The Disappearance of Grace (20 page)

Chapter 53

I CALL FOR GIOVANNI.

He turns at me, smooth-faced, brown-eyed and smiling. Always smiling while blue smoke oozes out the corners of his mouth and nostrils.

“Did you find out about the fingerprints?” he asks.

“Just mine and Grace's on the ring,” I say. “Some other unidentifiable ones, but that only makes sense.”

He nods, smokes.

“I'll go home now,” I say. “No need to follow me. I feel like my eyesight is going to stay for a while.”

His smile dissolves.

“I insist,” he says. “It is my duty and my pleasure to look after you, Captain.”

He's peering into my eyes like he's not about to take no for an answer. Like he's
ordered
not to take no for an answer.

“Grazie,” I say, but it spills out of my mouth sounding as cold and dirty as the canal water.

I walk.

Giovanni, quite possibly of Interpol, follows close behind.

Chapter 54

WHEN WE COME TO the door to my building, I turn and thank Giovanni.

“How long have you worked for the café?” I ask.

He smokes the last of his cigarette and tosses it down onto the cobbles instead of into the garbage-infested canal which is only a few feet away.

“Why do you ask, Captain?” he poses, the smoke gently escaping out his mouth and nose.

In my head I'm hearing Alessandra Betti:
“Who, prior to yourself, was the last man to touch the ring?”

“The owners are generous to you. They give you a lot of time off.”

He cocks his head over his left shoulder.

“They are very generous indeed. But this is Italy, Captain. Not America. We are not so obsessed with making money.” Working up his now-characteristic smile, which I characterize as decidedly false. “We are more concerned with
la dolce vita
.”

“Of course,” I say, the first signs of total gray beginning to mask my vision. In a few moments I will be blind again. But in the blindness, I will begin to see things. Things having to do with the disappearance of my Grace.

“The good life,” I add.

“Yes, the good life.”

I unlock the door, step inside, and close it behind me.

“The good life,” I whisper to myself. “The. Good. Life.”

Chapter 55

BY THE TIME I get upstairs my eyesight is coming and going. Mostly going.

I use what sight I have left to view the keypad on my mobile phone while calling Betti back.

“I'm home,” I tell her. “How long will it take you to get here?”

“Not long,” she says. “I understand the urgency of the situation. The gravity.”

“I'll try and hold it together,” I say.

“Hold what together, Captain?”

“Me. My Vision. My broken heart.”

Chapter 56

WHEN SHE ARRIVES, I am seeing only gray. The French doors are open and I can hear the now familiar sounds coming from the narrow alley below and the occasional motor boat that travels over the feeder canal. Voices. Footsteps. Laughter. Not a single one of them coming from Grace.

I ask her if she wants coffee. She tells me she'll take care of making it for the both of us. I don't argue. I just stand before the open French doors, letting the sunlight soak my open eyes. The breeze blows in on me and the smells from the water-city fill my head.

“Interpol,” I say after a time. “The last man to touch the ring besides myself was a man I know. His name is Giovanni. He works in the café where Grace was abducted. He helps me.”

“How exactly does he help you, Captain?”

“He was the one who found Grace's ring. He was the one who alerted me to it and gave it back to me. He also acts as my seeing-eye dog. He even walks with me when the blindness isn't there, just in case it should suddenly come back.”

I hear her standing by the kitchenette, filling the coffee pot, setting it on the stove, turning on the gas, lighting the flame, setting out the demi cups.

“Do you know Giovanni's last name?” she asks.

“I don't. I've never asked.”

“Maybe you should. Or perhaps we can go see him together. This afternoon.”

“I'm not exactly seeing anyone right now,” I laugh. But nothing's funny.

I hear the sound of the coffee rapidly percolating, and she shuts off the gas, killing the burner. She pours the coffee and carries the cups over to the table, sets them down to cool for a moment. When they are sufficiently cool about a minute later, she sets my cup in my hands.

“How long will your blindness last?” she poses after a beat.

“It could last a week. Or it could last a few minutes. I've come to learn that it usually means I need to rest. Sleep. Most times, when I wake up, I can see again. Sometimes I sleepwalk, and I can see when I sleepwalk. But of course, I cannot remember what I've seen.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

I recall my waking up on the roof of this building. For a brief moment I think of telling her all about it. But then I decide not to. I don't want her to think I'm crazy.

I set down the coffee cup.

“Can I have the ring?”

She shuffles around in her pockets. Or that's what it sounds like she's doing anyway. She takes hold of my hands, sets the ring into the palm of my hand. I close my fingers around the ring, squeeze my hand tight. It isn't until a tear slowly rolls down my left cheek that I realize I'm weeping.

“What do you feel?” asks the journalist.

“I feel my Grace,” I say. “I feel her heart beating. Her lungs breathing. I feel Grace alive.”

“You understand that if she has been abducted, she could be anything but alive, Captain.”

Another tear rolls down the opposite cheek.

“I refuse to believe that. Just like I refuse to believe she has simply walked away from me.”

“This man who gave you the ring…Giovanni. Are you sure he is simply a café waiter?”

“I'm not sure what to believe anymore.”

I hear her shuffling around in her pockets once more. By the sound of it, I know she's unfolding a sheet of paper.

“I have an image of the Interpol man we identified by his print on the ring. But of course, you can't see it now.”

“What's his name?”

