by David Downie
“Correct,” Gambero said. “Who told you?”
“Are you kidding, Italo?”
The upshot was, Italo Gambero concluded, startled by his boss’s vehemence, that no one had been hurt, no fires had spread, the places were all very remote, everything had gone off perfectly, the local Canadair pilots from Albenga had outperformed the others—as expected—but the Chinese and Russians had done a fine job and dropped more metric tons of water and flame retardant than the Canadair planes…
Daria interrupted Gambero with a sharp, “Okay, all right, that’s great, that’s just too much information.” Then feeling guilty again for biting his head off, she got control of herself and asked a second later if Gambero had been able to confirm the registration numbers and information on the seaplanes and pilots. He answered in the affirmative, adding that, in fact, there were twelve airplanes involved, not eight, as Daria and Ambassador Bremach had assumed. “Excellent,” she replied, “now, does anyone at the airport have any idea which of those planes might have been flying around Rapallo, Santa Margherita, and Portofino yesterday around 10:00 a.m. and might have struck or scooped up Joe Gary?”
Gambero cleared his throat and said, “No, commissario. You see, the whole idea was for the competition to be a free-for-all—who could get to the fires first and put them out.”
“But they weren’t fires.”
“Well, no, but everything was filmed by helicopters and performance was tabulated…”
“Ah,” she interrupted. “Now Italo, what you must do is get the video footage from them so we can see which planes did what, where, when.”
There was a long pause. “I asked for that,” he said. “But there is a problem.”
“What problem?”
“The airplane manufacturers and the Chinese and Russian organizers of the air show paid for the helicopters and the filming, and they say this is proprietary information related to the performance of the seaplanes. They will not release it without a warrant.”
Daria laughed aloud. “They must be joking,” she said. “Do they realize that one of the pilots may have committed involuntary manslaughter or murder? I want you to ground or impound the seaplanes that are still in Albenga. We’ll get onto Interpol for the ones that have already flown abroad. Put the deputy director of the airport on, please.”
She waited impatiently, dangling the key of the Alfa Romeo for Gianni to take it. Technically it was against regulations for anyone but a DIGOS operative to drive a DIGOS vehicle, but Daria was in a hurry to get back to Rapallo, Gianni was a policeman, and, unlike most smartphone addicts, she could not talk and drive at the same time even with an earbud—she needed her hands free to gesture and help her speak.
Gianni took the key, started the car and the air conditioning, and waited for her to climb in. Then he began rolling slowly down the hill, creeping around the corkscrews while admiring the way Daria talked and drew holograms with her tendril arms and long fingers.
Flustered and defensive, the airport executive she was talking with argued that it was out of his hands. He did not have the video footage in the first place. The organizers had steadfastly refused to cooperate with his and Gambero’s requests—they had spoken to the Chinese and Russians not half an hour earlier. They had already left their hotels in a minibus. “They are flying out of Genoa this morning,” the man added, “we don’t get many long-haul flights here.”
“Well,” Daria snapped, “we will have to detain them at the airport in Genoa. By the way, you are hereby ordered to impound and ground all the planes in Albenga involved in the air show. Please hand me back to Lieutenant Gambero and follow his orders.” She drummed the fingers of her right hand on the car door. “Italo? You have the names of the organizers? Good. Call headquarters and have a squad sent to meet you at the airport in Genoa. Call the security detail at the airport, and the Carabinieri, and have them detain those people until you get there. We can use anti-terrorism legislation to hold them. They are suspects in a case of potential manslaughter or kidnapping possibly involving international terrorists—whatever it takes. And Italo, call Rome and have them issue a special warrant anyway. We want that footage, got it?”
Daria disconnected, shut her eyes for a few seconds, feeling the sunshine on her eyelids, then opened them and smiled at Gianni. “What a nice morning,” she laughed.
“It is a nice morning,” he said earnestly, reaching out to touch her hand. She shook her head.
