Requiem For a Glass Heart (47 page)

S
HE SAT IN THE ANTEROOM OF THE OFFICE OF
D
OCUMENTOS
Ufficiales on the third floor of the Palazzo di Giustizia. Functionaries came in and out of the anteroom, which was as huge as a house, with terrazzo floors, a twenty-foot ceiling, wood paneling along the walls, and twelve-foot wooden doors leading to all the offices. The hard leather soles of Italian shoes echoed in the voluminous room, and voices hung in the slightly chilled air. The cavernous old travertine building had not yet absorbed enough of the bright spring sun to warm its winter-cooled stones.

She had been waiting for over half an hour, she and two men, the three of them clustered together, sharing the space of a few square feet to one side of this grand space. One man unwrapped a piece of candy, the cellophane crackling like birds scratching through dry winter leaves. But winter was gone and it was now spring, and from where she sat she could see through the tall windows across the room the canopies of the chestnuts and stone pines that stood on the opposite bank of the Tiber, just outside. The azaleas were in full bloom on the Spanish Steps, and the trees were still trying to decide which shade of green suited them the best.

Nearly a week in Rome with nothing to do other than enjoy the city’s beauty had done little to calm her uneasiness,
though that was precisely why she had come five days before the appointed date. She had strolled along the Via dei Condotti, staring into the windows of the expensive shops at fashionable clothes she could not afford and did not need. She had lingered around the fountains and sidewalk cafes, watching the effects of the Roman spring on the Romans and tourists alike. It was beautiful to watch, but she felt no connection with it whatsoever. Perhaps it was an inevitable nervousness, considering what she was about to do, but it was also the uneasiness of association. It was not that far down the highway south of the city that she had come twenty-four months ago to collect Tavio’s body from the small, grim morgue in Salerno.

“Signora Cuevas.”

The sound of her own name startled her. She looked around, and a young man wearing a loose-fitting Italian suit was standing in one of the huge wooden doorways, a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm. He was looking at her, and the two men who had been her companions in this hollow chamber for three quarters of an hour were also looking at her.

“Yes,” she said, standing.

“This way, please,” the young man said.

They entered another, but much smaller, anteroom and then walked into a long, grand room which was sparsely furnished except for a few straight-backed chairs along the walls. The walls themselves were a pale canary yellow and were hung with enormous paintings, portraits of forgotten men from other centuries. At the far end of the room sat an enormous solitary Baroque desk with gilt scrolling on its face and legs, papers stacked about in an organized if not entirely neat fashion, and two gilt lamps that glowed in the shady vastness. Behind the desk sat a small balding man with a precise black mustache.

“Signora Cuevas,” he said, standing as she approached his desk. He introduced himself. “Please sit down.”

Cate watched him closely, wondering how all this had been worked out, wondering if he was nervous about it, or if he was glad to be of service, or if he was doing this against his will but had no choice, or if he was a sycophant and only too eager to please. None of this showed on his round forehead or in his beautiful eyes or on his generous mouth, which he tended to purse.

“I have all of the papers for you right here,” he said, getting straight to the point. Perhaps he was eager to be done with it. He picked up a packet of documents, which were in a large folder tied with a bright scarlet ribbon, and handed the packet across the desk to her. “Please feel free to look at them and make sure that they are prepared to your satisfaction.”

“I can’t read Italian,” she said, putting the packet in her lap, “and besides, I wouldn’t be able to understand the complex legal points. I trust that you have done all the proper things for me. I’ll make sure that the right people hear of your efficiency.”

He smiled with a little bow, but the mention of the “right people” put an edge to his smile. He was probably hoping to God he hadn’t screwed up anything.

Cate stood and shook his hand. “Again, thank you,” she said.

“If I can be of any further service to you,” he added quickly, “please contact me immediately. I am more than happy to be able to help you.
Arrivederci.”

It was a long walk back to her little hotel not far from the Piazza di Spagna, but she didn’t mind. Now that she had the documents, her mind turned to the meeting in the afternoon. The long walk would help settle her butterflies. Perhaps it would even give her an appetite.

She ate a light lunch in the hotel garden, under the dappled shade of an arbor. Afterward she had an extra glass of wine. When her watch told her it was two o’clock, she paid, walked out of the hotel, and stood at the entrance—still holding the documents—in front of the vine-covered stucco walls facing the piazza.

A dark Mercedes entered the opposite side of the piazza and made its way around to the front of the hotel and stopped. A young man got out and approached her.

“Perhaps you are Signora Cuevas?”

She nodded, and he opened the back door of the Mercedes and she got in. She didn’t even try to keep track of where they were going, but simply sat back and watched the streets and piazzas of Rome pass by outside her window. The car left the heart of the city and climbed up narrow lanes into the wooded hillsides, where the homes grew grander and villas stood back from the lanes behind walls or on beautifully landscaped grounds. Eventually she felt the car slowing and saw
that they were turning into a high-walled compound. A brass plaque on the pillars of the gates said
CONVENTO SANTA CECELIA DEL MONTI
. Cypresses grew along the gravel road that led up to the main building, which was as fine an example of a Renaissance villa as she could imagine.

The Mercedes stopped in front of the convent, and the young man got out and opened the door for her. As she was getting out of the back seat, a nun came down the front steps of the villa, smiling, her entirely white robes and wimple brilliant in the afternoon sun.

“Ms. Cuevas? I am Sister Sabina,” she said in very good but heavily accented English. “Please come inside. We are so happy to have you.”

