23
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—POSITANO, ITALY
The Italians dine late, eight o’clock, as Rainy knows from her own study. So at eight o’clock she goes out looking for a meal and the instant she steps out on the street, she notices a man with a round, pockmarked face following her.
She is stared at a bit in the trattoria she chooses—unaccompanied women are even rarer in Italy than in the States—but as a tourist this eccentricity is passed off with a shrug by the locals who, after all, can’t expect foreigners to understand anything, really. Harder to explain are the obvious bruises on her head and face, but perhaps her rumored ex-beau is the sort to slap a woman around a bit, hardly unusual.
She eats a small green salad, a dish of ravioli, an excellent piece of fish—she is unable to translate the species name—and a small dish of intensely flavored berry gelato.
This takes two hours, during which she pretends to read a book she found in the hotel lobby, Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death. It is not a reassuring title.
After dinner she walks down through the town, paying particular attention to the church. Her watcher will expect that. Then she makes the steep climb back to the hotel, retrieves her
key at the front desk, and returns to her room. She leaves the light on for twenty minutes, then turns it off.
Darkness.
She stands listening at the window. Water drips in the little sink. Someone in the room to her right is humming. Hooves clatter on cobblestones. The wind rises, singing through the ironwork of her balcony railing. A truck. The buzz of flies or mosquitoes, hopefully not the latter. A quick, flitting sound as a bat zooms past, banking sharply.
And far deeper, way down at the threshold of hearing, so it’s more a feeling than a sound, the slow, inexorable rhythm of the sea trying with infinite patience to swallow the land.
Midnight.
Rainy sits in the dark, waiting. Waiting for every light to go out in the town below. Waiting and thinking. About her father, who, without meaning to, has basically gotten her into this fix; her mother, who Rainy imagines haranguing her postmortem after she’s killed by the Gestapo, telling her in Yiddish-English-Polish that she brought this on herself; Aryeh, a million miles away on the other side of the world on God knows what hellish island.
I wish I believed in praying. I’d pray for Aryeh.
And myself.
And she thinks, too, about Halev. And, strangely, about Captain Herkemeier, an early supporter of her . . . what to call it? Job? Career? Both Halev and the captain are very smart, very perceptive men and for some reason this strikes her as funny, and in a bad impression of John Wayne’s cadence she says, “That’s how I like ’em, pilgrim: smart and perceptive.”
The sound of her own voice is reassuring.
Two a.m. She stands at the balcony door, hidden from view but able to see out. Barely a light anywhere. No sound of traffic. The humming from next door has become snoring.
Rainy gets her bag and stuffs the silenced .22 into it, barely, with about two inches of silencer sticking out and looking like a piece of plumber’s pipe. She steps all the way out on the balcony and looks down: three balconies, all dark. She goes to the bed, strips off the sheets, and carefully knots them end to end. Not long, but maybe long enough. She tugs at the knot a few times—it would be a long fall if the knot came undone.
She loops the sheets over the bottom post of the railing and climbs over, squats down in an awkward pose. She loops the handle of her purse over her head, grabs tight to the two sheets together, and with her heart in her throat she hangs in midair, willing herself not to gasp or cry out.
Or fall.
She slides down to the balcony below, hands burning on the sheet. Silence. Either no one is home or they’re sound sleepers. The drag of the purse on her neck cuts off her blood and makes her woozy.
She hauls the sheets down after her and repeats her maneuver. This time her foot kicks a chair and she half falls in panic, landing hard, freezing, listening, waiting. This balcony’s door is open. She hears breathing from within.
Next balcony and there’s no problem but for her hands cramping and already starting to blister. The steam burn on the back of her hand feels as if the flesh must split open at any moment. The final drop takes her down to a balcony from which she can step off onto a concrete retaining wall.
And then she is on the street below the hotel. She looks up: getting back up there will not be easy. There may be no way back.
It’s not hard to find her way to the church, it’s all downhill and that intriguing dome is the tallest thing around. There’s a small plaza between the church and the beach. Empty. No, wait!
She strains to hear, flattened against a wall. No, it’s just wind.
Dammit, Rainy, don’t panic!
Finding the entrance to the church is harder than she’d expected, but find it she does, only to discover it is locked. This is strange, shouldn’t churches be open all the time for . . . well, whatever Christians did in their churches? She’s momentarily disheartened.
Do priests live at their churches? Of all the things she’s studied to prepare her, this question has never come up. Keeping to the shadows within shadows she follows the walls of the church until she finds a door in the building adjoining and connected to the church. It’s also locked, but this lock is smaller, small enough to . . . click! Yes! Who knew you really could pick a lock with a bent hairpin? For a moment she savors the small victory. She is surprised—pleasantly—to discover that the lock-picking course back at the Army Intelligence school was actually useful.