by David Downie
Daria signaled her agreement, the pennies dropping one after another. She stood up when Lieutenant Morbido knocked on the office door. Through the large single-glass pane, she could see he was dusty and grimy, and was panting and sweating profusely. Did he suddenly have high blood pressure, she wondered? Diabetes? He looked like a heart attack about to happen.
“I guess you’re both under the weather,” joked Bianchi, glancing at Morbido. “A storm is coming,” he added, nodding at the horizon, “and it’s going to be a big one, a red-sand sirocco full of thunderheads.”
Twenty-Three
“There you are, Daria. I was beginning to wonder.”
Andrew Striker had a soft but persuasive voice. His smile shone bright with polished white teeth each the size and shape of a small, perfect white corn kernel. The voice and smile matched his tall, lean, good looks and his expensive, understated casual sportswear in shades of khaki, tan, and olive green.
The only visible flaws in this apparently ideal specimen of manhood, Daria thought as he took her outstretched hand and shook it, were his ghostly complexion, slightly jutting jaw, and remarkable widow’s peak. She had not seen Striker in several years—their separation had not been amicable. It had been acrimonious. His thick, salt-and-pepper hair was brushed back vampire-style as it always had been. But in the intervening years, it had receded so far on either side of his untanned forehead that what remained looked like a tongue of fur thrown on a Carrara marble floor. The effect was bizarre, almost demonic.
“Your man Morbido looks like he’s seen a ghost,” Striker observed, watching the lieutenant pull away from the parking lot.
“He’s feeling under the weather,” Daria remarked, wishing Morbido had stayed with her. “I mean that literally.” Freeing her hand from Striker’s grasp, she stepped back to what she thought was a safe distance. But he was clearly unsatisfied with a simple handshake. Leaning down from his six-foot-something height, Striker gently pulled Daria back into his arms and kissed her on both cheeks. Before she could wriggle away, his lips were squarely on hers. She opened her mouth to protest and felt his thick, muscular tongue dart in. Daria was suddenly glad she had been sucking on breath mints all morning. Realizing simultaneously how appalled, angry, hungry, and thirsty she was, she hoped Striker would stop trying to molest her and offer her some coffee and focaccia instead of sexual passion. Otherwise, violence would ensue and she knew who would lose.
“Honestly, Andrew, that’s not why I’ve come to see you,” she said, pushing him away and stepping back a full yard this time, prepared to aim simultaneous blows at his throat and genitals. “What is it with you middle-aged men? It must be the weather.”
“Yes,” he laughed, a strange, strangulated laugh. “Storms make men horny.”
She had forgotten how forceful and crude Andrew Striker could be, despite his suave exterior. He was that perfect ripe nectarine at the supermarket, a cleverly displayed piece of luscious fruit that when bitten into had no flavor and gave you a stomachache from greenness and chemical pesticides.
The stomach ache had also come from the physics of their intimate relationship, she now recalled. Striker made love like so many American men, brutally, as if he were a cowboy and she a bucking bronco. The style, rhythm, and timing were very different from the suckling, gluttonous, worshipful, slow lovemaking of the Italians she had known.
The fact that he had been shamelessly two-timing her when the split occurred did not help matters now. She remembered how she had lectured him when he had accused her of being old-fashioned and uptight. “Women are different,” she had said. “When you allow someone to penetrate you, you think twice about sleeping around unless you belong to the fractional minority of uninhibited, sexually voracious females who have more in common with men than other women. People think I’m one but I am not. I am an intensely private person.”
Striker looked her up and down now with a wry smile, clearly amused by her colorful jogging outfit and running shoes. “Gosh, and here I thought you were pining away all these months and years.” He cut short her silent reflections. “I love your fanny pack and baseball cap, by the way. Very sexy.”
“Don’t be sarcastic or offensive, please, it doesn’t flatter you, Andrew.”
“That’s weird,” he remarked, laughing a percussive, sardonic laugh this time. “Carla always said that.”
“Said. Past tense?”
Striker fashioned an exaggerated, artificial grimace. “It was short and sweet, like our little romance, though you and I never married. Carla insisted. They say third time lucky. They’re wrong.”
Daria raised an eyebrow but stayed quiet, eager to change the subject.
