by David Downie
Barely concealed rage twisted Morgana Stella’s remade face into a demonic doll mask. But with what was clearly a superhuman effort, she metamorphosed moments later into a golden bird of prey, perching on the arm of an overstuffed chair. “What do you want to know,” she hissed at Daria, now transforming herself into a snake. “Imelda,” she hissed again, “call Maurizio. Let’s get this over with.”
Nine
Was the deception willful? Daria thought so. Morgana Stella had proven singularly incapable of shining light on Joseph Gary’s whereabouts or the means to find them. For reasons not yet apparent to her, Gary seemed to have dug a moat around his companion. Morgana Stella claimed to know nothing of his business dealings or his movements when not at home or with her and the dogs on their daily excursions. These consisted of shopping for designer clothes and accessories in Portofino and Santa Margherita, boating in the Riva, motoring in the Maserati, or lunching at the yacht club, Galleria Club, or Jardin Club in Genoa. They rarely entertained at home.
Gary had what seemed to be casual friendships everywhere, Stella claimed. She did not know his close friends or relatives and said she thought that he did not have any. To the best of her knowledge, she stated, Gary was an intensely private, elderly, well-off American and had no relations in Italy. She claimed to be surprised when told his birth name was Giuseppe Garibaldi, and that he had grown up in dire poverty twenty miles south of the villa in the mountains behind the Cinque Terre. Daria had immediately asked whether they frequented the Cinque Terre and knew anyone in that area.
“Oh, we never go there,” Stella had exclaimed, in earnest, at last, “but we were planning to visit the Cinque Terre tomorrow, for the first time.”
Her claim that she did not know he was Italian was sufficiently farfetched, Daria thought. Morgana Stella also claimed she had never seen a will or spoken to Gary about a legacy. The commissioner listened, her face expressionless. She felt reasonably sure Stella was telling the truth, but not the whole truth. Wasn’t it more probable the legacy had been paid in advance for services rendered? The Guardia di Finanza would have fun tracing this one, Daria said to herself. Where might the money trail lead? To Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland, or someplace farther afield? The Bahamas, Barbados, Libya? The best method would be to find Stella’s family in Slovenia, then trace the remittances back to the source. But that would only happen if the Questor pushed for it.
With apprehension, and only after prolonged negotiations, Stella had conducted the three DIGOS agents into Joseph Gary’s remarkably impersonal, maniacally tidy, almost entirely empty office area, ordering Maurizio and Imelda Capurro to follow them and video their every move using their smartphones. But nothing had been found. Joseph Gary, she reasoned, did his business by telephone and via encrypted text messaging. There were no note pads and no laptop. Someone someplace else, possibly an entire network of associates, did the heavy lifting for him, out of reach of the Italian and other European financial and tax authorities. There was only one way to find out anything about his activities: interrogate Gary, if he was still alive. Perhaps, as they hoped, the key to the embedded GPS dot in his Rolex would be found in the analogue note pad they had discovered in the Riva, or on his smartphone?
The only useful lead Stella had provided turned out to be half a clue. Gary’s attorney resided in the Bahamas, she had said. He might know how to trace him, she had added. However, neither she nor Maurizio Capurro could provide the attorney’s full name, address, or telephone number. “Joseph called him Don,” Stella said peevishly. “That’s all I ever knew. It was none of my business,” she insisted, now speaking in a girlish Marylyn Monroe voice, no longer a snake or a bird of prey.
The din of the jumping, snapping, snarling, barking Rhodesian ridgebacks followed the police officers back to their cars. “Pity the burglar who tries to break in here,” muttered Morbido.
“Ever read The Hound of the Baskervilles?” asked Gambero, unable to repress a deep yawn.
Morbido shook his jowls in reply. “I don’t read unless I have to,” he joked. “Commissario Vinci reads enough for all three of us.”
Worn out by a long day’s work and in desperate need of antihistamines, Lieutenant Gambero asked to be relieved of duty. The pair of DIGOS cars followed each other down the highway until Gambero pulled over at the first pharmacy they found. He said he would drive back to headquarters on his own, taking the autostrada turnpike direct from Rapallo to Genoa. The lieutenant had a young wife and an infant child. Daria knew the twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts routine in the service were hard on him.
