Callie's Christmas Wish

by Merline Lovelace

  Callie didn’t comment. She still hadn’t quite processed the prince’s earlier outburst, wasn’t even sure now that she’d heard him correctly.

  “I thought I’d camp out here for a few days,” Joe said casually. Too casually. “Or we could move to a hotel. It would give us a little more space.”

  She glanced around the tiny apartment with its bright yellow walls and incredible view. She hadn’t put much of a personal stamp on it yet. Just angled the kitchen table so she could drink in the sight of St. Peter’s dome with her morning coffee and set out the nativity figures she’d bought in Naples. They rubbed shoulders on her postage stamp of an end table. Dawn’s flame-haired angel, Tommy’s Disney figure, Kate’s despised political candidate and the traditionally robed Joseph.

  Her gaze shifted from the Virgin Mary’s protector to her own. With a sense of inevitability, Callie accepted that her Joe wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.

  “Let’s stay here.”

  Chapter Ten

  Joe had agreed to meet Carlo at the center at eight thirty. Their plan was to beard the director in her den before the problems and events of the day distracted her or fired her temper.

  He woke at his usual five o’clock and lay in the shuttered stillness, trying to shift his focus from the warm butt nested against his groin to the sparse data Frank Harden had shared.

  The known aliases of the terrorist supposedly taken out by the drone strike. A list of atrocities attributed to the man as verified through human, signal, geopolitical and open-source intelligence. A blurred photo taken from a half mile away. The date, time and coordinates of the airstrike that had—supposedly—taken him out. There was nothing to suggest the bastard had survived the hit. Nothing, that was, except the recent queries about the center operated by IADW.

  The probes themselves were innocuous enough. None would’ve triggered an alert if not for the fact they’d been made on the same laptop previously owned by the target of the strike. A laptop that went off-line at the precise instant the drone hit. A laptop that had come back online only two days ago.

  US cyberspooks had pinpointed the source of the transmissions. By triangulating cell towers and satellite systems, they’d zoomed in on a squalid, teeming tenement in Palermo, on the island of Sicily. A door-to-door search by Italian security forces hadn’t yielded the laptop, however, or any indication of who might have powered it up.

  Joe had his own people working the problem—his cybersecurity folks at home, Emilio Mancera here in Italy. The affable Roman had met him at the airport last night, gotten a quick briefing and put one of his own men on a flight to Palermo an hour later.

  If the residents of that squalid tenement had withheld any information from the police, Emilio’s man would squeeze it out of them. He knew the island, knew the inner workings of the criminal element that still flourished there. Knew, too, that the Mafia had shed its skin several times over the decades. They were still heavily into narcotics and protection rackets, of course, but now funneled their profits into legitimate businesses like shopping malls and hotels and apartment complexes...all built by a construction industry that operated on bribes, kickbacks and corruption. Without a single twinge of conscience, Joe had given the green light to apply all three if necessary.

  In the meantime, he and Carlo would work the problem from this end. Starting with a thorough scrub of the backgrounds of each and every resident at the center and...

  “Nmmg.”

  The indistinct mumble was accompanied by a twitch that sent Joe’s thoughts sliding sideways. He held himself still, his breath stuck in his throat, as Callie wiggled again.

  She couldn’t seem to find a satisfactory position. With another mumble, she straightened one knee. Bent it again. Canted her hips. Thrust her bottom, and put Joe in an instant sweat.

  “Callie. Sweetheart.”

  He tried to ease back a few inches. She wiggled again and locked onto him with the precision of a laser-guided heat-seeking missile. Smothering a curse, Joe shifted his head on the pillow and threw a glance at the window. His internal clock said it was still predawn. The blackened shutters confirmed that.

  Hell! No way he could hold out until six or seven. Not hard and hurting like there was no tomorrow. If he and Callie hadn’t ended last night with an extended tussle between the sheets, he might’ve rolled her over and initiated a repeat performance. But she’d collapsed on his chest, and Joe had barely found enough strength to drag up the covers before they were both out.

  He’d let her sleep, he decided, and use this quiet time to contact his cybergeeks. He’d check in with Emilio, too. But not here. Somewhere that served thick, black, vein-opening coffee.

  * * *

  Callie was still dead to the world when he returned with two espressos and a paper sack of fresh-baked pastries. It didn’t take long for the seductive aromas to penetrate her consciousness. Especially after Joe held a still-warm cornetto mere inches from her nose. She blinked awake, stared owlishly at the marmalade-filled bun and slicked her tongue over sleep-dry lips.

  “Does that taste as good as it smells?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  An arm snaked out from under the blankets. Fingers latched onto the sticky sweet. Three bites later, a tousled head of mink-brown hair popped up.

  “Any more where that came from?”

  “On the kitchen table. Espresso, too.”

  He smiled as she lit up like the gaudy Christmas decorations strung across the streets outside. Rolling out of bed, she dragged a blanket around her like a tent and made for the kitchen.

  “I waited for you to wake up to take a shower,” he commented. “I’ll make it quick.”

  She was too busy exploring the contents of the bag to do more than flap a distracted hand.

