Dead Line

Chapter Eighteen

Thursday, September 25

The Boeing 777 landed at Leonardo da Vinci Airport as if it had descended on the wings of angels, making me wonder why it always is that the larger the plane, the smoother the touchdown. In fact, the entire flight had been utterly flawless, a sentiment attributable to the lovely young woman at the ticket counter in Boston who had the generosity of mind and spirit to upgrade me to business class. My only concern was the fact that the pilot, an unceasingly handsome fifty-something man with a voice as deep as well water, kept strolling through the cabin. Two people I never need to see while I’m in their care: the chef and the pilot. And yet, all of them seem to think that they’re the next Bill Clinton.

I racked my brain wondering if da Vinci had any inventory in the stolen treasures from the Gardner Museum, because if so, maybe I’d be seeing his work literally come across my desk in quick time.

I was tired, exhausted even. Back in Boston, I had punched out the tell-all story on the return of the Vermeer, raced home to pack an overnight bag, and left the keys under the mat for Melissa Moriarty, a delightful senior at a nearby college who regularly sat for Baker. She’d probably have sex on every surface in the house, throw wild parties with keg beer spilling all over the rugs, and have college guys hanging off my balcony screaming for their lives, which was all fine, just so long as Baker got his three long walks and his two square meals a day. And then I made my way to Logan Airport with about nine seconds to spare.

These European flights are like those college all-nighters spent writing the final research paper of the term. You land, and all you want to do is sleep the soundest sleep you’ve ever slept, and yet something pushes you onward in the face of physical and mental adversity, some unknown facet of the human soul.

In my case, on this trip, I think it’s called disgust, and no, not angst-ridden disgust, for what I’d already done to Hilary Kane. This was an even more urgent, pointed disgust for what I suspected I had unwittingly done to Maggie.

To wit, refer back to our telephone conversation of the previous morning. I dispensed what I thought was reasonably sound advice on something that’s always of the utmost importance to me and many others, and that’s superior accommodations, especially while journeying through a foreign land. I provided her a rendezvous spot with me. I gave her a precise time. I recommended a pair of very nice hotels.

What I didn’t give her, I realized on the long and restless plane ride over the ocean, was even a speck of thoughtful advice on how not to be found. I didn’t tell her to avoid her credit cards or her bank cards or her calling cards. I didn’t instruct her to get cash, or offer to wire her any currency. I didn’t advise her not to check into the hotel under her own name. I didn’t order her not to call home.

And I kept thinking of that errant shot fired by an unknown gunman in Copley Square.

In essence, I came to realize somewhere in the skies over Newfoundland, that if she checked into the Raphael under Maggie Kane, laid down a Visa card issued to her name, withdrew money from a local automatic teller machine, and called home on her AT&T account, then she and her sister were about to spend eternity together, both pretty much on my dime. Let’s just say that by the time I got off the plane, I was sick to my stomach, and not from the four-course meal that the nice people of American Airlines see fit to serve in their premium classes.

It was 8:15 A.M. Our meeting on the rooftop of the Raphael was set for 10:00 A.M. Walking through the bustling airport, I stepped into one of those newfangled Italian phone booths with plans to call Maggie’s hotel and then Elizabeth, before realizing that I had a better chance of personally piloting the jet airplane back to Boston than I did of figuring out how to make a call in Italy. For kicks, I picked up the receiver and pressed 0. A woman’s distant voice came on the line. I panicked slightly and said, “Je ne parle pas Français.” Hey, it’s the only line of any European language that I knew. She said something in what I presume was Italian, knowing full well now that I couldn’t speak French. I said something loud in American involving the acronym AT&T. She said something that seemed to end in a question mark. A moment later, I just hung up the phone.

On the cab ride into the old part of the city, to the Albergo del Sole, I thought back to my last visit to Rome, a couple of years before, a weekend getaway with Elizabeth Riggs of Boston, Massachusetts. She had just finished a series of sensational stories for the Boston Traveler — sensational in the good sense, not the common journalism criticism sense — on a shady real estate scheme presided over by the president of the Boston City Council. It cost him his job, those stories did, and later, his liberty. It made Elizabeth one of the hottest reporters in town in more ways than one.

