“Perhaps under my company’s name, then,” I offered. “TransAtlantic.”
After a moment he shook his head again. “Do you know when these were made?”
I slammed my open palm down on the marble surface of the reception desk. “I don’t care, dammit!” I said. “This damned hotel screwed up—”
“If you need a room, sir, I’m sure—”
I signaled to the bell captain. “No. Not here. I’m sure the Excelsior doesn’t make these kinds of mistakes.” To the bell captain I commanded: “Bring my bags around to the service entrance. Not the front, the back. And I want a taxi to the Excelsior, on the Via Veneto. At once.”
The bell captain bowed slightly and gestured to one of the bellboys, who turned the cart with my luggage around and began to push it toward the back of the lobby.
“Sir, if there is some kind of mistake, I’m sure we can straighten it out very quickly,” the reception clerk said. “We have a single room available. In fact, we have several small suites available.”
“I don’t want to trouble you,” I said haughtily as I followed the luggage cart to the rear of the lobby, toward the service entrance.
Within minutes a cab pulled up to the rear of the hotel. The bellboy loaded the suitcase and carry-on bag into the Opel’s trunk, I tipped him handsomely, and got in.
“The Excelsior, signore?” the driver said.
“No,” I said. “The Hassler. Piazza Trinità dei Monti.”
* * *
The Hassler overlooks the Spanish Steps, one of the most pleasant locations in Rome. I had stayed here before, and the Agency had booked a room for me here, at my request. The Grand Hotel episode, of course, had been a ruse, and it seemed to have worked—I had lost the followers. I didn’t know how long I could stay here unobserved, but for the time being, things seemed to be okay.
Exhausted now, I showered and collapsed onto the king-size bed, slipped between the luxurious, crisply ironed linen sheets, momentarily at peace, and drifted into a deep, much-needed sleep, which was troubled by apprehensive dreams about Molly.
* * *
A few hours later I was awakened by the distant honking of a horn somewhere near the Spanish Steps. It was midafternoon, and the suite was flooded with light. I rolled over, picked up the phone, and ordered a cappuccino and a bite to eat. My stomach was growling.
I looked at my watch and calculated that the business day was just beginning in Boston. I placed a call to a bank in Washington where I still maintained an old but active account I’d opened years ago. My broker, John Matera, had indeed wired my Beacon Trust “earnings.” (Earnings, of course, was the one thing they weren’t.) No sense, I figured, in making it easy for the CIA to monkey around with my money. I knew their tricks and was determined not to trust them fully.
The coffee came fifteen minutes later, served in a large, deep gold-rimmed cup, with beautifully presented sandwiches: thick slices of moist white bread topped with paper-thin slices of prosciutto, arugula, a few slices of pecorino fresco, and ringed with beautiful deep red slices of tomato, glistening with fragrant olive oil.
I felt as alone as I’d ever felt. Molly, I was sure, was fine—was, in fact, being protected as much as she was being kept hostage. Still, I worried about her, about what they were telling her about me, how scared she was, how she was holding up. But I was convinced that she would not buckle; she would instead make her captors’ lives hell.
I smiled to myself, and just then the phone rang.
“Mr. Ellison?” came the American-accented voice.
“Yes.”
“Welcome to Rome. You’ve picked a nice time to come.”
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s much more comfortable here than it is in the States this time of year.”
“And a lot more to see,” my CIA contact said, completing the coded exchange.
I hung up.
Fifteen minutes later, in the soft light of a late Rome afternoon, I came out of the Hassler. The Spanish Steps swarmed with people, standing, sitting, smoking, taking pictures, shouting at each other, laughing at one another’s jokes. I surveyed the bustling scene, felt terribly out of place amid the vivacity, and, my stomach already knotted with tension, got into a cab.
THIRTY-ONE
At the Piazza della Repubblica, not far from Rome’s main train station, I rented a car at Maggiore, using my phony Bernard Mason driver’s license and gold Citibank Visa card. (Actually, the credit card itself was real; but the bills run up by the fictitious Mr. Mason were paid, through a Fairfax, Virginia, law firm, by the CIA.) I was given a gleaming black Lancia as big as an ocean liner: the sort of car that Bernard Mason, nouveau riche American businessman, would undoubtedly hire.
