Venetian Blood

by Christine Evelyn Volker

  She continued diagramming money flows, noting transaction sizes, dates, senders, recipients, and respective countries where known. The final page of Brian’s fax included a handwritten note. “I cross-checked the attendance at the banking conference against all the names of people you provided. Need to review, but I think I found a surprise. Hope to send details tomorrow. Ciao.”

  Leslie had seen to it that Brian didn’t last one more day.

  Dressed in her gray pantsuit and low heels, Anna stepped out of the water taxi at the airport and asked for directions to the Guardia di Finanza. The driver pointed to a nondescript white building near the shore.

  She cajoled the lobby guard into allowing her to identify herself without a passport, using her California driver’s license and Treasury Department picture ID. For a moment, she worried if this was a trap to lure her upstairs and arrest her on behalf of US authorities, before jettisoning the thought. She didn’t have to come here to be arrested. That could have happened already.

  A smartly attired receptionist ushered her upstairs into an elegant conference room, its picture window framing the steel-gray expanse of the bay, and brought her a cappuccino. On the opposite wall hung a large mural in the bold, bright colors of St. Mark’s and the lagoon, the puffy cotton clouds above them evoking a fairy tale. Anna took a seat at a sea-green lacquer table, on which a crystal pitcher, some glasses, and a bowl of fruit were assembled like a still life.

  Entering the room, Manfredo Di Tomasso introduced himself and thanked her for coming, saying that they could make use of her information. After a brief discussion, he informed Anna that the agent heading the investigation would take over. She organized Brian’s faxes and while she waited, went over her rough analysis of the account relationships. As she spotted more transfers shifting through multiple accounts, she made notes and drew arrows, finalizing the list of countries where funds either originated or were sent. More could be gained through computer analysis, but that would have to wait.

  Checking her watch, she noted that twenty minutes had passed. These people were hardly the picture of punctuality, she concluded, suspecting it translated into a low ratio of solved cases.

  How rude, Anna was thinking, looking up with a frown as someone cleared his throat.

  Roberto stood at the threshold, dressed in a brown suit and tie, holding a thick notebook.

  La Guardia di Finanza

  Saturday, evening

  She gawked at him. “What are you doing here? Did they call you in for a tax audit?”

  “This is where I happen to work,” he said quietly. He shut the door and slipped into a leather chair at the head of the table, gazing at Anna with a cool air. “I’ve just had to disclose how my video camera was broken. You could have noticed it was aimed at the dining area, not the bedroom. And it wasn’t running.”

  She slumped, recalling the sound of the pantry door slamming.

  “I believe you owe me an apology.”

  “I had no idea. I’m awfully sorry.”

  When she reached for his hand, he pulled back and crossed his arms. “The camera is a tool to trap tax evaders, smugglers, and money launderers with their own words.”

  “So you pretend that you’ll provide them with financial advice and then record what they say?”

  “No different from what your agents do in the United States. You didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”

  “Would you have?”

  “I was ready to. You didn’t trust me enough to wait.”

  “I . . . I thought you were an investment banker getting his kicks. And you were once—a banker, I mean.”

  “Until I found a higher calling.”

  “But you don’t always work undercover?”

  “No, I need to stay active in finance, to be credible.” He opened a pocket in the table and powered up the computer that popped into view. “Shall we get on, then?”

  “One second, please.” Anna looked at Roberto and had to ask. “When we were together on Thursday, was it . . . was it for your job?”

  He gave her a disappointed look. “Who I get close to is my decision—my life.”

  “I see,” she said, hoping he was telling the truth. “Please let me know if I can reimburse you for the camera—”

  “I pay for my own mistake.”

  Anna sipped her coffee, recalling her early training and the repeated warning not to have intimate relationships with coworkers. This is going to be awkward, she thought.

  “Did you hear that Angela was attacked this morning? We saw her before she was rushed to the hospital. There was so much blood. Horrible.” She gnawed at her lip to keep from crying.

