David Wolf 01 - Foreign Deceit

by Jeff Carson

  Wolf looked at the two men. “Why didn’t you guys call me in yesterday when Julie and Chris came in?”

  Rachette’s eyes went wide. “I did call you, I—“

  Burton interjected. “I told him to leave you be. Your mother called here looking for you, and she was so upset I made her tell me what the matter was. There was no way we were going to bring you back into the station.”

  Wolf sighed and nodded. He shook Burton’s hand and walked out of the office with Rachette on his heels.

  Chapter 11 - Wednesday

  Wolf was jolted awake by the ping of the seatbelt sign and a loud voice in Italian over the Boeing 777’s intercom. He was in Milan. Milano. He looked out the window and saw green fields and countless red roofed buildings. Anything tall enough to be hit by an aircraft was painted in a red and white candy cane striping.

  While in the army, he’d been stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington, never serving any missions in Europe. His experience of foreign cultures was all much further east of the Prime Meridian or south—The Middle East, China, Vietnam, Laos, The Philippines, Central and South America. And when he was in another culture, it was usually on missions, taking in the sights through the scope of a gun. Ever since his final day as an Army Ranger ten years ago, he hadn’t set foot outside the United States, so it was safe to say he had no clue what to expect in Italy.

  He’d seen the pictures on his brother’s blog, read a few of his posts about life there, but he really didn’t have a sense of what he was getting into at all. For him, the word Italy conjured up thoughts of pizza, spaghetti, meatballs, and calzones. Food. Mario and Luigi.

  The plane came to a halt at the Lufthansa gate at Malpensa International Airport.

  “Ciao,” a pretty dark haired flight attendent said to Wolf as he stepped off the plane. The air was warm and startlingly humid inside the jet bridge, and his skin drank the moisture like a dry sponge.

  As he reached the main terminal, the air was still thick, and whatever was in the air, probably smog, tickled his throat. Looking out the terminal window past the docked planes revealed a flat landscape with a dense hazy sky. Any direction he looked seemed to present the same thick copse of deciduous trees beyond the airport. He knew the Alps were close by. He’d gotten a good look at the Matterhorn before the rough dive into Milan, but the Alps hid behind a veil at the moment. His mental compass was spinning. At home it was easy. Rocky Points had the Rocky Points to the west, and Denver had the towering mountains to the west. Gauging direction without landmarks was proving difficult, and his inability to get his bearings exacerbated his uneasiness.

  A sea of people chattered all around him in a language he had little experience with other than one semester class in high school before he changed to Spanish. Everyone was using the same voice intonations along with the same hand gestures. Grandiose was the word that came to his mind when he watched the people around him.

  Passing through the customs line, the officer asked him why he was in the country.

  “Vacation,” he said. No sense causing any confusion.

  The customs officer said something else to him, looked at him with an expectant look, then shooed him onward. Wolf walked on, into a vast terminal, coming up blank when he tried to figure out what was just said. The language resembled Spanish in many ways, but was spoken in such a rapid staccato, he had no chance of picking out a single word.

  Signs throughout the airport were in Italian with English underneath. He concentrated on listening to the people around him, listening for other English speakers, and heard none. He thought back on the phone calls and how difficult it was to communicate with the few people he’d spoken to.

  What was he expecting here? Sure, he was getting John’s body and bringing it home, but he had much larger aspirations for this trip. How the hell was this going to go down?

  He set out to find the train.

  Chapter 12

  The next two hours were an exercise of faith and following the poor directions from Maggiore Rossi of the Lecco Carabinieri. Not once was he completely sure he was on the right train or going in the right direction. The train app he’d gotten for his iPhone was rendered useless the moment he stepped off the plane, as he didn’t have an Italian SIM card for his phone. The sky outside was a dull gray, no shadows. Coupled with the flat landscape and towering buildings everywhere, there was still no way to get a bearing on direction.

