Red Riviera

by David Downie

  Daria had been brought up a nominal Christian, by a Catholic father and Protestant mother, but she had never found faith and rarely thought of religion. Duty was her creed, the law her golden rule. Resisting the temptations of superstition, she relied on reason to get her through each day. But as she climbed onto the gurney and allowed Bozzo to wrap her in a white linen shroud, feeling him tightening the straps uncomfortably over her, then attaching a label to her right big toe, she found her fingers irresistibly making the sign of the upside-down horseshoe, the horns of the bull, pointing down for good luck and protection from evil.

  The last thing she saw before Bozzo pulled the shroud over her head was a pair of stubbly cheeked ambulance drivers smoking cigarettes as they slouched across the parking lot toward the morgue. Moments later, the gurney was lifted unceremoniously and slammed into the vehicle, the doors banging loudly behind. Jerking away and roaring out of the parking lot toward Corso Europa, the young drivers in the front passenger compartment began laughing and joking, then turned up the thumping teeny-bopper music on the car stereo, the siren suddenly screaming into life and the ambulance’s deafening air horn blowing as they tore across town toward the autostrada, heading west. She breathed intentionally, reciting her mantra. The interior was air conditioned and cool, almost cold.

  Unable to move or see through the shroud, she repressed a burning cough and sneeze. They were smoking inside the vehicle, she realized, flouting every health regulation in the book with insouciant disregard for the dignity of a dead body which just happened to be very much alive. The cigarette smoke drifting into the back where she lay was nauseating and acrid. Suddenly seized by panic, she hoped Emilio Bozzo had remembered to take her shoes and her fanny pack with him, and that his taxi was managing to keep up. If it could, it would be a minor miracle.

  Twenty-One

  As Daria lay immobile on the gurney, jostled by the reckless, bouncing ride, she thought of many things—of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. She thought of novels and romance, and the men she had loved, men life had separated from her, walruses weeping as they swallowed oysters and carried on with their careers, wives, and families. Andrew Striker was one of the walruses. She had loved him, briefly, but her survival instincts had forced her to break away before he swallowed her alive.

  Reciting as many lines of Lewis Carroll’s surreal masterpiece as she could call to mind, she remained calm beneath the shroud for the first half hour of the journey. But current events kept circling and swooping in, crowding out Alice and the looking glass, the walrus and the carpenter—and the idealized, reassuring image of Gianni Giannini, the first man to stir her emotions in many a year, since the departure of Striker.

  With a sudden pang, Daria wondered what would happen if she were separated from her fanny pack containing her wallet, badge, and gun, and they wound up in the wrong hands? Centauri would throw the book at her.

  Shoes and ships? How could she run, let alone walk, from the clinic in Voltri to the wharf and container port if Emilio Bozzo had forgotten her shoes? With a stab of discomfort, she felt the bareness of her feet. The twine attaching the tag to her big toe was cutting off her circulation. The toe was beginning to throb.

  Shoes and ships and sealing wax, she said to herself again, thinking of Clement and Zack, the misery of migration, the inanity of tourism to the “sink-we terry,” and the draconian heartlessness of anti-terrorism legislation. When was it not only all right but necessary to put the shoe on the other foot, break the sealing wax, bend the rules, break the law, kick off your shoes, and step barefoot through the looking glass or dive into the rabbit hole in pursuit of the unknown? Break or bend to preserve? Could a state of emergency or martial law, for instance, potentially save a democracy, the way an artificial coma could save certain patients? Is that what Centauri and his friends were up to? Or were they bent on the opposite?

  Shoes, shoes, shoes, she thought, trying to puzzle through the tale of Clement and Zack. Was Clement wearing shoes Zack had discarded in flight? Or were they the shoes of the driver of the red bread delivery van? Was Zack that driver?

  But the most frequent recurring chain of thoughts tormenting her brain ran something like this. Centauri knew Joe Gary and must have dug up dirt on him, so he could run him. Or the opposite. Did Joe Gary know Centauri and have dirt on him? Why, otherwise, would the Questor stick his neck out, befriend Gary publicly, attend his parties, get him into society? They were propping each up, aiding and abetting, conspiring. To do what?

