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The Vision She Hid 140
Palermo at night looked like it had finished the Friday dinner and was now deciding what to do with the fish bones.The car had tinted windows and that faint new-leather smell that always made me think of dirty money disinfectant. The marina lights slid by our windows in long wet streaks. Inside, everything was muted, softened, as if the city had been wrapped in silk cloth and told us to behave.Elky sat beside me in the back seat. The driver was in front, a local low-key gangster Nicos had arranged for us last minute. That usually meant the guy was either reliable or disposable. We could do with some steady driving that night: the guy drove like he knew the streets too personally and thought the police was just a rumor. Her was in his late forties, with a face that had learned to stay neutral early in life and never forgot the lesson. He had olive skin, pleasant aftershave, and a jaw that had taken a few punches in its time. His eyes were almost black and steady, the kind that looked
The Vision She Hid 139
The room felt stuffy. Not because anybody moved in but because the air gave up circulating around rude people. The champagne sweated like it owed money to a gangster squad. The sashimi was starting to shine in a way that made your appetite shrink. The lawyers didn’t blink anymore; they looked awake in that reptile way men get when they smell a fat contract forming in all that cigarette smoke.Lucia watched Elky like he was a chess piece she hadn’t used yet. Elky’s jaw was getting tight. His shoulders had a stiffness I knew too well. The kind that says a guy is one shove from putting his fist into something expensive.“Ok, ok, mother. Lets be straight with each other. You spread the results of fake trials,” he said. “You faked scientific data. You bloody faked everything. And you expect us to trust you?”Eljy’s voice had a wide range, but now he kept it low. It sounded worse than shouting. Shouting is like a storm. A calm fury like his was a concealed knife.Lucia gave him a long, pati
The Vision She Hid 138
I have to say, the conversation got kinda more exciting. It wasn’t getting any friendlier though. The toro sat on Lucia’s plate like a bribe nobody wanted to take. The champagne sweated in the bucket. Lucia watched me over the rim of her glass. And the two lawyers watched Lucia like two beta males watching their alpha making a fool of himself. Elky, too, watched the space in front of him like someone had taken his past and hung it there for inspection.“Ok, ok. Since you’re in an evidence mood,” Lucia said at last, “we might as well look at the ghost you’ve been chasing all this time.”She turned her head a notch. The French lawyer got the signal and reached somewhere behind his chair. He lifted a slim black tablet case with his two pale fingers, the way you handle something contaminated with deadly poison. He laid it on the table between us, rotated it so it faced me, and tapped the screen.The tablet woke up. A familiar header slid into view. Δ-12 ADVERSE EVENT SUMMARY. Underneath,
The Vision She Hid 137
The champagne was cold enough to make a silver bucket sweat. That was about the only cold thing in the room. The heat was in the air, and it was about to melt down our confidence big time. Stunning Lucia Jennings lifted her glass, still smiling that soft, reasonable smile that had signed more death warrants than the Roman procurator. The two lawyers watched her like altar boys waiting for the bell to ring. Elky sat beside me with his hands flat on his knees, the way men usually sit when they want everyone to know they’re not reaching for a gun yet.I set my little LV purse on my lap and fussed with the clasp like I thought I might freshen my lipstick up. My thumb found a tiny button inside the clasp. One click. No light, no sound. Just a small vibration that told me the mic was awake and ready to earn its upkeep.Risky move if Lucia was smart enough to notice. Then again, if she had noticed I was as good as dead. Then the recording would be the least of my problems.I hung the purse
The Vision She Hid 136
I caught myself thinking that even if Elky was right, and “they” were really fighting with pens, “they” seem to excel in it. That morning Palermo had the kind of heat that didn’t come from the sun. It came from very old grudges and even older engines and the kind of air that took its time crawling off the warm water. You walked through it like through a sauna room. Even the seagulls looked fed up.Elky and I had been pretending to rest in the hotel lobby — the sort of lobby that smelled of too new leather. The hotel staff accustomed to talk softly because the walls had been known to have particularly good hearing. We sat in matching, fancy brown armchairs that probably had names. Mine felt like it didn’t want me there.The receptionist was a small girl with dark Sicilian hair and soft brown, old-soul eyes. She approached us with a practiced smile that was all tact and polish but somehow felt like a fruit that’d gone bad on the inside. She held a cream envelope between two fingers with
The Vision She Hid 135
The storm came in sideways over the hills. You could hear the vines complaining through the old stone. Christofides house held the noise the way it held everything else—behind thick walls, under a roof that had seen more convincing threats. We had taken the long dining table away from food. No plates, no candles. Just laptops, printouts, three cold coffee pots, and enough wires to trip a small army. The crystal chandelier above us looked confused. It was built for weddings and gala dinners, not for corporate autopsies. I sat halfway down the table with a stack of shipping logs on my right and a legal pad on my left. The pad stayed mostly clean. The logs did all the talking. Novazene LLC. Novazene Holdings. NovaZ Therapeutics. Then the same thing in Maltese, Cypriot, Greek, and whatever language tax men can dream of. Corporate addresses in Wilmington, Valetta, and Limassol. One phone number that rang in Zurich but nobody picked up. Nicos sat at the head of the table because he a
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