The Pegasus Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  Next door had been a pensione, a few rooms in a district that made little accommodation for visitors, certainly none for the luxury demanded by Americans.

  Perfect.

  He spoke only a little Italian, mostly the tourist vocabulary of directions to the men’s room and complaints about prices. And the universal “Prego,” a chameleonlike word that could mean anything from “in a hurry” to “you’re welcome.” Unfortunately, his Latin was of about as much use as Chaucer’s English would have been in today’s America. Not that it mattered at the moment. The driver of the Opel taxi he took at the station was even more unfamiliar with the native language. Whatever the cabbie’s linguistic shortcomings, it quickly became obvious he had acclimated to driving in Rome, using horn and gestures rather than brakes. Intersections without stoplights were tests of testosterone levels.

  Since only about a fifth of the streets were wide enough for vehicles larger than the ubiquitous Vespas and bicycles, the ride was circuitous. From experience, Lang found it easier on the nerves to close his eyes, hold on and pray to Mercury, the Roman god of travelers in peril.

  The cab lurched suddenly and Lang winced in anticipation of metal grinding against metal. Instead, he heard a stream of Italian invective fading behind them. He opened his eyes. The cab was on a bridge, the Ponte Palatina. The dull green Tiber, lined with trees, sloshed listlessly along in its concrete prison below.

  Lang remembered an observation Dawn had made: Unlike Paris, London or even Budapest, Rome did not show its best face along its river. The Tiber was more like the city’s backyard, she maintained, a nuisance towards which no major buildings faced, distant from the center of ancient, medieval and modern Rome. As happened so often, she had verbalized a thought he had never quite completed. One more reason she left a gap in his life that he doubted would ever be filled.

  Ahead and to the right, the dome of Saint Peter’s floated on a brown sea of smog, coolly serene above the mass confusion of early morning traffic. A right turn and the river was replaced by three- and four-story buildings, their worn stucco roseate in the early sunlight. He recognized the Piazza di Santa Maria di Trastavere by its Romanesque church. The small square was full of grandmothers pushing baby carriages and men unloading trucks. The neighborhood was groggy, stretching and yawning as it recovered from the previous evening. Tonight, dark would again send the older folks and children inside while jazz musicians, mimes, and the young swingers took their places. By night, this piazza was Bourbon Street, the Left Bank, anyplace funky.

  The Opel dashed down an alley into which it barely fit and then came to an uncertain stop. Shabby buildings huddled around a small square paved with stones that could have been placed there centuries ago or yesterday. Shadows gave the area an ominous feeling as they stubbornly retreated from the morning.

  Lang got out, paid the cabby too much and crossed the square, wondering if he could have chosen a better location. The trattoria he remembered had not yet opened but next to it the pensione was advertising a vacancy. He slammed the huge brass knocker twice against the massive panels of the door. From inside, bolts began to slide, one, two, three before the door groaned open on iron hinges.

  Lang had forgotten the locks.

  Either the city experienced a perpetual wave of burglaries or its citizens were fascinated with locks. It had not been unusual to have to open two or three to get into his hotel at night, another pair to access the proper floor and two or three more on each room. A guest in one of the smaller hotels, one which did not have a night clerk on duty, was weighted down by more keys than the average jailer.

  “Si?”

  Lang was looking at an old man, his frame so small Lang was surprised he could open the mammoth door.

  “Una camera?” Lang asked. A room?

  The old man inspected Lang carefully. Lang knew the look. The innkeeper was trying to guess how much he could charge for the room. Stepping aside, the old man motioned his potential guest inside. “Una camera. Si.”

  Lang was trying to disguise his American accent. “Con bagno?” With bath?

  The old geezer had apparently decided Lang had potential above his average guests: students, the traveling poor. He shook his head, no, the room didn’t come with a bath. “But come with me,” he gestured.

