The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  While the computer gave up its secrets, Enzo made a note of the names and addresses of the bars the cocktail napkins had come from. He knew them. They were all of a kind—large, ritzy in a bland sort of way, and expensive. The sort of place frequented by the sort of tourists who prided themselves on being stylish. In short, a great location if you didn’t want to be remembered.

  The rose told more or less the same story. Carefully wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, its drying petals puckered in a bud, there had been no point in lifting it to his nose. As a token of love, it was tawdry—the sort of thing that would impress only a starry-eyed teenager.

  As he repacked the box, replacing the contents exactly, Enzo found himself developing a strong dislike for the man in the photograph. He could at least have bought her real flowers. He could have taken her somewhere nice.

  He slid the pathetic little treasure back into its hiding place, then screwed the grate back over the duct and finally replaced the desk against the wall. Enzo Saenz took one last look around the room, then he switched out the lights and left the apartment.

  * * *

  “Hi,” the first message said. “Has anyone ever told you you have the most beautiful eyes in the world?”

  Enzo looked at the date. April 20, 2009. Ten months ago. If Kristin had replied, she hadn’t saved the message. Which suggested she hadn’t—because she’d certainly saved everything else. There were almost six hundred emails in the folder. Giorgio, if that was his real name, which it probably wasn’t, may have started off a bit rocky—with the Internet equivalent of “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” but he’d hit his stride fast enough. By late May there were as many as five emails a day, assuming all of them had been saved. Maybe more. Enzo clicked on another at random, this one in early June, from Kristin.

  I miss you so much. Things have really sucked recently. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know what I’d do. See? You’re bringing out the poet in my soul :)

  He scrolled back to the second email in the list, sent on April 22.

  I am sorry to bother you. I’m not harassing you or trying to stalk you, but I wanted to contact you again because I read the poems you posted on your page, and I was so moved. Your words touched me deeply. I would like to read more.

  Your page. Facebook. Enzo hadn’t seen Kristin’s page, he’d only heard it referred to by the computer geeks when they’d phoned saying there was nothing unusual on it. He’d bet even money some of that “nothing unusual” included an email link, and poetry. Which Giorgio had spotted, and fastened on when the you have beautiful eyes line hadn’t worked, even on a seventeen-year-old. So he’d tried again. Appealing to artistic vanity, the old hidden inner soul. Worked every time.

  Enzo clicked on the next mail. April 23. Kristin had waited a day, but she’d taken the bait.

  Thank you so much for your kind words about my poetry. I will be posting some more poems soon. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

  A day later she’d asked him where he was from.

  Florence, the home of Dante.

  Before they ran him out of town.

  I love Dante! Kristin had replied.

  Then I will call you Beatrice :)

  Enzo felt a wave of depression and pushed his chair back. Was this really all it took to snare a lonely teenager? Yes. He already knew that. He’d seen it a billion times before. Social networking sites were a mecca, a happy hunting ground for every horny, lying sleazebag on the face of the earth. The last statistics he’d read suggested that as many as forty or fifty percent of the postings were made under false identities. You could talk, all right. You could even fall in love. In your own head. Because the truth was, you had no idea who you were talking to, or falling in love with.

  He scrolled through a few more of the emails quickly, then came to one that stopped his heart.

  I am so sorry to hear about your mother. I know what it is like to grow up alone. I feel as if I can reach out and touch your loneliness.

  It was possible, of course, that Giorgio was the guy’s real name. That somewhere in this dismal correspondence he had told her that he was, what? At least a good twenty, and Enzo would bet it was closer to thirty, years older than she was. It was possible that all of this was, if not perfectly innocent, at least not illegal. There was no law that said two lonely people of whatever age couldn’t talk to each other over the Internet.

