by David Downie
Dessert arrived—they had waited for her, her mother explained, spiking the word with barbs. Daria dipped her spoon into the old-fashioned tiramisu and when it was finished, she could not remember what she had said or thought since sitting down to dinner. The words and talking heads of walrus-like Osvaldo Morbido, the smiling gap-toothed Clement, the morose Emilio Bozzo, the prerevolutionary marquise, young Zack Armstrong, and red-haired Ruffini yacked and yacked in her head as Gianni Giannini’s strong hands pressed her to his naked torso.
What was it Ruffini had said, she asked herself suddenly, sitting up straight in her chair, the tiramisu spoon sticking out of her mouth? When they were leaving the Cinque Terre, Lieutenant Ruffini had remarked to her that everyone in La Spezia knew those farmhouses had been occupied by the Nazis and Fascists during the war, that they had been the headquarters of Mussolini’s notorious Black Brigade, the ones in charge of reprisals and summary executions?
“And bad memories,” Gino, the Alpino had added, unless it was the other one, she couldn’t remember the second Alpino’s name.
Crowding out all the other voices singing or shouting in her head was the fresh, velvety voice of the manager of the Galleria Club, a rotund and affable gray-haired man. An hour or so ago, after welcoming her, he had locked her handgun in the club’s safe and, when questioned, had confirmed smilingly and without hesitation that yes, it was the Questor, Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III, who had sponsored Joseph Gary’s application to join the club, the Questor seconded by one of the club’s longest-standing and most beloved members, Madame la Marquise Augusti-Contini di Mandrella.
“You really should speak to the marquise privately one of these days,” Willem was saying, leaning over and staring intently into Daria’s kaleidoscope eyes as if he were reading her thoughts. He lowered his voice so no one else would hear. “Ask Giuliana about Giuseppe Garibaldi, is what I mean. It is astonishing how much she remembers from those distant days. Giuliana was all grown up by then, you see. Garibaldi and I were still teenagers.” Willem paused to gauge whether Daria was listening. Then he leaned closer and continued in a whisper, “Have you managed to see Andrew Striker yet? Homeland Security? Daria, are you all right?”
“No, I am not all right.” Daria took a deep breath and shook her head, snapping out of it, flushed and almost angered by the mention of Andrew Striker, again. “If you only knew,” she began to say. “I really have no desire to see Striker, but...”
“Oh, I can imagine,” Bremach tried to reassure her, still speaking in a whisper. “Go tomorrow morning early, without fail, before you see the Questor. Striker is up at dawn to catch the early worms, so to speak. He won’t mind. When you do see him, be sure to ask about Gary’s connections in Libya, Morocco, and Russia, and his relationship with Centauri and certain individuals in Rome. While you’re at it, ask Striker why he thinks Italy has been almost entirely spared a major terrorist attack, and why Centauri hasn’t retired yet. There’s not much time left, my dear. When you join the dots, you might be surprised, not to say alarmed.”
“Surprised?” Daria stared at her godfather incredulously, wanting to tell him that it was he who constantly surprised and alarmed her. “I’m too tired to speak, Willem,” she said. “I really must get home to bed.” She stood and glanced around, feeling giddy.
“Surely you’re not going to work tomorrow?” Barbara warbled, watching her daughter rise from the table and prepare to leave. “It’s a national holiday, dear. Why not come with us to San Terenzo, so you can continue your discussion with the marquise, whom you clearly find irresistible? All this can wait, can’t it?”
“All this?” Daria smiled wryly as she shook her head and spread her arms in a gesture of exasperation. “A man has died, Mother. Bodies have been desecrated, there are people being held in jail pending the outcome of my investigation—some of them no doubt innocent, others possibly guilty. I can say no more. But I will try to drop by the villa tomorrow night. If I can. Promise.”
“Yes, do come to Villa Pinky if you can,” said Willem, struggling to his feet.
“Don’t call it by that dreadful name, Willem,” Priscilla grumbled, blowing Daria a kiss. “Come if you can, but above all, rest. You will wear yourself out at this pace.”
