The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  They were both silent for a moment, thinking.

  “Of course, it’s not just Saito who’s a hero,” he added. “The word in the canteen is that if you hadn’t fought for the zoom idea, CNAIPIC would have killed it stone dead. There’s even a certain amount of respect for the way you handled that thing with your home computer. I heard one officer saying it couldn’t be you in the photograph, because that woman doesn’t have any balls, and you’ve got the biggest pair in the division.”

  She allowed herself a smile at that.

  “So all in all, things are almost back to normal,” he said. He didn’t add that “normal” meant he was still living in a hotel room, estranged from his wife; nor did he mention the pang of envy he’d felt when he’d seen Panicucci embracing her after the rescue. A handsome young man of her own age: why wouldn’t she end up with someone like that eventually? “The point is, no one will thank us for stirring up more trouble.”

  “Let’s think this through,” she said. “Let’s say the world is being told a big fat lie, and Mia’s rescue is as bogus as everything else about this case. Where does that take us?”

  “It means…” Piola took a breath. “It means this is even bigger than we thought. It means that they didn’t just arrange the kidnap of a teenager, they arranged the murder of her kidnappers too. It means the people who arranged the rescue are also responsible for the kidnap. It means the Americans are in this up to their necks.”

  They stopped and thought.

  “So just suppose the two of us were mad enough to take on the most powerful, technologically sophisticated army in the world, Capitano, how would we do it?” he asked.

  She said, “We’d find a way to rattle them – to make them think we know more than we do. We’d come out fighting, and hope to provoke them into fighting back. It’s only when they start to panic that they’ll finally make a mistake.”

  WEEK TWO

  SIXTY-NINE

  TWO DAYS AFTER Mia Elston’s release, Holly Boland took the grey Stefanel dress out of her closet for the second time in a month.

  At the Piazzale Roma pontoon an ancient launch was waiting, all mahogany and brass, its sides bearing an elaborate “B”. This, she knew, was the Barbo family boat, although the kid in the driving seat who’d been sent to pick her up looked more like one of Daniele’s hacker friends than an old family retainer.

  The launch sped down the Grand Canal, weaving through the vaporetti and gondolas, before turning into a quiet, dusk-filled rio, chugging more slowly past crumbling, bricked-up doorways. She loved these sleepy backwaters of Venice, the sense they gave that the city was almost derelict; although that was, she knew, an illusion – the Venetians were simply masters at knowing which repairs could be safely put off.

  He was waiting for her on the wooden landing jetty. He hadn’t dressed up, although the hoodie was a clean one and the sneakers looked new.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “The kitchen’s just at the back.” Then, anxiously, “You don’t mind eating here?”

  “Here’s perfect,” she assured him.

  She followed him towards an old wooden door at the rear of the ground floor. Stepping through it, she found herself in a tiny, unexpected garden, each side lined with columns like a monk’s cloister. It was so small she could have crossed it in three strides.

  Off to the left was a kitchen. A vaulted brick roof made it feel like a cellar, but windows that gave onto the canal filled the air with the quiet murmur of lapping water.

  If the room was old, however, the equipment in it was not. Ranged along the counter were several items of what looked like laboratory apparatus, while a whiteboard propped against the wall bore a complex equation.

  “You do experiments in here?” she asked, curious.

  “Not exactly.”

  He poured two glasses of prosecco, so fine and pale it looked almost like sparkling water. “Dinner will be in nineteen minutes.”

  “Nineteen?” she repeated, a little amused by his exactitude. “Are you sure?”

  “Certain.”

  Daniele was looking better, she thought. The deep-set hollowness of his eyes, so pronounced when he’d first been released, was easing now, and his blinks and twitches, though still frequent, seemed more like punctuation to his thoughts than something which could overwhelm them at any moment.

  He didn’t do small talk, but they discussed Carnivia. He was buying more servers, he said, with the Conterno reward money. “But this time I’ll hide the mirror sites better. One in Switzerland, in some quiet Zurich cellar. One in San Marino. Perhaps even one in Montenegro.”

  A timer behind them chimed, and he got to his feet.

  “What are we eating?” she asked.

  “Duck pasta. Smoked eel. And calves’ liver.” They were all classic dishes of the Veneto. “And a 1961 Oddero from my father’s cellar.” He placed a dusty bottle on the table, then checked one of the machines, which whirred faintly as he opened it.

  “And the art?” She indicated the whiteboard. “What’s that about?”

  “That?” He looked at it and smiled. “That’s very useful. The correct way to boil an egg.”

  The formula was intricate and, to her, quite incomprehensible.

  “Our cook had all sorts of superstitions and customs. She always pricked one end of the egg, for example, before she put it in the pan,” he explained. “So I did some research to see if there was a more scientific way.”

  “And was there?”

  “Yes. Obviously, the most important factor is the circumference of the egg.” He pointed to the “c” in the formula. “Then the ambient temperature, “T”. But it turned out that heating the water to a hundred degrees is too much. You need to cook it at a much lower temperature, but for longer.”

  “So the way to boil the perfect egg,” she said, “is not to boil it?”

