by G M Eppers
I did likewise. “They’re dating. I’m not sure how serious they’ve gotten. That’s their business,” I said pointedly.
“Got it. Butte out, right? I thought that was the problem between us. You guys want me involved or not?” His fingers began to drum on the armrest right under the window, and he looked at his watch.
I reached across him and put my hand on top of his to stop the drumming. There was no arm rest between the seats, since they were designed for the twins to sit in. “I can’t speak for Billings, but last I checked I think he wanted you to burn in Hell. Maybe after you help save his life he’ll feel differently. Isn’t that how these things usually go?”
“This is life. It’s not a book. There are no rules about that,” he mused, looking at his watch again. The plane began to taxi. “How can he not know how much I care about him?”
“Maybe because you never told him,” I suggested. It was dirty pool, but effective. Butte lowered his head and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t say it, but I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that maybe he had lost his chance to remedy that. I let it go unspoken because I couldn’t bear to hear it out loud either.
Before long we were in the air. As we climbed, I was enjoying the fact that my ears didn’t plug, and the engines were as quiet as sleeping mice. Butte noticed the change, too. “Wow, you guys got an APE? I asked for one and they said no. I’m going to ask again. In fact, screw asking. I’m going to demand they upgrade the AirWHEY. Gotta say it, Helena. Your plane may be smaller, but it’s better than ours.”
“I can’t believe they said no to something. You seem to get everything you want.” It sounded childish, but that wasn’t my intention. I was merely making an observation.
His eyes moved down, and then toward me, and then away. “Yeah, about that. What you saw, that wasn’t the usual. That was my mission, to impress you, maybe lure you over, but at least get into your head, see what you knew about the Meatball Bomber. Mission’s over. Most of that is going to go away. The limo, the champagne. My next hotel room, I’ll be lucky to have a mattress let alone a spinning bed.”
“Ssshhh, I don’t want that to get around. I’d never live it down.”
“Sorry.” No one was watching us, though. They all had their eyes on the seatbelt sign, waiting for the freedom to swarm Badger and his GPS. “I wish I’d never agreed to this,” Butte said quietly. “Then you would have been there and Billings wouldn’t be in trouble.”
“There no sense dwelling on that,” I said, although the thought had occurred to me as well. If I had insisted on staying with the investigation rather than trying some ill-conceived spy mission, we might at this moment have the bomber in custody and be heading for home. “Spying is stupid.”
“Naw, we’re just bad at it,” he said with a sad grin.
I twisted in my seat toward Butte. “I think you’re right. I’ve been too coy. Let’s start over.” I paused, and waved at him. “Hey, Butte! Nice to see you again. Did you hear about what happened in the Czech Republic?”
He grinned a little wider and twisted toward me. “Nice to see you, too. Yeah, I heard there was a bombing. It was pretty bad. What do you know about it?”
“It was the meatballs. Hand to God, honest.” I made the Boy Scout salute, as if I’d ever been a Boy Scout. I hadn’t even been a Girl Scout. I look terrible in green. With a little hair dye I could almost be an Oompa Loompa. “Not only that, there’s been a whole string of bombings all across Europe. Something big is going on. You guys at WHEY wouldn’t be making trouble, would you?”
“Go fish,” he responded. “Wasn’t us. We thought it was you!”
“Nope. Guess we’ll look someplace else. See you later.” I waved again, then made a phone with my hand. “Call me!” I straightened myself in my seat. “If only. We wasted two whole days on this charade.” Butte straightened as well, and used one finger to raise the window shade half-way.
The seatbelt sign turned off and Butte and I unbuckled, though we didn’t get out of our seats. If I got up and moved around I’d want to grab a parachute and jump. It wouldn’t get me to Billings any faster, and possibly not at all, but it would feel like I was doing something. Just riding was excruciating. I found myself drumming the fingers of my left hand, on the only arm rest I could reach. The rest of the team, as I predicted, had leapt up and were now gathered around Badger trying to see his little three inch screen. All except for Roxy, who came over to us with a worried expression on her face and her cell phone in one hand. She tried to look chipper as she asked, “How you holding up?”
