Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  “Who owns Carne Posta?” asked Badger. “Is there a lease agreement or something on file?”

  She pursed her lips. “I don’t need to look it up. That would be Pappardelle. “’Papa’ Pappardelle, to be exact. If he’s got your man, well, let’s just say you might as well start planning the funeral.”

  That was so what I did not want to hear. I saw Badger pull out his phone and assumed he was researching Pappardelle. “How can you say that?” I asked in a panic. “I thought you were law enforcement. You have authority. Are you telling me you don’t have the –“ I almost said “balls,” but stopped myself, “--guts to use it? Are you okay with someone just . . . killing whoever they want to? Listen, you’re not on your own anymore. I have seven heavily trained people with me, well, six, one of them is just a PR guy and he doesn’t even work for CURDS, but the point is we have firepower and authority of our own, and we WILL get our man back, with or without your help.”

  “I’m sorry. It’ll have to be without.” She returned to the other side of the counter and the squeaky chair. “I’ve seen The Godfather movies. It’s not just Papa, you see. The Pappardelle family is huge. I’ve dealt with them before and lost some very good friends. One of my deputies was beheaded, and another was forced to eat his own appendix.” She picked up a smoldering butt from the ashtray and sucked on it.

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Tell? He can’t tell us his own name anymore. He spends his days with coloring books and crayons in a halfway house in Naples. After we rescued him, we checked him out medically with a full body CAT scan. The appendix he had before he was captured was gone, and there was one in his stomach. It was a safe assumption.” She sucked on the cigarette again. “No. I can’t.”

  I pouted for a moment, trying not to dwell long on what had happened to her deputies. “I apologize for wasting your time, Ms. Vertucci.” I turned to go, feeling even more anxious about my son’s chances. Without support from local law enforcement, our activities would be drastically limited. We had authority worldwide, but it would not be hard for the local authorities to stop us now and answer questions later. As Badger and I walked back to the van, I said, “Maybe we can get help from the constabulary. I don’t want to be in the position of acting unilaterally. We’ll also have to check with Roxy. It won’t do Billings any good if we end up in jail. See, this is exactly how organizations like the Mafia get as far as they do. They are like teenagers. They get away with exactly what they are allowed to get away with. When stuff like kidnapping and extortion go unanswered it just escalates. Where’s the backbone? Where’s the justice?”

  “Where’s the van?” asked Badger. He saw more while still thumbing his phone than I did while I was ranting. The corner where we had left the van was now vacant.

  “Damn.” I pulled out my phone and called Butte’s number. I listened to it ring. Even if he was driving, someone would answer it for him, wouldn’t they? After five rings, someone did.

  It was Sylvia. “Sorry, Helena. We should have called you. We’re on our way back. Stay there.” So Badger and I stood on the corner as sparse traffic sped by. There were three Vespas and a couple of Fiats and a jet black Ferrari that went past at an alarming rate of speed. We were expecting a traffic cop, but none showed.

  A thin woman walked past us wearing jeans and a pink blouse with the hem tied above her midriff. Her arms spread wide as if she recognized us, but her eyes never met ours. “Beautiful. Gorgeous!” she said. “Wish you were here!” and she kept walking down towards the harbor without a glance at us. Shortly after that, a dark-haired, scruffy man ran to catch up, muttering, “Mon Dieu, we never should have left France!” We watched them disappear and shrugged at each other.

  After a minute or two, the tan van rolled up and we got back in. “Okay, what happened?” I asked, buckling my seatbelt as I slid into the seat behind Butte. I noticed that three of the windows were open now. They’d all been closed before, but now Butte’s window was open all the way and his elbow was resting on the frame. The windows by Sylvia and the twins were also half open and a nice cross breeze circulated through the van, bringing in the aroma of fish both alive and dead. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but even if it had been, I wasn’t about to complain.

  “Go ahead, Butte,” said Sylvia. “Tell her.”

  “You tell her. I’m driving.” I might have mentioned that we were currently parked, but I couldn’t get a word in.

  “Sir Haughty, you tell her. You’re good at telling stories.”

  “My dear, I had nothing to do with it.”

  From the back, the twins yelled, “Someone tell her!” in stereo.

