by David Downie
Red Riviera
Red Riviera
A Daria Vinci Investigation
David Downie
Alan Squire Publishing
Bethesda, Maryland
Red Riviera is published by Alan Squire Publishing, Bethesda, MD, an imprint of the Santa Fe Writers Project.
© 2021 David Downie
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, online, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher (www.AlanSquirePublishing.com).
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN (print): 978-1-942892-26-7
ISBN (epub): 978-1-942892-27-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952002
Jacket design and cover art by Randy Stanard, Dewitt Designs,
www.dewittdesigns.com.
Author photo by Alison Harris, www.alisonharris.com.
Copy editing and interior design by Nita Congress.
Printing consultant: Steven Waxman.
Printed by Carter Printing Company.
First Edition
Ordo Vagorum
By the Same Author
Un’altra Parigi
The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam
Enchanted Liguria
La Tour de l’Immonde (fiction)
Cooking the Roman Way
Paris City of Night (fiction)
Food Wine Rome
Food Wine Genoa & the Italian Riviera
Food Wine Burgundy
Quiet Corners of Rome
Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light
Paris to the Pyrenees
A Passion for Paris
A Taste of Paris
The Gardener of Eden (fiction)
More praise for Red Riviera
Red Riviera is one of the most high-spirited, well-informed, and exuberantly written thrillers I’ve read in a long time. It’s also funny as all get out. With his unsparing eye for detail, Downie takes the reader on an informative and unforgettable whirlwind tour of Genoa, its history, architecture, politics, manners, and mores. A gem. —Harriet Welty Rochefort, author of French Toast and Joie de Vivre
Red Riviera is so well plotted, so sensitive to present and past Italian history, so deep in characterization, that I want to see more of Daria Vinci. What a cast. A grand, unputdownable read until the lights go out. Marvelous! —Ronald C. Rosbottom, author of When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation
To Jan, in absentia, and Bianca, with love.
“One does see so much evil in a village.”
—Agatha Christie, A Body in the Library
Acknowledgments
Warmest thanks to my agent Alice Martell and editors Rose Solari and James J. Patterson, who took a flyer as the world shrank; to retired carabiniere F., who wisely does not wish his identity to be revealed; and to Alison Harris, Jo Stobbs, and Angela Scipioni for their diamond-tipped eyes and helpful remarks.
One
Joseph Gary peered at the shiny surface of the speedboat, mesmerized by the mahogany varnish and the mirrored reflection of his trim, sun-bronzed torso. Gary’s body gleamed the same oiled tone as the vintage wooden boat, a perfectly preserved Riva Aquarama, built in 1962. That was the year Gary had turned thirty-seven years old.
The percolating growl of the Riva’s twin inboard diesels and the nutty smell of the exhaust filled Gary with pleasure. Grinning, then smiling, his perfectly preserved, bleached white teeth sparkled in the morning sunlight.
Certainly, Gary thought, deeply pleased, he must be the luckiest, happiest, most perfectly preserved ninety-two-year-old in God’s creation.
Every wondrous, winterless, globally warmed day for the last two years, Gary had awakened to the spectacle of dawn on the Italian Riviera, that crescent of coast with Tuscany balanced on one end and the Côte d’Azur teetering on the other, in France.
Revving the boat’s engines, Gary felt amazingly virile. Virginity and virtue had few rewards, he reminded himself. Virility was better. The only slight regret he experienced now as he motored away from Rapallo’s yacht club marina was that he’d waited so long to come back. Why had he?
Simple, Gary told himself, talking aloud as he passed the breakwater into the open sea. I could not return because not all of them were dead. Because people live so damn long on the Riviera, the paradise of centenarians and refuge of rascals. Besides, he had been too busy enjoying life elsewhere, in the Bahamas, Palm Beach, or Carmel, California, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Joe Gary loved the sound of that last et cetera. Series of three were often divine, he reminded himself. That’s what his mother and the priest had told him when he was a choirboy, a reluctant choirboy singing in a thatch-roofed chapel grafted onto a crumbling medieval church smelling of hay, rat piss, and horse manure. He was free of them now, free of the ghosts, free to do as he liked anywhere, even in the blasted, dead village where he’d been born, the place he and his family had fled over seventy years ago.