  Two trains later, however, he was reasonably sure he was on the right route. Twice he caught a glimpse of the word Lecco on signs, and the Alps finally came into view amid the haze ahead, indicating he was at least heading north. The train stopped often, slowly weaving its way into the green hills. A large slow moving river flitted into view on the left hand side. There were boats pulled up along the shore on the dry riverbank, looking like the water line was a few feet lower than it had been in the recent past. Still, the amount of water sliding by looked to be more than a few of the largest Colorado rivers combined.

  Brightly painted buildings of sorbet orange, sky blue, purple, lime yellow, and other electric shades were everywhere; next to the river, halfway up the steep inclined hills, even directly on top of the mountain peaks. Nature was choked out by thousands of years of settlement, but the foliage was rampant at the same time. It was thick, dense, wiry and thorny. Grass grew in feet, not inches.

  Vibrant shades of painted stucco gave way to a consistent powdery gray stone color as the train continued north. Each roof on the thousands of buildings of all shapes and sizes was topped with the same tangerine-hue clay tile.

  Moving steadily north, the gaping river widened into small lakes, then narrowed into a tighter bottleneck before ultimately opening up into a gigantic body of water.

  Towering steep mountains, densely green with deciduous trees, and chalk-white cliffs lined both sides. Straight ahead, the lake continued until it faded out of sight in the muggy air.

  He recognized it as Lake Como, thanks to Google. The lake was one of the deepest in Europe, and looking at the steep mountains that dove straight into it, it wasn’t hard to imagine.

  The train arrived in the city of Lecco, where his brother had lived for the last five months. Wolf recalled his study of Google Maps from the other night. Lecco sat on the geographical lower right tip of the lake, which was in the shape of an enormous upside down “Y.” They were on the southeastern tip, and the northernmost end was somewhere far ahead.

  He was to get off at the train station and wait for his contact to find him. Wolf looked at the “No Service” indicator on his phone and hoped to God they held up their end of the bargain.

  …

  Wolf sat on a steel bench that was riddled with graffiti and thought about SIM cards for cell phones. Wolf looked around and came up with zero ideas as to where to get one. Maybe he would just settle for an internet connection and Skype. A Carabinieri officer would help, he assured himself.

  Thirty-five minutes later, Wolf was thinking he would need to begin walking, somewhere, when a smartly uniformed officer approached him.

  “David Wolf?” The Carabinieri officer was on a cell phone call, and pulled it a few centimeters from his ear.

  “Yes.” Wolf said.

  The officer was no older than twenty-five, dressed in a dark blue, sharp-looking uniform that had a red stripe down the leg, with a shiny white leather belt from which hung a Beretta. He held a shiny-billed military style hat in his left hand, and his cell phone in the right.

  “I am Tenente Langoria,” he said not offering a shake, since both hands were full. “You may call me Tito.” Tenente Tito put the phone back to his ear and waved Wolf to follow.

  Wolf thought back on the frustrating phone conversation he’d had with Tito, and resisted the urge to drop kick him.

  Wolf followed dutifully and studied the young man. Tito’s hair glistened in the sun as they stepped out of the station—hat still tucked under his arm. His sideburns were shaven to a precise point halfway down the sides of his face
, and a pencil thin goatee was etched on the skin around his mouth. It looked like it took him well over an hour to get ready in the morning.

  Wolf felt his own hair. It was a greasy mat that left his fingers slick. Then he pulled his hand over the sandpaper stubble on his face, and decided to take his mother’s advice and not pass judgment on others.

  Tito continued an animated conversation on the phone, bending to plead at the ground and standing straight to yell at the sky as he did so. It was a painfully slow march down the street, but they finally reached and stopped at his sleek Alfa Romeo Caribinieri cruiser. It had a V-configuration of three cylindrical lights on top and was painted a shiny jet-black with white stripe. Wolf couldn’t shake the impression of a thoroughbred horse stuck in a stable while it yearned to run freely in a pasture. Had John been trying to break free of something … or someone … before he died? Wolf’s reverie ended abruptly as Tito clicked open the vehicle’s locks, all the while continuing his conversation. Wolf plopped his bag on the back seat and slid onto the warm leather passenger seat. The interior was nice, equipped with what looked to be a top-of-the-line dash computer mounted in the center between the bucket seats.

