Mr. Ted frowned at the mention of Mary Louise. Kristin looked at him. She really did have to get him a new ribbon.
“No,” she said finally, “I haven’t told her. It’s none of her business,” she added.
Mr. Ted glanced at her bureau drawer. The yellow envelope lay inside, empty. Mary Louise had never even mentioned it. She’d never even asked when Kristin would pay her back.
“OK, OK,” Kristin said. “I’ll leave a note.”
Five minutes later, when Kristin Carson closed the front door of the building and stepped onto the street, dark was coming down. It wasn’t raining for once, but it was colder than she’d thought. The last of the light folded into a thin sticky mist. She should have brought gloves.
Halfway down the block, teetering on her high-heeled boots, the roller bag bumping behind her, she crossed the street. Kristin hopped up onto the opposite pavement, lifted the suitcase over the gutter, and looked back. The apartment window, the little one at the end of the hall, was glassy and black. She’d forgotten to leave a light on and Mr. Ted was afraid of the dark.
Something quivered in her chest. If she ran, if she went up the stairs two at a time, she could snatch him, and still make it. Still not be late. She glanced left and right. There was no one around, and she’d have to leave the suitcase, or drag it back, and dig out her keys, and—she was being a baby. Mr. Ted was a stuffed bear, for Christ’s sake. With a ratty bow, and glass eyes, and a button in his ear.
As she turned away, Kristin caught the flowery scent of the perfume he’d bought for her. It wouldn’t have been her choice, but she’d doused it on her coat collar, and even on her scarf. Now she realized he was right. It suited her. Kristin Carson adjusted her grip on the bag and walked quickly down the sidewalk and through the San Frediano Gate.
Wednesday, February 3
“So,” Enzo Saenz asked, “what do we know about the girl?”
Pallioti shrugged. It was nothing more than a slight lift and fall of his shoulders and spoke volumes. Of impatience. Annoyance. And something more than a tinge of disdain for the schools that could not keep track of their students, especially when those students were wealthy and American and had parents who were making a fuss. They stopped for the stream of traffic that spilled off the Lungarno toward the Ognissanti.
“Kristin.” The unfamiliar name sat awkwardly on Pallioti’s tongue. “Kristin Carson,” he said.
It was just after nine o’clock in the morning on the first Wednesday in February, and still freezing. Tires spat last night’s snow, causing both men to step back.
“Seventeen years old,” he went on. “Well, actually, she’ll be eighteen on Friday.” Pallioti’s nose wrinkled at the dirty snow and the leaden sky that promised more. “American citizen,” he added. “Arrived here in September with a group from a Sherbrooke College. For a year abroad.”
The way he said the last two words suggested that, in his opinion at least, this particular rite of passage—common throughout the world, but especially in America and England—was of dubious merit. Academically and otherwise.
Maybe, Enzo thought. Maybe not. Some minds would never broaden, no matter how many stamps their passport had. Others flowered in a local library. What could not be argued, however, was that the postgraduate year, the gap year, the junior year abroad, the self-discovery sabbatical—whatever you wanted to call it—contributed considerably to the city’s coffers. Apartments were rented. Language schools bulged. Visits to the Uffizi and the Accademia tripled. And of course, the students bought things. Gelato. Beer. Shoes. Gloves. Anything with Prada written on it. And postcards. Lots of postcards.
The grand tour wasn’t dead. It had simply shifted gears and moved with the times. Or not. Basically it still meant the same thing. I came, I saw, I shopped. Sometimes Enzo thought it should be the city’s motto. Other times, he realized it was.
The traffic stopped as suddenly as it had begun, dammed at some unseen light blocks away.
“Let me guess,” Enzo said as they stepped into the street. “She’s studying art history?”
