by David Downie
Home? It was a cramped, impractical crow’s nest of a studio apartment in a centuries-old building, a hulking, haunted reconverted fortress-tower astride the eleventh-century castellated walls of the city. But she had come to love it, even though the neighborhood was at best transitional. In the last two years, the area had become unappealingly trendy, an edgy place of dark shadows and strong smells only recently pried away from the drug dealers, prostitutes, and traffickers of migrants.
Yes, she said to herself, recognizing that she was more than tired, yes, a long, vigorous walk will do me good. She knew it would. Fear was not an issue. Daria had never feared her fellow humans. When young, she had trained as a gymnast, kick-boxer, and practitioner of Okinawan karate. She was also armed with a police ordnance pistol and was a very good shot.
Striding down the verdant zigzags of Via Giovanni Battista Marsano, past the Soviet-style postwar housing projects and into the valley below, two shop signs on the same premodern corner caught her eye. One advertised a trattoria serving home-cooked Ligurian specialties such as pasta al pesto at affordable prices. The other offered the services of a funeral home. She hoped a thick wall separated the two and the kitchen was not shared.
Jogging left on the nondescript Via Donghi, a residential street at the bottom of the hill, her eye was caught again, this time by an electric votive candle flickering on a tall, ugly modern building. She paused, glancing around to make sure no one was watching, then placed the lily in a wire flower rack below a commemorative plaque.
There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar street-corner shrines and plaques in Genoa and up and down the Italian Riviera. Each recalled the heroism of a partisan shot by the Fascists or Nazis. The numbers of dead seemed daunting, even by the colossal standards of World War Two.
Numbers brought her mind back to the business at hand. Were the criminals who had stolen the body parts college pranksters, or did they belong to some crazy cabalistic Catholic group, adepts of numerology, she wondered? Twenty-seven was three times nine, she said to herself, three times three times three, and the number two added to the number seven made nine, as Willem Bremach had joked. Had he joked? Thirty-three was another of those sacred numbers, she knew, the age of Christ crucified but also two threes set side by side. Daria shook her head. Nonsense, it had to be a coincidence, or some kind of prank.
Still thinking of numbers, but reviewing the coroner’s chronology in her mind now, she turned right on another apparently banal street, Via Giovanni Torti, and began reconstructing the events of the previous night as accurately as she could.
The bakery van is stolen from Quarto dei Mille at some point between 2:00 and 2:30 a.m., she told herself, guesstimating. It arrives at approximately 3:00 a.m. at the medical school’s shipping dock. Two people are in it—presumably males, but since they wore white smocks, hats, and masks and there’s no video footage, that cannot be assumed.
The perpetrators fill the plastic bags with twenty-seven or thirty-three body parts, she continued, depending on how you count them, and load the bags into the van, presumably between 3:00 and 3:30 a.m. They follow Via Giovanni Battista Marsano down the hill, jog left on Via Donghi, not respecting the fifty yards or so of one-way street, because, after all, who would be watching at that early an hour in the morning? Then they go right on Via Giovanni Torti, drive four blocks, and reverse the van down Via San Fruttuoso, a blind alleyway fronting Villa Migone.
Daria picked up her pace. In five minutes, she had reached the dark, leafy alleyway footing the hilly park of the magnificent Renaissance-period Villa Imperiale, now a public library, and its neighbor, the smaller but no less historic Villa Migone.
At the end of the alleyway, by the traffic barrier, she told herself, coming to a halt now, the thieves stop to drop the bag of body parts at the base of the caretaker’s house flanking the gates to Villa Migone. Their target is a plaque on the wall of the gate house commemorating the end of World War Two in Italy—a plaque, she now saw, that is dirty, encrusted with moss, and unlit. Daria sighed audibly. Where had the reverence gone for the heroes of that war and the founding of a modern, secular, democratic republic?
Staring up, scrutinizing the marble plaque in the low light, Daria tried to decipher the pompous verbiage lauding the war’s heroes. So, the treaty ending hostilities had been signed here? Yes. That made perfect sense. She looked through the ornate, wrought-iron gateway up the steep driveway to the isolated villa.
