Page 104 of Ruthless Daddy
Then, a voice. Two voices, actually, on the other side of whatever wall I was inside, speaking a language that was not English and was not French and was not Italian, not quite, though it pulled toward Italian. The cadence was wrongfor Sicilian. The vowels were harder. Arabic underneath, somewhere—a single throat-sound a man made when he was clearing the end of a sentence.
I opened my eyes.
A strip of light lay across the ceiling above me. A horizontal line of it, brilliant white, the white of sun on stone and not the white of sun on snow. The strip came through a wooden shutter that had warped slightly with age, and the warping had left a finger-width of daylight where the slats did not meet.
I was warm.
The analyst came on the way she always did. She did not ask permission. She just sat up in my head and started taking inventory.
Time. The strip of light was almost directly overhead, slightly southern. Midday, then. Local midday. I had been put on the plane at—I tried to remember—late morning Chicago time, eleven-something. A Gulfstream out of Lansing could not fly Chicago to anywhere in the Mediterranean in one hop. They would have staged. Shannon, Rome, somewhere with a friendly customs line. The drug had been dosed twice that I could remember and possibly more that I could not. Eighteen hours, conservatively. Maybe twenty.
Place. The shutter was wood, painted a color that had been white once and was now the soft chalk-yellow of paint that had been sun-bleached for thirty summers. The walls were limestone block, the joints visible, the surfaces washed in a thin layer of plaster that had been redone badly at some point. The floor was tile—small hexagonal tile in a faded amber, the kind that meant the house was older than the woman who currently kept it. The ceiling was high and beamed in dark wood. The bed I was on was iron, the frame painted black, the mattress thin.
The smell was the part I needed.
I closed my eyes again and breathed in through my nose. Sea. Stone. Hot dust on hot tile. And underneath that, faintly, the resinous bright cut of citrus — not the citrus of a kitchen but the citrus of a tree, the live oil of leaves and rind on a branch, somewhere outside the shutter, close enough that the wind brought it in.
A lemon tree.
The cadence in the hall. The Arabic at the back of the consonants. Italianate vowels. Limestone. Sea. Lemons. Heat in February.
Malta?
The trust was in Sliema. The bank was in Valletta. The signature woman lived three blocks from a bank. I had been working her file when the phone had rung. Of course they had brought me here. Of course Enzo was here.
Oh. A dreadful thought.
Wendell.
The pain, the agony, the hollow, empty nausea.
I made myself open my eyes.
Function, the analyst said. Grief later. Function now.
I stood. My legs were unsteady. I did not let them stay that way. I walked to the shutter and put my face to the warped slat.
A courtyard. Stone. A small lemon tree in a terracotta pot. A wall beyond it, taller than a man, with broken glass set into the top. Past the wall, the suggestion of a slope down to water — not visible, but legible in the way the light moved over the far hills. A man at the gate of the courtyard, standing, not bored, not sharp. Mid-thirties. Sidearm under a light jacket that he was wearing because the air had cooled half a degree in the shade. He was not French. He was local, or local-enough — the posture of a man who had grown up in this light.
Two men at least, then. One at the gate. A least one outside this door.
I sat back down on the edge of the bed and I put my hands flat on my knees and I breathed.
Pietro is coming.
He had to be.
The door opened.
A man stood in the gap. Behind him, beyond his shoulder, the corridor opened into more light. Tile, white plaster, a sliver of blue beyond an arch that could only be a sky over a sea.
“Madame,” he said. “He will see you now.”
He did not need to say who.
Thehallwascoolerthan the room. It ran along the inside of the courtyard, shaded by an arcade of low arches, and the tile underfoot was the same faded amber as the bedroom but worn smoother by feet. The man walked behind me, not touching me. There was no need to touch me. There was nowhere to go.
I counted as I walked. Two doors on the left, both closed. One open archway on the right that gave onto the courtyard with the lemon tree. A staircase rising at the far end, dark wood, no runner. At the top of the staircase, another arch, and through the arch a wash of sea-light so bright it made the inside of my eyes water.