  “I heard. Poor woman. I will call Margo later to see how she is. You know Angela did business with Sergio. We are looking into how much.”

  “I have data that should shine a light on that and on the rest of Sergio’s network.”

  “Let’s make sure we understand each other. Niente—nothing—nothing of what we speak can you tell anyone else, even Margo. That includes anything about me.”

  “I didn’t even tell her I was coming here.”

  “Good.” He leaned back in his chair.

  “She knows I’m trying to figure out Sergio’s crimes on my own, with help from my office, because of Detective Biondi. We’re seeking evidence to clear me.”

  “Mannaggia!” He tapped the table after cursing. “Margo talks too much to too many people. We had better get going before someone puts more twos and twos together.” He hit a few computer keys. “We’ve been watching Sergio for a while. Despite owning Banco Saturno and his family wealth and investments, we identified a sizeable gap between his jet-setting lifestyle and his declared income.”

  “At Torcello, you said he could do very well just clipping bond coupons.”

  “And I should share what our hard-fought investigations have discovered? No. I only repeated gossip and what is already in the public domain.”

  “I see.”

  “Sergio wasn’t liquidating assets but adding to them: another yacht in Monaco, his-and-hers 1967 Ferrari Spiders at a second home near Asolo. We suspected him of underreporting the profits from his gallery to evade taxes; the low sales figures did not correspond to the high turnover in artwork. We dug beyond his personal financial statements and the gallery’s by studying warehouse receipts and wire transfers. It was very difficult to establish the value of the art pieces. We couldn’t back into his stated sales. He continued overspending money, so either he somehow tricked us or he was getting money some other way. And it wasn’t from loans.”

  Roberto looked up as a man opened the door and beckoned.

  “Excuse me for a moment.” Anna overheard him saying in Italian, “I didn’t think he was. On the other hand, go ahead and schedule it.”

  Italian tax evasion was something Anna couldn’t pursue from her end. Roberto and his colleagues had just started to scratch the surface. They were heading in the same direction, but coming from different avenues.

  As Roberto took his seat again, he said, “Last week, from our interviews with one of the artists, we found out that Sergio did undervalue much of the artwork.”

  “Azizi Sabodo?”

  He nodded.

  “How long have you been investigating Sergio?”

  “Ten months.”

  “And you notified him?” she asked.

  “We had to, back in December. Twenty-five percent of the Italian economy is underground, and tax audits do happen here. He fought like the devil. He pulled every string he had, and those went very far and very high. Imagine, he was the chairman of CONSOB two decades ago, now a bank president, an art connoisseur, and a philanthropist, plus a member of the Venetian aristocracy, and we have the audacity or the poor judgment to treat him like any other Italian by trying to inspect his books. It was a very nasty fight.”

  So Sergio would have been in the midst of this when he sought me out, she thought. Italian companies and nationals were often in the news
as they paid back taxes and a fine. But a money-laundering trail, leading to underlying criminal activity, was something else entirely. Sergio was a powerful, connected man with no scruples and his back against the wall. She could easily imagine the damage he could inflict.

  “He dragged his feet, but in the end we prevailed, going beyond the financial statements to examine the ledgers for Banco Saturno and his personal bank records in Italy. We interviewed his staff accountant, that type of thing, looking for evidence that he was committing fraud, using the bank itself to fund other enterprises. I went undercover after analyzing his finances, to discover whether his art and extracurricular activities hid something illegal.”

  “What happened?”

  “Last month, we froze the lira account for his gallery. We had seen an abnormally large transfer to a Luxembourg entity, an investment company, a few months before. The gallery account automatically swept funds to two others, one in Frankfurt and the other in Zürich. The Germans won’t freeze the Frankfurt account—not enough evidence, according to their judge—and the Swiss . . . well, it’s all secret there, that’s how they make their money. Sergio was scheduled to come here in two weeks to present my partner with more information on his accounts and businesses.”

