A laptop sits on a long wooden worktable, beside it a stack of bills, a checkbook, several notes he cannot read, the American’s handwriting an indecipherable scrawl. The trash basket beside the table is small, overflowing, and he stoops to pluck out a half-crumpled piece of paper, attracted by the blue globe insignia, and flattens it onto the table. Now he sees it is the INTERPOL logo and a list of typed names. He thinks of the elegant woman in the domed house and how she told him the men were from INTERPOL. Could the American possibly be working for INTERPOL, or did this paper belong to the other one, the man he killed? Either way, names on an INTERPOL list are something he needs to check out. He wedges the paper into his pocket behind the tightly rolled Caravaggio picture. Then, he takes the neat stack of bills, envelopes, and checkbook and moves them from one side of the table to the other. No fun if the prey has no inkling that he is being stalked.

88

I started at Dalton. Another fabricated story. This one, that I was writing an article on New York’s “best private schools.” The headmistress was willing to cooperate. I had done my homework too, knew some of their famous alums, Claire Danes, Anderson Cooper, Chevy Chase, names I could drop along with Alexandra Greene’s. “She’s become a well-known art historian,” I said, though the administrator had never heard of her. I showed her the cell phone picture, one I’d taken of Alex asleep in our hotel bed, cropped to a discreet headshot. The headmistress said she did not recognize her. I made her look again. She said she was absolutely certain, and I believed her. There’d been no telltale tic, no hesitation.

It was the same at Spence.

I was close to giving up by the time I got to Brearley, one of Manhattan’s best “white glove” schools for girls.

“It would have been about a decade ago,” I said to this headmistress, a woman out of central casting, tight bun and matronly figure.

She said she had been in her position for almost thirty years and did not recall any student named Alexandra Greene, “and I have an excellent memory for all my girls, not that I am at liberty to disclose such information.”

I showed her the cell phone photo.

“Oh,” she said. Then, “No. I have no idea who that is.”

But I’d seen it, the flash of recognition in her eyes, the pause, the change in tone. I wanted to push further but knew it wouldn’t help, the woman already saying goodbye, wishing me luck with the article, and leading me out of her office.

Back home, I felt it right away, a palpable sense of invasion, the same feeling I’d had in my Florence hotel room, as if the air had been disturbed, along with the same stale odor of tobacco. I went through the large front room, then into the bathroom, swiping the shower curtain aside, half expecting to find a shrieking Norman Bates. In the studio, I peered in between paint racks, on and under my long worktable. Nothing appeared to be missing. Still, something felt off, papers and envelopes on the left side of my laptop that I could have sworn I always kept on the right—or did I?