“Later,” she said in a hoarse voice. Gianni silently obeyed, nosing the Alfa through a hamlet seemingly suspended from the steep hillside. Half a dozen cars were double parked near a local café. As the Alfa squeezed past, among the parked vehicles Daria thought she spotted an unmarked DIGOS car. “One of ours,” she remarked, glad the car’s occupants were in the café and not out where they might spot her with the sergeant.
Asking Gianni to pull over as they reached the bottom of the corkscrew road, she took the wheel. Before she could pull out and drive the last leg into the center of Rapallo, he leaned over and kissed her. Momentarily stunned by the electrical charge bucking through her body, she kissed back, thirstily, spinning into a vortex until she was out of breath. “This is crazy,” she said, pushing him back.
“What’s crazy?”
She took a deep breath, held it, and looked out of the windshield. “This. Us. You.” She paused and swallowed. “Let me guess,” she said slowly, her heart beating fast. “You have two teenage children, one girl, one boy, and you’re separated from your wife, heading for divorce…”
“Who told you?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “Gigi?”
Daria scoffed. “I don’t talk to Gigi if I don’t have to,” she said. “I’m just making an educated guess, Gianni. You’re too handsome and too gentle and too well-spoken not to be attached or have been attached. I’m also guessing you’re a few years younger than I am, so your children are not adults yet.”
He smiled, reaching out to take her hands. “You have most of it right, except my kids are both girls and I’m not separated, I’m widowed. My wife died three years ago, suddenly, of ovarian cancer. It ran in her family.” He paused and smiled sadly, then continued. “Luckily, my daughters are wonderful and we’re making do. The grandparents help a lot. The kids practically live with them.”
“I’m so sorry,” Daria whispered, hanging her head. She squeezed his hands, leaning over and kissing him again, softly, resignedly, knowing she would be the nail to drive out the nail of his dead wife, and, when he was fully recovered, she would in turn be driven out by another nail, a younger nail, the keeper. So be it, she told herself. It is my destiny to be the first nail, the stepping-stone, the bridge, for wounded men.
“It’s strange,” he whispered after another long kiss. “I haven’t felt so much in love since I was a teenager, when I met my wife. We were in high school, at the liceo classico. We both became teachers. I taught philosophy, but I knew I would never get a full-time tenured position in a college and I couldn’t afford to be a contract employee and substitute. So, I wound up a civil servant, a cop. Lousy pay, decent benefits, and pretty much a guaranteed job for life.”
Detaching herself from his embrace, Daria took another deep breath and sat upright at the wheel. “It’s an infatuation, Gianni, you think you are in love with me but it’s just an idea of me, not me, because you don’t know me, you can’t know me.”
“Who says?”
“I do.”
“Well,” he laughed, “this may be insubordination but I must say, you’re not always right, captain, no one is, and you’re wrong in this case. My daughters are infatuated with fatuous rock stars and movie stars. I’m all grown up. I’ve seen you around for years and I’ve dreamed of you but have never had the courage to approach you until now. This is love. Everyone else in the department knows it and snickers behind our backs.”
Daria was shocked. She caught her bre
ath then hiccupped—she was not only emotionally overwhelmed but also starving. “Gianni, please…” she began to say, “this is incredible, it’s scandalous they do that, we barely know each other.”
“Can we meet again tonight?” he interrupted. “I could come to your apartment in Genoa. That would be safer for the time being.”
“No,” she said, then realized she had barked an order. “There’s nothing wrong with recreational sex—that’s what they used to call it at Yale—and I’m no prude, it’s just that…the timing isn’t great now. Let me wrap up this case and put my mother back on a train to Rome first.”
“Your mother is here?”
She nodded. “And if you knew my mother. Mamma mia!”
Gianni nodded, smiling. A moment later he looked serious again. “Okay,” he muttered and opened his mouth to continue. She sensed what was coming and spoke again before he could.
