Nighthawks

by Lambert Nagle

  Stephen was slumped in front of the TV, following the news or at least trying to. They were running a piece on an earthquake in Indonesia. He could see the emergency services pulling people out of the rubble with ambulance workers standing by. Then the usual press conference with a regional chief saying that they were doing all they could. He was about to switch over to another station when the focus shifted back to the disaster. A rescue team had just pulled out a child from the rubble, and they were rushing towards an ambulance with the kid on a stretcher. Next to it was a young Western woman who seemed to have been unaware of the camera until it was focusing on her face. A face that was in perfect proportion, a face he’d recognise anywhere. As she pulled a headscarf over her head, long, dark, tendrils of hair escaped. That was different. He’d never seen her with anything but a gamine crop.

  Reaching for his camera, he fired off a few screen grabs. He was in two minds whether to call Tariq. He decided to sleep on it.

  Stephen slept fitfully. In his dream, Tariq had come to Rome. They had sat in a restaurant in the Campo di Fiori.

  ‘Like old times, eh?’ Stephen said.

  Tariq had nodded. Stephen had wanted to tell his friend that he wished he could turn the clock back. He felt pinpricks in his tear ducts and was doing his best to keep it together. Tariq, he sensed had more to say.

  ‘I wanted so much to go with you to the other side of the world when you went running after Cara. You could go where you wanted when you wanted. I was a prisoner stuck in this damn chair. But it wasn’t about you, Steve. It was for Cara.’

  The only reason that Stephen knew it was a dream was that not once in the whole time he’d known him had Tariq expressed a hint of neediness or self-pity.

  ‘She’s family to me and I love her.’ Tariq paused and looked up at Stephen, his face etched with pain. ‘And I think you do too. But not in the way I do. You’re still in love with her.’

  Just as Stephen was about to come up with a pat denial, he woke up. As he sat up in bed, it occurred to him that whatever excuse he’d made, Tariq wouldn’t have believed him. They’d known each other too long.

  As he drank his coffee, he went online. His scroll through the morning headlines was interrupted by an incoming video call. It was Tariq.

  ‘Hi Steve, sorry for the early call but I needed to talk. I know you’re going to tell me I’m paranoid, but I’ve been getting silent calls at odd times in the day and at night. They’re routed through South East Asia. I think it might be Cara. I think she’s alive, Steve.’

  Stephen hesitated. He wanted to say he’d seen someone who he thought was Cara on TV. But Tariq would seize on it, he felt certain, if he had said it was footage from Indonesia.

  ‘These calls. They could be a scammer, a fax machine, or a premium phone line.’

  ‘No, I checked all that. Your lot think you’re the only ones with spying devices?’ Tariq chuckled.

  ‘Talking of spying devices, what do you know about facial recognition software?’ It was both a genuine question and a nifty way of avoiding being grilled about Cara.

  ‘I saw what you did there. But I’ll answer the question. The system you cops use has its limitations. The only reason that an individual would be on a police database is if the person has been arrested or has a criminal record.’

  Stephen knew that bit but let it go. He wanted Tariq to talk.

  ‘What if they’re high profile and have been in the media, which I’m sure the guy I’m trying to identify has? It’s just that I can’t work out who he is,’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Maybe if he’s on social media and there are photos of him all over the place, you might get a match. But it isn’t as easy as they make it out on TV. Ideally you want them caught on CCTV.’

  ‘This is just a face in a gallery.’

  ‘You could always ask someone who works in the business.’

  Stephen groaned. ‘You’re going to suggest Ginny, I can tell. Nice try but I can’t. Even if she did give me a positive ID, I’d have to lie about why I wanted to know. She’d put two and two together. She’s not stupid. Any other ideas?’

  ‘Surely the gallery would have the CCTV? Or maybe it’s been wiped by now.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Stephen said.

  ‘So which databases have you tried?’

  ‘Europol.’

  ‘Interpol’s is more comprehensive, get them to try that.’