I met her at home under the guise of an early, celebratory dinner at our favorite Italian joint in the North End. Instead, I packed bags for both of us and hid them in the trunk of my car. Our passports and tickets were concealed inside my coat. She thought we were going for pasta. We were, just on a different continent. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little more than a little proud of myself.

“You missed the turn, goofball,” she said with quasi-urgency when I drove into the mouth of the tunnel for the airport.

“Damn,” I said, and kept driving. “I’ll turn around at Logan.” It wasn’t until I parked the car, popped the trunk and handed her the overnight bag that I told her we were going away. She didn’t know where until we got to the gate. It was and will always remain one of the best weekends of my life.

Funny thing, though. On that weekend, I recall thinking back to my previous time in Europe, on a honeymoon with my wife in the south of France, and I remember, even feeling as close as I did to Elizabeth, that constant ache for Katherine. A couple of years later, here I was again in Rome, this time alone, longing for the relationship I once had with either woman. Some people squander their whole lives dreaming of things that they’ll never have. Maybe I’m wasting mine by longing for things that are already gone. Rare are the good soldiers of life who can devote themselves to the present.

I was in this thorough state of depression when the taxicab rounded the corner of an ancient alley and pulled right into Piazza della Rotunda, one of the most inviting squares in the entire world. The sun shone brightly on the cobblestones. Beautiful Italians lolled in the outdoor cafés sipping cappuccinos and espressos. A few tourists in matching windbreakers and sneakers — I’m going to guess Americans — filed into the McDonald’s across the way. If I wasn’t so tired, I might have been ashamed.

I traded pleasantries in rudimentary Italian with the nice man at the hotel’s reception desk, and to his considerable credit, he neither laughed in my face nor carried the conversation any further. Rather, he began speaking better English than half of the copy editors at the Record are capable. I was assigned a room on the third floor, facing front, and when I pulled open the floor-to-ceiling shutters, and then the enormous French doors, I walked onto a step-out that looked directly down on the hulking gray edifice of the Pantheon.

The morning sun shone brightly. Italians buzzed past on mopeds. Others chatted at tables shaded by hunter green umbrellas at the half dozen trattorias that lined the square. Delivery drivers gunned their trucks as they waited for room to park. It was, all in all, the very vision of chaotic Italian charm. It should have put me in a wonderful mood, instilled me with that sense of worldly calm that takes over when I’m dispatched to various corners of the globe. Instead, looking down from my perch, a small part of me saw Elizabeth, at the good times we had here that were no more, at the finality that she had come to represent, at the gloom in her wake.

I left the doors open so the soothing street symphony could fill my room as I jumped into a cool, refreshing shower. I toweled off and changed into fresh clothes. At various points over my once-bright career, I had confronted corrupt governors and lying presidents. I had coaxed deep secrets from killer mobsters and untrusting militiamen. I had been the target of fists and bullets. But never before had I felt so helpless — frightened even — over a meeting with a potential source. Actually, scratch that. It wasn’t the meeting that I was so afraid of. It was the pulsing likelihood that the meeting wouldn’t take place, that she had been snatched or killed, all because I provided her with recommendations on where to stay rather than how to stay alive.

Years ago, breaking into the business, I once had a fat old city editor — a guy with ink in his veins — who told me that some stories involve an endless series of worst-case reporting scenarios. If it can go wrong, it will. In those cases, he said you’re no longer the lion, but the trainer, trying to beat back circumstances with a whip while you protect yourself with a turned over chair. That’s how I felt now, only the whip was lost and the chair was broken and I was left with my own questionable wiles to fend for myself and those who needed me.

I checked the clock beside the bed and saw it was 9:50 A.M. I walked out of the room, down the wide stairs and into the plaza. Very rarely do you ever say this, but the unfolding circumstances of the next ten or fifteen minutes could determine how I viewed my entire worth.