The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  There was the briefest of pauses before Pownall said, “Of course.”

  “Good. I’ll see you in about twenty minutes.”

  The peace camp was about five minutes’ walk, on a piece of waste ground to the north: half a dozen old Portakabins clustered around three marquees decked with rainbow flags and “No Dal Molin” banners. Going into the largest tent, Piola found the usual detritus of a long-running protest – a makeshift stage, posters, an industrial-sized cooking pot being stirred by a brawny woman with a stud through her nose. But it was also well swept and neat, with bins marked for every imaginable kind of recycling. Tables that looked as if they’d been liberated from a school or college held laptops, printers and tangles of wiring. Despite the earliness of the hour, half a dozen people were gathered around one of the computers.

  “Good morning,” he said to no one in particular. Faces turned towards him warily. “I’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge.”

  “No one’s in charge.” The voice belonged to a ponytailed man of about thirty with a girl sitting on his lap.

  “Then I’ll talk to you,” Piola said. “Your name?”

  The man scratched his ear, revealing a faded Betty Boop tattoo on his forearm. “First things first. Before I say anything, I need to see your ID, Colonel. In case you’ve forgotten, you work for us, not the other way round.” A couple of the onlookers grinned.

  Piola doubted the ponytailed man had ever contributed much by way of taxes to the running costs of the Carabinieri, but he inclined his head courteously and took out his wallet. “Certainly.”

  The man pushed the girl off his lap and carefully copied the details of Piola’s ID into a logbook before producing his own. It showed that his name was Ettore Mazzanti, and that he was a student, aged thirty-two.

  “Quite old to still be studying,” Piola commented.

  “I’m writing a PhD. On the erosion of civil liberties by the police.”

  Piola chose to ignore that. “I take it you were part of last night’s protest?”

  “I was.”

  “Would you mind telling me what it was about?”

  Mazzanti reached for a folder. “Read it for yourself, Colonel. Our mission statement, timetable, a list of objectives, and statements of intent from all participants. Oh, and photographs of each of us showing that we were sound and unbruised before we went in.”

  Piola took the folder and looked through it. It was all just as Mazzanti described. There was even a letter from a firm of lawyers arguing that the break-in fell within the category of democratic protest on public land. “May I keep this?” he said, impressed despite himself. To have documented their action so thoroughly wouldn’t give the demonstrators immunity from prosecution, but it would certainly help if they ever found themselves in court. He couldn’t remember when he’d come across a protest group as well organised as Azione Dal Molin appeared to be.

  “Colonel Piola!”

  Piola glanced over his shoulder. A man of about forty with a mop of curly grey hair was advancing towards him. Piola couldn’t quite place him, although his manner and use of Piola’s name certainly suggested they’d met.

  “Raffaele Fallici, Lega della Libertà,” the man added.

  Piola knew where he’d seen him now. Not as an acquaintance, but on TV. Fallici was a blogger-turned-politician, a self-styled man of the people who’d come to prominence as part of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. Subsequently setting up his own party, he had a reputation as a demagogue who spoke out against vested interests and corruption. On many occasions he’d also criticised the incompetence of the Carabinieri.

  “I understand you’re investigating the desecration that has occurred here,” Fallici continued.

  “I’m looking into this situation, yes,” Piola said non-committally.

  “Do you have enough resources? Are the authorities treating this with the seriousness it deserves? We must ensure that this unfortunate individual receives the same respect in death that any other Italian citizen would be entitled to.” Fallici half-turned to the room. “To be frank, no one was surprised to discover that those responsible for Dal Molin have been treating human remains with disdain,” he said in a louder voice. “They have been treating all of us, living or dead, with indifference, ever since the people of Vicenza made clear their democratic opposition to this development.”

  Faces nodded, and a few fists punched the air.

  “What can I do for you, Mr Fallici?” Piola asked wearily. The sofa wasn’t the most comfortable of beds, and even before Saito’s pre-dawn call he hadn’t been sleeping particularly well.

