by Robert Ryan
Francesca was waiting at the front desk. She had clearly been giving the clerk a hard time, because he seemed more pleased to see me than she was. ‘Mr Kirby, at last,’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’
I leered at the clerk. ‘I need a decent cup of coffee.’ That told him.
As we walked to her Alfa, she asked: ‘How are you?’
‘Spooked.’
‘You stood me up the other night. I thought you were coming to the dinner.’
‘I wasn’t in the mood.’
‘Me neither. I left early.’
‘How did you know where—’
‘I called your hotel, then the airfield, who put me through to Furio, who told me about the body in the plane and the arrests. They treat you OK?’
‘As well as the Secret Service can treat you.’
‘Secret …? What the hell were they doing here?’
‘You’re the lawyer, so it seems. You never mentioned that in your curriculum vitae.’
She climbed behind the wheel while I folded myself stiffly into the passenger side. She gunned the engine in the way that is hard to resist in an Alfa sports and spun out of the questura car park, heading north.
‘Things happened while you were away. I became an advocate. I am mostly corporate, not criminal. I work for the Hope Foundation as well. Most of what I did back there,’ she indicated the police station with her thumb, ‘was bluster and the name-dropping of Riccardo’s more influential friends. But I am qualified. You thought I had become a little housewife with a rich husband? All tennis and tanning?’ She raised an eyebrow and one corner of her mouth, which dimpled her cheek in a way that melted my heart.
‘I never thought you were a little anything, Lieutenant.’
She gave me a cold look. Nobody had called her that in quite some time, and maybe it no longer sat comfortably, but I still remembered her getting ready to die behind a line of sandbags, Stens, Colts and Berettas against tanks. In the end, it didn’t come to that. Once again, the priests went to work and the survivors of Gruppo Fausto had negotiated a safe passage to Lake Orta and avoided imprisonment and execution. The fascists, with the eyes of the Swiss Red Cross on them, had kept to their word for once.
We skirted the lake, its water glistening in the late-afternoon sunshine, the nearby islands with their vast terraced gardens and opulent palaces looking serene and peaceful. The Borromeans. The islands were named after the wealthy Milanese dynasty which had owned the fishing rights in the lake for four centuries. They still did, providing a nice steady family income.
‘You look worried.’
‘Well, it’s not every day you find a corpse in your plane. Especially one you thought deserved to die anyway.’
‘Nino? It was a long time ago, Jack.’
Maybe, but the man had killed her lover. I would be surprised if she could dismiss it like that. A thought came to mind—maybe she was part of a Gruppo Fausto revenge pact—but I quickly dismissed it. Instead, I repeated what Lindy had said. ‘But not that far away.’
‘No. Not far away at all.’
She squealed the tyres on a hairpin, and I felt the back of the car break away and fishtail. I held the dash as surreptitiously as I could. As she caught the drift with a flick of the polished wooden steering wheel, she noticed and smiled. ‘Relax.’ We drove through Stresa, its piazzas now full of tourist cafés and Coca Cola hoardings and handwritten Wir sprechen Deutsch signs dangling on door-handles. Some people could forgive and forget, especially when the customer was paying with Deutschmarks. Perhaps, like them, Francesca had successfully consigned Fausto and his war to the distant past. Maybe Lindy and I should take a leaf from that book and walk away.
‘Where’s your villa?’
‘Back there.’ She indicated the shoreline to the south. ‘Riccardo is at home, otherwise …’
‘Sure.’ I was still fairly certain that the three who beat me up had been Riccardo’s lads, and the incident was a response to my few hours alone with Mrs Conti at San Marco. It was a nice kiss, but the final bill was a little hefty. Still, that seemed par for the course with Francesca.
We crossed the bridge over the eastern reaches of the lake and turned left towards Domodossola. ‘I’m that way,’ I said, pointing to the right.
‘Like I said, relax.’