The cardiologist’s office was located a short drive away, on the Corso del Rinascimento, a noisy, traffic-snarled main street just off the Piazza Navona. I parked in an underground lot a block and a half away and located the doctor’s building, whose entrance bore a brass plaque that was engraved DOTT. ALDO PASQUALUCCI.
I was early for my appointment, almost forty-five minutes, and I decided to walk over to the piazza. For a variety of reasons, I knew it was best to adhere to the schedule set for me. I was to meet the cardiologist at eight that evening—unusually late in the day, but deliberately so. The inconvenience, I suppose, was designed to further my legend: this was the only time that the reclusive American tycoon, Bernard Mason, could meet the physician. Thus inconvenienced, Dr. Pasqualucci would presumably be more inclined to be cooperative and deferential. Pasqualucci was considered one of the finest cardiologists in Europe, which was surely why the former KGB chief had consulted him. So it was logical that Mr. Mason, who resided several months of the year in Rome, would seek out his services. All Pasqualucci knew was that this American had been referred by another physician, an internist whom Pasqualucci knew casually, and that a fair degree of discretion was called for, since Mason’s extensive business empire would suffer incalculable financial harm if word got out that he was being treated for a cardiac problem. Pasqualucci did not know that the physician who had referred Mason was in fact on a CIA retainer.
At this time of the evening the baroque ocher edifices of the Piazza Navona were illuminated dramatically with klieg lights, a stunning sight. The square bustled with people, crowding into cafés, garrulous and excited and electric. Couples strolled, absorbed in each other, or eyeing others; in another time they would have promenaded. The piazza was built on the ancient ruins of the Stadium of the emperor Domitian. (I’ll always remember that it was Domitian who once said, “Emperors are necessarily wretched men since only their assassination can convince the public that the conspiracies against their lives are real.”)
The evening lights glinted and sparkled off the spouting water of the two Bernini fountains to which people always seemed to gravitate: the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the square’s center and the Fountain of the Moor at the south end. It was an odd place, the Piazza Navona. Centuries ago it was used for chariot races, and later the popes ordered the place flooded so that mock naval battles could be waged.
I walked through the crowd, feeling somewhat alienated from the others, their effervescent high spirits contrasting with my anxiety. I had spent quite a few nights like this, alone in foreign cities, and I’d always considered it oddly lulling to be surrounded by the babble of foreign voices. That night, of course, graced (or was it afflicted?) with this strange ability, I found myself increasingly confused, as thoughts blended with chatter and cries in one great indistinguishable rush.
I heard, aloud: “Non ho mai avuto una settimana peggiore!” and then, in that thought-voice: Avessimo potuto salvarlo!
And aloud: “Lui e uscito con la sua ragazza.”
And in that softer thought-voice: Poverino!
And then, another muzzy thought-voice, but this one distinctly American: damn him left me all alone!
I turned. She was obviously an American, in her early twenties, wearing a Stanford sweatshirt un
der an acid-washed denim jacket, walking by herself a few feet from me. Her round, plain face was set in a pout. She caught me staring at her and gave me an angry glance. I looked away, and just then I heard another phrase, in American-accented English, and my heart began to thud.
Benjamin Ellison.
But where was it coming from? It had to be close, had to be within six feet or so. Must have come from one of the dozens of people immediately surrounding me, but who? It took enormous restraint to keep from whipsawing my head around, from side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of someone who looked slightly out of place, an Agency type following me. I turned casually, heard—
can’t let him notice
—and began to accelerate my pace, striding toward the church of St. Agnes, still unable to single out the follower from the crowds, and suddenly lunged left, knocking over a white plastic café table, knocking an elderly man off balance, and plunged into the darkness of a narrow alley, which was fetid with urine. From behind I could hear shouts, a woman’s voice and a man’s, the sounds of a commotion. I ran down the alley, sensed footsteps following me, and ducked into a doorway, which appeared to be some sort of service entrance. I flattened myself against the tall wooden doors, feeling the crust of peeling paint sharp against my neck and head, and slowly bent my knees and sank toward the cold tile floor of the foyer. I could just see out through a broken glass pane in the middle of the exterior door. The darkness and shadows would, I thought, conceal me sufficiently.
