And now Musgrave's assistant appeared in the doorway, followed by a lanky man, topped with a shock of strawberry-blond hair. He grinned to all and stepped forward. "Mike Hill." He shook hands with everyone, Rhyme included, paying no attention to the wheelchair.
Rhyme was not surprised when the consulate general told him that Hill--nerdy and boyish, a younger Bill Gates--was here to hawk high-tech products to the Italians; his company exported broadband and fiber-optic equipment, built in his Midwest factory.
"Henry was telling me what you need, and I'm happy to help." He then frowned and now glanced at the wheelchair. "But have to say, the plane's not, you know, accessible."
Sachs said, "I'll be going alone."
"What's the timing?"
"If possible, I need to get up there this morning and back tonight."
"Definitely we can get you there in a few hours. The only issue is returning. The crew's got other flights after Milan. If they time out, they'll have to spend the night in Lausanne or Geneva."
"That's fine," Rhyme said. "The important thing is to get there as soon as possible."
Hill said, "Now, where do you want to go? There're two airports in Milan. Malpensa, the bigger one, is about twenty miles northwest of the city and depending on the time of day, the traffic can be pretty bad. Linate's the downtown airport. It's much more convenient if you've got to be in the city itself. Which would be better?"
Rossi had said the warehouse was in town, not in the suburbs. "Linate."
"Okay. Easy-peasy. I'll tell the crew. They'll need to file a flight plan. Coupla hours should do it. And I'll have my driver take you to the airport."
Sachs began, "Mr. Hill--"
"Mike, per favore." Spoken with the worst Italian accent Rhyme had ever heard. "And if you're gonna bring up money, forget it. Won't cost much to make a stop in Milano. So consider this gratis."
"We appreciate it."
"Never had a chance to help catch a psycho and probably never will again. Glad to do my duty." Hill rose, pulled his phone from his pocket and stepped to the corner of the office, where, Rhyme could hear, he had conversations with the pilot and his chauffeur, coordinating the trip.
"Lincoln, Amelia." A woman's voice from the doorway. Rhyme looked up to see Charlotte McKenzie walk into the office, looking rumpled. Her short blond hair was a bit spiky and her copper-colored blouse a bit wrinkled. Maybe her cold was taking its toll. "Henry." She nodded to Thom too.
"So, hitching a ride to Milan," she said to Rhyme. "That worked out?"
Musgrave nodded toward Mike Hill, still on the phone, and said to McKenzie, "Mike's plane'll get Detective Sachs up there this morning."
"Good. You think this guy, the Composer, he's left Naples? He's up there?"
Sachs said, "We don't know the connection. Just an address on a note from the crime scene at the refugee camp." She then said to Musgrave, "One thing I'm hoping. Is there someone at the consulate in Milan who could drive me, translate for me?"
Charlotte McKenzie said, "I have a colleague there. He does what I do, legal liaison. Pete Prescott. Good man. I can see if he's free."
"That'd be great."
She texted and a moment later her phone chimed with an incoming message. "Yes, he is. I'll text you his number, Amelia."
"Thanks."
Mike Hill joined them, slipping his phone away. Musgrave introduced him to McKenzie and then the businessman said to Sachs, "All set. You're good to go. My driver'll pick you up at eleven...where's good?"
She gave him the hotel address.
"Know it. Great old place. Makes me feel like I'm part of the Rat Pack when I stay there."
Another figure appeared in the doorway, the slim, very pale man of indeterminate age Rhyme remembered from the other day. Ah, yes, the public relations officer. What was the name again?
He nodded to those present and introduced himself to Hill. "Daryl Mulbry."
The slight man sat and said to Rhyme, "We're getting inundated with requests from the press--about both Garry and the Composer. Would you be willing to sit down for an interview?" Mulbry stopped short and blinked--undoubtedly at the awkward choice of a verb, considering Rhyme's condition.
As if he cared. "No," Rhyme said shortly. "I don't have anything to say at this point, other than that we've got a composite rendering of the Composer and that's gone to the press anyway."
