by Stuart Woods
It soon became clear that their pursuers were under-equipped in the armor department.
“What are they doing?” Stone asked.
“They’ve dropped back behind us, and one of them is on a cell phone.”
“You think they’re calling for reinforcements?”
“I think we should behave as if they are.”
Stone checked the rearview mirror and saw the car rapidly approaching in the fast lane. He slammed on the brakes and cut across two lanes to an exit, while the pursuing car was forced to continue down the autostrada.
“Now we’re lost,” Dino said. The woman in the GPS was demanding that they make a U-turn as soon as possible.
“She’ll recalibrate in a minute,” he said.
“I think we should follow her advice and get back on the autostrada. The other guys will be getting off at the next exit.”
“Good idea,” Stone said, slamming on the brakes and executing a U-turn, then gunning it. “I don’t know what kind of engine they’ve got in this car, but it works,” he said, accelerating rapidly back onto the autostrada.
“Don’t go too fast, we don’t want to catch up to them,” Dino said. They passed the next exit. “Now go fast, they’ll be on surface roads, looking for us.”
Stone quickly achieved 180 kph. “It flies,” he said. “You want to get back up here?”
“I think I have a better field of fire from back here. I’ve only got the one magazine, though. Give me your gun.”
Stone handed back his pistol and the spare magazines. They continued unmolested to the end of the autostrada, where they had to stop and insert a credit card for the toll.
“Uh-oh,” Dino said, “I think their buddies are laying for us. You’ve got a car coming up fast, and there’s a shotgun sticking out a rear window.”
“Let me try something,” Stone said, accelerating, but not so fast that they couldn’t keep pace. He checked for nearby traffic, then slammed on his brakes and let the other car drift past; then, when they were just a little past him, he turned into them, smashing his left front fender into their right rear. The car spun, smashed into the guardrail, and came to rest athwart the fast lane, pointed in the opposite direction.
“The pit maneuver,” Dino said. “You’ve been watching Cops on TV.”
“How’d you guess?”
They managed to make it back to Marcel’s compound without incident. Jim Lugano’s people made much of their bent fender and bullet-scarred glass.
—
Upstairs, Stone found the liquor and poured them both a drink. “That was fun,” he said, raising his glass.
“It was, at that,” Dino said. “It’s been a long time since I shot at anybody.”
Lugano came into the room. “I hear you’ve scarred up my car a bit.”
“Isn’t that what it’s for?” Dino asked. “It’s not like we went looking for those guys.”
“I can’t disagree.”
“Question,” Stone said. “If those guys were tailing us, how come they waited until we were on the way back before they started shooting?”
“What’s your point?” Lugano said.
Stone found a pad and paper and wrote something on it, then handed it to Lugano.
The only time we discussed where we were going was in this room. I also made a phone call from here to book the table at Sibilla.
Lugano read the note and nodded. “Give me your cell phone,” he said, then left the room. He came back ten minutes later. “The room is clean,” he said, “but is your cell phone the original or the new one?”
“It’s the old one.”
“That’s how they knew where you were,” Jim said. “They waited until you stopped at Hadrian’s Villa, then sent somebody to intercept you. By the time they got there, you had already moved to the restaurant, and they picked you up when you left there, right?”
“Right,” Stone agreed. “I guess I’d better start using the new SIM card in the new phone.”
“Don’t throw the old one away,” Jim said. “It might come in useful later.”
38
Hedy swam up through a fog into something like sunlight, coming from the glass-brick window. They had been feeding her well, she thought, but they had also been drugging her. They had taken away her bonds, too. She was free within the room’s space of about eight by eight feet. She figured it was a maid’s room, but it showed no signs of having been occupied; the paint was fresh, the furniture new. She heard the door open. The woman came into the room and set a tray down on the table next to the bed. “Mange,” she said.
Hedy got her feet over the side of the bed and looked at the tray. Two fried eggs, pancetta, orange juice, coffee. Which one had they been using to drug her? The eggs weren’t scrambled, and they looked untampered with. She stuck a finger in the orange juice and tasted it: a slight bitterness. That one. She took it into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet, then she went back, ate the eggs, bacon, and bread and drank the coffee. The caffeine made a difference.
How long did they take to come back for the tray? Sometimes until they brought lunch. Maybe she had some time. She retrieved the phone from under the mattress and switched it on: three percent left on the battery; it was going to go any minute. She tried calling Stone, but the call wouldn’t go through. She hit the text icon: Running out of juice. Leaving the phone on until it goes. Find me please! She set the phone on the windowsill for the best chance of getting a signal. She had no idea if he had received the earlier texts. After it sent, she went through and deleted all the texts she had sent and received.
The phone made a weak little noise. She picked it up and looked at it: the battery on-screen turned red, then the screen went dark. It was done.
