by David Downie
“Well, he certainly did,” Daria remarked, recalling the report she had read that morning in the car, and the company Gary had managed, Sequester Free. “There are no signs on the boat of violence or forcible abduction, is that right?” she asked. Morbido made a grunting sound in the affirmative. “Okay. So, since he was in the water when he disappeared, according to the only eyewitness we have, meaning Ambassador Bremach, the kidnappers would have had to grab Gary from another boat with a fishing net, or from a submarine, or perhaps on water skis, like James Bond? Let’s be real, Osvaldo.”
The sarcasm in her voice caused Morbido to emit a guttural, basso laugh. “What about a helicopter?” he asked. “007 loves helicopters.”
Daria scoffed but acknowledged that was not impossible. Helicopters equipped with water barrels on steel cables had been used more than once to fight wildfires locally. She would need to find out if that had been the case this morning.
“He could have been scooped up,” Morbido said, “by one of those seaplanes.”
“Osvaldo,” she muttered, “the chances are one in a billion. But we’ll check on it. See you in half an hour.” She disconnected and shaded her eyes again, then waved the harbor master over to her seat.
“Yes, commissario, are you well enough to travel back to Rapallo?”
“Am I mistaken,” Daria asked, “or have the water bombers and helicopters gone home?”
“I guess the fires are out,” he said with skepticism, glancing at the hills. “That was uncharacteristically efficient.”
The commissioner raised an eyebrow. “Did those fires look strange to you?” she asked.
“How do you mean, ‘strange’?”
“Just, strange, I’m not sure how else to put it.”
“They seemed to make lots of smoke, without much flame, and the flame was a very blue color, not orange, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she said. “You’re very observant, my compliments. Did you also observe by chance if the airborne brigades were using helicopters to fight the fires today?”
The harbor master pursed his lips, shook his head, and ejaculated the typical Italian sound for baffled uncertainty, a percussive bo.
“One more thing,” she said, snapping her fingers in remembrance. “I get why Signor Gary would have the flares in his boat, but why the smoke grenades? I saw them earlier, in one of those floating plastic containers.”
The harbor master smiled indulgently. “That’s easy. They’re a great way to attract attention if you have a breakdown in daylight hours. Flares work early in the morning and at night, but it’s so bright here during the day most of the year that you can’t spot a flare, so you use smoke bombs. Sometimes they’re colored.”
Daria nodded, a penny dropping into a mental slot located somewhere behind her throbbing temples. “Cobalt blue?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s a popular color,” he confirmed.
Seven
On the bucking run back to Rapallo in the patrol boat, Daria tried to think positive thoughts about the late-afternoon sunshine and unseasonable heat, the speeding speedboat, and the muscular man at the helm, as her smartphone rang incessantly and vibrated in her clutched hand. The real problem was she could no longer think. She had to lie down again. If only she could get horizontal, everything would be all right, she told herself, cursing her physical weakness. She closed her eyes for a split second. When she opened them, she saw her dark blue linen pantsuit now thoroughly creased, reflected in the rear-view mirror of a car, her long thin body stretched out on the back seat of the Alfa Romeo. Morbido sat at the wheel.
“How long have I been out?” she asked, sitting up and staring incredulously at the mottled orange sunset sky.
“Long enough for more hell to break loose,” he said mildly, his best toad expression wrapped around his wide, saturnine face.
Lieutenant Morbido spoke slowly and clearly, in case his superior officer might still be dazed. He explained that the scuba divers had been sent home. They had run low on air, were tired, and had found nothing. The afternoon was nearly over, the light was going. No metal detectors were available. They would have to try again in the morning.
His tone, words, and expression made it clear he too was tired and fed up but resigned to go forward, as he knew they would have to.
While rooting in her purse, Daria listened and acknowledged the probable correctness of everything Morbido was saying. She found her breath mints, popping two into her mouth and offering the package to the stolid inspector.
“I’m on a diet,” he grumbled, shaking his jowls as he handed her a bottle of spring water. “Where to?”
