by David Downie
Daria glanced at the screen of her vibrating, squealing smartphone. “Rome,” she blurted. Stepping away, she said into the phone, “Vinci here, what is it?”
A call had just come through from the Bahamas, the voice at the Ministry of the Interior in Rome explained. A man claiming to be the legal representative of Joseph Gary Baldi was replying to the urgent messages he had received during the night from DIGOS in Genoa. Once he had confirmed the legitimate origin of the messages, said the voice in Rome, as requested, the lawyer had activated the tracking app Gary had provided and had pinpointed the GPS dot on Gary’s Rolex. It corresponded, said the DIGOS operative, to a hostel for backpackers located on the main street of Biassa, a mountain village above and behind the Cinque Terre, near La Spezia.
“Text me the name and address of the hostel, please,” Daria said crisply. “We’re on the way. Better send up two cars from La Spezia and an ambulance in case there’s trouble. They’ll get there first. No sirens. Make sure no one moves in or out of the hostel or the village until we arrive.”
She disconnected, trotted back to the TV van, and leaned inside. “Gigi,” she shouted, “you’re in charge here now. I’m handing over this part of the investigation to you. Don’t spend all our resources and manpower on that shipwreck.” Pivoting, she strode to the Alfa Romeo. “Climb in,” she ordered Morbido. “I’ll explain on the way. I’m driving.”
Looking more than ever like a cowed bulldog crossed with a boiled bullfrog, Morbido settled warily into the passenger seat. She switched on the swirling roof light and the siren then jerked the car out and around stalled traffic. With one arm waving from the window, she herded cars to the sides and drove at high speed down the middle of the road.
“The watch,” she said. “They’ve located it. We assume Gary is still attached.”
“Where?”
“A place called Biassa. Punch that into the GPS system, will you?”
Morbido shook his head bleakly. “That’s miles away,” he grunted. “You’d better go up to the autostrada and go through La Spezia. I know Biassa, it’s a dinky village, nothing there, or maybe I should say it was Nowheresville. We used to eat at this little trattoria when I was based in La Spezia, but now I hear everything is crawling with backpackers. What in hell would Joe Gary be doing in Biassa?”
Daria gripped the steering wheel and pushed the car through Santa Margherita, then toward Rapallo and inland to the turnpike entrance, the siren screaming. “We’ll soon find out.”
Google estimated their travel time at ninety minutes, Morbido observed glumly. That was forgetting the Alfa was a police vehicle and did not have to stay in designated lanes or respect the already terrifying 130-kph speed limit.
As the vehicle rocketed high above the Riviera through an interminable series of tunnels—dark, dank galleries clogged by lumbering trucks and buses and the cars of vacationers—Daria demonstrated that she, too, had excelled at the police academy’s emergency driving courses. The term “crash course” popped to mind, in English, making her chuckle in a sinister, unnaturally low register. With something like sadistic pleasure, she watched Morbido grip the armrest on one side and the edge of his seat on the other, squirming visibly when she drove along the emergency lane across a viaduct, then forced cars and trucks to the side as they passed through yet another bleak tunnel.
“Now,” she said calmly as the Alfa screamed south, exiting the tenth or twelfth long dark gallery into blinding sunshine, “what you need to do is find out if one of the fake fires set for the air show was in or near Biassa. So, while I drive, you get on the phone to Gambero. Second, we need updates on the garbage dump and that shopping bag, and the license plate and white Volvo. Third, we need Gambero to get research in Rome to find all those seaplanes, and check if there’s anything on social media showing a water bomber over the Cinque Terre and Biassa. That ought to keep you busy for the next hour.”
“Sì, commissario,” Morbido croaked, the sweat rolling down his forehead. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive so you can do all this yourself and feel satisfied everything has been investigated as you would wish?”
Daria could not help laughing out loud. “Put in your earbuds and leave the phone in your lap,” she chortled, “that way you can hold onto that armrest while you talk.”
