The Names of the Dead Page 16

  “She just likes to visit churches. Do you have two rooms for a couple of nights?”

  “I see. Yes, I’m sure we can do that.”

  “Great. And do you mind if we pay in cash up front? We’ve kind of maxed out our cards and I’ve still got all this to use before I fly home.” Wes held out the bundle of banknotes he still hadn’t touched since Bordeaux.

  Mia stared at him quizzically, as if he were performing some kind of street magic.

  “Of course, as long as you have ID.”

  “Naturally.”

  The receptionist smiled and said, “And I apologize for the mistake about weddings. I misunderstood.”

  “No apology needed. It’d be a great place for a wedding. It’s beautiful.”

  “We like to think so.”

  In fact its beauty turned out to be completely at odds with what Wes had expected to find here after visiting the abandoned village. Within its walls was a large garden of flower beds and fruit trees, with a restaurant area and bar on one side, a pool on the other.

  And there was peace there. The other guests seemed to lounge reading by the pool, or sit quietly over dinner. There was no disturbance in the hushed, cool corridors. If the monks had returned it might have taken them a little while to see that it was no longer a religious house.

  There was safety too, Wes was certain of that, and yet he couldn’t relax, knowing that he wasn’t moving toward any of his goals either. He checked the Gmail account a dozen times and was beginning to give up on Raphael getting back to him.

  Mia asked him if she could do anything to help and so the next afternoon he handed her the envelope with the contents of Rachel’s room safe from Granada.

  “Why don’t you take a look through that—see if you can find any clues.”

  “You think your son might be in there?”

  “Maybe. Maybe Sam Garvey too, the man who wants to kill me. My wife was investigating him, so there might be some clue. You might see something I missed.”

  Given the way her mind worked, he was surprised at himself for not having asked her to look through the various pieces of paperwork before. Every time he looked there were too many reminders of Rachel, too many triggers, whereas Mia would focus on the task at hand.

  So they sat for most of the afternoon in the dappled shade of the fruit trees near the bar. Wes was simply killing time. He dozed, he walked around the gardens a couple of times, he sat looking across at the two couples by the pool, one elderly, the other consisting of an older and grossly overweight man and a trim glamorous woman in her thirties.

  Meanwhile, Mia studied the contents of the envelope, paying meticulous attention to every receipt, every ticket. Once she’d finished most of it she picked up the pile of postcards she’d put to one side.

  “It’s okay? To read these?”

  “Sure. Like I said, she just wrote notes on them. She never sent them.”

  Mia nodded, looked at the picture on the first, then turned it over and frowned with concentration as she read the handwriting on the other side. For the next twenty minutes she studied one after another, occasionally smiling, even laughing, at the things Rachel had written.

  He’d read a few of the cards himself and hadn’t spotted anything particularly funny, and he wondered if that was just another sign that he’d never really understood her, or if it was just Mia’s skewed take on life, finding amusement where there was none. He didn’t ask her now what was tickling her, not wanting the answer to his own question.

  When she finished, she shaped all the cards neatly into a stack and put them in front of her on the table. She looked satisfied, as if she’d just read a particularly enjoyable novel.

  Wes had just picked up the tablet yet again, and smiled at her before turning back to the screen in front of him. He accessed the Gmail account and was so used to seeing it empty that it took him a moment to see that there was a new email there, from the same account.

  He opened it, his heart kicking up a beat, then sinking again as he saw Raphael’s words.

  I’m sorry, man, I’ve tried everything and I can’t find Sam Garvey anywhere. He’s really well hidden . . .

  “Is it bad news?”

  He glanced at her, nodded. “Maybe.”

  But then he looked back to the email and laughed as he read on, not so much at the contents but at the location.

  . . . but I had more luck with the other two. Even with them, I can’t find an address, but I can tell you with 98% certainty, they’re in . . .

  Wes smiled now. “Maybe it’s not bad news after all. I think it’s time for you to go home, Mia.”

  Her own responsive smile faltered. “I don’t understand.”

  “Zagreb. Here we are in Spain, but the people I’m looking for have been in Zagreb all along.”

  “Really? The man who wants to kill you?”

  “His colleagues are there, and I’m pretty sure that means he’s there too. How about that? Zagreb.”

  It made sense. He knew there’d long been talk of putting a gray team in the Balkans. George Frater had vetoed it more than once, but clearly the new guy in charge, Aaron Schalk, had been persuaded otherwise.

  “So we can scatter my father’s ashes.”

  “Yes, we can.” He liked the fact that she’d included him in that. “And maybe you can help me find the people who want to kill me.”

  “Yes, I can do that. I know people. In Zagreb. We leave in the morning?”

  “I think so.”

  “I can book a very nice hotel.”

  He could see that she’d absorbed a lot of his own doubt and uncertainty since leaving Madrid but was now feeding off his renewed purpose. He could see her enthusiasm flooding back.

  “Don’t you have a house in Zagreb?”

  “Of course. It’s where I’ll scatter my father’s ashes. I’ll never sell it. But I won’t stay there again, not ever.”