  Willem Bremach said Andrew Striker had dots to join. Bremach knew Striker. Striker must have known Joe Gary—or at least known everything there was to know about Gary, thanks to the American secret services he worked for. Bremach knew Gary and Centauri and must have had dirt on them both. Bremach, Centauri, and the marquise had allowed Gary to join the old-money clubs of Old Genoa. Why? Bremach loathed Centauri and seemed glad Gary was dead, and the marquise surely could not have known Joseph Gary in the past, a peasant turned spy, or enjoyed his company? But Bremach had hinted she did know him. Had she sponsored Gary at the Galleria Club to please Centauri or Bremach? And who devised Gary’s punishment, who stole the body parts, and who piloted the plane?

  Morbido’s words about the rioting came back to her. That’s precisely what Centauri and his friends want. A state of emergency? Martial law? Trump had toyed with the idea. France had done it for a full year and had come out as free as before, still the flawed, partial democracy it had always been, at least since the days of General de Gaulle. Clumsily, the Italian political right had tried but failed more than once to impose martial law: in the 1960s, during the failed coup d’état, and the 1970s, during the Years of Lead, when the Red Brigades and right-wing extremists were each running amok, kidnapping, killing, setting off bombs, and then blaming the other side to sow confusion.

  Confusion was the deep state in Italy. After World War Two, the Allies had helped write the Italian Constitution, devised to make the country ungovernable and keep another Mussolini from taking power. The real “historic compromise” wasn’t about Communism and Christian Democracy. So far, the compromise had been about avoiding military rule by maintaining a mostly benign police state with draconian anti-terror legislation, a pseudo-democracy clothed as a representative republic and watched over by the victorious allies of old, America foremost among them. But America under Donald Trump had changed, morphing into a strange new hybrid authoritarian police state aligned not with Britain and the historic allies but with Russia.

  Daria’s head and stomach were beginning to ache from the combined effects of the cold, the cigarette smoke, and motion sickness.

  When the siren of the ambulance finally fell silent and the bucking stopped, she sighed out loud—too loud. Taking a deep, anxious breath she braced herself. She must not move. She must not make noise. They must not see she was alive, or this caper would get back to Centauri and then the game was up.

  She heard and sensed car doors opening and slamming, heard the adolescent banter of the drivers, then felt the gurney being yanked out and lowered, and pushed jerkily through hot sunlight across asphalt and up a concrete ramp, banging through swinging doors, and coming to a halt in a cool corridor. New voices joined the scrum, someone of authority snarled and commanded and said he knew nothing about it—the “it” being her arrival. The shroud jerked up from her feet and the label was tugged, a name read aloud, then the label and shroud dropped. The gurney lunged forward again, rumbling down the corridor, through more doors and into a chill, quiet place that smelled of tainted meat and antiseptics. The doors flapped and banged. The voices retreated. Daria took a deep breath. She heard the whirring of the air conditioning, then realized that no, it was not air conditioning. It was a refrigerator. The gurney was in a cold room, a room for dead bodies. From experience, she knew that in such facilities the stinging temperature hovered a few degrees above freezing. She was cold already. And scared. Al
l she had on were a pair of jogging shorts and a jersey. They were damp. Her body was still daubed with sweat. Her bare feet were now protruding from the bottom end of the shroud. Where was Emilio Bozzo? How long would it take for him to arrive?

  Shoes and ships and sealing wax, she whispered to herself, feeling light-headed, her big toe burning and aching from lack of blood.

  Several more minutes went by. Her teeth began to chatter. Her lips, toes, and fingers began to go numb. She calmly, slowly, methodically tilted her head back, so her jaw was held shut by the taut shroud, stopping the chatter that might give her away. She could barely move. She was not an escape artist, she had no knife up her sleeve. She had no sleeves. Tears of anguish, fear, and terrible, killing cold welled up in her eyes. Taking slow, deep breaths through her flaring nostrils, her lips clamped shut, she repeated her mantra. But the mantra only worked when you were in control of your environment.

