Trick Turn

by Tom Barber

  ‘His corpse?’

  ‘It’ll never be found.’

  ‘I don’t feel safe at all here, Rossi. I feel exposed. It’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘No-one knows where we are. You act nervous, you’ll draw attention.’

  ‘People figured we’re tourists, but we’ve been in this place for over eight weeks now. We got American accents. Locals talk. I want us to move on.’

  ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Villages and towns like this have networks. You know that. They run on gossip. Strangers stand out.’

  ‘Will you cut that shit and relax? You worry too much.’ He sipped his espresso, watching the morning activity in the Square, then reached into his wallet and withdrew a wad of banknotes. ‘This’ll help. Go shopping.’

  She took the money. ‘How much?’

  ‘A grand.’

  ‘How about two?’

  ‘You want the fillings out my teeth too, Bianca? Christ.’ She just looked at him and he reached into his pocket, counting out another thousand Euros.

  ‘What you gonna do?’ Stefani told him, taking the money. ‘Wait for me here?’

  ‘I’m meeting someone from the old family in Malcesine,’ he said. ‘See if we can get more permanent protection until we can get back to the States.’

  ‘A goonsquad? That’s really gonna help us keep a low profile?’

  ‘Just a couple guys paid to make sure if we get found, it ain’t a problem.’

  *

  ‘Get that murdering psychopath back on the phone,’ Stefani ordered four years later, walking into their real estate office now they’d returned to Baltimore, more of her guys waiting inside for the group who’d gone to D.C. ‘And don’t bleed on my floor,’ she told the man who’d received the knife in the thigh courtesy of Vargas.

  After the grenade had totalled their ride, she’d sent Marco and Roberto in their stolen cab to pick up the NYPD cop’s sister, while she’d been dropped off away from their burning car and waited to be picked up by another two of her guys driving from Baltimore. She’d had to hang out with the man who’d been stabbed in the leg, which had put her in a foul mood; he was a new guy who hadn’t been around before she and Rossi took their unscheduled four year vacation to Europe, and so far, he hadn’t done anything to impress her. He’d let that bitch cop stab him and get her hands on a grenade; Stefani had almost shot the idiot in the car on the way back after they’d finally been picked up, if only to shut him up.

  ‘I’ve been trying, boss,’ one of her men told her, a soldier. ‘He’s gone quiet.’

  ‘News from across the pond hasn’t,’ another said, watching the latest BBC World updates on cable, part of which was still covering the aftermath of the Oxford shootout. ‘More attention on this thing.’

  ‘How hard can it be to kill her?’ Stefani screamed at them. ‘She’s eleven, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘He’ll get her,’ the first man said. ‘If he tracked the girl there, he can find her again. And Marco said they got the cop’s sister,’ he added. ‘The one McGuinness told you about. She’s on her way here. She’ll come in useful.’

  ‘She’s not the prize,’ Stefani snapped, the men around her seeing a hint of derangement in her eyes. ‘The Lombardi brat is.’

  *

  That day on Lake Garda, Stefani stepped out of a cab a few hours after her husband had left to go see the contacts from the old family and walked into their rented villa, carrying some shopping bags. It was a good thing Rossi had given her the extra grand. She’d spent all but a hundred Euros.

  He still wasn’t back. She took a bottle of sparkling water from the refrigerator, taking a sip as she sat down on their living room couch, worn out from the heat, shopping and constant underlying stress.

  She turned on the TV and looked for American news channels, to see what was going on back home.

  On the way she clicked through the local station then quickly clicked back.

  The footage was coming live from a square in Malcesine, a small village on the opposite side of the lake. Tenting had been set up, the square taped off, but she saw a white sheet covering something on the ground.

  Before he left, she remembered her husband mentioning he was meeting his contact there. She went to her temporary cell and started calling him. No-one answered for a moment, but then someone did.

  ‘Ciao,’ an unfamiliar voice said. ‘Chi e questo?’

  She didn’t reply and hung up.