Before leaving the Portofino Peninsula, Daria and Lieutenant Morbido stopped in the easternmost of Santa Margherita’s two curving coves. There they wolfed down several slices of the local cheese focaccia. It was not as good here as in Recco, the capital of Ligurian gastronomy, over the hills toward Genoa, Morbido said, providing Daria with a short history of the delicacy, while the cheese and olive oil dribbled down his large and now stubbly chin. Given the circumstances however, he had hastened to add, the focaccia they were eating seemed more than good enough.
The night air had cooled, but the sweat on Morbido’s bulging forehead still stood out, glistening in the florescent light of the seaside pizza joint. On the wide beach front sidewalk, under the motionless palm trees where they had parked the Alfa Romeo, Daria wondered out loud where Joseph Gary might be. Had he floated to the surface already, or was he somewhere else entirely, a captive or a corpse?
The steep hills up and down the curving, rugged Riviera twinkled with pinpoints of fire light. The smell of burning brush mingled with the floral scents wafting from the luxuriant gardens of the tony seaside resort towns that ran continuously for hundreds of miles along the arching coastline from Tuscany to France. Were they new fires, Daria wondered, or old fires that had flared up again from embers? But she was too tired to think it through. Not my table, she said to herself. To be continued. Tomorrow.
Except tomorrow was already today, now, this evening, and it was also yesterday, because time was a circle without beginning or end, she felt with sudden clarity. The continuum could not be over yet, she said to herself with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders. For one thing, she had agreed to meet the coroner, Emilio Bozzo, near the morgue on the way back to town. Like Willem Bremach earlier in the day, Bozzo had said he had things not only to tell her, confidentially, but to show her, urgently. He never spoke freely on the telephone.
This time Daria sat in the front passenger seat. It was a relief. She felt the difference in rank and social background melt away. Osvaldo Morbido happened to be one of the smartest, and, given the opportunity, funniest police inspectors she knew. Why had he been skipped over and never risen above the rank of lieutenant? Was it his politics or his looks? His manners? Was it because he lacked the most basic social graces?
She knew Morbido had little grasp of or interest in history and culture, for instance, and did not seem able to get beyond his family’s blue-collar past. He had every reason to be proud of his father, she reflected, a steelworker and Communist union organizer at the giant Ansaldo steel mill and shipyards in the city’s eastern suburbs. But the mill and shipyards were gone, the political party and union Morbido Senior had represented were moribund, and he, the father, Benedetto Morbido, was long dead. The 1970s were dead and gone, Daria told herself, glancing out of the windows at the magical nighttime view. Except they lived on in the hearts and minds of millions of men and women like Osvaldo Morbido, people forged during the Age of Ideology.
It struck her as right and fitting that she and Morbido had so far worked together in apolitical harmony. He never questioned her decision to join DIGOS, for example, a notoriously right-wing branch of the national police, when she clearly did not have right-wing tendencies. He had never asked her how she voted. Surely, he had read the abundant material available publicly about her father, Roberto Vinci. Yet Morbido never spoke of him to her, p
robably out of respect, she reasoned. Everyone knew what had befallen Roberto Vinci. A high-level government functionary, diplomat, and, it was claimed, a longtime intelligence agent, the dashing, mustachioed Roberto had spent the greater part of his career keeping tabs on Italy’s Communist unions and left-wing political groupings while liaising with his virulently anti-Communist American and European counterparts. In other words, he had spied on the organization Morbido’s father had represented from the shop floor.
On his last posting, undercover in Asia posing as a commercial attaché at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Roberto Vinci had been stabbed to death in his hotel room in Jakarta by an unknown assailant. The year was 1995, the year Daria had dropped out of Yale and moved home to be with her widowed mother. She blinked now at the view beyond the windows of the speeding Alfa Romeo, but also glanced inward. How far from the paternal tree had she fallen, after all? Though they had grown up on opposite sides of the spectrum, how different was she really from Osvaldo Morbido? They were both dedicated public servants, both idealists case hardened by decades on the force, and both wary of politics and an excess of self-questioning, self-doubt, and self-analysis.