“We must proceed cautiously,” she whispered. “Before we do the Italian thing and get families involved, I mean. You realize your mother especially and your late wife’s mother will probably hate me, and your daughters too, unless they simply resent and dislike or distrust me? No one can replace their own mother. It is so difficult to succeed in a relationship when children come attached, especially if the children are only on one side. I speak from experience, Gianni.”
He nodded again, leaned over and kissed her softly, and watched her put the Alfa in gear. She drove calmly and methodically toward the train station. “It isn’t the time or the place,” she added in a gentle voice. “My mind is elsewhere. This case, it’s so strange, it’s unlike anything I’ve investigated before.”
“It sounds pretty complicated,” he said resignedly.
“If you only knew.”
“I hate to further complicate things for you,” he added. “But before you take off, there’s someone you should meet. He’s not exactly an informant. Sometimes he sees things and shares what he sees with me.”
Daria’s eyebrows twitched. “Who is he and what has he seen?”
“If you park the car here and come with me across the square, I’ll introduce you. His name is Clement,” Gianni said. “No last name yet. But we’re getting there. He’s an illegal, from Congo. Soon he’ll have papers, if things go my way. For the time being, he sleeps rough, in the park on the edge of the bus depot across from the station. I got him a tent a few months ago and we’ve become friends, I guess you could say.”
“Your pet African?” she remarked. “That’s what Gigi says.”
Gianni hung his head, then looked up at her with his baby blue eyes through his long, sun-bleached eyelashes. “I’m not of Gigi’s persuasion,” he said. “I talked to Clement this morning before you got here. He’s expecting us. It might be important.”
Fourteen
Clement the no-last-name African had pitched his green pup tent on a tiny patch of parched grass behind the tatty shrubbery fringing the bus depot and public car parking lot across from Rapallo’s train station. The encampment was screened by half a dozen industrial-sized garbage dumpsters and recycling bins. They exhaled the nauseating stench of rot and corruption. Litter blew and danced in the morning breeze. On it wafted clouds of diesel exhaust from the buses idling nearby.
But a bright generous sun smiled down through the foliage of the laurel and cypress trees, and the faces of the two law enforcement officers who stepped out of the Alfa Romeo special series sedan were also smiling. As Daria and Gianni approached on foot, bells rang out 9:30 a.m. from the campanile of an ancient stone church whose name Daria could not remember. An architectural hodgepodge, it looked as if it were about to crumble and bury the spot in a cloud of Romanesque rubble.
A third smile lay upon the remarkably thick lips of the young man named Clement. They spread wide and appeared full of sincerity to Daria. Already youthful-looking, the man’s front teeth were missing, making him look even more like a lost child. She judged he was in his late teens or early twenties. Clement wore the requisite uniform of the young of all nations—a bright cotton hoodie and a pair of baggy sagging jeans that looked like falling diapers. In his case, she told herself, the sag was not a slumming-bobo fashion statement but the result of slim pickings. That was why she could not help noticing that his brand-name athletic shoes were new and expensive—she possessed a similar pair.
It also seemed clear Clement liked and trusted Gianni Giannini. Sweeping off his billed cap as a sign of respect, Clement bowed and nodded when the commissioner stepped up to him and with unexpected courtesy offered him her hand.
“So, you are from the Congo?” Daria asked. “Which Congo? Brazzaville or the Democratic Republic?”
“Oh yes, signora, today would be a nice, cool day in my country, Congo-Brazzaville.” When he spoke, Clement bounced on the balls of his feet, swaying like a rubber-band boxer. “You have been to Congo, ma’am?”
“Yes,” she said, “a long time ago, before you were born.”
“That is impossible, ma’am, for you are surely no older than I.” His winning smile grew even wider.
Cocking her head, Daria heard a French and English matrix behind his gallant words, spoken in Italian. Could be Congolese, she decided, or Ghanaian or Nigerian. The skin coloration would fit with tribal groupings in any of the three. Ghana was most likely. What was his real story? Gianni had said Clement had no papers and had refused at first to say where he was from, fearing swift deportation if his country of origin was not at war or experiencing major civil strife. Ghana was safe, democratic, successful—a nonstarter for anyone seeking refugee status in Italy. Daria decided it didn’t matter. Not now.