“Okay,” I responded automatically. I let her know that her expression wasn’t lost on me. “You look especially worried.”
She also looked like she had no saliva in her mouth at all. Roxy positioned herself next to my seat, and crouched low in her Louboutins. “Helena, I need to talk to you. And Butte, I guess.”
“You’re in luck. We’re both here.” Without the seatbelts on, it was much easier to twist in the seats to face her. I couldn’t imagine what she could have to say so confidentially.
Glancing around to make sure the rest of the team remained huddled around the GPS, she finally turned back to us. “We may have a bigger problem than we think.”
“What do you mean?” asked Butte.
“Calabria, Italy.”
“Yes, that’s where they’ve taken him. Probably a lovely place if you aren’t trying to rescue someone. I understand Italy is just heaping with history, and, of course, you know how I feel about history. Now, it’s nowhere near all the best spots, like the Coliseum or the Parthenon, but even the smallest cities can have amazing sites. Why, a country like Italy probably has fascinating sites dating back a thousand years or more, especially the coastal cities like Calabria, what with all the civilizations forming around the Mediterranean Sea—“
Butte interrupted me. “Helena, you’re babbling. Let Roxy talk.”
“Sorry,” I apologized. I’d seen a way to get my mind off the fact that Billings was missing by exploring history and geography. I’d had several paragraphs all lined up about the Italian viaduct system and the life of Leonarda Da Vinci. “What is it, Roxy?”
“I’ve been researching the Calabria area of Italy, trying to find out who could be behind this whole thing. And there’s only one criminal organization big enough to pull off the string of bombings Miss Chiff told you about, Helena.”
My stomach fell through the floor and I wanted to vomit. Before she even said it, I knew. It wasn’t a joke anymore.
Roxy continued, “The Calabria region is home turf for the modern day Italian Mafia.”
Healthy Beating
Chapter One
Calabria is located on the toe of the boot of Italy, separated from Sicily by the two kilometer-wide Strait of Messina. There are forested mountains and vast lowlands which contain vineyards and orchards of olive trees and orange trees. Because it’s surrounded by water on three sides, it’s also a very popular tourist resort with big hotels and exotic beaches. We approached the main airport, but Dinny announced over the speaker that the tower had not given us permission to land. We had to circle for nearly an hour before we were allowed a runway, mostly to avoid having us crash when we ran out of fuel. Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with the airport staff regarding refueling the plane. That’s Dinny’s department. And she has the only key to the weapons locker. I’m not sure if the airport personnel were aware of that.
Roxy’s news had given Butte and me a lot to worry about. I’d been doing pretty well working on the assumption that he’d been taken by some know-nothing thugs and that the rescue would be relatively simple. But the Italian Mafia are professionals. We couldn’t afford to underestimate them. We were going to need a plan, but it was impossible to devise one without knowing the end destination. We prepared to deplane with a thorough trip through the locker room, snapping on fully stocked HEP belts and bullet proof vests. Dinny hugged me tight before I left, saying, “Call me, Helena. I want to k
now what’s happening every step of the way.” We both knew that wasn’t practical, but I promised to keep her informed.
Badger had his phone with its GPS tracking Billings’ STD (ugh). We followed the blip slowly in a rented tan conversion van, hanging back several blocks. Finally, Badger announced. “It stopped. Port of Reggio.” Butte was driving—he had insisted on it—with Badger next to him so he could see the GPS screen. He glanced at it now, shifted gears, and accelerated.
“Wait a minute, Butte,” I said from behind him. “Slow down. We need a plan. Drive slow, like we’re lost, so we can get the lay of the land. Sylvia, can you see all right? I want your eyes on this.”
She’d been sitting in the middle of a bench seat between Sir Haughty and Roxy, but unbuckled and traded with Sir Haughty to get to the window. Once they were both in place, they put their seatbelts back on. “I’m on it,” she said. “Do we know which building?”
