“Look, while the espresso is so quaint of you, even you know that this isn’t going to go for a cover. My British accent is worse than yours - and that’s saying something - and how the hell I’m supposed to pass as “Dan Billany” is beyond either of us. Let alone the fact that it puts me under the pressure of a whole lot of time with Mussolini you know I can’t account for.” Which wasn’t necessarily true, it would just require privacy and a lot of magic. Privacy they barely had given it was the late 1960s, and magic he also couldn’t access without raising his own metaphorical stink with.
Still. That didn’t keep him from being... interested. Or willing to try. He took up the small, damask porcelain cup, taking a sip of the appropriately sugared coffee. People who drank straight, black espresso were usually either painful alcoholics or other types of addicts. Or, more frighteningly, either uncultured or not of this Earth. But then again, his vectors of normal were broken. “So, tell me more. What is this little Socialist writer who got lost in the mountains to a failing empire, eh? I take it he survived, at least somewhat plausibly even to function as a conspiracy act. He’d be nearly fifty now, which is a bit of a stretch given my looks but enough to work with.”
Aging spells, after all, weren’t terribly difficult. Especially when he was only really looking for ten or so years past what age he was at now. But that wouldn’t compensate for the fact that he was posing as someone possibly well-known in the British Isles, and with the open state that was now Europe, that could be both dangerous and an advantage. An advantage because populations west of the Iron Curtain were moving all the time, and almost always without decent documentation, which even now definitely couldn’t be helped. A danger because the European aristocracy and art-istocracy were heavily in place, and people who knew Billany were likely still alive. Likely to be traveling? Possibly less so, but one never really knew.
“I know you - you’ve got every detail related to the case. It’s why I agree to work with you. You work like an archivist, which is what I am. So I’m asking both as a friend and as your target what you know about “me” that I need to know to play this role,” he continued, keeping his tone susurrant and below recording level for anyone more than an arm’s length away from them. Which no one was, graciously. And the cafe itself was far too loud to not drown out the idle conversation between two tense men.