Before speaking, Daria thanked him, then gulped down the entire bottle of water. She scanned the two dozen text, voice, and encrypted app messages on her phone, toggling back and forth between professional and personal accounts. Triage was the only way forward. She skipped the three messages from her mother, for a start, more than mildly annoyed that one message wasn’t enough and the pushy, unstoppable stainless-steel Barbie the Barracuda was breathing down her neck again.
“To Gary’s place, Villa Glicine,” Daria blurted, raising her eyes. “I’ll be all right.” She said the words more to reassure herself than to persuade the lieutenant. Pausing, still unconvinced, she asked, “What about you?”
“Oh, I’m as fresh as a rose, commissario,” he grunted, switching on the swirling light and siren, then bumping over several curbs and out of the parking lot of Rapallo’s yacht harbor. He raised his bellowing voice over the roar. “Life on the Riviera is a never-ending holiday.”
She wanted to laugh but couldn’t. “The fires are under control?”
“Sì, commissario,” he shouted, “but they are all in very remote locations, apparently all of them in World War Two bunkers, like the one near Rapallo this morning, so no one has been up to them yet. The Questor is delighted.”
“Not even Gigi’s men made it up to them?”
“Certainly not Gigi’s men. They couldn’t climb in body armor, especially in this heat.”
“What about that traffic cop, I think his name was Gianni, did he get up to that big bunker?”
“You think his name is Gianni? Don’t be coy, Daria. You know it is. Gianni Adonis Giannini. He has not reported back yet, as far as I know, but Gigi may not be in a mood to share his info with us, after the way you mocked him and led him astray this morning. Finding the dogs and wild boars, and the origin of the plastic leaf bags—really, Daria, sometimes you overdo it.”
She ignored the remark and the innuendo about the unnaturally handsome traffic cop but felt the heat race to her cheeks nonetheless. “Can’t we send in some firemen and people from the Civil Defense Department to check the bunkers?” she asked, regretting her reference to Gianni Giannini.
“It will be dark soon,” Lieutenant Morbido replied calmly.
“But we have night-vision goggles.”
He chuckled. “Oh yes. One set of them, commissario, the Carabinieri have the others, like the metal detectors.”
Daria laughed out loud, a bitter, sardonic laugh. Her head was throbbing from heat, motion sickness, and dehydration. “Tomorrow at first light, then,” she suggested.
“Sì, commissario,” Morbido agreed, watching her. When she raised her eyes again from the screen of her phone, he spoke. “With your permission, I have two important things to say to you before we arrive at the villa. Primo, Rome is sending reinforcements from Savona and La Spezia, because the Questor wants your head and the Minister wants results yesterday.”
“Good, so do I,” she replied in a clipped, cool tone. “Let’s detail the extra men to go up to the sites of the fires, accompanied by local firemen or Civil Defense volunteers. We also need to get someone over to the airport in Albenga, about the seaplanes. I’ll explain later.”
Morbido nodded. “Se
condo,” he added in his booming basso voice. “Emilio Bozzo, the coroner, phoned. He says he has news for you. He called you but you didn’t answer, so he sent you a text message.”
“Osvaldo,” Daria said, leaning forward and cupping her hands, “can you kill the siren?”
Relative silence returned. The car paced itself past stalled traffic, leaving Rapallo, this time on the busy two-lane shoreline road to San Michele di Pagana, a luxury seaside village. It lay halfway between Rapallo and Santa Margherita. The values of certain isolated properties here, like Joe Gary’s celebrated Villa Glicine, hidden among olive and citrus groves, rivaled those of Portofino.
Daria raised her phone to her ear and listened to the first voice message. It was from Willem Bremach. “I was watching the TV news just now and had an epiphany of sorts, Daria. Regarding those delightful little parcels left for you this morning in the plastic bags, I am reminded of the Brindisi Bronzes. Might that solve at least part of the riddle? Ta-ta, my dear.”
More perplexed than before, Daria replayed Bremach’s cryptic words. It was typical of him to speak in riddles, in part because of his unshakable paranoia about eavesdropping and wiretapping, a leftover from predigital days. She loved and respected her godfather, and had idolized him when she was young, but sometimes he irritated her almost as much as her mother.