  “I just want to be certain due process is being followed,” Fallici said emphatically.

  “Of course.”

  “By which I mean,” he continued as if Piola hadn’t spoken, “that a full survey must be done of the entire site: environmental, archaeological and anthropological, just as was demanded at the outset. Questions that were previously brushed aside by the developers in their indecent haste to get under way will now have to be answered fully.”

  Piola was beginning to see now why the local Carabinieri hadn’t been keen on getting involved, and why Saito had wanted someone experienced on the case – not just to handle the pressure from the Americans, but to take the heat for having done so. The US might have plenty of clout in Rome and Milan, but there were few local votes in appeasing them. The protestors, on the other hand, were clearly a bloc worth courting.

  “It’s still too early to say what investigations will be appropriate, Mr Fallici,” he said. “But rest assured, whatever needs to be done, will be.” To his relief he saw Panicucci heading his way, holding a phone. “Yes, Sottotenente?”

  “It’s General Saito, sir.”

  Piola took the phone and walked outside.

  “Any progress?” Saito’s voice said.

  “Some,” Piola said, wondering what the man expected after just a few hours. “That is to say, it looks as if the protestors had nothing to do with it.”

  “Good. Aldo, I’ve had five calls already about this case, and I haven’t even had breakfast yet. One from the base commander in charge of the Vicenza garrison. One from our own generale di divisione. One from the mayor, and two from government officials in Rome who are so damn important I have absolutely no idea who they are.”

  Piola sighed inwardly. “The issue, as you’re probably aware, is that the consortium are in a hurry to get their men back to work. But first I need to establish how the remains got into the tipper truck. And that would have happened a lot quicker, frankly, if they’d cooperated from the start, instead of trying to pin it on the boy who called it in.” He hesitated. “There’s something else you should know. That politician Raffaele Fallici’s here, talking about environmental surveys, legal challenges…”

  “Oh, that’s to be expected. Where there are votes, there are vultures. We’re caught in the middle, as usual. Keep me updated, won’t you? It would be nice to have some progress to report back to Rome.”

  As Saito rang off, Piola realised it hadn’t been news to him that Fallici would be there. He had the curious feeling that he himself was like an actor at the first rehearsal of a play, being fed his lines one by one, told where to stand and when to move, precisely so that at some later date everyone could point to him and say, “There. See what he did?” But that was often the way of these things – the top brass far more concerned with making sure no one could blame them for some procedural irregularity than actually solving crimes.

  As he got into the car, spreading muddy stains over the carpet, he also realised that, sometime over the course of the morning, he’d managed to mislay that damn hat.

  FOUR

  THE WOMAN SLIPPED out of bed, careful not to wake the sleeping body at her side, and stepped into the bathroom. Scanning the hotel toiletries with a practised eye, she reached for a bottle of shower gel. Bulgari’s Thé Vert, indeed. Her companion certainly hadn’t spared any expense on the room.

&n
bsp; She hadn’t bothered with her clothes, just her phone. Checking the screen, she saw she had four missed calls and a voicemail, all from the same person. She ignored them and turned on the shower.

  When she came out, wrapped in two big towels, the man in the bed was awake. He watched her as she dressed – quickly and efficiently, so unlike the night before, when the same clothes had come off slowly, piece by piece, their progress interrupted by kisses, sweet talk and mouthfuls of prosecco.

  “Good morning, cara,” he said at last, when she sat on the bed to put on her stockings.

  She eased a kitten-heeled shoe over one foot. “Good morning,” she answered just as evenly.

  “I enjoyed last night.”

  “Me too.” Although her words agreed with him, her tone was casual.

  He reached out and ran a hand along her thigh. “Will we do it again?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. It’s difficult for me.” She stood up abruptly. As if unconsciously, she looked down at her left hand. Reaching into a pocket, she took out a wedding ring and slipped it back on.