From outside she began hearing clanging and banging noises. They went on all day, and she finally figured out that they were dismantling the construction elevator. She had been hearing banging and power tools inside the house for what seemed like days. Now all that was silent; all she heard was a vacuum cleaner, maybe two.
At lunch she feigned sleep when they left a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. She ate the sandwich and poured the milk into the toilet and flushed. She put the dead phone back under the mattress; it was useless, but she didn’t want them to know she had it.
As daylight waned, the noises from outside stopped. Was the elevator gone, or were they just quitting for the day? The cleaners in the house were quitting, too, and she heard a new, very faint mechanical noise. Had they replaced the construction elevator with a permanent one? She had no way of knowing.
She took her daily shower and rinsed out her thong and bra, then put them back on to dry on her body, under her jeans and sweater.
It was dark when they brought dinner: pasta with plain tomato sauce and a glass of red wine. She ditched the wine and drank water with her dinner.
Stone tried calling Hedy’s phone and texting her, but nothing went through. He checked for texts from her but got nothing.
Jim Lugano turned up and took a sheet of paper from his briefcase. It was a map of Italy, and little red dots had been placed on it around Naples and as far south as Salerno. “These are the buildings with Casselli’s company’s name on the building permits. Two of them have permits for construction elevators: the one you raided in Naples and one at Ravello, a village on top of the mountain above the Amalfi Coast.”
“Then it must be the building at Ravello,” Stone said. “Let’s get down there.”
“Hang on,” Jim said, raising a hand. “I’ve already got people on the way, but darkness will hamper them. They’ll find the building early tomorrow, and we’ll have it photographed.”
“Why don’t we just raid it, the way we raided the Naples building?”
“First of all, as I’ve just explained, we don’t know exactly where it is, and we won’t know until daylight, when the e
levator will be visible. Secondly, your raid in Naples was successful because there was nobody there. If they’re holding her at the Ravello site, she’ll be guarded, and we’ll need all the recon we can get before we go in there. Be patient, Stone.”
“I’m running out of patience,” Stone said. “I’m going to explode soon, if we don’t get some leads to follow. Anything on the chocolate?”
Lugano laughed. “Nothing on the chocolate. It’s in a truck somewhere, and we have no idea where to look.”
“And still no trace of Casselli?”
“He knows we’re looking for him. He’s hiding, and doing a good job of it. Have you had any messages from Hedy?”
“No, I just checked.”
“On the new phone or the old phone?”
“Shit!” Stone yelled, and went to get the old phone. He turned it on, hit the messages icon and read, then he handed the phone to Lugano. “She’s all out of battery. Did your guys get a location? She turned on the phone, at least long enough to send that text.”
Lugano made a call. “Nothing,” he said. “Could be the weak battery or a weak signal, or both.” He closed his briefcase. “I’ll see you this time tomorrow.”
39
Leo Casselli sat back in his reclining chair and watched CNN. His lap was full of work papers, and the sound was turned down fairly low, but then he heard his name mentioned. He turned up the volume.
“Let’s go to our Rome correspondent, Jeff Palmer, for more on this very interesting story,” the young female anchor said. The scene cut to a shot of a middle-aged man standing outside the Colosseum.
“Kalie, Leo Casselli, or Leonardo, as he prefers to be called, made headlines in the United States nearly twenty years ago, when a member of the Mafia family he ran in New York ratted him out to a congressional committee. Before the Justice Department could indict him, Casselli vanished and has not been seen in the United States since that time. He has, however, been seen in fashionable hot spots around Italy and France, schmoozing with the glitterati and having his picture taken with scantily clad young women, usually in restaurants. Casselli maintains that he is a retired businessman, but he is rumored to have a finger in the pies of a dozen Italian industries, and his name appears on many building sites around the country.” They cut to a shot of a Casselli Costruzione sign outside some under-construction condos.
“But now, the Italian police department that concentrates on the Mafia—the DIA—has taken a sudden, overt interest in speaking to Signor Casselli, and two multimillionaire businessmen, one an American, the other French, have posted flyers around Rome and Naples, offering a cash reward of five million euros, a new passport, and resettlement to anyone who can produce evidence that will put Casselli in prison, preferably forever.”
Casselli smiled and leaned back in his recliner; he was enjoying this.
“Trouble is,” the reporter continued, “that suddenly, Leo Casselli has vanished from sight, and the police, in spite of an intensive effort, have been unable to locate him. He has not been seen at his two homes, one in Naples and one on the Amalfi Coast, nor has he been dining at any of his favorite restaurants. He was last seen at lunch in a Paris brasserie that he managed to leave, in spite of the fact that it was surrounded by police. And since that time, two of his ostensibly right-hand men have been murdered, some say because Casselli feared their collecting the big reward.
“The Italian police, in spite of several inquiries on my part, have refused to so much as mention Casselli’s name, and it seems that his continued absence from the scene has become something of an embarrassment for them. The Rome and Naples newspapers have become interested, though, and they have begun running daily photographs from their files, in an effort to spread the word that the police would like to have a chat with Leo Casselli. The search continues. We’ll get back to you with any news.”