Tomorrow, he said to himself, tomorrow afternoon I will grab Morgana and the dogs, drive up in the Maserati, and hike in for a look. It will be a fast drive down memory lane to the end of the paved road. A roots celebration. Hell, I could buy back the whole fucking hillside. Put the sheep back to grazing. Dress Morgana up like a shepherdess.
The vision of his platinum bimbo Morgana Stella playing Marie Antoinette in the Ligurian outback gave Gary an erection. He clutched his parts, crossed himself, and laughed out loud. Throttling up, Gary watched the nose of the arrow-shaped hull. The Riva leaped, slapping down into the troughs before slicing upwards again. The rhythmic bucking, pounding, and splashing, and the sound of the growling then roaring engines, felt to him like sex, like penetration and dominance, ejaculation and climax. It overpowered the droning of the helicopters and water bombers spinning and circling overhead.
Glancing up, the man who called himself Joseph Gary cursed. The copters and planes had been out since sunrise, he muttered, a whole fleet of strange-looking aircraft, fighting the wildfires that seemed never to burn out or even die down. Why spend all that money dumping salt water and good flame-killing chemicals on useless, barren hills? Let them burn, let everything burn, then start again, that was his motto.
The sea breeze caressed his nut-brown, sweat-dampened forehead and crewcut scalp. It bristled with stiff, dyed orange-yellow hair. He couldn’t wait to get into the water. Accelerating, Gary remembered how, when a boy cooped up in that stinking boulder-built village in the hills, he had rarely had the opportunity to swim, and never in spring. The locals didn’t know how to swim. They were too busy working the land. Back then even the visiting pale-skinned vacationers only swam in June, July, and August. It was unheard of, unprecedented, to take a dip in April, and he loved that, too.
Bring on the greenhouse effect, assholes, he chuckled, then shouted, raising an open hand in the salute of his youth. Bring on global warming, the fires, and the end of time and fuck you all very much, hippies, lefties, commies, and queers!
Checking his waterproof Rolex, Gary crinkled his thin lips, squinting and peering through wraparound sunglasses reprising t
he boat’s Dolce Vita windshield. If the Rolex says it’s 9:53 a.m., then 9:53 a.m. it must be, he congratulated himself.
As always, Gary was on time, perfectly on time. Punctuality was his sole virtue, he cackled, a virtue to the point of being a vice. That made it okay.
Slowing then gliding then drifting silently to a standstill, with expert ease he reached out with a gaffer hook and snagged the buoy. It floated one-quarter mile off the rocky point marking the western edge of his second-favorite seaside resort, Santa Margherita, a point precisely one nautical mile from the horseshoe-shaped bay of Portofino—Billionaire’s Bay, he called it, the most magical spot on earth.
Effortlessly tying up, forming the knots he had learned in the U.S. Navy, Gary glanced at the rocky shoreline and the towering Castello di Paraggi, hoping his great friend, the former prime minister of Italy and fellow plutocrat, was in residence, down for the long holiday weekend. But the windows of Silvio Berlusconi’s faux castle were shuttered and the police escort absent.
Gary thought gleefully about the divine conjunction of wealth and political power, glancing from the castle to the mirrored reflection of his golden trinity, the gold Rolex, the gold chain around his neck with the glinting Saint Christopher medal, and the thick gold U.S. Navy signet ring on his gnarled finger. He was particularly proud of the ring. The trinity never left his wrist, neck, and finger, in that order. Never.