We drove through twisty streets between the usual abandoned warehouses and seaside storage buildings. Badger kept an eye on his screen, directing Butte this way and that as we drove. “Take a right here, Butte. I want to go around this building and see if I lose the signal.” Butte turned as directed, still driving slowly. After we finished the circuit, Badger nodded. “He’s in there.”
It was actually a sizeable storage building, about three stories high and half a block long. The criminal element seemed to enjoy large spaces, although they often didn’t use them efficiently. It was common to track down Uber dealers in buildings that covered entire city blocks in all directions, only to discover a relatively tiny operation hidden inside, as if the airspace provided cover. This building was compact in comparison. We drove around the block again, examining all four sides. It appeared to be red brick, and had two doors on opposite sides, and several square windows that were all boarded up. The back of the building had an alcove about eight feet across that hid one of the doors and a covered garbage dumpster. There was a smaller building, almost a shack, with a pointed roof and a lightning rod extending into the sky. It had a sign near its front door. Badger reported that it said “Harbormaster.” That one was green and appeared to be made of stucco. The buildings shared a central parking lot that was heavily pitted and cracked.
We parked half a block north to discuss it. “Sylvia, what’s your assessment?” I asked.
“I think Calabria Harbor needs work,” she said. “If I owned a boat, I wouldn’t dock anywhere near here.” I gave her a dirty look and she continued, “Right. I would assume that the doors we saw are all going to be locked. The walls are not suitable for climbing –“
Avis, from the rear seat, interrupted. “We could climb the sheer side of a glacier if it’s to save Billings,” she said, speaking for both herself and Agnes.
“Hold on,” I said. “No one’s climbing anything yet. We aren’t going to just jump out of the car and start clambering up to the roof. Someone would probably get shot.”
Butte had his head down as he peered through the windshield at our target building. “I have an idea. But you may not like it.”
I said nothing.
“We need to talk to the harbormaster.”
“About what?” I asked.
He nodded his head toward the building where we suspected Billings was being held. “He may not know he has a Mafia stronghold in his backyard. The harbormaster has far reaching authority and could help us. He’s pretty much in charge of everything that happens at the harbor as well as out at sea.”
Sylvia spoke up from her seat right in front of the twins. “What if he already knows about them? What if they have his blessing? He could be part of their organization.”
“We’ll have to take that chance,” I said. “I just wasted two days being too afraid to ask my own ex-husband what he knew about the Chembassy bombings, and we probably wouldn’t be in this fix if I hadn’t.” I was sitting behind Butte. I could still smell his aftershave. “Badger, you’re with me just in case he doesn’t speak English.”
“Odds are good he does,” said Badger. “He has to deal with dozens of nationalities in his job. Any vessel that wants to dock here has to go through him. So to speak.”
“The rest of you wait here. We shouldn’t be long.” Badger and I extricated ourselves from the van and I ducked traffic to meet him on the boardwalk. Like the port in Belgium, the common sounds of a shoreline greeted us: water lapping, seagulls calling and swooping about, the creaking of wooden infrastructure. Instead of the North Sea, it was the good old Mediterranean, and the air was considerably warmer. The day was sunny, with a few widely scattered, white, fluffy, non-threatening clouds. The harbor had a couple of boats docked in it, though they were small, about a hundred feet each, and both appeared to be private yachts. One was marked ‘Lady Brenda’ and the other, according to Badger, was ‘High Tide’ in German.