Casselli turned the volume back down and returned to the papers in his lap. “What’s doing with the fucking chocolate?” he asked a man sitting in a smaller chair next to him.
“Don Leonardo, we continue to try and find a buyer for the stuff.”
“Where is it?”
“About fifty meters from here, in a refrigerated trailer.”
“And how much is that costing me?”
“Only the gasoline, Don Leonardo; the trailer, we stole and repainted.”
“I’m sick of that fucking chocolate,” Casselli grumbled. “We’re going to end up dumping it into the sea.”
“That is a possibility, Don Leonardo.”
He waved a hand in the air. “Tell them to get this thing moving.”
The man got out of his chair, walked to a wall telephone, and spoke into it. From outside, there came the faint sound of an engine starting, and Casselli’s living room began to move. His minion staggered back to his chair.
—
In Rome, Stone had watched the CNN report, too, and Jim Lugano had come into the room while it was running and had taken a seat.
“Good morning, Stone.”
“Good morning, Jim.”
“As I explained yesterday, two of Casselli’s building projects had permits for construction elevators on-site. One of them you’ve already visited, in Naples, and the other is in Ravello.” He laid a stack of photos on the table. “These are of the Ravello site.”
Stone picked them up and leafed through them. “I don’t see a construction elevator,” he said.
“That’s because there isn’t one. If you’ll look at the aerial shot—the one with the sea far below, in the background, you’ll see that the only visible access to the building is on the outskirts of Ravello, a narrow stairway cut out of the rock of the mountain, leading down to a broad deck, at what appears to be the rear of the building.”
“What sort of building is it?” Stone asked. “It appears to be cut into the mountainside.”
“Honestly, I don’t know. The building permit says it’s a storage facility, but for the life of me I can’t see why anyone would store anything there. The seaward side would have an impressive view, though, so it could be a residence.”
“So how would they get construction materials in there? Certainly not down that narrow stairway.”
“First, on the construction elevator, which would be removed when an interior elevator is available.” Jim produced more photographs. “Then like this,” he said. “A large flatbed truck pulls up as close as it can get to the rear of the house, and a crane lifts pallets of boxes or pieces of furniture and sets them down on the rear deck, from where they are taken inside by workmen. It appears that someone or some business is moving into the building now.”
“This has got to be the place,” Stone said, “by a process of elimination, if nothing else.”
“Except we’re missing the feature we’ve been searching for: the outside elevator.”
“You said they’re moving into the place—maybe they were finished with the elevator. Had to happen sometime.”
“I expect you’re right.”
“Maybe there’s a more permanent elevator on the other side.”
Jim showed him another photo. “The other side is a sheer rock face, nearly three hundred feet above the coastal highway.”
Stone looked at the photo. “This is impossible.”
“More like impossibly expensive.”
“How’s that?”
“The only place they could have an elevator would be inside the face of the cliff.”
“You mean, a vertical shaft cut out of the rock?”
“It’s the only thing I can think of.”
“Who could afford to do that?”
“Maybe somebody who owns his own construction company,” Jim said.
“Can we get plans for the building?”
“They’re on the way.”
40
After sunset, the articulated truc
k and trailer bearing Leo Casselli pulled to a stop at a wide place in the Amalfi coastal road. This led to a sort of canyon large enough to hold a couple of dozen cars.
The rear doors were opened and a set of steps set in place, and Casselli walked down them.
“This way, Don Leonardo,” his minion said. He led the way toward a tall, recently planted hedge that shielded the entrance to the house from sight.
“Very nice,” Casselli said, stroking the hedge like a pet.
“This way, Don Leonardo.” The man opened a heavy steel door, then another of smoked glass. A couple of steps, and they were in the new elevator. “Very good,” Casselli said. “I told the architect I wanted it big enough for a grand piano.”
“The piano is already in place, Don Leonardo. The house is ninety-nine percent ready for use, should you wish to spend the night.”
Casselli pressed the top button, and the elevator rose swiftly.
“First, the lower floor for staff, technical equipment, and kitchens, which are connected to the other floors by a dumbwaiter, then the main-floor living quarters, built to your specifications.”
The elevator came to rest on the main floor, and the doors slid open, directly into a very large living room, which was beautifully furnished with soft furniture and good art.
“It is like the architect’s drawings,” Casselli said. “It is very pleasing to me.”
“Would you like to see the bedrooms?”
“Yes.”
The man led him up a spiral staircase from room to room; each bedroom had a large en suite bath and a sitting room, as well. “And now the master suite,” the man said.
Casselli emerged into a large suite with two bathrooms, two dressing rooms, and a large sitting room with a spectacular view of the sea below. Still more art hung there.
“Your clothes have already been placed in your dressing room, Don Leonardo, as per your instructions.”
