conversation, muted, from the front of the vehicle, the voices low and indistinct. He concentrated on the tinny voice from the speaker and concluded it was a foreign language, one he didn’t recognize. Cutting through all the noises was the distant, two-tone panic wail of a siren. Two sirens, moaning out of sync.
He could tell from the road noises, the short accelerations and brake applications, that the van was cruising in traffic. Time passed. How much Toad didn’t know. The sirens eventually became inaudible.
When he felt his legs cramping and he could stand it no longer, he said, in as conversational a tone of voice as he could muster, “Take your foot off my neck, please.”
The pressure increased. He raised his voice, “I asked you nice. Take your fucking foot off my neck!”
“Okay, let him up.” Judith’s voice.
“He’ll see our faces.” It was the flat, American Midwest voice.
“He ought to see yours.” Another male voice. This was a heavy accent, perhaps Eastern European. “You agency assholes want to be included, then you fuck it up.”
“Shut up, everyone,” Judith said. “Let him up.”
He was pulled bodily toward the rear of the van and turned into a sitting position. Hands seized his face. They were Judith’s hands. Her face was only inches from his. “Don’t look around.”
The light came through the back windows of the vehicle — headlight glare and occasional streetlights. Her eyes held his as the lights came and went. They were the most intelligent, understanding eyes he had ever seen.
“Don’t ever tell anyone what you’ve seen or heard. Promise me! Not a word.”
Her eyes held him.
“Oh, Judith! Why you?”
“If you tell, people will die. Not you. Other people. Good people.”
“You?”
“Perhaps.”
“I don’t even know your real name.”
“Don’t tell,” she whispered fiercely and increased the pressure of her hands on his temples.
“I love you.”
The van came to a halt and the rear door opened. “Get out.” As he did so, he heard her say, “I’ll keep the letter.”
The van accelerated into traffic. He was beside a pedestrian island in the middle of a vast piazza. Buses were parked in rows across the street from him. To his right was the central train station, easily recognizable with the black triangles on the low, flat roof. He was in the Piazza Garibaldi.
Then he remembered that he should have looked at the license number on the van. He wildly scanned the traffic, but it was gone. He had been looking at the little rear window when it pulled away. Pedestrians were staring at him.
He put his hand in his pockets and began shuffling along.
Jake and Callie were having dinner in a storefront trattoria on the Via Santa Lucia famous among U.S. Sixth Fleet sailors. Unit patches covered three large mirrors in the crowded dining room. The floor was linoleum and round bulb lamps hung from the ceiling. Pictures of American ships and airplanes in cheap black frames adorned the dingy wallpaper. Two men in their fifties served the noisy customers at the fifteen tables.
An Italian couple at the next table was slaughtering a pizza and demonstrating the proper use of the knife and fork on this delicacy to their daughter, who was about eight. The utensils were used to roll up the triangular slice until it looked like a blintz, then the fork was stabbed through it and the pizza roll raised to the mouth, where one took a delicate bite from one end. The youngster was having her troubles with the technique. Red sauce and gooey cheese dribbled down her chin.
The little brother was peeking at Jake. Jake winked. The boy averted his face, then peeked again. Another wink. The little head jerked away, then inched back around very, very slowly. Jake grinned.
“Kids are great, aren’t they?” Jake remarked.
“Oh, you think so?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Then you won’t mind if we adopt?”
Jake hitched himself up in his chair and stared at his wife. She sipped her wine and gazed innocently around the room with a trace of a smile on her lips, her eyebrows slightly arched, the corners of her eves minutely crinkled. God, she was beautiful!
He grinned. “Anyone specific in mind, or will a generic kid do?”
Her eyes swiveled onto him like two guns in a turret, then her head followed. “She’s ten years old. Her name is Amy Carol. She has black hair and black eyes and a smile that will break your heart.”
“And …”
“She has diabetes. She’s been in four foster homes and she needs a family of her own. She was sexually abused in her first foster home, and the man went to prison. She doesn’t like men.”
Jake’s smile faded. “Well …”
“She needs us, Jake. Both of us. She needs love and understanding and a place of her own and a man who can be a loving father.”
Jake took a deep, deep breath, then exhaled through his nose. Callie had mentioned adoption casually in the months before the
“Amy Carol Grafton. When do we get her?”
“Oh, Jake,” Callie exclaimed and dashed around the table. She sat on his lap and enveloped him. People at the neighboring tables applauded enthusiastically as Callie gave him a long, passionate kiss. After all, this was Italia.
Qazi leaned back against the sink. Noora and Ali sat at the kitchen table with Youssef and the senior helicopter pilot.
“So Sakol and Yasim are dead?”
“The police radio says they are.”
“Sakol is no loss,” Ali sneered. “But Yasim is. Who were these people?” Ali asked the question of Qazi.
“I don’t know. I heard the silenced automatic weapon in the courtyard. I heard them speaking English. I looked. One of them was a woman, perhaps Judith Farrell. We had finished listening to the tapes Yasim had flagged, and Sakol had left.”
“Why did you let him leave?” Ali asked. “He could betray us.”
“My judgment. My decision. We shook hands and he left. A few moments later we heard the shots and I looked out the window. We ran toward the stairwell and started down. Then we heard someone running up. So I went up onto the roof. Yasim must have decided to go back through the corridor and take the elevator down to the lobby. He probably figured it would be safe with all the people there.”
“So they killed him in the lobby.”
“Apparently. He isn’t here and the police are telling each other there are two bodies.”
“Yasim is a martyr,” Youssef said. “He’s on his way to paradise.” Youssef was a Palestinian, the senior man in the PLO contingent that El Hakim had foisted on Qazi. Political considerations. The PLO needed a success just now, and El Hakim would need the PLO if this operation was to pay the kind of dividends the dictator hoped it would. So the PLO should earn a share of El Hakim’s glory. Not too much of it, of course, but an expedient little bit of the shine. Too bad, Qazi thought bitterly, that the Palestinians’ primary asset was enthusiasm.
“What do the Americans know?” Ali asked.
“This afternoon Captain Grafton and his wife discussed the fact Farrell is not a native English-speaker. Apparently they were worried she would entrap Lieutenant Tarkington, one of the officers from the ship. Grafton
