The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  The canals and buildings of Carnivia appeared to exactly replicate those of the real Venice, to a level of detail bordering on the obsessive; it was said, for example, that if you counted the panes of glass in any real Venetian window, you’d find that its equivalent in Carnivia contained precisely the same number. But inside the buildings, space behaved rather differently, in a way that she’d read somewhere was based on string theory, but which always reminded her of a line of poetry she’d come across at school – something about seeing infinity in a grain of sand. Every table in a bar, for example, could host a dozen different chat rooms, each of which might link in turn to a thousand cyber lockers, peer-to-peer torrents and individual web pages, all created by Carnivia users eager to make the most of the extraordinary new world in which they found themselves.

  The booth she sat in now contained a link to a site she’d visited many times: the Married and Discreet message board. She clicked on some graffiti scratched into the wooden panelling, and it materialised in front of her.

  Riccardo hadn’t wasted any time, already logging on under his own Carnivia identity of Zanni2243 and reviewing their encounter. He’d given her five stars, along with the comment: Wow! Un’esperienza incredibile!

  Smiling to herself, she added her review of him. Anche tu non eri per niente male. Not bad yourself. Four stars.

  She’d noticed she usually gave her partners lower scores and more ambivalent comments than they gave her. But there was no point in letting praise go to their heads. After all, it wasn’t as if she was going to see any of them a second time.

  Venice was a small city. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone gossiped. Ironically, it was the sudden success of Carnivia that had exacerbated the problem, by making it possible to post rumours about friends, colleagues or neighbours without being identified as the source. Kat’s reputation had been so bad – Carnivia’s infamous gossip ledgers now contained over a hundred and twenty anonymous comments about her, few of them favourable – that she’d decided Married and Discreet was the only way to ensure her partners had as much reason to keep quiet about their encounters as she did.

  It was easier in other respects as well. The men she met didn’t know her real name, her real email address, or what she did for a living. And generally, she’d discovered, married men didn’t bombard her with texts, send her flowers, or demand attention and ego-stroking like single men did. It suited her to be able to concentrate on what was going on at work, whilst also being able to let off steam occasionally.

  Or so she told herself. A nagging voice at the back of her head – which sounded suspiciously like her mother’s – disagreed. But then, Kat and her mother had never seen eye to eye about such matters.

  Her desk phone rang. Quickly, she closed the browser. “Tapo.”

  “Capitano, it’s General Saito.”

  “General,” Kat said, surprised to be called directly by such a senior officer. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “The American Civilian Liaison Office at Vicenza has called about a missing person, a teenager. I understand they’ve already approached you informally?”

  “Yes. Of course I told them it would have to go through the proper channels—”

  “That’s fine,” Saito interrupted. “You can go over there straight away. Give them any assistance they require.”

  “Really?” She knew the top brass were always sucking up to the Americans, but she hadn’t imagined that would extend to relatively trivial family matters.

  “There’s another investigation going on – nothing to do with this, it needn’t concern you directly. But the upshot is that I’d like to do them a favour. If this family want a female officer, I’m happy to help.”

  Ah, so that was how Holly, or one of her superiors, had spun it. Kat could just imagine the phone call. “It’s a job for someone sensitive. A female, perhaps. I believe we know just the officer…”

  Well, she’d show them how sensitive she could be.

  “Of course, sir,” she said sweetly. “It’ll be a pleasure to get my teeth into something useful.”

  If Saito noticed the implicit complaint, he didn’t mention it. “Good. Any problems, come to me direct.” He rang off.

  Kat picked up her mobile and texted Holly. Spoke to my boss and managed to swing it. With you in an hour.

  She hesitated, wondering if she should add something to clear the air before they saw each other in person. The incident that had caused their falling-out – abruptly terminating not only their friendship, but also Holly’s temporary residence at Kat’s apartment – was not one either would forget in a hurry.

  But then, she reasoned, the American had made it clear that this was a purely professional request. And there was no one better at keeping her own feelings in check than Holly Boland. Better, perhaps, to do the same, and keep their personal history out of it.

  The matter decided, she pressed “Send”.

  FIVE

  “GONE?” PIOLA REPEATED incredulously. “Gone where?”

  “No one knows,” Pownall said. “It seems he left without picking up his pay.” He indicated a grizzled man in work clothes. “According to his foreman here, when the driver heard the Carabinieri wanted to speak to him, he asked for permission to go back to the accommodation cabins to fetch something. That was the last anyone saw of him.”

  Behind Pownall, Sagese’s face was impassive.

  Piola sighed. It confirmed what he’d suspected all along, even before it had become apparent that the Azione Dal Molin protestors had nothing to do with the skeleton’s appearance. Any construction worker coming across a pile of old bones might be tempted to get rid of the evidence rather than face up to the bureaucratic tangles that would ensue if he reported it. He might even be tacitly encouraged to do so by his bosses, who would certainly be unenthusiastic about having their site shut down for days or even weeks while the archaeologists did their work. But it would have been nice to have heard it from the excavator driver himself, rather than learn that he had simply been allowed to walk out.