  ‘Thanks mate, I appreciate it,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Now can we get back to talking about Cara?’

  Stephen sighed. ‘If it is her, why doesn’t she talk to you?’

  ‘You know why, Steve. If ASIO is monitoring the calls, then they can track down where she is and send someone after her. She was a threat to national security, remember?’

  Stephen veered between thinking that Tariq was right half the time and the rest, worrying that Tariq’s conspiracy theories were clouding his judgement.

  ‘But then she’d no longer be on Australian soil, would she, that’s the difference. They’re no longer actively looking for her.’ Stephen lowered his voice. ‘That find in the outback changed everything.’

  Tariq looked at Stephen, mouth open in shock.

  ‘You were the one who said they hadn’t found any forensic evidence,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘No one knows how she got out to where she did. It was right in the middle of nowhere. The best theory is that she got lost, or she had heatstroke and got disoriented.’ What Stephen didn’t say was that she might just have run out of water.

  Tariq turned away from the screen.

  ‘Why would she bury her own clothes? She can’t have been alone.’

  How the hell had Tariq got hold of that information? There had been an embargo on it.

  Composing himself, Tariq turned to face Stephen square on.

  ‘You, a copper of all people coming up with this far-fetched theory. You should know better. Until there’s conclusive proof, I'm not giving up on her. What they were trying to do to her out there, only she knows.’ Tariq glared at him.

  ‘I’m sorry Tariq. You know I…’

  ‘I get it.’ He looked steadily at Stephen. ‘Got to go,’ he said abruptly and hung up. He deserved that. Who did he think he was to crush Tariq’s hopes like that? What to do? Stephen messaged Tariq, apologising. He left it at that. And heard nothing back.

  Chapter 12

  Ginny had left a series of texts. Stephen scanned them as he walked back into the office. There had been a last-minute change of plan and a meeting had been switched from Milan to Rome. Was he free for the weekend? So far, he wrote back, let me know when you get in. There was no time to dwell on why she’d got back in touch when relations had been so frosty. He had work to do.

  Stephen slid an authorisation request across to Elisabetta.

  ‘And this is for?’

  ‘A tap on the antiquities restorer, Aniello di Lauro, known associate of Tony Sanzio’s. I got his number off Corri. Tony had to have someone to clean up and restore the pots.’

  ‘Yes to surveillance and background checks. The name doesn’t ring a bell and the pool of art restorers, even in Italy, is small. But someone else in the profession will have had dealings with him. We should be able to find out about him fairly smartly. Call a meeting and we’ll get the team onto it.’

  ‘If it turns out he is legit, I won’t have to answer for phone tapping someone on the right side of the law going about their daily work?’

  ‘Exactly. Someone will know this guy, even if he didn’t train here. You can’t just come along and try your hand at art restoration. Not like that deluded parishioner in Spain, the one who botched up the face of Jesus in the fresco.’

  Stephen supposed Elisabetta was trying to protect him from the wrath of Alberti in case he turned out to be wrong. If he was right, then he’d press her again for the phone tap.

  The briefing was over in a few minutes. Less than an hour later, Pasquale had come back with intel that di Lauro’s car
had been caught on speed cameras in northern Italy, heading towards the Swiss border. And then crossing back into Italy a few days later.

  ‘Anyone have a tame opposite number in Switzerland by any chance?’ Elisabetta said.

  ‘I do,’ Stephen said. ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘You might want to see this, boss,’ Pasquale said, talking to Elisabetta and turning his back to Stephen. Maybe he was being paranoid, but the guy seemed to take every opportunity to try to undermine him.

  ‘His workplace is in a rundown part of Marconi. We’ve triangulated CCTV. It’s a nondescript building with a dry-cleaner’s at the front.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do to advertise to thieves that you had priceless artwork on the premises,’ Stephen said.

  ‘You and I better pay him a visit,’ Elisabetta.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘No time like the present.’

  ‘What about calling my contact in Switzerland?’