Pallioti’s eyes slid sideways. It had become a kind of bad joke, like people ringing up and asking if your refrigerator was running. I spent a year studying art history in Florence. He didn’t bother to answer. Instead he said, “Her parents landed in Rome on Sunday morning,” and sighed, as if the mere idea of a transatlantic flight exhausted him. “Flew up here in the afternoon. The girl was supposed to meet them for dinner at their hotel. When she didn’t turn up, they figured she’d appear in the morning. She didn’t, and didn’t answer her messages. On Monday night they contacted the school. Yesterday they went to the consulate. Her father knows people in Washington. Replaced part of the vice president’s brother.”
Enzo looked at him as if he’d lost his marbles.
“He’s a surgeon. Knees.” Pallioti waved his hand vaguely, as if that explained everything. “They’re visiting for a week,” he added. “The parents. To celebrate her birthday. They have a party planned, for Friday night.” Pallioti named one of the more expensive, and pretentious, restaurants in the city. “She shares an apartment.” He reached into a pocket and handed Enzo a card with the address on it. “With another student in the program. She hasn’t been seen there, and there’s no record of her leaving Italy. Or of her flying down to Sicily or Sardinia, or wherever it is they go.”
Enzo had a sudden vision of small brightly colored birds, let loose and scattering to the four winds.
“No airline booking,” Pallioti said. “No car rental or train booking made online, at an agency, or a station. An alert has been issued, all points of entry and departure, and she’s flagged on Europol.” He spoke abruptly, naming the EU-wide police database, ticking off the standard procedure that launched a missing-persons investigation—the throwing out of the net that would cover any hotel or hostel Kristin Carson tried to book into, any border she attempted to cross, anytime she slipped her credit card into an ATM, or bought a train, bus, or plane ticket using her own name. The clip of his words matched their pace, which quickened as they shouldered past a few cold-looking tourists and scurrying locals.
“Any chance they’re together, this Kristin and the other girl, the roommate?”
Pallioti shook his head.
“None. Unless Kristin’s hiding under the bed. I’ve arranged for the roommate to meet us, with the parents and the teacher in charge.” His gloved hands clapped, beating against the cold. “I also called the school in the United States that runs the course. This morning. She, Kristin, didn’t attend it, for high school or whatever they call it, so they don’t know all that much about her. She signed up for this program more or less at the last minute. When I pushed, they admitted that the recommendations from her own school weren’t good. Apparently she’s done this kind of thing before.”
“What kind of thing?” Enzo asked.
Pallioti shrugged without breaking stride.
“Pulled vanishing acts. Disappeared. According to the woman I spoke to, her record suggests she likes to get people in a stew. Especially if they’re her parents. The school wasn’t going to accept her because of it, for this course, but—” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for cash. “They were having a hard time filling places, the economy and all. And Papa was persuasive. To be fair, they also said they haven’t had a problem with her. Until now.”
“Until her parents arrived.” Enzo stopped abruptly, planting his feet like a mule’s. “So, this is a complete waste of time?” He asked. “Another windup?”
Pallioti stopped and looked at him. “Does it matter?”
It didn’t, and both of them knew it. What mattered was that the girl’s father “knew people in Washington.” What mattered was that foreign students equaled cash, and Florence wasn’t the only beautiful city in Italy, and February was a dull time for the press, and wealthy blond American girls were like chum to sharks. Especially if they were missing.
Pallioti sho
ok his head, and walked on.
“As of now,” he said a moment later, “that’s all Guillermo’s dug up.”
Guillermo, whose very sharp brain was housed in a head as bald and polished as a billiard ball, was Pallioti’s secretary, and notorious for his efficiency. And speed. The joke in the office was, if Guillermo called you in the middle of the night he’d tell you what you were dreaming.
Even so Enzo was surprised he’d had time to find out this much. Enzo himself had only heard of the girl half an hour ago when Pallioti had barked down the phone, clearly in no good temper, that “the Americans had gone and lost one of their students.” He hadn’t added, “Ancòra.” Again. But Enzo had heard it, loud and clear. It happened, every so often. Along with keys, passports, and train tickets—students got misplaced.