  “Did you get his papers?” he asked. “And the plan of where he was working?”

  Silently, Pownall handed over some documents. The top one was a photocopied work permit for migrant EU workers, issued by the Sportello Unico per l’Immigrazione in the name of Tarin Krasnaki. It appeared to be in order. But peering closer, Piola saw that some of the individual letters were of microscopically different thicknesses. It was a forgery, albeit a very good one.

  Again, that many of Italy’s foreign workers were in the country illegally was hardly a revelation. He’d heard that these days you could even get false papers from the Mafia on easy credit, with payment deferred until your first pay packet – the catch being that only then did the illegal worker discover he was being charged an exorbitant rate of interest on top of the original amount, carefully worked out so that he’d never quite be able to pay off the debt.

  Such an arrangement meant the criminals had a hold over the worker that could be exploited in other ways, too, Piola reflected; such as making him take the rap for some minor misdemeanour – throwing away a skeleton, say – that was holding up work for them all. “Do we know his real nationality?” he asked.

  The foreman shrugged. “He said he was Albanian. I noticed he didn’t talk much with the other Albanians, but he had the right papers, and he was vouched for by the agency, so…”

  He spoke confidently enough, but Piola noted the flash of anxiety in the glance he gave Sagese afterwards, as if to check he was saying the right thing. Something was wrong here. But what it was, and whether it was relevant to his investigation, he doubted he’d ever find out.

  Feeling his phone vibrate, he pulled it out. Hapadi’s name was on the screen.

  “Ah, Doctor. It will be nice to hear some real facts for a change,” he said, stepping away from the construction workers.

  “Don’t say that too hastily,” the forensic examiner said. “I don’t have anything definitive for you.
But I’ve taken a first look at our friend, here in the mortuary. As I suspected, the distortion to his left wrist is from polio, which means he was born prior to the vaccination programme in the 1950s. Taken together with the fragments of khaki, it seems likely the remains date back to the war.”

  “Thank you,” Piola said. “That’s very useful.”

  “There’s something else that might interest you. We recovered a bullet from his right glenohumeral joint – that is, the right shoulder. The shot passed right through his head. There was an exit wound very close to the jawbone, which was why I didn’t spot it at first.”

  Piola tried to picture how that could have happened. “So he must have been kneeling?”

  “That’s right. With his head forced to one side, and his jaw pressed against his shoulder by the pressure of the muzzle. The gunman would have been standing just behind him, to the left. I’ve sent the bullet for further analysis.”

  Thanking Hapadi again, Piola rang off. He knew exactly what he should do now – call Saito and tell him the case was effectively closed. Whether Krasnaki had really found the skeleton, or whether someone else had ordered it thrown into the excavator before it could hold up work, he didn’t know. But it hardly mattered now. The point was, a scapegoat had been found, and had apparently confirmed his guilt by running away. The bones themselves dated back to a conflict almost seventy years ago. There was no reason not to allow the consortium to resume construction while Piola took himself back to Venice to write up his report in the warmth of his office.

  “Well?” Sagese demanded. “Can we get back to work now, Colonel?”

  Piola turned back to Pownall and Sagese. “Not yet. First I need to speak to the archaeologist.”

  For the second time that morning he climbed the ladder up to the tipper. Inside, it had been taped into a grid, each square labelled with a reference number. Dr Iadanza was crouching amidst the rubble, carefully photographing each square.

  “Any progress, Doctor?”

  She looked up. “Well, I’m certain the remains weren’t scooped up with this spoil.”

  He indicated the tapes. “Is all this strictly necessary, then?”

  “It might be useful to prove it, at some point. I’m always asking myself what the archaeologist called by the other side might say in court.”

  “Of course,” he said, a little surprised at her assumption that this might end up in a court. But perhaps that was just proper professional caution. He rather liked her, he realised; not just because of the way she’d resisted being browbeaten by Sagese, but because she hadn’t made a big deal of it afterwards. “I was just going to inspect the area where the driver was last working, and it occurred to me that you might be able to tell rather more from it than I could. Would you like to come with me?”

  “Certainly. Although to do a proper survey, I’ll probably need ground sonar.”

  He climbed down the ladder again and waited for her to join him. Inevitably, he glanced up as she descended, and inevitably he couldn’t tear his eyes away once he had. A little involuntary jolt of delight surged through him at the sight of her fine bottom, encased in the paper suit, negotiating the rungs towards him, followed almost immediately by a wave of irritation at his own predictability. Why did he always have to look? And having looked, why did he have to like what he saw so very much? He had absolutely no doubt that Dottora Iadanza would be appalled if she knew the direction his thoughts had taken. As for his wife… well, he was in enough trouble in that direction already.

  Annoyed with himself, he was initially silent as they walked over towards the far part of the construction site. The fog was lifting now; a faint glow from the east suggested that later, it might even be a beautiful day.

