by David Downie
“And there is more,” he had snarled. “How did social media know almost before we knew of Gary’s background in operational intelligence? And what of that Signor Striker of Homeland Security? Another of your conquests! He will not be operating in this country much longer, rest assured. I am confident other irregularities will be revealed at your hearing, unless your behavior turns out to be the result of hysteria, female hormones, or the menopause. Now go! And not another word to the media or you will face immediate disciplinary action. I will place you and your fellow conspirators under house arrest pending court martial.”
Trembling with rage, Daria had opened the door to Centauri’s office and stepped out without answering.
Now, as she watched the tennis balls bouncing and the rackets swinging at the club across the way, she found the words she had been searching for, starting with “sandbag.” Centauri was trying to sandbag, bury, and derail the investigation. Why?
In that moment, she also knew what she had to do. In haste. Slowly.
The Vice Questor would not be back until late afternoon at the earliest—Ruggieri could not possibly arrive from Morocco before then. Morbido and Gambero had already left and, knowing them, would have disabled the Bluetooth and GPS tracking devices embedded in their DIGOS cars, ignoring calls from Centauri to return to headquarters. Centauri would be distracted, busy preparing for his speech at Villa Migone that afternoon for the commemorative celebrations. It was the perfect bully pulpit for this Fascistic sorcerer’s apprentice, with a national television audience in the millions.
This was their last best chance to make sense of the case.
She swiveled the screen of her desktop computer away from the glare of the windows, entered two passwords, and opened the reserved-access area of the DIGOS website, then called up the image of the Canadair plane Centauri had shown her. She had just finished taking a picture of it with her smartphone and grabbing a screenshot to email herself, when the screen went black and the computer rebooted automatically. Trying to reenter the website, her passwords were refused. ACCESS DENIED appeared. She tried entering with her smartphone, but got the same message and another—NO SERVICE. Switching to her personal SIM card, she saved the screenshot photo in a subfolder tagged “mamma.” Prying eyes in this society where mother worship was the norm were unlikely to open it.
Using her safe, encrypted land line, she called Emilio Bozzo and was relieved to find the coroner at the morgue. “Meet me at the Orange Nightmare in an hour,” she said quietly. “I’ll explain later.” She hung up, then took the stairs to the street.
Twenty
Daria knew they were on her tail from the moment she stepped onto the sidewalk fronting the DIGOS headquarters. Striding swiftly up the pseudo-Aztec-Incan staircase on the southern end of Piazza della Vittoria, the same way she had come to work an hour earlier, she watched, amused, as the unmarked police tail tore up the ramp to the coast highway. The regulation anthracite-gray Alfa would have to travel a mile then double back to reach the bastions where Daria emerged from the staircase in the fortifications and began trotting west.
Taking refuge in Bar Zena, she gulped a glass of sparkling water, then shot down a bitter espresso, observing with professional detachment as the Alfa cruised slowly by. It was pointless playing cat-and-mouse on main streets. They knew her habits and had guessed where she was headed. That suited her fine.
Letting herself into her apartment building by the main door outside the city walls, she quickly changed into blue jogging shorts, a light blue-and-white top, and a pair of all-terrain Nikes. Then she wrapped herself in a bathrobe and grabbed her cordless land line telephone. Throwing open the French windows, Daria stepped onto the balcony, gesturing and gesticulating as she spoke at the automated voice answering machine of the telephone company’s client relations service. It assured her the call would be answered within ten minutes. That meant she had ten minutes to put a mile between herself and the tail.
Peering down, she spotted the unmarked Alfa below, idling in the alleyway beyond the walls. A pair of bored-looking operatives sat inside, their arms out and cigarettes twitching, their eyes glancing up every ten or twelve seconds, waiting for her to reappear. Mario and Celestino. The Questor’s attack dogs.
Leaving the French windows open, she stepped in, pulled the diaphanous drapes, and retreated to her bedroom. There she took off the dressing gown and hung it in the closet.