Among the police and carabinieri it was commonly acknowledged that the Japanese kept the best track. The French and Germans were OK. The English and Scandinavians were indifferent, and the Americans were hopeless. Usually these fragments of wandering youth—who were almost always girls and almost always found in the arms of some local Lothario—were none of Pallioti’s and Enzo’s business. Usually they had bigger fish to fry. But then again, usually, the kid’s father hadn’t replaced the vice president’s brother’s knee.
They turned the corner. Wind hit them in the face, splintered with cold. Even Enzo, who was normally impervious to weather and seasons, hated February. He began to turn his collar up, then thought better of it. They were only steps from the American Consulate, and it was arguably bad enough that he was wearing one of his ubiquitous leather jackets. He kept several changes of clothes in his locker, and had offered to at least shave, and even to change into a suit and tie for this meeting with the girl’s parents, but Pallioti had snapped that he didn’t have time. Which was nonsense. Enzo Saenz could go from unshaven street punk to suited, ponytailed five o’clock shadow faster than most magicians could blink. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that it was bad enough that they’d been called out on babysitting duty in the first place, and Pallioti was damned if he’d compound the insult by having his officers gussy themselves up for the American consul who, just for the record, he considered to be a bore and a half-wit.
All of which Enzo knew without a word being spoken because he had worked for Pallioti for the better part of a decade now, ever since Pallioti had first come to Florence and talent-spotted him for the undercover unit he had set up and run—an anarchic and surprisingly effective group that came to be known informally as the Angels. After six years of that, when Pallioti had been promoted and asked to form his new department—an elite squad designed to deal with especially complex, or unpleasant, or simply politically suicidal cases that no one else could be arm-twisted into taking—the first person he asked for was Enzo Saenz.
Since then Enzo had become Pallioti’s shadow. His fixer. The occasional Sancho Panza to his Quixote. And once or twice, his bodyguard. The product of a “mistake” made by the daughter of one of the cities more prominent families on a convent school trip to Quito thirty-four years earlier, Enzo Saenz, half Ecuadorian and half Italian, was raised by his grandparents, and had never met his father. Pallioti, on the other hand—son of a Milanese banker and a Florentine mother—was a solid product of the upper middle class. Separated by almost twenty years, the two men were as different, and as alike, as it was possible to be. If, a decade ago, they had been master and pupil, now they were something more equal, and more ill-defined.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Pallioti swore under his breath at the sight of the new security wall that had been erected outside the American Consulate. A legacy of the latest terrorist threat, it was see-through, bulletproof, presumably bombproof and, to be fair, not altogether unsightly. It had also, Enzo knew, nothing to do with his boss’s current fit of ill-temper.
Alessandro Pallioti was not annoyed about half-witted consuls or bulletproof panels, but simply because he was here. Because, despite the fact that he was one of Florence’s most senior policemen, he had been more or less ordered to drop what he was doing and proceed posthaste to what was commonly known as Uncle Sam sul Lungarno to personally express his deep interest and concern over the fact that a wayward teenager had run off for a few days. This was the part of his no-longer-quite-so-new job that Pallioti truly hated, being Band-Aid sticker in chief. It was, he reflected as he reached for his credentials, a strange and cruel trick of fate that he was quite as good at it as he was.
* * *
“The father’s name is Kenneth Carson,” Pallioti murmured as they were waved through the consulate’s security barrier. “Doctor, as I said. Surgeon. Famous. Wealthy. From the east coast. Boston.”
Enzo knew Boston. He had visited there once from New York. It was cold.
“And the mother?” Enzo tucked his identity wallet back into his inner pocket and fell into step beside Pallioti as they began to climb the stairs.
“Anna. No other children. She’s his second wife.”
“So not the girl’s mother?”
Pallioti shook his head. “No. According to the school, the mother was killed in a car accident when the girl was small. They suggested, strongly, that it’s one of the reasons she gets away with behaving the way she does.”
Given that Pallioti’s own mother had died when he was a child, Enzo doubted that Kristin Carson, or anyone else, getting a free pass because of a similar tragedy would hold much water with him.
