Chapter 2
“Nothing. None of the taxi drivers outside the restaurant collected a woman matching the description. They’re reviewing the security recordings. I’ll have something by morning.”
Dante remained silent.
Tom recognized that silence.
It was the silence preceding wrong decisions, the heavy quiet that had come before 3 or 4 choices during the previous years that neither man discussed afterward.
Tom decided not to press him.
The telephone rang at 3:12.
Tom answered and listened for 40 seconds without speaking.
His expression changed.
Dante’s changed in response.
Tom crossed the room and spoke with the quiet voice people used at a wake.
“There was an ambush planned at the restaurant tonight. Two of Halloran’s men were inside and 3 were outside. It was scheduled for 9:15. I confirmed it with our contact in Charlestown.”
Dante did not move.
He looked at the glass, then at his own reflection in the window—the dark jacket, the closed expression, and the rigid line of a jaw that rarely revealed what occurred beneath it.
His hand opened against the shelf. The fist released slowly, as though he were counting his fingers.
“Say it again.”
Tom repeated the information.
Dante closed his eyes.
Years later, Tom told me it was the 1st time in 5 years he had seen his boss grip the edge of a shelf like a man who needed the floor beneath him.
The woman who kissed him had not been frightened.
She had saved his life.
Dante turned toward Tom with a calm that was not calm. It was the composure a person trained for years to use when everything inside him was collapsing.
“Find her.”
“Sir, with respect, she won’t want to be found.”
“I didn’t ask what she wants. Find her.”
Tom nodded once and left.
The penthouse door closed with the discretion of expensive doors.
Dante remained alone with his reflection and the indifferent Charles River beyond the glass.
It took him 3 minutes to raise the whiskey.
When he drank, he swallowed it at once. The liquor seemed to descend through a fracture that had not existed before that night.
He did not know my name.
He knew my face and my voice.
He knew the brief, firm taste of my mouth and the urgency of a woman controlling her own heart while executing a plan.
He knew how I tilted my head while lying.
He was certain I had lied about at least 1 thing at the table.
He simply could not determine which.
It was little.
It was enough.
Three weeks later, I remained inside the life I had sworn to resume, pretending nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
Joss arrived at the office on a Tuesday carrying 2 coffees and a question she placed on my desk before sitting down.
“Are you sleeping?”
“I am.”
“Liar.”
She pushed a cup toward me.
Joss Whittaker had been my closest friend since I was 23. She worked behind a bar in the South End as though the room were a stage and every customer an ungrateful audience.
She possessed the kind of humor no one requested and everyone needed. She also had a habit of arriving at the precise moment I had convinced myself I needed no one.
The coffee was strong and contained too much sugar, the way she always ordered it because she assumed everyone liked it that way and never asked.
“You have an expression I’ve seen only once before,” she said.
She crossed her legs and studied me with the attention of someone who had watched strange people from the opposite side of a bar for years.
“It was when you became involved with that history professor from Cambridge and discovered he was married.”
“I’m not involved with anyone.”
“I can see that.”
She drank from her cup.
“This is worse.”
I did not answer.
I looked toward the defective window and considered, for perhaps the 100th time, asking the building manager to repair it.
A thread of cold air entered through the gap, traveled up the wall, and died near the back of my chair.
For the 100th time, I also considered not asking.
Repairing the window meant remaining in that office for another year, and I had not decided whether I would stay.
“Marcy.”
“Hmm?”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
She accepted the answer.
Not because she believed me. Joss never believed the 1st denial, a quality I admired and found exhausting.
She accepted it because she was a friend, and a real friend understood when to push and when to leave a door slightly open.
She stood, came around the desk, kissed the top of my head with the familiarity of someone who had performed the gesture for a decade, and announced that she would return Friday with wine.
After the door closed, I stared at the coffee she had left behind and tried to remember the last time I had lied to her.
I could not.
That afternoon, while descending for lunch, I noticed the 1st man.
He wore a dark coat with the collar raised and sat in the ground-floor café reading a newspaper he was not reading.
He looked at me 1 second longer than a disinterested stranger would.
One second was sufficient when a person had spent years learning how to measure them.
The following day, another man occupied the café. His face and clothing were different, but he possessed the same incorrect posture of someone pretending to notice nothing while noticing everything.
On the 3rd day, I altered my route.
I left through the rear entrance, took the subway at Park Street, changed lines at Downtown Crossing for no reason, entered a pharmacy, and left through another exit.
Even so, on the 4th day, I saw an unfamiliar man inside the bakery on my block greeting the clerk by name as though he were a regular customer.
The clerk frowned for half a second before smiling in response.
I saw the half second.
I removed the bakery’s loyalty card from my pocket and never returned.
I telephoned Pierce.
The line rang 9 times before disconnecting.
I called the alternate number he had provided at the beginning of the contract for emergencies.
A recorded message stated that the number was no longer in service.
I returned to my office after dark, when the street was empty and footsteps echoed over wet pavement.
I opened the gray cabinet, removed the entire Pierce file, and carried it home inside a backpack held against my chest rather than worn on my back.
The men were not watching me because of Pierce.
They were watching because of something else.
I knew exactly what it was.
The next several days passed beneath the low, constant tension that exhausted a person more completely than openly declared fear.
Pierce did not return.
His office in Cambridge closed without formal notice. His name disappeared from the business registry as though someone had disconnected a machine.
I had been a small part of something larger.
I had suspected it from the day he pushed the final white envelope toward me while refusing to hold my gaze for longer than 2 seconds.
Now I was certain.
It was another Thursday in October, late in the afternoon, when Boston became gray and gold simultaneously and no one could determine whether daylight remained or night had already begun.
Fine rain fell, the same kind that had fallen outside the restaurant, as though the city repeated certain scenes to ensure no one forgot the previous performance.
I locked the office, descended the 3 flights while listening to my own footsteps, and pushed through the street door with my shoulder.
Then I stopped.
A man leaned against a black sedan parked beside the curb.
He wore a well-cut dark coat, his hands resting in its pockets. His shoulders were too broad for the white shirt visible beneath the open collar.
He was not looking toward me.
He watched the sidewalk across the street with the patience of a man who had waited for things far more difficult than a woman descending a staircase.
Rain left small points of light across his shoulders.
He seemed unaffected by the cold, the water, or the time he had spent there.
I recognized him before seeing his face.
His right hand turned a key between his fingers in a slow, mechanical, almost unconscious motion.
I had documented the gesture in a February report.
It was 1 of 3 habits indicating that he was thinking.
My heart accelerated.
Not from fear.
It came from something else, something I decided not to name.
Dante looked up.
There was no surprise in his eyes.
There was something slower and deeper, accumulated over 6 weeks of searching. On finding what he had been looking for, he finally allowed himself to breathe.
He pushed away from the car and crossed the 3 steps between the curb and the sidewalk.
I had described his stride as controlled.
From that distance, I recognized it as something else.
He stopped before me, too close and too slowly for the encounter to be casual.
Rain fell between us as it had fallen outside another building on a night neither of us could undo.
May you like
His voice was low.
“You forgot to tell me your name.”