"Yes, I've seen it. Intimidating-looking guy. Big. But what about Garry? Any statement?"
Rhyme could just imagine Dante Spiro's reaction when he read in the press that an unnamed "American consultant" was commenting on the case.
"Not now."
McKenzie added, "I should tell you: Garry's been getting threats. Like I mentioned, those accused of sexual assault are at particular risk. Add that he's an American...Well, it's a problem. The authorities keep an eye on him but there are no guarantees."
"No press," Rhyme said insistently. But he added, "While Amelia's away I'll be following up with his case, though."
McKenzie said, "Ah. Good." The uncertainty told Rhyme she'd be wondering how exactly he could follow up when his ass was parked in a wheelchair, in a country that did not seem to have the equivalent of the American With Disabilities Act in force.
He didn't tell her that he had a secret weapon.
Two, in fact.
Chapter 36
The Black Screams had begun.
But the failure at the camp and the sight of the redheaded policewoman had conspired to shake him awake early and fill his head with the screams, shrilling like a dentist's drill.
Yes, he had a plan for Artemis. Yes, Euterpe had whispered calming sentiments from on high. But, as he well knew, very little could stop determined Black Screams. He'd hoped to control them himself, but ultimately, he knew, he'd lose. It was the same as when you wake with that first twist in your gut, small, nothing really. Still, you understand without any doubt you'll be on your knees over the toilet in an hour with the flu or food poisoning.
Whispering screams, soon to become the Black Screams.
And soon they were.
Shaky-hand, sweaty-skin--these were nothing compared with a Black Scream.
Pacing the farmhouse, then outside in the wet dawn. Stop, stop, stop!
But they hadn't stopped. So he'd popped extra meds (that didn't work, never did) and, in the 4MATIC, sped to where he stood now: to chaotic downtown Naples where he prayed the ricocheting cacophony would drown out the screams. (That sometimes worked. Ironically, noise was his salvation against Black Screams--as much and as loud and as chaotic as possible.) He plunged into the jostling crowds filling the sidewalks. He passed food vendors, bars, restaurants, laundries, souvenir stores. He paused outside a cafe. Imagined he could hear the forks on china, the teeth biting, the jaws grinding, the lips sipping...
The knives cutting.
Like knives slashing throats...
He was sucking up the noise, inhaling the noise, to cover the screams.
Make them stop, make them stop....
Thinking of his teenage years, the girls looking away, the boys never looking away but staring and, sometimes, laughing as Stefan walked into the classrooms. He was thin then, passable in sports, could tell a joke or two, talk about TV shows, talk about music.
But the normal didn't outshine the strange.
How often he would lose himself in the sound of a teacher's voice, the melody of her words, not the content, which he didn't even hear.
"Stefan, the sum is?"
Ah, such a beautiful modulation! A triplet in the last of the sentence. Syncopated. G, G, then B flat as her voice rose in tone because of the question. Beautiful.
"Stefan, you've ignored me for the last time. You're going to the principal. Now."
And "principal," an even better triplet!
Only then did he realize: Oh, messed up again.
And the other students either looking away or staring (equally cruel).
Strange. Stefan is strange.
Well, he was. He knew that as well as anybody. His reaction: Make me unstrange or shut the hell up.
Now, on this busy corner in a busy city, Stefan pressed his head against an old stone wall and let a thousand sounds pass over him, through him, bathing him in warm water, circling and soothing his rampaging heart.
Hearing, in his head, his fiery imagination, the tolling of the red bell on the dirt, spreading outward from the man's neck last night.
Hearing the sound of blood roaring in his ears, loud as a blood bell ringing, ringing, ringing.
Hearing the refugee's screams.
Hearing the Black Screams.
From the time of adolescence, when the Black Screams started, it had been a battle to keep them at bay. Sound was the lifeblood for Stefan, comforting, explaining, enlightening. The creak of boards, the stutter of branches, the clicking of tiny animal feet in the Pennsylvania garden and yard, the slither of a snake in the woods. But the same way that healthy germs can become sepsis, sounds could turn on him.
