The Pegasus Secret (10 page)

“Whatcha playin’?” Lang asked the child.

He wasn’t shy of strangers. “In-ig-ma,” he said without looking up.

Lang watched the blips scramble across the tiny screen. He could feel the adult’s question: Did Lang know? But there wasn’t a whole lot Lang’s shadow could do without attracting attention.

“How d’you play?” Lang asked innocently.

He listened to an explanation surprising in its detail for a child that age.

“Sounds like it would be more fun for two,” Lang suggested.

“That’s mighty nice of you, mister,” the man said, “but you don’t have to . . .”

Lang couldn’t place the accent but it certainly didn’t come from Atlanta.

“But I want to,” Lang said. “Reminds me of my own son.” He managed a pained expression. “He was about this age when he died of leukemia.”

The eyes of the white-haired woman in the seat across from Lang instantly glistened. There was no way the man could gracefully get Lang to leave the little boy alone. From the expression on his face, that had occurred to the minder, too.

“May I?” Lang held out a hand.

The child looked at the man for approval and handed the game over.

“Oops!” Lang dropped it.

As he reached under the seat to retrieve the little electronic box, Lang slid something out of his pants leg and into his hand.

Lang suddenly jerked erect and pointed down the concourse. “Isn’t that Mel Gibson?”

Heads snapped around in unison. Lang slipped the object into the backpack and retrieved the Game Boy.

“Guess I was mistaken,” Lang admitted sheepishly. “Show me one more time how this works.”

Lang was getting soundly thrashed when the flight was called a few minutes later.

As a first-class passenger, Lang went to the head of the boarding line, noting the table that, since 9/11, always stood ready for random searches. When he handed his ticket to the gate attendant, he also leaned forward and spoke in low tones. From her reaction, he might have made a lewd proposition.

She hurriedly turned her duties over to one of the ticket agents and scurried away.

Lang waved to the little boy and boarded.

He was sipping Scotch and trying to find his place in a paperback novel when a woman slipped a thin bag into the overhead bin and slid into the seat beside him. She wore a business suit, a matching gray jacket and skirt. Lipstick and a slight blush were her only makeup. Her ash- blond hair was gathered into a chignon by a tortoiseshell comb. The important finger sported a diamond that anywhere other than Texas would have been vulgar. She was young, twenty-something, but puffing like an octogenarian climbing his third flight of stairs.

Lang smiled at her as he put down the drink glass. “Sounds like you ran the whole way.”

She gulped a lungful of air. “I thought they were gonna cancel the flight and I have to, absolutely have to, get to Fort Lauderdale.”

If the ring hadn’t been a tip that she was a native of the Lone Star State, the flat drawl was.

Lang mustered his very best surprised expression. “Cancel the flight?”

The few stray hairs outside the comb waved like an insect’s legs as she bobbed her head. “Guy tried to smuggle a gun on board.”

“No!”

“Yeah, in his son’s backpack. Somebody tipped Security to bring one of those portable X-ray machines an’ there it was, big as life, right in the child’s pack.”

Lang gasped in amazement. “You see it, the gun?”

“No, but they, the security people, were hauling the guy away, said they were gonna search the kid’s backpack in a secure area. Wanted to make sure he didn’t have a chance to use a weapon with all the people around, I guess. Feel real sorry for the little fella.”

Lang lifted sympathetic hands. “Pretty low, involving a child in something like that.”

It was at that moment he noticed he still had smudges of chocolate under his fingernails. It had gotten there while he sat on the john, waiting for his palms’ heat to soften the outside of the Peppermint Patties so he could fashion them into the
L
shape of a pistol before using the tinfoil wrappers, highly X-ray–reflective, to encase his creation.

International intelligence or not, they could be outwitted.

Lang stood, stooping to avoid bumping his head. “Reckon I’ve got time to wash my hands before they make us strap this airplane on?”

Leonardo da Vinci International, Rome
The next morning

Rumpled and gritty-eyed, Lang disembarked, relishing the cool spring morning after the fetid, recirculated air of the L-1011. It was a relief to be outside even if the smell of diesel fuel filled his nose. At the base of the stairs pushed against the plane, he watched vehicles scurry across Leonardo da Vinci International like bugs across a pond’s surface. Along the airport’s perimeter, perpetual smog turned distant trees into gray lace.

A herd of busses chugged to a stop and his fellow travelers clamored aboard. For reasons as mysterious as the Poussin, the Italians rarely used jetways that allowed passengers to enter the terminal directly from the aircraft. He suspected the owner of the bus company was well connected.

Speaking of connected, the Rome airport had been a
joke in years past, construction ongoing in what Lang and his peers had assumed was a permanent political boondoggle. Now it was finished. White concrete slabs, bowlike angles and portholes of tinted glass gave the international terminal a slightly nautical appearance. Inside, another surprise awaited. Elevators, escalators and stairs were also new, although their multidirectional confusion was much the same as before.