What could Willem possibly mean by referring to the Brindisi Bronzes? She could not remember anything about the bronzes found near the southern Adriatic coast city of Brindisi decades ago, when she was a child, other than the fact that they were a clutter of hundreds of broken Greek and Roman statues made of bronze, scattered underwater around a shipwreck. What could they have to do with bodies in plastic bags?
The additional strain on her brain caused by this enigma made her dizzy again. Hoping that Willem Bremach had made himself clearer the second time around, she listened to another message from him. “Sorry to trouble you again, Daria,” he chirped. “You must know by now that despite our efforts to keep her out of your hair, your blessed mother got on the noon train from Rome and will detrain in Rapallo this afternoon. We are picking her up. She will spend the weekend with us, as per her request. She said if the mountain won’t go to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain. I expect she means the impregnable natural fortress of the Monte di Portofino, unless she’s referring to you. In any case, we hope you will join us tomorrow night for an indecently early dinner at the Galleria Club, say, 7:30 p.m.? I am reserving and treating. That makes three for Mohammed plus one mountain. Ta-ta.”
Feeling the sweat breaking out on her brow, Daria growled and forced herself to blank out the vision of her mother, the manipulative matriarch, unstoppable at age eighty-nine. Refreshing her mental cache, she scrolled down and read the coroner’s encrypted text message, the small, smudged screen jostling in her hands. Then she phoned him back. “It’s me, Emilio,” she said, “What’ve you got?”
Eight
Smoking a cigarette in the semi-darkness of Villa Glicine’s lush garden, Lieutenant Italo Gambero was leaning his long, wispy, slightly sinister silhouette on the police cruiser. The unmarked gray special series BMW sports sedan sat sideways under the orange and olive trees lining the cobbled driveway of the villa, as if it had slid to a stop. The property appeared to be true to its name—glicine meaning wisteria in Italian. From ground level up, the front and side walls on both of the villa’s two wide stories were cloaked by twining, sinuous wisteria vines dripping with delicately scented mauve grape-bunch clusters. Daria nosed the air blowing in the car window and found the scent divine, though she would not dare say so to either of her vulcanized lieutenants.
Joseph Gary’s pair of Rhodesian ridgebacks had heard the police car approaching. They were busy barking, jumping, and snarling behind a six-foot chain-link fence. Gambero ground out the butt of his cigarette and saluted as Daria and Morbido stepped out of the Alfa Romeo and strode over. Even in the low light, she could see Gambero’s thin black eyebrows arched high on his forehead, so high that his streaming, puckered red eyes seemed ready to pop out of his head. He looked as if he had been punched or scratched by sharp fingernails or both.
“Thank God you’re here,” he muttered, blowing his nose.
Daria glanced at Morbido, who bowed, swept his arm, and said, “After you, commissario.”
The villa’s heavy oaken door swung inwards. Standing on the threshold was Imelda Capurro, the Filipina housemaid married to Joe Gary’s personal assistant. She wore an old-fashioned, frilly, powder-blue outfit. It looked to Daria at least one size too small for her. A toothsome woman of perhaps thirty—her age was hard to guess—Imelda dipped her head silently, her dark eyes not meeting theirs. No blush of fear or expression of nervousness marred her dusky cheeks or stiffened her smooth, muscular movements, Daria remarked, always fascinated by the nuances of human body language.
Imelda led the three DIGOS officers through a wide atrium, then down a long corridor. It was glassed in on one side and brightly lit by golden sconces shaped like torches. The floors were of colorful variegated marble. Beyond the windows lay an Olympic-size pool and a hidden patio clearly conceived to keep out prying eyes. It was hedged by closely planted eight-foot-tall oleanders blooming riotously in shades of white, pink, and blood red.
