By unspoken agreement, we didn’tdiscuss the case until dinner was finished. It would have been a crime to tarnish that mealwith work talk. Taverner had leaned in hard to the local produce, whipping up a pitch-black squid ink risotto to follow fried sweet and sour sardines and a pot of salt cod pâté with piles of grilled bread he’d rubbed with garlic and green olive oil. He served a heavy Sicilian white wine with it but he watered it to keep us sharp. For dessert there was a bowl of cherries bobbing in ice water alongside tiny cups of mint tea. Because he was also an assassin—and a smart-ass—there was also a box of pastries from Malvestio. Just like Auntie Evgenia liked.
I raised an eyebrow at the box. “You’ve been busy,” I said to Taverner.
He smiled expansively. “I thought a little recon wouldn’t go amiss.” I didn’t say anything, just helped myself to a handful of cherries, popping each one into my mouth and sucking off the flesh before I spit the pit into my hand.
“I think that was a very good idea, Taverner,” Helen said in a tone that was a shade too bright. Like family, we had fallen back into our old roles and Helen’s was pourer of oil on troubled waters. I didn’t miss the fact that she’d chosen Taverner’s side though.
“Billie doesn’t,” Natalie said as she grabbed a pastry. Her role was brat.
Even with his mouth shut, Taverner could annoy me. He just smiled over his teacup and kept quiet.
“Smug isn’t a pretty color on you,” I murmured in his direction.
He turned the smile up a notch. “I cooked. You can wash up. I’m going for a walk.” He pitched a dish towel in mydirection and eased out the door. Silence lay heavy in the room after he went.
“It’s been forty years,” Natalie said. “Are you still doing this?” She waved her hands to indicate where Taverner had been sitting.
“Do you really want to talk about relationships?” I asked sweetly. “Because if I’m aiming at you, I’ve got a lot of bullets in my bandolier.” She flipped me off, but there wasn’t much she could say for herself after three divorces and a string of disastrous love affairs from Hong Kong to Helsinki.
Mary Alice clapped her hands. “Girls. Enough. Now, we have a potential lead on where to find Galina.” She explained her hunch about La Fenice to Helen and Natalie who looked suitably impressed.
Minka’s phone buzzed and she frowned as she studied it. “Something bad has happened.”
I took the phone and scrolled through the article she’d pulled up. Mary Alice came to read over my shoulder.
It was just a few lines from a Swiss newspaper. It had been written in German, but a name jumped out at me. Evgenia Dashkova.
“How did you find this?” Nat asked.
“I set search engine alerts for everybody involved in this business,” Minka explained. “That just posted.”
I read fast, translating as I went.
“What am I looking at?” Mary Alice asked.
“An obituary,” I told her. “Aunt Evgenia is dead.”
After we’d passed the phone around and everyone had had a chance to read the obit, we debated the timing of AuntEvgenia’s death. There wasn’t much dissent. We were all pretty much in agreement that it was too coincidental. Besides which, I had seen her just a few days before.
“She was older than Moses’s grandmother, but she looked good,” I said. “Healthy enough under the circumstances.”
“Old people do just drop dead sometimes,” Akiko said hopefully. I understood her inclination to chalk it up to natural causes. It was a hell of a lot less scary than the alternative. “I mean, why would Galina kill her own aunt?”
“Because she knew we’d been to see her,” I said gently.
Mary Alice filled in the rest. “Galina would have been afraid that Aunt Evgenia gave us information that Galina didn’t want us to have.”
“Like the fact that she’s actually alive,” Natalie put in.
“But you still don’tknow,” Akiko began.
I held up my hand. “We know.” I read aloud from the obituary. “ ‘Evgenia Feodorovna Dashkova is survived by her niece—Lilian Flanders of Mount Desert, Maine, in the United States.’ ”
“Thatbitch,” Mary Alice said.
Akiko looked puzzled. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Lilian Flanders is the name of the agent Galina killed before we killed her brother,” Nat explained.