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"Max."
"Yes, sir?"
"You may put my suitcase in the trunk."
The sun over the Bay of Naples makes his eyes smart as it bounces off the Mark X Jaguar's chrome plating, the way it did off the automobiles of long ago, driven by him and others. But all that has changed, and his old shadow is nowhere to be seen either. Max Costa glances beneath his feet, tries shifting slightly, to no avail. He can't remember exactly when it happened, but that hardly matters. His shadow has gone, left behind like so many other things.
He grimaces resignedly, or perhaps it is simply the sun in his eyes, as he tries to think of something real and immediate (the tire pressure for a half or fully loaded car, the ease of the synchronized gearbox, the oil gauge) to fend off that bittersweet pang that always comes when nostalgia or loneliness gets the better of him. Taking a deep, leisurely breath, he finishes polishing the silver statuette of a leaping cat above the front grille with a chamois cloth, then slips on the jacket of his gray uniform that was lying folded on the front seat. Once he has carefully buttoned it up and straightened his tie, he slowly mounts the steps, flanked by headless marble statues and stone urns, leading up to the front door.
"Don't forget the small bag."
"I won't, sir."
Dr. Hugentobler doesn't like the way that in Italy his employees address him as "doctor." This country, he frequently says, is swarm- ing with dottori, cavalieri, and commendatori. I am a Swiss doctor. A professional. I don't want people mistaking me for a cardinal's nephew, a Milanese industrialist, or some such thing.
As for Max Costa, everyone at the villa on the outskirts of Sorrento simply calls him Max. This is paradoxical, because most of his life he used various names and titles, noble or otherwise according to the needs of the moment. But for a while now, ever since his shadow fluttered its handkerchief in a last farewell (like a woman who vanishes forever amid a cloud of steam, framed in the window of a sleeping car, and one is never sure if she is leaving at that moment or if she started to leave long before), he has been using his own name. A shadow in return for the name which, until his forced retirement (recent, and in some ways natural), has appeared in thick case files in police departments all over Europe and America. In any event, he thinks as he picks up the small leather bag and the Samsonite suitcase and places them in the trunk of the car, never, not even in his darkest moments, did he imagine he would end his days replying "Yes, sir?" when addressed by his first name.
"Let's be off, Max. Did you bring the newspapers?"
"They are on the backseat, sir."
The clunk of two doors. Max Costa has donned his chauffeur's cap, taken it off, and put it back on again in order to install his passenger. Once behind the wheel, he leaves it on the seat beside him, and in a reflex of vanity glances in the rearview mirror before smoothing down his gray, still abundant hair. Nothing like the detail of the cap, he thinks, to highlight the irony of his situation: the absurd beach where the tide has washed him up after his final shipwreck. And yet, when he is in his room at the villa shaving before the mirror and registers the lines on his face like someone tallying the scars of love and war, each with a name of its own (women, roulette wheels, uncertain mornings, evenings of glory or catastrophe), he always ends up winking at himself in absolution, as though recognizing in that tall, no longer so slim, old man with dark, weary eyes, the image of a former accomplice for whom any explanation is unnecessary. After all, his reflection seems to be saying in a tone that is familiar, gently mocking, and possibly a little spiteful, that, at age sixty-four and considering the dreadful hand life has dealt him of late, he can still count himself lucky. In similar circumstances, others (Enrico Fossataro, old Sandor Esterházy) were forced to choose between public charity or last moments spent writhing uncomfortably at the end of a necktie, in the bathroom of a miserable boardinghouse.
Excerpted from What We Become by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Copyright © 2016 by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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