At the end of the evening, Rizzo insisted on paying. He tipped generously and, again demonstrating his legere de main, if not his outright kleptomania, pocketed a blue and white porcelain ashtray in front of his headwaiter friend, Carlo, who rolled his eyes and suppressed a laugh. Later, in the hotel lobby, Rizzo gave the ashtray to Mimi as a souvenir of the evening. She made a complex verbal joke out of her previous knowledge of Rizzo’s light fingers and deft touch. Having consumed perhaps too much wine, they all exchanged a bawdy laugh. To end the evening, Rizzo walked both women, their combined age not quite approaching his, to the elevator that led to Alex’s suite. He held Alex’s hand and had his other arm wrapped around Mimi’s waist.
He gave Alex a kiss on both cheeks to wish her a good night, turned, and headed toward where he had left his car as Alex rode the elevator up to the fifth floor.
THIRTY
The next morning, Alex took the elevator down to the lobby. She checked out and was about to ask the concierge to summon a taxi for the airport but instead felt a hand on her arm.
“Alex, my dear,” came a smooth male voice in Italian.
Startled, she turned and found Gian Antonio Rizzo next to her. He was clean-shaven, sharp-eyed, and obviously refreshed, even wearing a different suit, this one every bit as impeccable as the last.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I never left. I’ve been here all night.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Yes, I am. Of course I went home, but now I’m back. I came over to drive you to the airport,” he said.
“That’s so kind of you. But completely unnecessary,” she said.
“Yes, of course, but what is unnecessary in life and what one does of one’s own volition is often a pleasure, as is this. So I insist,” he said. “I am a man of leisure these days, or at least give the impression of being one. Come along. I’ve been wanting to show you my car since the day we met.”
He took her bag for her.
“What is it they say in America? ‘Pimp my ride.’ Well, look at the ride that I’ve pimped for you today.”
Outside the front entrance, gradually drawing a small crowd, was a sparkling white 2009 Maserati GranTurismo, Rizzo’s set of wheels.
He held the passenger side door for her, and she slid in to cool leather that made her sorry she was leaving Italy so soon. Rizzo hustled around to the other side and took the wheel. Six figures’ worth of Maserati trumped a Fiat taxi any day. A few minutes later they were out on the highway leading to Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport. The drive felt like a lift on a magic carpet. One could enjoy an auto like this for getting around town every day.
“How does a career policeman afford such a beautiful automobile?” Alex finally mused aloud in Italian on the journey to the airport.
Rizzo laughed. “The same way that a career policeman might afford such a beautiful woman,” he said with a laugh. “
“I suppose you do,” she answered with dual meaning to match the Maserati’s dual exhausts.
Almost protectively, almost like a big brother or maybe even an uncle, Rizzo revealed another facet of himself. Using his own security passes as a retired member of the brigade omocido in Rome, he escorted Alex all the way to her gate. Then, before she boarded the flight to Cairo, he pulled her to a safe distance from the other travelers. He held her hand and spoke to her with urgency.
“Alex,” he said, “I must impress upon you: you are not just dealing with criminals now. You are dealing in espionage. This is dangerous, venal, and dirty. It is not fun and games. There is always the chance that an operation will blow up and your career will be ruined in ten seconds. You can be disfigured or killed in even less time than that. In World War II-my
Rizzo’s eyes were narrowed and his voice was low and succinct.
“Today, the armies are often invisible until they attack,” he said. “Our national borders mean nothing. Saudis fly airplanes into the beautiful skyline of New York, and American fighter planes attack weddings in Pakistan in return. There are no heroes, only villains. It is very hard to discern your motivation when the objective is vague, dear Alex. I worry about you so much on this ‘adventure.’ “ He shook his head, and she saw tears well in his hard brown eyes, much as they might at Mimi’s death in La Boheme.
He put his strong arms around her and hugged her so hard and dearly that her feet lifted from the ground. Then he set her down again.
“Who are you going to be dealing with in Cairo?” he asked. “Arabs and Russians, correct?”
“Probably.”
“If hell itself emptied out tomorrow morning we would discover that it was mostly filled with Arabs and Russians,” he grumbled. “I do not like this for you!”
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Really! I’ll be all right.”
“Let me go with you,” he said. “I can join you in a day.”
“I can’t do it that way,” she said. “I have specific orders from Langley how this is supposed to be done. There will be a team in Cairo and-”
“I don’t trust your team in Cairo,” he said. “And you shouldn’t either.”
On the airport public address system, the last call was made for boarding Flight 34 from Rome to Cairo.
“I need to go, Gian Antonio,” she said.
He held her as long as he could, then released her to a world he knew to be cruel and calculating. At the last step before the gate, she turned and gave him a smile and a wave. She knew he would still be watching. To Alex’s eyes, he looked sad and overly concerned.
Then she boarded another Alitalia jet.
She was seated in 5-H of business class, a window. She had a wonderful view of Rome and Naples as they flew south. Her eyes then followed the bold coastlines of Corsica and Sicily and the boot of Italy in the Mediterranean as the plane banked and turned to the southeast. The geography had not changed since the time of Christ, and with suddenly refreshed eyes, she was thrilled to gaze upon it.
She watched out her window with fascination as the flight traveled southeast and crossed the Mediterranean. She was finally on the final leg of her trip to Egypt.
Part Two
THIRTY-ONE
Within two hours she saw the topography of northern Africa for the first time. She recognized the contours of the Nile Delta where it met the sea. Far away to the east she could see the ancient land where the Suez Canal had been built a hundred and fifty years ago. Beyond, also within her view in the distance through the hazy sky, she could see the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, the land of so many of the Bible tales of her youth.
For much of the flight Alex had been prowling through files on her laptop and poking through a phrasebook of Egyptian Arabic. Now she leaned back from the window. A strange feeling was upon her, accompanied by a poignant memory.
When Alex had been in her midteens, she had been too good a student for her own school system. One thing had led to another, and she had been sent away on a full scholarship to a private boarding school in Connecticut where she was allowed to excel in all her studies, particularly languages. The summer after her junior year she had won an internship to work in France, and off she had gone again, full of adventure and naivete, and hiding within her a heavy element of fear and intimidation.
She had been away from home before but had never been so far away, never on another continent and immersed in another culture. Additionally, it was one thing to have excelled in French in the classroom, quite another to be smacked down in it in real life.
She had flown from New York to Paris. Her first night in Paris passed safely and securely. She had registered in advance at a student residence in Paris and had hung out with some other Americans. But the next day had been different. She had taken a train deep into the center of France, a single girl of seventeen traveling alone, with one cramped bag of clothes, three hundred dollars in cash, and a single credit card that would max at five hundred dollars.
She had been scared and had felt lost and vulnerable. She asked herself why she was doing this, whether this was what she had really wanted, whether it might have been easier and more pleasant to have just spent the summer hanging around her mother’s home in California.
On the southbound train, Alex fell into a conversation with an older French woman, a woman old enough to remember the world war in which, fifty years earlier, she said, she had lost her husband at Dunkirk. The old woman befriended her, even gave her some fresh fruit from a basket. They both descended from the train at Saint Etienne and said their good-byes. The old woman, whose name was Marie-Claire, gave her a hug, and Alex reciprocated. Marie-Claire felt frail and bony in her grasp and almost unsteady when Alex released her. She reminded Alex-distantly and in spooky kind of way-of her own late grandmother.
Alex had to find her way on foot to a local youth hostel, where she would stay overnight, and then the next morning take another train to the Camargue region where her job awaited her.
She walked down some questionable streets to get to the hostel. She took the wrong route twice and was corrected twice when strangers
