I am turning into my mother, she thought. And once that would have appalled her; now she just felt proud. She turned away from her reflection, moved into the milling crowds, and a man came out of nowhere and bumped hard up against her.
Her bags went flying. She let out an ‘Oh!’ of shock and staggered back. She had a quick impression of a middle-aged man, grey-haired, instantly forgettable. He scrambled around, picking her bags up.
‘Sorry, lady,’ he said, and thrust them into her hands.
‘Wh-’ she started, but he was gone, vanishing into the crowds.
She looked down. He’d put something else into her hand too: a piece of paper. Frowning, she stared at it. Then she closed her fist over it, stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, and flagged down a cab.
Annie went pale when Layla showed her the small square of paper.
‘It was weird, Mum. This guy bumped into me outside Bloomingdales, knocked my bags everywhere, then he gave them back to me and he gave me this, too. Next thing I knew, he’d disappeared.’ She squinted over her mother’s shoulder as Annie sat at the table. ‘It looks funny. Letters, numbers, I don’t know what the hell it is.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Annie.
‘Do you know what it means?’ Layla dragged out a chair, sat down, peered at her mum’s face in concern.
Annie looked at Layla. ‘I know what it means. I know what it is.’
‘OK, what is it? Come on.’
‘It’s a pizzino. Caesar’s code.’ And she hadn’t seen it in a lot of years. Not since Constantine.
Who would use the same code that Constantine had always used? She stared at it, started to shake her head.
‘Get me a pencil and paper,’ she said. ‘Hurry up.’
Layla did so. They sat at the table and as she scribbled on the paper, her pen moving faster and faster, Annie talked.
‘This code is over two thousand years old. It was used by Julius Caesar. Each letter of the alphabet becomes a number, and you add three. So A is one, plus three, which equals four, B is two, plus three, that’s five, and so on. Constantine reversed it for numbers.’
Layla watched, fascinated, as Annie jotted stuff on to the paper.
When she’d finished, Annie sat back and stared at it.
‘Oh. Dear. God,’ she said. ‘These are map co-ordinates.’
‘What?’ Layla demanded.
Annie looked at her daughter and suddenly she started to laugh.
‘Honey – It’s a grid reference. Alberto’s telling you where he is.’