The wheels locked as she braked hard and spun us onto a small side turning between a couple of neglected vineyards, kicking up stones and a spray of grit. ‘Oops, nearly missed it.’ We began to climb through a series of switchbacks, past flinty rockfaces covered in moss, a spring gushing out of the earth every ten yards or so. The air was dank and refreshing against my face, the sky occasionally shrinking to a long gash high above us as we plunged into a gorge. I did as she suggested and tried to enjoy the ride without thinking too much.
‘Plant pots,’ she said after a while.
‘Sorry?’
She indicated the shape of Mount Rosa over to the west. ‘Look at the sides.’
There were several big scars disfiguring its slopes, what must be massive scoops close up, although from a distance they looked like the fingermarks on the side of a kid’s sandcastle. ‘They take out the granite to make plant pots and chopping boards and what do you call them … kitchen worktops. They think the mountain is infinite. Already it is changing profile. In thirty years, it will look like an apple core.’
‘Who does it?’
She smiled, full of sadness. ‘Oh, one of my husband’s subsidiaries.’
There was little traffic and she danced the car through the turns and over the bridges that spanned the deep crevices sliced into the mountainsides. I couldn’t help thinking how much more fun it would be on a good racing motorcycle.
There were villages huddled around their belltowers every few kilometres, but they seemed moribund, with all the gaiety of the graveyard. Not so much as a café was open. There was the occasional black-clad crone sitting in a doorway, who either stared at us impassively or raised a hand in silent welcome, albeit without much enthusiasm. Dogs yapped at us or hurled themselves through the air until caught short by their wire, snarling after us as if their tethering was our doing. The few men we saw were chopping wood, stacking willow branches ready for drying, digging drainage ditches, all too busy to pay us much attention. It didn’t look like I was going to get my coffee. I doubted we were going to come across many Wir sprechen Deutsch signs in this neck of the woods.
Ahead of us, I could see the tooth-like guardians of the Val Grande, getting closer. We were on the opposite side of the area from where we had laid out the drop zone for EH-148. This was the scrubbier end of the region, where the trees barely covered the lower slopes of the mountains. Only walkers and naturalists came up here. What were we doing here, apart from admiring the view?
A thought suddenly occurred to me. Perhaps Francesca knew where the Liberator was.
We pulled over onto a rough verge dotted with stunted olive and fig trees, the remnants of an attempt to make this land productive. We were within walking distance of the ridge called the Corni di Nibbio, marking the place where two glaciers had collided and created a long knife-edge from the earth. Over the aeons, wind and rain had flattened the top, leaving a long, natural viewing platform. As I stretched my limbs, grateful for fresh clean air, not to mention freedom, Francesca swapped her lawyer’s shoes for something more sturdy, took a small pack from the boot of the Alfa, slung it over her shoulder and signalled we climb, following a zig-zag stone path up towards the ledge. She moved with a confident grace, her feet finding solid ground each time. I simply followed in her footsteps. At the top, she indicated a rocky outcrop and sat, cross-legged.
The shadows were lengthening, and much of the vista below us was in shade from the mountains. I could see the rapids and waterfalls of the Val Grande River quite clearly; some of the upper alpine meadows, dotted with dilapidated baiti and rifugi—wooden cabins and stone huts—were still glowing in the afternoon sunshine. Immediately below us were overgrown stone ra
mparts, one of the chain of forts built across this wilderness in World War One, in anticipation of an Austro-German attack on Italy through Switzerland which never came; the Austrians had struck further east. There had been dozens of these strongholds, some high on vantage-points, other cleverly carved from the rock and moulded into the cliff, hard to spot until you stumbled on them. These latter were now slowly crumbling back into the landscape, and were even more difficult to locate.
From her pack, Francesca took a silver screw-top flask and poured me a cup of inky black coffee. Still standing, I reached down, took it and sipped. ‘Thanks. I needed that.’
She poured herself one and gripped it two-handed as she gazed into the distance. From somewhere far away came the faint sounds of an Italian autumn, the flat crack of a shotgun, the snapping of a pruning hook on wood. This was the time of grape-picking, vine-stripping, fruit-squeezing, hare-hunting, mushroom-gathering and olive-pressing, and even up here, the air held the tang of woodsmoke. Like everywhere else in Europe, Italy was losing its seasonal rhythms to the artificiality of modern life, but the battle was not yet lost.
