by David Downie
Turning east, she stared at the sinister outsized silhouette of the Monte di Portofino, a titan’s castle of conglomerate stone infinitely older than Genoa or even Rome, dropped on the jagged edge of the Mediterranean almost precisely at its northern apex. Somewhere out there beyond, or perhaps atop that forbidding rock, lay the body of the late Giuseppe Garibaldi. Daria knew it in her tired, aching bones. Gary had not been kidnapped. He had been murdered.
Twelve
Why scramble up a thousand vertical feet?, Sergeant Gianni Giannini had asked Daria. The better way of reaching the Nazi bunker behind Rapallo was to drive to the pass and hike back on the ridgetop trail bearing west by northwest.
It was nearly 7:15 a.m. when the Alfa Romeo, Daria at the wheel, crested the Passo della Crocetta, having negotiated the archetypal corkscrew two-lane road up from the coast.
Sergeant Giannini had shown admirable sangfroid as she screeched around the hairpins and slid toward the guardrails on loose gravel. They had skidded to a halt and backed up twice, first to allow a miniature passenger bus and later a delivery truck to get by. At the top, Daria had pulled onto the gravel shoulder by a small roadside shrine, leaving the car at the intersection of an even narrower road, hopeful passing traffic could go by unhindered. Enchanted by the boundless view from two thousand feet above sea level, Daria’s eyes swept over Rapallo, then out across the rugged Portofino Peninsula and Gulf of Genoa. She could see the flotilla of police and Carabinieri boats, Coast Guard cutters, fire boats, and harbor masters’ skiffs and launches, already back at work searching for Joe Gary’s body. Had she really seen Andrew Striker among them yesterday, or had he merely been a figment of her nauseated imagination, stimulated by Willem Bremach’s puzzling words?
Daria knew it was too soon for Morbido to have heard from Lieutenant Gambero at the airport in Albenga, but she was tempted to call him again anyway. The three had met at headquarters that morning at six, divvied up tasks, reviewed their strategy, then spoken again just before seven, when she had met Sergeant Giannini at the Rapallo train station.
Given the extreme isolation of the mountain pass, Daria was startled by the arrival of a cluster of wobbling cyclists, seniors dressed in colorful athletic wear, peddling up on racing bikes from the opposite valley, dismounting at the summit, then marching like robotic penguins on their stiff riding shoes while gulping water and talking a mile a minute. A moment later, half a dozen graying backpackers appeared on the ridge, their aluminum Nordic walking sticks swinging and clicking. They had come from the direction of the Sanctuary of Montallegro a mile or so east, they bleated joyfully to the cyclists.
“Popular spot,” Daria remarked.
“It’s the weather,” Gianni confirmed, “and the long weekend.”
They allowed the trekkers to go ahead of them on the ridgetop trail. Shouting loudly, as if born with megaphones in their mouths, the group bounced off, tricked out in high-tech hiking gear, ready to set geriatric speed records. Daria could not keep up with them. She already regretted having donned her uncomfortably stiff blue DIGOS military-style summer uniform. Worse were her loose black leather shoes with soft rubber soles. They gave no ankle support.
Scrambling up the steep, slippery gravel scree, Gianni led the way west. They spoke little. Beyond his sunny personality and tuneful tenor voice, Daria also admired the man’s stamina and stride. Though encumbered by his ridiculous traffic cop outfit crowned by an impractical upswept white military-style hat, Sergeant Giannini had the physique of an alpine trekker. When Daria made a remark about the pace, he admitted to having done his compulsory military service in the famous Italian Alpine Brigade.
Compulsory was the key word, she knew. Feeling it a dereliction of duty to think of such immaterial subjects, nonetheless she couldn’t help doing a quick calculation. The military draft had been abolished in Italy in 2005—over fifteen years ago. Men were usually twenty when they did their compulsory military service, though they might be anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five. That meant Giannini was at least thirty-three to forty years old, about ten years her junior, though he might be five years older than that and therefore closer to her age.