Calm, quiet, methodical, she said to herself.
Rolling up a bright yellow wind shell and a pair of ultralight running pants, she pressed them into a fanny pack, afterwards adding her wallet, badge, and ID, and then her service revolver. Hesitating, she reached into her night stand, slipping a tube of red lipstick into the pack’s zippered compartment. With her smartphone strapped to her upper arm and a bud in her ear, she completed the outfit by twisting up, then stuffing, her long, chestnut hair into a billed cap. Her alpine sunglasses dangled around her neck on a strap.
Daria knew headquarters was listening through the land line, sending updates to the tail. So, she turned on the sound system and left the handset by one of the speakers. The phone company voice assured her she had only seven minutes left on queue.
Swiftly and silently, Daria let herself onto the landing, then dashed down the stairs two at a time, taking the back door to a cramped, malodorous courtyard, and from it into the hulking old building next door. Passing through another courtyard lined by double columns of carved marble, she exited one floor below into another alley and wended her way north, jogging slowly and glancing around calmly, until she reached the bottom of the hill and emerged near the medieval city gate, Porta Soprana, and the house of Christopher Columbus.
Picking up her pace, she wriggled forward, a fish swimming through schools of tourists around the Columbus house. Then she darted between cars stopped at a red light, crossing the main thoroughfare marking the frontier of the rebuilt post-medieval city. Choosing a one way and heading for the hills and the leafy lanes of the Acquasola Park, she galloped under the soaring arcades of the Mussolini-era palazzi. Anyone following her would have to detour many blocks to pick up her trail.
Genoa was just possibly the hardest city in Europe to successfully follow anyone. Built over a span of two thousand years atop a dozen hills and hillocks, over dips and river valleys and promontories jutting into the sea, it was infinitely more labyrinthine and confusing than Venice or Rome. With its hundreds of light-less, crevice-like alleyways and sudden dead-ends, countless connecting courtyards, and endlessly long, steep staircases surrounded by a tangled roller-coaster of one-way streets, Genoa was the proverbial maze inside a labyrinth. If you knew your way around, even a top-notch pursuit team on motor-scooters would be hard pressed to stick to you. Not even a drone could do it.
In less than three minutes, she had slalomed around shoppers and commuters on Via Venti Settembre and picked her way up the staircase flanking the tiger-striped Santo Stefano, an abbey nearly a thousand years old standing alone in a sun-washed piazza. Putting on her sunglasses, she sprinted as far as the serpentine upper ring road, then headed east at a gentle jog. There was little traffic here, but glancing down at the area around Brignole Station, Daria was surprised to see a massive tailback. Jogging in place, she peered down and, with increasing alarm, counted two dozen swat and riot squad vehicles, and a dozen or more armored trucks of the Polizia di Stato and Carabinieri lining the teeming streets behind the train station and in front of Villa Migone and Villa Imperiale.
Sucking her lower lip, Daria recalled how, two days earlier, she had recommended DIGOS dispatch a mere handful of men and sharpshooters to guard Villa Migone during the commemorative ceremonies. A small team was all anyone needed. What was this full-blown crowd-control circus? As far as she knew, there had never been big, dangerous, violent protests on April 25th before, not in Genoa. Centauri must have been warned of potential rioting. She had been cut out of the loop. Unles
s… unless what?
Running again, confident no one was following her, she slackened her pace and breathed freer as she neared the San Martino hospital facility from the hills above, planning to walk the final stretch to Corso Europa and the Orange Nightmare. Then her phone vibrated with a message. She checked the screen. It was Emilio Bozzo.
Someone followed me to the café. Meet me in the tunnel from the hospital to the morgue, level −2.
What about the security cameras? she texted back, jogging in place. His answer came seconds later.
The system is down—again!
That final word, again, and the exclamation point, spoke volumes.