  That’s when my head count instinct kicked in and I noticed that Roxy was not in the van. “Where’s Roxy?” I said, just to let everyone know I had gotten that far.

  There was utter silence.

  Nitro finally spoke. “She got a leg cramp, and I told her to get out and stretch her legs. You know, when she sits in a car, her knees are higher than her, um, her pelvic area, which affects blood flow and can lead to these things.”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  Sylvia, frustrated, blurted out, “Oh for Pete’s sake. She was massaging her leg and the Italian police pulled up and arrested her for prostitution. We were following the police car when we got your call. Does the Italian system give a prisoner one phone call? If she doesn’t call us we may never find out where they took her.” She adjusted the patch, which had slipped a little bit, over her left eye.

  “Well, I don’t know. Those are questions we would normally ask Roxy.”

  “Minerva.”

  I don’t even know who said it. “Stop that.”

  Badger, whose phone was so ubiquitous it goes without saying, said, “the nearest police station is northeast of here. That’s probably the one.” He had retaken his seat next to Butte and turned his phone to show him the map. I looked longingly out the window at the building where Billings was being held and took a breath. We could split up, but we didn’t even have a plan for how to deal with the Mafia yet. So I told Butte to drive us to the police station. It went against every instinct I had, but I had to remind myself that Billings had been trained. Odds were that if he didn’t antagonize them, they wouldn’t hurt him. Much. I was pretty sure they weren’t interested in him in particular, anyway. They wanted me. Or maybe even Miss Chiff. They weren’t going to mess with someone who had no real authority. He was a pawn. My reasoning wasn’t helping. Pawns were the first things to go in chess. Nevertheless, we had to retrieve Roxy.

  Five minutes later we pulled up in front of the police station. I flagged Badger once again for possible translating and we entered through a doorway elevated by a single cement step.

  Police stations the world over defined the word “drab”. I’ve never seen one painted even a proper white. Off white at best, but this one was dingy tan with brown moldings and appeared to have been last painted about a century ago. A large cork bulletin board was hanging on the wall with various things attached with pushpins. Even those were drab, all a uniform gray. There were a couple wanted posters, a cartoon, a recipe for risotto, and a photo of the precinct personnel en masse. Two of them had heavy black ink handlebar moustaches and three others had their faces almost entirely covered with crosses drawn on with silver metallic marker. A short hallway led to an anteroom with a reception desk. The female officer behind the counter was speaking Italian with a young man and we waited until his business was finished. After several minutes, a teenage girl with thick dark hair down to her waist, dressed in cut-off shorts and a halter top, was escorted out and handed over to her father, who grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly on their way out of the building, shouting what had to be Italian obscenities at her.

  I had Badger do the talking this time. Partly it was to make him feel useful, but I also felt it would speed things up rather than spending time determining how much English she understood. She and Badger conversed for a couple of minutes as Badger described R
oxy. He made an hourglass figure in the air and gave himself imaginary breasts, primping imaginary hair. According to him, you can’t speak Italian without gesturing. They just won’t understand.

  In any case, his lengthy description was followed by a shrug and a shake of her head, and what seemed to be a polite apology. “Grazi,” Badger said and turned back to me. “They haven’t seen her.”

  “Could this be the wrong station?” I asked him as we stepped to one side out of the way.

  “I don’t think so. And I just had a bad thought.” Rather than telling me what that thought was, he pulled out his phone and began thumbing the screen this way and that. “Damn.”

  “Badger?” His face had turned a lighter shade and I didn’t like it.

  “Let’s get back to the van.”

  We returned to the van and buckled in even though it was still in park. I prodded him yet again. “Badger, what is it?”

  “Her STD is moving toward Billings. I think that police car we saw was working for Pappardelle. I also think they saw us following and drove into town to lose us, and now are heading back to the harbor. They know we’re here, and that we are on to them.”

  Butte started the car and we drove back to the harbor, still without an action plan. What they knew or didn’t know was no concern of ours. It wasn’t going to change our minds about getting into the building. We again circled it, then parked two blocks inland to avoid being seen. “I’m open to ideas,” I said, trying not to let my desperation show. It was getting to be late afternoon. I hadn’t eaten since Butte cooked me breakfast, and the remainder of my team hadn’t had food since the night before, passing on the hotel’s continental breakfast in favor of searching for Billings. “We ought to get something to eat.” I wasn’t hungry, and neither were they, judging from their response, but I put my foot down. “Hungry or not, we can’t change biology. We need food.”

