W
hen Constanza d’Amico awoke in Rome the morning of January 9, her head was pounding. She was trying hard not to think about the direction her life was taking. But she couldn’t help it.
She lay in bed with her eyes open. The sun penetrated the drawn blinds in her bedroom, spilling little slashes of sunlight across the room. The clock at her bedside said 9:12 a.m.
Her stomach churned. Her nerves wouldn’t settle. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes. Then, next to her in her bed, she was aware of light snoring.
Oh, yeah. She was married.
Beside her, Rocco, her husband, slept fitfully. She had arrived home before he did in the early morning hours, and he had crawled into bed next to her.
Not unusual. Rocco was a musician, a guitarist for a techno-pop band that had a modest following around the city. He often came poling in shortly before dawn, usually smelling of sweat, booze, and cigarettes, sometimes smelling of cheap perfume, but never smelling of nothing. He would set the clock radio in their bedroom for 2:00 p.m. the following afternoon. He would set it LOUD with a heavy metal American CD. The intense volume of music was the only thing that could rouse him.
Whatever. Constanza had given up caring and always made plans to be out of the apartment when the music blasted on. She and Rocco had been married for four years and had started to go their separate ways. He was particularly repulsive, she had come to learn, when he crawled out of bed in the early afternoon after his usual night of debauchery. So she arranged each day to miss those golden moments.
She edged up in bed and looked at him. How could she ever have made such a mistake? She could only see half his head since he was facing away from her. But that was enough. Dark, dirty hair. No shirt. Unshaven for a week.
She sighed. Her head pounded. What a life. There was a time when she had been philosophical about it. No matter where you are, there you are. Recently, however, she had become more proactive about her fate.
Her future: she decided she wanted to have one.
Extra work. Specialty jobs. Some significant income on the side. Like the previous night. Stash some money, put together enough to take off. Make sure she had a passport that was good to go on a moment’s notice—or more than one passport if she could work it right. Make sure no one could ever find her. She could start again under a new name. After all, some bad people might come looking for her.
Maybe she could even get to America. She had heard that in the cities of the United States a woman could pay off certain priests and get a marriage annulled. Well, she decided, she would do that and find a way to stay in America.
It would be a new life, and it would be all hers.
But first, that horrible headache, the one that threatened to define the new day.
The buzz in her head graduated to a full firestorm. Time to go proactive on that too.
She had some Vicodin stashed in her purse, thanks to an amateur pharmacist she knew from some of the clubs. The Vike and a Red Bull would get the day off to a good start.
Got to get up. Got to get moving.
A few more weeks and she’d be out of this nightmare.
She rose. Above her bed, a halfwit movie poster in Swedish, not even framed, just tacked to the wall to cover some cracks and peeling paint.
Cheech and Chong—de korsikanska bröderna.
She eyed the poster in anger. Stuff like that had destroyed her life. Set her on the wrong path. Well, not much longer. Not much longer.
She stepped over her dress and shoes from the night before. She lurched uncomfortably into the bathroom, stared at herself in the mirror and winced. She looked awful and felt worse. But her life was a mess. She took her clothes off and turned on the shower.
She walked to the next room. She was in the habit of stashing her purse somewhere so that her husband wouldn’t filch money. Her head was hurting badly. Where had she hidden the purse this time? It took a moment to remember.
Then she found it. It had been under a pile of shoes in the front closet.
She found the Vicodin. She went to the refrigerator and found the Red Bull.
So far, so good.
On the kitchen counter, she found some bread. It was yesterday’s, half a loaf of good stuff from the corner
panetteria
. But it was unwrapped and half stale. Her pig of a husband must have come in late with the post-gig munchies. You’d think he could at least rewrap the food. But no.
She had given up complaining. On the walls of the apartment were several pictures of her a few years earlier when her career as a model had been taking off. Print ads in glossy magazines. Her on the runways of Rome. For two years, everything had been crackling with excitement. Then it all crashed, about the time she met Rocco and started spending too much time out late. She started to look too tired and dissipated for morning shoots. The business went away to younger, thinner, fresher girls. It never came back. Now, as she stood in her apartment surrounded by the glossy ghosts of the recent past, all she wanted was to get out, which was what the income on the side was all about.