  Tito fired up the engine with a roar and pulled out of his parking spot with a jolt. A car screeched to a halt behind them and leaned on the horn for a few seconds. Tito merely glanced in his rear view mirror while he spoke and peeled down the street.

  The leather seat creaked under Wolf as he was pulled back from the acceleration. With reflex speed, he reached for the seatbelt and put it on.

  Ten minutes later, and three near collisions that Tito had no awareness had ever happened, and two pedestrians that were lucky to still be alive, they reached their destination. Tito pulled into a parking lot that was behind an old gray building, and parked.

  The building stood near the shore of the lake. It was square and gray, rising a few floors up from the ground, reminding Wolf of any number of communist era buildings he’d seen throughout the world.

  Wolf stepped out of the car and pulled his bag from the back seat. A damp breeze came off the lake, smelling vaguely of fish, and the air was clearer than it had been just a few miles away, on the train. There was a line of crisscrossing sails in the distance moving at high speed—kite surfers and sailboarders.

  They walked the short distance to the back of the building and entered through a thick metal door set in marble.

  Wolf almost gagged as the spicy odor of human sweat filled his nose and mouth. They appeared to have just entered hell, or at least the waiting room for it.

  People were everywhere inside the large room, apparently waiting for something – something that didn’t seem to be coming nearly fast enough. People from places south or east of Italy, if Wolf had to guess, leaned up against the cracked and dirty yellow walls. They all had stacks of paper in their hand. To the right was a swarm of people outside another smaller room, which inside, was filled to the point of spilling out to the larger room Wolf and Tito had just entered. An infant shrieked from within, and not a soul spoke to one another.

  The artwork hung on the walls was a collection of black and white pictures of various buildings in rubble, as if after an earthquake or an aerial shelling. Wolf wondered what kind of sado-masochist was in charge of the décor of this place.

  Across the vast room was another entrance with a metal detector. An armed Caribinieri officer interrogated an Asian couple with a baby, while people streamed in behind them tripping the alarm. No one of authority seemed to care about the blinking light and incessant beeping, so Wolf guessed he shouldn’t either.

  Directly above them was an immense vaulted ceiling and a spiral stone stairway to the left corkscrewed to the upper levels.

  The room’s collective impatience and despair was a palpable force, and Wolf prayed they were going up. To his relief, Tito was already halfway up the first flight, wrapping up his phone conversation and waving to Wolf.

  …

  They climbed two flights of marble stairs and entered into a light and airy large room with numerous desks and people in uniform. The windows of the great room offered an unobstructed view of the lake, and were all propped ajar letting in the pleasant breeze, which carried mouthwatering aromas Wolf couldn’t put his finger on.

  Tito stopped and looked to his right. He sucked in a deep breath and pulled down his uniform jacket with both hands, as if to steel himself for what he was to do next.

  Wolf followed his eyes. He was staring at a door, with the words Colonnello Marino painted in black on the frosted glass. Someone inside the office was yelling, and the deep voice seemed to shake the door.

  Tito finally stepped to it and knocked gingerly.

  “Dai!” The voice boomed.

  Tito poked his head in and then entered, opening the door to let Wolf in behind him. Colonnello Marino had a phone up to his ear, staring toward the windows, which dominated one wall. He waved his hand at two chairs against the wall without looking at his visitors.

  The man that was apparently Colonnello Marino yelled loudly in rapid Italian, slamming his fist into his leg. Tito squirmed in his chair and his face drained white. Wolf noted the sweat beading on Tito’s forehead and sliding down his perfectly manicured hairline.

  Marino finished his conversation and twisted in his chair. Tito flinched, and Marino held up a finger to them, still not resting his eyes on his new visitors. Colonnello Marino pushed his finger on the plunger of the phone, then dialed a number and twisted to the window again.