Barbara put on her best wounded, long-suffering look. She stood shakily and reached for a cane that had been leaning unseen against the wall behind the table. “I would come visit you at your apartment,” she warbled, “if I were invited, and if I could climb all those steps. Perhaps when you grow out of your eternal adolescence, you will take a flat with an elevator?”
Daria kissed her mother on the cheeks, held her free hand for a moment, and left the dining room swiftly and silently, headed for the cloakroom, where the manager awaited with her revolver. As Daria walked past Simonetta Farina’s table, the marquise raised her champagne glass with one hand and with the other waved like the Queen of England.
Eighteen
Few things were as pleasing to Daria as the wordless dawn walk from her apartment atop the medieval city walls of Genoa to the fortress-like headquarters of the Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali a mile west. The DIGOS headquarters faced another, even more imposing, city wall. It dated to the 1500s, the heyday of Admiral Andrea Doria, the cunning pirate who helped make Genoa the richest, most powerful city in the western world for half a century.
The way took her down dusky zigzagging alleys, between hewn-stone houses nine stories high and nine hundred years old. She passed bustling market stalls and scores of cafés, trattorias, hole-in-the-wall houseware shops, grocery stores, and bakeries thriving in the labyrinthine, permanent semidarkness. Surfacing into the bright morning light when she reached Piazza di Sarzano, she crossed the handsome square, then veered left onto the arches of the Carignano Bridge.
As unexpected as it was harmonious, the span of Carignano had been built and paid for some three hundred years earlier by the colossally rich and ostentiously pious Sauli clan, so they might drive smoothly and with decorum in luxurious carriages and alight at their freshly erected Basilica di Carignano, long the largest and most ornate place of worship on the Riviera.
From the Saulis’ cupola-topped basilica crowning the hill, Daria threaded around blocks of faux-Renaissance and Baroque palazzi until she reached Andrea Doria’s breathtakingly tall sixteenth-century bastions. The views from them hovered over slate rooftops to the glassy modern skyscrapers near Brignole Station. Farther out, they embraced the forbidding, steep, dry, sawtooth mountains cupping the city, Genoa’s natural, impregnable bulwark.
It was said the harsh landscape and stony cityscape had shaped the character of the Genoese. To these two influences, Daria decided she must add a third: the sea—for its unpredictable, stinging violence, and rare beauty.
Daria had fallen into the habit of stopping each morning at an anonymous neighborhood café along the bastions, where she sipped a cup of hot, black caffè americano and devoured a slice of oil-daubed, sea salty, spongy focaccia flatbread. Why she had not gained weight over the years, and why the Genoese were rarely fat and almost never obese, baffled her, given the quantities of focaccia she and everyone else ingested. Was the olive oil the secret to long life? Or was it the stairs and hills and gusty iodide-laced winds—or the Ligurians’ genes?
As she chewed and sipped, standing at the polished steel-topped counter of Bar Zena, she thought of the marquise and her remarkable physical and mental condition. If Giuliana Augusti-Contini di Mandrella had really been born in 1919, the year the Treaty of Versailles was signed, she was a centenarian and then some. Yet she indulged herself like a young woman, went out on her own legs to the Galleria Club and enjoyed her seaside summer villa, and, if Simonetta Farina was right, still drove a car. That seemed an accident waiting to happen, Daria reflected, reaching for a second slice of focaccia and pondering the eventuality with a shudder. Surely there was an upper limit to a driver
’s permissible age? She could not remember and would have to check the current Italian driving code.
The thought of disasters and accidents waiting to happen brought her mind back to the challenges at hand. Today, perhaps in only a few minutes, she might have to face the Questor, Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III. His family wasn’t quite as rich or pious as the Sauli clan of Carignano but nearly so, and the Lomelli-Centauri had certainly always been at least as devout and reactionary.