  “There’ll be an indoor swimming pool and gymnasium here, eventually,” Dr Iadanza said, pointing. “Building number two hundred and forty-seven. And next to it, a cinema. Amazing what you need to fight a war these days. But I suppose you can hardly expect them to go to the multi-sala at Stradella dei Filippini with the rest of us to watch their war movies.”

  “You’re no great fan of the Americans, I take it?” he said.

  Her voice, when she replied, was careful. “I didn’t say that. Of course we were frustrated not to be given proper access. But that was the Italian partners in the consortium, not the Americans themselves.”

  “Which partners are those?”

  “Principally Conterno, plus a few others who deal with the specialist engineering.”

  Now Piola thought about it, he’d seen the Costruttori Conterno logo, a regal griffin’s head on a heraldic shield, tacked to every entry gate, but it was so familiar it had barely registered. There was hardly a civil engineering project in northern Italy that didn’t involve them in some way.

  “One thing that being an archaeologist teaches you is that all empires fall eventually,” she added. “I just wish the Americans appreciated that.”

  It took fifteen minutes of brisk walking to reach the far side of the site. Although mostly flat – this part had clearly been the runway, when it was an airfield – there was a small hummock to the side, perfectly round; almost, Piola thought, like an Iron Age burial mound. A huge bite had already been taken out of it by the excavators. “This is where the driver was working, according to the plan I was given,” he said.

  Dr Iadanza walked up close and peered at the face of the dug area, the way an art historian might scrutinise the details of a painting. “Quarried rubble,” she said thoughtfully. “During the war, they probably kept a big heap here, ready to patch up the bomb craters.” She pointed. “And that’s where they came across the skeleton, I’d say.”

  Almost at ground level was a small cavity, hardly any bigger than the baskets the old ladies of Venice put their cats in. Something brown was hanging from its roof. She crouched down to examine it better.

  “What is it?” Piola asked.

  She took out a biro and used the point to tease away some of the earth.

  “Well, well,” she breathed. “You know what this is, don’t you?”

  He didn’t, even when he squatted down beside her and she scraped away more soil to show him. It looked like a piece of folded cloth. Although faded now, it had clearly once been bright red.

  “It’s a fazzoletto rosso,” Dr Iadanza said. “A red necker-chief. Our skeleton, Colonel, belongs to a partisan. Specifically, a partisan from one of the communist brigades.”

  “Somewhat ironic, then, that he ended up on an American air base.”

  “It may be rather more than that.” She looked at him, her eyes shining. “There’s someone I’d like you to speak to about this, Colonel. I think we may just have helped to clear up a mystery.”

  SIX

  SHE PACED HER cell anxiously. Six steps one way, three the other. It had clearly been built as an animal shed – the walls were of bare stone, the floor compacted earth. Part of a farm, then. A single window, high up in the roof, admitted the grey light of dawn, but it was barred with a metal grille that looked new.

  She’d listened carefully, but she could hear no sounds of humanity – no hum of traffic, no chainsaws or church bells. Once, she thought she caught the distant clanking of cowbells, which made her think she must be high up in the mountains. Wherever they were, it was very remote.

  The room contained a camping mattress, a blanket, a small chemical toilet like the ones used in caravans, an ancient gas heater, and a packet of Nuvenia sanitary towels. It was very cold, but the heater needed a special tool, so only the kidnappers could turn it on. In the corners of the room, too high for her to reach, were two small cameras. Between them they covered the entire room.

  She wondered if they meant to rape her. To begin with she’d been certain of it – had assumed, with a sickening lurch of nausea, that that was why she’d been taken. But now she wasn’t so sure. Almost the first thing they’d done was to make her undress, taking her into another, larger barn that led off this one, where they’d photographed her from
every angle. But there had been something oddly impersonal about it, as if it were all part of some ritual she didn’t yet understand. Not that it was possible to read anything from their expressions – both kidnappers wore masks all the time, at least in her presence. One, the shorter, more thickset of the two, wore a Bauta, the classic plain white mask with an elongated chin and no mouth. The other wore a Harlequin, the red-and-blue diamond-patterned mask of a clown. The fact that they were Carnevale masks made her think of the club where she’d been snatched, but she couldn’t work out if that was just a coincidence.

  They’d paid particular attention to one of her legs, moving in and taking several close-ups. It was only when she glanced down that she’d seen why: it had got cut somehow during the kidnap, the blood crusting over the wound while she was drugged. They also took photographs of a bruise on her arm.

  Noticing her trembling, one of them had fetched a blanket then, draping it round her shoulders like a shawl. It didn’t stop her shivering – it wasn’t just the cold, it was the nausea and the fear of what they might be about to do to her – but it was one of the things that had made her think that perhaps they weren’t going to rape her after all. She remembered the many stories she’d read about Italian kidnaps. From what she recalled, they were usually carried out by the Mafia, who tried to look after their victims, at least initially, in order to protect their investment.

  I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, she thought suddenly. That was one of the precautions they taught you at the American High School, the school all the military teenagers attended, where it was drummed into you over and over that Americans made prime targets. Always make sure someone knows where you are. But the only person who’d known she was at the club was Johann, and he didn’t even know her real name.