by David Downie
She paused, thinking back to the farmhouse, the body, the Rolex, the one-coincidence-too-many breaking the camel’s back. “Is there any easy way to find the name of the Italian great-great-grandmother or great-great-great-aunt of that Australian boy, Zack Armstrong?” Gambero and Morbido glanced at each other and each shrugged and said bo. “She’s still alive,” Daria added. “That’s what the boy says.”
“Why not ask him?” said Gambero.
“Because then he’ll know we’ve figured it out,” said Morbido.
“Figured what out?” Gambero was confused.
“The old woman driving the getaway car,” Morbido said, winking at Daria. “Right?”
Daria glanced away. Morbido had done it again, outwitted and out-reasoned her, or at least kept pace.
What else was there, she asked? Someone, probably Gambero, given how well he had gotten along with them at the last encounter, needed to swallow an antihistamine and get back to Villa Glicine and Joe Gary’s people. They needed to get Maurizio Capurro or Morgana Stella to come in and positively identify the corpse and help contact the nearest living relative—one of the sons who was not estranged from Gary, presumably. They needed to provide the authorities with detailed lists of dinner guests and others invited by Gary to the villa in recent months.
Who knew Gary’s habits intimately and knew he’d be swimming in that spot at that time? Had Gary ever mentioned fears or threats, had he received letters, messages, emails that might have tipped him off to an attempted murder or kidnapping? Did anyone at the villa have any idea who might have done this, who had a motive?
“A motive?” Morbido guffawed. “Probably only ten or twelve thousand people worldwide had a motive, by the sound of it.”
Daria nodded grimly. “Yes, if not twice that. So, we’ll have to talk to a few hundred thousand people and try to get some answers.” She tapped her lips. “Whoever did it must have known from someone—the air show organizers or someone somewhere in the bureaucracy—about the fires in the bunkers, and the flares and the smoke bombs. They applied for permits for nine artificial fires?”
“Correct,” Gambero confirmed.
“There were ten,” she said. “The tenth was the real target, but only for one of the planes, unless two or more were involved.”
“Right,” Gambero said, “bearing in mind that the pilots did not know how many fires there were or where they were or that they were not real fires.”
“The tenth one was real,” Morbido chipped in, “the smoke bombs and flares were there, but they had also built a hell of a bonfire in the ruins. The water bomber didn’t fully extinguish it, unless someone went back and lit it again to roast Gary’s cadaver.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t dead yet?” asked Gambero. “So technically he wasn’t a cadaver yet.”
“Okay, okay,” Morbido grumbled. “Whoever did this, deserves a medal,” he added with a bleak, basso croak.
“In other words,” Daria said, “the pilot really may not have known what he or she was doing? It may have been unintentional manslaughter? A freak accident?”
“Maybe,” Gambero agreed. “In that case, the real killers are the people who dreamed it up.”
“Isn’t that always the case?” Morbido remarked. “It’s the minds, not the hands, that are guiltiest.”
“So, we need everyone in DIGOS to drop what they’re doing, come back from vacation, and drag in every person in the prefectures of Imperia, Savona, Genoa, and La Spezia, plus all the municipal offices of the villages, towns, and cities involved, the people in the parks departments, and the paper pushers in Rome who knew about the air show organizers’ plans, and interrogate them and do background checks until we find the connection.”
“Right,” Gambero said, “plus the people who might have overheard conversations or read emails or talked to boyfriends and girlfriends or just seen the permit requests as they passed through the bureaucracy either in paper format or by interagency email.”
Daria shook her head and held up her hands. “There’s no time for that,” she said. “Tempus fugit and we’re standing still. As soon as I get out of here, I’m going to try to find a guy named Striker, Andrew Striker, with Homeland Security. They seem to know everything. He must have the dirt on Gary or my godfather wouldn’t have suggested I see him. Then I’m going to grab Bozzo and drag him to the Albenga airport, but only if at least some of the water bombers are still there, so he can look for evidence—blood, genetic material, torn clothing, dents on the fuselage, whatever it might be. We’re in a process of elimination. A seaplane out there somewhere is involved.”
