Blood Makes Noise (24 page)

The smart thing, the spook thing, would have been to pick up his bags right then and walk through customs. Instead he went to the toilet, locked the door, and threw up.

He splashed his face in the sink and thought,
I’ve lost everything I ever knew of this work.
He swallowed a couple pills to coax a frame of mind, flushed the rest in case it didn’t work. He sat on the toilet lid, hung his head between his knees till gravity worked the pharmacology into his brain. Feeling half stable, he retucked his shirt and straightened his fifteen-year-old tie.

Just walk through like you own the place. The only thing airport stiffs—stiffs anywhere—can smell is dog fear. You took a piss first. So what? They bought a sixteen-year-old passport photo; they’ll buy the next thirty seconds.

A hand banged on the bathroom door. “Mr. Phillips? Are you all right?”

Michael hoisted his bags, unlocked the door, and found the passport kid waiting outside checking his watch. Michael shrugged like the kid was out of his mind and walked resolutely through the green
NOTHING TO DECLARE
exit.

They stopped and searched everything in his luggage.

The TSD skeleton keys were tucked individually throughout the lining—he’d remembered that much—and the rest was at least vaguely
turistico
. When they’d properly emptied his possessions into a jumble, the customs suits stood back without apology and waited for him to pack and zip them up himself. He did so, forcing with monumental effort to keep it slow and unhurried. Done, he dragged them off the table, avoided giving the day’s third awkward smile, and showed them his back for maybe seven steps.

“Mr. Phillips.”

The passport kid’s voice. Michael stopped, managed an exasperated I’m-late-for-a-train sigh…

And heard a submachine gun cock.

“Please put your hands up, Mr. Phillips.”

“What?” Michael fairly squeaked with it. He still hadn’t turned, a bag in each hand.

“Your hands, Mr. Phillips.
Pronto
.”

Michael set his luggage down and raised his arms. It was the passport kid who stepped up and pulled the Brazilian .25 from his waistband. He didn’t have to bother reaching under Michael’s coat to do it. The American tourist on a two-day visit had saved him the trouble by jamming his coattail into his pants along with the gun.

They had him in back now, an interrogation room with a view of yellow fuel trucks. You could feel the throb of jet engines through the walls.

“Why do you bring a gun into Italy on vacation, Mr. Phillips?” It was the supervisor, speaking across a table where the Brazilian pistol lay.

“It wasn’t loaded.” Not technically. He had two clips for it but they had been in different pockets. The stiffs found both of them. Michael’s head throbbed—probably dehydration from the flight. One more addition to his list of blood-chemistry disorders.

“I bought the gun for self-protection.”

“Protection from whom?”

“From anyone.”

“Are you ill?”

“I’m uncomfortable.”

“Are you on medication?”

Ha.
“NoDoz, maybe.”

“Why do you not want to sleep?”

“Bad dreams.”
Whole world of truth in that, Mr. Airport Man.

“What business are you on in Italy?”

“No business. I’m on vacation.”

“When was your last vacation?”

“I don’t remember.”

“1956?”

The supervisor had a telex. Sure. Gary Phillips had been here in ’56.

“I’ve had vacations since then.”

“Your last visit to Milan, in 1956, you also stayed only two days.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To visit a friend.”

“Which friend?”

“She’s dead.”

“When did she die?”

“Then.”

“1956?”

“Yes.”

“You came for a funeral?”

“Yes. Yes I did.”

“What was her name?”

They’d check that. If he made one up and luck wasn’t on his side, it would mean a night or two in here at least. Telling the truth would risk…what? Digging her up?

“María Maggi.” The truth. Paint it red. The supervisor wrote it down.

“Where is she buried?”

“Musocco.” The supervisor wrote that down too and passed it to an assistant who disappeared. Here we go.

“We’ll check, of course.”

“I’m sure she’s still there.” That bunched up the supervisor, and for the first time Michael felt on top of the moment. That old, very old feeling.

“What did this María Maggi do for a living?”

“She was a nun.”

“Italian?”

“Yes. I knew her as a boy in Argentina.”

“And you came all this way for her funeral?”

“She meant a lot to me.” And might even be still alive, but that would take time to check.

“Did you bring a gun the last time too?”

“No.” Another truth. They felt good.
And the Truth Shall Make You Free
—the CIA’s motto, inscribed on the lobby wall. To 99 percent of the people who worked there, its meaning was obvious, even quaint. To the other 1 percent, to the Clandestine Service officers, it held a maxim that was the flip side of
Paint It Red
. Always tell the truth. Even when you lie, make some part of it a truth you know. Only then will a lie take on wings.

“What is your work?”

“I’m a miner.”

“Excuse me?”

“I dig holes in rocks.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

He knew they’d run “Gary Phillips” through Washington. That, undoubtedly, would ring some queer bells. But he had time on his side. If they didn’t hold him, if he didn’t give them another moronic reason, he could still finish this.

“Why did you bring a gun to Italy?”

“I…my wife was shot and killed. In a burglary. Since then I’ve carried a gun. You can’t understand what it’s like watching your wife die.” A grotesque distortion, but Michael knew, as the supervisor stared into his eyes, that the man saw the real, convulsing pain beneath it. And the lie, all his lies, became real.
And the Truth Shall Make You Free
.

The assistant returned and nodded to the supervisor. There was a María Maggi in Musocco buried in 1956. Michael could feel the wind go out of the supervisor’s sails.

“You have a permit for that pistol?”

“In America.” And Michael knew they weren’t going to hold him.

“We will have to confiscate the gun as a customs violation.”

Michael kept his look neutral.