Beyond the plate-glass window of Striker’s high-tech, air-conditioned office spread the endless wharves and storage facilities of what was Italy’s biggest container port. Looking like Lego constructions, the bright red, yellow, green, blue, or pink shipping containers—almost all of them marked with Chinese brand names—were stacked sometimes four or five, sometimes seven, high. The port area had been built on landfill and was shaped like the deck of a giant aircraft carrier. Dozens of cranes the height of skyscrapers edged the wharves, each rising steeply above four widespread fretwork legs and appearing to Daria like a herd of monstrous metallic horses.
“Did you know,” he said, raising a finger to point, “that when there are more than five of them stacked up the containers are empty?”
Daria did know—it was one of the first things Striker had told her years ago. “I had heard rumors,” she said.
Striker grinned. “They are a silent commentary on the state of the European economy,” he continued, offering Daria a leather-upholstered swivel chair at a long, gunmetal work table. It was covered almost end to end with computers, scanners, telephones, modems, routers, and other electronic equipment she could not identify. “They arrive full of cargo from China, are unloaded, and sit empty for months or years because Italy in particular and Europe in general have nothing China wants—except money and real estate, and those don’t travel in containers. A few years ago, some bright young man in Genoa finally decided to collect all the recycled packaging from the Chinese goods, fill the empty containers with it, and send them back to China. It’s a lucrative business, I’m given to understand.”
Daria nodded again. She had heard that one before as well. His repertoire had not expanded. “Find anything interesting lately?” she asked, searching for a diplomatic way to back into the topic that had brought her to Striker. “Still x-raying those containers with that giant machine of yours?”
Striker watched her and smiled brightly. “You know we are,” he said, “and you know I can’t tell you what we’ve found lately, unless it falls under your purview. So far, in the last five years, you’ve made sure Lieutenant Morbido was my interlocutor, not you.”
“I’m sure it was the capo who made that arrangement,” she remarked, “not I.”
Striker shrugged and thrust out his lips. “Whatever. The scanner works away, Daria, but it’s the algorithm that finds the stuff we want to keep out of the country. Same as before, except the new algorithms are much more powerful, much more efficient, than a few years back, when you and I were, well, friendly.” He paused again. “But that’s not what you’ve come to see me about.”
Daria shook her head and studied her fingernails, deciding they needed care. “Greetings from Willem Bremach by the way,” she said. “My godfather seems to think you’re the Wizard of Oz and knows everything there is to know about Joseph Gary and my boss, and Libya and terrorism and human trafficking, and so on.”
“Your boss’s boss, you mean? Il Generale Centauri? Your immediate boss is Ruggieri, isn’t he, and he’s a good guy, he wears a white hat.” Striker smiled his bright smile again. Walking to an espresso machine in the corner of the office he prepared a caffè americano for her. “This is how you like it,” he said, “if memory ser
ves. Long, black, no sugar. Very tough. Very alpha.”
“Correct,” she said, taking the Styrofoam cup with thanks and glancing around, hoping to spot cold sparkling water and focaccia hidden amid the array of computers.
“Local staff is off today,” he remarked, watching her eyes. “We can speak freely. There are no bugs in my office.” Striker winked. Daria raised her eyebrow again, this time in obvious, profound disbelief. “He must be handing in his resignation right about now,” Striker continued in a mild, neutral tone, glancing at his watch.
“Who would that be?” she asked.
“Well, you haven’t changed an iota,” he laughed. “Doubting da Vinci, that’s what I used to call you, wasn’t it? You know who.” Pausing to gauge her reaction, he went on. “Centauri is ancient history. Seen the news lately? I mean, in the last five minutes?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been on the move. What’s up?”
Striker seemed sincerely delighted. “Well, this is breaking stuff, Daria, fresh news. You need to keep up. The latest development five minutes ago is Centauri has had some kind of health issue and has resigned. Heat stroke, the doctors say. I think it must be that heavy old military uniform of his, with all the stars and epaulets. Naturally he is eager to defend the honor of his family, dragged in the mud by being associated with Gary Garibaldi and the Mussolini Brigade, so he’s stepping back and hiring lawyers. Ruggieri has taken over and will give the speech shortly at the commemorative ceremony, in another two hours, I think it is.”
