Everybody Knows

by Karen Dodd

  He hung up the few clothes he’d brought. In addition to the black jeans he wore, he brought one pair in denim. One pair of dress slacks, a white and a blue linen shirt, and two T-shirts; one black, the other navy. Even though at home he had to have various dress shirts, suits and ties, he hated having to make a choice each morning. Packing minimally, it guaranteed that the need to deliberate would be minimal.

  He’d just put his underwear and socks away when there was a quiet rap at the door. A young man stood on the other side of the door and handed him a white sealed envelope. “A lady is in the lounge to see you, sinjur. She wouldn’t give me her name but asked that you come down to meet her when you’re settled.”

  Nico thanked him, closed the door and tore open the envelope. It was a note from Francesca saying she was downstairs and was looking forward to meeting him.

  He splashed some cold water on his face, ran wet fingers across his scalp, and grabbed his jacket off the back of a chair.

  * * *

  The inn’s main staircase afforded Nico the briefest opportunity to observe Francesca Bruno as she waited by the front desk. The only person in the lounge besides an elderly man sipping a glass of mid-afternoon sherry, she sat as if hyperalert on the edge of an uncomfortable-looking baroque chair. It was difficult to ascertain her height sitting down, but she was of slim build and wore her auburn hair in a bob that just grazed her shoulders. She had on cream-colored trousers and a smart navy blazer. Her eyes darted toward the concierge desk, then back again. Nico saw her shake her head and give a polite smile when the gentleman put down his newspaper and offered to pour her a drink.

  Nico descended the stairs and their eyes met. She all but leaped up to shake his hand. “Please, no names,” she whispered. Despite her diminutive stature, the firmness of her handshake surprised him, although he was somewhat taken aback by her cloak-and-dagger comment.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Have you eaten?” she asked. When he shook his head, she suggested they continue their meeting at a café nearby.

  Once out of the inn, they turned right and continued up the road. “I hope your flights were smooth,” she said, indicating they should turn down a side street. She led him to a vacant table that was situated on sloping steps that ran parallel to the café, facing the harbor. With a small metal table on one step, Francesca took the chair on the step above it, leaving Nico to sit on the lower one. While it was comical, he found the difference in their levels to be a bit off-putting. Must be the lawyer in me, he thought. Always jockeying for the most powerful position.

  “Thank you for trusting me, Mr. Moretti,” she said.

  “Please, call me Nico.”

  She gave him a shy smile. “Very well, please call me Francesca. I’m sorry to have been so secretive back there. But given the manner of threats Ariana received before she died,” she said, her voice lowering, “I thought it better not to reward listening ears. She was quite well known here, and not always favorably.”

  “The old man in the lounge?” Nico asked.

  “I know, but as innocuous as he appears, one cannot be too careful, considering the unrest here since the journalist’s murder—I’m sure you saw the shrine in the square. The people built it to honor her—and the government keeps tearing it down. Even though Ariana died in Italy—”

  She paused when the waitress came out to take their order.

  Nico knew he needed to eat something but making any decisions about food when he had so many questions about Ariana, seemed overwhelming. “What would you recommend?” he asked Francesca, leaving the menu unopened on the table.

  “If you’re very hungry, I can vouch for the daily soup and piadina. I’m going to have their pastizzi—traditional Maltese pastry made with filo dough and filled with warm, creamy ricotta cheese. And coffee.”

  “Sounds great.” He turned to the waitress with a smile. “I’ll have what Fr—” He stopped himself. “I’ll have whatever the lady is having.”

  As soon as the server had left their table, Nico said, “What can you tell me about the investigation into Ariana’s death? Even though it happened on Italian soil, she was Valletta’s senior prosecutor. And yet, I’ve seen very little on the news.” And absolutely nothing about what her office might have been ready to announce.

  Francesca frowned, and put both hands on the table. “After the initial report of the bombing in Tropea, there has been virtually nothing more reported here. In fact, as it occurred outside of Malta, the authorities here appear to have washed their hands of the entire matter, referring questions to your jurisdiction in Tropea.”

  This was news to Nico. He had heard nothing specific from his office or Investigator Pezzente, other than they were still looking at the domestic terrorism angle. And to be fair, there were victims other than Ariana. “And there’s been nothing in terms of the announcement from Ariana’s office that she spoke about?”

  Francesca shook her head.

  That didn’t make any sense. It should have been out by now. He decided to change tack, but their server arrived with their food, so he waited until she’d left.

  “So, were you Max’s nanny?” he asked.

  “In a manner of speaking. I’m actually Ariana’s personal assistant.” She hesitated. “Or I was. I lived in her summer home, looked after Max and homeschooled him during the week. She came over every weekend and then I’d travel back to my place here. She felt he was safer there. But now . . .”

  “Did you and Ariana ever discuss sending Max away somewhere if anything ever happened to her?” Maybe that would give him a hint of where she’d sent him.

  “I . . . I guess we did, but never anything specific, and I didn’t really take her seriously.” Her sea-glass-green eyes filled with tears. “It just seemed overly dramatic, even with all the threats she’d received. But now it’s happened.”