  “Don’t you dare,” said Avis from the way back. “I can’t eat a thing until Billings is back with us.” She didn’t seem to include Roxy in the sentiment, but I didn’t point it out.

  “We’ll be fine, Helena,” objected Sylvia, “We’re not stopping to eat, even if they deliver to a van. We can eat afterward.”

  Nitro spoke up in my defense. “Helena is right. We should eat. None of us has much in reserve. We don’t want to risk getting weak in there, do we? Something quick. Is there a drive-through around here?”

  “The usual Mickey D’s,” said Badger. “Four blocks north, one block east.”

  Nitro groaned. “McPoison is more like it.”

  “They have salad,” I assured him.

  “Food,” said Sir Haughty suddenly, pressing the button to bring his window down all the way. He turned his head into the breeze and breathed deeply. “By Jove, I think I have it.”

  “Have what?” I asked.

  “A way into the storage building.”

  “I’m not doing the pizza delivery thing again. Besides, these guys won’t be as gullible as those Sultans in New Delhi. They’re probably on a first name basis with every delivery guy in the area.”

  Butte wanted more information. “Pizza delivery? Seriously?”

  “It wasn’t as prosaic as it sounds,” I answered casually. “Those Sultans had only seen pizza in pictures. They treated us like gods, even though we didn’t get there in 30 minutes and we didn’t bring any breadsticks. AND,” I stressed the addition, “one of the toppings was a liquid emetic. While they were all blowing chunks we were able to search the palace and uncover a stash of incredibly rare Uber kalimpong.” I was watching Sir Haughty as I spoke. He had rolled down his own window and now had his entire head outside like a ride-happy dog. I sniffed the air current moving through the van myself but still detected nothing but the scent of fish. “All I smell is fish, probably of the dead variety.”

  Sir Haughty came back inside to reply. “Ah, my dear, that is because of your uneducated olfactory organ. I’m now 100% positive I detect the distinct aroma of a mild Limburger. Although I will admit that if I were not so hungry I might not detect it either.” He pronounced it ‘eye-ther.’

  I was brought up short. We all were. And it was a way in, if there was reason to believe the source was inside that building. Limburger cheeses have a reputation of being quite aromatic, even downright stinky. The mild form, whose odor might be camouflaged by that of fish or other strong scents, indicated a very fresh batch. The aroma gets worse, or better, depending on how you look at it, as the cheese ages. In addition, it’s a German cheese and wasn’t likely to be made here in Italy. As I thought about it, another thing became clear. I remembered the map that Miss Chiff had shown me and its trail of pushpins. If a German cheese were being cooked in Italy, and if it was, in fact, connected to the series of bombings, it meant the bombings had been done not to create a path INTO Europe, but to create one OUT of Europe. This cheese, if we could find it, was meant to be exported to Germany and sold there where the Limburger market was strongest, or possibly head to America via the less than direct route through the North Sea. Normally, it would be shipped to Germany by boat, but an inland route would provide an alternate and the opportunity to get shipments through by using decoys. If you let the authorities think you were sending by boat you could ship by ground and vice versa and it would decrease the odds of them catching you with contraband. “You wouldn’t be lying to me to give us probable cause, would you?” I asked Sir Haughty.

  “Absolutely not. I never lie. About cheese.” He said it just that way, with the last two words as a sentence of their own.

  “Maybe we need to get a warrant,” suggested Sylvia. “That would at least give us a legal leg to stand on.”

  “We’d need more than a mild odor to get one. It’s Roxy’s department, but I really don’t see a judge giving us permission to search a place based on,” and I still had trouble talking about them, “STD tracking and an aroma. Besides, we’re in the home turf of the Mafia. What are the odds that we can find a judge who isn’t compromised?”

  No one answered that. We knew the odds were slim to none.

  I unbuckled. “We’ll have to walk and follow your nose, Sir Haughty. It could lead to another building entirely. Even if it’s unconnected, our duty is to check it out. Let’s hope it’s connected, because I really don’t have the patience for a distraction right now.”