They stepped into an enclosed verandah hung with heavy chintz curtains woven and flecked with gold. The curtains were pulled closed, presumably to prevent paparazzi from seeing inside. The verandah was also overlit by golden torches. The light bounced off the golden legs of the crystal-topped coffee table and was picked up by the gold trim and gold-patterned upholstery of the outsized couches and armchairs ranged around the vast room. A pair of long-haired Persian cats, one white, the other black, sat on gold cushions on miniature throne-like chairs in one corner.
The combined scent of wisteria, citrus, and pittosporum filled Daria’s nostrils. It was underlaid by the smell of cats and large dogs and overlaid by yet other scents—of a woman’s powerful perfume and, Daria thought, lavender deodorizers hidden under the furniture, presumably by Imelda Capurro. The cumulative effect was overpowering. One after the other, Gambero, Morbido, and Daria sneezed. Gambero tried to speak but could only cough, his eyes streaming.
“Aromatherapy,” he spluttered.
Imelda invited them to sit, left the room, and returned almost immediately followed by a tall, slim, remarkably buxom woman of middle age, wrapped in translucent golden veils, her fingers and neck sparkling with diamonds and gold. She teetered on golden high heels under a mass of coiled platinum blonde hair. The woman grimaced, frowned, and struck a pose, as if on a runway. She watched the police officers rise to their feet.
Had she been equipped with black hair, and had she been wearing black instead of gold haute couture clothing, Daria couldn’t help thinking, Morgana Stella would look like the cat in the celebrated Chat Noir posters, her back unnaturally arched, perhaps in pique at seeing a woman police officer.
Morgana Stella’s Trump Tower Miss Universe look evoked a starveling Slavic variation on Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, and Stormy Daniels—each on a bad day. The blue-tinted bulging contact lenses on her small, heavily mascaraed eyes seemed hard and dry. In her gestures and expressions, she did not convey a sense of grief, sadness, or anxiety, but rather of annoyance, anger, and arrogance.
“Which one of you is the commissioner?” she demanded of Daria and Morbido, waving them back onto the couches. Her voice was shrill, a penetrating soprano, her spoken Italian almost unaccented, except for the slurred double consonants. “I said specifically I wished to see the Questor or at least a commissario. And I demand to know what progress has been made. Have you found Joseph yet, and if not, why not?”
The dogs barked ferociously from somewhere behind the villa. A man’s voice shouted at them to shut up. Daria waited a beat, then rose to her feet again, her cheeks coloring. “Signora Stella,” she said with icy calm, “in my exper
ience it is the role of the investigator to ask the questions. If you sincerely desire to aid in the search for Signor Gary, you will be kind enough to cooperate and provide the information essential to our effort.”
“Are you suggesting I do not want Joseph to be found?” she shrilled. “That’s preposterous. I have told your lieutenant here everything I know, over and over, and see what good it has done! You are forcing my hand. I will phone the Minister this minute.”
Morbido and Gambero glanced at each other, their jaws tensing. Daria smiled poisonously. “Please do,” she said. “I will be very happy to give him a progress report. However, you might prefer to speak with the Minister of Finance, whose operatives, la Guardia di Finanza, are working closely with us on our investigation and are eager to speak to you. They will be very interested to learn that Signor Gary has resided in Italy for the last two years and has not left the European Union in the last ten months, yet possesses no residency permit and, above all, does not declare or pay his taxes in Italy or anywhere else in the EU.
“Naturally,” Daria continued, slowly and ominously, “you understand, Signora Stella, once Signor Gary is found alive and well, he will be able to resolve this deplorable situation without difficulty, perhaps with advice and encouragement from his personal friends at a variety of ministries. However, in case something has befallen him, his current illegal status will complicate the investigation and freeze for an open-ended period of time the probate period of his will. Anyone benefiting from Signor Gary’s testamentary wishes will doubtless want to avoid such an unfortunate series of eventualities.” She paused to gauge whether Morgana Stella was following her elliptical, bureaucratic phrasing.
“Indeed, signora,” Daria began again, a dark, toxic liquid racing through her veins, “everyone in Signor Gary’s household could very well be subject to prolonged scrutiny by more than one branch of the administrative and police authorities.”