Plucking off his sunglasses and leaving them on the dashboard, Gary slid out of his handmade leather boat shoes, lifted and carried a pair of yellow-and-black rubber flippers to the stern of the boat, slipped them on, and lowered himself lovingly into the delicious, clear, cool water.
Lying on his back and kicking gently, watching the helicopters and wide-winged, red-and-yellow Canadair water bombers circling and dipping then diving and scooping up silvery mouthfuls of water, Joseph Gary rotated his head right then left, east to west, scanning and counting the fires on the amphitheater of Apennine hills. Though his ears were partly submerged, he could still hear the droning of the aircraft. Closing his eyes and feeling the sunshine, he imagined giant bumblebees, mud wasps, and dragonflies, and he smiled beatifically.
As he flipped onto his stomach and swam farther out, Joseph Gary’s last glimpse of the bright, cloudless blue sky was darkened by a swift, sudden shadow. The open jaws of an amphibious water bomber skimmed toward him, barely touching the wave-rumpled surface as it filled its bay. Opening wider, the jaws swallowed the lone swimmer legs intact and one arm flailing, a single rawboned fist banging uselessly against the outside of the stainless-steel fuselage.
Heaving and thrusting, its belly filled, the seaplane broke free. It flew east by southeast over the harbor at Chiavari, then climbed steeply south toward a pinpoint of flames burning red and cobalt blue on a ridge one in from the sea. Tilting its wings, the plane passed over the umbrella-spangled beaches and the swarming hiking trails of the Cinque Terre, a thousand necks craning to look up and a thousand fingers tapping screens.
Slowing and dipping low over the blaze, the plane’s jaws popped open again, dumping seawater and chemical flame retardant into the air. The red rain squirmed with sparkling anchovies, a crumpled, one-armed body, and what looked like a pair of mangled rubber swim fins. The plane’s engines thundered. The fire spluttered. Then all was silent, save for the fiddling, slivered song of the cicadas.
Two
“Pinky?”
Willem Bremach called over his shoulder, swiveling in his wheelchair and swiping with a handkerchief at his glistening brow. “Pinky, be a dear and bring me the other set of Kraut binoculars. You know, the ones in the leather case, in my study, on the shelf, by the propeller.” Bremach paused until he was sure Priscilla had heard him. Sometimes she pretended not to. “Oh, and Pinky darling, my morning elixir, please.” He spoke histrionically, as if adding an afterthought, his strong, reassuring baritone voice wavering piteously for effect.
Checking the aviator’s watch strapped to his left wrist, Willem Bremach was surprised to see the hour, minute, and second hands converging on ten o’clock. The heat was appalling for April. The summer sound of cicadas, helicopters, and water bombers vibrated from all sides. “Not a puff of air,” he said to himself philosophically, “nor a drop of liquor to slake my thirst.”
Hearing Priscilla rummaging under the Spitfire propeller in his studio, Bremach swiveled the wheelchair around, studying the 180-degree view from the villa’s wide verandah. He loved that view. The ancient olive trees and blackish-green flame cypresses planted by his grandfather on the terraces below would need pruning soon, he muttered to himself. Otherwise their branches and floppy tips would become a visual impediment.
Lifting the heavy high-tech Zeiss binoculars to his eyes again, he repeated the words “visual impediment” and reprimanded himself for thinking in Italian and translating in his head into stilted English. Neither Italian nor English was his native language, though he had heard and spoken and read both earlier than he had Dutch. He had also used them more frequently than Dutch, except when carrying out his official duties as consul, ambassador, or military attaché in the Netherlands embassies and consulates around the globe, duties that had occupied forty precious years of his life. They had been happy years, he thought with a sigh, but, in retrospect, the best years of all were the ones when he’d strapped himself into a cockpit, with four-hundred horsepower and several machine guns at his fingertips.
