by David Downie
“Hours,” Morbido said glumly. “Who knows where he went, and if he’ll agree to come all the way back here. I wouldn’t if I were him.”
“Who says he has the choice?” Daria remarked, her sense of duty offended at the thought of juvenile rebellion. She added that they’d better keep going. Sooner or later they would find the secondary trail to the northwest, leading to Prati di Bovecchia.
“It’s up there,” Gino, the bearded Alpino, said, raising a thick finger and pointing to a copse of beech trees. He appeared unfazed by the climb and ready for anything.
The group began shuffling again toward a fork in the trail. As they walked, the thundering eggbeater wop-wop-wop of a helicopter grew nearer. In less than a minute, the blue-and-white police department machine was hovering directly overhead. It moved slowly along above the trail looking for a place to land, then hovered over a grassy meadow. Rickety hunters’ blinds along the edge of woodland shook and flew apart from the rotors’ blowback. A moment later, the copter had touched down. Ruffini stepped onto the skids and helped a young man get out. Ducking, they walked toward the group at the edge of the meadow.
Daria greeted Zack Armstrong, speaking English and thanking him for his assistance.
“No worries,” he said cheerfully. “How cool can it be? An American policewoman in Italy?”
Daria smiled and shook her head, leading the young man back down the trail, away from the noise of the rotors. “My mother is American,” she said. She stared down at the boy’s shoes and then at his backpack. “I’m as Italian as pizza and gelato,” she added.
“That’s even cooler,” Zack said enthusiastically. “I love pizza and gelato!” He paused and looked her in the eyes. “My great-great-grandmother or great-great-great-aunt, I can’t keep it straight, she’s Italian, I think, so I guess we’re almost even.”
“Great-great-grandmother?” Daria exclaimed, impressed. “She must be very old.”
“Oh, yeah, I think she’s nearly a hundred. Good genes, I guess.”
“And where does she live?”
Armstrong hesitated, blushed, shook his head, and said, “I really don’t know. Milan, maybe? I just, like, know from my mother that she’s still alive, somewhere in Italy. I guess I should visit her before it’s too late?”
Daria nodded sympathetically and allowed Armstrong to orient himself. He turned and looked around carefully, then walked swiftly along the trail to the fork.
The secondary trail was overgrown with blackberry bramble and stinging nettles. The sea was not visible, hidden by a knoll. In a hollow another few hundred yards north, Armstrong paused and began hunting around again. He wandered off the trail.
“I think it was around here,” he called out, then walked back to where Daria stood. “I hate to be impolite, officer, but you see, I stopped to answer nature’s call, if you get my meaning, and when I turned to get back on this footpath, I reckon I saw the watch on the ground right about here.”
Daria pondered, glancing again at the boy’s shoes and backpack, listening for something in his voice and watching for something in his plain, open, sunny face. “You slept only one night in Biassa, correct?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Armstrong said.
“And where did you sleep the night before?”
A perplexed look came over the boy’s young features. He blushed. Daria wondered if he had begun to shave yet. His cheeks still had that peachy softness of the adolescent. “Well, I hope you won’t arrest me,” he joked. “I think it wasn’t exactly the thing to do, but I found a little park in the hills behind some town up the coast from here. I climbed over the fence and camped out. It was so warm and beautiful. I camped under the orange trees and the stars. Then I walked down and caught the train to the Cinque Terre and hiked up and got lost and I guess I wound up here before finding the trail to that hostel.”
Daria noticed that he pronounced Cinque Terre “sink-we terry” and was thrown momentarily, remembering Willem Bremach talking disparagingly to Pinky about adolescent partiers on the Riviera. She pressed Zack gently for more information.
The town where he had camped, it transpired, was Rapallo. Armstrong had taken an early train, he confirmed, getting off at Monterosso al Mare, the northernmost of the Cinque Terre. The trails up to and over the ridge he claimed not to remember in detail—the analogue print map he had was confusing, and there was no coverage with his smartphone.