Sixteen
The police cruisers and the off-road ambulance of the Soccorso Alpino—a special Alpine Rescue Squad—had arrived from La Spezia about thirty minutes ahead of Daria and Lieutenant Morbido. One of the DIGOS cars had driven through the hillside village of Biassa, placing itself sideways across the narrow road to the summit at Colle del Telegrafo, where the old telegraph tower had once stood. From the tower, the road coiled west and down steeply to Riomaggiore, the southernmost of the Cinque Terre, those five world-renowned fishing and wine-making villages perched like the nests of seagulls on a largely inaccessible strip of the rocky, jagged Ligurian Sea.
The second police cruiser and the ambulance had blocked access to Biassa from below. Four hiking trails ran through the jumble of old stone-built houses. DIGOS agents had taken up positions on each crossroad and were preventing arrivals and departures.
Zigzagging back and forth along the road, the armed officers in bulletproof vests stopped only a handful of cars—Biassa got little motorized traffic. But they were kept busy by dozens of hikers, instructing the trekkers to turn back or wait where they stood, until further notice, either outside or inside the besieged citadel. The three-man alpine ambulance crew in their reflective yellow-and-orange outfits leaned on their matching color-coded four-wheel-drive vehicle, sunning themselves and chatting, unaffected by crowds or emergency situations.
Saluting as they strode forward, Daria and Morbido told the rescue squad to stand ready. “We do not think this is a kidnapping case,” Daria said to the commanding police officer, Lieutenant Oreste Ruffini, a tall man aged forty or so with reddish hair and pale blue eyes. “We do not anticipate violence,” she added. “But it is best to be cautious.”
“Sì, commissario,” said the lieutenant, saluting and falling into line behind her and Morbido.
“Has anyone been inside the hostel yet?” she asked. Ruffini said no, they had waited as ordered. “Has anyone left the village?” Again, Ruffini confirmed that no one, to the best of his knowledge, had left on the road or the hiking trails.
“There are several very impatient and unpleasant hikers who want to go. They say we have no right to prevent them,” the lieutenant added.
“It is interesting,” Daria observed sardonically, “that so many people know so much about Italian anti-terrorism and kidnapping legislation, don’t you find, lieutenant?”
Ruffini nodded gravely.
Entering the hostel, they found the lone young woman at the desk surprised and agitated. She struggled to clear away the long lank locks of mouse-brown hair from her pale forehead, trapping them behind her prominent ears. Then she demanded in a petulant, strangled, adenoidal voice to know what was going on. Her young clients were in a panic.
Daria smiled coolly. “Signorina,” she said, “we are looking for this man.” She held up a photo of Joe Gary. “And this watch.” She held up a second image, of the gold Rolex.
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “I knew it would turn out to be a headache…”
The watch, said the anxious young hostel manager, leading Daria, Morbido, and Ruffini into the spartan office area, then closing the door, had been left in her custody early that morning, by a young backpacker who claimed to have found it near the hiking trail a few miles northeast of Biassa.
“I told him to take it to the police in Riomaggiore, where he was going this morning,” the manager explained, “but he refused. He said he avoids the police and was in a hurry and might not go to Riomaggiore right away. Besides, he told me, he had already done his bit. He could have kept the watch and sold it. He was doing the honest thing and
it was over to me to call the authorities or give the watch to the lost and found or throw it away for all he cared.”
The three police officers glanced at each other before examining the Rolex, dangling it by the watchband.
“We’re not going to find many usable prints on this,” Morbido said, shaking his head. “It looks like it’s been handled by a thousand sticky fingers already.”
The hostel manager confirmed that, in fact, several guests earlier that morning, together with her colleagues running the hostel, had looked carefully at the watch over breakfast, trying to determine if it was real or counterfeit, and if there were any names or markings engraved on it. They had cleaned off what looked like red chalk to see better. The stickiness was strawberry jam, homemade, she added.
“This watch is probably worth tens of thousands of euros,” remarked Morbido. “What extraordinarily honest or unwitting person gave it to you?”