  “But she didn’t consult you before she sent him away?” Nico said.

  “No, the first I heard was when Ariana called to tell me she was going over to meet you, and that she didn’t need me in Gozo.”

  “Is there any chance she could have left anything here that could point to Max’s whereabouts?”

  “You mean at her apartment?”

  To Nico, it seemed like an obvious place to start. Even though it would still be a crime scene, he hoped his position would have sway with the Maltese authorities and he might be able to gain access to Ariana’s home, if not her office.

  Francesca put down her coffee. “A neighbor said the police swooped in within hours of the bombing in Tropea. She saw men carrying out Ariana’s computers and boxes of files. But I suppose it wouldn’t hurt for us to look.”

  Nico put down his coffee. “Isn’t it still cordoned off for the investigation? It hasn’t even been forty-eight hours. You and others are free to come and go as you wish?”

  “Well, other than the building manager, I’m the only one who has a key. But in answer to your question, no, it isn’t cordoned off.”

  Nico shook his head in disbelief as Francesca pulled several euros from her purse before he insisted on paying.

  “Her apartment is only a few blocks from here.”

  * * *

  A ten-minute walk from the café and down another cobblestone side street brought them to an inconspicuous entrance that led to a small brick courtyard. Francesca let them into Ariana’s ground-floor apartment. Nico followed her into the arched stone entrance, but something, although he couldn’t pinpoint what, kept him from venturing farther in. His chest tightened and his whole body felt heavy. It was as if something malevolent had accosted him when he stepped through the door. He had this strange sensation of the energy being sucked from his being. He wanted to turn and run, but Francesca looked back at him questioningly, and he felt stupid.

  “You’re overly sensitive,” his old-school Italian father had ridiculed him.

  Embarrassed, he shook it off and followed Francesca into a sparsely furnished living room. But fr
om where he stood, all he saw was chaos. It was as if a tornado had swept through the room, scooped up its contents and dumped everything on the floor. Although Francesca’s expression appeared strained, she didn’t seem surprised.

  Nico stood aghast. “The police did this?”

  She shrugged. “I presume so.”

  Stunned, he ventured farther into the apartment. Every room had been tossed, but none more so than what he assumed had been Ariana’s office. Filing-cabinet drawers lay empty and turned on end, having taken huge gouges out of the wood floor. Books had been ripped from wall-to-wall shelves and were scattered across the room. Stubs of telephone and internet wires poked out from the wall like little clusters of flowerless stems. His heart sank. Nothing in here gave a hint of Ariana’s essence, or that she had once occupied this space. There were no dark squares on the faded walls where pictures might have hung. If there had ever been any photographs or mementos on the furniture, they were absent. This is what Ariana’s life and work had been reduced to. A vandalized, hollowed-out shell.

  Among the papers strewn across the floor, Nico’s eyes fell on a tiny piece of red paper. It looked as if it had been torn from an envelope. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. In a childish scrawl, the word Omm—the Maltese term for Mama—was written on it. It pierced him like a dagger through the heart. Had it been part of a card written by his son?

  He turned to show it to Francesca, but he’d been so lost in thought he hadn’t noticed her leave the room. He tucked the paper in his pocket and threaded his way back through the apartment until he spotted her through the open French doors off the kitchen. Outside, on a small iron-railed terrace, everything there looked undisturbed. Pots of herbs and colorful flowers occupied every square inch. Magenta bougainvillea covered the red-brick walls and moss-lined baskets hung from the railings. In the center of the tiny oasis sat Francesca, perched on a metal chair, tears streaming down her face. The woman who’d given him a firm and confident handshake now looked tiny and frail, like a lost child.

  Nico pulled out a chair opposite her. “May I?” He felt guilty he’d even questioned her honesty when she’d first contacted him. The pain in her eyes said it all. “I’m so sorry, Francesca. What can I do?”

  She stared at him for a few seconds, blinking back more tears. Then something changed; she seemed to grow taller in her chair and she set her jaw.

  “Put an end to this, Nico. Someone needs to stop these people. Ariana lost her life trying to rid our beautiful country of its curse.” She shook her head. “You were deprived of knowing your son because she was so scared of putting you both in danger. She wanted to protect us, but we owe her to see this to the end.”

  Nico’s thoughts hurtled around his head like a pinball machine. He wanted to help, more than anything, but this wasn’t his jurisdiction, he had no power here; he had no choice but to leave it to the Maltese authorities, as inept as they appeared to be. It sickened him.

  But then he thought of Ariana. She had indeed lost everything. The legal world had lost one of its strongest crusaders. Her young son had lost his mother. He had lost his dearest friend. He knew what he had to do.

  “What can you tell me about this group, Journalists for Justice? Do you know what was in the envelopes Ariana sent to three of them?”

  Francesca shook her head, then pulled a piece of paper from her bag and handed it across the table. On the front was a logo of a person’s finger held to their mouth. He hesitated to touch it, although it was unlikely there would have been anything useful, like fingerprints. It would be too late now. He took it and turned it over.

  Tell anyone what you know and you’ll be next.