  “And you’re thinking others are still running his operation.”

  “Given the size of it, he couldn’t have been acting alone. If there are ill-gotten gains, they sit in someone’s account, and we’ll bring those people to justice. Maybe he was like the mythical Hydra; you chop off its head, two more spring to life, and the organization continues. We will see.”

  “I found a recent transfer after his death that’ll interest you, a large transfer of funds to an account in Panama. Maybe it was preset, but it’s something to check.”

  Roberto looked past Anna at the mural with the church, lagoon, and puffy clouds. When he pushed a button on the console, the cheery image slid behind a wooden panel. In its place was a stark whiteboard map of the world. “This will help.”

  He pulled an assortment of colored markers from a cardboard container, making Anna think of a giant box of Crayola crayons. She remembered her eagerness as a child contemplating the tantalizing array, deciding exactly which hue to choose. Now she was coloring for her freedom.

  “It’ll be easier if you view from here,” Roberto said. “We’ll both use the board.”

  She came and sat beside him. She caught the spicy fragrance of an aftershave or shampoo and thought about Thursday with a pang.

  “What have you brought?” he asked. “Maybe we can piece it all together.”

  “I’m freelancing, Roberto. I asked a coworker in San Francisco to apply algorithms I had created back home to thousands of funds transfers that he gathered from all of Sergio’s US dollar accounts. That included Sergio’s and Liliana’s personal accounts, the gallery account, and Banco Saturno’s. I also focused on the individual accounts of people I’ve met here. These were distilled to roughly three hundred questionable transactions. My boss isn’t even aware of all the implications.”

  “I see. Why did you take this on yourself? Why should you care?” Her mind raced. She could invent a story, which might blow up in her face, or she could tell him everything—about her humiliating affair with Sergio, his threats of blackmail, Biondi’s suspicions. She couldn’t squirm out of this one. Although the Guardia di Finanza was a separate unit, it surely cooperated with local police. Chances are he already knew all about her.

  She gazed through the window for a moment and took a deep breath. A pair of spoonbills careened beneath a copper sun.

  “I met him at the Italian Banking Association conference in Milan in January.”

  “I remember the announcement. You were on the program.”

  “In more ways than one.” She felt herself blushing. “He used our liaison to threaten me with some photographs. Before I left for Venice, I checked his US account activities, and they seemed suspicious. We met at a caffè on the day he was killed. He told me he would return the photos if I did him a ‘favor.’”

  “Which was?”

  “He wanted me to use my position to work connections and tell him anything I could find on his financial activities that the Italian authorities were investigating. I refused. Sneaking into the masked ball that night to try to talk with him again and then lying about it to Biondi were huge mistakes. Besides suspecting me of killing Sergio, Biondi has even accused me of trying to kill Angela! He searched my room today. He has a crazy theory that I hallucinate.”

  “It will not hold up. But you need to stop.”

  “I don’t have a lot of options. Biondi would be happy to arrest me. Both cases could be closed. He can’t forgive me for lying to him in the beginning.”

  “Someone warned you with that cart. If you persist, who knows what will happen? Do you wish to end up like Angela?”

  “It’s my only chance.”

  “Testa dura.” He took a sip of water. “Allora, if we find out something today, will I get you in trouble by contacting your office and officially asking for cooperation if needed?”

  “Do what you have to do to get to the truth. I don’t know what I’ll be going back to—assuming that,” her voice cracked, “Biondi will let me leave the country one day.”

  “He will.”

  “It won’t be to that job in the Treasury Department.”

  “Why not?”

  “My boss fired me. She accused me, if you can believe it, of working with Sergio. I have a history with her, and this provided an opportunity to give me the boot.”

  “Things will improve. We need to hurry. Let’s start.”

