by David Downie
“Genova la Rossa,” she teased. “Is it still a red city?”
“More black and blue than red nowadays,” Morbido muttered, regretting that he had allowed himself to be baited. “Remember the bruising the political left took during the G8 Summit in 2001? Look it up on the Internet, commissario. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. The worst violations of human rights in Europe since the end of the war were committed, the kind of brutality the Nazis and Black Shirts loved, and this, perpetrated by our esteemed colleagues, several of them promoted, to boot. In this context I will not mention the name of the Questor. But you know Marshal De Filippo was there? We were both young…” Morbido paused and drew breath and seemed to also regret his vehemence. “What was it all for?” he asked rhetorically, echoing the words of Emilio Bozzo, the pathologist. “What do our idealistic children do? They vote for right-wing crackpots or they don’t vote at all and the crackpots get in. The only thing the young seem to care about are smartphones, junk food, and avoiding work. My kids have no backbone—they’re nice but have no moxie.”
Daria made an empathetic noise and glanced out the window. “Getting back to the delivery van,” she suggested.
Morbido watched her in the mirror as he spoke. “Sì, commissario. It was reported missing this morning at approximately 5:30 a.m., presumably stolen at some point between midnight, when the bakery knocked off, and 3:15 a.m., if the first bag with body parts was dropped at 3:42 a.m. in front of Villa Migone, as the video footage indicates. The bakery owner and delivery driver have both given statements already. We also talked to the taxi driver who reported finding the van in Rapallo at 6:45 a.m., as I said. It was there when he arrived at the stand and then went to the men’s room before starting his shift. He saw nothing unusual. And no, there are no surveillance cameras in the area, and no license plate identification cameras either.”
“What’s the name of the bakery?” she asked.
Morbido cracked a rueful smile. “Garibaldi.”
Daria metabolized the information. “Gary Baldi?” she asked. “Or Garibaldi? Do you think someone is sending us a subtle message?”
“Too subtle for me,” Morbido grunted. “What is the message, commissario? And who is it addressed to?”
“Garbled. Recipient unknown.”
“Exactly what I mean. It’s like clumsy Russian disinformation. It’s so ham-fisted it works. We’re confused.”
“Speaking of ham,” she said, “we’re going to be late for lunch. The Dutch eat early. You remember the address?”
“Sì, commissario,” he said eagerly, “Villa Pinky, above Zoagli on that corkscrew, dead-end alley.”
She raised an eyebrow at the mention of the facetious name those in the know had given the ambassador’s family mansion, Villa Adele. “You will drop me and return for me one hour later?”
“Sì, commissario.”
“There’s a café at the bottom of the hill on the Via Aurelia,” she added in the same apologetic tone. “They make very good sandwiches. And cut the sì commissario stuff, Osvaldo. You know I would invite you to join us, but my godfather is eccentric and he wants to speak to me in private, doubtless about some family matter.”
“Having to do with the family of Joseph Gary Baldi, alias Giuseppe Garibaldi, or is it the other way around?” Morbido’s delivery was deadpan. “Don’t worry, Daria,” he said in his affable basso voice, his face twitching, betraying the lingering nausea that had seized him earlier that morning near the bags full of butchered bodies. “The heat has taken away my appetite.”
Daria shut her eyes, counting to ten. Then she forced them open and turned to the pile of printed, single-spaced sheets on the back seat, picking up where she had left off, trying to focus on Joseph Gary, alias Gary Baldi, Joe Gary Baldi, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, his birth name, an international operator of a high order, it was clear.
As she read, she felt Morbido’s eyes on her, watching her reflection in the mirror. She guessed from several things he had said that he had read or at least scanned the Joseph Gary dossier when downloading and printing it out.