If it had been the other way around, she told herself with a philosophical shrug, no one would bother. She wondered if Italy would ever evolve from patriarchal medievalism toward a progressive, egalitarian, gender-respectful society. Perhaps if a prime minister or president had an older wife or lover, like President Emmanuel Macron of France, or if a woman were finally put in charge of the government, things would begin to change. But probably not. There would always be the Vatican, and thousands of years of male domination and ingrained machismo. She could not repress a loud scoff. Gianni turned to look back at her and asked if she were all right.
Glancing furtively at his large, muscular hands, she tried to remember if she had seen him wearing a wedding band. But the hands were in motion, swinging like pendulums as he strode toward the bunker complex. She had looked at his ring finger before, she chided herself now, and had seen but had not observed if it bore a band. The time had come to pay closer attention. She rewound the mental videotape of her encounters with Gianni over the last two or three years. There had been several, all brief and businesslike but somehow memorable. She shivered despite the heat.
Veering off the main hiking trail, they took an offshoot due west, wading through the scented Mediterranean scrub of yellow broom, white rock rose, tree heather, and spiky-fruited arbutus. Gianni came to a sudden halt. He raised his arms high, warning her to stay back. She heard a grunt and a squeal, unholstered her pistol, and seconds later jumped to the side as a feral sow and its piglets rushed by. Daria couldn’t help laughing out loud from nervousness and childlike hilarity.
“That’s probably the most dangerous thing we’ll experience today,” he chuckled good-naturedly.
“I certainly hope so,” Daria said, her large, ripe mouth glistening.
Criminals were one thing, she remarked, and she was used to dealing with them. But wild pigs in the middle of nowhere? The only way out if you were injured was by helicopter.
The bunker complex turned out to be much bigger than she had expected. This was no simple machine gun nest but rather a full-blown shore battery fifty yards long and built of reinforced concrete. How the Fascists and then the Nazis who took over from them in late 1943 had gotten their heavy cannons up here and supplied the bunker with food, water, and ammunition in the days before helicopters was beyond her imagination.
On the other hand, she knew from having walked along parts of the so-called Gothic Line—the Nazis’ rampart against the approaching Allies, running east to west across the Italian peninsula, from the southern outskirts of La Spezia to Pesaro on the Adriatic Sea—that it had over two thousand machine gun nests and nearly five hundred heavy gun positions along its length. Many of them were just as elaborate and even more isolated than this one. War, violence, bloodletting—they were so much a part of human nature that she wondered if peace and harmony were no more than pipe dreams, and her vocation futile.
“Watch out for vipers,” Gianni shouted as they pushed through the last barrier of scruffy vegetation. “It’s so hot they might already have come out of hibernation.”
“You make it sound like we’re in the Wild West,” Daria said, wide eyed, “except the Nazis never made it out to California.”
“No,” he laughed, “they seem to have settled in Washington, D.C.”
Daria glanced at him, astonished by his candor.
Jumping down onto the roof of the ruined bunker, Gianni swiveled and reached out his hands, offering to help her down. She hesitated, decided she really did not want to twist an ankle, and accepted reluctantly. A strange tingling sensation passed through her fingertips and up her arms. She shuddered imperceptibly. To mask what she was feeling, she said in an unintentionally suffocated voice, “At least they had a nice view.” Dusting herself off and followin
g him around and down into the gutted gun position, she paused. “Sergeant Giannini,” she said. He turned and looked at her.
“Please call me Gianni,” he said. “No one can hear us.”
Daria felt her heart skip several beats. Her flesh tingled again and her knees were rubber. She fumbled for words. It had been so long. The last one she’d truly loved had been that rat Andrew Striker. She had forgotten the sensations. “Gianni,” she shaped his name in her mouth, “have you noticed anything?”
He looked at her meaningfully. “Many things, commissario.”
“You may call me Vinci,” she said. “Or Daria, call me Daria, but only when we’re alone.”
Gianni nodded and did not take his eyes off hers. “Let me help you downstairs again,” he said, his big, baby blue eyes twinkling in the sunlight.
