One Way Fare

Evan

The first thing I learned about Enzo Calabrese's villa is that nobody sleeps past five.

The second is that nobody tells you this in advance. I found out at 4:58 AM, when a woman I had never met knocked on my door and said, "Your first block begins in two minutes," like it was a perfectly normal sentence to say to someone who'd been awake for twenty-six hours the day before.

"Block," I said, from somewhere inside the pillow.

"Foundation. Downstairs, the blue room." She had the posture of someone who had never once been late. "There is coffee."

I lay there for a second after she left. The last person who'd gotten me out of bed at this hour was Matteo, standing in the doorway in his gym clothes, saying "Stance" before I'd even found the floor. I'd complained about it every morning for months. I'd have traded the whole villa for one more of them.

I reached for my phone. No Service. Same as the car, same as the plane, same as the airport.

I needed to fix that, and I decided I'd start with the man who ran the place.

I found the blue room by following the smell of coffee and the sound of a ticking clock. It was a real clock on a real wall, in a room with a table, two chairs, and a small gray-haired woman who looked up and said something in Italian that went by so fast I caught maybe one word. It was probably "late."

"I'm sorry, I don't—"

She said something else. Slower. Louder. Still nothing.

"English?" I tried.

She smiled with great patience and began, very slowly, to point at things and name them. "La tavola. La sedia. L'orologio."

That was Foundation. Two hours of pointing and repeating, and a notebook she took away from me when I tried to write in English. By the end I could say "The table is brown" and "I am very tired," which covered most of my immediate needs.

I told myself it wasn't pointless. Half of Matteo's world slid into Italian whenever Franco or Enzo didn't want Sofia following a conversation. If I could catch even a little of it, I'd be useful when I got home. That was probably why Enzo had put it first.

It was a good thought. It got me through the second hour.

The tablet was waiting on my bed when I went up to shower. The red badge in the corner read 91 now, up from 68. I'd been gone from home for less than a day and the number was already growing faster than I could read it.

A text had come in while I was in the shower, from a number I didn't know.

"Password: Tr4nquillo-7. Do not share. Welcome, Mr. Moretti."

I stared at that for a second.

Then I decided it was a typo. A bad autofill, or someone on Enzo's staff with Matteo's name stuck in their head from the paperwork. I typed the password and the tablet opened, and across the top of the screen, in tidy grey letters, it said: E. MORETTI — TASKS (91).

Not a typo, then. Or a typo that had spread.

I scrolled. Most of it was written in a language I technically spoke and absolutely did not understand. Reconcile: harbor fees vs. Naples ledger, Q2. Confirm: signature authority, Calabrese Holdings (Salerno branch). Draft: condolence letter to the Brandolini estate — DO NOT SEND. Verify: the Genoa matter (see Alessio). I tapped one and it asked for a second authentication I didn't have. Tapped another, same. Seventy-odd more were locked behind a wall I hadn't been given the key to.

My head hurt. I looked at the calendar instead. Grey blocks from five to ten, every one of them named for something that told me nothing. Threshold started in eleven minutes. Near the bottom, almost at ten, there was a block called Tether, and I had no idea what it was, which in this house meant it was probably another lesson.

I went to breakfast with wet hair.

Breakfast was on the terrace. Enzo was already there, jacket on despite the heat, reading something on his own tablet with his glasses low on his nose. He didn't look up when I sat.

"You're four minutes late."

"I was in a language class. I learned the word for table."

"Tavola." Still not looking. "You will learn four hundred more by Friday."

I opened my mouth to say something smart and then really looked at him. He looked smaller in daylight. Thinner at the wrists. There was a small pill case beside his saucer, and when he thought I was reading the schedule he took something from it and swallowed it without water, the way you do when you've done it a hundred times and refuse to make it an event.

I looked down at my plate and didn't say anything.

"Eat," Enzo said.

I ate. Then, because I couldn't help it: "Enzo, my phone doesn't work. I haven't had signal since we left. Is there any way I can reach home? Even a few minutes. Sofia made me promise."

"Ah." He turned a page. "Yes. I'll see to it."

"Today?"

"I will see to it, Evan."

That was all I got. I was too tired to push, and he'd said it so easily that I believed him.

"Also," I said, "Why does the tablet say Moretti? I think someone mixed up the files."

"It is not a mistake."

I waited for the rest. He took his time.

"It pleases an old man," he said finally. "I have known Matteo since he was in short trousers. I would have liked to see the wedding."