She could check later, if need be, Daria decided, wondering if the boy had used the public rest rooms in Rapallo before taking the train, wondering if Clement had unwittingly or intentionally muddied the waters, unless it was another coincidence and this wasn’t the person Clement had seen.
The language barrier had kept Daria’s monolingual colleagues at a distance. She beckoned them over with her hand. Morbido, Ruffini, and the pair of Alpini stepped nearer, now that she had stopped speaking English. Their body language said, It’s okay, we’re safe.
“The boy says he found the watch here,” she explained in Italian. “Can we get the copter to fly overhead and look from above? Lieutenant Ruffini, you could ride in it and look for Gary’s body or the flippers and signal to us if you spot something?”
Ruffini nodded.
“What about getting the dogs?” Gino asked. “If you have something with Signor Gary’s scent on it, we have a team of dogs in La Spezia.”
Daria shook her head. “I don’t think the watch will give dogs the scent, it’s been handled by too many people. We’d have to get his clothes from the villa, and it would be dark by then. I should have thought of that earlier.”
“No one is perfect,” Ruffini remarked.
“Let’s fan out,” Daria said to Morbido and the Alpini. “But first, the boy. Ruffini, you go in the helicopter with Armstrong, take him back to wherever it was you picked him up, find out where he’s going, and get his mobile number so we can reach him if necessary. Please, as discreetly as possible, take photos of any shoes and clothes he has and his backpack—he must have a bigger backpack somewhere, perhaps at the hostel in Riomaggiore? Then send the photos to Lieutenant Morbido and me. Afterwards, come back and fly low, and let us know if you see anything we can’t see hidden in the woods.”
Ruffini saluted and signaled to the Australian. “Thank you so much,” Daria said, shaking the boy’s hand. “The lieutenant will accompany you back to where you were. Please give us your contact information. Let the lieutenant know where you’re going next.”
“That’s easy,” Zack said. “Poland! I’m flying out of Pisa tonight. Going to hike the big forest up there, before they chop it all down, then join the international protest march.”
Daria paused a beat. Then she said, “Thank you for your honesty, Zack. You have helped us a great deal.”
“No worries,” the boy said again, blushing with what Daria assumed was pride and pleasure.
“One more thing,” she asked, as if it were an afterthought, causing Ruffini and Armstrong to pause and turn around. “When you were in Rapallo yesterday morning, did you by chance use the public washrooms in the narrow alley by the train station?”
The boy blushed even deeper and looked at his feet. “Yes, I guess I did, ma’am,” he answered. “Was that against the law?”
“Not at all,” she said, studying his eyes and facial expressions. “Notice anything unusual?”
Armstrong shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable. “As a matter of fact, I did,” he said, taking a deep breath and mastering his embarrassment. He ferreted out a smartphone, swiped, tickled and tapped the screen, then smiled, holding it up. “I took a snap of this funny sign. Made me laugh out loud.” Daria peered at the sign. She had seen it before. Out ov Ordre it said. Guasto. Armstrong laughed heartily now. “What seemed even stranger to me was I could tell someone was hiding inside the WC with the sign on it. Their feet weren’t on the floor,
but I could hear them inside. I figured they might be up to no good at that hour and whatnot, hiding in a broken toilet, so I took care of business so to speak and hurried out.”
Daria smiled and nodded. “You weren’t by chance in the stall next to the one that was ‘out of order’?”
Armstrong shook his head. “No, I used the first one, near the door, on the right, when you come in. The others were unoccupied except the broken one with the sign and the one next to it.”
“Someone was in that stall?”
“I’m not sure, I couldn’t swear to it, but I think so. The door was closed and there might have been some clothes on the floor. Hanky-panky, I figured. I didn’t think much about it at the time. It’s only now that you ask, and that funny sign...” He laughed and shrugged the tension out of his shoulders.
Daria smiled wryly, nodded, shook Armstrong’s hand again, and watched as he and Ruffini strode back along the path. A minute or two later, the helicopter was airborne and thundering over the hills toward the sea.