  “Me, either,” said Avis. She pronounced it ‘eee-ther.’

  “Ditto,” said Agnes, overlapping her sister just a bit.

  The others voiced agreement as well while they climbed out of the van. Everyone strapped on their HEP belts which had been stowed in the wheel wells while we drove about. I insisted that Butte take Roxy’s belt, though we had to adjust the length a bit to make it fit. “I’m not licensed to carry, let alone fire,” he observed.

  “I don’t care. Improvise. You’re not going around defenseless. You’ve seen enough gangster movies, haven’t you?”

  “The Godfather. Once,” he responded as I wrapped the belt around his middle and fastened the buckle. He stood there, hidden from view behind the van, with his arms raised. From a distance, someone might think he was being held up. “Besides, they had fully automatic machine guns then. What do you think they have now?” The rest of us were still wearing our bullet-proof vests, but Butte had no such protection.

  I didn’t want to think about that. I pulled his arms down. “I don’t care if they have a nuclear bomb. We all carry and that’s that.”

  At last we had a plan, and scenario, and a reason to fear for our lives. Butte pushed the remote button to lock the doors and we started off, Sir Haughty taking point. We followed him like riders after a foxhound. Tally-ho. I kept close, Sylvia and Butte were right behind me followed by the twins, and Badger and Nitro brought up the rear. Butte looked very uncomfortable with the HEP belt on and it gave him an odd gait that made Walter Brennan’s limp look graceful. Being in front of him, at least I didn’t have to watch. But it wasn’t long before I heard him grunt and Sylvia s
poke in a low voice,”Relax, Butte. You’re walking like you’ve got a load in your pants.”

  I stopped us after one block and stared out to sea. Not far from the harbormaster’s office and the storage building was the harbor itself, with its long line of docks for small boats. Three boats bobbed, tied up with thick white ropes. Beyond that was a long, slender promontory jutting out into the water. I could see some structures over there. “Badger,” I said, calling him forward, “are there any licensed production facilities in this area?” Licensing cheese factories would come under the jurisdiction of the Chembassy. Italy had six Chembassies, the nearest being in Sicilia on the island of Sicily. Any or all of them could be secretly under Mafia control, however.

  He tapped on his phone a bit, “there’s one out there.” He pointed to an area near the base of the promontory. “But it’s small. The license is supposed to be for mozzarella and provolone.”

  I turned back to Haughty and Badger fell back. “Could the Limburger be there?”

  Sir Haughty licked his finger and held it up in the air, then turned his head toward the base of the promontory and sniffed. He turned his head again toward the tip, in the direction of the harbor master’s office and the storage building, and sniffed again. “No,” he said with confidence. “The Limburger scent is coming from that direction,” he pointed to the north, “and so is the wind. They could be making pont l’eveque out there and we wouldn’t be able to smell it. That’s likely why the license was granted for that location.” Hesitantly, he added, “we could go out there and inspect the facility.”

  There is something to be said for thoroughness. There is also something to be said for not wasting time. “No. I’m satisfied. Any objections?” I turned to get their responses and got that gut feeling that something was wrong. “Where’s Nitro?” I asked.

  Everyone looked at each other in complete innocence. Most everyone had a good excuse. They’d been walking in front of him. But Badger, who for once did not have his phone in his hand, although his hand was in his pocket, also looked stymied. “He was just here!” he said anxiously. “I swear!” And a second later he had the phone back in his hand, thumbing away, as if he had no idea what had happened. “We were discussing who would win in a fight: Iron Man or The Titanium Titan,” he explained without looking up. I don’t know if he actually had to watch the screen or if he couldn’t meet my eyes. “He says Iron Man, but that’s ridiculous. Iron Man is, at his core, a human being, whereas the only organic parts of the Titanium Titan are his brain and his big toe. Stark is a sardine in a can. You’d think Nitro, who knows chemistry like the back of his hand, would be smarter than that.” He was clearly panicked and feeling guilty. But it wasn’t really his fault. We had no reason to suspect we were being followed. It had been quick, and quiet, obviously, but the Pappardelles now had three members of our team. “Damn,” Badger continued, the superhero argument already history. “He’s already in the building, closing in on the other signals.”