As the car sped west through the heavily built-up suburbs of Genoa, Daria’s phone rang. Again. And again. She did not recognize the number. No name was associated with it.
“Am I speaking with Colonel Vinci?” said a hesitant male voice, a light, musical tenor.
“Who is it?” Daria growled, instantly suspicious. “Who gave you this number?”
“Sergeant Gianni Giannini here, from Rapallo. Gigi, I mean Marshal Luigi De Filippo, said I should report to you.”
“Ah, yes, good evening, Giannini. I am a captain, by the way, not a colonel. What did you find?” Daria sat upright and unconsciously straightened her pantsuit and rearranged her hair. She remembered Gianni Giannini’s baby blue eyes and gentle smile, the smile of a Boy Scout leader, a grade-school teacher, a young father, a poet—not a traffic cop.
“It was strange, commissario capitano,” Gianni Giannini said respectfully, “the hike up that hill behind the turnout where the bag was found is very, very steep and the trail overgrown. When I finally reached the top, there was no trace of fire and no heat from flames, but I saw a sparkling light and there were great clouds of smoke pouring out of the bunker, so I could not enter the shore battery complex, because of the smoke. I was forced to turn back. Apologies for taking so long to report to you. It has been a busy day.”
Daria pondered this, tapping her lips. “That is interesting,” she said. “Very interesting.”
“I could accompany you there tomorrow, if the commissario capitano wishes,” he added.
“Yes, that would be nice,” she answered readily—too readily. “That is to say, it might be useful, sergeant. May I call you tomorrow morning, first thing, at this number, to arrange a meeting?”
“Sì, commissario,” he said, “with pleasure.”
“Good night, Sergeant Giannini,” she said and disconnected, her heart beating faster than it should.
Glancing over, she caught a glimpse of Morbido’s bullfrog grin. “Do you mind taking Corso Europa instead of the turnpike?” she asked, regaining her composure and willing away the heat in her cheeks. “There shouldn’t be any traffic now going into the city.”
Morbido assented silently, the grin by now uniting his large, pendulous earlobes.
When the Via Aurelia coast highway widened into the Corso Europa four-lane expressway, on the eastern edge of suburban Nervi, Lieutenant Morbido accelerated into the center lane reserved for buses and emergency vehicles. Determined to drive the image of Gianni Giannini out of her visual cortex, Daria began compiling a mental checklist of what she knew, what she didn’t, and what steps had to be taken next.
There were times when she felt like an organist with both hands and feet on the pedals and keyboard, simultaneously reading and playing the music, and pulling out and pushing in the stops. At other times she felt like the reluctant young Yale premed student she had been a quarter century before, making up lists and methodically moving down them, her own predigital pull-down menus.
Whichever metaphor she chose, mastering her current task list felt daunting. Unsure why, she found herself dreading the impending encounter with Emilio Bozzo, the coroner. Was it because the bodies had been butchered into so many pieces? Was it because it reminded her of the remains of her own father? Roberto Vinci had not only been stabbed to death. His attacker had then hacked him apart, packed him into suitcases, and dumped the suitcases in the river. To this day, she still did not understand why she and not one of her elder brothers had been made to leave school, fly out to meet her mother, and identify the remains. Why hadn’t she insisted one of them handle the emergency, or at least come with her? What was it that made her brothers and so many of the males in her life behave like princelings surrounded by female attendants?
Willing away the memory, Daria moaned unintentionally, then covered her mouth and pretended the moan was a yawn.
“Okay,” she said with more emphasis than she had intended, breaking the silence that had filled the passenger compartment. “Tonight, in theory, I will find out more about the bags and mutilated bodies,” she continued, raising her fingers to use them as counters. “Tomorrow morning, we have Gary’s note pad and his attorney and the GPS dot. We have the Guardia di Finanza and Gary’s tax status. We have the sites of the fires, and the airport in Albenga where the water bombers are based. We have people representing the Veterans Administration and the Ministry of Culture for the commemorative ceremony at Villa Migone for the anniversary of the liberation, and we need to brief them before the Questor’s speech the day after tomorrow. And we have the scuba divers and metal detectors and the small task of finding Gary’s body, unless he is still alive. Then we have to make sense of it all.”