  That uneasy sensation she’d had earlier suddenly blossomed into full-on panic.

  They found us.

  Down the street, a car pulled up and three men got out, dressed in jeans and polo-shirts. They walked towards the house, each drawing a pistol once they were out of sight of the road.

  They broke the glass on the door, undid the lock and entered, conducting a quick but thorough search.

  They found shopping bags on the bed, but no presence of the woman.

  One of them looked over the balcony as the others ran back out onto the street.

  From past experience, Stefani and her husband had known how to make a swift exit. She’d watched the men pull up from the shadows of a side street, waited until they were out of sight, then moved rapidly down the sidewalk, having left almost everything behind.

  She passed a hotel with a large coach outside, the driver helping people load their bags into the side of the vehicle, tourists smiling and thanking him before climbing on board. By the time the coach left, the three men who’d come to the villa to kill Stefani were on the street outside, their pistols now hidden under their loose shirts as they searched for the woman.

  They didn’t spot her sitting on the bus, hidden among the tourists as the large vehicle drove out of the small Italian town.

  Which until only this morning, her husband had thought was safe.

  *

  ‘The girl said she was attending a summer camp in Oxford,’ Mary from British Airways told Porter, who was sitting with her in an office inside Heathrow Terminal 5. She’d finished her shift for the day, but had stayed behind with her colleague Jason to talk to the ARU sergeant and fellow officer Fox, who’d just left to investigate some evidence relating to their case that had just been reported elsewhere in the Terminal. ‘I thought something was strange. She acted older, yet looked so young. So even though her passport and ticket were valid, Jason and I went through to the Gates to find her. Then I saw the TV screens with her face on them.’

  ‘Did you find her at the Gate?’ Porter asked.

  ‘She was loitering in Duty Free. She put her finger to her lips and put her hands together like this.’ She motioned what Isabel had done. ‘Then did the throat slit gesture. I got what she meant. You’d have to be an idiot not to with the look on her face. She clearly felt she was in danger.’

  ‘She is. But I’m surprised you didn’t approach her.’

  ‘Probably should have. But there was something about the way she looked at me. Guess I shouldn’t have let her go. That’s why I talked to airport police after the flight left, and they contacted you.’

  ‘If the person chasing her made it here before us, you might have saved her life by letting her board that plane. As long as he wasn’t on the flight too.’

  As Porter finished speaking, Fox walked in, holding a see-through bag with latex-gloved hands. ‘Cameras picked up the girl dumping something in the rubbish outside the building,’ he said, pointing across the Terminal. ‘They went through it and found this.’

  He opened the bag, took out the passport before flipping it open and Porter saw a familiar face and name. ‘Chalky’s passport.’

  ‘And his credit card. Issy must have realised taking them through security could prompt questioning if they found them. She got here from Oxford, wrong-footed police, booked a flight, dyed her hair, changed her clothes and dumped this, all in the space of a few hours. And with our guy hunting her.’

  ‘And she’s eleven years old,’ Porter said.

  ‘She’s e
leven?’ Mary asked, incredulous.

  ‘Who is she?’ the other BA employee, Jason, asked.

  ‘We can’t share that, I’m afraid,’ Porter told him, before looking at Mary. ‘So that’s where she went? New Orleans.’

  ‘She told me her father was there,’ she said, still in shock at the girl’s age and how effectively she’d been duped. ‘She was meeting up with him for his birthday.’

  ‘Her father’s dead. But I’m pretty sure I know who she’s running to.’ He turned to Fox. ‘The NYPD told me Archer was down there, last they spoke to him.’

  ‘He still isn’t answering any messages?’

  ‘Not a peep.’

  Instead of replying, Fox suddenly gripped his colleague’s arm.

  ‘What?’ Porter asked.

  ‘When Chalk arrived from New York, how did they get to Oxford?’

  ‘Train.’