  After what seemed an hour but may have been only five or ten minutes, fearing she might die from hypothermia, Daria began wriggling and shouting, gasping for air through the shroud, her face, hands, and feet now entirely numb.

  “Shhhh,” shushed a familiar voice, the mouth and bad breath close to her ear. “We’re moving you out of here now.”

  Quaking and gasping, Daria forced her eyes shut and felt herself sinking. Once again, the gurney bucked forward, then rumbled and bounced, and finally rolled to a halt. She felt the straps being loosened and she smelled Emilio Bozzo’s nauseating halitosis as he panted, his face hovering over her, wrestling off the shroud and forcing her to her feet. “You’ve got to get up and out,” he whispered hoarsely, “before anyone comes in.”

  Daria opened her eyes and saw Bozzo standing before her, her shoes and pack in his outstretched hands. Dazed, her hands transformed into frozen lobster claws, she worked the tag off her toe and wrestled on the shoes. Leaning on Bozzo’s arm, she hobbled out of what was clearly an examining room and down a short hallway to another empty room. “Sit here and get warm,” he whispered, leaning close. “Can you hear me?” He shook her. She nodded back. “I called another taxi,” he said. “It will be here in a few minutes. Can you put on your windbreaker and running pants?” She nodded again, watching him unzip the fanny pack and pull them out for her. “I have to find some way to get that gurney back to the ambulance without being seen and explain what happened to the corpse,” he added, his voice choked, fluty, and panicked. “This is crazy,” he added. Then he disappeared, reappearing moments later just as Daria felt the numbness at last leaving her lips.

  In the taxi, with her billed cap pulled low on her forehead and the sunglasses covering her exhausted, bloodshot eyes, she shivered violently despite her nylon windbreaker and running pants. Asking the driver to turn off the air conditioning, she opened her window to let in the day’s staggering, humid heat. Bozzo listened with dismay.

  “Where to?” asked the cabbie, eyeing her with resigned annoyance.

  Daria concentrated for half a minute before speaking. “The airport in Albenga,” she said, as she clawed and fumbled in her fanny pack. “Step on it,” she added, flashing her badge. Then she leaned over and took the swirling roof light from Bozzo’s limp hands. Switching it on, she reached up and out of the window, suction-cupping it to the roof. “Five minutes,” she said, turning to Bozzo, “just give me five minutes of silence to thaw and think.”

  When the taxi pulled up at the off-limits staff entrance of the Albenga airport half an hour later, Osvaldo Morbido emerged from the shade of an open hangar where he had been waiting, a paper cone of fried artichokes in his hands. He tossed the greasy cone into a garbage can and strode over. Beckoning, he led Daria and Bozzo inside the hangar, toward an office. “No point wasting time talking to the administrators,” he croaked, looking with a gimlet eye at Daria’s jogging getup and haggard face. “No one knows anything about anything, and the important people are off today, except one, and he’s a mechanic.” Morbido paused and raised a thick eyebrow, expecting a reaction. “Cat got your tongues? What happened? You look half-dead.”

  Bozzo muttered something incomprehensible about hypothermia and studied his feet while Daria said, deadpan, “You are correct, Osvaldo, I’m half dead but very happily back from the underworld.”

  Shrugging, used to her enigmatic utterances, the lieutenant said he thought they were wasting their time with the seaplanes, and they would see why shortly.

  Morbido’s vigorous knocks on the glass-fronted door to the office of the airplane maintenance department summoned a stocky man of medium height and middle years. He appeared wearing a pristine, starched and ironed mechanic’s outfit. It consisted of dark blue, short-sleeved coveralls cloaking an ironed short-sleeved white cotton shirt. His hair was black, graying around the temples, and his fingernails, Daria noticed, were immaculate. The man’s name was stitched on the left breast of the coveralls. She raised her sunglasses, peered at it, and read Vincenzo Bianchi—Capo Reparto Tecnico. As head of the airplane maintenance department, Bianchi clearly no longer got his hands dirty.