“That’s it?” Morbido croaked ironically.
“What’s on your wish list?”
He chuckled. “Well, you’ve got the fires, with Sergeant Adonis, and you’re the one who speaks English, so you’ve got the note pad and the call to the attorney in Barbados or wherever he is, unless you want someone in Rome to handle it. That leaves the Guardia di Finanza, Albenga, Villa Migone, and the divers and Carabinieri and the body. Gambero can take his pick. A breeze.”
“Deal,” she said. She pulled a leather portfolio from underneath the front passenger seat and flipped it open. Reaching back, she picked up the Joseph Gary file from the rear seat. She opened it and carefully slid in the sheet of handwritten notepaper and the aviation magazine Willem Bremach had given her that morning.
That morning? It seemed a week ago. She explained to Morbido what the two documents were and asked him to make a copy of Bremach’s notes and the flagged magazine article about seaplanes, scan and email them to her, and take the original with him to Albenga, or give them to Italo Gambero if he needed them to identify the water bombers Bremach had spotted. An air show was under way, she explained, or may have just ended, she wasn’t sure and was too tired to google it now. Someone at the small regional airport set among the artichoke fields of Albenga would be able to answer questions about water bombers, and detail where they had come from, who had flown them yesterday, where exactly they had been operating, and when. “It’s a very long shot,” she said, “but crazier things have happened.”
Morbido assented. He cleared his throat and seemed reluctant to speak. “I picked up a novel once,” he began, taking her by surprise.
“You did what?”
“Yes, occasionally I read novels. It was maybe twenty years ago? Something by a Canadian author. Translated into Italian. It took place in Canada, on a lake. I can’t remember much of anything about it except that a swimmer is scooped up by one of those Canadair planes.”
Daria swiveled in her seat and stared at him, astonished. A smile stretched her lips wide. “That’s excellent, Osvaldo
,” she exclaimed, pausing to study his flushed face. “That must be what my godfather meant. I’ll ask him. Maybe this is some kind of crazy copycat crime and that’s what he was hinting at. Willem is amazing. He’s terrifying in a way.” She paused again, reluctant to press her luck with further questions. But Morbido’s words had reminded her of something else Bremach had said. “Do you remember anything about the Brindisi Bronzes?”
Morbido shook his head. “The Riace Bronzes I remember,” he said. “I saw an illustrated book about them. Beautiful craftsmanship. Ancient Greek, not Roman, I think.”
Revived and curious, Daria had her phone out and was tapping the screen, then scrolling as the car raced up the last hill into central Genoa. “Here it is,” she said. “The Province of Brindisi website says…” Her eyes scanned the entry. She paused at the section titled “The Archaeological Dig.” “So,” she summarized. “The archeologists think the sculptures were either substandard or too broken to be fixed, and they were being shipped to a foundry to be melted when the ship transporting them sank.”
Morbido shook his jowls in bafflement. “I don’t get it.”
“Not important,” she said. But now she understood. “Incinerated,” she muttered, “cremation for bronze, except with bronze it melts, you can recycle it, you see, and with human body parts you can’t, unless you’re Doctor Frankenstein.”
Morbido glanced at her warily. “If you say so,” he remarked. “Sometimes you make my head ache.”
“I’m getting out here,” Daria said, pointing.
A small, rusted sign a few yards off Corso Europa indicated the coroner’s office and morgue. Camere mortuarie, it read, Via Giovanni Battista Marsano.
Morbido tapped the brakes, put on the swirling roof lights and emergency blinkers, and pulled the Alfa Romeo over to the right, nudging it up and onto the sidewalk. Thanking him and jumping out, Daria walked swiftly the remaining half block to the meeting place. She could already see the coroner, Emilio Bozzo, at a two-top table in the café, alone by the window, facing her way, his lean figure bent over a pile of papers. Bozzo was too old to be putting in such long hours, she said to herself. But he was unattached, an old bachelor, and dedicated to his career, like Morbido, like herself. She had long sensed she and Bozzo shared more philosophically and even politically than met the eye. A hidden world view, perhaps, a hidden avenging angel agenda?