  Wolf watched Marino bounce his head, speak in pleasant tones, laugh heartily, hand gesture animatedly, and mumble niceties into the phone for another few minutes. He was beginning to wonder if anyone spoke to one another without the aid of a telephone in this country. Wolf checked his watch, which showed 7 o’clock a.m. Colorado-time.

  Marino swiveled back to the phone again and Wolf noted that seven minutes had passed. The Colonnello brought his non-phone hand to the ancient rotary, pressed the switch again, then dialed another number and held up a finger as he swiveled slowly toward the window.

  “Excuse me,” Wolf said. “I’ve come a long way and would like to speak to you about my brother.”

  Colonnello Marino pulled the handset from his ear and glared at Wolf. After a moment his face broke into a sympathetic smile. “Ah, yes. Mr. Wolf. I am sorry about your brother. And I am sorry about my English. It is terrible.” It was terrible; Wolf was having trouble making out the words.

  Marino gently hung up the phone, and then launched into a hurried monologue to Tito in Italian.

  In turn, Tito translated for Wolf.

  “He says he is waiting for final authorization to release your brother’s remains. It should be in the next two days. You will be allowed to transport his body at that time.”

  Colonnello Marino folded his hands and leaned forward on his desk with a sympathetic expression.

  “Okay, thank you,” Wolf said. “I spoke with a Detective Rossi on the phone earlier in the week. As I told him, and as I’m sure you are aware, I am a police officer in the United States. I do not question the Caribinieri’s resources or integrity. I hope you will understand my desire to learn all that I can during my short visit. I respectfully request permission to see my brother’s body, review the police report, and speak to the investigating officers. And, of course, I will need access to his apartment to retrieve personal items.”

  Tito conveyed Wolf’s request to Colonello Marino. Tito used far less words, leaving Wolf to wonder about Tito’s translating ability. Nonetheless, Wolf nodded as Tito spoke, watching the Colonello’s reaction closely.

  When Tito was finished, the Colonnello smiled at Wolf and lit a cigarette in a practiced flourish. He pulled a deep drag and spoke his exhale, “Mister Wolf. I understand your concern with your brother’s death,” he said in nearly unrecognizable English.

  Marino placed his cigarette on the lip of his ashtray, and a smooth stream of smoke rose in front of him, undisturbed
in the hot, still office.

  Wolf glanced at the large window and wondered why it wasn’t open.

  “I can give you Tito for a day. He’ll go with you tomorrow to see your brother,” Marino nodded, picked up his rotary phone and dialed a phone number. He plucked his cigarette, swiveled to the window, and spoke jovially into the receiver.

  Obviously relieved, Tito stood and opened the office door, where he turned and awaited Wolf.

  Wolf sat for a few seconds. Then he walked to Colonnello Marino’s desk and pressed the phone switch.

  Colonnello Marino looked at the handset as he processed what had just happened. Realizing Wolf had disconnected the call, Colonnello Marino’s gaze rose to Wolf’s face, fell to Wolf’s finger, and then rose again to his face. He made no effort to disguise his anger.

  Wolf stood his ground, leaving his finger in place on the phone. “I need more than Tito for a day. I need to see my brother, I need to see the police report, my brother’s apartment, and to speak to the officers who discovered the body,” Wolf said.

  Marino’s face brightened to a glistening tomato-red in a matter of seconds. “You don’t tell ME what to do!” He then snapped a quick order to Tito, who relayed the message in a loud voice to the room outside.

  An instant later, two officers slammed into the office, each taking one of Wolf’s arms and wrenching them back. Then one of them kicked the back of his knees, landing him hard on the tile floor. A third showed up and wrapped him in a chokehold, pulling him up to his feet. Wolf fought his instincts to free himself or fight back and stared at Marino.

  “You want to tell us how to investigate? American Cowboy?” Marino taunted loudly. Wolf could hear a group gathering in the office doorway behind him, officers shuffling to get in on the action.

  “Sir,” Wolf coughed, struggling to breathe. “No sir.”