by David Downie
Daria said she would need to know how many Picasso Doro markets there were in the region, and where. “Go on, Clement. Tell us what happened next.”
Clement frowned and shook his head. “Not too much,” he said. “I’m so very uncomfortable here and so afraid to lose my other teeth if those people come back to beat me again. They are Albanians and Romanians, gypsies. So, I am very tired. I cannot sleep at night. I sleep during the day. It is very hard to remember and tell you, ma’am…”
“That’s not what you said this morning,” Gianni spoke up. “Why are you holding back?”
Clement smiled a gap-toothed smile and splayed his hands. “Maybe the nice lady can help with my dossier?” He pronounced it the French way. “I been waiting nine months. Getting tired, Gianni. She’s a big important lady, I can tell.”
Daria smiled wryly. “We’ll try to enroll you in the witness protection program,” she said. “You’ll get papers soon enough. You can also tell us who knocked your teeth out, and who brought you here, the human traffickers. That’s my specialty.” She paused. “Where are you really from, Clement?”
The young man hung his head, then jerked it up. “Congo,” he said, “I swear. But my father, he was from Ghana. My older brother was a priest in DRC in Kinshasa. He said things to the government. The police do not like him for that. They kill him. They chop him up and throw him in the river so his body wash up in Brazzaville. They say they come back and kill all of us in my family. So, I leave, I run. I get to Libya. They make me a slave, they beat me and torture me. I escape and get on the raft. I get to Lampedusa. Then I get another boat and come here. All my money gone. My teeth gone.” Somehow Clement managed to smile through the telling.
Daria and Gianni stepped out of earshot. She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “It might be true,” he said. “I checked about the priest and it’s true, it happened. But he could have heard about it or read it in the newspapers. We wired the authorities in both Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo and sent Clement’s particulars, but you know what happens.”
“The rubber wall,” Daria said, “things bounce right off it.”
“Yes, the rubber wall,” Gianni repeated. “Just like Italy.”
“He might be making up this whole story,” Daria sighed, glancing again at the young man’s expensive new shoes. “He’s a smart kid. He sees the bakery van. He hears about what’s going on. Maybe he even reads the newspapers or sees something on the TV in a café.” She glanced at Clement. He was undeniably clever, resourceful, good-looking, and had the resilience of the young and desperate. Yet there was something very old and tired and street-savvy about him too, a stray pet pleading to be adopted.
They walked back to where Clement awaited them. “A deal’s a deal,” Daria said. “You better start studying Italian. What else did you see?”
Clement beamed. With great detail—too much detail, she began to think—Clement described what had transpired next. The man had jogged away, up the alley, disappearing. The woman had followed him a few minutes later, walking fast. Clement had begun heading back to his tent. But as he crossed the bus depot, the woman had reappeared.
“You see,” said Clement, pointing, “if you go up that alley and you turn left, you can turn left again a block later and you come out here in the square.” Gianni confirmed this. “So, I rush and hide behind a bus and wait and watch her cross the street and the parking lot. Then I follow her.”
“Why?”
“Something strange going on, signora,” Clement said importantly. “I felt it. Why they leave the bread truck with a broken door and take off clothes and hide clothes and walk and run away separately? So I turn my head and look back to the train station, because the early train for Genoa is coming in, and I see a man, the same man from the bathroom, I think. This time he comes out of the tunnel from under the tracks, he looks around, then he climbs up into the station, and I think he takes the train for Genoa. But there is also a train for La Spezia coming on the other track, so I don’t know.” Clement paused for effect.
“The woman, she keeps walking across, right near the garbage,” he continued, pointing again. “She steps on the pedal and the big bin here opens and into the bin she throws the shopping bag. Then she goes into the alleyway by the market into the middle of the town.”
Clement indicated the medieval tangle of alleyways constituting central Rapallo. “Come with me,” he said, taking Daria by the hand and pulling her behind, his fear and shyness gone, “I show you.”
