Ford followed behind and when the woman stopped at the desk he stood slightly behind and slightly to the side, as if waiting in line, close enough to listen. His only interest now was to locate the villa.
The woman gave a tight smile to the clerk. ‘Would you check to see if someone was on the flight?’ English, yes, but American also. The slightest lilt. She’d noticed Ford, half-turned, was that for him?
The attendant gestured at the computer and explained that she’d shut down the system but couldn’t in any case give information about the flight.
‘I understand. But I’m asking about my son. You can look, can’t you, for my son? The passenger list? It can’t be complicated.’
The attendant looked at her, cold. A girl, hard-faced, eyeliner etched fine along the lower lid. It wasn’t a matter of simplicity, she explained. She simply didn’t have the information.
‘My son’s name is Eric Powell. My name is Anne Powell. I have my passport. Check under Henderson. Eric Henderson. He might be travelling under his father’s name.’ The idea clearly aggravated her. She pinched the brow of her nose, summoned patience. ‘No. I bought the ticket. It’s Powell. He should be under Eric Powell. Has everyone come through from the baggage area? Could you check? They obviously won’t allow me through.’
Ford gave no visible reaction to the name.
The attendant, stiff in every gesture, said she would return.
‘It’s Powell,’ Anne repeated. ‘Eric Powell.’
Anne Powell waited at the desk, one arm on the counter. She turned to Ford with an expression of fixed irritation, and they looked at each other without remark, her eye catching on the small cut under his eye.
‘I’m sorry — are you waiting?’
When the attendant reappeared through the automatic doors, Anne immediately forgot her aggravation at Ford and walked toward her, brisk and clipped. Ford followed after, then asked the attendant himself if everyone had come off the flight. ‘I’m also waiting,’ he explained.
‘I’m sorry?’ Anne stopped and appeared puzzled. ‘But do you have information about my son?’
Ford tipped his head to the side and blinked. What was she asking?
‘Do you work for the airline? Do you know if my son was on the flight?’
‘No,’ Ford replied. ‘I don’t work for the airline.’
‘Then can’t you wait?’
Stung, Ford stepped back.
Anne turned to the attendant. ‘Did you find anything? Was he on the flight?’
The attendant gave a sympathetic frown as she explained that she had asked someone to check the arrivals area and the baggage-claim area, but there was no one there, and no one either in the facilities, the toilets. The manifest did not show her son on the flight. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.’
The security guards hovered close by with folded arms.
Anne Powell stiffened. ‘What do you mean, he wasn’t on the flight? Are you certain?’
The attendant apologized and slowly repeated that there was no one travelling under the name of Eric Powell. No such name on the manifest. It happens all the time.
Ford asked if everyone was off the flight and the attendant patiently repeated the information. ‘Sir, everyone has come through.’ The halls and lounges were all clear.
The guards grouped closer.
‘I don’t understand. What are you saying? Was he taken off the flight? Would you know if he had changed his booking?’
The attendant explained that it would be impossible for her to know what Anne was asking for, not without a booking reference, and this information couldn’t be retrieved right now. She would have to wait until the morning. She could either come to the airport or go to their offices in Valletta. Irritated, Anne turned smartly about and walked to the exit. The guards separated. The slap of her sandals clacked through the hall.
* * *
Ford followed quickly after and came purposefully out of the terminal to find Anne Powell with a mobile phone in her hand: if she was speaking with Eric he wanted to hear. Instead of speaking, she snapped the phone shut and signalled a cab.
The woman hesitated before she opened the door, as if she sensed him, Ford couldn’t be sure, but some doubt caused a momentary pause. When she sat in the cab she closed her eyes, and Ford saw her mouth the name of the village, the name he had read in her letter: Marsaskala. She leaned forward, the cab window opened, and she repeated the name to the driver, a hint of anxiety over her pronunciation. Marsaskala.
He watched the cab round away from the terminal and repeated Marsaskala, Marsaskala, into the night.
* * *
The next morning Ford set up post in a café opposite the airline office. He sat in the shade cast by a statue of Queen Victoria, obstinate, pig-faced, the grey stone flecked white. He watched the streets, the offices, the surrounding shops with a sharp eye, alert to every change. The sun slowly crossed the square. Anne Powell did not show.
Ford revised his plan. He would go to Marsaskala and find a similar café where he would wait. The waiter brought him a newspaper which he scanned quickly for news of Howell, HOSCO, and again found nothing.
5.3
The rain stopped in the late afternoon, the sky broke in one moment from grey to a mellow blue. On his way from his hotel to the bus terminal Parson browsed through a small market. He took with him a baseball cap he’d bought in Istanbul, and bought a plain short-sleeved shirt, a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses he thought he might keep afterward, but chose them mostly because he thought this or that suited his idea of Sutler. In front of the mirror he asked himself how a man who’d stolen fifty-three million might dress. This shirt, that shirt? These sandals, those flip-flops? He found himself distracted by the buses rounding the fountain with their white roofs and sunny yellow sides, as if these were familiar to him, part of a memory — or were strangely some kind of a joke, too small and toy-like to take seriously. Laura would like this, he told himself. This would be her thing. Finally, everything ready, he was satisfied that with the hat, shirt, sunglasses, he looked nothing like himself. As there were no photos of Sutler, this would have to do.
* * *
He took the bus to Msida then walked along the marina, the sunlight beginning to dry the pavement. He liked the view across the inlet, the watchtowers at the bastion walls, the water flat in the bay, silver and alive, the boats, their ropes slapping at masts, and how lazy this appeared, picture-perfect: there wasn’t anything he didn’t like. He began to prepare for Sutler’s departure, thinking all the time what a great game this was, and under the name Paul Geezler he upgraded the room he’d reserved at Le Meridien to a suite, then booked a passage, second-class, from Valletta to Palermo and on to Naples. If he was to negotiate Sutler’s silence, then he would first need to find the man, and this could take some time. Sutler, under Geezler’s name, would travel at night to Sicily, and slowly roam the small Italian islands on his way to Naples. He asked for the booking information to be passed to the hotel and gave a fake credit-card number, knowing that this would be reported first to the hotel, then to the police. He couldn’t gauge the amount of fuss he should stir: how much trouble would a man who’d stolen fifty-three million dollars make? He couldn’t guess. Just as he had no real knowledge of what fifty-three million dollars would look like, or what, in any real sense, fifty-three million dollars actually meant in any meaningful way. What, for example, would that be in yachts? Fifty yachts? Thirty? Twenty? Every yacht in the harbour? How much did these things cost? It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but imagining the harbour without thirty or fifty yachts made little difference to him and would barely alter the view. Busy or empty the harbour would appear just as picturesque.