“The boy who left it is Australian,” the young woman said, tapping the keys of a computer. “His name is Zack… let’s see… Zack Armstrong.” She looked from one face to the next, blushing. “I know he was hiking to Colle del Telegrafo this morning and then down to Riomaggiore at some point. I think he said he was going to the hostel at the Sanctuary of La Madonna Nera for the night.”
From the same drawer where the watch had been kept, she produced a hand-drawn map and showed it to Daria. “The X marks where he says he found the watch. He drew the map for me. It looks like it’s near that abandoned farmhouse complex where people camp sometimes.”
“Please explain,” said Daria. “We are not familiar with the area.”
The woman explained that there were several abandoned farmhouses and barns and the ruins of a manor house and church about two miles away in a very remote area, a quarter of a mile or more off the main hiking trail leading to the interior, not the coast. It was not a popular trail. Few people used it, and most of them were locals—mainly hunters and adolescents from La Spezia out for a good time. The main house and church had been damaged in the war and the farms had burned down or fallen into ruin decades ago, she added. They were not in the national park area but rather in a protected buffer zone recently donated to the Italian government. “That is where he found the watch,” she said. “We call it Prati, but I have no idea if that is the official name.”
Morbido took a snapshot of the hand-drawn map, messaged it to Daria and the research unit in Rome, and pulled up a reserved-use military surveyors’ map app on his smartphone. Finding the Biassa area, he zoomed on the hiking trail and scrolled along it northeast. “Is this it?” he asked. The hostel manager glanced at the screen and nodded. “It says Prati di Bovecchia,” Morbido added, reading off the screen.
“That’s it,” she said. “Abandoned farms. That’s all I know. I’m not from here.”
Getting a detailed description of Zack Armstrong from the manager, they called up Google Images and then Facebook and, after searching for several minutes, summoned the manager again. “That’s him,” she confirmed, scrolling down then back up his Facebook page. “You see, he even posted photos of the watch and the place he found it, and here’s the hostel and Biassa and…me...” She blushed with embarrassment. “I look awful.”
Daria tapped her lips and thought for a moment, a sense of the incompleteness of the manager’s tale troubling her. The name Bovecchia sounded strangely familiar, too, but she couldn’t work out why. “Osvaldo,” she said to Morbido, “send these images to Rome, get them to pinpoint the spot, then send us a map with a dot.”
“Already done,” he said.
Daria smiled. “Meanwhile,” she continued, “you and I and someone from the Alpine Rescue Squad will hike to Prati di Bovecchia, and Ruffini and the other car from La Spezia will separate and find this Armstrong boy and then bring him to us. Get a copter if need be. Oh,” she added, snapping her fingers, “let’s call Bozzo and see if he’s willing to come down here. We might need him. I want our coroner, not that guy in La Spezia—he’s too close to the Questor. Definitely get a helicopter on standby for Bozzo. There’s a helipad at Colle del Telegrafo, I noticed it on the map. But maybe they can land closer, near the farms.”
Morbido nodded and went outside with Ruffini.
“Signorina,” Daria said, turning back to the hostel manager. The girl’s mouse-brown hair had fallen forward again, half covering her pimply forehead. “Was there anything strange or suspicious about this boy Armstrong?”
The girl grimaced and shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said in her pinched, high-pitched voice. “He was just an Australian boy, a teenager, hiking alone, out for a fun time. We see lots like him. He spoke no Italian, and my English isn’t great, so we did not share much. He seemed perfectly normal to me, eager to get going, that’s all.”
“He avoids the police?”
The girl hesitated. “Everyone avoids the police.”
Daria let the remark pass. “Do you recall what kind of foot gear he was wearing, and what type of pack he was carrying?”
The young woman seemed baffled. She shook her head vigorously. “Honestly, I don’t notice that kind of thing. We get dozens of people through every day. They usually have extra shoes dangling from their packs, and sometimes they have a big pack and a smaller daypack. But with him, I, I don’t know.”
“He stayed only one night?” Daria inquired. The manager nodded emphatically. “And you had never seen him before?” Daria asked pointedly. The manager nodded again, desperate to pin her hair back behind her ears. She scratched at a pimple on her forehead, then scowled when her fingernail came back bloodied. “He was an attractive young man?”