“What about the bag?” Daria asked, freeing her hand but following Clement.
“Not good,” Clement said, shaking his head. “The bag gone, the garbage gone. I tell you later. First, I follow this lady across town, through the market square, where the people are setting up stands already, to sell fruits and vegetables and fishes…”
As he spoke, Clement, Daria, and Gianni trailed across the small square with its vintage ironwork covered market. It was surrounded by animated stalls spilling along adjoining alleyways. The morning crowds had thickened here. The raucous voices of hawkers filled the focaccia-scented air. They shouted and sang out “Ripe strawberries!” “Sweet chard!” “Albenga artichokes!” and “Extra-fresh local oranges!” Customers clutching bushels of sweet basil or heads of garlic stepped back and watched the unusual procession of an African illegal leading a DIGOS officer and a traffic cop.
Continuing west, the three zigzagged across the toy town center of Rapallo through a maze of pastel-painted teetering old apartment buildings, finding themselves at the city’s miniature medieval gateway fronting the bay.
“Here,” Clement said, pointing to the two-lane seaside road and the palm-lined promenade beyond it. “The woman walks out and across and a car drives up and she gets in and the car drives away. I go back to the garbage bin but it’s too late, the trucks are there, the garbage men shove me back, they dump everything in their truck and drive away.”
Clement batted his thick, dark eyelashes and looked at Daria, then Gianni, with saucer eyes, wanting to be believed.
Without replying, Daria took out her phone, dialed headquarters, and spoke clearly and briefly with the duty officer. He was to get a detail to the Rapallo garbage dump and get as many garbage men who were there to help go through everything brought in yesterday morning from the train station district—everything, that is, that hadn’t already been incinerated. It was a long weekend and a long shot. Maybe they were stockpiling and not burning, she reasoned, remembering the crematorium. Describing the yellow Picasso Doro shopping bag and then signing off, she turned back to study Clement’s expressions and body language.
“Okay,” Daria said at last, “we need to have you look at some photos and identify people, maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow. It’s the long weekend, so it’s complicated. In the meantime, tell me how you know the man and woman were young and Caucasian, you said that several times. And tell me what kind of getaway car it was on the road back there and who was driving it, if you can. Did you see that?”
Clement smiled his baby smile and bounced along as they crossed town again back to his tent. The two people, he said, walked like young people and dressed like young people. He knew the difference. He had spent nine months on the streets of Italy watching all the old people—they were everywhere—and he knew how they dressed and walked and talked—like people from old movies. So, even though he had not seen the faces of the man and woman in the bathrooms, close up, he knew they were not old. He had seen their hands and they were pale white, therefore Caucasian.
For the car, he added, he was sure it was an old Volvo, though he wasn’t sure which model or year, because it was very old. “We like Volvos in Congo,” he added, “they are very good cars, they last a long time, not like American junk.” Then he concluded by saying he had been studying engineering at the University of Brazzaville and he had dreamed of owning a car one day, a Vo
lvo, Saab, or BMW.
“Color?”
“White,” he said. “With a strange license plate.”
“Strange? How so?”
Clement said it was bigger than most European plates, had a white background with big black letters and seemed to have a small NZ in the corner, though he couldn’t be sure, it might have been an N or an H or a Z. “I see so many cars all day, and so many license plates,” he said, “but never this plate, never before.”
“The numbers, letters on it?” Gianni asked.
Clement shook his head, then slapped his forehead. “I was looking so hard at the car and the strange plate that I did not see the letters. Maybe a W and a two and a five…”
“The driver? Passengers?”
Clement shook his head again. “It was far away and hard to see. An old woman driver, I think, with white hair, or an old man with a big white beard, bent over the steering wheel.”
“Did the young woman who left the bathrooms flag the car down, as if she were hitchhiking, or was the car expecting her, waiting for her?”
Clement sucked his teeth and lips. “I think it was waiting for her in the parking lot down there,” he pointed, “and drove up when she came out of the alleyway.”