Under the bored gaze of customs officials at the nothing-to-declare exit, Lang submitted his passport to cursory inspection before ducking into the first available men’s, both from necessity and to see who from his flight might follow.

No one.

Opening his single bag, he swapped his Levi’s and button-down shirt for French jeans and a shirt with the distinctive Italian taper. Oxblood Cole Haan loafers were exchanged for the Birkenstock sandals European men insist on wearing over dark socks. A mirror splattered with hairspray and streaked with substances best not inquired into gave him back the reflection of a man dressed in Eurofashion, the combination of the worst a common market had to offer.

The unfavorable exchange of dollars for euros at the airport posed a financial hit. Still, he was willing to pay for the opportunity to see if anyone he recognized lingered while a machine completed what amounted to small-scale extortion.

Another series of people-moving devices deposited him into the train station, the one place unchanged since his last visit. A pavilionlike roof sheltered four tracks and a small arcade. He bought espresso from an old woman and a ticket from another machine. Then he sat, waiting for both the caffeine high and the train into Rome. Predictably, the coffee did its work before the Italian Railway.

The train was as refreshingly new as the airport. Comfortable seats upholstered in tasteful blue fabric had replaced dirty and cracked vinyl. Instead of small, dusty windows and cramped aisles, the cars boasted panoramic views on either side of a generous aisle.

The ride was unchanged. Lang inevitably expected a countryside dotted with ruins of temples and crumbling arches, alabaster badges of glories past. After all, this was Rome, the Eternal City. All he ever saw from train windows were weed-infested switching yards, rusting rolling stock and the backs of drab housing projects. The same disappointing intrusion of the twenty-first century every time.

When he had brought Dawn here, she had found even the blight exciting. She had almost exploded with anticipation at each dreary stop, thrilled by the very names along the route.

Dawn.

She had enjoyed every second of life, delighted in the smallest detail. He saw her not in the modern coach but the old one, relishing the filthy vinyl of the seat, alternately staring at the Italians on board and craning her neck to make sure she missed nothing of the industrialized suburbs of Rome. For the forty-five minutes the trip took, her fascination with a foreign country’s banalities never subsided.

Later, she admitted she found even the smells of the crowded coach exotic. Anyone thrilled by the aroma of fifty or so unwashed bodies reeking of garlic and hair tonic truly loved life.

Dawn.

He and Dawn stayed at a tiny hotel that had shared a piazza with the Pantheon for half a millennium. Then, the city had been romantic, fascinating, full of treasures at every turn. Now all he saw were the crowds and grime of one more big town, a place full of painful memories.

The train was creaking to a stop for Tiburtina, the end of the line, as he managed to set memories of Dawn aside as gently as he might handle fine porcelain. Where to stay? He rationalized that the place Dawn and he had enjoyed so much was too touristy, too likely to be found were someone searching for him. The big hotels, the Hassler and Eden, were even more obvious, places that catered to Americans. A number of smaller establishments were clustered along the remnants of the northern wall, hotels that offered modest prices and a view of the Borghese Gardens over the crumbling bricks of Rome’s ancient perimeter. No good: haunts for Americans on package tours and budgets, students, academics and retirees. Worse, these hostels were within blocks of the embassy, their prices and location ideal for use by old acquaintances. He preferred not to encounter former comrades by accident. Too many questions to answer.

Assuming the people he sought weren’t Italian, he needed a place where a foreigner would be rare, easy for him to spot as he tried to blend into the fabric of the city. There were a number of small, pricey inns along the Via del Corso, places where Armani salesmen from Milan and glass manufacturers’ reps from Venice would stay to service the stores along one of Europe’s most chic shopping districts. A possibility.

As the train shuddered to a final stop, he decided upon none of the above. Instead, he chose the Trastavere district. Lang remembered it from pre-Dawn days. Like some other urban areas separated from the main city by a river, the Trastavere considered itself different, more Roman than Rome, just as Brooklynites prided themselves on being the real New Yorkers or the residents of the Rive Gauche the true Parisians.

He had originally found the area’s charm in its history. In the sixteenth century, it had been Rome’s blue-collar
neighborhood, home to the artisans who built the cathedrals, painted its frescoes and carved its monuments. Michelangelo and Leonardo had both stayed in the Trastavere. In modern times it had become a haven for the bohemian lifestyle, the residence of unemployed musicians and artists looking for patrons.

There was a trattoria on the Piazza Masti where he had shared pasta with a Czech defector. The food had been abysmal, the decor worse, featuring photographs of those two Italian-American icons, Sinatra and Stallone. The piano player had mangled American tunes of the fifties. He never considered taking Dawn there.

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.