“We need to make contact with Galina to set up a meeting.”
I was about to elaborate when he bolted. One second he was there, the next he was up and gone, pelting up the steps of the bridge. Helen was too busy still fighting the seagull away from her pizza to chase him, and I got tangled with a waiter who was delivering plates of pasta to the table next to mine. It was all up to Natalie and Mary Alice.
Chapter Twenty
“What do you mean youlost him?” I demanded an hour later when we all met back up at the house in the Campo Santa Margherita.
“I mean we lost him,” Mary Alice said testily.
“He’s a husky blond opera singer in a city full of Italians,” I reminded her.
“What can I say? He moves like Baryshnikov. Besides that, I am a sixty-two-year-old woman with bad knees,” she shot back.
I glanced at Natalie. “What’s your excuse?”
“Let me count them. One,” she said, lifting up her middle finger, “you missed out on chasing him too, Billie.”
“She knows,” Helen said mildly. “That’s why she’s annoyed and taking it out on you.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” I said.
She shrugged and turned back to Natalie. “I’m not taking that personally and neither should you. She’ll get over it.”
I headed to my room then and I might have stomped a little as I went. It wasn’t mature, but it felt damned good. I sat in the chair by the window, sulking and smoking, watching life in the campo go by. A market had been set up with stalls of lettuces and onions. A tiny section of it was devoted to fish, freshly silver and gleaming on their beds of crushed ice in the afternoon light. They’d probably been swimming that morning. I watched the housewives move from stall to stall, carefully choosing the freshest artichokes, the fattest bulbs of fennel. It was oddly peaceful watching people go about their lives.
After a few minutes, Helen joined me. She didn’t say anything when she took the chair next to mine. She just sat and watched the market, clocking the comings and goings of the Venetians. The fish vendor was having a good-humored argument with a man about the state of an octopus and kept waving its little tentacles around to indicate freshness. Across the aisle, a woman was running a finger over an embroidered tablecloth.
“Those table linens are a nice color. I should pick up a set,” Helen mused. She was always Wendy to our Lost Boys, sweeping up the hearth and setting a place for everyone.
“You don’t have a house anymore,” I reminded her. “Thanks to me.”
She shrugged. “I like to nest, even in temporary accommodations,” she said, waving a hand to indicate the safe house.
“You’d hang curtains in hell if the devil would let you,” I replied.
She turned to me with a curious expression. “Are you happy? Just living quietly on your Greek island with Taverner.”
“I was,” I told her. “I am.”
“What do you do with your time?”
“Mostly what I always did between missions. I have translation work, I do yoga. I run. I’m learning to sail.”
“Sounds as if you keep busy,” she said mildly.
“I do. I miss the job,” I admitted. “And I miss all of you.” I waited a beat before launching into what I really wanted to say. “Helen, about Benscombe—”
“I know.” When you’ve been friends as long as we have, you can shorthand a lot. With those few short words, I’d apologized and she’d accepted. She knew I’d never completely forgive myself. “I’m still mad at you, though,” she added.
“I would be too. It was a nice house.”
She shrugged. “It was a money pit with termites and dry rot. But I loved it.”
“I know,” I said. “What will you do now?”
She considered that a minute before answering. “I could rebuild, I suppose. But maybe it’s time for something new. Kenneth bought that house for me, and there was never a minute I spent there that I didn’t think about him, about Constance. I adored it, but there were a lot of ghosts in those walls.”
“Where would you go?” I asked her.