“If you’re asking me whether we had sex,” the girl blurted, “the answer is no.”
“But he kissed you?”
The young woman blushed and looked away. “Yes,” she said.
“And you are planning to meet him tonight, at La Madonna Nera?”
The girl blushed deeply and nodded. Daria nodded back silently, pursing her lips, not out of disapproval or prudishness but as a sign of her perplexity. She rejoined Morbido and Ruffini outside.
“Divide and conquer,” Morbido croaked.
“Divide and rule?” Daria suggested instead. “Philip II of Macedon. Much older. Caesar was a copycat.”
“I don’t want to rule,” Morbido grumbled. “I want to conquer, right now, then go home and rest. I haven’t seen my wife except asleep in three days. We are no longer children, Daria. I can’t take this pace much longer.”
“You’re right, Caesar,” she conceded. “Lead the way.”
With a wave of her hand and a few words to Ruffini, Daria lifted the siege of Biassa. The police dispersed.
Leaving clutches of native rubberneckers and disgruntled foreign trekkers behind in the village, then driving north by northwest as far as they could on the kinky paved road, Daria, Morbido, and the Alpine Rescue Squad eventually found a dusty trailhead near Forte Bramapane, an abandoned, tumbledown military outpost. The unlikely pair of police hikers were followed by two of the three-man alpine squad wearing large orange-and-yellow backpacks stuffed with emergency equipment. The third Alpino stayed behind to man the ambulance. Uncomplaining despite the heat and the steepness of the climb, the Alpini also carried a lightweight, collapsible stretcher. They walked at a measured pace, seemingly content to keep to themselves.
In single file with Daria out front, the four trudged up the hot hillside through scrubland, spotty woods, and overgrown meadows. The area must once have been pastures, Daria decided, judging by the trampled, bedraggled look of the terrain, overgrown since who knew when. After millennia of human occupation, it took decades or centuries for the natural world to repair itself, Daria said aloud, inwardly pleased to think so much land would now buffer the overcrowded, loved-to-death national parklands of the Cinque Terre.
“Good thing we have an a
mbulance crew with us,” Morbido wheezed after forty minutes of forced march, breathing and sweating heavily. “How high up are we?”
“Over two thousand feet,” Daria answered, pausing to glance at the northeast-facing view of trees, limestone screes, and distant, hovering, half-abandoned villages. “The sign back there at the fort said 668 meters above sea level, and we’ve been climbing since then.”
“We’re at 712 meters now,” said Leonardo, the heftier of the Alpini, a stalwart giant, checking his altimeter. “Those farmhouses are another half mile away, over there.”
“You didn’t say you knew where they were,” Daria protested. “Why not?”
“You didn’t ask,” Leonardo replied. “We’ve been to them before. Last year some kids held a rave party in the ruins and two people almost died. Kids come here sometimes. The place is a pigsty, sprayed all over with graffiti, you know…”
“Sounds promising,” Daria muttered.
“I thought we were above the seagull line,” Morbido remarked moments later, glancing into the sky.
Daria stared overhead. “They’re not seagulls,” she said.
“Vultures,” remarked the first Alpino. “You don’t see many of them in Liguria.”
The four glanced at each other. “Road kill?” Daria asked.
“No road here,” the second Alpino, a quiet man named Gino, confirmed, tugging at his scraggly black beard. “That’s probably why everything was abandoned. No road, no electricity, no water, nothing—so the people left for town.”
“Nothing but bad memories,” the other Alpino confirmed. “This place does not have a good reputation.”
“Very quiet, though,” Morbido quipped, his toad face appearing, “except for the cicadas. An ideal spot for retirees.”
The Alpini glanced at each other and shrugged. Humor was clearly not their forte.
Finding a pine tree that cast shade across the trail, Daria and Morbido sat on a fallen log and listened to the chirping, thrumming song of the cicadas. She wondered out loud how long it would take for Ruffini and his men to track down the Armstrong boy and bring him along.