  “And you have no idea who could have left this?” he asked.

  Francesca didn’t answer. At first, Nico thought she hadn’t heard him. Gazing out toward Grand Harbour she seemed lost in a world of her own. Did the note refer to her going to the police, or did she know more than she was letting on? She seemed like a decent person, but putting his lawyer’s hat back on, what did he really know about this woman? He was just taking her word for it as to how close she was to Ariana and Max. It seemed odd if that really was the case, that Ariana wouldn’t have confided in Francesca. Or even have her take Max somewhere safe.

  “Could it have been someone other than the police who did this?” Nico prompted again, sweeping his hands toward the chaos inside the apartment. “From what Ariana told me about her work, she appeared to be working on several cases before she died. Maybe this is unrelated?” Although even he didn’t believe his own words.

  “That is true,” Francesca replied without turning her head from the view. “But they all circled back to the same thing. What we here refer to as the ‘Ghost of Malta.’ Our shame. The way of life that has allowed greed to take hold of this country.

  “First, there’s our pay-to-play passport tragedy. Our prime minister travels the world, recruiting anyone who has the money to buy their way into Maltese citizenship—Russian oligarchs, dictators of countries with atrocious human-rights violations. Then there is our largest private banking empire, run by a multigenerational family from old Maltese money. There have been rumors they’ve laundered money for those same despots. Then, there is the cronyism in the government. I could go on, it’s a never-ending loop that always comes back to what our country has become: a haven for criminals pretending to lead respectable lives.”

  Ariana had railed against the corruption of her homeland to him so many times. He also knew that the alleged banking fraud extended across into his own jurisdiction of Calabria.

  “What else can you tell me about what Ariana was about to announce?” he asked.

  “A year ago,” Francesca said, turning back to face him, “some kind of secret report was leaked about corruption within the government. Then a second one emerged. It was thought to have come from a member of parliament in our Nationalist Party.”

  Malta’s ruling party. The party Ariana despised. “Do you know who the mole was?”

  She steepled her hands together, her index fingers touching her top lip.

  Nico looked into her eyes and saw fresh tears ready to escape. “Francesca,” he said as gently as he could. “You have to trust someone. Is that why they killed Ariana? Was she about to expose someone in the party?”

  Her brows knitted together, and she spread both hands on the table. “She told me it was safer if I didn’t know.” She shook her head and her eyes filled with tears. “There’s a Nationalist Party MP by the name of Lydia Rapa. Ariana met her after she bought her home on Gozo—she lives there as well. Most weekends, they both commuted on the ferry that went from Ċirkewwa. That’s how Ariana got to know her well.”

  “So it would be fair to say she was supportive of Ariana, despite the obvious political differences?”

  Francesca nodded.

  “So, if Lydia Rapa was the leaker, do you think she knew what Ariana was about to expose?”

  Nico felt the familiar buzz of adrenaline. “Francesca,” he said, “I need to speak to her.”

  Francesca looked at her watch. “It’s Friday, she will be on the five o’clock ferry to Gozo. That’s the one she and Ariana always took.”

  Chapter Seven

  By Nico’s calculation, he had a good two hours before he had to be at the ferry terminal. To get to the car rental place, he had to walk past the slain journalist’s shrine again. He tried to just walk on but something pulled him toward it. In the midst of the multitude of flowers was a portrait of the woman so many still mourned. The photograph had been in all the papers in Italy at the time. Dozens of candles illuminated her doe eyes and serene, beatific smile. But this time, it was Ariana he saw looking back at him. The growing sense of what these two remarkable women had stood for suddenly overwhelmed him, and he swallowed back the ache in his throat. He should have done more.

  “Please, Nico,” Ariana had pleaded months ago. “You must help me. I can only do so much from inside the country, but if Malta see
s Italy hitting back, it will force our own justice system to do something about it.” Even as she gave voice to those thoughts, Nico had questioned if she really believed it.

  “Everybody knows this is happening, Ariana,” he’d said to her. She had lost more weight and looked thin and gaunt, older than her thirty-two years. He’d been concerned at the time, but hadn’t said anything. Why hadn’t he done something then, before she took an even more dangerous path?

  “Yes, everybody knows we have lost the monopoly of truth. But nobody does anything about it, including you. You all sit in your comfortable offices and go home to your comfortable lives. Lives made possible by greed and corruption. And you do nothing. Nothing!” She’d looked him directly in the eye and her words cut deep. “You’re sworn to uphold justice, but you’re just like the rest of them.”

  He’d thrown his hands in the air in protest, responding with anger rather than hurt, as they’d sat at the very table she’d been at only a few days ago.

  Now, as he drove out of Valletta’s city limits, he remembered the utter frustration etched on her face. Could he ever forgive himself for ignoring her desperate pleas?

  * * *

  While sitting in his car waiting for the ferry to board, Nico caught up on some emails. He checked in with Gina, who’d had limited success finding the reporters Ariana had sent her notes to.

  “Testa’s wife said he’s somewhere on assignment,” she reported. “And both De Rosa’s and Sinclair’s voice mail is full.”