Morbido croaked, “Okay, I’ll get onto it.”
“Has our discovery of the body been leaked?” she asked. “Is there anything in the media yet?”
Morbido shook his jowls. “Amazingly enough, it’s still under wraps.” He paused. “What I want to know is, why does Centauri want it kept secret?”
“Why not ask him?” Daria suggested, raising an eyebrow.
“The official explanation,” said Gambero, “is they don’t want to fuel a fire—the so-called anarchists and anti-Fascists are back. The peaceful protest march might not be so peaceful.”
“But that’s precisely what Centauri and his friends want,” Morbido blurted.
No one rebutted him. They fell silent, their eyes jumping from face to face, then seeking refuge in studying the worn flooring.
“What about the air show people in the lockup?” It was Gambero asking, breaking the silence.
“Let them stew,” Daria said grimly. “One might cave in and hand over the video footage or make a confession. Until we know who did this, all are potential confederates and suspects.”
“The capo isn’t going to like it,” Gambero said. “He and the Russians are pretty tight.”
As if the capo had overheard them, Daria’s phone rang. Simultaneously Gambero’s desk phone and Morbido’s smartphone also rang. “It’s him,” she said, glancing at the caller ID and paling.
“Spartacus on the warpath,” Gambero whispered.
“Break a leg,” croaked Morbido. “I’m leaving the building before anyone can stop me. If you need me, I’m in Albenga eating fried artichokes at that stand near the airport.”
“We’re gone,” said Gambero, locking the drawers of his desk. “I’ll be in La Spezia. Friends in City Hall will know how to get me into the land registry when it’s closed.”
Nineteen
Despite her best efforts, Daria could not help seeing the Questor as the splitting image of Augusto Pinochet circa 1990, dressed in his best generalissimo uniform. Everything about Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III evoked the Chilean strongman of her increasingly distant youth. He had the dictator’s same small sleepy gray-blue eyes and the same salt-and-pepper caterpillar mustache. He wore a similar blue single-breasted uniform with brass buttons and gold-encrusted epaulets clustered with gold stars, not to mention the gold filigree band around the collar of his jacket.
Daria had never heard Pinochet’s voice, nor had she been there in person to see him strut and strike poses, so she could not confidently ascribe the Questor’s cock-in-a-farmyard performance that morning to South American influences. Still, had he been carrying a riding crop, the autocrat outfit and performance would have been complete.
Back in her office after their catastrophic meeting, she stared out of the window, watching pairs of tennis players hitting balls back and forth at the tennis club across the way. The club had been built on a long, wide terrace against the old city walls. She idly wondered if Willem Bremach had injured his knee there or at another tennis club. Like Centauri, her godfather was a member of all the clubs worth belonging to, starting with the Galleria Club. Therein must lie one of the keys to the enigma of Joseph Gary.
Tempus fugit? The words came back to her. Time was still flying. Like her lieutenants, she too
needed to fly from the office. But another Latin adage sprang to mind: Festina lente. Make haste slowly. It was the great oxymoron, the paradox that explained the essence of martial arts, modern military strategy, and successful lovemaking.
Daria hastened to order her thoughts, to plan the radical, life-transforming steps she knew she must now take—slowly. She drew a long, deep breath through her nostrils and silently recited her personal mantra. Calm, quiet, methodical. The three-word formula had gotten her out of more than one corner in the last twenty-five years.
Do the background first, she told herself. It was common knowledge at DIGOS that the Questor’s blue-blood grandfather and father had been fascistoni—super-Fascists. They had backed the Fascist regime from the get-go in the early 1920s, becoming eager personal friends not only of Benito Mussolini but, later, of Adolph Hitler and Francisco Franco. You could not condemn a son for his father’s or grandfather’s sins. But Centauri’s case seemed special. Carlo Alberto III had apparently inherited the jackboot gene. How else could he have ordered the brutal beatings and killings of peaceful protesters during the summertime 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, a massacre quickly overshadowed by the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11?
