Red Riviera

by David Downie

  “Willem,” she began to protest. He held up his hand to check her.

  “I’m afraid I have no other great perceptions about this rather dismal-sounding case,” he sighed. “Perhaps something will come up, some clue.” He paused, then said, “Might there be a connection with our man, Joe Gary Baldi?”

  “Come to the table,” Priscilla commanded from the dining room, “otherwise the food will get hot.” She laughed suddenly and smiled. It was so rare for Priscilla to pun, quip, or laugh that all three of them were stunned.

  Bremach’s eyes sparkled. “Coming,” he called back. Placing one large, mottled hand on Daria’s arm, he whispered, his breath scented by his morning whisky. “Remember, with Joseph Gary, cherchez la femme. He is, or was, a womanizer. Your American counterparts are cruder, telling you to follow the money. In this case the politics, the women, and the dollars, or rubles, who knows, may be one and the same.” He winked.

  Daria began pushing him toward the table, where a bowl of pasta salad with cherry tomatoes and thimble-sized mozzarella balls awaited, flanked by a platter of thinly sliced cold veal topped with creamy tuna sauce.

  “What about the Mob?” she asked in a whisper. “Everything in his profile points to the Mafia.”

  “You know better than I,” he added, “that the Mob wears a cloak of invisibility, or a carnival mask, or a tailored linen suit, and speaks all of Mammon’s languages, even Bitcoin. My last word to you, dear Daria, is go to Albenga, to the airport, to see about the seaplanes, and then seek out Andrew Striker, the head of the x-ray security team at the container port in Voltri. A damn fine pilot he is, by the way, though reckless. Tell him I sent you. They have some all-knowing algorithm, it is claimed. If Joe Gary was scooped up by a seaplane, they will know it and they will find him.”

  Daria glanced down at Willem Bremach, her heart thumping at the mention of Andrew Striker. She composed herself. “They?” she asked. “Meaning Homeland Security?”

  He nodded. “You know Andrew Striker?”

  Daria frowned and flushed. “Willem, you know I knew him well,” she blurted out. “Too well.”

  Bremach’s face twitched. He struck his palm to his forehead. “Of course, how could I forget, I introduced you to him. And you left him heartbroken because he was a blackguard. My apologies, Daria dear, I am getting old after all, old and senile, like that blighter Centauri, the damned Questor.”

  Six

  Daria knew in her heart, stomach, and soul that this was her lucky day. After car sickness in the morning on the Via Aurelia, she was now experiencing seasickness live, on camera, in one of the world’s more spectacular settings, Portofino. She had not meant to be the star of the show.

  Surrounding Daria on sea and land were sea gods, goddesses, and heavily armed, blue-cheeked policemen who appeared to be enjoying the cruise as if it were a school outing. Only she, the commissioner, was seasick.

  Away across the waves from Daria, scores of pedestrians, joggers, and rubbernecking drivers gaped at the police authorities from the snaking seaside road. Illegal immigrants moved among them, selling sunglasses, paper tissues, handheld electric fans, and bottles of cold water. A fender-bender had already caused the temporary closure of the narrow two-lane coast highway. The vans and cars of the press corps stood bumper to bumper, further complicating the job of the traffic cops, among them the familiar, disconcertingly handsome, Sergeant Gianni Giannini.

  Overhead and at water level, drones and powerboats sent by local and national TV news stations hovered and sharked. They and the dozen or more speedboats owned by curious local residents and Riviera visitors were kept at bay by a motley flotilla of boats from the Coast Guard and Guardia di Finanza—the customs and tax police—not to mention the state and municipal police, the Carabinieri, several local fire departments, and the harbor masters of Portofino, Santa Margherita Ligure, and Rapallo. Daria knew why she was dizzy and nauseated, and it was not simply a matter of the swelling, sultry sea.

  How had the disappearance of Joseph Gary degenerated into a circus so quickly? Daria knew the two-word answer: social media.