Daria waited a beat, then said skeptically, “Not many cases I know of where an elderly woman or man drives a white getaway car, especially a conspicuous older foreign car with unusual plates that would be easy to identify.”
“An unwitting older person might,” Gianni suggested. “Someone coming to pick up a young friend or relative?”
Daria shrugged, unconvinced. “I’ll believe anything these days,” she added, “but only when there’s solid evidence, proof, not hearsay and speculation and invention.” Studying Clement again from another angle, she wondered out loud how to say “wild goose chase” in whatever his native tongue really was.
Powwowing with Gianni at a discreet distance from the boy, she said she’d call an immigration official in Genoa, once the holiday weekend was over, and see what could be done. In the meantime, Gianni should take Clement to the local police station and get a sworn statement from him detailing the information he had just provided. He should pitch his tent somewhere safe, where the police could see it and protect him 24/7. She would run checks on the supermarkets, trains, and white Volvos or similar cars with oversized foreign plates, and cross-reference with any video footage they could find.
“Have you had breakfast?” Daria asked the young African. When he said no, he hadn’t, she swung her head toward a focaccia bakery on the corner.
They loaded up on flatbreads filled with cheese or topped with onions or pesto, pulled bottles of water and soda out of a standing fridge, then feasted, sitting on the park bench near the tent. “Good work,” she said to Clement, folding Gianni into the conversation, her eyes locking with his for several seconds. “Now I get to add a whole slew of new things to my task list.”
Fifteen
Daria’s phone had not stopped ringing and pinging, as calls and messages came in on both SIM cards. Saying goodbye to Clement and Gianni in as neutral a tone as she could muster, she drove west again, back to the Portofino Peninsula and the search for Joseph Gary. The scuba divers had been at work for several hours. Lieutenant Morbido had texted her urging her to hurry. They had found something interesting—extremely interesting.
Four large men, among them Osvaldo Morbido, were packed into the dark recesses of the hot, stuffy mobile TV van jointly operated by DIGOS, the Carabinieri, and the fire departments of Santa Margherita and Rapallo. It was parked halfway up the sidewalk on the highway to Portofino, worsening the monumental traffic jam caused by the holidays and fine weather. The police seemed to be looking into a crystal ball. They stared, mesmerized and slack-jawed at the live images being transmitted to the monitor by divers on the seafloor half a mile away. When Daria stepped up and coughed repeatedly, three of the four backed out of the van to make room for her. The fourth was Gigi De Filippo. He did not budge. Beckoning Daria to the side, Morbido croaked, “Amazing, it is so beautiful… and be warned, Gigi is pissed off. I think he got someone in Genoa to call his people at the Ministry of Defense in Rome and gripe about you.”
Daria entered the van silently and stood behind De Filippo. What she saw on the monitor astonished even her skeptical, tired eyes. Several divers were holding up bright underwater spotlights. They illuminated not only schools of anchovies and other tiny silver and blue fish but also a pyramid formation of what looked like mollusk-encrusted, ancient terra-cotta amphorae and the prow of a wooden ship. How could it be, she wondered? Why hadn’t it rotted away or been found before this?
“No Signor Gary in there,” De Filippo muttered, addressing Daria without turning around, the ultimate insult for a southern Italian. “Something better, maybe.”
“Roman?”
“Looks like it,” Morbido said, thrusting his head in, his anger at De Filippo rising. “It’s not the first ancient Roman ship they’ve found off Portofino, but look at how wonderfully preserved it is. And all those amphorae!”
“Maybe they still have wine in them,” Gigi De Filippo speculated with irony. “I wonder if the wine was good back then?” He swiveled and grinned maliciously with his yellow teeth at Daria. “The Romans had plenty to celebrate and be proud of. They were victorious, they were powerful, they were proud, they were just.”