Voices became sounds and sounds voices.
Roadside construction equipment, driving piles was really a voice: "Cellar, cellar, cellar, cellar."
A bird's call was not a bird's call. "Look swinging, look swinging, look swinging."
The wind was not the wind. "Ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone."
The creak of a branch: "Drip, drip, drip, drip..."
And a voice from a closed throat that might have been whispering, "Goodbye, I loved you," became merely a rattle of pebbles on wood.
Now a Black Scream, a bad one, the whining drill. It was starting in his groin--yes, you could hear them down there--and zipping up through his spine, through his jaw, through his eyes, into his brain.
Nooooooooo...
He opened his eyes and blinked. People stared uneasily as they passed. In this part of town, fortunately, there were homeless men, also damaged, so he did not stand out sufficiently for them to call the police.
That would not be good at all.
Euterpe would not forgive him.
He managed to control himself enough to move along. A block away he stopped. Wiping sweat, pressing his face against a wall, he struggled to breathe. He looked around. Stefan was near the famed Santa Chiara church, on Via Benedetto Croce--the mile-long street that bisected the ancient Roman part of town and was known to everyone as Spaccanapoli, or the Naples Splitter.
It was a chaotic avenue, narrow, throbbing with tourists and pedestrians and bicycles and scooters and punchy cars. Here were vendors and shops offering souvenirs, religious icons, furniture, commedia dell'arte figurines, cured meats, buffalo mozzarella, limoncello bottles in the shape of the country, and the local dessert, sfogliatelle, crispy pastry that Stefan adored--not for the taste but for the sound of the crackly crust between teeth.
The morning was hot already and he took off his cap and wiped his shaved head with a paper towel he carried with him.
A Black Scream began but desperately he turned his attention back to the street sounds around him. The putter of scooters, shouts, a horn, the sound of something heavy being dragged along stones, a cheerful child's tune chugging from a boom box next to a street performer--a middle-aged man folded into a box that resembled a cradle. Only his head, covered with an infant's bonnet and positioned above a doll's body, was visible. The eerie sight and his bizarre singing captivated passersby.
The wind, snapping laundry overhead.
Mommy silent, Mommy silent.
He was then aware of another sound, growing louder.
Tap...tap...tap.
The rhythm caught him immediately. The resonant tone. He closed his eyes. He didn't turn toward the sound, which was behind him. He savored it.
"Scusati," the woman's voice said. "No, uhm, I mean: Scusami."
He opened his eyes and turned. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty. Slim, braided hair framing a long, pretty face. She was in jeans and wore two tank tops, white under dark blue, and a pale-green bra, he could see from the third set of straps. A camera hung from one shoulder, a backpack from the other. On her feet were, of all things, cowboy boots with wooden heels. They were what had made the distinctive tap as she approached.
She hesitated, blinked. Then: "Dov'e un taxi?"
Stefan said, "You're American."
"Oh, you are too." She laughed.
It was obvious to him that she'd known this.
Obvious too that she was flirting. She'd liked what she'd seen and, college girl on her own, had moved in. The sort who had no problem making the first--or second or third--move. And if the boy, or maybe, for a lark, the girl, said no, she'd offer a good-natured smile, no worries, and move on, buoyed by the unbreakable union of youth and beauty.
He was round, he was sweaty. But handsome enough. And not a player. Safe, cuddly.
"I don't know where you'd get a taxi, sorry." He wiped his face again.
She said, "Hot, isn't it? Weird for September."
Yes, though the humid southwestern Italian air was not the source of his perspiration, of course.
A group of schoolchildren, in uniform, streamed past, guided by a protective Mother Hen of a teacher. Stefan and the girl stepped aside. They then shifted again the other way as a Piaggio motor scooter bore down on them. A grizzled deliveryman in a dusty fisherman's cap drove them yet another direction as he staggered under the weight of a carton-filled pushcart, glaring and muttering, as if the sidewalk were his own personal avenue.