She and the Questor had only one thing in common, as far as Daria knew. Like her he was routinely up long before daylight. He always arrived before his subordinates and could be seen pacing back and forth in his top-floor office, making a nuisance of himself the moment anyone else arrived and could be seized upon and put in motion. The highest-ranking police official in the province, his thumbs were in every investigative pie, truly a recipe for disaster. The long hours Centauri put in justified the long lunches that he took, his long-suffering assistant and secretary would routinely explain. Likewise, the Questor’s frequent absences were to be forgiven. They were taken, it went without saying, at government expense and in the line of duty.
Daria comforted herself with the knowledge that the Genoa office would soon be free of him. Having crossed the statutory threshold for retirement years ago, the notoriously venal Centauri was holding on for another stint of six months, reportedly expecting yet another symbolic promotion, followed by a ministerial appointment in Rome which, though of necessity brief, given his age, would increase his pension manyfold. To say that he did not need the extra money was gross understatement.
Daria had long thought that what the Questor wanted most of all was an uneventful finale—a seamless transition to administrative apotheosis in Rome, the Eternal City, the cradle of Fascism and mother of all bureaucracy.
But then the populist-nationalist administration had won the elections and Centauri’s mood, expectations, and priorities appeared to have changed, revivifying him and making him more ambitious and obnoxious than ever. In any case, for now, the farewell party he was getting looked the opposite of uneventful: garbage bags stuffed with dismembered cadavers discovered near war memorials, and the death of an aged Italian-American spook, a personal friend of Centauri’s—not to mention a brewing diplomatic row with the new government’s preferred authoritarian regimes, Russia and China, and, she had just learned via text message, a protest march from City Hall to Villa Migone set to begin at high noon. Would violent rioters take part? Possibly. Why? Only they knew—unless you were a conspiracy theorist. In that case, the range of possibilities became infinite.
She paused on the overlook at the western edge of the city walls, above the lavishly landscaped parterres and the arcaded Fascist-era rationalist white marble expanse of Piazza della Vittoria. Victory Square? Hardly. Unless you counted as victory the reality that Fascist-era legislation still made up much of Italian law, and the children and grandchildren of former Fascist capos—few of them punished—still ran everything.
From the panoramic point, Daria looked directly across into the upper-story windows of the DIGOS headquarters one hundred yards away. Most of the offices in the building were still dark. Not those of Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri and Lieutenant Osvaldo Morbido. Clearly, they had punched in before her, holidays be damned.
She watched now as Centauri’s silhouette marched back and forth, arms shooting out and flailing in all directions as he snarled down the telephone at someone, somewhere, probably in a different time zone. How easy it would be for a sharpshooter to pick him off from here, then jump in a getaway car. So much for high security.
Outside the massive faux-Renaissance police headquarters, the usual line of immigrants requesting visas, political asylum, and war refugee status snaked along the sidewalk for hundreds of yards. Many had camped overnight. Europe needed them, but Europe, the greatest single engine of war and overpopulation in human history, did not want them. Daria supposed no one had told them that the admin offices were closed on April 25, that it was a national holiday. They might as well attend the protest rally or go home and come back another day.
The word “home” stuck in her throat. The problem was, most of these war-weary people of color were homeless. Many were without a country. There was nowhere for them to go. They would be too scared to take part in a protest march—and they were right to be scared.
Striding through the security barriers and metal detectors, Daria was surprised to see few armed officers on duty. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator, she climbed five stories and ducked left into a florescent-lit hallway running like a mouse maze toward the middle of the building.
Osvaldo Morbido, arms crossed over his paunch, was leaning on Italo Gambero’s desk. The desk was small and cluttered and had been wedged years ago into a windowless corner carved out of the corridor. That was why Daria hadn’t seen Gambero’s lights on from the viewpoint on the bastions. Lieutenant Gambero pocketed his smartphone and looked up, anxious, gaunt, and pale. Both men appeared to have shaved hastily. Their cheeks and necks were marked by red razor cuts.
“Fresh as roses,” Morbido croaked before she could speak. “And you?”