No one attempted to stop Daria or asked for ID as she pushed through the desperate crowds in the airless, stinking-hot emergency room, found the staff elevators marked OFF LIMITS TO PATIENTS AND PUBLIC, and rode down two floors. She could feel the perspiration prickling on her forehead, back, and thighs, and she tugged uncomfortably at her sweat-soaked jersey molded to her torso. The subterranean cool of the tunnel gave her a welcome chill. Then the scent of sickness and death hit her. She began shivering, goose bumps rising on her tanned, tendril arms.
Emilio Bozzo’s hand was as sweaty as hers, but his was a cold, clammy sweat. She could not help thinking it was cadaverous, the pale hand of a corpse fished from water. He mumbled a greeting, and looking behind to make sure they were not being followed, ducked through a double door that he locked behind them, shushing her and catching his breath. Standing silently in the dark in the underground chamber, Daria saw in a blinding flash in her mind’s eye an epiphanic inkling of eternity. She saw a tunnel of perpetual darkness and the finality of the grave. Then insects, rot, mulching, dissolving flesh. Cremation would be better, she shivered. It was perhaps un-ecological but a swift shortcut to elemental being. The reduction of wet fleshy matter to ash and gas had to be less awful. She would need to spell out her wishes clearly so her mother, siblings, and colleagues knew.
Silently repeating her soothing mantra, calm, quiet, methodical, she could hear Bozzo’s irregular breathing and wondered if he were hyperventilating. His acrid halitosis filled the air with the stench of bile. Several minutes went by. He turned on the light. She followed him silently across the echoing, empty room, through another set of double doors, into a florescent-lit tunnel, and from there into the familiar cold storage area of the morgue.
“You’ve come to see the body?” he asked, gulping and wiping his face with a handkerchief. He was as pale as the sheet covering the mutilated corpse of Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Daria shook her head without looking down. “No,” she whispered. “I’ve come to see you, because I need your help.”
He blanched a paler shade of white. Giving Bozzo a quick, redacted version of her meeting with Centauri, she added, “Someone has been ratting on us, someone has been listening and watching, someone wants the murder of Garibaldi hushed up, at least temporarily, and I need to know why.”
“Have you seen the TV news?” he asked. “It looks like the G8 Summit all over again or the riots in America. I haven’t seen so many swat teams and police trucks in Italy in nearly twenty years.”
Daria emitted an affirmative growl and told him she had just observed the scene from above and wondered if it might turn ugly. She dared not say it, but the footage she had viewed in the police academy years earlier of coups d’état in countries from Argentina to Greece, Brazil to Zimbabwe, had looked exactly like that.
Bozzo nodded gravely. “So, what is it I can do?” His voice quavered. “I’m not a policeman, I’m actually a coward, and I’ve seen so much death and dying that I’m not in a hurry to join the cadavers.”
Daria explained that what she needed was a ride to the container port facility in Voltri, and then the airport in Albenga, or perhaps the other way around. “I want you to inspect the seaplanes that are still there, if any are,” she said. “An hour ago, the Questor gave permission for them to fly. But Lieutenant Morbido should be there by now, so it might not be too late, he might find some pretext to hold them.”
“You realize Albenga is in the province of Savona?” he asked. “That’s not my territory.”
“Those farmhouses were in the province of La Spezia,” she said, “but you flew down because this is your case.”
“My case? The bags of body parts were my case.”
“You saw the words on the wall of the farmhouse,” she said. “You realize Garibaldi’s death and those plastic bags are related. When you agreed to come to Prati di Bovecchia you agreed tacitly that Garibaldi was your man.”
Bozzo gulped, nodded reluctantly, and began packing a tool bag with his equipment. He held up the swiveling police light he always suction-cupped to the roof of the morgue’s car, staring at it portentously. His shoulders slumped. “Should I call Pino Brignole?” he asked, gloom overtaking him.
Daria shook her head and said, no, the two of them could take photos and videos with their smartphones. It was too risky to get anyone else involved, even Pino Brignole. Who could say who had betrayed them to the Questor?
