The Flight Attendant(89)
He stopped in his tracks and released her hand. He brought his own hand up to her cheek and gently turned her face toward his. “A gun? This is Italy, not America.”
“I take it that means no.”
“My American grandmother is from Florida, and I follow the news. Why do you ask?”
“Never mind.”
“No, please. Tell me. My uncle hunts. Wild boar. Deer. Not very seriously, but he goes to Montisi during the season. He has a podere—a little farmhouse—there. But he only lives two blocks from me here in Rome most of the time. His apartment? Much nicer than mine.”
She resumed their walk down the path because now she felt incapable of maintaining eye contact. He walked beside her, his hands behind his back. “I was thinking of a handgun,” she said.
“You know you can’t carry one in public places here. It’s against the law.”
“I did not know that.”
“Do you have a license for such a thing? Maybe in America?”
“No.”
“Have you ever even fired a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” He sounded shocked.
“It’s been years, but yes. Not a handgun, a rifle. A Remington pump-action. It was my father’s. Remember, I grew up in the country. I went hunting with him a couple of times, and I took a hunter safety course for kids.”
“Kids?”
“Yes, kids.” Then: “Do you think your uncle has a pistol? Or just a hunting rifle?”
“He has a pistol.”
A ten-or eleven-year-old boy with wide eyes and a broad smile ran up to her and gave her a magnificent, niveous white rose, one of easily two dozen he held in his arms. She smiled and inhaled the aroma. It still smelled fresh. Enrico handed the child a couple of euros, and the boy ran off. In the distance was a woman with a straw hat, but it wasn’t the same hat from the airport and it wasn’t the same woman. Then Enrico asked, “Did you ever hit anything?”
“I wounded a deer. It was a bad shot. It took the animal far too long to die.”
“Why are you interested in this? Why do you need a gun?”
She shrugged. “I might need a gun. Maybe I don’t. I honestly don’t know.”
“Does this have something to do with that phone call you made to your sister back in the hotel lobby?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“You know, I could lie to you, Enrico. I’m a very, very good liar. I lie all the time. I lie to other people, I lie to myself.”
“But you’re not going to lie to me right now.”
She smiled at him. “No. I’m not. But I’m also not going to tell you a whole lot. You could find most of it online. Just Google my name. But Enrico? I have a sense you’re better off not knowing.”
“I’m a bartender. I make people drinks. I make love to beautiful flight attendants—”
“You mean I’m not the first?” she asked, cutting him off to tease him.
“You are the first and the only.”
“You’re a pretty good liar, too.”
“All I mean is that I have no enemies,” he said.
“No, but I do. Or I might.”
“Here in Rome?”
“Apparently. Maybe.”
“So, you want protection, is that it?”
“Yes.”
He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her into him. “Then I will protect you.”
“I’m not sure you can.”
“But I will try.”
She shook her head. “Nope. The best thing you can do is bring me to your uncle’s.”
“If he’s home, he might not let me have his gun. His Beretta.”
“Just for one night?”
“He’d be afraid I would get myself into trouble.”
“And if he’s not home?”
“You mean I just take it?”
“I mean we just borrow it.”
“I have a better idea,” said Enrico, his voice mischievous.
She waited.
“Spend the night at my apartment. With me. No one would have any idea you were there. And if somehow someone did? You would have two strong, young waiters and one strong, young bartender to protect you.”
She thought about this as she walked, occasionally glancing around at the vendors with their gelato and the couples on their rented bikes or the tourists photographing the Roman temple beside the small pond. She saw two American boys in baseball henleys, the pair almost but not quite teenagers, running a little ahead of their parents. She saw a young man in shades standing beside a lusterless silver bike, and he looked back at her when she passed him.
She breathed in the air, lush now with the promise of twilight, and recalled Alex Sokolov’s cold body beside her in bed and his blood in her hair. She thought of his neck and the white pillow sodden like a sponge with his blood. She envisioned the decomposition Ani had alluded to on the phone. After her conversation with her lawyer, she knew that she couldn’t endanger Enrico that way. Moreover, she understood in the deep reptilian part of her brain, the core that controlled her body’s most vital functions, that something inside her had been heat-blasted and now begun to harden. It was why she wanted that gun.