  He nodded. “That’s when I bought my first temperature bath.” He indicated one of the pieces of equipment behind her. “I’m using it for our dinner tonight, in fact.”

  “Which course?”

  “All of them.” He got up and went to the counter. “The pasta should be ready. It’s had four hours.”

  She couldn’t see what he was doing until he put the food on the table. It wasn’t beautiful – there was nothing elegant or chef-like about Daniele’s presentation – but she could tell immediately that this was going to be like no dinner she had ever eaten. On her plate were four small tubes the thickness of fountain pens, anointed only with a small puddle of green olive oil.

  She cut into one. Dark sauce gushed out, releasing an intense gamey aroma of duck.

  “Neat,” she said. She put a forkful to her lips. “My God! That’s… that’s…”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  In some strange way she couldn’t quite get her head around, the pasta was inside out – the rich, strong sauce encased by the pasta, instead of the other way round.

  He poured them both some wine. “It needs this. The amino acids in the duck match the Maillard reactions in the wine.”

  “Daniele…” She struggled for words. “I’m just astonished to discover that you can cook.”

  “Well, I only cook twelve recipes. But those, I’ve hacked and rehacked until they’re perfect.”

  If the pasta was unusual, it was nothing compared to the calves’ liver. Fegato alla Veneziana was the signature dish of the city. Holly had eaten it many times, and although every housewife and restaurant cooked it a little differently, the basic formula never varied: onions, simmered over a low heat until they became translucent; liver, cut into strips and dusted with flour, then quickly fried in a mixture of oil and butter; the two tossed together with a splash of white wine vinegar.

  Daniele’s liver, however, had been cooked for twelve hours in the temperature bath, and was flavoured with star anise and lavender.

  “Liver and lavender both contain the same sulphur molecule,” he explained. “Put
the two together, and they amplify each other.”

  “And the star anise?”

  “Contains estragol, which brings out the natural caramel in the onions.”

  It was delicious – as meltingly tender as fillet, but with incomparably more flavour. Her favourite course, though, was dessert. When he told her it was a combination of salted chocolate and smoked eel, she almost refused to try it, but in fact it was heavenly: a dark roll of paper-thin chocolate, lightly salted, on top of a mousse whose pungent smokiness and sweetness she would never have identified as eel. It was served with a tiny glass of Torcolato, a Venetian sweet wine that was almost brown in colour, its age belied by explosive, fresh aromas of mango and raisin.

  As the meal progressed, Holly noticed how Daniele’s eyes made contact with hers more frequently. He asked about her father, and it felt quite natural to confide her guilt about not seeing much of him. Though he didn’t recognise her any more, she told Daniele, his strokes having robbed his brain of whatever it was that made him a person, she felt bad for her mother and siblings that she wasn’t closer to home.

  “When I was a teenager,” he said slowly, “I thought I hated my father. But recently, I’ve come to understand how similar we are. The obsessiveness with which he collected his paintings, for example. If I had a son, and I thought he’d simply sell Carnivia after my death, would I let him? Possibly not.”

  “Is that the kind of work you do with Father Uriel? Therapy about your father?”

  “In part.” He hesitated. “And some other exercises too.”

  “Like what?”

  He looked at her. “I’ll show you, if you want.”

  “OK,” she said doubtfully.

  He cleared the plates from the table as he explained how the exercise was structured. “You can’t look away, though. No matter how intense it gets.”

  She leaned forward, as instructed, and fixed her eyes on his. To begin with she felt mildly amused – Well, this is a weird way to end the evening. But even before the first minute was up, she recognised that the amusement was simply a form of self-consciousness. Beyond it, there was only an extraordinary sense that she was somehow opening herself up to him, and he to her, the tiny muscles of their eyes carrying on a non-verbal conversation of their own, in a language she couldn’t understand. More than once, whatever was being silently discussed made her want to drop her gaze, or blush, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom; sometimes, too, she found herself thinking, Wherever did that come from?

  Or, Hope he doesn’t realise I just thought about that.

  When they began mirroring each other’s movements, their eyes still locked together, she felt as if they were dancing in perfect synchronicity across a ballroom of the mind. Every tiny movement of her hand or neck, every stretch and tug of the cashmere dress against her skin, had the softness and intensity of a caress. The back of her neck flushed, and her earlobes burned.

  Behind her a timer chimed. “Truth,” he said softly.

  “You first.” She was suddenly shy.

  He thought. “There are so many things I want to ask you. But the only one that matters, I don’t want to ask. In case the answer’s no.”

  Lost in confusion, she didn’t respond.

  “Is there anything you want to ask me?” he added.

  “When you do this with your surrogates… is it the same?”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s intense. But not like this.”

  “And do you…” She stopped, unsure how to word this. “Where does it end?”

  “You want to know whether I have sex with them?”

  “I guess I do, yes,” she confessed.

  “Father Uriel thinks it might be helpful. But I’ve not gone that far yet. Although there is one surrogate in particular I find very attractive.”

  “I can never tell when you’re joking,” she murmured.

  “That’s because I never do.” After a moment’s thought he added, “Why? Do you think I should go to bed with her?”