Name: Joseph Gary. Born Giuseppe Garibaldi, Prati di Bovecchia, Province of La Spezia, March 24, 1927, the report began. Changed name and renounced Italian citizenship, 1946. Granted refugee status, Toronto, Canada. Naturalized Canadian then U.S. citizen, 1948 and 1954, respectively. Korean War veteran, general discharge. Subsequently U.S. Navy Intelligence. Joined FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, 1961, contract terminated, 1969. CIA operative, dates unknown. Various covers. Import-export manager, Caracas, Venezuela. Principal, Sequester Free, a private security firm specializing in freeing kidnap and blackmail victims. Political adviser, Washington, DC, and, later, K Street lobbyist for Monsanto, Gazprom, the Libyan National Oil Corporation, the NRA, Boeing, Finmeccanica, and others. Real estate developer with interests in Bahrain, Barbados, Bucharest, Dubai, Naples, Panama, Florida and New York City. Now officially retired but unofficially an active “security consultant” and “trade promoter,” otherwise known as a “fixer.” Friend of Trump, Putin, Erdogan, et al.
Daria skipped ahead, wondering why the discharge had been general and not honorable, why Hoover had fired Gary from the FBI back in the late 1960s, and whether he was still communicating with the CIA, and, lastly, what kind of defense systems he had helped Finmeccanica, Italy’s largest arms exporter, sell to the Pentagon and possibly others.
Estimated worth, she read, $100–$140 million or approximately €80–€120 million.
So, she said to herself, he isn’t a billionaire, merely super rich.
Gary had been married four times, the report confirmed, and divorced four times. He had four children. One had predeceased him. The three survivors were scattered across the globe. All were adult males aged between fifty and seventy, the younger two estranged from Gary and disinherited. They had so far engendered fourteen grandchildren...
Daria ran her finger down the page and found what she was looking for. Currently, Joseph Gary was living with a certain Signora Lepa Sneguljčica, alias Morgana Stella, a self-described aroma therapist, aged forty, of Slovenian nationality, holding a valid long-term Italian residency permit issued in Genoa in 2009. Stella met subject Gary in 2017. Moved into Villa Glicine with Gary in 2018, the report specified.
Daria paused and reread the paragraph that followed. It made clear that Joseph Gary was not registered at the prefecture of Genoa with a long-term residency permit. He had entered the country via Luxembourg and France two years earlier as a tourist. His official residence for tax purposes was Barbados. Gary had traveled back and forth to Luxembourg in the interim and to Switzerland at least six times in the last year.
Daria smiled. The Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s tax enforcement authority, might be curious to learn the details. Perhaps they already knew them?
A red flag shot up. If the tax police knew about Gary and had not intervened? This was a question for the higher-ups. Since Vice Questor Ruggieri was away on vacation, should she jump the chain of command and refer the case directly to the Questor, Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri? But Centauri had attended a political meeting with Joseph Gary at Villa Glicine. That suggested a conflict of interest. Centauri’s extreme-right bent was a matter of public record. After the beatings and murders at the G8 Summit, Centauri had been nicknamed Spartacus, the great hero of the Italian political right.
Daria hung her head and rubbed her eyes. Clearly, Joe Gary was a model citizen. Probably protected and almost certainly untouchable. The perfect profile for Portofino. She closed her eyes again and let the pages fall back to the seat. Why had Willem Bremach told her to dig out his dossier—and why now?
With lights swirling and siren screaming, the Alfa Romeo raced downhill on the serpentine country road into the cluttered, heavily built-up valley. A streaking bullet-proof rocket, it passed the freeway off ramp and sped through the blight of Rapallo’s postwar outskirts, picking up th
e busy Via Aurelia coast highway again in the medieval center of town. After battling through traffic near the train station, the car pulled free of the pocket-size downtown area and continued south by southeast on the scenic, winding highway. Soon it was slaloming through citrus and olive groves, amid Art Nouveau and Art Deco villas teetering on rocky cliffs.
Wherever she looked, willing her eyes open to avoid motion sickness, Daria seemed to see suffocating masses of blood-red bougainvillea and purple morning glory knotted around the guardrails along the road or hanging from the fleshy-leaved, pungent pittosporum trees. The pittosporum grew in suffocating profusion, their dark, musty branches clotted with tiny, cloying white and yellow blossoms oozing translucent honey. The windows of the Alfa Romeo were closed, but the sickly sweet smell reached her. She coughed, almost gagging.
“Thank God for air conditioning,” Daria said aloud, filling the void.