  Lang followed him up a dark staircase and down a hall to an open door. Inside, the furnishings were about what Lang would have expected of a pensione: double bed, its sheets and pillows rolled at the foot; a dresser against the wall, its imitation wood veneer scarred by cigarette burns. Above it hung a mirror in a plastic frame. An armoire, also with a mirror, matched the dresser only in age.

  Lang crossed over to the single window and was delighted to find himself looking down into a courtyard, one of those Roman surprises hidden from the noise and grime of the street. Like many such places, this one had been turned into a compact and fertile vegetable patch, an Italian specialty. Even though it was only April, round red tomatoes peeped out from lush vines. Some eggplants already bore purple fruit. There were greens Lang didn’t recognize along with the basil and oregano without which no Italian garden is complete.

  The old man spewed out words so fast Lang would have had a hard time understanding him even if he had been fluent in the language. Lang surmised he was describing the amenities of the room.

  “Non parlo Italiano,” Lang said sadly as though admitting one of his life’s greater failures. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  Being German would explain the edge Lang had put on what little Italian he had spoken. After years in Bonn, Frankfurt and Munich, Lang’s German was pretty good.

  There were a number of other reasons to assume a German identity.

  The old man shook his head, reappraising his guest. Lang guessed he might well be old enough to remember the German-Italian Axis, Hitler and Mussolini. The Italians did not find it inconsistent to recall II Duce as a builder of roads, the only man ever to make the trains run on time, while blaming the devastation of their country on Hitler. In fact, the anniversary of the collapse of the Fascista was a holiday every April, called Liberation Day. The national pretense was that the people themselves had had nothing to do with World War II. True or not, the old hotelkeeper was not likely to admit he knew the language of the country’s former oppressors.

  Neither historic revision of Orwellian proportions nor the more recent Common Market had reduced the awe with which the Italians regarded the German people. Teutonic trains ran to the precise second; their automobiles were reliable and their economy and government stable. Germans were not like Italians.

  Even more distinct was the German’s lack of interest in the haggling that was part of every Italian purchase. Lang could see the disappointment in the old man’s eyes as he stepped into the hall to display what he considered the room’s most salable feature: it was adjacent to the guest bath.

  With a gesture, Lang declined his host’s offer to inspect the facility. Lang had seen enough bagno to anticipate he would stand and use the shower hose rather than sit in a tub that might receive a weekly cleaning.

  Lang nodded. He would take the room.

  “Quotidano?” Would Lang pay by the day?

  “Si.”

  The innkeeper named a number, disappointed when Lang’s lack of reaction indicated he had started too low. He held out his hand for Lang’s passport. Like most European countries, Italy required establishments renting rooms by the night to make records of their guests’ nationality papers, information entered into a computer by the local police and checked against lists of wanted criminals and other undesirables such as suspected terrorists or couples staying together without benefit of clergy.

  “Ho una ragazza,” Lang said with a salacious wink. I have a girlfriend. Lang tendered several large bills in excess of the night’s rent.

  Lang didn’t have to be fluent in the language to read the old man’s mind as he inspected the cash and leered, communicating his understanding of illicit romance with a wink. Thi
s guest, he was thinking, is a German and therefore wealthy. He wants only to spend a night or two with a woman not his wife without the potential inconvenience of that fact being stored in endless government records. The question was not one of morality but of economics. How large would be the bribe to the local police to forget this minor infraction of an onerous law that did nothing but invade personal freedom anyway?

  Such questions were frequent in Italian business.

  Lang headed for the stairs, pretending to be leaving, before the old man grudgingly agreed to accept what had been offered. He handed Lang a ring of keys along with another incomprehensible string of Italian and left the floor, his muttering trailing up the stairs behind him like malodorous smoke from a cheap cigar.

  Lang locked the door and stretched out on the bed. Through the open window, the sharp noises of traffic were smoothed into a sleepy drone. He inhaled the fragrance of freshly turned earth mixed with a bouquet of herbs.

  He thought of Janet and Jeff.

  In less than a minute, he was asleep.