  ‘He booked tickets himself?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘The fare would show up on his statement,’ he said, holding up Chalky’s credit card in the evidence bag. ‘I’ve been trying to work out how the hell McGuinness found him and Issy. If he got into the account, he could find out where they were.’

  ‘Yeah, he could. But how could he access Chalky’s bank details?’

  ‘Someone else who had his log in number and password.’

  ‘Who?’

  The two men looked at each other.

  They both realised there was only one person that was likely to be.

  FORTY SIX

  Verona Villafranca had been the nearest airport for Stefani, but she figured the men who’d killed her husband would almost certainly have people all over it, so she’d taken a bus over the border instead. Rossi’s death hadn’t made the news in the United States yet, which meant the Italian public still didn’t know who he was; a hit on an American mafioso in a picturesque Lake Garda village would create a feeding frenzy once the media networks picked it up.

  ‘They got him,’ Stefani told Vincent from a payphone, a few days later, keeping her eyes on the street as she talked. ‘Shot him in the street like a dog.’

  ‘Who the hell was he meeting?’

  ‘Dunno. Said he was looking for some protection for us. That worked out well.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Don’t wanna to say, right now,’ she replied, looking at the street signs outside the payphone booth in Vienna, Austria.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Find out who he was at that table with. I don’t care who they are, what their lineage is, if they’re mobbed up or an old-time family. We do it harder and better than these old-timer pussies. They gotta learn who they messed with.’

  ‘I’m on it, boss.’

  As she put the receiver down, that last word lingered in her mind, not lost on her how he’d addressed her. She gave a small, satisfied smile. But she knew it would be premature to start thinking of herself in those terms yet. It had occurred to her that the attack on her husband could very well have been the result of a coup; her own boys back in Baltimore, staging a rebellion and getting their boss picked off when he was vulnerable, but her gut feeling told her it wasn’t them. They were killers and thieves, but they’d always been loyal to her and Rossi. They also knew what she was capable of if crossed, which was at least as bad as anything Carla Lombardi could come up with and possibly worse. However, she intended to keep her location a secret for now, until she was sure they were on her side.

  She didn’t have to wait long. Vinnie, Marco and the others soon discovered that Rossi’s murderers were associates of an old family distantly connected to the Lombardis, who’d informed Gino and Carla as soon as they’d received the request from Rossi Fusella for protection. On Stefani’s orders, Vincent sent Marco and the others to even out the score. She was told that three men had met her husband that day in Malcesine and less than a week later, the one who’d pulled the trigger was drowned in a bath of boiling water, the man who’d set up the meet was garrotted with wire, and the last was shot, but only after giving them all the information they wanted.

  Now, she looked up as Marco walked back into her office. ‘McGuinness made contact.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the air. He used Wi-Fi to send a message from a flight back to the US. Said he can’t talk until he’s landed Stateside and he’s right. Airlines might monitor communications sent from the planes.’

  ‘Where’s he landing?’

  ‘Didn’t say, but he wanted the cell number for the brother of the bitch in the wheelchair. Got Paulie to take it from her phone and we sent it over to him.’

  ‘The NYPD guy better answer, then,’ Stefani said, her thoughts returning again to her recent past. After Rossi’s death was finally picked up by American news outlets, realising she’d survived the hit, the FBI had doubled down in their pursuit, using Interpol to help search for her, that kind of heat preventing her from heading home. She’d zigzagged across Europe, with no intention of repeating the major mistake her late husband had made, by sticking around one place too long. His error. Not hers. And he’d paid a high price for it.

  Scandinavia had been her main hiding place for most of her four year absence. Organised crime in Sweden and Denmark didn’t have the grip it had in American cities, being run instead by outlaw motorcycle clubs, prison gangs, or crews formed of immigrants from Turkey, Africa, Albania or Iraq. She steered well clear of them and kept a low profile, giving them no opportunity to find out who she was, knowing how much she’d be worth if they discovered her identity.