‘You think the plane is out there?’ she asked.
‘I was hoping you would tell me,’ I said.
She did a good imitation, if that’s what it was, of surprise. ‘I have no idea. Why should I know?’
‘I’m clutching at straws.’
‘So is your friend. That poor girl. So much riding on the search.’
‘You think I shouldn’t do it?’
‘Unless you can guarantee results.’
‘That’s going to be difficult without my Beech.’ She looked up quizzically. ‘It’s a murder scene. Or at least a crime scene—Nino was probably killed elsewhere.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘The plane’s cabin interior is pretty clean. If they’d shot him in there … well, you know.’
She nodded to show I didn’t have to paint a picture of splatter marks, and poured herself a second cup from the flask. She knew exactly how much mess a gunshot wound to the head can make. ‘Can you get another plane?’
‘I could,’ I said without much enthusiasm. If I was going to fly between those peaks, skimming the vegetation, and riding the eddies and vortices that played like mischievous sprites across the Alps and their foothills, I wanted to be in a plane I knew instinctively, one I felt at home in, a ride that was good and steady like the Beech. ‘Francesca, why are we here? It’s a nice view, good coffee, fine company but—’ I plucked at my shirt and wrinkled my nose. ‘A shower would have been nice first.’
‘I need you to listen to me.’
I crouched down on my haunches, finished the coffee, threw the dregs into the grass, and handed the cup back for a refill. ‘I’m all ears.’
She pointed north-west, beyond the mountain known as Pedun. ‘When we were out there that night, you didn’t miss the plane.’
I shook my head in sadness. She was trying to assuage my guilt. A kind but misguided gesture. ‘No matter how you look at it, I was somewhat distracted.’
‘Maybe. But I didn’t have your full attention.’
‘It felt like it.’
‘You think I don’t know if a man is fully engaged with me?’ She handed the full cup back. ‘You picked up the first sounds of the engine, I am certain.’
‘Are you trying to make me feel better after all this time?’
‘If you’d come back earlier, I might have told you the truth.’
I wasn’t certain what she was talking about, so I said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth back then?’
‘During the war? Orders. I was a lieutenant, remember? Fausto’s lieutenant.’
I suddenly felt cold. A wind had appeared, blowing from the north, off the glaciers we could see as white waves over the Swiss border. I zipped up my jacket. ‘What is the truth of it, Francesca?’
She reached up and pulled her hair back, expertly knotting it, a little distraction so she didn’t have to look me in the eye. ‘That it wasn’t your fault. Fausto and the others … they never lit their beacons at all. You were the only one who did. If the plane crashed because of anyone, it was because of Fausto.’
Twenty-Three
I WASN’T SURE WHERE the next few hours went after Francesca took me to that ridge and kicked the ground from beneath me. I couldn’t recall being dropped off by her at the Hotel Cannero, nor saying goodbye to her. I lay on my bed in shock for what seemed like five minutes, but was probably much longer.
From the hotel, I made calls to check that Furio and Lindy were OK, and I explained why we couldn’t fly, and wouldn’t be able to for the foreseeable future. I offered to return Lindy her money, to call the whole thing off, but she refused, which was good, because I no longer had it. I even suggested she find herself another pilot, but she gave me a ‘we’re all in this together’ speech and suggested she come over and get me drunk.
It was tempting, but I was a grown-up now, and I told her I could manage that part all by myself.
I didn’t. I went down to the bar and shocked Maria by ordering a Coca Cola and asking for a pen and paper. I doodled for half an hour, writing down names, putting a line through them, or question marks.
Why would Fausto sabotage the drop of supplies? I had asked Francesca that question.
He wanted the supplies, she had answered, but he didn’t want the man. He was gambling that, without flares, they would drop the canisters blind; it wouldn’t be the first time. He’d take a chance on finding them. Supplies were one thing, but the Liberator crew would never turf out a senior BLO into a dark and stormy night with no DZ. There was a good chance, then, that Fausto and his group would get a result—the ordnance they wanted, without the interfering Englishman. If someone tried to infiltrate him over the Alps later, well, they’d deal with that at the time.