Feeling vulnerable, something she was unused to and did not like, Daria withheld her hand. “What I mean,” she said, confused by the onslaught of emotions, yet drawn forward by professionalism and the call of duty, “what I mean is, have you noticed that nothing is burned on the ridge or around the bunker? The ground is still wet and stained red from the water bombers, but there was no fire here.”
“As I told you yesterday,” he said smiling, still holding out his hands. “Lots of smoke, no fire.”
A long semicircular slit about a foot and a half high in the concrete face of the building let in bright sunlight. This was where one of the big cannons in the shore battery must have been, she reasoned.
“It’s only because I’m wearing these stupid shoes,” Daria protested, still hesitating, “otherwise I would be perfectly capable,” she began to explain. Then she jumped down, almost into his arms. She did not pull her hands away this time.
“Of course, you would be more than capable, commissario,” he said softly. “I mean, Daria. You are in amazing condition.”
“For an older woman, you mean?” Turning to face Gianni, she stepped closer, but before leaning in to meet his lips, her eyes darted around warily, a defensive reaction that had become second nature. Her glance fell upon a knee-high heap of burned-out flares and smoke grenades. Then she spotted another mound of flares and smoke bombs in a dark corner at the other end of the bunker. Stepping back abruptly, she pointed and blurted out, “There’s your explanation.”
Gianni blinked and leaned back, aware the magical moment had passed. They had missed it. He coughed and reached out unthinkingly to touch the burned materiel. Daria ordered him back. “Don’t!” she snapped. Peering down at the mound, she counted a dozen or more flares and just as many smoke bombs. They appeared to have been wired to a timer mechanism.
“We need to check for prints,” she said, “and we need the bomb squad and specialists in here. You must never tamper with evidence, Sergeant Giannini,” she scolded. But there was something playful in her tone. “Especially if you hope to transfer to the regular Polizia di Stato and rise up the ranks.” Not waiting for him to react, she took his hands in hers, tugged him toward her and kissed him gently on the lips. Gianni neither resisted nor seemed surprised. She was in command. But only temporarily. Folding her in his arms, he pressed his superior officer to his chest and kissed her deeply, seriously, dangerously. Daria gasped for breath and wriggled free. “It’s too fast,” she said hoarsely, “it’s too much, too soon…”
“Is someone down there?” shouted a man’s voice from above and outside the bunker.
Daria muttered an incredulous, incomprehensible imprecation, ran her fingers through her tousled hair, then straightened her uniform and shouted back. “Who is it?”
“We’re a group of hikers,” the voice shouted again. “Are you stuck in there? Do you need help?”
“No, stay back,” called Gianni. “This is the police. Do not enter. Get back to the ridge trail and wait for us.”
She and Gianni looked at each other in silence. He raised his eyebrows and smiled ruefully.
Following close behind him, Daria climbed to the roof of the bunker unassisted. “Please, Gianni, tell the hikers the site is off limits,” she said, stepping away. “I’m putting in a call to headquarters, if there’s any connectivity up here. Let’s check around the bunker to see if we find the body.”
“What body?” he asked. He seemed perplexed.
“Joe Gary Baldi’s body.” She paused. “Didn’t you know that’s what I was looking for?”
Thirteen
Daria cringed as she heard the tale unfold. Speaking to her via a GPS connection, Lieutenant Italo Gambero gave her the details unedited, in a calm, even voice that she heard very clearly over her smartphone while she and Gianni marched single file along the ridge, back to the Alfa Romeo.
It was so typically, so wonderfully, so grotesquely Italian. Here was a small, overcrowded peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean that nonetheless ranked among the top-ten industrial powers, a country with no natural resources but an overabundance of talent, energy, and creativity, the cradle of ancient Roman civilization, the builder of the Colosseum and the inventor of law and the Latin language, the seat of the Roman Catholic Church, the birthplace of the Renaissance, humanism, and modern science, of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo, Vivaldi and the opera, the godhead of architecture, urban planning, modern banking and insurance, and countless inventions from pasta and espresso to the radio.