  ‘Pasquale can do it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stephen said. As he passed the information over, he heard himself telling Pasquale that his contact was a valued one who was doing them a favour.

  Pasquale looked at Stephen over his John Lennon glasses with contempt.

  I wasn’t imagining it then.

  ‘While you’re at it, can you try Interpol to see if you can get a match with Tie Pin Man?

  Pasquale was never going to like him. He had nothing to lose by making it known that the feeling was mutual.

  ‘There’s an admin charge. Sign here so I know which account to put it against.’ Pasquale practically threw the paper at him.

  Stephen signed it and shoved it straight back.

  Elisabetta who had been observing their antics, shook her head.

  ‘You two are as bad as each other.’

  On the other side of the city, a skinny, wasted teenager, with track marks all the way up his arms, wandered from room to room in a building that looked like a cross between Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and a methamphetamine lab. There were white plastic benches, glass beakers, medical instruments laid out on metal trays, a series of magnifying glasses in assorted sizes, test tubes, and glass bottles full of liquids in an array of jewel colours from amber to verdigris to papal purple.

  ‘Hey, will you look at this shit! I mean it, come over here will you.’ A homeless guy, in his late thirties but looking fifty, his trousers held up by string and his teeth tanned from tobacco, seemed less enthusiastic, picking up a brass Bunsen burner and turning it over.

  ‘Maybe if we could melt this down, it’d be worth something.’

  The kid who was standing nearby, grabbed his arm. ‘Hey, don’t touch that,’ he shouted.

  ‘Okay, okay, I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Don’t you see? We can make our own meth. We won’t have to pay a dealer.’

  ‘You a chemistry teacher, now, like that guy, Walter White?’ Tanned Teeth, scoffed. ‘You’ve been watching too many TV shows.’

  The kid was hyper, jumping from one foot to the other, punching his palm with his fist. ‘Shut the fuck up.’ His scream echoed around the deserted building.

  His fellow addict wandered off to a storeroom, full of boxes, mainly empty. The labels read: statues, calyx, psykter, funerary vases.

  ’It’s not a meth lab, it’s a factory,’ Tanned Teeth said as the junkie kid walked in, his face crumpled as if all his hopes had been crushed there and then. He turned on the older man and started throwing, wild, wilful punches. The man covered his face with his arms, trying to hide his fear. He started to creep away.

  ‘Where are you going? You’ve ruined everything.’ The kid tore open the last of the boxes. Inside was a delicate vase. In a rage, the young junkie picked up the vase to fling it to the ground. The target of his anger tried to stop him.

  ‘Not that one.’ The man had it in his grasp, but the young addict found the strength to tackle him from behind and push him until he toppled over, his body curled over the vase. Instinctively, he put his hand over his head to lessen the impact, before he hit the concrete floor. The 2000-year-old vase shattered into lethal fragments, and in the confusion, a shard of ancient ceramic punctured his carotid artery. The slash across his neck burst into a red seam of foaming, arterial blood. He tried to pull the jagged pottery from his throat, but his vocal cords were cut and blood filled his mouth. One hand was trying vainly to staunch the flow, with the other he made to grab the young man’s sleeve, imploring the addict to help him.

  The startled child froze. He began to blink, unable to process what he was seeing. A look of terror on his face as he rolled away to avoid the rapidly spreading pool of blood. He squatted down with his back to the dying man, clenched his eyes shut and put his hands over his ears to blot out the bubbling cries.

  The dying man fell in and out of consciousness. In the moments when he was awake, he clawed at his shirt, trying to tear strips off, as though a make-shift bandage might save him. As the life ebbed out of him, his shirt was in tatters.

  The young junkie cowered, counting the seconds. When he reached a hundred and eighty, he raised his head and listened. The man was silent.

  Dry-retching, his hand held over his mouth, he stumbled past the now dead man lying in a pool of his own blood. He picked up an old rag lying on the floor and in a futile attempt at cleaning up, tried to wipe away the evidence. With the blood-stained rag in one hand, he grabbed as many of the bloodied fragments in the other, stuffing them into his backpack, then fled the chemical lab down the empty alley.

