The Eighth Day (18 page)

Danny took a deep breath and leaned forward. “There are a lot of people out there,” he muttered, appalled to hear the reediness in his voice. It occurred to him that maybe he ought to launch himself at Zebek, knock something over, create a ruckus, start yelling.

“On the other hand,” Zebek said, raising a finger as if to make a point, “that wouldn’t be much fun.” Suddenly a grin snapped into place, and the billionaire stopped pacing. “You know what?”

Danny shook his head, muscles tensing. If Zebek looked up—if he raised his eyes to the security guard—Danny would come across the desk like a load of birdshot.

“You’re on your own,” Zebek decided. “It will be more fun this way. Like the race with Bruco, a real contest.”

The American blinked. “What?”

“I’ll give you five minutes. After that, you’re fair game.”

Danny glanced at the guard behind him, then back to Zebek. “You’re insane. I mean, really: you’re
out there
. I mean, clinically. Am I right?”

Zebek nodded. “Probably.” Checked his watch. “Four and a half minutes.” He looked up and cocked his head. “Still here?” A smirk of incredulity from the billionaire.

Danny came out of the chair with a low curse and headed for the door, half expecting to be stopped and ready to swing on anyone who reached for him.

“I’ll watch from the balcony!” Zebek called out.

Bursting into the corridor, Danny brushed past a coterie of NATO generals, ran to the staircase, and descended the steps two at a time. The party was in full swing, the air alight with laughter and music, the chatter and clatter of a hundred people having a good time. But not him. He hit the courtyard at a run, only to stand by the door while one of the security guards spoke quietly into a cell phone. Finally, the guard yanked open the door and nodded deferentially.
“Ciao.”

Then he was on a dirt track, about ten yards from a makeshift fence of red-and-white-striped barricades. Behind the barricades were fifty thousand Italians—and tourists—jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in an area about the size of a city block. The noise was deafening, the air bright and stifling. A policeman stormed up to him, then grabbed him by the arm and, gesturing dramatically, led him away from the track and pushed him toward the packed mob. Squeezing between the barricades, Danny merged with the crowd, hoping it would convey invisibility.

His instinct was to run and to keep on running, to put as much distance as possible between himself and Zebek. But the density of the mob was such that even walking was a challenge. The best he could do was sidle between one person and another, making his way a step at a time. It was like moving apologetically through quicksand.
“Scusi, scusi—“

Suddenly the crowd surged and he found himself swept up in a kind of human current, with no more control over his own direction than a leaf on a river. He was a part of the mob, and it was all he could do to remain on his feet.

He’d never been in a throng like this—not even in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The square was more densely packed than a rock concert, more crowded than the Metro at rush hour. The whole piazza was a holding pen, enervated by the heat, suffused with noise, spiced with the pungent scents of sweat, garlic, and horseshit. Mixed with the adrenaline roaring through his heart, the scene left him breathless. Bodies pressed against him from every side. An elbow jabbed him in the ribs; a belt buckle dug at his spine. Realignments were constant, as tides of people were carried away by unseen forces.
Contrada
gangs joined hands above the crowd in a hopeless effort to stay together while plunging this way and that, laughing and giggling. Flags floated in the air. Songs broke out. People shouted to one another in a dozen languages and dialects. Somewhere someone was thumping a drum, while off to the right a ceremony of some kind was taking place. A fanfare of trumpets went up, and the crowd roared its approval. Rising to his tiptoes, Danny saw a dozen horses being led to the starting gate.

So far, so good,
he thought. He was a needle in a haystack, and it would take a miracle for Zebek’s goons to find him. Giving himself up to the crowd, he let himself be carried along until he arrived at the heart of the Campo. This was the eye of the storm, a relatively calm place where people sat cross-legged on the paving stones, worn out by the heat, the noise, and the long wait for the race to begin.

It was, of course, the very worst place to watch the race. Even at six-one, Danny had to lean forward on the balls of his feet just to scan the crowd. Anyone shorter would see nothing but the backs of other people’s heads—except for the children and some girls who perched on the shoulders of their fathers and boyfriends.

Not that Danny was interested in the race. Lifting his eyes to the buildings around the square, he searched the balconies until he found Zebek. The billionaire was standing beside a peacock, looking directly at Danny through a pair of opera glasses, speaking calmly into a cell phone.

Their eyes met (Zebek had the shades off), and a shock of recognition went through Danny. The Campo was a trap, a killing floor where every exit was blocked and nothing would be simpler than to die. Tracked by Zebek from the moment he’d left the palazzo, Danny was a murder waiting to happen. It was as simple as that. Amid the drumming and singing, the cheering and laughter, few would notice an American sinking to the ground with a knife in his back.