Daria nodded. “Champagne always gives me nice dreams.”
“Of romantic hikes to panoramic bunkers,” Morbido chortled, “holding Adonis’s hand?”
“The capo awaits you,” Gambero said, attempting humor. “He’s thrilled we put the Russian and Chinese commercial attachés in the pen. No, I was not aware of their diplomatic status. We had a slight language and attitude problem.”
Morbido chimed in. “Centauri is already wearing his generalissimo outfit and Pizza Margherita red, green, and white sash. He’s rearing to get to Villa Migone to show off his stripes to the protestors this afternoon—the way American presidents hold the Bible for a photo op.”
“Good,” Daria said, “if he’s in a rush, that will speed things up.”
The pair of lieutenants glanced at each other skeptically.
“Want company?” Morbido asked. He stood straight, pulling up the pants of his undersized plainclothes outfit.
Daria shook her head. “Let’s brief and debrief each other and get you on your way. Then I’ll go in to Centauri. Later we can reconnect by phone.”
Gambero and Morbido glanced at each other again as if they knew something she didn’t. Neither spoke.
“Where to start?” Daria muttered. “How about, the body?”
The coroner’s initial analysis before autopsying Gary was that he had been severely injured but had not died when the seaplane scooped him up. Gary had not died by drowning in the airplane’s water bay either—according to Emilio Bozzo, there was no water in the lungs. Rather he died from having his neck and back broken, or from loss of blood resulting from having his arm sheared off, presumably by the release mechanism of the seaplane. A coronary collapse would have followed, probably when he was being roasted alive by the fire at the base of the farmhouse wall.
Now that they had a body, and the death was clearly not an accident, unless extraterrestrials were involved, they had every right to hold the air show organizers until they cooperated, whether they were diplomats or not. “A murderer’s accomplice is a murderer’s accomplice, no matter what his status,” she said.
“Unless he’s the democratically elected president or prime minister of a major industrial power,” Morbido remarked, “or the head of the provincial offices of a police department.”
Daria did not rise to the subversive bait. She continued, a mounting sense of dread enveloping her as she heard her own words. The bags of body parts per se were no longer a priority, she explained, telling them what she had learned from the coroner. They were bits and pieces left over from the medical school, slated to be incinerated. No murder had been committed and no threats issued by the perpetrators of the crime, unless the promise of final justice—jus stat—could be interpreted as a threat.
It was, in a way, given what had happened to Joe Gary.
Either way, presumably the same gang was responsible for the bags and the lethal seaplane. The message in the delivery van and the scrawled slogan on the farmhouse wall confirmed that much.
The men grunted their assent.
The seaplanes and pilots had to be tracked down. That was the priority. Who was the best water bomber pilot in Italy? In the world? How many could be skilled enough to scoop up a moving swimmer and deliver a bull’s-eye hit? Did the pilot know what he or she was doing? Were they told it was part of the air show exercise, for instance, and led to believe the swimmer was a dummy? Was that incredible? Absolutely! It was nonsensical. But so many things about both cases seemed like nonsense.
It also seemed incredible, she added, that social media and the usual search engines had not yet produced an image of the water bomber or bombers that overflew the Cinque Terre a few minutes after ten on the 23rd of April, with a million swimmers, sunbathers, and hikers taking selfies and videos and panoramic shots. They needed to make sure Rome was on the case—had they all left on vacation down in the research department or gone on strike? Or was it a conspiracy, a cover-up?
And while she was on the topic of research, had anyone checked the land registry in La Spezia as she’d requested by text message last night, to find out who owned those ruined farmhouses? Had anyone read up on local history to find out what went on in the houses and barns during the war? If Lieutenant Ruffini was right, the torturers and hunters of Communist partisans, and the extrajudicial killers of lost foreign aviators and other wartime “spies,” had been based in those haunted, blasted, burned-out farmhouses. Who were the torturers and murderers? Had any survived the war on either side, and were any still alive today? If so, they were very, very old.