“Not Pino,” Bozzo said, stiffening. Daria shrugged. Bozzo cleared his throat and stood straight. “You’re too tall for me to hide you in the Fiat,” he mumbled, shyly sizing her up and appraising her seemingly for the first time as a human being, a body, a woman, a future corpse.
They could not very well go to the container port or airport in a hearse, he added. Besides, it was a national holiday and no hearse would be available. “We could call a taxi, an SUV or van, and smuggle you into it,” he suggested. “We’ll bring it right up to the exit of the morgue and open the car doors this way.” He motioned inward. “No one out there will be able to see who is getting in.”
Daria pondered for several seconds, then pursed her lips and squinted. “We’ll get the taxi for you, and you’ll get into it without being seen,” she said. “Put on a hat and a lab coat or whatever you have here that will work as a disguise and bend double when you walk.” Bozzo listened and began tapping the screen of his phone, ordering the taxi. “For me,” she added, “call an ambulance from the hospital rank. There must be a clinic in Voltri.” Bozzo looked up, his cheeks twitching, then he nodded. “When the ambulance arrives, tell them to take the corpse to the clinic,” she continued, “and tell them you’ll follow them there with the taxi. Put that swirling light on the taxi’s roof and make sure the driver glues his car to the ambulance’s bumper.”
Bozzo shook his head uncomprehendingly. “What corpse? Garibaldi?”
“Me,” Daria smiled. “You’ll wrap me in a shroud and I’ll lie on a gurney. The ambulance crew will never know.”
Bozzo’s cheeks flushed, but he could not help smiling. “What if someone follows the taxi?”
“Then we go into the clinic in Voltri and figure out how to get out and lose the tail. Maybe we call another ambulance or taxi and both hide in it. But I doubt they’ll follow you or the ambulance. They’re concerned about me and won’t imagine I’m posing as a corpse.”
“Okay,” said Bozzo skeptically, his fumbling, sweaty fingers missing keys as he used the morgue’s land line to call the ambulance rank out front. “Twelve minutes for the ambulance,” he said, cradling the phone. “The taxi will be here in eight minutes. It will have to wait.” He swallowed hard. “How do we pay for this? I mean, how do I justify it with the accounting office?”
Daria drummed her lips. “Put the ambulance on the morgue’s tab,” she suggested. “You had to take Joseph Gary to be ID’d by a very busy man named Andrew Striker, a U.S. agent who knew the deceased but could not come to the morgue. I’ll pay for the taxi with cash.” She handed him two fifty-euro bills.
While Bozzo readied the shroud and gurney, and ferreted out a driving cap and beige raincoat for a disguise, Daria drifted over to the open refrigerated drawer where the body of Joseph Gary lay, covered with a sheet. She reached out, start
ed to lift the sheet, glimpsed one stiff, bloodless arm, halted, and let the sheet fall back.
When Bozzo reappeared, she asked if he had found a signet ring on the cadaver’s remaining hand. “A large, gold ring,” she said, remembering what Lieutenant Morbido had told her. Bozzo shook his head and said no, there was no ring. “It must have fallen off when he was ejected from the plane,” she reasoned. “Unless someone stole it from the body.”
“You’d better lie down on the gurney now and let me cover you and strap you down, as we always do,” he said. “I assume your phone is on silent mode?” Daria nodded. Glancing down, Bozzo pointed to her shoes. “Dead bodies leaving the morgue don’t usually wear running shoes,” he added, waiting and watching her slip them off, “or socks.”
Taking off her socks and stuffing them into the shoes, she saw him staring with something like rapture at her perfectly pedicured, tanned, slender feet, the toenails freshly painted with glossy red polish, her one, secret concession to femininity. Twinkling them self-consciously, she wondered if Emilio Bozzo had a foot fetish, if he were married or had a fiancée or perhaps a boyfriend. She knew nothing about him, his sexuality, beliefs, or background. The extreme impersonality of their vocations struck her. How different were they really from nurses, doctors, monks, or nuns?