“We have the name of your hotel and will contact you tomorrow or Tuesday. You’re free to go.”

Michael rose. “Mr. Phillips…” Michael turned to the supervisor. “Be sure to see Siena. It’s beautiful this time of year.”

“Thank you.”

Michael opened the door. As he walked by the passport kid, he heard him hiss under his breath, “Do yourself a favor, Phillips. Stay out of trouble. You’re not built for it.”

He took the train in from the airport. His eyes stung with their constant, nervous movement, even with the lids closed, which was pointless anyway; he was way beyond sleep. The car clacked through the confusion of a city built by conquerors: Austrian blocks of yellow-washed plaster, Parisian facades of granite and playful lattice, Norman paranoia, Swiss money, and sewers that gurgled of Africa.

The train coughed into the Stazione Centrale, Il Duce’s soaring salute to a modern Pax Romana. Michael passed through the terminal of heavy columns and vast marble walls and remembered his first time here, in college, just a year after a war he barely missed, waiting between trains. The great fascist symbols leering from those marble slabs had been hastily covered that summer by acceptable republican flags or simply mangled with haphazard swaths of cement. There were still Allied soldiers everywhere then, eyes cocked no longer on the Italians but the Soviets, mustering over the northern mountains. There’d been poverty and eternal style.

There’d been Gina.

His hotel was a block south of the station. There was a message from Hector, a number in Madrid, and he returned it on a pay phone at the post office.

“Michael.” The voice as enthusiastic as always. “Everything went okay?”

“I’m here.”

“Excellent. My nephew will meet you at the agreed place at four. He’ll have the documents you asked for.”

There was a pause on Hector’s end. “Michael, Alejandro Morales has disappeared from Argentina on a forged passport. We don’t know his destination. It could be anywhere. It could be Milan.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“I am here for you at all times, Michael. Good luck.”

Michael dropped his bags in his room, lay down on a wafer mattress, locked his arms behind his neck, and looked out the dusty window. He’d clear his brain in a minute, meet Hector’s nephew coming down from Bonn in a few hours, and together they’d complete the arrangements at the cemetery for the exhumation of María Maggi.

Beyond the glass was the train station. It hadn’t changed much in a quarter century. Fewer bullet holes. The city had seemed bigger then. The whole world had.

Twenty-three years ago he’d finished his summer exchange year at the University of Bordeaux and was drifting magically between the girl left behind in France and the one he’d marry in Chicago.

The train that summer had taken him through the Vichy collaborationist south and a Monaco that was a passing blur of tanned bodies, swimming pools, and the nagging feeling that maybe there had been a war somewhere.

But there had been war, and crossing into Italy, its footprints were on a hundred Lombardy towns. Piles of rubble swept up but not yet removed, cratered fields, and everywhere the sour iron tang of a million obliterated battle machines.

Michael had been on his way to Florence, like all Americans, to taste white-man history older than the Alamo. He’d been restless on the ride and wandered the train, hung his elbows out the side windows, and watched the power lines race up and down, up and down.

She’d spoken first. “Sometimes, people’s arms get caught on the mail hooks. They get ripped off so fast the person doesn’t even notice at first, yes? If they live, it’s important to remember
to notify the railway police, so that if they find the arm they can return the wedding ring.”

“I’m not married.”

“Then you have less to be concerned about.”

He pulled his arms in from the window.

She was standing in profile beside him and promptly hung her own elbows out the glass. “I’m not married either.”

She was a few inches shorter than he, with the dark blonde of a northerner. Her dress was blue polka dots on white, fitted at the waist and flared to the ankle. It suited her, though not outrageously so. He told her his name in Italian, she glanced him up and down, arms still hanging out the window. “A Yankee wop with a Russian name.”

“Raised in Argentina.”

“My.”

He continued speaking to her in his mother’s Italian, and she kept answering in English. “Where are you from?”

She’d only met his eyes once, in her brief appraisal, and had since concentrated on the bushy rush of hillsides and glimpses of coast. “Not far from here. In the mountains. But I live in Marseilles now.”

“What’s in Marseilles?”

“My boyfriend.”

She turned then, and the eye that had been hidden in profile was bruised purple and black. “Tell me about your family,” she asked.

“They’re dead.”

She taught English in France and was on her way home for a visit: mom, dad, a small pharmacy, none of which she seemed to like much. He didn’t ask about the black eye. The war had grazed them—an uncle she’d never met killed in Calabria, a little brother’s eye lost to a stray B-24 lightening its load over the Alpes-Maritime. Michael felt compelled, stupidly, to apologize for it.

She shrugged. “Life gets you one way or another. At least they never saw it coming.”

“And you do?”

“Don’t you? You strike me as the kind of guy who sees it coming with both feet.”

She took a cigarette out of his pocket, stuck it into her mouth, and walked back down the car.

He found her later in a compartment full of attentive teenage soccer players, slid the door open, and sat down opposite. She didn’t seem surprised in the least to see him.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Life can’t come and get you. It can’t, because life is a dumb, blind, thoughtless blunder.”

“You believe that?”

“I have to.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette and regarded him.

“What’s your name?”

“Gina.”

There wasn’t much left of the train ride, so they talked of simple things: living among the French, the sensation created by the arrival of black American GIs. Then the train was in Milan and there was the pulling down of cases, the flushing onto the platform. They walked silently together past hissing engines, dodged rain puddles from a thousand war-holes in the curved superstructure.

The crowd diluted in the vastness of the station, and they stopped near the ticket windows for local trains.

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“Florence.”

“Of course.”

“Is it nice?”

“It’s old.”

“What’s better?” he asked.

“Acereto.”