  But she consoled herself with a positive thought. There was a potential upside to Facebook et al.: a superabundance of photos and videos to analyze. Despite the holidays, tech teams at the provincial DIGOS headquarters in Genoa and at the mother ship Ministry of the Interior in Rome had been on the case for several hours, tracking images purportedly capturing the scene of what looked increasingly like a crime. The postings so far offered variations on the theme of “the American secret agent” and “foreign billionaire, friend of oligarchs and potentates,” who had, it was claimed, been murdered, kidnapped, poisoned with nerve gas, or drowned, with or without a glamorous former porn star named Morgana Stella in his arms, in the bay off Europe’s most exclusive seaside resort. What had Joe Gary done, who was getting revenge or would stand to profit, which crime family might be involved, and where was the body to be found—these were the questions with the longest comment chains.

  Other equally accurate and intelligent posts speculated on the retail value, top speed, horsepower, and desirability of the victim’s Riva Aquarama motorboat and the victim’s comparably vintage Maserati parked in Rapallo’s yacht harbor, guarded by municipal police officers.

  On land, three teams of Polizia di Stato and Carabinieri, including two men pulled from Gigi De Filippo’s squad, were going door to door along the coast road between Santa Margherita and Portofino, asking for eyewitness accounts. So far, no one had noticed anything suspicious about the speedboat or the lost swimmer. Why would they? Like the Aquarama, dozens of handsome motor yachts and boats of all kinds were out on this perfect spring morning. Like Gary, hundreds of waders, water skiers, and swimmers could be seen splashing, slaloming, and cavorting in the sun. Besides, everyone knew that the oligarchs, Mafiosi, and felonious politicians came a dime a dozen on the Riviera, so why notice them?

  Peering down into the depthless crystalline waters of the Gulf of Tigullio directly off Portofino, Daria leaned perilously on the thin stainless-steel railing of the harbor master’s motor launch. Holding her handkerchief over her mouth, she knew what the color green felt like. She regretted losing the lunch Priscilla Bremach had gone to such trouble to prepare and wished she had not been caught on camera being sick.

  The harbor master was Rapallo’s most affable aquatic hunk. He seemed hesitant to give advice to a DIGOS commissioner. The deeply tanned former weight-lifting champion kept watch from the helm of the launch, ready to fish Daria out if she fell in.

  Given past precedent, why she had agreed to ride in the high-powered patrol boat she could not now imagine. The inevitable self-questioning began. Was it a sense of duty?

  Earlier in the afternoon, Daria had merely cluttered the scene of the crime and gotten in the way as the fingerprint team and detail men from headquarters worked over Joe Gary’s gleaming, rocking Riva. Every inch of the speedboat including its many locked compartments had been unlocked, checked, and photographed. Gary’s smartphone had been bagged, plus a pocket-sized paper note pad and gold-plated pen. His leather boat shoes had also been wrapped in plastic and taken away. Containers filled with an assortment of sun screens, lotions, makeup, chap stick, and lip balm, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and bandages, as well as high-impact bins holding waterproof flashlights, flares, smoke grenades, and other emergency equipment, were labeled and removed for inspection.

  Something among the jumbled items called out to Daria, something unusual, but in her muddled, queasy state of mind and body she could not form an articulate thought about what that something might be. She also had the vague notion that behind the controls of one of the countless official-looking boats on the scene she had glimpsed the unmistakable profile of Andrew Striker. When she had turned to look back, that tall, lean figure with a vampire widow’s peak and a jutting jaw had vanished.

  Only after the routine and fruit
less checks had been completed had Daria rejoined the harbor master on his lethal launch and vomited repeatedly as they toured the scene. The boat rocked gently now, almost at a standstill, following the boiling bubbles of the three fire brigade scuba divers below. They were searching the bottom, so far without results.

  A hundred yards north of the launch, Joe Gary’s toy boat, as Pinky Bremach had called it, tugged gently at a buoy. Two uniformed police officers from the Santa Margherita station sat with their submachine guns cradled in their laps and looked distinctly out of place in the tuck-‘n’-roll upholstered interior. They watched Inspector Morbido pull alongside and clamber out of another launch, then teeter on board in his pointy black leather shoes. For a meatball on legs, Morbido was surprisingly agile. Accompanying him was a sullen-looking, muscular, deeply tanned, middle-aged man wearing expensive designer sports clothes, a thick gold chain, and mirrored sunglasses. He might have been the cheerful harbor master’s twin but for his evident grumpiness and the fact that the first joint of his right index finger was missing.