  “My pleasure,” he said in an affable tenor, stepping out and closing the door behind him. They shook hands. Unabashedly astonished by the way Daria looked and the cadaverous temperature of her hand, he glanced down and asked, “Do you travel holding an ice bucket, captain?” When Daria did not answer, Bianchi added, “I already showed your lieutenant why it could not have been any of these planes…”

  “Please be kind enough to show me and the coroner,” Daria said, politely but firmly. “We are trying to solve a peculiar case and cannot reveal the details. Thank you for your forbearance.”

  They walked out of the hangar and across the tarmac, following the head mechanic. The airport was eerily empty. No planes appeared to be landing or taking off, presumably because of the long holiday weekend. They heard the tinkling sound of wrenches and the whirring of power tools in the distance, coming from another hangar. A solitary forklift trundled by, loaded with what looked like sections of bleacher seats, the driver waving at Bianchi. Otherwise it was a ghost town airport, a few short runways surrounded by endless fields of artichokes.

  “It’s mostly charters and private planes we deal with here,” Bianchi volunteered, as if sensing her thoughts, “plus the Civil Defense and Fire Prevention Corps, as you know. Now that the air show is over, and we’ve cleaned up, things will go back to being nice and calm—except for fighting fires and rescuing folks.”

  She nodded. The scorching sun felt wonderful, heating her back through the windbreaker and jersey. She walked at an unnaturally slow pace, savoring the heat, feeling life and energy returning. Daria now realized that what she craved was a bottle of water, a double espresso, and a slice of focaccia. Later, she told herself.

  A row of four Canadair water bombers stood in line, their yellow-and-red detailing and fuselages spotless and glinting. They were remarkably small, squat, stubby machines, Daria could not help thinking, from nose to tail no longer than a standard city passenger bus and not particularly tall, either, perhaps three or four meters from the ground to the top of the wings, she judged.

  Beyond them were two much larger seaplanes, one clearly Chinese, from the red ideograms on the side. The other was Russian, she assumed, vaguely recognizing their outlines from the hasty research she had done over the last thirty-six hours—and from Centauri’s silhouettes, burned into her visual cortex earlier that morning. She pointed.

  “These first, please,” she said to Bozzo and Bianchi, indicating the big Chinese and Russian airplanes.

  “Be my guest,” the mechanic replied. “The pilots won’t be here for another hour,” he added, glancing at his watch. It was nearly 11:00 a.m. “They went to the beach for a swim. It’s not every day people like that find themselves on the Italian Riviera.”

  Morbido laughed sardonically. “Well, the Russians have their own Rivieras now, don’t they, on the Crimean Peninsula? Better than th
ose old Black Sea resorts. And there’s always Syria, nice and sunny there, as long as the chlorine gas and barrel bombs don’t get you.”

  No one laughed. As usual, Bozzo stared at his feet, blinking in the glare.

  Raising a finger, Daria pointed to the forward section of the underbelly of the Russian plane, where, presumably, the water was taken in. She asked if Bianchi could open it, but he shook his head. “I have no idea how to do that,” he said, “and I would never go on board without permission.” He smiled knowingly. “The thing is, on both these planes a protective screen mechanism fronts the intake bays. I have seen it. If you look at the manuals online, you’ll understand. There’s no way you could scoop up a human being with either of them, unless that protective screen was removed, and it wasn’t, not while they were here in Albenga, anyway.”

  Morbido smiled wryly. “So, the capo was right,” he said, “for once.”

  “And the Canadair planes?” Daria asked.

  Bianchi dipped his head and smiled affably again. “As I explained earlier to your lieutenant, it’s more or less the same story—come over and I’ll show you.”

  They trooped back to the Canadair water bombers. They were identical and of recent manufacture by the look of them. Bozzo scratched his hollow, pale cheeks and scrutinized the front end of the first plane while Bianchi climbed inside, threw a series of hydraulic switches, and called out of the open cockpit door for them to stand clear. The belly of the plane sank slowly, the scoop stopping a foot or so above the tarmac. Bianchi reappeared as Bozzo and Morbido stepped up and studied the intake mechanism.

  “See,” said Bianchi, “you might pick up some small fish, and maybe a dog or even a small child, but it would be virtually impossible to scoop up a grown man.” He paused and watched the disappointed expression on Daria’s face. “I’m guessing that’s what this is all about?”