  “Yes, of course. Your husband. But if you ever find yourself in need of another little adventure…”

  “I’ll get in touch through the website.”

  The man, whose name was Riccardo, said, “I’ll look forward to it. I mean it. That was something really special. And people like you and me… We have to take our fun where we can.”

  She nodded, her hand already on the door handle. “Ciao then, Riccardo.”

  “Ciao, Rita.”

  She passed through the hotel lobby, ignoring the night porter’s polite “Good morning, signora.” When she reached the street she looked at her watch. Still time to go home and change. As she walked through the fog-filled streets she pulled off the wedding ring and put it back in her pocket, then flicked her phone off silent. She was only a hundred metres from her apartment when it rang. Glancing at the screen, she saw it was the same person who’d been calling repeatedly all night.

  Holly B.

  Clearly Holly B wasn’t going to give up. “Pronto,” she said in her most businesslike voice.

  “Kat?”

  “Si, this is Katerina Tapo,” she said, pretending she didn’t already know who was calling.

  “Kat, it’s Holly.”

  “Yes?”

  At the other end of the line, Second Lieutenant Holly Boland of the US Army’s Civilian Liaison section pulled a face. She’d known this call would be awkward, but she hadn’t expected it to be quite as difficult as this. “Kat, I’m calling on a semi-official matter. We have a military family over here at Vicenza whose daughter’s gone missing. The local Carabinieri have been told, but… well, they don’t seem to be taking it too seriously. The family have asked Liaison if there’s anything we can do.”

  “How long’s she been gone?”

  “Two nights. She was meant to be on a snowboarding weekend with her class – at least, that’s what the parents thought. When the coaches came back, it turned out she hadn’t actually signed up for the trip.”

  “So she lied to her parents. And she’s how old?”

  “Sixteen. Almost seventeen.”

  “Have they checked with her boyfriend?”

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend.” Even over the phone, Holly caught Kat’s snort of disbelief. “Apparently it’s totally out of character,” she added.

  “Well, the local officers will know what to do. Check the hospitals, call her friends. Chances are she’ll turn up.”

  “They did all that before they called it in,” Holly said patiently. “And all the local officers have done is go through her bedroom, looking for drugs.”

  “Did they find any?”

  “No. The thing is, Major Elston and his wife don’t speak Italian, so—”

  “Oh, he’s a major, is he?”

  “He happens to be an officer, yes. But they’re understandably upset, and they could really use someone who can talk them through the Italian system.”

  Kat sighed. “Who can hold their hands until their precious daughter crawls out from whichever bed she’s in, you mean.”

  “Is that so unreasonable? Put yourself in their shoes —”

  “I’d have to ask my superiors,” Kat interrupted. “And I should tell you it’s highly unlikely they’ll agree. I’m involved in a number of urgent cases at the moment.”

  “OK,” Holly said, accepting defeat. She understood the source of Kat’s hostility, and the almost permanent sense of anger the Carabinieri officer carried with her these days, but it was no easier to deal with for all that. “Let me know what they say, will you?”

  “Of course. Ciao.”

  Kat had let herself into her apartment and started changing into her uniform while she was still on the phone. Not long ago, when she was on a homicide team, she’d worked in plain clothes. Going back into uniform – even the beautiful Valentino-designed skirt and jacket of the Arma dei Carabinieri – had felt like a snub; and, she knew, had been intended to feel that way by those who had ordered it. Nor, despite what she’d said to Holly, were the cases she was currently engaged on much more than glorified filing. Stolen cameras, cloned credit cards, pickpockets dipping into open backpacks in Piazza San Marco – by the time she’d written up the crimes, the tourists who’d reported them were usually long gone, making any kind of investigation impossible.

  She slipped the wedding ring onto the coat hook on the back of the bedroom door, ready for its next outing. It had cost a hundred euros and was one of the best investments she’d ever made – that, and the subscription to the Married and Discreet message board. Coupled with an anonymous account on Carnivia.com, it allowed her to conduct her sex life without any emotional entanglements whatsoever.