Seeing Zebek, Danny suddenly understood what the billionaire was doing with the cell phone. He was hunting him down by remote control, sending telemetry to the thugs who’d been sent to kill him.

By now, the head start was long gone (if it had ever been real) and Danny was fair game. Glancing wildly around, he searched in vain for the man who was hunting him, then lowered his head and plunged deeper into the crowd. As if on cue, a cannon went off like a clap of thunder. A dozen horses broke from the gate in a surge of color, the mob roared, and the Campo became a trampoline, with thousands jumping up and down in place. Nearby, a blonde punched the air with her fist, shouting, “Oca Oca Oca!” from her perch on her boyfriend’s shoulders, digging her heels into his ribs.

Danny moved to his left, staying as low as he could, heading for the gate farthest from the Palazzo di Pavone. With a little luck, he might still lose himself in the crowd. The idea that anyone could follow him in this casserole of humanity was ridiculous—or so it seemed until he saw something that made him freeze in his tracks.

A few feet away, a peacock feather winked at him from the background of a black T-shirt. Looking up, his eyes locked with Gaetano’s. Another step, and he’d have walked into his arms. For a long moment, the two of them remained where they were, a still-life amid the frenzied crowd. Zebek’s thug had a cell phone in his left hand and a shank in his right.

It was Danny’s soccer instincts that saved him. Without thinking, he dropped his right shoulder, threw a head fake, and didn’t so much juke as
dive
to the left. Gaetano moved in the same instant but went the wrong way, lunging upward with such force that if he’d connected, Danny’s colon would have been lying in a loop on the ground.

Finding a seam, Danny plunged through the crowd in a crouch, his head below his shoulders, invisible to the balconies around the square. The mob was crazy now, roaring louder than ever as the horses drove toward the finish line, galloping under a dozen whips. And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun. The crowd held its breath—and sagged, its roar dwindling to a disappointed murmur that soon gave way to a woman’s screams and a chorus of angry shouts.

He cut someone,
Danny thought.
When he lunged at me, he must have cut someone.

“E Pavone,”
a man complained.
“Pavone vince.”

The woman’s screams became louder and more hysterical.

Danny shuffled toward the gate. He hoped that Zebek had lost him, but there was no way to know if he had. And it was impossible to stay in a crouch. The Palio-goers were in the grip of their own centrifugal forces, flooding the half-dozen exits leading out of the square. Like everyone else, Danny moved in slow-mo, inching forward with tiny steps.

An ancient arch loomed about twenty yards ahead of him, and he was sure that once he reached it he’d be home free. If nothing else, he could break into a run. But then he sensed, as much as saw, a commotion to his left and, turning, glimpsed Gaetano, fighting his way through the crowd in a desperate effort to get at his prey.

A chorus of complaints rose up in the killer’s wake, then turned to shock as Gaetano grabbed a woman by the face and shoved her out of the way. A man who might have been her husband reacted in anger, then crumpled to his knees when a head butt shattered the bridge of his nose. Children screamed, someone threw a punch, and the crowd swayed in panic. Beside Danny, a dark-haired woman with carefully drawn eyebrows began to whimper with fear.

He knew how she felt. Only ten feet from the exit, the crowd was now so tightly packed that a stampede seemed likely. If it happened, the crowd would become an avalanche of meat and they’d all be trampled. Danny was getting ready for it, unconsciously holding his breath, when the ground seemed to lurch. Then the mob surged and he popped through the archway like a champagne cork flying across the room.

It was a Palio version of the Big Bang, with the crowd exploding from the Campo in every direction, the distance between people growing like the distance between stars. Danny’s shuffle turned into a trot, the trot to a run. Taking the path of least resistance, he set off on a broken-field sprint down an ancient street hung with flags. Left, right, left, up an alley, and down an arcade, he ran until he could run no more. Finally, drained of air and adrenaline, he leaned against a shop window and gasped for breath. He had no idea where he was, other than downhill from the Campo.

A dark-haired woman in a lavender skirt turned the corner, walking hand in hand with a little girl in overalls. Seeing Danny breathing hard and thinking him drunk, she veered to the other side of the street, while the little girl pushed herself into her mother’s skirt, pulling its lavender fabric around her.

In a coffee bar across the street, a dozen men stood watching a replay of the race on TV. His breath restored, Danny began to walk, following the street downhill, trying to figure out where he was, where he should go, and what he should do.
The first thing,
he thought,
is . . . call Inzaghi.
He had the priest’s phone number on a scrap of paper in his wallet and he still had the cell phone Zebek had given him.