“Here you are, Signor Ambassador,” Priscilla said briskly, coming up from behind her husband’s broad shoulders. She dangled the old leather case in front of him like bait on a hook and appeared to enjoy teasing him. Fully fleshed, suspiciously blonde, and disconcertingly energetic, Priscilla Bremach née Christiansen also appeared indecently younger than Willem, more the age of a daughter or niece than a wife. “What do we say?” she asked, raising a plucked eyebrow into an accent mark.
“Thank you, dear Pinky,” Willem intoned, grinning while swapping the binoculars, then raising the smaller, older set to his bulbous, pale blue eyes. They had a mischievous, satisfied, pearly gleam. “Have you taken a look?”
Priscilla sighed. “I don’t need binoculars to see the fires and the water bombers and the motor yachts,” she said in her pleasant, lilting accented Nordic English. “It’s supposed to be springtime and they’ve been out there every day for a month,” she added. “Is there anything left to burn, Willem? Will it ever rain again? In my day, only barbarians swam in the Mediterranean in April. Now even the Italians have caught the disease. Look at all those boats and air mattresses.”
Bremach smiled toothily. “Tut-tut, Pinky,” he said. “In my day long before your day we did not complain about the weather. This isn’t the first hot spring on the Riviera, either, you know. But what I mean is, have you ever seen so many Canadair seaplanes operating simultaneously?” His excitement was boyish. “Count them. There are one, two, three, four, five, six.” He paused. “And my whisky?”
“It’s too early, Willem,” Priscilla retorted with mock alarm, “please behave. Do you want to make me a widow so soon?” Something like genuine anticipatory grief transformed her handsome face.
“Soon?” Bremach laughed, wanting to float their conversation back to the sunny surface. “But Pinky, we’ve been married forty-six years. I should think you’d had quite enough of me by now.”
“It’s strange you remember the number,” she quipped, piqued by his offhand tone, “since you forgot the date last week.”
Willem Bremach reddened, making a sucking, clucking sound. He wiped his brow again with a large, starched, monogrammed linen handkerchief and swallowed guiltily. “Surely that’s your fault, Pinky,” he said, buying time, trying to think his way out of his callousness. “How can you expect my mind to function properly if you deprive me of my elixir?” Before she could object, he went on. “Now look here, you will forgive me, won’t you? What was it, my darling Pinky, April 10th?”
“You know that to be the correct date of our anniversary,” she said, her Norwegian intonation more pronounced than before, her shoulders lifting unawares toward the tiny glinting diamonds in each earlobe.
“The day I twisted my knee playing tennis?” Willem stammered, his arm reaching out to volley an imaginary ball. “The day your niece and nephew showed up from Trondheim or Bremen or wherever they live? How could I possibly remember something like a wedding anniversary after such a ghastly accident and an invasion by obnoxious adolescent relations?” He reached up from the wheelchair and took her hands, studying the liver spots she refused to erase with surgery or disguise with makeup. “Now, do forgive me, Pinky. If it had been forty-four or forty-five years I would have remembered,” he pleaded, histrionic again. “How could I forget the summer of 1944 or the spring of ’45?”
She glared at him, then relented. “I don’t know, Willem, I wasn’t born yet.”
“Indeed, you weren’t, young Pinky,” he said. “As soon as I’m out of this torture contraption I’ll take us to a bang-up meal.”
“What about Paris? April in Paris? Singing in the rain? It must be raining and cool somewhere,” she said. “I’ll check the weather report.”
“Yes, of course, Pinky,” he muttered. “Paris…”
But Willem Bremach was no longer listening. Following the trajectory of the swooping water bombers he counted them again, taking notes in a notebook, then he spoke out loud. “It’s like a ballet, or a cat’s cradle. Incredible! Some of those planes are very close to shore this morning. It’s an aerial circus. Just look at how they glide and dip and scoop up the water and pull up and turn and climb and climb and disappear into the interior and then—splash, a beautiful red cloud of water and spray and vapor extinguishes the flames. It really is too marvelous. Extraordinary. I could watch them all day.”
