A half-hour later I found myself back in the center of town. The fire was finally out at the Hotel Schoeneweiss, leaving Main Street smelling like the biggest ashtray on the planet. Everywhere I looked, dozens of scorched and blinking Santa Clauses were still roaming the streets, dazed and bewildered, and the singed ClauWau banner was dangling from one of the buildings. Blue flashing police and fire truck lights flickered off the blackened foundation of the old liquor store, which had already been cordoned off by emergency crews. An upside-down sleigh lay half buried under a pile of bricks. A reindeer dipped its head to drink from a black puddle with a Santa cap floating in it.
Everywhere I looked, Swiss cops and soldiers stood with high-intensity LED flashlights, shining them on the faces of passersby, lining up eyewitnesses against the wall, asking for ID.
I turned and slunk up the other way, down an alley, and disappeared into the darkness.
I took the wad of euros that Gobi had given me out of my pocket and counted them with only slightly shaking hands. There was a few hundred here, along with the fake ID that she’d given me back in Italy, a picture snapped at a train station photo booth, a face I barely recognized as mine. I could get on another train, if I had the slightest idea where to go.
Or I could just give up. Wave the white flag. Sweet surrender. It had never been more tempting. Even if I could get my family back again, what would life back in America be like? Was “normal and ordinary” still any kind of option? Had it ever been?
A clumsy, scraping splash rang down from the far end of the alley. I heard a muffled curse and a series of slowly approaching footsteps.
Halfway down the alley, the man switched on a flashlight, and I saw his face.
The beard.
The sneer.
The camera.
There was no mistaking that combination-Swierczynski.
He was wearing a long, shabby coat with tails that practically dragged the ground behind him so that they picked up little scraps of debris along the way, which was probably his idea of going undercover. I could tell by the way he was moving that he hadn’t seen me yet.
I felt a surge of adrenaline-it felt good to be mad about something I could do something about right away. I might not know the first thing about fighting, but at this point, I didn’t care what happened to me, and that alone gave me the advantage.
Edging back into the shadows, I put my back to the wall and waited, hearing his boots shuffle closer, waiting until he was right in front of me. I remembered back in Venice when he’d tried to grab Gobi’s shotgun. He hadn’t been particularly quick about it-without the element of surprise, he had no advantage at all.
I reached out, grabbed the camera by the strap, and twisted.
He grunted and went down, already on his back by the time my knee landed on his chest.
“Still trying to tail Gobi?” I got right into his face, close enough that I could smell the pickles and sour vodka on his breath. Whatever Kaya was paying this guy, it was too much. “I might be able to help you with that.”
“Where is she?”
I climbed off his chest. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“On your feet,” I said. “We’re going to see Kaya.”
He blinked at me, not understanding.
“Right now,” I said. “It’s time to visit your boss.”
A quick, dismissive head shake. “Is not possible.”
“Oh, is possible.” I gave him a cold smile that had nothing to do with any of the ordinary reasons that people smile-happiness, humor, hope. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my tour of Europe, it’s that as human beings, we’re all a whole lot more flexible than we might think.”
“But I cannot-”
“I want to talk to Kaya. You have a contact number, an e-mail… You tell him I want a meeting right now, tonight.”
“I cannot make promises.” He was sounding more Slavic by the moment. “Is not my decision to make.”
“Ask yourself how pissed off Kaya’s going to be when he finds out that you lost Gobi,” I told him. “She was working for him, right? And you’re supposed to be her babysitter. In other words, you had one job and you screwed it up. How much of your ass do you think he’s going to chew off for losing her in Switzerland?” I waited, silently counting to ten before adding, almost off-handedly, “Especially when I can tell him where to find her?”
He recrossed his arms and glared at me even harder, then muttered something in Russian.
Twenty minutes later, we were on a train.