Italy, the California-sized country that single-handedly had given humanity more than half the sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list, and yet, and yet, Italy had also produced Caligula and Nero, perfected the Inquisition, invented the papacy and the Borgias, suckled Machiavelli, nurtured the Mafia, and produced the monster Mussolini, not to mention Silvio Berlusconi and the notorious Northern League and other neo-Fascist populists. It was a chaotic, filthy, polluted, incurable, sclerotic, inefficient, suffocating, tangled, backward, corrupt, impoverished, Mob-infected, cynical, vitiated, maddening bureaucratic mess of unparalleled beauty.
Daria kept herself from shouting out loud at Gambero by biting her lower lip, watching her feet, and reminding herself not to shoot the messenger.
First of all, Gambero had said, he was calling from the Albenga airport. That accounted for the helicopter and airplane noise in the background. So, he explained, the three-day international search and rescue and water bomber air show had ended yesterday evening as planned.
“Planned” was the key word. Everything had been planned and had worked to perfection, according to the organizers and the deputy director Gambero had spoken to, the man in charge of the coastal farm town’s small, rural airport.
As always, since the 1990s, the triennial air show had been planned a year ahead and permission duly given by the Albenga municipal authorities to hold it. This year, the organizers had wanted to put the competing seaplanes through the paces by having them carry out real-life rescue operations of migrants stranded off the coast and, for the water bombers, put out fires scattered around the interior.
“Of course,” Gambero had reasoned, “given the critical fire risk caused by the drought and heat, they couldn’t set real fires.”
So, they had asked for permission to light fire-safe, spark-free flares and also set off smoke bombs in a series of isolated, safe sites distributed along the ridges above the Riviera.
“Of course,” Daria had muttered, taking Gianni’s hand as they slipped side by side down a gravel scree. “What could be more natural?”
“Well,” Gambero had continued, “the ideal spots were the old machine gun nests and bunkers, made of reinforced concrete and therefore free of vegetation and in isolated locations. The pilots were not told where they would be expected to drop the water bombs. It was up to them to respond. The test was to see which planes could pinpoint the blazes, scoop up the water, and extinguish the source of the smoke fastest and most thoroughly.”
Daria nodded bleakly and said yes, she understood. “But why were we and the Ca
rabinieri not informed?”
“That’s the tricky part,” Gambero said brightly. He explained that, as Captain Vinci knew, permission to carry out such activities would have to be obtained from the prefecture of the province and the municipality where the nest or bunker was located. Since there were four prefectures involved—from west to east, respectively, Imperia, Savona, Genoa, and La Spezia—applications would have to be filed with each. If there were nine bunkers or nests chosen as targets, as was the case in point, each of the municipalities where the sites were found would also need to give the go-ahead. In three cases, he added, the bunkers or gun nests actually straddled the city limits of more than one municipality, and five were in municipal, provincial, or regional parklands. Each of the park authorities would also have to reply.
“Then once all of the permissions were granted, the dossier would need to be submitted to the sub-secretariat of the National Fire Prevention Authority in Rome.”
“Naturally,” Daria said as they neared the Alfa Romeo. She clicked her key and watched as Gianni unbidden opened the doors to let the infernal heat out of the passenger compartment.
“Since the air show had been organized so far ahead, and planes had come in from Canada, the U.S., Britain, China, and Russia,” Gambero continued, “and the countersigned permissions had not arrived yet, the organizers decided to go ahead and pay any fines the authorities might later impose. It was cheaper than canceling the air show, you see.”
“Of course, I see, it’s only human. And let me guess,” Daria continued, unsure whether to laugh or cry, “the organizers assumed the airport and municipal authorities would have contacted the local police departments up and down the Riviera to make sure no hikers were in the vicinity, and the municipal authorities and local police departments naturally thought the provinces and prefectures would do that, so nothing was done, and no one even thought of telling us or the Carabinieri, not to mention the various fire departments that might be involved?”