“Heath Lowrance. Originally from New Jersey. Princeton undergraduate in criminal justice. Did his master's at Oxford before joining the military and earning the rank of Captain in the Army Rangers. Fought in the Persian Gulf War. Decorated. Fought in Iraq in the second Gulf War. Decorated. Fought in Afghanistan. Again decorated. Knows several languages fluently including Italian, his dialect decidedly Tuscan. More recently he'd been picked up by Interpol to work in both the war crimes and terrorism divisions.”

“Could be he waits tables in Piazza San Marco on the side.”

“Could be that's his cover right now while he keeps an eye on you. That is, Interpol and the US military feel the need to keep an eye on you, both prior to and after your fiancée's disappearance.”

In my head, I'm seeing the hill in Tajik country. I see the ancient village that's situated near the top of it. A village that will be bombed back to the Stone Age.

“Captain,” Alessandra Betti goes on. “Is there something else that happened to you in Afghanistan that you have not told me?”

I'm blind. But I see inside my head I see brilliantly. With full clarity. I see the jet fighter reflecting the sun off its silver skin as it screams across the valley. See it nosedive towards the hilltop. See the missiles rocket off the wings. See them strike the village, the red-hot lightning explosions visible before I hear their back-to-back concussive bursts. In my head I climb the hill once more, see the wrecked stone and wood buildings, the burnt- out shells and the dead bodies. I see a small boy lying beside a stone well, his arms resting above his head like a toddler asleep in a crib, a white patina of dust coating his round face and bare legs. It's his feet that steal my breath away.

His. Feet.

Feet that no longer resemble human feet, but more like something belonging to a crushed insect. The feet steal my breath away and within a matter of days, will steal my vision away along with it.

I exhale and say, “Like I've already said, I ordered an airstrike on a village. A Tajik village. A Taliban holdout. I ordered an airstrike and it killed people.”

“People die in war, Captain. What made this different from any other airstrike?”

“I'm not at liberty to discuss it.”

“But if the bombing stole your eyesight, perhaps you should talk about it.”

I shake my head.

“I am not at liberty to discuss military affairs with the press. And you are not my shrink.”

“Captain, your wife is missing. It's possible you are being monitored by Interpol war crimes division. The police seem to be uncooperative and you are all alone to find out the truth in a foreign country with eyes that are no longer reliable. I wish you would speak to me.”

I close my eyes and lie down on the bed.

“Please just let me rest for a moment,” I say suddenly feeling a wash of exhaustion rinse over me, from head to toe. “It's possible my sight will return if only I can sleep for a few minutes.”

Soon I feel a blanket being draped over me.

I hear the words, “Rest, Captain. I'll be here when you wake up.”

I want to tell her thank you. But before I can get the words out, I am already drifting off to sleep.

* * *

In the dream I'm riding in the back of a personnel carrier. Other than the soldier at the wheel, I'm alone. We're moving over rocky ground inside the valley between the hills. Easy targets for the bands of Taliban that hide inside the rocky outcroppings like hornets in their nests.

Raining down on us are bullets.7.62 mm rounds pinging off the metal sides of this bullet magnet. Mounted on a swivel post directly above me is the 50 cal. machine gun. I should be manning that gun, returning the fire, holding back the hornets. But I don't want to stick my head out of that hole. I know that if I reveal my head, I'll lose it. My brains will cover this carrier like blackberry jam on toast.

Soon the dream shifts and it's nighttime…

We're climbing a hill until we stop at a gate that's guarded by a cow. I place my hand on the shoulder of the driver, ask him why he's stopping. When he turns to me, I see that he is not a part of my company. He is the man I saw in Piazza San Marco only moments prior to Grace's disappearance. The man with the dark complexion, and the closely cropped beard. He's wearing sunglasses that mask his eyes.

He does not answer my question about stopping. Instead, he looks into my face and whispers, “I See…I See…I See…”

“What do you see?” I beg of him.

That's when he removes his sunglasses to reveal two gouged out eye sockets that are as black as tar pits and just as deep.

I back away and find myself suddenly on the ground.

Coming from behind me, the sound of a jet fighter. It's racing towards me from out of the near distance, its thunderous roar reverberating against the mountains like God's wrath. The headlights from the carrier shine on the stone village before me. They shine on the cow that is still roped to the gate even though it's been shot dead by one of my men, its wounds plagued by white frothy puss and swarms of flies.

The lights shine on something else too.

Two people running towards me from the direction of the village.

A big person and a little person.

The closer they come I can see that it's the little boy whom I met inside the village only the day before he died. The second, bigger person is my Grace. They are running towards me, their arms wide open as if expecting me to take them in my own arms. Embrace them. Save them.

But that fighter plane is closing in. Fast.

The fighter plane is overhead. It's a Warthog and it's diving.

“Go back!” I scream. “Get down!”

But my voice is entirely drowned out by the scream of the nosedive and the release of two rockets that slam against the earth and explode in a fireball of hell and destruction at the feet of the little boy l. At the feet of my fiancée…

Chapter 57

WHEN I WAKE UP I am shivering. I open my eyes, and although I am not entirely blinded, my vision is blurry at best. I am breathing. Hard. My heart pounds inside my chest, my pulse throbs against my temples. There is a dull pain behind my eyeballs as if someone were somehow pressing their thumbs against them, only from the inside out.

It takes me a moment to realize that the journalist is holding my hand, tightly.

“You were having a terrible nightmare,” she says from where she sits beside me on the couch. “You screamed ‘Get down' and ‘Go back.'”