  He thought he understood, but didn’t want her to dwell on it, so he pointed and said, “You didn’t find anything?”

  “No.” She looked down at the postcards, then picked the stack up and went through them before pulling one aside. “Except this.”

  He looked across at it, unsure what she was getting at. All he could see was a picture of a cathedral, pretty much interchangeable with all the others.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s not in Spain. It’s in Italy.”

  He reached out and took it from her. He turned it over and read the small printed caption—it was the Duomo in Milan. He hadn’t noticed the message before either; not so much the content—For old times’ sake!—but the writing itself. It was similar to Rachel’s handwriting, but it wasn’t hers.

  Alina had been Rachel’s witness at their wedding, her oldest friend from college. And Alina had been Milanese. He thought of the train receipt that had no corresponding ticket. Had she traveled to some meeting point—maybe Barcelona—and handed Ethan over to her oldest friend? Had Alina brought the postcard, remembering Rachel’s odd habit from the many shared travels of their youth? And had Rachel kept the postcard in the hope that Wes might . . . No. That was a speculation too far, but the underlying truth was harder to doubt.

  “My son is in Milan.”

  “You’re sure?” He nodded, still looking at the picture of the Duomo, trying to think of alternative explanations, nervous of investing in this hope, but knowing he had to be right. “So we should go to Milan first?”

  Yes, more than anything, he wanted to go to Milan, but he couldn’t do that, to Rachel or to Ethan, not until he knew it was safe. And it would never be safe until he’d dealt with Sam.

  “No. Zagreb first. Then Milan.”

  “But your little boy is safe? You know the person he’s with?”

  “Yes, he’s safe for now. He’s with someone who was at my wedding.”

  And there was some bitter irony that the principals in Wes’s hasty and short-lived marriage were all reunited here in some fashion. Rachel’s maid of
honor had naturally been the person she’d turned to when she’d needed to guarantee the safety of her child. While Wes’s best man had effectively brought about the end of the marriage, killed Rachel, and was still determined on killing Wes. If a person’s friends were the measure of them, it just seemed to offer one more piece of proof that Wes had never been nearly good enough for her.

  Thirty-Three

  They left early the next morning. He didn’t ask Mia why she’d chosen the feeding of the four thousand in St. Mark’s Gospel for him to read, but he understood well enough why Patrice had underlined a particular passage near the end of it—For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

  It was a question Wes could quite easily put to Sam Garvey and the others who’d betrayed him. But he didn’t plan to be asking many questions, not now.

  They made the coast north of Barcelona and more or less kept to it as they crossed southern France. They stopped for lunch outside Montpellier and stayed the night in Menton near the Italian border.

  When they set off the next day he was given Isaiah for company. But again, he was more intrigued by Patrice’s choice of underlined passages, because this one seemed particularly appropriate in the light of Wes’s journey—Say to them that are of a fearful heart, be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.

  “That’s something else,” Wes said, and turned to her. “What makes you choose the things for me to read?”

  “The black man.” She threw a quick glance before turning back to the road. “I think he must be a very wise man. He chooses very interesting things.”

  Wes smiled. It had never occurred to him that she’d always intended him to read the sections underlined by Patrice, that she’d also been intrigued by them.

  “He is wise.”

  “His name is Patrice.”

  “That’s correct.”

  He looked across and could see her smiling to herself as she concentrated on the road.

  They crossed the north of Italy and stayed that night in Trieste. But the next morning Mia seemed preoccupied and he noticed the bible had been left where he’d placed it on the back seat. He picked it up anyway, and was oddly disappointed to find the bookmark still on Isaiah. Idly, he tugged at the other bookmark, easing the blade clear of the spine before sliding it back in. It felt like an age since he’d driven that spike into Skip’s neck.

  They drove across a narrow section of Slovenia, and as they approached the border and the traffic began to slow, Mia said, “Croatia is in the European Union, but not in Schengen. So. We have to go through customs.”

  “Will they search the car?”

  She looked at him with a dismissive smile. She’d been so out of sorts since breakfast that it was a relief, but he also wondered if she understood that he was carrying a serious amount of weaponry and ammunition.

  “Why would they search?”

  “I don’t know, maybe . . .”

  He didn’t know. When they got to the Croatian customs post, she handed in the two passports. The border guard looked at Wes’s first and frowned and looked across at him with what appeared to be suspicion. He said something and Mia replied—the first time Wes had heard her speak in her own language. The border guard looked unimpressed by her response, but he casually opened her passport and Wes noticed his demeanor change instantly. He asked Mia another question, she answered to the affirmative, and the border guard reacted as if to a celebrity, offering warm words, waving them through, even nodding respectfully to Wes.

  Once they were driving again, Wes said, “He recognized your name?”

  “Yes. Many Croatians are called Pavić, but he knew who I am when he saw it. Some people do. Some people don’t.”