  2

  Portugal

  0827 hours the same day

  Hundreds of miles away, at about the same time Langford’s plane touched down, fog swirled against rippled and nearly opaque windowpanes, condensing into tiny rivers of silver that ran along the leaded edge of each piece of ancient glass. The mist, not yet dissipated by a monochromatic sun, made gray stone resemble a grainy black-and-white photograph.

  From a window, a light, muted into quicksilver by the moist haze, danced across the otherwise still fog. The light took on a bluish tint as a computer screen flickered alive, an event so starkly anachronistic with the hand-carved stone, battlements and turrets as to be disturbing had anyone been watching.

  The man in front of the screen might also have been from another time. He wore a coarse robe with a hood, something from a medieval monastery, perhaps. Despite the chill, his feet were clad only in thong sandals. He waited impatiently for the Macintosh to boot up before typing an eight-letter password. A series of letters, five to a group, appeared. These groups were completely arbitrary to anyone without decryption software. When he was certain the message was complete, the operator touched a series of keys. The indecipherable letter blocks were replaced by a single sentence.

  The man wagged his chin up and down as though agreeing with what he was reading. An unauthorized and virtually undetectable entry into worldwide airline reservation systems had revealed that Langford Reilly had flown into Rome from Miami. Similar hacking into credit card records failed to disclose hotel reservations. Presumably his whereabouts would soon be available from police computers into which his passport would have been entered. The information could be picked as easily as grapes from the vine.

  The operator scowled. He didn’t like to wait; that wasn’t what computers were all about.

  A breeze parted the fog outside like a curtain and rattled the windows in their hand-forged lead casements like a spirit seeking entry.

  The man didn’t notice. He reread the message as he unconsciously twisted the silver chain around his neck. From the chain hung a pendant with four triangles. He input instructions to his electronic correspondent: Find Reilly. See who his past contacts in Rome might be. The authorities will shortly be looking for him also. Before you kill him, see what he knows, who he has told.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Rome

  1300 hours

  Lang woke up refreshed, having made up for the sleep he had missed on the plane and the change in time zones. Outside, the hum of traffic was missing. A check of his watch told him why. Thirteen hundred hours, one o’clock, the time in the afternoon when businesses, museums and even churches close for three hours.

  Lang swung his feet off the bed and unlocked the door. He stepped into the empty hall and gently rapped on the door of the communal bath. With no response, he ventured in. It was every bit as bad as he had anticipated. After washing his face in the cracked porcelain sink, he did his business before venturing out of the pensione.

  Standing in the shadow of the doorway, Lang checked the piazza for anyone who didn’t seem to belong. Little boys shouted as they kicked a scruffy soccer ball. Crones in black poked and sniffed the produce in a small vegetable stall. Old men sat at tables in front of the taverna across the way and drank coffee or grappa while watching with watery eyes. Those of the median ages between the very young and the very old were, Lang guessed, having lunch inside before returning to work.

  As he crossed the square, he was gratified to note the trattoria next to the pensione, the one with the bad food and worse art, had few customers.

  As he walked, he was surrounded by cats. The animal most symbolic of Rome wasn’t really the she-wolf of legend but an ordinary house tabby. They didn’t seem to belong to anyone if, indeed, a cat ever does. But they all looked well fed and healthy. Maybe that’s why he didn’t see any rats. Small fountains, no more than cement bowls with flowing pipes, were placed on almost every block so that the cats, and the occasional dog, wouldn’t go thirsty.

  The only thing more numerous than cats were Gypsies, dark-haired women extending roses for sale, reaching for palms to read, or suckling infants. Or muttering curses at passersby uninterested in whatever was being offered. Gypsies, Romans believed, made their real living as pickpockets and thieves. True or not, Lang shifted his wallet to his front pocket.

  It was a rare piazza that did not have its own unique church, stature or fountain. Likewise, each of those miniature neighborhoods had its own odor. Brewing cappucino might dominate one, while a block away, an open-air market would scent the air with ripe vegetables.