  But the Italian arm of the Lombardi crime family was a different matter. Bianca’s immediate retaliation for her husband’s execution hadn’t gone down well. Some of Gino’s old country associates almost got her in Stockholm; she’d noticed them just in time when she’d been walking back to her accommodation not far from the main train station. They almost succeeded again months later in Copenhagen, where she’d been renting a place in the Frederiksberg section of the city.

  Back home, her guys were holding their own in Baltimore, and she was still calling the shots via Vincent, who for safety reasons was the only one she was using as a point of contact on the phone. She’d expected a power grab by now, with a challenge to her leadership, and was puzzled it hadn’t happened.

  But her instincts were right. She didn’t have long to wait.

  ‘When were you last here?’ an ARU officer called Deakins asked Chalky’s mother’s cleaner, outside the injured officer’s mother’s home. The woman had pulled up just as they’d knocked on the door for a second time; Porter and Fox were still at Heathrow, so Port had sent Deakins and another officer nicknamed Shifty to check on Chalky’s next of kin.

  ‘Two days ago.’

  ‘Was she here?’

  ‘No, and I don’t have a key; that’s why I’ve called by again. I’m worried about her. She’s always here to let me in. I rang a couple of times, then left. Assumed she must’ve forgotten and gone out.’

  ‘She ever done that before.’

  ‘No.’

  Deakins felt a surge of concern. Moments later, he and Shifty breached the house and separated, quickly checking the property. There was no sign of the woman.

  Finally, Deakins opened a door under the stairs leading down to the cellar and flicked on the light.

  That’s where he found Chalky’s mother, sprawled in a heap at the bottom in a pool of blood.

  ‘I triple checked for any tail,’ Stefani’s soldier called Seppi assured her a year before her return to Baltimore, the pair in a coffee shop inside a shopping mall in central Copenhagen.

  ‘Why’d you fly to meet me in person?’

  ‘Vincent’s been talking with other families. He’s been hinting at making a move.’

  ‘That piece of shit. I wondered how long this would last. My husband brought him up from nothing.’

  ‘He’s been asking why we’re still taking orders from you.’

  ‘He’ll find out wh
en I get back.’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Get rid of him.’

  Seppi’s eyes glistened, a gleam of triumph which Stefani didn’t miss. ‘You got it.’ He left his old boss’s wife at the table, stopped off to buy some cigarettes, then walked swiftly back to his hotel to pack, his flight to the States leaving later in the day.

  When he entered his room, like Vargas a year later, he became aware a second too late that he wasn’t alone.

  Before he could react, he was clubbed over the back of the head, and when he came to a few minutes later, he was being bound and gagged.

  ‘Trying to get me to order the death of one of my most loyal guys so you can take his place?’ Stefani’s voice said above him, before she walked over to the door. Looking up, he saw Marco standing over him. ‘You’ll get a headache using all that brain power.’

  That was the only time her leadership had been tested, her men remaining loyal, especially when they heard from Marco what she’d done to Seppi. His remains had been buried in a field an hour out of the city, but Stefani, knowing her location had been compromised, decided once again that it was time to move. Before the end of the week, her apartment was empty and she was on her way to the bleak, remote volcanic island situated between North America and mainland Europe. She hoped here at least, she’d be harder to track down.

  Renting a cabin, she’d camped out in Iceland for the next twelve months undisturbed, until those two assholes had come for her that day out in the wilderness, when she’d been driving back from the local town after her weekly food run. More men from the Lombardi’s connections in Italy, retaliation for the three she’d had killed after they’d murdered her husband. The never-ending cycle of revenge. Only God knew how they’d found her; she suspected it was sheer bad luck on her part. She’d lived in Reykjavik for a few months before moving out to the cabin, but the place was always busy with tourists, and her sliced up face made her memorable. Maybe someone had recognised her. Organised crime from all over Europe had networks and ties in Iceland, a gateway stopover to Canada and the northeast of the US which was why she’d moved to such a remote cabin out in the wilderness, hoping to avoid ever being recognised. Seemed it hadn’t worked.