  That was the end of it, and she fell back into silence. They reached the coast again, the Adriatic this time, but then turned inland at Rijeka. And now, as they drove through the forested hills of her country, the unease she’d seemed to exhibit turned to something more like a nervous excitement and she started to talk.

  “It’s a beautiful country, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “When I first saw Renaissance paintings, you know the religious paintings, in Italy, I thought they were all painted here, because the countryside in the background, it looked like Croatia, in every one. It was very exciting for me, as a child, to see that.”

  “Because you were religious?”

  “Of course. Many people in Croatia are religious. Young people like me.” It was the first time he’d heard her refer to herself as a young person. “I’m twenty-nine. I don’t really remember the war. Or my mother.” She smiled, and appeared to almost breathe in the landscape. “It was a very happy childhood for me.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say in response. She’d grown up without a mother, she’d developed an eating disorder and a problem with self-harming, was possibly autistic, and yet her belief in this happy past seemed genuine. Wes’s childhood had been about as safe and stable as it was possible to be and yet all he really remembered was how bored he’d been most of the time.

  “So you must be happy to be back.”

  Her smile turned into a frown of concentration.

  “I don’t know. Thinking of happy times can make people sad—isn’t that so? I’m coming to scatter his ashes. It’s what he wanted. And then . . .” She fell silent briefly, apparently unable to think past the scattering of her father’s ashes, but then her face brightened a little. “And you must kill some people.”

  “I don’t have to kill them, I just . . . Actually, no, you’re right—I do have to kill them. I won’t be able to get my son otherwise. And anyway, they wanna kill me.”

  “Because they’re afraid of you, like the people in Madrid.”

  “Yeah, I think so. They betrayed me, and they think I’ll want vengeance, so they’re trying to kill me first.”

  “Which is why you have to kill them.”

  “Yeah.” She laughed, presumably at the circularity of it all.

  She continued to talk on and off, of nothing in particular, and then as they reached the outskirts of Zagreb she started pointing out places and landmarks, sometimes talking about memories of her past.

  Then as they neared the center she said, “The hotel is called the Esplanade. It was built for passengers from the Orient Express—you know, like the novel?”

  “Yeah, I know the one you mean.”

  She pointed. “There it is.”

  It was an imposing block a hundred yards from the station, and she drove up the sloped entrance to the front doors as if it were something she’d done a hundred times before. Maybe she had, because there seemed to be a mix of familiarity and respect from the three young men who emerged from the hotel—one taking the bags, another the car keys, the third standing by the door and offering a welcome to them in Croatian.

  Mia replied, just a few words, and the young man turned to Wes with a bow and said, “Welcome to the Hotel Esplanade. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay in Zagreb.”

  “Thanks, I hope so too.”

  He showed them inside and handed them over to one of the people on the reception desks. As they were invited to sit, Wes noticed the same deference. Mia was in her typical attire—sneakers, tight black jeans, a black long-sleeved top—yet there was something almost regal in the easy manner with which she accepted this special treatment.

  As the woman behind the desk handed the keys over, she said in English, “We’ve upgraded you to a suite, Miss Pavić, and you too, Mr. Wesley, so that you can be nearby.”

  He nodded. It was clear from her tone and expression that she thought he was a bodyguard or some other employee.

  In the elevator, Mia said, “How will you find the people you must kill?”

  “I’m not sure. I n
eed to find out if anyone’s aware of an office being run somewhere in Zagreb by Americans, something that seems suspicious. I know that’s a bit generalized.”

  She shook her head. “It’s a small city. People will know, and I know people who will be able to find out.”

  “Good, but first, I think we need to do something else.”

  She stared at him for a few seconds, a puzzled expression, and said finally, “You want me to guess?”

  “No, I . . .” Even now it took him by surprise that normal conversation was so full of riddles for Mia. “I just mean, we should scatter your father’s ashes.”

  “Oh, yes. But your business is urgent.”

  He didn’t want to have to explain to her that his business might make it hard for him to be involved in the scattering of her father’s ashes. Even if Garvey hadn’t secured backup from the Agency, there were still at least three of them and Wes didn’t see many ways of it ending without him killing them all—or getting killed by them in the process. No matter how many friends Mia had in Zagreb, he’d probably need to leave immediately after it was done.

  “You’ve waited long enough, and so has your father. I think we should do it now, this afternoon.”

  She stared at him again for a few seconds, but he knew she understood this time. Maybe her real reluctance was founded in simply not wanting to say a final goodbye.

  Thirty-Four

  They drove across the city and then up into the surrounding hills, along a leafy road with large houses set behind electric gates. She told him that rich people and many foreign ambassadors lived here. She slowed down then as they approached a gate set in a wall that seemed to have only woods beyond it. The gate was open and an elderly man was standing next to it—he waved as Mia drove in.

  “Did he know you were coming?”

  “Yes, I telephoned. He looks after the house. He has an apartment, in the basement, with his wife.”

  She headed up the drive without slowing, beyond the woods to the nineteenth-century mansion that sat amid immaculately maintained lawns. The house itself looked closed up, shutters blocking the windows on the upper floors.