  The smell of fresh bread stopped him cold. He was hungry, hadn’t eaten since the soggy, unidentifiable mess the airline had proclaimed a meal. He made a right turn down another alley-width street, dodged a Japanese motorcycle under less than complete control by its driver, and arrived at the Osteria den Berlli, a restaurant on the Piazza San Apollonia. He hoped the Osteria still had the quality seafood he remembered.

  An hour later, Lang stepped back into the sunshine, the taste of garlic octopus clinging to his palate. He strolled north, just one more Roman letting lunch settle in his stomach, until he reached the traffic-choked Via Della Concilazone, the wide boulevard that leads to the Vatican. Even in April, before the tourist season started, the sidewalks were jammed. Shops displayed religious trinkets, small busts of the Pope, cheap crucifixes. Lang would not have been surprised to see St. Peter’s Basilica in a snow-globe.

  Before leaving Atlanta, he had made one more call to Miles, this time asking about common acquaintances in Rome.

  Miles had been guarded. “You’re going to Rome for a vacation and just want to renew auld lang syne, right? This doesn’t have anything to do with the thermite or your sister’s death, right?”

  “You’re overly suspicious, Miles.”

  “Comes with the job, remember? Besides, I’d get shit-canned, I told who the Agency people in Rome were. Maybe shot.”

  “They don’t do that any more,” Lang had said. “Just cancel your government pension and benefits.”

  “Years I put in, that’s worse.”

  “Besides,” Lang said reasonably, “I didn’t ask who was Agency in Rome, I asked whom we knew in Rome.”

  “Typical lawyer hairsplitting. Why you wanna know, anyway?”

  “I need an introduction at the Vatican, figured the Agency’d know whom to contact.”

  Miles made no effort to even sound as if he believed him. “Vatican, like where the Pope hangs? You want to fill out the forms for future canonization, right?”

  “Miles, Miles, you are letting cynicism poison your otherwise bright and cheerful disposition. I simply want a brief conference with one of the Holy Father’s art historians.”

  The phone connection did nothing to diminish the snort of derision. “Right. Like I would engage only in intellectual conversation were I alone on a desert island with Sharon Stone
.”

  Lang sighed theatrically. “Miles, I’m serious. I have a client who is about to spend a fortune on a work of religious art. The world’s most renowned expert on the artist is in the Vatican. Would I lie to you?”

  “Like I would if my wife found lipstick on my fly. Okay, okay, I can’t give you a roster of Rome assets, don’t have the clearance to call it up, anyway. Just so happens, though, that I heard Gurt Fuchs is presently assigned to the trade attaché at the Rome embassy.”

  Lang couldn’t remember if he had taken the time to thank Miles before hanging up the phone. There had been a time when Gurtude Fuchs had made him forget everything else.

  Lang’s first career had been with the Agency, the job he referred to in his mind as being an office-bound James Bond. Like most embryonic spies, he had trained at Camp Perry near Williamsburg, Virginia. Known as the Farm by its graduates, there he had learned the arcane arts of code, surveillance and the use of weapons ranging from firearms and knives to garrote and poison. His performance had been either too good or too poor (depending on the point of view) for a posting to the Fourth Directorate, Ops. Instead, he had been sent to a dreary office across the street from the Frankfurt railway station where he spent his days with the Third Directorate, Intelligence. Rather than cloak and dagger, his tools had consisted of computers, satellite photos, Central European newspapers and equally humdrum equipage.

  In 1989, Lang had seen his future in the Agency shrunk by the much-heralded Peace Dividend and changed by shifting priorities. Even the grime-encrusted office with a view of the Bahnhof in Frankfurt would be a source of nostalgia when he was forced to learn Arabic or Farsi and stationed in some place where a hundred-degree day seemed balmy. Dawn, his new bride, had drawn the line at including a floor-length burka in her trousseau.

  He had taken his retirement benefits and retreated to law school.

  Gurt, an East German refugee, had been a valued linguist, analyst and expert on the German Democratic Republic, who was also stuck in the Agency’s Third Directorate.