To her overwrought mind, there was something magical about the mottled light and intertwining branches that made an archway over the mossy pavement. It seemed impossible such a place could lie hidden among the city’s blighted clutter of high-rise, blistered housing projects and battered, badly built postwar apartment complexes. How could any planning commission have allowed low-income projects to be placed here, she wondered, their massive cubist shapes cutting off Villa Migone from the city and a view of the sea? But she knew the answer. It was a five-letter word starting with “M” and ending in “a,” with “afi” sandwiched between.
The Mafia was not the whole story, she also knew. More than half of Genoa had been destroyed by five years’ worth of Allied bombing raids and naval barrages. When the war had ended in 1945, real estate speculation had raged like the wildfires now destroying the region’s hinterlands. Reconstruction was the mantra. Quality and aesthetics went out the window. Anything would do.
As she turned to leave, a pair of powerful floodlights attached to the security cameras on the driveway flashed on. Shielding her eyes, Daria spontaneously stepped up to the video intercom and spoke clearly.
“Commissioner Daria Vinci, DIGOS.” From an inner pocket, she produced a badge and held it up to the camera lens.
“How may I help you?” croaked a voice, the voice of an elderly man, Daria guessed.
“Forgive me for troubling you,” she said, “I merely wished to see the premises from the outside in order to form an idea of how many agents to send over the day after tomorrow, during the commemorative ceremony, should that prove necessary.”
The voice made reassuring noises through the intercom. It asked if she wanted to come in and familiarize herself with the villa and grounds.
Blinded by the floodlights, Daria blinked and listened carefully to the man’s accent, his manner of speech and choice of words. He spoke like an aristocrat, not a gatekeeper or superintendent or security guard. She guessed he must be one of the villa’s tenants—an owner, possibly a member of the Migone family.
“Will you be joining us this evening?” the man inquired in his grave, vibrating voice. “You are accompanying the Questor to dinner, I assume?”
Daria drew a sharp breath. “My apologies,” she said, “I was not aware Questor Lomelli-Centauri was expected here tonight. Mine is a routine security check, given the events of the day, about which you will have heard, no doubt, the lamentable discovery of the bag in front of your gate, and the heightened political tensions since the elections. We anticipate a rally or protest march on April 25th.”
“No need to apologize,” said the voice, “you are doing your duty. May I help you in any other way?”
“No, no thank you. Again, I apologize. Good evening to you.”
Striding away, Daria felt the tingling sensation of having narrowly escaped something. It filled her with apprehension, causing her to walk even faster than usual.
A unit of local Polizia di Stato sat in a van wedged into the mouth of the alleyway. They had been called, no doubt, in anticipation of the Questor’s arrival for dinner. Recognizing each other, the officers on duty gave Daria salutes that struck her as insubordinately slack. She nodded back disapprovingly and continued on her way.
For the Questor and the millions of right-wing Italians like him, was April 25th a celebration or a commemoration? A sad remembrance and reminder of the end of a lost war, the end of Fascism and authoritarian rule, or a joyful date markin
g the dawn of democracy? Daria knew the answer and it troubled her.
She paused on the corner of Via Giovanni Torti to recap, returning in her mind to the chronology she had begun earlier. So, where was I? The security cameras of Villa Migone pick up the van and pair of men dropping the first bag onto the mud at the bottom of the driveway below the plaque. The body-snatchers then retrace their route. Instead of turning left on Via Donghi, they continue up the hill until they reach the expressway. They drive east approximately five miles, taking fifteen to twenty minutes, exiting in the suburbs at Nervi. Then they leave the second bag of body parts under the commemorative plaque on the corner building facing the traffic circle, where Via Oberdan intersects with Via Felice Gazzolo. At this point, it is 4:14 a.m.—we know that from the security camera footage from Nervi.