Overshadow was the word. Another was sneeze. America sneezes and the world gets a cold, wasn’t that the expression? America gets hit by Al Qaida, passes the Patriot Act, and heads toward authoritarianism, and Italy follows suit fifteen years later. America, still sneezing, elects an autocratic narcissist with help from Russia, and, in an imperfect revival of the 1920s and ’30s, Italy and the rest of the world votes heavily for and sometimes elects populists and neo-Fascists, and no one in America notices. Italy, Hungary, the Czech lands, Austria, Poland, Sweden, the UK, and how many others?
After this latest and possibly final Hobbesian meeting with Centauri—it had been ugly, brutish, and short—Daria was more convinced than ever that the pseudo-American Joe Gary had been a crony of the Questor. Clearly, the two had sympathized, as Willem Bremach might put it. They had dined together regularly at the Galleria Club. That may have been purely for professional reasons. But maybe there was more to the friendship. The Questor had told her during their heated exchange that Gary was an inexhaustible if not always reliable source of information and inspiration. Inspiration?
Daria still couldn’t help wondering how well connected the former spook really had been, and how active he had been in recent years. His name had never come up in any investigation or incident she knew of, except when Steve Bannon’s crowd had blown through town, feted by the Italian far right in the spring of 2018.
In the middle of the meeting with the Questor, Willem Bremach’s silly ditty had popped back into Daria’s mind. “Once a flyer always a flyer, and flyers are liars.”
Once a spook always a spook, and spooks are of necessity liars or actors in a murky clandestine world closed to public scrutiny. The image of Andrew Striker came to mind. She chased it away, but not before she remembered his sinister silhouette and striking widow’s peak, his boyish charm and boiling, repressed rage.
With a sigh, she watched now as a middle-aged man in tennis whites had a temper tantrum and smashed his racket to the asphalt surface of the court, then kicked it once, twice, three times. Below the club stretched the lines of immigrants on the sidewalk. Several looked up, pointing and laughing.
When she had asked Centauri skeptically whether DIGOS had really lost such a valuable asset with Joe Gary’s death, the Questor had snorted at her ignorance, striking his right fist into the palm of his left hand as he marched back and forth across his office, its windows blazing with early sunlight. The light had caused the photosensitive lenses of Centauri’s glasses to darken first on one side, then the other, emphasizing his demonic qualities.
Joseph Gary, he had barked, had been “a master of discord, of dissonance and disruption,” pitting colleagues, employees, associates, and lovers against each other. He had never been a strategist and was not a thinker. He was a man of action, with his feet on the ground, ready to fight wherever Communists or terrorists appeared, a short-tempered, violent man whose gut reactions had somehow gotten him through rough patches in a unique if checkered career spanning nearly seven decades. Gary had not been useful, Centauri had growled, Gary had been essential.
Wiping the steam off his sun-sensor lenses, checking his watch, then pounding his desk with his fist, Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III had asked Daria if she had seen the latest images taken off social media and sent to DIGOS Genoa by operatives in Rome just minutes before. No, she had not, she had said, she had been briefing Morbido and Gambero before stepping into his office and had not seen her feeds yet.
“Well, look for yourself, captain,” he had mocked, turning the screen of his desktop computer so she could see it. “This is the plane that flew from the gulf fronting Portofino to the Cinque Terre at 10:07 a.m. on April 23rd.” He opened a second window on the desktop screen and clicked. “This is the graphic study Rome worked up of the fuselages of all known makes of seaplanes built in the last fifty years, including those designed for search and rescue and convertible to water bombing. There are surprisingly few, no more than a dozen.” Approaching the desk, Daria had leaned forward, glancing back and forth from the blurry amateur social media photo to the airplane silhouettes. “Well?” Centauri had barked.
“My opinion, sir,” she had said, “as a non-expert eyeballing this comparative study in haste, is that the plane in this out-of-focus photograph was probably not one of the newer, larger, dedicated water bomber models or the convertible water bomber/search and rescue models shown in the workup.”
“Oh, how very perceptive of you, captain,” Centauri had scoffed. “What you mean is the plane that scooped up Joe Gary was not of recent French, Belgian, Russian, or Chinese design and manufacture, but rather a classic, out-of-date Canadian-built Canadair, the garden variety of water bomber, in service for nearly forty years?”