  As they had crossed over the Tiber, Stephen had been struck by the clash of old and new: a magnificent domed church marooned between the autostrada and a concrete and glass block, in a part of Rome where tourists, he supposed, would find little to interest them. Elisabetta had taken the exit slip road closest to the river on the western side, bringing them into the middle of a working-class neighbourhood. The plane trees lining the streets did little to disguise the grey 1970s apartment blocks, the depots, repair shops and rundown cafes.

  As the car slowed, Elisabetta spotted an empty parking space next to a tiny urban park where old folks exercised their lap dogs. She pulled in, turned off the engine and turned to Stephen. ‘Shall we?’

  They walked along the street until they came to a warehouse with a dry-cleaning business built onto its frontage.

  ‘Let’s try the back and see if there’s a way in,’ Stephen said. They went around the perimeter. There was a roller door pulled shut with an empty parking bay backing onto it. Stephen put his ear to the door. The sound of running footsteps. He motioned to Elisabetta and they crept down as an ill-looking slip of a lad carrying a bag, his face white as a sheet, ran out of the warehouse straight into the two police officers. Stephen tackled the white-faced boy and had his arm up behind his back and was leading him away. Elisabetta picked up the dropped bag and peered inside.

  ‘Fragments.’ She showed Stephen the contents.

  ‘You’re going to show us where you got this stuff right now,’ Stephen said, leading the boy towards the warehouse.

  ‘He’s covered in blood.’ She pressed the number for the emergency services. ‘You call back-up,’ she mouthed to Stephen. ‘Someone has to go with him to the hospital and make sure he doesn’t do a runner,’ Elisabetta said. ‘There’s nothing we can really to do to stop him if he wanted to go. He’s young.’

  The boy pointed towards the building and started to shake. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he began.

  ‘How old are you, kid?’ Elisabetta had barely got the words out before the boy started trembling and foaming at the mouth.

  ‘He’s having a fit.’ By now the boy was on the ground with his head back. Elisabetta had him in the recovery position and was trying to hold the boy’s head straight as he was twitching from side to side, his eyes rolling. Just then the ambulance came screaming around the corner, followed closely by a police car.

  ‘Stephen, you go in first. Once I’m done here, I’ll be right behind you.’
<
br />   Stephen followed a trail of blood, presumably the boy’s, through the back entrance. He walked into the abandoned factory. He scanned the layout. In one corner of the room was an array of white benches, set up like a chemistry lab.

  He followed the bloody footprints' trail as it headed off to a side room. In front of it, hundreds of pieces of a shattered pottery urn lay scattered in front of an open doorway, the door held ajar by a man's body lying in a pool of blood. The lethal shard of priceless pottery was covered in blood and chunks of flesh from the victim’s neck. He reached over to check his pulse. Nothing. He was still warm.

  He grabbed his phone and hit Elisabetta’s number.

  ‘Call homicide, I’ve found a body.’ He heard the sound of running footsteps.

  It was Elisabetta. She was panting.

  ‘Nothing more we can do for him,’ she said, indicating the corpse. She crouched down at the scattered pottery fragments.

  ‘Now that it’s a crime scene and homicide are going to sweep up all our evidence, you didn’t see me do this,’ she said, picking up a clean, dry fragment from the broken vase.

  Stephen was taken aback. ‘Don’t they need that to establish whether it was murder, manslaughter or an accident?’

  ‘They’ve got enough to go on. It's just bad luck that two junkies chanced on the factory, and worse luck that they got into a fight. What went on here has nothing to do with our investigation. That blood-stained shard is all homicide will need to determine how the guy died. In any case, whether it was an accident or murder, the kid’s too young to be charged with anything.’

  Before Stephen could protest, Elisabetta was on the phone to homicide. As she hung up, she turned to Stephen.

  ‘Ten minutes, tops, before they get here.’

  ‘What about the boxes in here?’ Stephen pointed.