Daria walked slowly west toward her apartment, pondering, the chronology coming together in her mind and beginning to make sense. After dropping the second bag, she said to herself, the body-snatchers take the on-ramp back onto Corso Europa, leaving Nervi and heading toward Rapallo. Almost immediately, the expressway narrows, turning into the two-lane, roller-coaster Via Aurelia coast highway. At some point before reaching Rapallo, probably before entering the tunnel in Ruta, approximately eight miles southeast of Nervi, they turn left and follow Highway SP31 to Santa Maria del Campo.
Why would they do that?, she asked herself aloud. The answer was obvious. To avoid driving into downtown Rapallo, where they might encounter a random roadside blockade by the Carabinieri or be picked up by security cameras on the various public buildings, banks, and other commercial real estate downtown. Once beyond the tiny hamlet and church of Santa Maria del Campo, they cross the valley under the autostrada turnpike, then drive east into the hills, depositing the third bag on the muddy turnout below the Nazi machine gun nest where she had parlayed with Marshal Gigi De Filippo and Sergeant Gianni Giannini. By then it’s about 5:15 a.m.
The final leg takes the conspirators down the hill and into central Rapallo, where they ditch the van in the alley by the public bathrooms flanking the train station, at some point before six. Either they are met by accomplices, possibly in a car, or, if they are amateurs, they take a taxi, and we will soon have them. Other possible exit strategies are, one, they get on a train, which makes sense given their choice of the drop site, or, two, they walk into Rapallo and disappear, or, three, they take some other means of transportation they have left ahead of time: two motorcycles, for instance, or two cars, or even two bicycles. Another, remote, possibility is they live in Rapallo and simply go home.
What about the white clinical outfits they were wearing?, she asked herself. Are they still wearing them? Have they dumped them along the way, along the Via Aurelia or up in the hills?
As Daria walked across a wide, animated square not far from the railway viaduct, scores of local residents sat out on benches amid refreshment stands selling cold drinks and ice cream. She paused to watch a motorcade of unmarked police cars approach then turn and drive in the direction she had just come from. She recognized the cars but could not see the drivers or passengers through the deeply tinted windows. The Questor, she whispered to herself. Why is Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III dining at Villa Migone tonight? A rehearsal dinner? Rehearsing what? Perhaps he is a personal friend of the Migone family?
Shrugging the tension out of her shoulders as she walked across the gritty city, she added new elements to her mental laundry list. She needed to accomplish the following: thorough checks of the Rapallo train station security system, if there was one, the ticketing machines, the surveillance cameras in downtown Rapallo and anywhere else along the van’s route. Surely, the white clinical outfits would have been thrown into a ravine, a dumpster, or a trash can somewhere? Would the trash have been picked up? It was a holiday weekend. Could the trash be checked in time, before it was taken to the dump and incinerated?
These routine checks could be entrusted to the reinforcements coming from La Spezia and Savona. Once home she would email HQ. An officer on night duty would put the machinery in motion. She needed to reserve Lieutenants Morbido and Gambero for the crucial, strategic tasks.
More important was the question of who and why. Who were the body-snatchers? What was their motive? Was it to get the government and Church up in arms over the treatment of unclaimed corpses and monkeys presumably used for experiments or dissection? Was it to stir up animal rights activists? Or denounce the return of Fascism? Or halt the invasion of Italy by illegal immigrants, while simultaneously equating them with monkeys? To decry the lack of funding for public services, from the mortuary and medical school to public safety and the security infrastructure?
She stopped at a red light on the city’s broad, straight main thoroughfare, Via Venti Settembre. What if it wasn’t any of the above? What if the bags were a ruse, a diversionary tactic? In that case, to cover what? The kidnapping or murder of Joseph Gary? Why put them in front of commemorative plaques where they were sure to be seen? Was there a wartime connection? That seemed unlikely. Gary would have been a teenager during the war. But Willem Bremach had also been young and an active participant. What had Gary done, and why had he renounced his Italian citizenship after fleeing right after the war to Canada then America?
Questions, questions, questions, she said to herself, darting along streets laid out centuries ago then rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War. Each question was an island. What she needed were answers—at least one or two answers. With them, she could build bridges and move from island to island, getting nearer to the truth.