  “No,” she said. “I think you should probably go to bed with me instead.”

  SEVENTY

  SERGIO SANTINI STRODE out of the airlock into the dim glow of the Archivio Segreto, where the friar, Tonatelli, was waiting for him. The two men talked as they went, Santini impatiently pulling on a pair of cotton gloves as they did so.

  “Well? Do we have it all?” he demanded.

  “It’s impossible to say with any certainty,” Tonatelli replied. He sounded weary: for the first time, his voice betrayed his years. Santini knew that he’d been sleeping down here of late, his whole life dedicated to the task he’d taken on. It was a curious feature of the Vatican: in a city-state where almost no one had a family, the temptation to work twenty-four hours a day was hard to resist. Men wore themselves out and died in the Curia’s offices, their lives literally spent in the attempt to ensure the continuation of the papacy’s influence. “But we’ve followed every obvious reference. I’d say we’ve got most of it.”

  He made it sound like a weed, Santini thought, or an infection: something that had to be scraped out so that not even the tiniest trace of it remained, lest it spring up again unfettered. But perhaps that was not so very far from the mark.

  “I’ve put it in here,” Tonatelli added, showing Santini into a meeting room. A security guard stood at the door, and the glass walls had been covered up for privacy.

  Santini walked in, and stopped dead. The glass walls hadn’t been covered at all, he now saw. They were simply lined with row upon row of boxes: boxes that were stacked floor to ceiling, four deep.

  “But… how much is there?” he asked, astonished.

  Tonatelli pointed to each of the walls in turn. “From 1945 to 1947, four hundred and sixty-five reports. From 1948 to 1950, six hundred. From 1951 to 1953, two thousand and thirty-five. We stopped there, for the time being.”

  Santini reached into a box and pulled out a document at random:

  It was discussed how in Emilia-Romagna a certain Quirico Buccho, a communist, has been secretly attending confession. It was debated how best to counter Signor Buccho’s hypocrisy. In conclusion, the matter is being brought to your attention…

  It was dated May 1948. He pulled out another:

  A woman in Friuli, Camilla Conti, reports to the priest that her husband refuses to attend Mass, having fallen in with the communists…

  And then this:

  This man has openly said that he will vote communist in the forthcoming election. As he is the local schoolteacher, there is concern that he may be a person of influence in the community. It has been suggested that he is not a physically courageous man, and might be persuaded to change his mind…

  Here was a similar report from Portugal, another from France, yet another from Spain; some of them were even written in Latin, in those days the universal language of the Catholic clergy. All reporting on suspected communist activity.

  The local doctor, an atheist, has been heard to espouse radical ideas…

  The sermon explaining why it is our parishioners’ duty to vote for the Christian Democrats has been well received: however, if I might bring some additional points to Your Grace’s attention…

  “Well?” Tonatelli said quietly. “What do we do? Destroy it? Put it all back?”

  Santini looked around him. “Neither, for the moment,” he said at last. “There’s someone I need to talk to.”

  He went to a small, discreet palazzo situated just a short walk from the Vatican, and gave his name to the receptionist. After a few minutes he was shown to a quiet corner, where a white-haired man was waiting for him.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” he said.

  “Not at all.” The man, who was Santini’s predecessor at the Vatican Information Service, had seemed neither surprised nor alarmed when Santini contacted him. “I imagine the job is keeping you busy?”

  “Busier than I could ever have imagined,” Santini confessed. “And rather more stressful. The burden of secrecy�
�”

  The white-haired man nodded. “It gets easier, believe me.”

  “There is one matter in particular I wanted to ask your advice about. It concerns Archbishop Montini, as he then was. His Holiness Pope Paul VI.”

  The other man’s expression gave nothing away. “Soon to be Saint Paul, I understand. He has already been declared a Servant of God and Venerable by his successors. Now there are reports of miracles being done in his name.”

  “What I’m wondering,” Santini said quietly, “is whether as well as being a Servant of God, he was also a servant of the CIA.”

  “Ah.” The other man was silent for a moment. “I always wondered who would be sitting at my old desk when that resurfaced.”

  “Resurfaced? So it was known about before?”

  “Of course. You couldn’t have run an operation like that without it being common knowledge at the time, at least within certain circles.”

  “And this operation… what was it, exactly?”

  “Nothing less than all-out war against the communists,” the white-haired man said simply. “A war in which, from the vantage point of history, victory now looks as if it were easy; almost, perhaps, inevitable. But believe me, it didn’t appear that way at the time. It was a desperate struggle, and it called forth a great – some might even say, a desperate – strategy in response.”

  “The Christian Democrats.”

  “The Christian Democrats,” the other man agreed. “Essentially, an alliance between the two greatest powers of the West: the Catholic Church and the USA.”

  “Some might say there was little that was either Christian or Democratic about it. Not when it meant priests spying on their own parishioners. Or those parishioners effectively being instructed which way to vote. Not when it meant the Mafia rigging elections, and the Curia passing information on dissenters to the security services. Who in turn clearly passed it back to the Mafia in some cases, for enforcement.”