she exclaimed.
I rolled my eyes. “You just gave away your age.”
Maria flushed, but kept her focus on Anatoly. “This is perfect,” she continued. “You can call him and if he’s not available then sneak over, break in and—”
“No,” Anatoly said quickly. “I’m not going to break the law for you. But I will find out if he has a guest.”
“You can do that without breaking in?”
“Of course.” Anatoly smiled. “Magnum did it all the time.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” Anatoly mused as we followed Maria through the winding traffic.
Enrico hadn’t answered his phone, not even while Anatoly was leaving a message on his answering machine telling him that he believed someone was in the process of breaking into his restaurant. After that the three of us piled into two cars, Maria into her Mustang and Anatoly and I into my Audi, and we all went over to Enrico’s condo on Telegraph Hill. Since I had been the one doing all the drinking, I had given Anatoly the keys.
“I thought you wanted me to,” I lied. The truth was that I couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting home alone, thinking about the sex I wasn’t having. At least this was distracting. “Besides, it’s not like we’re trying to hunt down the Zodiac Killer,” I noted. “Maria basically hired you to knock on a door and ask if anybody’s home. I don’t see how I could screw that up for you.”
I saw the flash of white teeth as he laughed in the darkness. “You’re underestimating yourself. I’m sure you could screw up anything if you put your mind to it.”
I groaned as he pulled into a spot located only one block away from our destination. “I really hate you, you know that?” I asked lightly.
“I hate you, too,” he whispered. He kissed me and I felt his rough hands gently but firmly pulling my hair back from my face. Anatoly had incredible hands. Watching him knead bread dough was the equivalent of watching a porn flick.
We walked to the condo and found Maria in her car blocking the complex’s garage. She rolled down her window just low enough so she could reach her arm out and shove a set of keys at us. “The silver one’s to the building, the gold one’s to the condo itself. Come down and let me know what he’s up to as soon as you can.”
“No,” Anatoly said simply.
“No?” Maria repeated. “No, what?”
“If you want us to go in there you’re going to have to open the door for us.”
“But that’s preposterous! You yourself suggested that the whole reason Enrico didn’t answer the door earlier is because he didn’t want to see me. If he knows I’m there what’s to keep him from hiding out again?”
“I didn’t say you had to call out to him. But you have to be there. I’m assuming that the reason you have these keys is that this was, until recently, your home. You can argue that you have a legal right to burst into this condo unannounced. Sophie and I can’t make that same claim, not unless we’re there with you, as your guests.”
Maria lowered the window farther and glared up at Anatoly. “No one is that paranoid! What’s the real reason you’re insisting I accompany you?”
“That is a real reason,” he said. A streetlight flickered above us as if struggling to stay awake. “Another real reason,” he went on, “is that I find your motives for hiring me questionable. You’re divorcing Enrico, so why are you so concerned with his well-being? Do you still have feelings for him or did you do something to him and now you want someone else to find him and clean up the mess…or even take the blame?”
“I came to you for help and now you’re accusing me of some kind of crime?” Maria shrieked. “I have never been so insulted! How dare you! You’re completely full of…” Maria shook her head violently, too angry to continue.
“I believe the word you’re looking for is chutzpah,” Anatoly said with a smirk. “Are you coming or should Sophie and I go home and leave you to stew in your Mustang?”
Maria let out something that was between a scoff and a growl before raising her window and thrusting open her door. She didn’t even bother to look at Anatoly or me as she marched to the entrance of the building and unlocked it. She walked in without holding the door open for us.
“What have you gotten us into?” I muttered.
“I got myself into this,” he countered as we followed Maria up three flights of stairs. “I take no responsibility for your decision to come.”
When we reached the top floor of the four-story building, we paused. From the look of it there were only two apartments on this floor, and, as promised, the music of Gabrieli could be heard coming out of one of them. Maria went up to that door and pressed her hand against the wood. “Now what?” she whispered. I started to raise my finger to my lips, but then realized that the volume of the music would allow us to whisper without the fear of being overheard.
“Do you expect me to break through the chain lock for you?” Maria went on.
Instead of answering, Anatoly reached into his pocket and took out a small black object that looked like the kind of magnifying-glass used by jewelers. “What’s that for?” I asked.
“See for yourself.” He gestured for Maria to step aside and then put the object against the peephole. Silently, he invited me to look through it. Upon doing so I discovered that the device reversed the optics of a peephole, making it possible to look into the condo in the same way someone inside would have looked out into the hall. Little gizmos like that always delighted me. It was so very 007.
Anatoly smiled at my obvious pleasure and then took a turn looking through it.
“Well?” Maria asked in the same whispered hiss she had used before. “What do you see?”
“A parrot.”
Maria squeezed her eyes shut in an expression of disgust. “I hate that damn bird. Enrico’s trained it to torment me, you know. He used to instruct it to steal my soy nuts.”
I did a quick double take. “You’re not serious.”
“This would be a good time to open the door,” Anatoly said, locking eyes with Maria.
“I told you, the chain lock is on.”
“It was on,” Anatoly corrected. “There’s no reason to assume that’s still the case, unless you know something you’re not telling us.”
Maria’s glare became a little more venomous. In one swift movement she stuck her key in the lock and pushed the door open…or at least she opened it as much as possible, considering that the chain really was on.
“See?” she said with an I-told-you-so smirk. Anatoly shrugged and reached into the pocket of his jacket again. This time he took out a thin rectangular mirror that was roughly as long as his palm. He leaned against the doorjamb and stuck the mirror through the slit in the door.
“Can you see anything beyond the
