them. They have agents up from Washington running around the Boston office with lie detector equipment, much more concerned with who leaked you that first story than in finding who stole the paintings. Oh, and they got a subpoena to haul your ass before a federal grand jury for questioning. The paper put out a statement that you were out of the country on assignment. We just haven’t told anyone you’re sleeping one off in Rome.”

  I shook my head at it all, and that hurt as well, not the events, but the simple motion. I thought of Tom Jankle, special agent with the FBI, and more important, my personal sieve, and how he was withstanding the pressure. Was he acting independently? Was he under orders to set someone up? Who was telling the truth, and who was it that wanted Maggie Kane dead?

  And then the image of the mayor popped into mind, staggering through his own lobby in the dark of a drunken night, his arm folded around the beautiful Hilary Kane. Hilary was gone within half an hour, dead within three days, and me, Mongillo and my trusted friend Hank Sweeney were the only ones who knew of his possible—check that, likely—involvement. Mayor Daniel Harkins, a killer. Now there’s a story that would kick a city on its side.

  I glanced over at the paper one more time, and back at Mongillo. I said to him, “You still going to bail out on the business?”

  He replied, “Look at you, Jack. Look at you. Get up and look in the damn mirror. You have a hurt head and a broken heart. You’re exhausted. You feel like you’ve been used. You want nothing so much as to take a break, and yet there’s nothing within your body or soul that will allow it. You have to find a truth that may well leave you dead, that already killed one, maybe two women. And as soon as this is all wrapped up for good or bad, another story’s going to break, another leak or a crash or a stupid act by a ridiculous politician, and you’re going to have to climb back on that horse all over again.”

  He paused, looked at me hard, and said, “Yeah, I’m still getting out of the business, and the way you look, you should come too.”

  The creaky door slowly opened and a nurse came walking into the room. She was young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three years old, with olive skin and full lips and jet black hair that flowed past her shoulders to the middle of her back. Her uniform, white, seemed to be cut inappropriately short, which was terrific. She flashed me an enormously alluring smile and said, “Mr. Flynn, I’ve come to give you your sponge bath.”

  Actually, I lie. The door did open, a nurse in fact walked in, but she looked like s
he had eaten her share of rigatoni with shaved Parmesan cheese, if you know what I mean, older, stern as a high school vice principal, and she said to me something to the tune of, “What the hell are you doing up?” Add an “a” to the tail end of each word for effect.

  I told her I really needed some aspirin, preferably extra strength, and she stalked off, clearly unhappy with the idea of aiding a patient. I looked at Mongillo hard and said, “We’ve got to get out of here. These people could kill me.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first,” he said.

  I struggled to my feet. My legs were wobbly, but not necessarily weak. I just hadn’t stood in a while. I found my clothes in the drawer of a cheap dresser. I thought of my overnight bag sitting on the bed of my room at the Albergo del Sole. Probably the same guy that punched and kicked me had already riffled through the few belongings that I had brought. I put my clothing on, looked aghast in the mirror at the dark circles around my eyes, at my hair standing on end, and at the dressing that covered all of my jaw. I slowly, delicately pulled the bandage off, and saw that the huge black and blue welt was on the underside of my chin. So at least my male modeling potential was still intact.

  As we stood ready to leave, Florenza Nightingale walked back in with a bottle of medicine in her hand, presumably aspirin—I hoped. She saw me fully clothed and yelled something in Italian, flapping one arm while she wagged a finger in my direction. I was going to get detention, I just knew it. She fled out of the room with obvious plans to quickly return, probably with reinforcements, and I looked at Mongillo and said, “Let’s go.” With that, we strode out into the hallway. After a couple of steps, the agony of motion lessened into excruciating pain. Mongillo pushed through a heavy fire door into the kind of stairwell that got me into so much trouble before, and down three flights. In the landing, I paused with my hands on my knees and said, “Hold on a second,” as I tried to catch my breath.