Closing her eyes and tapping her lips, Daria pondered in silence. It must be a fluke, she said to herself. Millions of people wear New Balance trekking shoes and carry red-and-blue packs. Besides, she reasoned, Armstrong’s weren’t running shoes or athletic shoes as Clement had said, they were New Balance hiking, trekking shoes, more like boots than anything else. The pack was a daypack, not a cyclist’s pack. And what could this Australian teenager possibly have to do with plastic garbage bags full of stolen body parts or an aged multimillionaire spook with possible Mob connections?
Clearly, Clement’s testimony was not entirely reliable but was at least partly true. Had a desire to please, to spin a detailed yarn, led the illegal African migrant to embellish the facts? Or had he simply been unaware that Armstrong was also in the washrooms? Had it been Armstrong he’d seen jogging away or the driver of the van—or were they one and the same? And had it been Armstrong, not the driver of the van, who had emerged from the pedestrian underpass at the station in Rapallo, then climbed the stairs to take the early train to La Spezia?
Morbido raised a thick eyebrow and cleared his throat. “Anything I can do?” he asked. She shrugged in silence.
“It just gets more and more complicated,” she remarked a moment later.
The helicopter had flown off. The silence of the cicadas had returned and so had the vultures. Daria and Morbido stood on the trail in the midst of tangled weeds and watched the vultures circle. She had seen millions of seagulls on the Riviera but had never noticed a vulture before.
It was Gino who found Joe Gary’s handless, severed arm, and Leonardo who discovered the hand about ten feet away, caught in an arbutus shrub, its branches hung with spiky, bitter orange fruit the size of Ping-Pong balls.
“We need Bozzo,” Daria muttered after wading through the underbrush and looking at the gore—the arm and hand crusted with dried blood, the flesh torn and mangled. “Now.” Stopping to call the coroner, she made her case to him via the satellite link, prevailed upon him to get to the hospital’s helipad in fifteen minutes, then rejoined the others. “Best not to move anything until Bozzo gets here,” she said. “We need to find the rest of Signor Gary before any hikers or media show up. Gino, you stay here and guard the arm and hand.”
The Alpino nodded, outwardly unmoved. The other three continued along the trail into a meadow dotted with the ivy-hung, weed-choked ruins of the farmhouses, barns, church, and manor house. Morbido swiped his fingers on the leaves of the shrubs and held them up for Daria to see. They were covered with a fine red powder.
“Not pollen?” she asked, “Or red sand from the sirocco?”
“Flame retardant,” he said. Glancing around at the muddy ground, wet from the water bombers, Morbido grunted and added, “I bet more than one plane dumped water here. The wet area is too long and too wide for just one load from one plane.”
“Unless it was one of those huge Chinese or Russian planes…”
Lieutenant Morbido croaked like a bullfrog, then began a disquisition on certain technical aspects of water bomber seaplanes. But Daria only half heard what he was saying. Her attention lay elsewhere.
Despite years of training, Commissioner Daria Vinci’s immediate reaction when she spotted Joe Gary’s cadaver was to hold her breath and stand stock still, speechless.
The body had clearly been hurtled from above, landing on top of the crumbling front wall of one of the roofless farmhouses. The man’s back and neck were obviously broken. She had never seen such an unusual combination of rigor mortis and the aftermath of crushed, snapped vertebrae. The fall and hard landing had caused the body to break backwards, like a chicken’s back on the butcher block. As the muscles had relaxed in death, the body had sagged farther backwards before stiffening with rigor mortis. Now Joe Gary looked as if he were cast from plaster or rough fiberglass dipped in blood and mud. The left arm was missing, the shoulder joint ripped out, and the surrounding flesh torn ragged, as if they had been chewed by metallic teeth. There were deep purple gashes on the lower legs, and what looked like the marks of sharp beaks and pecking by vultures or crows across the stomach and torso.
Joe Gary’s swimsuit had also been torn open. His penis and testicles hung loose, shriveled and blackened, apparently by fire, and stained dark red by fire retardant and blood. The head seemed largely intact, though it too was blackened by fire and reddened by the chemical flame-retardant mixture. One eye had been pecked out, probably by a bird of prey, she guessed. A gold chain with a Saint Christopher medal glinted just below the jaw line. Gary’s mouth was twisted by a nightmarish grimace of agony, as if he had not died immediately but in gruesome, agonizing stages.