  Anna shared the information she had about Le Pont Neuf, the Luxembourg company, along with what she had found on the involvement of Alessandro, Dudley, and Angela with Sergio. She was pleased that she had asked Brian to look back for a full year. Scrutinizing the list of older transfers, she and Roberto focused on the art gallery and other accounts, tracing each route between countries with a different color. They added codes for size and frequency and made notations on the specific account and any counterparties. Soon a tangle of lines strangled the whiteboard map of the world, connecting Dar es Salaam, San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Dongguan, in China’s Guangdong Province, Shanghai, Grand Cayman, Panama, Lima, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and other locations, with Hong Kong sometimes substituting for China. Polo Road had wired US dollars to Sergio’s gallery accounts several times a month.

  “The size of his dollar-denominated gallery sales surprised me,” Anna said. Certainly, foreign purchasers enjoyed more access to and familiarity with the US dollar than the Italian lira, but more likely, this reflected Sergio’s desire to spread his transactions through different countries, making him harder to apprehend.

  “Suspect, if you ask me,” Roberto said.

  “Do you think African tribal art sells particularly well in China?”

  Roberto got on the phone and muttered something about documentation history. After accessing a file via the computer, he turned the monitor toward her. The image of a letter of credit totaling a hundred thousand dollars, issued by the Banco Saturno branch in Dar es Salaam for ten wooden shields shipped directly to Dongguan, flickered on the screen. Anna noted the Banco Saturno logo, a Roman temple.

  A letter of credit, used in large part for trading between exporters and importers, was a conditional guarantee of payment. The bank decided to pay based on the documents submitted and the terms; the merchandise was not inspected. Roberto selected another file that indicated the export of Tanzanian wall hangings bound for Palermo, Sicily. “We assume they were loaded onto trucks and brought here,” he said.

  “But why have a bank branch in Dar es Salaam in the first place?” Anna asked. “Did Sergio do that much business there?”

  “His export company there sent thirty million dollars a year in letter-of-credit volume through that branch.”

  “That’s a lot of artwork.”

  “Yes. Maybe Serg
io was not misappropriating bank funds per se, but was using the bank in a corrupt way,” Roberto said. “He had to pay various tribes for the art. A letter of credit made his exports look proper, as if he had nothing to hide.”

  “Shall we contrast last year’s network against the most recent?” A fleeting thought about the dark Yacana crossed Anna’s mind. She told herself to concentrate on what was missing, not what was present.

  “Of course.”

  When she posted and summarized the transactions from 1992, the web was smaller. “There’s the dividing line,” she said, circling the activity in the previous December. China had dropped off the map of gallery transactions. Sergio and Liliana’s personal account transfers went from fifteen to five regular counterparties. Banco Saturno’s US dollar accounts with brokerages and commodity and foreign-exchange traders remained the same, however, and activity with Angela’s gallery in Texas continued.

  “Cazzo. He switched methods once we started investigating him,” Roberto said, nodding. “Before that, everything was visible, very bold. But this year, instead of settling via the New York account in dollars, he used other currencies, or secret accounts in countries like Liechtenstein. We can’t get bank information from them, either.”

  “Did anything revert back to Italian lira accounts, like payments to or from Alessandro or Dudley?”

  “Nothing very recent with Alessandro Favier. The Filberts’ one account in Italy had no connection with Sergio. They must have stopped making local investments with him.”

  “But Sergio put twenty-five thousand dollars a month into Dudley’s US account until two months ago,” Anna said. “And look at this.”

  She showed Roberto a page of the fax from Brian; after drilling into Polo Road’s bank accounts in New York, additional data showed the company had been making payments directly to a Shanghai company. “Polo Road specializes in African tribal art. Let’s say Sergio combined his legal gallery business with something illegal to yield more money.”

  “Right, the old trick of blending the sources of funds. We are to think New York imported African art from China? Ha!” Roberto’s eyes flashed. “We have already found a line of artwork leading from Tanzania to Dongguan to Shanghai and New York. It’s trafficking in animal contraband, Anna. Ivory, rhino horn, and animal parts are hidden in the art from Africa, and then the art is reshipped with the finished illegal products.”