I knocked on the harbormaster’s door. There was no response at first, so I knocked again, a bit louder. Finally, a low gravelly voice called, “Come.” The door was unlocked and we entered the tiny outer office. The room was divided in two by a long counter of heavily polished wood with a pass-through on the far right. Behind the counter was a full bank of gauges, dials, switches, and other gadgetry including a shortwave radio and microphone. Next to the microphone was an ashtray overflowing with ashes and butts. Facing the bank of controls was a wooden wheeled chair with a high back, and in the chair sat a tall, thin person with very short black hair. The chair squeaked as it first swiveled, then rolled forward toward us. “Ciao a tutti,” she said, for the harbormaster of the port of Calabria was, in fact, a woman. Her voice was so rough she made Harvey Fierstein sound like a nightingale and I wanted to offer her a throat lozenge. A brief look seemed to tell her we were tourists. “Americans?” We both nodded. “Benevenuti. Welcome to Italy. What can I do for you?” Her accent was not hard to understand, but I was always thankful to have Badger as a backup. There were times when, even though English was being spoken, the accent was too thick for my ears, or the dialect too unfamiliar. Both were the case when we were in Wales four years ago. Badger got me through some really rough dialogs there. Without him, I probably would have ended up either married or in jail.
“See?” Badger said. “Multilingualism is really ruining it for us translators. Whatever happened to some good, healthy xenophobia? Americans are the only ones left who are pig-headed enough for exclusionary linguistics. Maybe if we go to China I could be useful.”
“You’re useful,” I said automatically. “Don’t forget, you are also the best at finding answers. Keep your cell phone charged and your thumbs at the ready and pay attention. Besides, how good is your Chinese anyway?”
He spoke something that sounded like Chinese to me.
The woman behind the counter responded and then the two of them were jabbering away leading me to look for subtitles to come floating through the air in a badly translated crawl. “Okay, okay!” I said to stop the exchange.
“My apologies,” said the harbormaster. “I was merely repeating Chinese phrases I use in my work, such as ‘reduce your speed,’ ‘do you need assistance,’ and ‘we are not accepting any more Ramen.’” Still in her chair, she extended her right hand. “I’m Florencia Vertucci, Calabria’s harbormaster.”
We shook hands and exchanged “pleased to meet you’s.” “Unfortunately, Badger, China is not big on our Uber crime list,” I said. “There won’t be much call for Chinese.”
“Uber?” asked the harbormaster. “Should I call the Chembassy?”
“No. I’m sorry, Ms. Vertucci,” I said, and proceeded to introduce us as I should have done in the first place. “I’m Helena Montana, Coordinator for CURDS Team A. This is my associate. You can call him Badger.” There was another round of handshaking, yet she still didn’t rise from the chair. “We are in Europe investigating a series of attacks on Chembassies around the continent. Have you heard about them?”
“A bit. Something about meatballs? I haven’t had time to watch the n
ews much lately. The harbor has been very busy. We have two more ships due in this evening from Tunisia and Greenland, and one early tomorrow morning from South Africa.” Her chair creaked again as she rose to her full height. She was rail thin, with almost no breasts to speak of, but her bearing was still female. She wore a uniform similar to a police officer, with a holster and gun. She towered over me, just like almost everyone else. We had a mission in Central Africa once and met a very nice tribe of pygmies. They called me stretch and handed over about twelve pounds of Uber Caravane from Mauritania. The tallest among them came up to my sternum and I could not have been happier about it. But the harbormaster was not a pygmy. I remembered the results of my physical and desperately wanted that quarter of an inch back. People with height have no concept of how valuable a fraction of an inch can be. Trying to exert authority over someone significantly taller than yourself can be very difficult.
“Yes, that’s correct,” I said. Then I finally got to the meat of our visit. “You see, one of my agents was captured and we’ve traced him to a location nearby. I was wondering if you could help us.”
“A rescue?” She seemed excited as she moved quickly to the pass-through and joined us in the outer office. Her voice was still making me wince. “Who captured him? Where is he?”
I exchanged a look with Badger, and then decided it would be best not to mention the Mafia connection right off the bat. So I answered her second question first. “We have reason to believe he’s being held in the next building.” I pointed to show the direction. “Do you know who owns it? Can we arrange some kind of access?”
“I don’t know about the access, but it’s shipping storage for Carne Posta, the mail-order meat company.” That couldn’t just be coincidence. Again I exchanged a look with Badger and both of us raised an eyebrow. He was better at that than I was. It makes me look surprised. It makes Badger look like a Vulcan.