A familiar refrain sprang to mind. Might this be the doing of the Honorable Society, alias Cosa Nostra, ’Ndrangheta, la Camorra, la Mano Nera, la Mafia—none of which were honorable, all of which were murderous, the antithesis of justice, unless you considered summary justice and frontier justice, revenge and vendetta, legitimate forms of justice?
The self-styled avengers typically affiliated with these criminal groups had memories as long as their proverbial knives, though nowadays guns were their weapon of choice. Their modus operandi was nearly always the same. They could wait months, years, even decades to settle a score. The more she thought of it, the more she felt sure the gruesome body parts and attention-grabbing kidnapping or murder of Joseph Gary Baldi smacked of one of the families of organized crime.
Yet in all the years she had been stationed on the Riviera, she had rarely had contact with them outside the flourishing realm of human trafficking. That was a growth industry, but one unlikely to have involved a man of Gary’s caliber and wealth—unless… unless smuggling humans was merely one part of a more complex mechanism, a form of payment in kind or barter. She shook her head, unable to join the dots. Morgana Stella certainly looked like a Mafioso’s moll, she reflected, and Maurizio Capurro was the archetype of the small-time mobster. They had even branded him by snipping off his trigger finger.
Daria’s legs were aching by the time she reached the cobbled ramp tilting up from the turn-of-the-century section of town into the medieval core of Genoa. On her right she passed the Casa di Colombo, the unlikely stone-and-brick hovel where Christopher Columbus had supposedly been born or grown up, she couldn’t remember which. Just beyond and behind the tumbledown house rose the reconstructed medieval cloister of Sant’Andrea. Its pale, weathered marble jigsaw of stones looked like upended bones thrown down on a card table by some otherworldly hand.
Looming gloomily over everything were the tall, twin crenellated towers of Porta Soprana, the upper gate of this ancient Oz, its mouth gaping wide and seemingly wriggling with human bodies. They were the bodies, she now recognized, of the tireless party people who had taken over the neighborhood, keeping it awake until dawn day in, day out, despite police raids, fines, and attacks by irate neighbors.
The towers of Porta Soprana had already been three or four hundred years old when Columbus had sailed the ocean blue in the year 1492, then sai
led the deep blue sea in the year 1493.
The ditty became an earworm lodged in Daria’s exhausted mind. If he could return to life, she thought, Columbus, a bigot and reactionary even by the abysmal standards of his day, would doubtless hate his old neighborhood now. It was a handsome part of town and sizzling with atmosphere but has been utterly denatured, transformed into a playground for spoiled bobos with no respect for the law.
Wending her way past the city gate then farther up and to the west, then up again still higher, and higher, through teeming, twisting alleyways an arm-span wide, past crowds of drunken trendies, fashionistas, and foodistas milling and dancing in the streets, she entered a quiet maze of even narrower alleys and reached the refuge of her building. Unlocking the heavy back door, she crossed a courtyard into the main foyer, emptied the contents of her neglected mailbox into her arms, and began trudging up the 165 stairs to her seventh-floor walk-up aerie.
Similarly obsessed by secrecy, in Paris, nineteenth-century novelist Honoré de Balzac had chosen his unlikely lair in the Passy neighborhood for many of the same reasons. Like Balzac’s, Daria’s building possessed two entrances, one of them known only to the tenants. This secret back door gave onto multiple easy escape routes down unlit back alleys.
Flinging open the French windows in the airless apartment’s living room area, Daria stood on the stone balcony breathing deeply and gazing over the crazy crumpled quilt of her adopted city. Its dozens of hills rose steeply, plunging into the sea amid a chaos of puckering, peeling, frescoed facades on helter-skelter knife-slit alleys. Leaning belfries, sloping slate roofs, teetering crumbling campanili, and lantern-topped domes hovered over terrace upon terrace of cyclopean stone walls. To the south and west towered the massive cranes of Genoa’s port, one of the world’s biggest and busiest.