“I hate spring,” Morbido grumbled, accelerating around a car, bus, and truck in one smooth but risky maneuver. “Winter is the only good season.” Though she admired the way Morbido drove, like a Formula One champion, she wished he would slow down. “I hate air conditioning,” he added, “but sometimes it’s useful.”
To Daria’s mind, the air conditioning transformed the speeding vehicle into a climate-controlled spaceship flying across an enchanting April morning. The cool temperature matched the slide show of seductive images in her head, vintage Technicolor images of the Italian Riviera in a picture-postcard springtime from days gone by, the days of her youth, when she and her parents had spent entire weeks at Villa Adele with her godfather Willem Bremach and his wife Priscilla, a.k.a. Pinky.
But Daria was not seduced by the Riviera. She knew things rank and steamy were uncoiling amid the riot of dripping honeyed blossoms and blood-hued flowers. It was not fear that caused her to shiver imperceptibly. It was a sense of dread, of looming tragedy.
Swerving south and weaving from lane to lane, the unmarked police car reached the tangle of narrow roads rising up the seafront hillside to the hamlets suspended above the scenic resort town of Zoagli and neighboring Chiavari, a small, prosperous city of the eastern Riviera di Levante.
You had to be a billionaire to live in Portofino, Daria reflected, unwilling to admit to herself that she disliked the famous seaside hamlet despite its staggeringly beautiful setting. Even here, ten miles away from Portofino as the crow flies, unless you were lucky enough to be born on the terraced slopes, you still needed millions to buy even a fisherman’s shack. Willem Bremach was among the lucky few, grandfathered into paradise.
Daria had long thought of her enigmatic godfather as the Flying Dutchman, an unlikely chance Italian. Still standing six feet three inches tall at ninety-three years old, he was the scion of a Dutch trading dynasty based since the 1890s in the teeming alleys of old Genoa. That was why he had been born in the heart of the city of Christopher Columbus, in a bedroom the size of a tennis court, hidden within the massive, fortress-like seventeenth-century frescoed Palazzo Spinola.
Now a national house museum hung with priceless Renaissance and Baroque paintings, and stuffed with rare porcelain, tapestries, and furniture, Palazzo Spinola had lured Daria into its labyrinth of rooms half a dozen times since her transfer to Genoa from Rome six years ago. She loved everything about the palace—the smell, the suffused light, even the dust. She had gotten to know the museum’s director, dottoressa Simonetta Farina. She had even introduced Farina to Willem Bremach, who, after revisiting his birthplace in the charming director’s company, had told Simonetta Farina everything he remembered about life in the palazzo before World War Two.
It was after the war, in the booming fifties and the wild, swinging sixties, that Willem Bremach had become Daria Vinci’s father’s closest friend and associate. As secretive as he was jocular, the Dutchman remained an unapologetic cold warrior, like Daria’s long-dead father. Also like him, Bremach had not always served his country in the capacity of a bland, guarded diplomat. Because Willem’s mother had been English, giving him dual nationality, and because he had lied about his age, the plucky Bremach had become a fighter pilot for the RAF when still a teenager at the end of World War Two. The propeller of his Spitfire, shot down over La Spezia in April 1945, adorned the wall of his study. Ever since she was a small child, Daria had wondered at the strange fact that the propeller was made not of steel or aluminum but of laminated wood.
Under diplomatic cover, Bremach’s duties and postings had been various and colorful, like her father’s—like the variegated vegetation she could see now beyond the car’s windows—and equally tangled. Bremach had retired eons ago, but, it was said, kept his hand in, a mirthful eminence grise who could pick up a telephone and speak with government ministers, heads of secret services, and the industrial elite who flocked to places like Davos each year to set the world’s agenda. That’s what made him such a useful, if willful, ally and sometime informant.
Waking now from her daydream, she braced herself as the car skidded to a halt in front of Bremach’s sprawling, turn-of-the-century residence, Villa Adele. It was known to friends and family members as Villa Pinky in part because the faded rose-hued stucco mansion was surrounded by pink roses and pink hydrangeas. Around the garden grew clumps of scented pittosporum. The terraced olive groves and rows of flame cypress trees covered dozens of acres and reached halfway down to the sea.