Though he knew the billionaire could monitor his calls, it didn’t make any difference where Inzaghi was concerned. Zebek was already trying to kill them both, so warning the priest was a kind of freebie. They could only kill each of them once, after all.

The phone rang four times; then the answering machine picked up. Danny waited for the tone and left a message that was borderline coherent:
Forget our meeting. You gotta get out. He knows about the files. Check your machine. I’ll call back every couple of hours.
It was something like that, but with lots of exclamation points.

Next up: he had to get his bag from the hotel. It had his tickets and everything else except his passport. (He had that on him.) Then he’d catch a cab to another town, where Zebek wouldn’t be looking for him. Then the train to Rome, a hotel, and a flight out in the morning. Once he got home, he’d sort things out. Take a look at the floppy with Terio’s files on it. Get the FBI involved.
Whatever it takes
.

But first, the bag. He couldn’t go back to the hotel. Zebek would almost certainly have the place watched. But he could call the hotel and ask the concierge to send a taxi to him with his bag.

Stopping at a café on a side street in the Dragon
contrada
, Danny ordered a double espresso and searched through his wallet for the hotel’s card. Finding it, he asked the
barista
if could use the house phone. Then he dialed the Scacciapensieri and asked for the concierge.

“I was hoping you could send a taxi for me,” Danny said.

“If you like, signore—”

“And I’ll need my duffle bag,” Danny reminded him. “They’re holding it at the front desk.”

The concierge chuckled. “I think we have a confusion! Signore Zebek’s staff—they collect your bag a few minutes ago. But this is okay, because they’re still here. They wait for you outside. So I think, maybe you don’t need a taxi. Do you want to talk to one of them?”

ELEVEN

He hitched a ride with a trio of Brits who were “on holiday” from a candy factory in Liverpool and, like him, didn’t have a place to stay in Siena. But they did have a car—a rented VW Golf—and, unlike Danny, they were much too drunk to drive.

He met them on the way out of town, where they were drinking cans of lager by the roadside while fumbling with a jack in a slapstick effort to change a flat tire. “Oy!” one of them shouted, raising the jack in the air. “Mate! Can ya tell us what
the fuck
we’re supposed to do with this?”

It was a newfangled scissors jack that Danny did, in fact, know how to use. Soon the tire was changed, and so grateful were his new friends that they thrust a can of Holstein’s into his hands and offered to take him wherever he might be going—so long as he drove.

They decided upon San Gimignano, about twenty miles away. One of Italy’s most famous hill towns, its skyline was pierced by an array of improbable and faintly sinister watchtowers that, seen against the sun, suggested a child’s drawing of Lower Manhattan.

Danny left “the lads” at a small pensione and went looking for a taxi that would take him to Rome. No dice. One after another, San Gimignano’s cabdrivers gave him a sorrowful look or laughed in his face. It wasn’t so much the drive to Rome, they explained. It was the return trip. They wouldn’t get back until morning. A wad of cash might have worked, but he didn’t have one.

He had better luck at the bus terminal, where he learned that he could catch an express to Florence in half an hour. There he’d have a fifteen-minute wait, after which there would be another express to Rome. Or maybe in Firenze he could get a cab. He bought a ticket to Florence, crossed the street to a café, and ordered a bottle of Peroni. Then he pulled out the cell phone and started to call Inzaghi.

This time, he didn’t wait for the answering machine to come on. After the third ring, he hung up. There just wasn’t any point in leaving the same message that he’d left before. And, besides, the cell phone was beginning to worry him.

Could it be used to track him?

He remembered a news story that he’d read about a woman who had been carjacked. Imprisoned in the trunk of the car with her cell phone, she’d dialed 911 and kept the line open to the police. The cops tracked the call from one cell tower to another. Before long, they realized the woman must be heading south on Route 29 (or whichever road it was). Eventually, they set up a roadblock and rescued her.

The newspapers said the police had “triangulated” the call, but that wasn’t accurate. The woman’s car had been traveling through a rural area, so its signal was never within reach of more than a single tower. As a result, all the police could tell was which “cell” she was in and how far she was from the tower at its center.

If the carjackers had been in the city, where cell towers were numerous, the cops might have triangulated the call by measuring the time it took for the signal to arrive at three different locations. Then they could have located the woman to within a few feet.

Could Zebek do that? Danny stared at the phone in his hand. Probably not, he decided. Even if the billionaire was wired into the cops or the local phone company, Danny had no intention of keeping the line open or of staying in one place. So he ought to be okay, unless . . .