  But nothing about it felt right. Enzo doubted it would have felt right even if the girl wasn’t missing. The cash. The secrecy. Dismissing his—what now seemed slightly deranged—fantasy about Signora Carson, Enzo thought again of the scentless rose and closed the file. He ejected the memory stick. He needed to get it down to the basement and get the geek squad to take the hard drive copy apart and see if they could at least trace the server paths to try to get some line on who this guy was. Maybe when they found him, he’d answer the phone. Maybe he’d hand it to Kristin, who’d explain where the two of them were and why she was torturing her parents. Maybe there were unicorns in the Apennines and mermaids in the Arno.

  * * *

  There was no smoking in the fancy new police building, a fact that was much lamented, and probably just as well, because anyone lighting a match in the outer room of Pallioti’s office would have blown up.

  Pausing in the doorway, Enzo felt a pang of alarm, then relief. An import/export case he had been working on—partially refined heroin packed into the legs and lamp bases of artisanal furniture, giraffe tables, and elephant chairs shipped from Thailand—had flared. Between putting out that fire, and visiting the computer labs—where he’d called in every chip he had to get them to put a rush on looking at the netbook’s hard drive, something they’d promised to get to, well, sooner rather than never—he’d lost track of time. He had no idea what was going on up here in the real world, but if it had involved finding Kristin Carson’s body, the atmosphere would be altogether different. Low, sober, and morose. This was electric.

  Guillermo, whose head had been bent far too industriously over the keyboard, looked up and widened his eyes, which were round, very blue, and generously lashed. His eyebrows rose in a pantomime gesture of alarm.

  “Warning,” he muttered. “All personnel to battle stations.”

  The comment might be apt, but it wasn’t very helpful. Enzo was about to ask what on earth had happened, when the office door flew open.

  “For Christ’s sake, will you get ahold of—”

  Pallioti stopped in mid-sentence, glaring first at Guillermo, then at Enzo. His reading glasses had slipped on his nose and he was holding one of his fountain pens, which was as likely to mean he had been beating it against the edge of his desk as writing down great thoughts.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  Enzo had turned his cell phone to mute before going into Kristin’s building. Then on going down to the labs, he’d turned it off. The geeks couldn’t actually insist that all pagers and phones were killed in their presence, but they gave strong hints. Now he slid it out of his pocket and saw that there were a slew of messages. The first three were from Guillermo. The last several were from Pallioti.

  “Never mind that now,” Pallioti snapped. “You’d better have a look at this.”

  Before Enzo could ask what “this” was, Pallioti disappeared back into his office. By the time Enzo joined him he was brandishing a copy of the enlarged photograph from Mary Louise Tennyson’s phone.

  “I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. I should have seen it immediately.”

  Enzo was inclined to be sympathetic, but he had no idea what Pallioti was talking about. The photograph didn’t seem to have changed since last night. Kristin was still getting into the car, part of the license plate was still visible, the man was still smiling.

  Pallioti sank into his desk chair, reached for his pen, and began beating his little tattoo. The taps were so sharp and so measured that Enzo sometimes wondered if they were Morse, or some other secret code known on
ly to Pallioti.

  “Well, don’t you recognize him? No,” Pallioti muttered, staring toward the window. “Why would you? You were hardly even born.”

  Looking at his boss, Enzo began to wonder if it was him, or something in the water. The computer techs barely grunted at the best of times, and both Guillermo and Pallioti seemed to be speaking gibberish. The most intelligent conversation he’d had so far today had been with the cat. He looked at the enlargement, and shook his head.

  “Should I?” he asked. “Recognize him?”

  Pallioti dropped the pen abruptly, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Today’s cuff links were lapis and matched his tie.

  “No,” he said quietly, when he finally looked up. “No, you shouldn’t. But I should have. Before I did.”

  “Why? Who is he?”

  The prickling Enzo had felt on entering Kristin Carson’s apartment ran down his neck again.

  “Antonio Tomaselli.”

  Enzo frowned. The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.

  “1978.” Pallioti stood up and went to the window. He dug his hands into his pockets. “March 16, 1978.”