Yes: a watcher.
A hulking, muscle-bound figure made its way down the alley, hands outstretched as if they were being used to keep balance. I had seen this man in the piazza, off to my right, but he had looked like every other Italian man; he had blended in too well for my unpracticed eye. Now he passed directly in front of me, moving slowly, and I saw his eyes peering directly into the tiny lobby where I knelt.
Did he see me?
I heard: run to …
His eyes stared straight ahead, not down at an angle.
I felt the cold steel of the pistol in my pants pocket, slowly withdrew it. Released the safety, and fingered the trigger tentatively.
He moved on, down the alley, peering into doorways on either side. I crept forward, watched as he reached the end of the alley, paused for a moment, and took a right.
I sat back, let out a long, slow breath. Closed my eyes for a minute, then leaned forward and glanced out again. He was gone. I had lost him for the time being.
Several endless minutes later I emerged and walked down the alley, in the direction the watcher had gone earlier, away from the piazza, and through a rabbit warren of dimly lit back streets to the Corso.
* * *
At precisely eight o’clock, Dr. Aldo Pasqualucci opened his office door and, with a slight bow of the head, shook my hand. He was surprisingly short, rotund but not fat, wearing a comfortably worn brown tweed suit with a camel sweater-vest. His face was kind. His brown eyes had a look of concern about them. His hair was black, peppered with gray, and looked recently combed. In his left hand he held a meerschaum; the air around him was vanilla-fragrant with pipe smoke.
“Please come in, Mr. Mason,” he said. His accent wasn’t Italian at all, but British, upper-class and crisp. He waved with his pipe toward the examination room.
“Thank you for seeing me at such an inconvenient time,” I said.
He dipped his head, neither assenting nor disagreeing, and said smilingly, “My pleasure. I’ve heard much about you.”
“And I you. But I must ask first…”
I paused, concentrated … and found nothing audible.
“Yes? If you can please sit over here and remove your shirt.”
As I sat on the paper-covered examination table and took off my suit jacket and shirt, I said, “I need to make sure I can count on your absolute discretion.”
He took a blood-pressure cuff from the table behind him, wrapped it around my arm, pressed the Velcro closures together, and said, “All of my patients can count on complete confidentiality. I’d have it no other way.”
Then I said loudly, deliberately provocative: “But can you guarantee it?”
And in the instant before Pasqualucci replied, pumping the bulb until the cuff squeezed my upper arm uncomfortably, I heard:… pomposo … arrogante …
He was standing so close to me that I could feel and smell his tobacco-scented breath hotly against me, sense a tension in him, and I knew I was reading his thoughts.
In Italian.
He was bilingual, I had been briefed: Italian-born but raised in Northumbria, Great Britain, and schooled at Harrow and then Oxford.
So what did that mean? What did it mean to be bilingual? Would he speak in English while thinking in Italian, was that how it worked?
He said, this time with considerably less warmth, “Mr. Mason, as you well know, I treat some very prominent and very reclusive individuals. I shall not reveal their names. If you feel uncomfortable about my discretion, please feel free to leave right now.”
He had left the cuff pumped up to its maximum rather too long, so that my arm throbbed. At least half deliberately, I suspected. But now, as if punctuating his declaration, he released the pressure valve, which gave off a loud hiss.
“As long as we understand each other,” I said.
“Fine. Now, Dr. Corsini said that you have been suffering from occasional fainting spells, that once in a while your heart races seemingly without reason.”
“Correct.”
“I want to take a full history. Maybe a Holter monitor, maybe a stress-thallium test, we’ll see. But first I want you to tell me in your own words what brings you in here.”
I turned around to face him and said, “Dr. Pasqualucci, my sources tell me that you also treat a certain Vladimir Orlov, formerly of the Soviet Union, and that concerns me.”