Dante’s Inferno, Daria said to herself, trying to remember what kind of crime would be punished by so horrible a death in the medieval poet’s vision of Hell. Sniffing the air, Daria winced involuntarily at the stench. She checked her watch and calculated. The body had begun to decompose and outgas in the unseasonably hot sunshine. The caustic odor of festering flesh blended with the smells of doused charcoal, acrid chemicals, and candy-sweet spring flowers.
At the base of the wall were traces of fire, a real, sizable fire that had licked and marked Gary’s lacerated body, like a sausage on a grill. Had it been burning when he landed, or had it been lit on purpose afterwards to roast him alive? Searching farther with her eyes, Daria recognized the mound of flares and smoke bombs lying in another corner of the room, the same kind of flares and smoke bombs she had seen in the bunker that morning. Was it only that morning?, she wondered.
“A perfect hit,” she said at last, letting out her breath.
Osvaldo Morbido swallowed hard and wiped his brow. His eyes bulged. “An ace pilot,” he murmured. “Amazing.” He waited, the song of the cicadas ringing in his ears. “And then there were ten,” he croaked. “Ten fires, not nine.”
As Daria and Morbido crawled through the ruins taking photos and shooting video footage with running commentary, one of the Alpini came forward and reported he had found two mangled swim fins near the arm and hand. Moments later, they heard the thunder of the helicopter returning. Morbido looked up. He answered his phone, telling Ruffini in the copter to call off the search, the body had been found, and make way for the coroner’s copter, which was about to arrive. They watched the first helicopter touch down, hesitate, then take off again like a dragonfly, making room for the next one that moments later would deliver Emilio Bozzo and the pathologist’s photographer, Pino Brignole.
In less than two minutes, the shambling red-haired Lieutenant Ruffini reappeared on the trail, stepping into the meadow, breathless. He had spotted the severed arm and hand on the way, he said, and the mangled swim fins. Now he stood in silence, his mouth open, gazing at Joseph Gary’s mangled body. “My God,” Ruffini whispered, crossing himself. Then he turned. “Did you say Giuseppe Garibaldi was his real name?”
The growling beat o
f Bozzo’s helicopter drowned out Daria’s words. She said, “Hora fugit.” Like God stretching a finger toward Adam in the Sistine Chapel fresco by Michelangelo, she raised an arm and pointed at the moldering back wall of the ruined farmhouse. Shading her eyes with her other hand from the blinding afternoon glare, Daria read out two short words, the letters scrawled a foot high in weeping, blurred black charcoal, written as if in answer to her own.
Jus Stat.
Seventeen
“You’ve made a miraculous recovery,” Daria remarked, unable to disguise her surprise or the irony in her voice. With a practiced, measured stride that communicated self-possession, she crossed the dimly lit dining room of the Galleria Club, looking straight ahead to avoid eye contact with anyone she might know. Willem Bremach was standing erect, perilously gripping the edge of the dinner table, awaiting her arrival.
“Praise be!” he exclaimed with irreligious glee, “the mountain has come!”
When Daria reached him, he bowed, clicked his heels, and bent over her hand—then promptly fell forward into her arms. Daria helped him back onto his chair before the waiter could rush over or make a fuss.
“Thank your mother,” he chuckled, gesturing at a handsome octogenarian with silvery hair seated at the table, smiling maliciously. Though less angular, the woman bore an uncanny resemblance to Daria. Barbara Vinci was a flattering future portrait of the commissioner in approximately forty years.
“Do behave, Willem,” Priscilla chided, her Norwegian sense of propriety offended by the Dutchman’s buffoonery. “No more silly remarks, please.”
“But Pinky, Barbie is the proverbial faith healer,” Willem continued in his theatrical mode, watching Daria and winking affectionately. “She gave me a knee brace and a walking stick she’d bought in Rome, got me out of the wheelchair, and commanded, ‘Walk, Willem.’ And I keeled over,” he chortled, “just as I did now.”