  If only she’d found Married and Discreet before, she thought. If she had, her career might not be in such a total mess.

  Leaving her apartment, she caught a train for the short hop across the Ponte della Libertà. As she strode out of the vast, imposing Stazione Santa Lucia – the only Fascist-era building in Venice, it was considered a monstrosity by most, although Kat secretly rather liked it – she was lucky enough to step straight onto a number two vaporetto. Even though this was the fast line, the boat made slow progress as it chugged its way up the Grand Canal. During Carnevale Venice attracted up to a million extra visitors, and crowds of people – some in masks and costumes, despite the early hour – surged on and off at every stop. A few surreptitiously raised their phones to take pictures of her. But she was used to that. A capitano donna, a female captain of the Carabinieri, was still a rare enough sight that even some Italians did a double take.

  The Carabinieri headquarters were in Campo San Zaccaria, just behind the waterfront at Riva degli Schiavoni. Once, these cloisters had been part of Venice’s largest convent. And the people who worked here now, Kat thought viciously as she passed through the entrance lobby, would probably prefer it if their female colleagues still behaved like nuns. But even though the comparison gave her some satisfaction, she knew it was actually a flawed one. The convent of San Zaccaria had been famous for the licentious behaviour of its inmates, many of whom had been dumped there by noble families unwilling to pay their daughters’ dowries. Having escaped the crushing social confines of their family palazzi, the young women soon realised that the convent afforded them their first opportunity to take a lover. Like so many things in Venice, appearance and reality were two subtly different things.

  There was nothing subtle, though, about the graffiti she found scrawled across her locker in the female changing room.

  Va’ a cagare, puttana.

  Piss off, whore.

  A few weeks back, when the insults had started appearing, she’d meticulously cleaned each one off with lighter fuel. Now she tended to leave it until three or four had accumulated before bothering.

  She rarely used the locker these days. It had been a while since she’d opened it to find dog shit inside, though more than once someone had tried
to urinate through the keyhole. When you made a complaint of sexual misconduct against one of the most popular male officers in the division, and a colonel to boot, this was the kind of thing that happened.

  At her desk, she logged into her computer without acknowledging the officers on either side. They in turn ignored her, just as they did every day. She wondered which of them had written the graffiti.

  She could tell from her inbox that it was going to be a morning of yet more tedium. On top of everything else, someone had forwarded a request from the Guardia di Finanza to investigate whether the handbags sold by the hawkers around Piazza San Marco were counterfeit. Of course they are, she found herself shouting inside her head. The bags cost a few euros from a homeless Nigerian on a street corner. Did anyone really imagine that was how Louis Vuitton and Dolce e Gabbana chose to sell their goods? Even if she arrested someone, the counterfeiters would simply find another vagrant, while the Carabinieri provided bed and breakfast to the first. It was utterly pointless.

  Discreetly checking that no one was watching, she opened a web browser and typed a familiar URL.

  A screen appeared. Below a white Bauta mask – which, despite having no mouth, somehow seemed to be grinning mischievously – was a login box.

  Enter Carnivia.

  She typed in her username and password.

  Welcome, Columbina7759. Where in Carnivia would you like to go?

  She typed “Rialto”, and found herself standing on a perfect, 3D simulacrum of the bridge she’d passed under earlier. Every detail was accurate, right down to the current level of the tide, with one difference: here every passer-by was wearing a mask.

  With a few clicks of her mouse, she propelled her avatar through the pescheria. The market stalls in Carnivia, she knew, actually sold much more than fish, but it was something else she was after now. Heading over the Ponte delle Tette – the “Bridge of Tits” – she entered what had once been Venice’s red light district. In both the real Venice and Carnivia, it was still the centre of Venice’s nightlife, with people crowding into the tiny bars. She went into one of the smaller establishments and approached a booth towards the back.