My stomach did something warm and ridiculous. "We're not even engaged. There's a promise ring. There's no date. There isn't even a proposal."

"I know that stubborn fool." Enzo finally looked up over his glasses, and something very close to a smile touched the corner of his mouth. "He will take his time. He is patient, and you have time to prepare. But I promise you he is already ordering security and choosing a location with one road in and one road out."

I laughed before I could stop myself, because it was so exactly him that I could picture it.

"Humor a dying man," Enzo said, mildly. "Let me have the name for a little while."

I looked down at the ring and forgot, for a second, what I'd been arguing.

"It's a lot of Moretti," I said.

"It's nearly the same number of letters as Mercer." He went back to his page. "Threshold begins in six minutes. The study at the end of the east hall. Do not touch anything."

Threshold was a room full of photographs.

Hundreds of them, pinned to a corkboard that took up an entire wall, each with a name and a line of notes. Men in suits. Women at restaurant tables. A teenage boy squinting at a boat. A man with a white mustache, circled twice in red.

A tall man named Alessio stood next to the board with his arms folded. He was Enzo's right hand, the one who'd been told about the illness before me. His face was like a closed door.

"Names, faces, relationships," Alessio said, in perfect English. "By tonight you will know who is related to whom, who owes whom, and who must never be seated near whom at dinner."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight."

"There are, what, three hundred people on this wall?"

"Three hundred and twelve."

"That's insane."

"Yes," said Alessio, and handed me a cup of cold espresso like it was an apology, and walked out.

I stood there for a while looking at the wall. The man with the white mustache looked back at me. His note said: Brandolini. Cousin to Salerno by marriage. Does not forgive. Does not forget. Never discuss Genoa.

I wrote that down. Then I wrote down another one, and another. I told myself this was what the faces were for. When Matteo sat down at a council table and I stood behind him, I'd know who everyone was before they opened their mouths. In the war room I'd been useful because I remembered names. Enzo had probably just decided to see how far that went.

Probably.

By the time the next block chimed I'd gotten through maybe sixty of them, and my hand had cramped into a claw.

The block after that was called Continuance, and it was Enzo, in his study, with the door closed. I sat in a chair beside his desk while he made phone calls in rapid Italian. I understood a handful of words, and every so often he pointed at me and said, "Write." Letters, mostly. He dictated them in English for my benefit, in a formal, careful cadence, to people whose names I'd just spent two hours memorizing.

Around the fourth letter, I noticed that every signature line read "E. Moretti, on behalf of E. Calabrese."

I asked about it, again. He said, "A formality," without lifting his eyes from the page. It was the same answer, delivered the same way, and I accepted it the same way.

I tried once more to ask about the phone. He held up one finger without looking at me, finished his sentence into the receiver, and said, "Yes, yes, I haven't forgotten." Then he went straight back to the call.

It was almost four in the afternoon when I noticed his hand shaking on the pen.

He saw me notice. He set the pen down very deliberately, folded his hands, and said, "Continue."

I continued.

By nine-thirty I had been awake for sixteen hours and spoken English to exactly three people, and each of the three had been giving me orders. I'd eaten a dinner I couldn't remember with a table of men whose faces I'd memorized and had to pretend I hadn't. I'd corrected a staff member's use of "Mr. Moretti" in the hallway twice. She'd said "Of course, Evan" both times, in the voice of someone who would absolutely go on saying it the other way anywhere I couldn't hear.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in my hand. I'd stopped bringing up the signal at dinner. I'd figured Enzo had forgotten, and I was too tired to be the person who kept asking a dying man for favors.

At 9:50 the phone lit up.

Tether.

Four bars. Actual signal, for the first time since the gate.

I stared at it. The block I'd been dreading all day hadn't been a lesson. It was a window, ten minutes long, and I had no idea whether Enzo had forgotten and arranged it anyway or had never forgotten at all. I decided not to wonder.

My hands were shaking. I hadn't expected that. I'd gotten through the whole day on numb autopilot, and now that there was something I actually wanted, I was falling apart over it. It was late afternoon at home. Sofia would be done with lessons. Matteo would be at the study desk, or standing in the study doorway pretending he wasn't waiting.

I hit the contact I'd typed in the car and listened to it ring once.

Matteo picked up before the second.

"Evan."

Just my name. Not "hello," not "are you alright." Just my name, in the voice he used when he'd been holding something heavy for a very long time and had finally been allowed to set it down.

I didn't say anything for a second, because I couldn't.

"Hi," I managed. "I'm here."