  Daria shaded her aching eyes and watched Morbido and the new arrival. She knew the man’s name to be Maurizio Capurro. He was a local jack-of-all-trades with just a shade of murk in his past, enough to have caused the loss of his trigger finger. Somehow, he had risen from short-haul skipper and small-time smuggler to become Joe Gary’s live-in personal assistant. According to Daria’s other sidekick, Lieutenant Gambero, who had interviewed Capurro at the Gary villa earlier that day, Capurro and his handsome young wife were highly paid and greatly appreciated by their employer—their former employer, by the looks of it. They occupied a bungalow on the villa’s grounds.

  Maurizio Capurro’s job was to take care of the Riva and Maserati, do the day-to-day maintenance on the villa, and supervise everyone else—the outsourced dog-walkers, swimming-pool people, mow-and-blow teams, and construction crews called in periodically to add an elevator or gazebo or rebuild a bathroom in the already obscenely large, rambling villa.

  Maurizio’s wife, Imelda Capurro, née Cruz, a naturalized Italian from Manila, handled the grocery shopping, extra cleaning, catering, and cooking, under the dancing baton of her exigent mistress, Morgana Stella, the recycled starlet of Eastern European pornographic cinema, now an aromatherapist.

  Stella had also given a statement to Gambero, preferring to remain at the villa for the time being and avoid the zoo at the scene of the disappearance. Besides, she had said, the dogs were traumatized by Gary’s sudden absence.

  Judging by his scowls, Maurizio Capurro seemed to be aware that this was likely going to be his last trip piloting the vintage speedboat back to Rapallo’s yacht harbor or driving the Maserati along the corkscrew highway to Gary’s garage. Everything in his demeanor telegraphed the same sour message. The good times are over. Stop. What did he know that made him so sure Joe Gary would not pop up like the proverbial jack-in-the-box? Daria was confident she would soon find out.

  Steadying herself, she wondered how much longer the search for the body would last, then realized it was up to her to make the decision to call it off. Surely the divers would run out of air? Secretly she hoped that, for purely technical reasons, the day would soon be over, she would not be blamed for weakness, and she and her team could rest and regroup.

  What confused her most was why Joe Gary’s body had eluded detection for so long. He should have been found by now, face up, on or near the surface, or on the bottom, within swimming distance of his boat, somewhere along the narrow sea lane he followed. There was no wind, no tide to speak of, no undertow, and the water temperature was a mild 23 degrees Centigrade—73.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The gulf looked and felt like a tepid bathtub.

  Reportedly, Gary swam in the same direction every morning, out to sea about a quarter mile, then back again, two or three or even five times, following an imaginary line drawn from the buoy and boat to the lighthouse at Portofino. He was a small, lightweight man short in the arms and legs. That meant his body caused little or no drag and would naturally tend to turn on its back, face up, and remain stationary.

  If he had suffered a sudden, massive heart attack or been struck on the head, she reasoned, he might not have had time to inhale water, meaning he would not sink. In that case, someone—Willem Bremach and his binoculars for instance—would have seen him floating. If instead he had died from sucking water into his lungs, he would have sunk quickly and remained stationary on the bottom for the time being.

  Gary always wore extra-long, high-performance buoyant rubber flippers, according to the sulky Maurizio Capurro and the petulant Morgana Stella. The fins doubled as flotation devices and probably would have kept Gary suspended at least partway between the bottom and the surface. They were also highly visible in clear water and should have been spotted already.

  Most human bodies sink quickly, Daria reminded herself with a shudder of pity and disgust. They only float back up once bacteria in the cavities form gases. Then they remain on top for days or weeks before sinking to the bottom again. That was why the dead were weighted down when buried at sea, she knew, and why victims, whether alive or dead, when dumped in the water by organized criminals and other murderers, wore the proverbial cement overshoes. With time, depending on the salinity and temperature of the water and the tides, a body might rise and sink more than once before decomposing or washing up on shore. Sooner or later, Joe Gary would bob up and be spotted.