“The conquerors of your ancestors, Osvaldo,” Daria said facetiously, not to De Filippo but to Morbido. “Portus Delphini was the Roman name for Portofino,” she added. “They had good taste. Not many dolphins left in Portofino, but it’s still one of the most beautiful peninsulas anywhere, don’t you think?”
“You imagine the Ligurians weren’t here before your people from Rome?” said Morbido, chuckling. “We were here way before the Romans took over. And look at the mess Rome has made of poor Italy. Now we have to put up with southern tribes and barbarians like Gigi, people who want to take Italy back to antiquity, even the wine he wants ancient...”
Gigi’s moustache whisked back, revealing his lips and large teeth. “You northerners always said we were the Negroes of Italy,” he growled. “We were the slaves not of the Romans but of the rich up here. But now we all have real Africans, millions of them, invading the whole country, so get ready for the new Italy and the new slavery. Globalized, standardized, black or cappuccino-colored, another America, no faith, no church, everyone the same, men, women, dogs…”
“America has no faith and no church?” Morbido snorted incredulously. “You must be kidding.”
“Now, now, boys,” Daria interrupted. “We’re all proud of our heritage, especially as the creators of the law, and we’re all equal before the law, including southerners and Africans.”
“And dogs,” Morbido croaked, staring at Gigi De Filippo.
De Filippo did not bark but brayed out a sinister guffaw. “The law says that third bag of meat was mine. But then DIGOS steps in and everything changes. Where is the equality, Commissario Vinci, where is the justice?”
Morbido bellied up closer. In his bullfrog voice he bellowed, “We found the first two bags long before you found the third bag. The case is ours. The investigation is ongoing. You will receive reports and updates when appropriate.”
Swiftly stepping out of the suffocating, testosterone-infused van, Daria strode to the guardrail overlooking the gulf, took a deep breath, and waited for Morbido to join her. The flotilla that had been at work the day before was out, presumably looking for Joe Gary’s body, but in reality, distracted and derelict of duty because of the discovery of the Roman shipwreck. Morbido stood next to her, muttering and cursing under his breath.
“It’s great they found the wreck,” she said, suddenly remembering the Brindisi Bronzes and Willem Bremach’s words. It was uncanny. How could Bremach have known a wreck would be found? Another freak coincidence? “It’s great,” she b
egan again, now thinking of classical bronze statuary and Gianni Giannini’s torso, which was thicker and more muscular than Andrew Striker’s torso, “but what about Joe Gary? What about the real object of all this?” She waved at the fire department boats, the Coast Guard, harbor masters, Carabinieri, and Guardia di Finanza.
“If you ask me,” Morbido grunted, “they’re not going to find anything but Roman amphorae and empty Coke cans.”
“And why is that?” Daria asked.
“For the same reason you think they won’t. Because Gary is not here.”
Tapping her lips with her index finger, Daria said, “Okay, I need to bring you up to date on the bunkers and fires and the eyewitness testimony I just heard in Rapallo.”
“With Gianni?”
“Yes, with Sergeant Giannini. He’s very observant and well connected,” Daria said.
“And well put together?” Morbido teased. “I already know about the toothless kid, Clement, from Gianni, early this morning, and I know about the bogus fires from Gambero.”
She eyed Morbido. He was still capable of surprises. “Before we get into that,” she said, “what’s happening at the Genoa airport?”
“Gambero has all of them—the air show organizers and a couple of pilots—in the customs zone lockup and is putting the fear of God into them. But so far, the Russians and Chinese refuse to cooperate. They claim there is nothing on the books that says they have to hand over the video footage of the air show. They are threatening the Italian contingent and the other Europeans with retaliatory actions if they cave in to Gambero.”
“They know nothing of European law,” she scoffed. “Do they think they’re the only police states in the world?” Daria laughed savagely. “Get Gambero to take them to headquarters in Genoa. They can cool their heels there for a few weeks until they change their minds. But don’t mention it to the Questor yet.”
“Sì, commissario,” Morbido said, grinning. “The Questor will be thrilled when he finds out.”