There was a soft knock on the apartment door. The sound startled her. Everything startled her these days. She kept still. Then the soft knocking came again, followed by a familiar voice in accented Italian.
“
Constanza
,
ci sei?
” Constanza, are you there?
She recognized the voice. She moved to the door. The last thing she wanted was for one of her butch male friends to wake her husband. There would be explaining that she didn’t wish to do, plus arguments and sour recriminations. Fortunately, Rocco slept through early mornings as if he were hibernating.
She leaned to the door.
She peeked through the eyehole. Two male figures shifting nervously, an empty hallway behind them. One with a twitchy left eye, one in wraparound shades. They must have slipped by the old woman, Masiella, who kept guard downstairs. Masiella was deaf as a doorknob and not much smarter.
“
Eccomi
,” she answered. “I’m here.”
Twitchy Eye switched to English. “Open us the door. We have you the money,” he said. Twitchy was a good-looking guy, but he spoke no language perfectly.
“Let me get my robe,” she said, her voice very low.
She quickstepped into the bathroom where the warm water continued to run in the shower. She found a robe and pulled it on, tying the sash around her waist.
She returned to the door, turned the bolts, undid a chain, and unlocked it.
Two men stepped in. She embraced the first one, Twitchy Eye. The second man shut the door. “Anyone else here?” the first man asked. “
My husband,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “He’s sleeping.”
The nervous eye was on overdrive now, blinking, twitching, worse than she had ever seen it. He gave the second man a nod. “Okay,” he said.
“So? Where’s my money?” Constanza asked.
“Don’t be so anxious,” he said. And she saw him give a slight nod to the second man. Then he turned back to her. “It’s in my pocket,” he said, indicating to a spot within his jacket. “Give me a kiss first.”
She glanced as he beckoned to his jacket, open to show a black and white camo T-shirt that showed off the muscles of his chest. She also saw he was wearing a gun, not unusual. And he had an envelope, as promised, in his inside pocket.
She grinned slightly. She saw what she wanted. She saw, in fact, a great deal of what she wanted in comparison to the geeky husband who slumbered noisily in the next room. Well, today she would have to content herself with the
denaro
, the
cinquecento dollari
that she had been promised. Five hundred bucks of blood money.
She leaned to him and reached in, bringing her body close to his. The man leaned forward to savor the closeness and the scent of her body. She winked at him as she reached into his coat. Why not? They had been lovers once recently, though no one else knew that. Flirtatiously, he planted a gentle kiss on the lips, something she did not resist.
Then he did something rougher than usual and something that was highly unexpected.
He held her tightly at the left wrist, then used his other hand to hold her other wrist. He held her arms downward against her body, making the upper half of her body highly vulnerable. All this, while continuing to press his face to hers. Her robe loosened slightly, something she was okay with at first but then began to resist.
Then the first man withdrew his lips and the second man removed something from his pocket, something that Constanza soon realized was a silk cord. With incredible dexterity, and hardly allowing her a moment to struggle, the second man looped the cord over her head and around her throat. The cord went tight quickly, faster than she could utter a word. It was so tight that it cut into the flesh and almost disappeared.
She tried to kick but they overpowered her. Twitchy Eye let go of her wrists and stepped back impassively to watch her die.
She saw him mouth some words. “I’m sorry, Connie. I’m sorry.”He shrugged. The young woman’s fingers dug into her own flesh to fight for her life.
As the cord went tight, her face darkened with compressed blood. Then the blood began to run from the wounds at her throat. Her wrists went free, her eyes bulged, and after a brief struggle, all the strength drained from her body. First there was pain. Horribly searing pain. Her legs folded, her body sagged, and an earthly darkness descended upon her. The pain went away.
The killers released her. Her body hit the floor.
The first man gave a nod to the second. It was Twitchy Eye’s turn now.
He drew his pistol. He disappeared into the bedroom where there were still sounds of sleep from Rocco. There were two large reports from a high-caliber pistol. Then a third to make sure the job was done.
Twitchy Eye reappeared.