“That would seem to be the case, but only if that photo on your screen shows the plane that actually scooped up Signor Gary.” She had leaned forward and studied the images, zooming on the photograph, aware that Centauri was bristling. “There is no proof as yet that only one of the seaplanes flew over the fire near La Spezia and dumped water on it. There may have been two or more planes involved.”
“No proof?” he had snarled. “Nothing else has come up. This is it. How many planes flying along the coast between Chiavari and Imperia, miles north of the drop site, could have known about or spotted a fire deliberately set near La Spezia? I’ll tell you how many—one! And this is it.”
She had shaken her head in disagreement, recalling the width and length of the water-soaked area near the farmhouse. It had seemed to suggest multiple deliveries of water. She had restated this observation to him and then rolled on before he could interrupt her. “And if you look closely,” she had said, undaunted, tapping the computer screen, “you will note that there are no registration numbers visible on this seaplane. They appear to have been painted over.”
Centauri had glowered at her, torn off his glasses, stepped up, and squinted at the screen. “Well, that would make perfect sense, would it not? You have subverted your own logic. If you were about to murder someone you would black out the registration, wouldn’t you? Rather, you would white it out, as they’ve done here, with water-based white paint, we can safely assume, paint that can easily be removed afterwards to cover your tracks.” He had stroked his mustache with grim satisfaction and stared at her. “Unless the reason we cannot see the registration numbers is the angle of the fuselage and the reflection of the sun, which is more likely. Look again, captain, with your excellent uncorrected vision.”
Daria had stared at the screen and shrugged. “That also might be the case,” she had admitted.
“But this is missing my point,” Centauri had roared. “My point is, the diplomats from our essential, strategic trade partners China and Russia c
ould have nothing to do with this case of what is clearly left-wing subversion and agitation, because their planes did not carry out the attack. The Canadair plane did. That is why, when I received that image and the analysis from headquarters in Rome not ten minutes ago, I immediately ordered that the Chinese and Russian attachés be released and their planes be allowed to fly. I personally made an official apology to them, promising that those responsible for this breach of diplomatic immunity would be duly reprimanded and punished.”
Daria had hung her head, knowing what was coming next. Turning away from Centauri to look out of his windows at the once-proud bastions of the city, she had said, “Sir, there was no way to know what kind of seaplane was involved. The air show organizers refused to cooperate with us. We were obliged to keep them in custody pending developments. What are they trying to hide?”
“Well,” he had said, savoring the words, “I am obliged to remove you from the case, Captain Vinci. You, Gambero, and Morbido are suspended from duty. You will be reassigned, and your individual cases reviewed in due course.” He had paused for effect, his wrath reaching a climax. “Be good enough to hand over your research and any contact information you have to my assistant. I will pass it on to the Vice Questor and brief him thoroughly when he arrives. Having heard reports about the events of the past days, on his own initiative, your immediate superior Colonel Ruggieri has cut short his well-earned vacation in Morocco and is flying back as we speak.” Centauri had paused. “That is all, Vinci. You may go.”
Saluting, she had said, “You realize I will contest this decision, sir.”
“That is your right,” he had snapped, raising his hand in a wavering dismissive salute. She had turned to leave, but his words had stopped her in her tracks. “Be prepared to explain to the review board why you cut out the Carabinieri from your investigation, why you have been conspiring with your godfather Ambassador Bremach to this end, why you and the coroner of Genoa failed to fully disclose details of the theft of human and monkey bodies from the medical school, why you bullied and threatened Joseph Gary’s fiancée, why you grounded fire-prevention and emergency aircraft in Albenga, thereby imperiling innocent lives and making it impossible to battle the blazes destroying the region, why you allowed a municipal policeman from Rapallo with whom you are reportedly having an affair to drive a DIGOS vehicle, and why you flew the said coroner of Genoa by helicopter to the province of La Spezia to inspect Gary’s corpse, instead of relying upon the local authorities and the province’s own coroner with whom we have an excellent working relationship.