  Pallioti was not quite right. Enzo had been born, but he’d only been two. Not that that made much difference. He knew about it, all the same. There wasn’t an Italian of a certain age—and certainly not a European policeman of any age—who didn’t. It was the day Aldo Moro, leader of the Christian Democrats, the man known as the Father of Italian Politics, had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades.

  Italy’s answer to the Baader-Mienhof Gang, ETA, and the Red Army Faction—their own homegrown version of the left-wing terrorist groups that had swept across western Europe in the 1970s—the Brigate Rosse, or simply BR as they preferred to be known, had been almost single-handedly responsible for the Anni Piombi, the Years of Lead. A decade during which so many bullets had been fired, banks robbed, judges and union leaders and policemen kidnapped and kneecapped and just plain killed, that the numbers were still squabbled over to this day. Fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand, or ten thousand acts of violence. Seventy-five, sixty-five, or a hundred fifty dead. Not that it mattered. The net result was the same. A failed reign of terror that resulted not in some dreamed-of Utopia of the Proletariat but in deaths, maimings, arrests, and ransom demands. Ironically it had been the BR’s pièce de résistance, the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, that had finally turned the country against them. And achieved, however briefly, what Moro himself had been trying to achieve for most of his long career—the uniting of the political jigsaw that was Italy.

  Pallioti’s back was stiff. He appeared to be staring down into the piazza, but Enzo didn’t think he was seeing the fountain, or the fogged windows of the restaurant on the far side of the square, or the glassy damp paving stones. There was not a policeman in Italy who did not remember exactly where he had been when Moro was kidnapped. Or what he had been doing fifty-four days later when, after the biggest manhunt in Italian history, his body was found and their failure was broadcast to the world.

  The prickling on Enzo’s neck was replaced by a cold feeling. When Pallioti finally turned around, his face was drawn.

  “I recognized it last night,” he said. “Or thought I did. I called someone, a friend. In Rome. Emailed him a copy—” He gestured toward the picture in Enzo’s hand. “He confirmed an hour ago. He’s sure. It’s Antonio Tomaselli. Fifty-four years old last August. Born in Ravenna, educated at Padua. His father’s dead, his mother’s in a home outside Mestre. His only sibling, a brother, was killed in a factory fire. That may have been one of the things that drove Antonio into the BR, who knows? What we do know is that he was convicted in the Moro kidnapping for being part of the group that carried it out—ran the apartment, engineered the People’s Trial, all that. They were never able to prove,” Pallioti added, “in court at least, exactly who killed Aldo Moro. He was shot more than once. There were conflicting reports, confessions.” He nodded at the enlargement. “Tomaselli was certainly one of the candidates. Not that it matters,” he said smiling sourly, “who actually pulled the trigger.”

  Enzo shook his head. “I don’t—” Then he remembered. There had been an amnesty, of sorts.

  Pallioti nodded.

  “Antonio Tomaselli was caught, in 1978. In 1981 he was convicted. He served twenty-eight years. His behavior inside was exemplary. He was released ten months ago.”

  Pallioti crossed to his desk, sat down again, picked up his pen and began to tap it.

  “None of which,” he said, “necessarily means anything. He may be entirely innocent, and have done nothing wrong. All we know for sure is that the girl knows him. Well enough,” he added, “to get into a car with him ten days ago. We don’t even know if she’s with him now. Or if she is, what the hell he’s doing with the seventeen-year-old daughter of a surgeon from Boston, Massachusetts.” Pallioti looked up and smiled. There was no warmth in his face. “Maybe,” he said, “Signor Tomaselli just likes little girls.”

  And maybe, Enzo thought, “Giorgio from Florence” was someone else altogether. And maybe pigs with wings would flutter above the unicorns and the mermaids.

  * * *

  Anna came around the corner without breaking stride. When she had been here two days ago with Ken and the terrified art teacher, she had not taken much in. They had been in a taxi and she had been exhausted. Now she glanced up and down the street and registered the lights in the salumeria, and the coin-op laundry, and the tall rows of houses.