Feeling dizzy again, Daria handed the Joseph Gary file to Morbido and tried to clear her mental cache. Something told her she was about to learn a thing or two from her beloved godfather, things she could not learn from the DIGOS printout, and perhaps not from anyone else still alive to tell. “Thank you, Osvaldo,” she murmured as the car idled in the driveway. “Enjoy your lunchtime reading.”
Five
“Where is your dear Communistic friend?” Willem Bremach asked Daria with a wicked wink, feigning surprise at the absence of her perpetual sidekick, Inspector Morbido. Bremach rose shakily from his wheelchair, gave Daria a lingering hug, and kissed her on both cheeks.
Freeing herself, she lowered him back to safety, then pulled Priscilla into a warm embrace, pecking her cool, powdery cheeks. Daria always thought of Priscilla’s cheeks as made of porcelain and smelling of perfumes a grandmother might wear. “Morbido will be back in an hour to pick me up,” Daria said, pushing Bremach’s wheelchair toward the living room.
“So soon?” he protested. “Well, we have no time to waste. A drop of elixir, Daria? You may need it.”
She shook her head, knowing what would happen if she consumed an alcoholic beverage at lunch in the heat after getting up at five. “Let me wash up, then I’ll help Priscilla get lunch together.”
Priscilla wagged her index finger. “You two stay out of the way and talk. Everything is cold. It’s already on the table. Angela and I will take care of things.”
“The angelic Angela,” Willem sang, his shrubby white eyebrows quivering. “You’ll never break through the glass ceiling if you behave so civilly, Daria,” he added, scolding. “You must let your subalterns do the work so that you may enjoy the glory.”
With a nod and a friendly tweak of the shoulders, Priscilla redirected Daria down a side hallway. “Use the kitchen bathroom, please,” she said. “The guest rooms and bathrooms are occupied and the occupants are still sleeping or showering.”
“’Tis the season for migratory nieces and nephews,” Willem said, raising his voice, “not to mention children, grandchildren, and their friends and cousins, the entire populations of the Netherlands and several Nordic countries, in fact, plus New Zealand and Australia. We’re a proper Hotel California just now.”
“Don’t be an old crab,” Priscilla said. “You were young and idealistic once.”
“Idealistic? Tut-tut, Pinky. You mean young and hedonistic, young and narcissistic, young and hormonal, young and so on. They come by the droves in spring to hike the Sink-we Terry, as they call the C
inque Terre, and go to nightclubs, and then crawl home in the wee hours making sure to wake us up, or, worse, have us pick them up at indecent hours,” he snorted. “They are highly idealistic.”
“That’s unfair,” Priscilla said, “they protest, they sign petitions, they march against gun violence and sexual harassment or to save the planet and liberate themselves from racism and gender oppression.”
“All very heroic,” Willem clucked. “When I was their age…”
“Oh, when you were their age,” she cut him off, “the world was young, men were men, and everyone was a hero, as long as they were white males!”
Willem and Pinky continued their mock battle as Daria shut the bathroom door behind her. She could hear him raising his voice again, making sure he could be heard through the door and over the splashing water. She wondered, not for the first time, if all old couples inevitably bickered, battled, and played childish games with each other. Maybe, she decided, maybe it was a different form of love, a form she would never understand or experience because she was doomed to be single.
“Now Daria is different,” Willem roared from beyond the bathroom. “She’s the true idealist, because she is operating from the inside, not throwing stones and running away.” He paused, then shouted. “You should be a Vice Questor by now, my dear Davinci. I must make inquiries. When will that wretched Centauri retire?”
Once Daria had returned to the living room, her cheeks pink and damp, Willem Bremach beckoned her to follow him as he rolled himself ponderously toward the wide verandah. “Tennis,” he said, “in case you’re curious. Not serious, not worth discussing. My man Vittorio pushes and drives me around, and Angela feeds me chocolates and whiskey when Pinky isn’t looking, so all is well.”
“I meant to ask what happened,” Daria said, contrite.