“Of course you can.”
“I’ve built up all the contacts. It’s taken months. You know that.”
“I know. I’m just…”
“We shouldn’t have gotten involved.”
It was true, perhaps. But by now Sam couldn’t quite imagine what life would look like without Saïd in it. “Too late,” he said, watching his lover’s fleshy lips. “You want me to hide what I’m feeling?”
The Moroccan smiled. “It’s what we do. We should be good at it.” Seeing that the joke hadn’t played well, Saïd kissed him and said officiously, “Plenty of time, young man. We’re still on for the rally?”
“Absolutely.”
“You and me under the Kenyan stars again. We’ll have plenty of time to figure out our future.”
Which, Sam noted with satisfaction, was the first time Saïd had used that blessed word, future.
So he’d gone over the operation a hundred times more, adjusting details here and there and even bringing in an extra agent to provide coverage inside. Paul Fisher, from Geneva.
“Paul,” he said from his window perch. “You’re there?”
“Si,” came the whisper.
“Everything’s smooth. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
Though they’d known each other in the academy, it was a surprise to see Paul again. He was the most visibly nervous agent he’d ever dealt with. Sam even called Geneva to make sure that this was a man he could depend on. “Fisher’s top-notch for his age,” was the reply, which told him nothing.
While briefing Paul in his apartment, though, Sam had discovered a small P-83, a Polish gun, in Paul’s jacket. “Where’d this come from?”
“A Milanese I know.”
“Why?”
Paul shrugged. “I like backup.”
“Not on this job,” he said and put the gun in his desk drawer. “I’m not having you get them killed.”
Paul had been sitting at the foot of the bed where Sam had last made love to Saïd. He hated this fidgety man touching those sheets. Paul said, “I wasn’t planning on using it.”
“Then you don’t need to carry it.”
Paul nodded unsurely.
While it had taken weeks to set up and could go wrong easily, the operation itself was simple. Lorenzo and Said were to visit the mosque and sit down with the Imam in his study to discuss a Camorra arms shipment they had intercepted and wished to sell to like-minded people. From his post across the street, Sam would record the conversation. Natalia would watch the street for activity or reinforcements. Paul was to wait in the prayer hall to help facilitate any emergency escape.
It took them a while to reach the Imam’s study. A body search would be de rigueur, as would an electronics sweep. In the far window, a light came on. A young man in a white skullcap pulled the thin curtains shut. Sam held one side of the headphones to his free ear, checked the levels against some language, perhaps Kurdish, being spoken in the room, and began to record.
A total of seventeen minutes passed before their arrival in the Imam’s chamber. During that time Sam talked briefly with Natalia and listened to Paul mouthing the late-afternoon Asr prayer with the congregation. Then a door opened in the room, and the Imam greeted Said and Lorenzo in Arabic. For the benefit of Lorenzo, they switched to Italian. The proposal was on.
In his other ear, Paul whispered, “There’s some activity.”
“Problem?”
“Three guys breaking off prayer. Talking.”
“It’s nothing.”
“They’re going to the stairs.”
“How do they look?”
“Not happy.”
Sam felt the old tension rising in his chest. The conversation with the Imam was going well. They had moved on to the makes of the weapons.
Paul said, “They’re gone.”
“Stay there,” Sam ordered.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Another one. He’s looking at me.”
“Because you’re not praying. Now pray.”
“That’s not it.”
“Ignore him and pray.”
Silence, just the throb of voices speaking to their god.
“Natalia?”
“All clear.”
In his right ear, the Imam mentioned a price. As planned, Lorenzo was trying to raise it. A knock on the Imam’s door stopped him. Someone came in. Arabic was spoken. Sam’s grasp of the language was sketchy, but he knew enough to understand that they were discussing a suspicious worshipper in the prayer hall. According to the visitor, it was clear from the bulge in his pocket that he was carrying a pistol.
“You fucker,” Sam said. “You brought your gun.”
No reply.
“Stand up and walk out of there before you get them killed.”
No reply.
“You better be walking.”
No reply, just the sound of movement, a grunt, and then a single gunshot that thumped into Sam’s eardrum. A pause, then Paul’s wavering voice through the whine of his damaged left ear: “Shit.” On the right, the Imam’s room had gone silent. Lorenzo said, “What was that?” Movement.
Saïd: “What’re you doing?”
The Imam, in Arabic: “Get them out.”
More movement. Struggling.
Natalia: “Paul’s out. He’s running. Should I chase?”
A door in the Imam’s quarters slammed shut.
“Sam? What do I do?”
It wasn’t until Thursday afternoon, two days later and a couple hours after he’d gotten the news, that he tracked Paul Fisher to a bar near the Colosseum, hunched in the back with a nearly empty bottle of red wine. Sam waited near the front, observing the shivering wreck of a man who was too drunk to see him. Behind Sam, two Italian men slapped on a poker machine, shouting at it, and he reconsidered the one thing he’d felt sure he would do once he found Paul Fisher.
Though both had made a game of hiding their true feelings, he and Said had known from the start, when they were going about their various embassy duties in Nairobi, that they had found something unprecedented. Both had a broad enough sexual history-Sam in the Bay Area meat markets, where you could be as open as you were moved to be, Said in the underground discos of Casablanca-but from their second night together they’d opened up more than they had with anyone else before. Perhaps, Said had suggested, they were like this because they knew that Sam was leaving for Rome in a month. Perhaps. But six months later, in Rome, Sam’s phone rang. Saïd had wrangled a transfer and convinced his superiors that he should offer help to the Americans.
“This is a bed of liars,” Saïd liked to say during their secret liaisons in what they started to call their Roman summer. But then he used that fantastical word, future, and Sam pounced on him with joyous descriptions of the Castro. Said was entranced, though he offered a countersuggestion: Rio de Janeiro.
“Too hot,” Sam told him.
“Northern California is too cold.”
Now, listening to the angry Italians and blip-bleep of the poker machine, Sam wondered what would have happened. Might they have bought a place in some high-rise along the Rio beaches? Or had their optimism been a symptom of the Roman summer, and in the end things would have gone the way of all his previous relationships-nowhere? There was no way to know. Not anymore.
Because of this drunk man in the corner.
Kill Paul Fisher? Sam wasn’t that kind of agent-he’d never actually committed murder, and until now he’d never wanted to. Yet as he approached the table he thought how easy it would be, how satisfying. Revenge, sure, but he began to think that Paul Fisher’s death would be something good for the environment, the subtraction of an unwholesome element from the surface of the planet.
Terrified-that was how Paul looked when he finally recognized him. Drunk and terrified. Sam sat down and said, “We heard from the carabinieri. Two bodies, minus their heads, were found in the Malagrotta landfill.”