No more snoring sounds. Just some gurgling.
“
Finito?
” asked the first man.
“
Finito
,” Twitchy Eye answered.
“
È certo?
”
“His brains are against the wall if you want to go look.”
Twitchy Eye went into the bathroom. Using a washcloth to preclude leaving any finger prints, he turned off the water. No point in presiding over a flood that would bring the
carabinieri
here days before they otherwise might be summoned.
Their business there concluded, the two men left the apartment. They were in separate cars leaving Italy before the sun rose to the midpoint of the sky.
A
lex LaDuca and Michael Cerny sat at a round table in the office at the State Department office he had reserved for such meetings.
They had been together for two hours. It was already past 11:00 a.m. His background briefing on Yuri Federov and The Caspian Group neared conclusion. The forefront of Alex’s mind was teeming with new information and ideas as Cerny moved his discussion of Federov in a final direction.
“He has one soft spot,” Cerny said. “One Achilles heel.”
“I can hardly wait to hear what that is.”
“He has a passion for highly educated Western women.”
“I was up till 2:00 a.m. reading the FBI file,” Alex answered. “He’s a pig, a murderer, and a gangster.”
“That would be accurate.”
“I don’t know why any educated Western woman would want anything to do with him. And if you don’t mind a little vengeful Old Testament spunkiness,” she continued, “his soul should burn in hell someday.”
“Look,” Cerny said, “I like your take-no-prisoners spirit, but let’s be constructive. Your assignment will be to discuss issues pertaining to The Caspian Group and US Taxation. As mentioned, Federov owes the US millions in unpaid taxes. Just getting him to file the proper forms would be a victory.”
She felt a wave of indignation building. “And what’s my
real
assignment?”
“Stay with him every moment you can. Barely let him out of your sight for the duration of your trip, particularly while the president is there. Find out everything you possibly can.”
He fell silent. She felt there was more on the way. She waited.
“It wouldn’t bother us if you got to know him as well as a woman could,” he said.
Then he smirked. There was a nasty pause.
“Are you asking me to
seduce
him?”
“If you choose to do that,” he said, “even if it were only an occasional relationship. At your rank you’re eligible for performance pay. Bonuses.”
Alex steamed. She glared at Cerny. He raised his eyebrows. “Why don’t I just walk out of here right now?” she asked.
“I was expecting that question by the end of this briefing,” he said, “but it’s my job to put this proposition before you. It’s not coming from me; it’s coming from your government. Sometimes dirty work has to be done for the greater good.”
“You people are disgusting. Why don’t you hire a hooker?”
“Not to put too keen an edge on it, Alex, but if we could find one who was a security specialist, spoke five languages, could master a crash course in Ukrainian in a month, and could take care of herself and
possibly
come back in one piece, which, since you like honesty, the last part wouldn’t be essential, we probably would. But we can’t. So there. We’re asking you.”
There was a moment that passed between them in tense silence.
“Have someone else do your dirty work. And have me fired if you wish,” she said.
“Not at all. And once again, you’ve just demonstrated why you’re perfect for this assignment. Alex, really! We need you to do it. You don’t have to get physical with him, but we do want you to be with him. Constantly.”
She seethed. “Why?” she pressed.
“I can’t answer that. I don’t even know, myself. We want you to watch him every moment,” he said. “Every inch of the way. We want to know exactly where he is. Just shadow him. Promise him anything. Find out whatever you can about him, his business, his associates. Anything from how he used to beat up his bimbos in Brooklyn to whether he’s selling Pepsi-Cola and
Playboy
to the North Koreans. You’re our one person who will keep him interested. Your country is counting on you.”
She found herself fingering the gold cross again. Her thoughts went far away as she disappeared into herself. A long silence passed between them.
He waited.
“I’ll take the assignment. I’ll make the trip,” she said, “but I’ll do things on my own terms. And if your sleazebag Bolshevik narco-gangster puts his hands on me I’ll break both his filthy wrists.”
“See? That’s what we like about you. Righteous indignation. You’re perfect for this.”
“Those are my conditions.”
“All right,” he said. “It’s a deal.”