  It was late afternoon and foggy. Already the streetlights glowed in dull orbs, highlighting the sleet that ran down the chipped plaster facades and the tracks of rust that dribbled from the shutters, making the buildings look like aging tarts wearing cheap mascara. It was a typical student neighborhood, the sort of place friends back in the States would rave about as “authentic,” which meant “grubby,” Anna thought sourly. For a moment, she felt a longing for the safe, comfortable, boring suburban street she had called home for the eight years she had been married. For the spreading trees and lumpy sidewalk, the manicured lawns and wooden houses. She pushed it away. Blocked it with the memory of his voice.

  The call had come at breakfast. She’d come down before Ken, which was lucky, because she wasn’t sure how she would have explained it otherwise. Even without him there, she’d stood up and stepped away from the table, turning her back on the room.

  The number had shown on her BlackBerry screen as Unknown. Of course.

  It would be a land line, in a bar or a phone box, if they still had them. Or in this day and age, a pay-as-you-go disposable.

  The chatter of conversation, the clink of cutlery and china rose behind her, and for a split second she had contemplated not answering, dropping the phone on the overpatterned carpet and grinding it with her heel until it cracked and broke, and was silenced to nothing. Then she thought of Kristin.

  At first she’d heard only the empty buzz of miles, and wondered if it was better, or worse, this hovering silence. Then his voice came, like a remembered touch.

  “Ciao, Carina,” he’d said. “Da quando non ci si vede.”

  Hey, Sweetheart. Long time, no see.

  Anna glanced at her watch. She crossed the street, reached into her pocket, and pulled out the spare set of keys. It was half past three.

  Getting ahold of them had been pathetically easy. All she’d had to do when they visited the school this morning was wait until Ken was grilling someone before she sidled up to Clarissa Hines and mumbled some nonsense about Kristin’s dress for the party. The poor woman had given her the building’s security code and handed over a set of keys to the apartment so fast she seemed almost grateful—almost as eager as Ken himself to buy the idea that Kristin might actually show up for her birthday bash tomorrow night. It was, Anna reflected, and not for the first time, amazing what people could believe when they really wanted to.

  She punched the code and pushed open the front door. Standing in the dingy s
tairwell, she fumbled for the light, then when it snapped on stood blinking in the sudden glare, breathing in the damp smells of mildew and cooking. The girls’ apartment was on the third floor. Anna had passed the second landing when she heard the street door open. Two women came in, their words bouncing and echoing up through the stairwell as they stood discussing the shocking cost of children’s clothing. Keys in hand Anna opened the door and stepped inside Kristin’s apartment before they even suspected she was there.

  She paused, listening to the click of heels on the stairs. A door opened and closed on the floor above, followed by the creak of footsteps, then the low gabbling of TV. The shutters were open in the apartment’s main room, filling it with gray watery light. Anna let her eyes adjust to the well and ebb of shadows before she stepped into the corridor.

  Opening the door to her stepdaughter’s bedroom, Anna Carson felt a pang of something like shame. Long years of habit made it hard to ignore the barrier of privacy, the fact that she had never snooped on Kristin, and rarely gone into her room uninvited, even when she was a little girl. Maybe I should have, Anna thought. Maybe she didn’t want to be left alone as much as she insisted. Anna took a deep breath, then stepped inside. The single window looked out to a wall. She flipped the light.

  It was hardly the den of a teenage girl away from home and having the time of her life. The room looked like a cell. Or a cheap motel room. It looked like one of the loneliest places she’d ever seen. Anna sat down on the bed, and felt something move. She started to jump up, then stopped when she saw the little white arm. Mr. Ted must have been here on their previous visit, and she must have been too tired to have noticed him. She had only been in the room for a minute, to fetch Kristin’s computer and passport. Now her sitting had knocked him behind the pillow. Fishing him out, Anna looked into his frowning face and felt a sudden, heart-thumping panic.