He sputtered, “I said—as I say—you are free to see another cardiologist. I can even recommend one to you—”
“I am merely saying, Doctor, that it worries me that Mr. Orlov’s files, or charts, or whatever they’re called, are here in your office. If ever there’s a break-in because of … shall we say, interest in him on the part of any intelligence agency, then aren’t my files, too, vulnerable? I want to know what security precautions you take.”
Dr. Pasqualucci looked at me hawkishly, angrily, his face reddening, and I began to receive his thoughts with an astonishing clarity.
* * *
An hour or so later I maneuvered the Lancia through the loud, crazed, snarling traffic toward the outskirts of Rome, to the via del Trullo, and then turned right down the via S. Guiliano, a modern and rather desolate section of the city. A few yards up on the right I located the bar and pulled over.
It was one of those all-purpose bars-cum-everything-else, a little white-painted stucco building with a striped yellow awning, white plastic outdoor furniture neatly stacked in front. A Lavazza coffee sign bore the inscription: ROSTICCERIA-PIZZERIA-PANINOTECA-SPAGHETTERIA.
It was twenty minutes before ten o’clock, and the place swarmed with teenagers in leather jackets, jostling with gray-haired laborers drinking at the bar. A jukebox blasted out an old American song I recognized: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Whitney Houston, I decided.
My CIA contact, Charles Van Aver—the man who had called me at the hotel earlier in the day—wasn’t there. It was too early, and in any case he would probably be in his car in the parking lot out back. I settled on a plastic stool at the bar, ordered an Averna, and watched the crowd. One of the teenagers was playing a card game that seemed to involve a lot of slapping of cards against the deck. A large family gathered around a too-small table, toasting one another. No trace of Van Aver, and—with the sole exception of me—no one seemed to be there who didn’t belong.
In the cardiologist’s out-patient office, I was able to confirm what I had first observed with Dr. Mehta, that a bilingual person thinks in two languages, a peculiar sort of melange. Dr. Pasqualucci�
�s thoughts were an odd twisting, blending of Italian and English.
My Italian was sufficiently workable to enable me to make out the sense of what he was thinking.
Concealed in the floor of his supply closet, a small room that evidently held cleaning substances, mops and brooms, photocopy paper, computer disks, typewriter ribbons, and the like, was a concrete-reinforced safe. It held samples of controlled substances, the files of an unpleasant malpractice case he had been involved in over ten years ago, and several patient files. These patients included several prominent Italian politicians of rival parties; the chief executive of one of Europe’s largest automotive empires; and Vladimir Orlov.
As Dr. Pasqualucci placed a cold stethoscope on my chest and listened for a long, long time, I agonized over how I could possibly get him to think the combination to the safe, how I could ever get to it, when all of a sudden I heard something, an almost-but-not-quite-distinct buzz, like a shortwave radio coming into and out of tune, the words:
Volte-Basse …
and Castelbianco
And again: Volte-Basse … Castelbianco.… and Orlov …
And I knew then as much as I had to know.
Still Van Aver hadn’t appeared. I had memorized his photograph: a large, flush-faced man, a hard-drinking southerner of sixty-eight. He wore his thick white hair so long that it curled over the collar at the back of his neck, at least in the most recent Agency file photo. His nose was large and webbed with the broken veins of an alcoholic. An alcoholic, Hal Sinclair used to say, is a person you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.
At quarter after ten I paid the bill and slipped quietly out the restaurant-bar’s front door. The parking lot was dark, but I could make out the usual assortment of Fiat Pandas, Fiat Ritmos, Ford Fiestas, Peugeots, and a black Porsche. After the din of the bar, I enjoyed the quiet of the dark lot, inhaling the cold air that somehow, in this part of Rome, seemed cleaner and crisper. A moped buzzed by, its flat, high-pitched whine piercing.
In the farthest row of cars was a gleaming olive Mercedes, license plate ROMA 17017. And there he was, asleep in the driver’s seat, in an old man’s slouch. I suppose I had expected that he’d have the motor running, impatient to set out for the three-hours-plus drive north to Tuscany, but the car was dark. Neither was the interior light on; Van Aver was, I figured, sleeping off the vast quantities of booze he regularly consumed, according to his personnel file. An alcoholic, yes, but a man who’d been around, who knew everyone, and so his peccadilloes were tolerated.
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