Unless the phone was more advanced than its American counterparts—which seemed likely. Zebek made a point of being on the cutting edge of just about everything. Which meant that the phone might well be equipped with “enhanced 911,” an Orwellian “safety feature” federally mandated for all American cell phones by 2005. Embedded with geo-positioning devices, the new phones would broadcast signals establishing their whereabouts to within fifty meters.

Screw it,
Danny thought. Finishing his drink, he dropped the cell phone in a trash can on the way out and returned to the bus station. An hour later he was in Florence, and twenty minutes after that he was on a second bus to Rome. This time, he had a seat at the front, where he was given a close, and in fact unavoidable, view of the day’s video selection.

It was a Disney movie—
The Incredible Journey
—and it began to play as soon as the bus pulled out of its bay.

Grimly Danny watched as two lost dogs and their fussy little pal, the cat, made their way through a dangerous world to rejoin their human family. For upwards of two hours the lovable fur balls skirted disaster, weaving in and out of one tough spot after another, all the while speaking Italian.

Danny knew the movie had been made with kindergartners in mind, but he found himself completely caught up in the tale. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that, like him, the wandering pets were in danger and desperate to find their way home. Or maybe it was deeper than it seemed—a pet-centric retelling of
The Odyssey
. He hoped so, because otherwise he’d have to admit that he had the emotional maturity of the average five-year-old.

That would have been Ian’s theory.

Ian was merciless where Danny’s predilection for popular culture was concerned. “It’s one thing to be ‘open,’ ” he’d once remarked, “but it’s another to be a Dumpster with the lid up.” This because Danny played pickup basketball, listened to the Cowboy Junkies, and thought Krazy Kat was more interesting than Andy Warhol.

It was an aspect of Danny that Caleigh found charming. He could be happy at the Kennedy Center listening to Verdi, but he’d be just as content at a
Survivor
party.

Caleigh.
Thinking of Caleigh reminded him of Paulina, and Paulina reminded him of the trouble he was in—here, there, and everywhere. A soft groan fell from his lips, prompting the woman in the seat next to him to nod and smile vigorously at the television.
“Si,”
she whispered,
“e cosi triste.”
Her eyes were wet, he saw, and, what was worse, so were his own.

As the bus rolled through the twilight, he stared at his reflection in the window and began making deals between himself and God. These were complicated bargains that bound marriage and fidelity to his continued survival. Not that he believed in God. Not really. Then again—not that he didn’t. Some immutable Catholic-boy core must have survived his childhood, because he found himself thinking that if he could save Inzaghi that ought to count for something. After all, the man was a priest.

Zebek’s face floated into his mind, the rich man’s dark eyes boring into him, his cane punching the air:
You know,
Daniel,
before you fuck with someone, you really ought to think about who you’re pissing off.
Danny thought of Chris Terio in his little tomb, of Jason Patel crucified in the desert, of Terio’s house reduced to ashes. Where Zebek was concerned, it was pretty much his way or the die-way.

He thought back to what the billionaire had said on the phone, when he’d been speaking in Danny’s voice. He’d told the priest that he’d get to Rome by nine or ten—an hour or two before Danny himself could arrive. Zebek knew that Danny was listening to the conversation, so he must also have known that Danny would try to warn the priest. Either Danny would call Inzaghi or, if that didn’t work, he’d go to the priest’s apartment.

It occurred to him that this might be what Zebek was counting on—a backup plan, in case Danny escaped the thugs in the Campo. A way of killing two birds with one stone. If so, Danny wasn’t going to let it happen. When he got to Inzaghi’s, he’d create a ruckus—set off fire alarms, get the cops involved, whatever it took. He was determined to warn the priest. One way or another, he had to try.

Like Shadow.

On the inescapable little blue screen before him, Shadow the dog was giving it his all. He and his pals were trapped in a railyard, having narrowly escaped the wheels of a passing freight train, only to have fallen through some rotten planks, landing in a deep pit. The cat and the younger dog had managed to clamber up its slippery sides, but Shadow was too old—and too weakened by his adventures. “Jump, Shadow! Jump!” pleaded Sassy the cat.

“I can’t believe I’m watching this,” Danny muttered to himself. “A guy’s trying to kill me, and I’m practically in tears because some actor-mutt falls into a hole.”

Speaking in a world-weary baritone, Shadow ordered the other critters to
“continuare senza de mi.”
Danny knew what the old dog was saying and knew, also, that the Disney organization was not about to let this lovable
cane
expire in some industrial pit. Nevertheless, when the bus finally pulled into the terminal in Rome and Shadow came bounding out of nowhere into the arms of his young owner Danny’s heart slammed against his chest.