"Crazy here! Don't you just love it?" Her freckled face was infinitely amused, and her voice was light but not high. If the sound had been flower petals, they would have been those from pink roses, plucked but still moist. He could feel the tones falling on his skin like those petals.
None of the crackly rasp of vocal fry that the music-hater refugee, Fatima, had.
As she spoke, the Black Screams grew quieter.
"Don't know anyplace back home like it, that I can think of," he said, because that was what somebody from back home would say. He thought New York City was like this actually but, given his recent adventures there, he didn't volunteer that observation.
She rambled, charmingly, about being in the south of France most recently, had he ever been? No? Too bad. Oh, Cap d'Antibes. Oh, Nice!
The screams abated some more as he listened. He looked too: such a beautiful young woman.
Such a lovely voice.
And those tapping boots! Like a rosewood drum.
Stefan had had lovers, of course. But in the old days. Before what the doctors would call--though never to his face--the Break, at around age twenty-two. It was then that he had simply given up fighting to be normal and stepped, comforted, into the world of sounds. Around the time Mommy went all quiet in the cellar, quiet and cold, in the quiet and hot cellar, the washing machine spinning the last load of towels ever washed in the house.
Around the time Father decided he wasn't going to be aproned to a troubled son anymore.
Before then, though, before the Break, sure, there'd been the occasional pretty girl, those who didn't mind the strange.
He rather enjoyed them--the occasional nights--though the sensation grew less interesting than the sounds of joining. Flesh made subtle noises, hair might, tongues did, moisture did.
Nails did.
Throats and lungs and hearts, of course.
Then, though, the strange got stranger and the girls started to look away more and more. They started to mind. Which was fine with him because he was losing interest himself. Sherry or Linda would whisper about taking her bra off and he'd be wondering about the sound of Thomas Jefferson's voice, or what the groans of the Titanic had been like as she went down.
Now the young woman in the cowboy boots said, "So, I'm here for a few days is all. My girlfriend, the one I was traveling with? She broke up with her boyfriend before she left, but then he called and they got back together so she just went home, pout, pout. And abandoned me! How about that? But here I am in Italy! I mean, like,
I'm going back to Cleveland early? Don't think so. So here I am. Talking and talking and talking. Sorry. People say I do that. Talk too much."
Yes, she did.
But Stefan was smiling. He could affect a good smile. "No, it's all good."
She wasn't put off by his silence. She asked, "What're you doing here? You in school?"
"No, I'm working."
"Oh, what do you do?"
Presently slipping nooses around people's necks.
"Sound engineer."
"No way! Concerts, you mean?"
With the Black Screams now at bay he was able to act normal, as he knew he had to. He ran through his arsenal of blandly normal tones and words and launched a few. "I wish. Testing for noise pollution."
"Hm. Interesting. Noise pollution. Like traffic?"
He didn't know. He'd just made the career up. "Yep, exactly."
"I'm Lilly."
"Jonathan," he said. Because he'd always liked the name.
Triplet. Jon-a-than.
A name in waltz time.
"You must get lots of data, or whatever it is you do, here in Naples."
"It's noisy. Yes."
A pause. "So, no idea where to get a cab?"
He looked around because that was what a blandly normal person would do. He shrugged. "Where do you need to go?"
"Oh, a touristy thing. A guy at the hostel I'm staying at recommended this place. He said it's awesome."
Stefan was considering.
Not a good idea...He should be following up on his plan regarding Artemis (it was quite a good one). But, then, she wasn't here, and Lilly was.
"Well, I've got a car."
"No way! You drive? Here?"
"Yeah, it's crazy. The trick is you just forget there're traffic laws, and you do okay. And don't be polite and let people go ahead of you. You just go. Everybody does."
Blandly normal. Stefan was in good form.
Lilly said, "So you want to come with? I mean, if you're not doing anything."
A Black Scream began. He forced it to silence.
"What is this place?"
"The guy said it's totally spooky."
"Spooky?"
"Totally deserted."
So it would be quiet.