“Congo is a big, beautiful country,” she said, “with endless resources and that incredible river. Why leave? Brazzaville isn’t so bad. It’s worse across the river in the DRC.”
“War, signora, ma’am, violence, killing. My family afraid. My brother dies…”
They walked to a bench in the shade of the cypress trees. It was here, using large gestures and a freewheeling mix of three European languages, that Clement told Daria what he had seen at dawn the day before. “I was in the public bathrooms,” he said, “washing up, you see, as I do every morning, between five and six…”
There are two sinks in the bathrooms, plus urinals and four toilets on the men’s side, Clement added. No one had ever come in before at that early an hour, he went on, except some of the taxi drivers he knew. But he always prepared for and avoided trouble, and people meant trouble, so he stayed away from people as much as possible. “So, I put up my sign,” he said, smiling, “it says ‘Out of Order’—Guasto. I like that word, guasto, it sounds like something really broken! I hung my sign on the outside of the toilet door—I do that to protect myself, you see, then I take the sign with me again. Would you like to see it?”
“Not now,” Daria said. “Go on.”
Clement had heard a car or truck pull up and stop outside. Ducking into a stall, he had perched on the toilet seat and raised his feet and legs so no one could see them. “In comes some man. He walks up and down and pushes on all the toilet doors and looks inside, but can’t come into my stall, see? I look down and see strange shoes, like shoes in wrapping paper or cloth.”
Daria nodded. “Overshoes. Then what happened?”
The man went into the next stall. The man stripped off a pair of latex surgical gloves and a suit of protective clothing and dropped them to the floor. The gloves and clothes fell partly into Clement’s stall. That’s how he could see it was latex and a kind of papery, pressed cotton material. Clement also noticed the elasticized booties when they dropped to the floor. They were dirty, with mud and something like talcum powder on them. They had been covering the man’s shoes. Now he could see the shoes. “They were running shoes, new shoes, the brand with the big N on them, sideways.”
“Nike?”
“No,” he laughed, “Nike has the swoosh strip
e, don’t you know?” He pointed at his own shoes. She nodded. “This was the N of New Balance. It looks almost like a Z.” He slapped his thigh. “My favorite shoe!”
Clement went on with his tale. The man gathered up the outfit and stuffed it into something. Then he relieved himself and left the toilets. The whole operation had taken no more than a few minutes. While it was going on, Clement had also heard noises in the women’s bathrooms next door—someone walking back and forth, running water, then flushing a toilet.
“So, when the man leaves,” Clement said eagerly, “I wait, I open my door and sneak out and stick my head out of the bathrooms and look up and down the alleyway.”
What he saw was the backside of a tall young Caucasian male wearing a track suit, with a small pack on his back. “Like a cyclist’s pack,” Clement explained. “It was red and blue and narrow.” He held up his hands in parallel. “The track suit was also red and blue. The man he runs up the alley away from the parking lot, like he running a foot race or jogging.”
Then Clement remembered the sound from the women’s toilets, so he ducked back into the men’s bathroom and waited. A minute later, a young woman walked by. Again, he stuck out his head and watched her. She was wearing sports clothes too, but he didn’t know how to describe them. Like something you would wear to play tennis. “And she was carrying a shopper, just like one of the bags I have, from Picasso Doro Supermarket. Do you want to see?”
This time Daria said yes, she would like to see the shopping bag. So the three of them returned to Clement’s tent. He ducked in and reappeared with the Out of Order sign—it was spelled Out ov Ordre—and a heavy-duty yellow shopping bag with the supermarket’s name and logo on it.
“Doro is nationwide, but Picasso is a local chain,” Gianni explained, pointing. “The nearest Doro supermarket is two blocks away.”
