Chapter 3
The rain began before I took my 1st step along the sidewalk.
It was fine and cold, the kind that did not soak through clothing but attached itself to the skin and remained there.
I attempted to move around Dante Sabatini as one might avoid an unfamiliar dog in the street, with my head lowered and my pace steady.
Dante was not a man a person moved around.
He left the black sedan with the calm of someone carrying all the available time in his pocket and having no other obligation.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he asked.
His voice remained low, almost courteous.
“I asked your name.”
I did not answer.
I adjusted the strap of my bag and continued walking. That usually functioned as an adequate indication.
He matched me in 2 strides.
He did not touch me. He walked beside me at exactly my pace, which was worse than a hand around my arm.
The fabric of his coat brushed my elbow every 3 steps.
He smelled of rain and the woody cologne I had already recorded months earlier in a file he would never see.
“You have 2 choices,” he said without turning toward me. “You can enter the car, and we can speak somewhere warm. Or you can continue walking, and I will walk beside you all the way to Cambridge.”
“Cambridge is 40 minutes away.”
“I have good shoes.”
I pressed my lips together to prevent myself from laughing.
He noticed.
He always noticed.
I stopped at the corner. The red traffic light created a truce I had not requested.
I faced the man whose routine I knew by heart.
His height matched the reports. So did the narrow scar near his temple.
What I had not accounted for was the way he looked at me, as though I were a book he had waited months to open and had never been certain he would find in any secondhand shop.
“I’m not going to your penthouse,” I said. “And I don’t enter cars without taxi plates.”
“Agreed.”
He tilted his head.
“You choose the location.”
That disarmed me more than it should have.
I gave him the address of Joss’s bar in the South End. It was the only territory where I knew every exit and the number of steps between the rear table and the back door.
Dante opened the passenger door of the sedan and waited without hurry or a smile.
I entered.
The car smelled of leather and silence.
The driver did not look back.
Dante touched a finger to the fogged window and drew a short, straight line through the condensation for no apparent reason.
I watched his hand, the knuckles, his wrist, and the confidence with which he seemed to hold nothing.
I looked away before he noticed.
“You’re shaking.”
“It’s the rain.”
“You aren’t wet.”
“Then it’s the cold.”
He did not answer.
He removed his coat and placed it across my lap without asking, explanation, or ceremony, as though closing 1 subject and proceeding to the next.
The fabric was absurdly heavy and warm. It carried the woody scent I already knew.
I did not thank him.
He did not expect me to.
The bar in the South End was crowded enough to feel safe and empty enough to appear selected for us.
Low amber light gave every conversation an intimacy it might not otherwise possess.
Joss saw me before she noticed him.
I watched the precise instant she recognized the man beside me.
Her tray shifted by a centimeter. Three glasses moved toward its edge.
She raised 1 eyebrow, an expression that told me I had a great deal to explain before sunrise.
We chose a corner table with our backs against the wall.
Dante pulled out my chair, not from gallantry but method. He performed every action as though it belonged to a larger design only he could see in full.
Joss approached carrying 2 glasses and the smile she used for difficult customers.
“The house has a reasonable red wine and an honest whiskey,” she said without looking directly at Dante. “I’ll bring both, and you can tell me whether I chose correctly.”
“We’ll take them,” I answered without taking my eyes from him.
Joss departed, though not before glancing at me over her shoulder with the bartender’s expression meaning that I should shout if necessary.
I acknowledged her with a small movement of my hand that she probably did not consider sufficient.
Dante held the wineglass by its stem without rotating it.
He looked at the wine as someone might study a thought he had not completed.
The surveillance reports had not prepared even 5% of me for sitting inside that man’s gravitational field at a small table beneath low lights with no remaining excuse to leave.
“How did you learn my identity before I learned yours?” he asked.
I had rehearsed the explanation in the shower, inside taxis, and before the office-bathroom mirror.
I had rehearsed it during a telephone conversation with Joss, pretending it was hypothetical, until the lie sounded like an event that had truly occurred.
My voice remained steady.
“I was working in a building in Back Bay. I needed to make a call and went into a quieter area of the garage where the reception was stronger. While I was beside a pillar, I overheard 2 men speaking on the other side of a vehicle. They mentioned a restaurant, a time, and your surname. I didn’t know your face, so I searched for it.”
Dante observed me for a period that seemed longer than it was.
The bar continued around us: glasses touching, distant conversations, and music no one intentionally heard.
“You searched 3 different sites.”
I held his gaze.
“You appear in newspapers more often than you think.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Because the police would have arrived afterward. And because if you were the man the newspapers described, perhaps you deserved the bullet.”
I drank from my glass.
“But I couldn’t decide that for someone else.”
The sentence emerged more sharply than intended.
It worked.
Dante looked down at his wine.
The corners of his mouth rose for less than a second.
“Continue.”
“With what?”
May you like
“Why you entered the restaurant. Why you kissed me. You could have called anonymously, warned the manager, or left a note at the door. You chose to go inside.”
That was the difficult portion.