That was why they hadn’t wanted me along that night, but I’d insisted. So they did the next best thing—put me to the south with Francesca, where I couldn’t see that their flares weren’t lit.
Here was the big question, the one I was too cowardly to ask. Was that whole business out in the ferns with Francesca her way of distracting me, of trying to stop me lighting my flare? If it was, it didn’t succeed. I’d snapped out of it in time to get my signal going. In a way, though, it would have been better if her ploy had worked—the one single source had obviously confused the pilot enough for him to come round for a second view. If it had been all dark, he might well have dumped the canisters and headed on back. Whichever way you added it up, it was my stupid fault that those men on the Liberator had died. I drew nine little black crosses along the bottom of the sheet.
When I ran out of paper and searched my jacket pockets, I found the envelope Zopatti had given me. Before opening it I looked around, unable to shake the feeling of being watched. All I could see close by were the two ancient women who apparently came every season, wrinkled biddies sipping negronis. I somehow doubted they were SISDe plants.
I slit open the envelope and took out the three pages within. They had been torn from catalogues, one of them French, one English, the other, with prices quoted in dollars, probably American. I’d like to pretend I recognised the items that were circled in red pen right away, but I had to read the inscriptions. A rock-crystal flask, with gold crucifix, a reliquary which, the description said, was inlaid with precious stones and enamels, and a liturgical ivory comb. The reserves on all three were in the thousands of dollars, pounds and francs. What was a reliquary? I had no idea. I folded the pages and put them away, and helped myself to a Scotch from behind the bar. I might not have a clue, but I knew a skydiver who did.
For someone like me, who was used to the dark satanic motorcycle factories of the British Midlands, Moto Guzzi came as something of a shock. Situated at Mandello del Lario in a series of tall, mustard-coloured, flat-fronted buildings, it backed onto a huge concourse which overlooked Lake Como, a place even more breathtaking than Maggiore. This was a part of the earth wher
e, it seemed, God got the combination of water, mountains and sky just right.
Before going to Milan, I took a very expensive cab across to see Ragno at MG. He was on the third floor, a big empty space with makeshift offices around two walls; there was a gleaming red Stornello bike at one end and a gold Falcon at the other, both in Perspex cases. In the centre of the room stood a wooden packing crate, bound with wire stays, and next to it, a machine under a thick green shroud.
Ragno was sipping coffee, looking out of the window; he was dressed in his best overalls, a variety of tools in the top pocket. When I stepped from the freight elevator, he threw his arms open and walked towards me, ready for a hug.
‘Ribs still not good,’ I warned him.
He settled for shaking my hand. ‘Nino?’
I sighed. ‘It wasn’t me.’
‘It wasn’t me either.’ He laughed. ‘But part of me wishes—’
‘Don’t even think it. There’s the cold clammy hand of SISDe on this.’
He blanched. ‘Shit. Why?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the problem with the Secret Service. They don’t like sharing information.’
‘You enjoy the ceremony?’
I made a non-committal gesture. ‘Enjoy? Can you enjoy such a thing?’
‘I still miss him.’
‘Fausto?’
A nod. ‘You know my father had been shot by the fascists. I was an orphan. Fausto took me in, trained me, gave me a gun. Everyone else said I was too young, couldn’t be trusted. And I was just a kid. But I would have died for that man.’
In the absence of anything to say, I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. Then I changed the subject, like an emotionally stunted Englishman should. ‘Is this it?’
I pointed at the crate and he beamed. ‘Yes.’
Ragno pulled out wire-cutters, clipped the stays, and yanked away the wooden sides and the big foam slabs of packing. Underneath was a Kirby CrossCountry, the motorbike I had ridden round the IOM mountain course. Apart from a thin tear of oil from the crankcase, it was as good as new. Ragno had arranged for the Moto Guzzi delivery people to pick it up on a run to the UK. I pulled away some more packing material. Spare tyres, big diamond-studded Avons for off-road work. Thanks, Dad.