  Joe emerged fifteen minutes later showered and shaved. Callie took considerably longer, but the results were definitely worth the wait. The steamy shower had left a delicate blush on her cheeks, and her hair fell in glossy, raisin-dark waves above a sky blue turtleneck sweater. The worry was back, though, shadowing her eyes to a purple so deep they looked almost black.

  “What time did you say Carlo is going to meet us at the center?”

  “Eight thirty. But it might be better if you stay out of this one.”

  “Why?”

  “Your boss is already torqued at me for asking to review the center’s screening process. Even more at Carlo for insisting it happen. No need to get her pissed at you, too.”

  Callie didn’t comment but had to admit she was secretly happy to stay out of the line of fire.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, she didn’t stay out of it long.

  Bundled in boots, jeans, a warm sweater and her wool duster, she huddled close to Joe’s side for the short walk to the center. Carlo was already there and looking none too thrilled with the task ahead.

  Callie peeled off with a murmured “good luck” and headed for her office to prepare for the nine o’clock group session. When she came out twenty minutes later, notebook in hand, Simona’s door was closed. The thick panel didn’t quite block the sound of raised voices, though, or the thump of something banging down on the desk. Simona’s palm? Carlo’s fist?

  She didn’t stick around to find out. But when she got to the session room, the news that the mental-health tech who normally conducted this group therapy had called in sick added another wrinkle to the day. Luckily, the group was a small one. Only one translator and four participants: the two teens who’d escaped brutal sexual slavery, the disfigured wife from Bangladesh and the sad-eyed, stoop-shouldered young widow. Hiding her nervousness at being thrust into the role of facilitator as opposed to observer, Callie picked up where they’d left off yesterday.

  “We were talking about how we see ourselves, and how what we’ve experienced
colors our self-image.”

  She waited for the translator, then picked her way carefully over sensitive ground.

  “Too often when something bad happens to us, something we can’t control, we think it’s our own fault. We feel guilty, anxious. Unable to make decisions or relate to others.”

  The woman from Bangladesh drew her veil tighter across her mutilated face and murmured something Callie couldn’t quite catch.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “A leper,” Leela said in her soft, British-accented English. “I feel like a leper. I show myself to no one.”

  The thinner of the two teens spoke next. A single word, muted, reluctant.

  “Unclean,” the interpreter translated. “After what was done to her, she feels unclean.”

  Callie nodded and looked to the other two participants. The young widow shrank back against her chair and shook her head, but the second teen, the one named Sabeen, chose to speak out. Usually so happy and giggly, she launched into an angry spate that set the beads at the ends of her braids dancing and the words whistling through the gap in her front teeth.

  “She, too, feels dirty,” the interpreter related, hurrying to keep. “She bathes two or three times a day but cannot wash the smell of those pigs off her skin, out of her hair.”

  As if to emphasize her feelings, the girl grabbed a fistful of the braids and shook them angrily.

  “Sabeen says she would cut them off. All of them. As she would cut off the thing between the legs of every man who took her.”

  “Well...”

  Callie was treading delicate ground here. For all she knew, those colorful beads denoted rank or marital status in the tribe these girls had been abducted from. They’d chosen not to return to their tribe, however, deciding instead to make a tortuous journey to another country, another way of life.

  “Why not cut them off?” she asked gently. “The braids, I mean. Although I think castrating the pigs who hurt her is a pretty good idea, too.”

  The question was obviously one the girl had debated before. A host of emotions flickered across her face, not least of which was fear of losing the last vestige of her identity in this foreign world.

  Callie waged a similar internal debate. She was here to facilitate, not direct. Enable, not lead. Yet she couldn’t force herself to remain detached and neutral and merely nurturing. Something drove her to bridge the seeming impossible gulf between these women’s world and her own.

  “Hang tight,” she instructed through the interpreter. “I’ll be right back.”

  She hurried down the hall to her office, throwing a quick glance at Simona’s closed door as she went. She didn’t hear any raised voices or loud thumps and couldn’t decide whether that was a good or bad omen. Joe could be pretty intimidating when he wanted to, she knew. Carlo, too, as she’d discovered last night. Simona would have to be made of kryptonite to stand up to both of them. And after having known the director for all of two days and a few hours, her money was on the director.

  Once in her office, Callie riffled through her desk drawer for a pair of scissors. She found them in a bottom drawer, then rooted around in her purse for her handy-dandy little travel mirror. Clutching both objects, she hurried back to the session room.

  “I haven’t suffered as you have,” she told the other women through the translator. “I haven’t experienced anything that could even remotely compare to what you’ve suffered. But, like you, I’m beginning a new life in a new place. So I think... No, I know. I’m ready for a new me.”

  Brandishing the scissors, she held the mirror at arm’s length and tried unsuccessfully to wield the scissors with the other.

  “I could use some help here. Will someone please hold the mirror for me?”

  The interpreter looked as hesitant as the four residents. When none of them replied, Callie dropped the mirror, grabbed a hank of her hair, and hacked off a good eight inches.

  Leela sprang to her feet, half laughing, half scandalized. “Buddha preserve us!”