“Ecco!”
the conductor announced. The mechanized door wheezed open and disgorged its passengers into the hot Roman night. The concrete apron where the buses pulled in was crowded with people waiting to greet friends and family while travelers edged their way onto the buses. Arriving passengers stood in bunches around men in caps, who dragged their luggage from the compartments under the buses. Loudspeakers boomed unintelligibly.

Danny followed the crowd into the bus terminal and out into the street. Unruly clusters of people waited for taxis at what seemed like random points beside the road. Nothing resembling a line—or a system in lieu of a line—seemed to exist. After ten minutes of losing ground, Danny lunged past a well-dressed woman in red, who gestured mightily and complained noisily as he slid into the backseat of a white taxi. When the driver spoke to him in Italian, Danny gave him the business card with Inzaghi’s address on it.

The driver glanced at it, then rolled down his window and cursed at the woman in red, who’d had the effrontery to slap the car’s fender. Then he chuckled.
“Andiamo,”
he said, and the cab jerked away from the curb.

There were no thoroughfares in Central Rome, as far as Danny could tell. The trip to Via della Scrofa took twenty minutes and involved at least as many turns—and they still weren’t there. Raindrops spattered the window. The pavement gleamed. Neon pooled on the street, just like it did in a Michael Mann movie—or in a Hiroshige print.

Even this late and in the rain, Rome was wide open, the streets crowded. The cafés, bars, and gelato stands were packed, the corners clotted with people looking for an opportunity to cross the street in the rain. The driver tapped his horn once or twice to clear jaywalkers out of the way, but his touch was so light that Danny realized that he’d hardly heard a horn in Rome. It must be illegal, he decided. Otherwise the Italians would be leaning on it all the time.

They were not, from what he could tell, a diffident people.

On one corner, Danny watched a young couple jump out of the way. They laughed—the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulder. She had a cone of gelato and Danny watched her take a tiny bite, then round her mouth into an
O
of delight. There was something about her that reminded him of Caleigh and something about the moment that stung him.
What was he doing in Rome?
Everything he loved was in Washington. What was he thinking, coming here?

The driver drummed his fingers on the dash.
“Merda,”
he muttered, then turned to Danny and fired off a question.

“Sorry,” Cray said, a helpless look on his face.

“No capiche?”
The driver sat back in his seat and sighed. A Vespa whined past, only inches away, as the driver reached for a small book and began turning its pages. Finally, he shut off the meter, got out, and jerked open the door to the backseat.

“Camminata,”
he said. “You walk now.”

“I
what
?”

“Is no far.
Accidenti
.”

Danny saw what he meant. Traffic was at a standstill. Climbing out of the backseat, he paid the fare on the meter and added a couple of thousand lire. “Which way?” he asked, looking this way and that.

The driver sighed and held out his hand, palm down. Keeping his fingers and thumbs aligned, he gestured left and right. “
A destra, sinistra, a destra.
Is shoo-shoo-shoo, okay?”

Danny nodded, not sure if it was or it wasn’t okay. The driver gave him a you-can-do-it smile and a little pat on the shoulder. “Ciao!” he said, and slid behind the wheel.

Danny did as he’d been told. Not the shoo-shoo-shoo part (whatever that was), but the right-left-right. The turns took him deeper and deeper into a working-class neighborhood that seemed to be the site of an intractable traffic jam. People stood on tiptoe in the street beside their cars, doors open, craning to see what was up ahead.

Danny kept walking until he saw a placard affixed to the second floor of a corner building:
VIA DELLA SCROFA
. It was a big street, lined with shops, but it wasn’t a straight street, as it would have been in Washington or New York. After a block or so, it veered off sharply to the left, following some invisible demographic of its own.

“Che cosa e questo?”
a silver-haired man asked Danny. All he could do was shrug. He passed an art gallery, a shoe repair shop, the window of an antiquarian bookstore. Then he turned a corner and the reason for the backup became apparent. Red and blue lights fluttered against the walls of the old buildings, casting puddles of light on the wet pavement. In the center of the street, crowds pressed up against a fragile wall of candy-striped barricades. All around, people craned to see what lay behind them.
“Che cosa e?”

“Che e esso?”

“Alastair?” a woman asked in a plummy accent. “Was there a crash?”

“Dunno, mollycoddles. Can’t quite see.”

Danny’s stomach tightened as he glanced back at the wall above the antiquarian bookstore. The number, he saw, was close to Inzaghi’s own.

Alastair turned to the man beside him and put the question to him in fluent Italian.

Danny shrugged.

“Well?” the woman demanded.

“
He
doesn’t know, either,” her husband replied.

Then the crowd parted as yet another police car klaxoned its way toward the barricades. People were beginning to lose patience. A wall of horns rose up around them.