Chapter 11: Finding Bink.
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Tammy goes to the library and does a very generic search with Bink's description: young girl squirrel, blonde hair. The search results come up with tabloid report of child assassins roaming around Italy killing adults, usually Padana Political Terrorists or anyone associated with them. There were several pictures with children running with guns, but mostly were blurred. One picture catches Tammy's eye, a girl looking like Bink carrying a violin case with an adult male mouse. How odd the picture looks, it was obvious that they were not related unless adopted.
"Bink?", Tammy says to her self.
The caption of the photo says it was made in Milan to weeks before Tammy arrived.
"She was here?", Tammy says to herself. Though she could be anywhere in Italy, chances are she might return to Milan one day. It's a matter of when.
She looks at the picture more closely, looking for details where she could pick up. Finding a building number, she throws it at Google Maps. There were 47 locations with that building number. She goes through each one until she finds it on location number 37.
"Milan Cultural Center of the Arts?", Tammy says to her self. Finding the address on a side bar of the browser, she writes it down on one of her note sheets. She goes back to the other windows and prints them out. The printed sheets get put into her backpack before she leaves the library. Once outside she rides on her bike to the outskirts of the tourist center and studied a street map for a while. She finds the Milan Cultural Center of the Arts on the other side of the city in the Arts and Theater District. She takes careful notes of directions and heads off on her way.
It takes her almost two hours to go cross-town but she makes it to the Milan Cultural Center of the Arts. She looks around and finds a couple of theaters in the area of the Cultural Center, a library and an Arts Museum. She walks around to find a bike stand to secure her bicycle to.
After securing her bicycle, she walks inside the Cultural Center, finding it like New York's Lincoln Center but smaller with fewer buildings. She finds a map of the area and sees that the cultural center extends outside of the block with several more theaters and a small art gallery that sells its wares.
She walks about the area, looking at the building and people. What few children were there were with their matching parents; squirrel children with squirrel parents, mice children with mice parents. At least she found the building in the photograph. She waits and looks around, thinking that maybe Bink with that adult male mouse would come out. But after a couple of hours after the theater shows end, and the audience is let out, she finds nothing. After a few more minutes of waiting, she heads back to her bike and rides for home.
She makes it home in time for dinner. After putting her bike away, she sits down with rest of the students and the elderly couple for dinner. She goes back to her room and looks over the new information she found during the day.
The following day, Tammy puts on a dark hair wig, dark glasses and a female trench coat she barrowed from one of the female students. She heads out to the bank in the tourist section and withdraws twenty thousand euros. The code the ambassador gave her works as money is counted into the chute before it is rolled out for her to receive. She quickly pockets the money and leaves for home to return the barrowed things.
Once home, and after she returns the things she barrowed, she hides most of the money, and leaves the house with three thousand euros. She goes out shopping for assorted items, wrapping paper and tape. She takes the items home and gift-wraps them, for Christmas was coming. Cards for everyone with ten euros in it, a couple of expensive watches to the elderly couple renting her the room, and a student kit containing pens, pencils, a scientific calculator and a note book pouch to hold them in for the students in the house. She hides the gifts in the bottom drawer of the dresser in her room.