  Her veil slipped, revealing a glimpse of her horrific disfigurement, before she threw the ends over her shoulder again and grabbed the scissors.

  “I will do it. But only if you really wish me to.”

  “Whack away,” Callie instructed cheerfully.

  * * *

  Within a remarkable short period of time, hair lay in heaps on the floor. Callie’s dark brown. Sabeen’s black braids. Leela’s hennaed tresses.

  Sabeen kept slapping her hand over her mouth to contain her giggles, but her infectious laughter soon drew a half dozen curious residents. Then Nikki. Then an obviously irritated Simona.

  “What goes on here?”

  “Hair therapy.”

  Grinning, Callie shook her short, surprisingly curly locks. She felt pounds lighter and thought she looked like a completely different person. Unfortunately, her boss wasn’t impressed.

  “Hair therapy? Is that some new American fad?”

  The scorn behind the question cut as sharp and as deep as the words themselves. Smiles slipped. Expressions turned worried. Sabeen passed a nervous palm over her new buzz cut.

  “It’s hardly a fad.” Callie’s response was cool and level. “You might want to read Dr. Elaine Boyer Barrington’s Adaptive Therapies for Female Adolescents. Her work merely reinforces the basic fact that a teenager’s hairstyle is one of the most obvious indicators of her feeling of self-worth. So obvious, in fact, that therapists too often fail to ascribe it the significance they should.”

  Simona’s brows snapped together, but she didn’t challenge Callie in front of the others. Instead, she merely glowered and issued a terse command.

  “I want to speak with you. In my office.”

  “Of course. I’ll just sweep up the hair and...”

  “We’ll take care of it,” the translator said quickly.

  “Thanks.”

  With a smile and another toss of her short, who-would’ve-guessed-it curls, Callie followed her boss. Simona marched down the hall, her back stiff and her chin held at a combative angle.

  “Adaptive therapies?” she huffed. “Dr. Elaine whoever Barrington? If I go online and do a search, will I find either?”

  “I’d be very surprised.”

  “So you invented all that nonsense?”

  “No, I didn’t. I knew Elaine in grad school. She was a very innovative thinker but switched careers after earning her PhD. Last I heard, she and her husband were operating a treetop guest lodge in Tanzania.”

  Simona stopped with one hand on the doorknob of her office. Blue fire shot from her eyes. “Are you playing with me? If you are, I’ll tell you now I’m not in the mood for it.”

  No kidding. Didn’t take a genius to see her meeting with Carlo and Joe hadn’t gone well and Callie was about to take the heat for it.

  “Well,” she said with a calm smile, “the treetop lodge might be in Zimbabwe.”

  Those blue lasers narrowed dangerously. Callie kept her smile in place but felt the narrowness of her escape when the director whirled and thrust open the door. She stomped in, waited for Callie to follow, then slammed it shut and wasted no time on preliminaries.

  “The prince and your fiancé shared some disturbing news.”

  “Joe told me about it last night.”

  Simona resorted to the classic Italian gesture. Bringing the fingertips of one hand together, she waved it up and down. Despite her short time in Rome, Callie had seen the gesture often enough to know the most polite interpretation was What the hell?

  “I cannot not believe this. My center, the target of inquiries by a dead terrorist! It is not to be believed.”

  Her accent thickened with each word, along with her indignation.

  “I think,” Callie replied carefully, “that we should
trust Joe’s instincts.”

  “The prince most certainly does,” her boss huffed. “He informs me—informs me, you understand—that your Joe considers our security totally inadequate.”

  Callie couldn’t help thinking of the rusted panel beside the front door. “Well...”

  “The prince also informs me,” Simona fumed, “that your fiancé sends one of his subordinates to install additional equipment.”

  Emilio Mancera, Callie guessed, Joe’s very efficient head of operations here in Rome.

  “I don’t see why you would object to a little additional security,” she said cautiously.

  “Ha! You see no problem?” Bristling from the ends of her superfine white hair to the tip of her indignantly quivering nose, Simona folded her arms across her chest. “Then perhaps you agree that Carlo and your fiancé should have access to our case files.”

  “What?”

  “Ah. So you didn’t know?” The director assumed an expression of fake surprise. “Your fiancé didn’t tell you that he wants to sit down with us? To go through every case file?”

  “No, he did not.”

  Callie was more indignant than she’d been in longer than she could remember. At Joe, for not discussing this with her before springing it on her boss. At Simona, for thinking she would condone such a breach of ethics.

  “And if he had discussed it with me,” she added icily, “I would’ve given him the same answer I suspect you did.”

  Her obvious ire defused some of the director’s. Simona’s chin lost its pugnacious thrust and a satisfied smirk replaced her fake surprise.

  “But, yes! I told him, ‘Non lasciatevi la porta si colpisce nel culo sulla via d’uscita.’”

  Callie had picked up enough Italian to string “porta” and “uscita” together. “I got it. You told him not to let the door hit him in the ass on his way out.”

  “Sì!”

  She bit her lip. She wasn’t ready to let go of her indignation just yet, but the thought of this tiny sprite of a woman unceremoniously booting Joe out of her office shaved off some of its sharp edge.