“As I said,” Pallioti went on, “the parents arrived Sunday. It’s Freedom Day, or some president’s birthday, or something. One of those American holidays. In any case the school’s on break. There aren’t any classes. Which probably explains why they didn’t notice she was missing. About half of the girls live in independent apartments and apparently a lot of them have gone off.”
Carnevale was coming up. Enzo thought of the birds again. Teenaged ones, this time. With credit cards and hormones.
“So what do we actually know?” he asked. “I mean, in terms of facts?” Do we have anything more solid, he wanted to ask, than a vanishing act?
They had reached a landing. A woman was making her way down. Suited, glassy-eyed, and nodding, she held a cell phone jammed to her ear. Pallioti stopped to let her pass. A not especially handsome man whose restless soul was betrayed only by the habitual drumming of his fingers, he was both loved and feared by those who worked for him. They were inclined, somewhat to their surprise, to stand up when he came into a room, and were silent when he spoke. Many of them had asked specifically to be assigned to his new unit. He was so immaculately dressed that behind his back they called him Lorenzo. For Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as the Magnificent. Now a smile flitted across his face, turning his rather ordinary features sharp and foxlike.
“That,” he said, “is what I am counting on you to find out.”
* * *
Tall, sandy-haired, achingly polite, and possessed of a slightly goofy smile that he frequently used to pretend he was stupider than he was, James MacCready, deputy to the American consul in Florence, looked and sounded like an advertisement for the Ivy League. The fact that he actually came from Indiana, and had gone not to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Dartmouth, but to his state university on an athletic scholarship, only enhanced the disguise. Enzo had wondered, more than once, if James really was just a junior diplomat, or if he was something altogether murkier—one of the creatures who slid in and out of the CIA’s offices in the aptly named DC suburb of Foggy Bottom. Not that he cared. Unless James MacCready got in his way.
If not exactly friends, James and Enzo were a little more than colleagues. They belonged to the same gym, and occasionally ran side by side, pounding treadmills late into the night, private roads unreeling in their heads. In spring and autumn they sometimes played football—or according to James, soccer—on the same Sunday afternoon pickup team. In a more official capacity, they came across one another from time to time, usually at the city jail where James had been dispa
tched to explain that, contrary to popular wisdom, Uncle Sam offered no protection from Italy’s—or any other sovereign nation’s—laws. If you broke them, you were screwed. Whether you had an eagle on your passport or not.
Now, as they took their places around a conference table in a private room on the consulate’s upper floor, James MacCready caught Enzo’s eye. All this hoo-ha, the message that flicked between them said, over yet another kid who’ll probably stroll back in the next hour, unsuitable boyfriend in tow.
Trying not to smile, Enzo pulled out a chair. He knew that at least half the people gathered in the conference room, certainly himself, Pallioti, and James MacCready, and probably the art teacher and Kristin’s roommate as well, would put money on the fact that that’s exactly what would happen. Still there was the infinitesimally small, but nonetheless real, chance the girl was in serious trouble. Or about to be in serious trouble. Or dead. Which more or less summed up what he hated about cases like these. They didn’t require policemen, they required seers. One glance around the table suggested no one there had a crystal ball.
Dr. Kenneth Carson had placed himself at the head, obviously the seat he was used to. Clean-shaven and blue-eyed, his brown hair peppered a distinguished gray, Kristin’s father had the kind of fifty-year-old good looks—at once handsome and completely nondescript—that reminded Enzo of ads for luxury goods. Cars with a lot of walnut veneer. Flight cabins with seats that turned into beds. Credit cards named after rare metals.
His wife, at first glance anyway, was a perfect match. Attractive but not showy, blond and conservatively dressed, Anna Carson sat beside her husband. And across the table from Pallioti, whom she was not looking at. Which was interesting. Because, while everyone else in the room was at least pretending to be intent on what Pallioti was saying—to be listening closely to his expressions of concern for her stepdaughter’s well-being and to his reassurance that she had probably not gone far and his description of the alert that had been issued and the fact that the police, even as he spoke, were doing everything humanly possible to find her—Kristin’s stepmother was studying her hands.
The Lost Daughter Page 5