  But not if he had been struck by the hull of an amphibious plane and dragged off his normal course, decapitated, or lifted in the air and dumped on a distant fire.

  Checking her wristwatch, Daria was about to call off the search and tell the harbor master to take her back to shore when she found a fold-down bench and perched wearily on its edge. Her phone rang and she answered reluctantly, afraid she might be sick again or, worse, that it might be Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III, the Questor, demanding another update.

  She was relieved when it proved to be Lieutenant Morbido, waving at her from the deck of the Riva. He was close enough that she could see his thick, rubbery frog lips moving when he spoke to her.

  “The personal assistant, Signor Capurro, says his boss always wore a close-fitting gold chain with a Saint Christopher medal, a large gold signet ring, and a waterproof Rolex with a GPS tracker dot embedded in the backing,” Morbido barked. “We need to reach the divers and tell them to use the underwater metal detectors. That might speed things up.”

  “Good,” Daria said. “We need to find out who’s tracking the GPS dot, presumably Capurro or the woman, Morgana Stella?”

  “Negative. That’s where it gets complicated,” Morbido said. “Capurro claims he used to have the app and code to track his boss, but he says his mobile was stolen last week and he and Gary failed to install the app on the new phone. I checked with the local Carabinieri, and they confirm Capurro reported the theft of the phone. Capurro says he has no idea if his boss wrote down the codes elsewhere or who else would have them. He’s never noticed a laptop or other computer in the house.”

  She pondered. “What about Morgana Stella?”

  “No,” Morbido replied. “Capurro says Gary didn’t want her to know where he was or be able to track him down. Clearly, the Viagra worked.”

  “I see,” Daria muttered, the vision of an overly tanned nonagenarian having sex with a woman fifty years his junior increasing her queasiness. “Then the app and code would be on the victim’s mobile, the one we bagged from the boat?” Daria managed to ask. Morbido grunted and said that was probably correct. “And that phone is locked?” Daria questioned, following up. Morbido again said yes. “Then please ask HQ to find someone who can unlock it,” she said.

  “I already have,” Morbido answered wearily. “It’s not easy and everyone in the tech section is gone. They’re on vacation. Back next week. Even then, it is no picnic to break into one of these phones, as you know very well. Remember the case in America with Ap
ple. We should probably send it to Rome or ask Homeland Security for help.”

  Daria raised her head suddenly, then shook it. “No, not Homeland Security,” she said, thinking, yet again, of Andrew Striker.

  Morbido shrugged philosophically. “I might point out, commissario, that there’s also an old-fashioned paper note pad. Maybe something was noted in there. I’ll get the fingerprint team to bring the note pad upstairs to your office. They’re already back in Genoa at headquarters with it.”

  Daria tapped her lips and frowned. “Okay,” she said, buying time. “Get them to scan each page of the notebook, upload them, send them to the research department in Rome, and email a copy to me. I want every name and number in that pad analyzed before the day is out.”

  “Sì, commissario.”

  Daria took a deep breath and felt her head pounding. “I’ll tell the harbor master to alert the divers about the gold items and getting metal detectors,” she said, trying to be systematic, “then I’ll meet you at the car in half an hour. Anything else?”

  “You know Gambero is at the villa?” Morbido queried, reluctant now. “It seems the fiancée, Signora Stella Morgana, is distraught and hysterical and wants you or the Questor to come over in person—otherwise she says she will phone the minister, a personal friend of her husband’s.”

  “Which minister,” Daria asked, exasperated, the nausea mounting again. “Our Minister of the Interior?”

  “No, the Minister of Defense,” Morbido muttered. “Carabinieri,” he added with irritation. “The woman says if Gary’s not in the water or on the boat or in his car then he may have been kidnapped. That’s why he had the GPS dot embedded in the Rolex, she says, not because he thought he might misplace the watch. He never took it off. She seems to know a lot about the kidnapping business.”