Sister Sabina was in her thirties, Cate guessed, and she was nothing less than charming. Together they walked through the great rooms of the old convent, meeting other nuns in groups and alone as they passed through corridors, across courtyards, and along loggias. Finally they went through an open gallery and out the other side to a large and beautifully tended garden. There were lime trees and azaleas, cypresses and palms and chestnut trees, paths with privet hedges and flowerbeds and garden benches.

Cate could not get used to the idea that she was expected and welcomed everywhere she went. The way had been prepared to perfection for her. All was arranged.

“Your friend arrived just ahead of you,” Sister Sabina said, and then she slowed and stopped and motioned with her hand to a secluded corner of the garden, where a man was sitting on a bench alone, staring at the water splashing in a fountain on the other side of the path from him.

“Thank you very much,” Cate said, and Sister Sabina turned and left her.

The man glanced up and saw her and stood as she approached him. He was wearing a suit and tie, which she had not expected, and he was a little taller than she had guessed from his photographs, his complexion a little ruddier, his face a little kinder. But none of the pictures she had seen had prepared her for his eyes. They were stunning, bright amber, like chunks of pyrite shaded by long sable lashes. He was smoking a cigarette but switched it to his left hand to greet her. They shook hands without actually introducing themselves.

“Please sit down,” he said, and together they sat on the bench facing the fountain and a flowerbed of cerise flowers. He nodded at the folder with the bright scarlet ribbon. “Everything is arranged, I hope.”

“I don’t know,” Cate said. “I told the man that I was taking his word for it.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he smiled. “The Italian government won’t give you any trouble about this, and neither will the Americans. But before you leave, the sisters inside will have to put a bunch of seals and things all over the documents to make them legal from their standpoint, since the convent is the registering agency for this.” He smoked. He glanced at her. “This is very amusing to me. Me helping the FBI.”

“No,” Cate said. “You are helping me, not the FBI.”

“Oh, yes, okay.” He smiled again. “I guess they didn’t make this easy for you.”

“No, you’re right. They didn’t.”

“You can imagine,” he said, blowing smoke away into the afternoon heat, “how surprised I was to receive these … overtures from you. After all that.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I was a little surprised to be doing it.”

They were both silent for a moment, and the convent garden was silent too, except for the droning of cicadas.

“Well, anyway, the world is better off without Sergei Krupatin,” he said, dropping his cigarette and mashing it out in the gravel. Cate thought how out of place a cigarette butt was in this immaculate setting. There were already several on the ground at his end of the bench. “But I am sorry about Irina.”

Cate said nothing.

“He was a real bastard,” the man said.

“Is Volkov any better?” she asked.

“Better?” he shrugged. “It all depends on what you mean by better. He is different, at least.”

“How is he different?”

“Well, he’s not crazy. That’s something. And he kept his end of the bargain with Irina, even though she was dead. That’s something.”

Another pause.

“Then you’re still working with him?” Cate asked.

The man kept his eyes on the fountain and smiled slowly. “We really should not talk about this.”

“What’s happened with the Chinese organization? They still don’t have a clue about what happened?”

“Well, it took him so long to die. That was very clever. People get sick. There is not much you can say about that. I think some of Wei’s lieutenants are suspicious and very angry. But he had very good doctors. You know what, he had been in Thailand. That’s where the doctors think he got it. I really didn’t know Sergei was that clever.”

He continued looking at the fountain. The sounds of its splashing accompanied the drone of the cicadas.

“I want to thank you,” Cate said. “I know this was not easy to do.”

“I promised her too,” he said. “Some of us are honest guys. We have morals.” He paused. “And you know, I don’t care how he died, exactly—the details. I still owed her a debt. She could have killed all three of us.”

Cate did not look at him, so she didn’t know whether he was fishing for the real story or actually knew it. She had managed to convince the FBI to keep the facts, as they appeared in the media, vague enough for Volkov and Bontate to believe that all the rules had been followed—just in case there was no honor among thieves. But apparently there was.

Cate didn’t even know what to think. She had just received a lot of help from the Russian
mafiya and
the Sicilian Mafia, all of it illegal, and yet she thought it was the right thing to do. She knew it was. It had to be.

They heard voices through the trees in the garden, and Cate looked around.

“A couple of the sisters took them walking,” he explained.

“Them?”

Just then the voices came closer, and from around the corner between two palms on the sun-dappled pathway appeared two nuns in dazzling white and in between them two little girls about six years old, wearing very similar white lace dresses with spotless white stockings and black shoes. One of the girls was as dark as a Gypsy, with long jet hair. She was leading a speckled hen on a string.

“This is my daughter, Stefania,” he said affectionately.

The other little girl made Cate’s heart stop. As pale as a
gardenia, she had thick, long flaxen hair pulled back from her face and falling over her tiny shoulders like spun gold. She looked at Cate with curious sea-green eyes and almost smiled.

“And this-… is Félia.”

Cate almost lost her grip on the folder of documents that made this child her adopted daughter. Tears sprang to her eyes so suddenly it frightened her. As she knelt slowly on the gravel path and put down the packet, Félia stepped toward her hesitantly, as if she understood what was impossible to understand. Cate smiled, and at that moment she knew that she had done, the right thing. As long as this child breathed, she would be a living reminder of her mother’s love. Surely in the scales of eternal judgment the love that Irina so fervently had nurtured for this tiny child would weigh heavily against all the evil and sadness that had been so large a part of her life. Félia would be a living requiem for her mother, a constant prayer, and a reminder that of all the many passions that gripped and compelled the human heart in the course of a lifetime, the greatest of them was love.