Before the thunderstruck Daria could ask for an explanation, Striker flicked a remote control, and a screen lit up on another long desk. A local 24/7 news channel came on. Images streamed across the screen. Joseph Gary was shown alive at his villa wearing a tuxedo, with Steve Bannon’s entourage in the spring of 2018, then in a swimsuit on the deck of the vintage Riva speedboat, then dead—very dead. Aerial views showed the sites where he had been scooped up and dumped.
“Wait, our photographer, Pino Brignole, took those shots from the helicopter,” Daria said. “I reviewed them on site. And I took those,” she blurted again, pointing at the screen. “How did they get them?”
“Shhh,” Striker shushed her, as the newscaster spoke. He raised the volume.
The American undercover agent known as Joseph Gary, accidentally or deliberately lifted from the sea off Portofino by a Canadair water bomber on April 23rd, as we reported earlier today, was found dead yesterday evening by police authorities from Genoa and La Spezia. The discovery was kept secret until now to allow the investigation to proceed unimpeded, it has been claimed.
The mangled body of the victim was dropped from the air on a fire burning in an abandoned farmhouse near the Cinque Terre on the morning of April 23rd, a date and time coinciding with the start of the Insurrection of Genoa in 1945. Signor Gary and the farmhouses played a role in the insurrection—an evil, unpardonable role in one of the region’s darkest hours.
Channel 5M can now confirm that Joseph Gary Baldi was none other than Giuseppe Garibaldi, formerly an Italian citizen, born in Prati di Bovecchia, Province of La Spezia, on March 24, 1927, in the same farmhouse where his body was found hideously disfigured and nearly broken in two, draped over a wall, having fallen from the seaplane…
Who was this mysterious individual, and why was he targeted on such a symbolic date?
Now a series of black-and-white historic archive shots came on screen. They showed Giuseppe Garibaldi young, a teenager, holding a rifle, among a group of other Fascist youths. A white circle appeared around his head, then underneath ran the subtitle Giuseppe Garibaldi, Mussolini Brigade, spring 1945.
Standing behind the group was a tall, older man, an officer. The frame zoomed to him. Now a circle appeared around this man’s head, followed by the subtitle Colonel Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri II, Coordinator of the Genoa and La Spezia Committees of the Mussolini Brigade in 1945. A final image showed the words Jus Stat scrawled on the farmhouse wall and the translation, Justice Abides.
The newscaster’s voice was somber. Justice bides its time—that might be a better rendering of the ancient Latin motto. After the war, Colonel Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri II was court-martialed, tried in civil court, jailed for war crimes, then inexplicably exonerated in 1948, later joining the Polizia di Stato. He was decorated numerous times for his courage and zeal combating organized crime and terrorism in the 1960s and ’70s during the Years of Lead. He rose to the rank of three-star general during his long and distinguished career and died in 1998 of natural causes.
His son, General Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III, is the current Questor of the Province of Genoa and, like his father those many years ago, was a personal friend of the victim, Giuseppe Garibaldi.
The Questor has declined to comment on these startling revelations, and Channel 5M has so far been unable to reach spokespeople for the Questura, the Provence of Genoa, or the Ministry of the Interior in Rome. All are closed for the public holidays.
Striker cut the sound and turned to look down at her, grinning. “This is Italy,” he chortled. “I will believe anything. How about you?”
“This is how you stop a coup before it starts,” Daria said grimly, “by pulling back the curtains and revealing the plotters before they can strike.”
Striker chuckled as he thanked her with sardonic irony for the elucidation. “We still don’t know who did it, who killed Gary, I mean,” he said.
Daria laughed darkly. “Don’t we, Andrew?” She glanced at the TV again. The Centauri report had ended. The local weather report had come on. Daria could not help staring at the orange thunderbolts and storm warnings in red-and-black lettering that stood out starkly on the big-screen TV. “So, you said Vice Questor Ruggieri is already back from Morocco?” she asked, trying to hide her surprise.
Striker laughed. “Ruggieri never went to Morocco. I guess you really were out of the loop. You should have kept in closer touch, Daria. You should have come to see me earlier, as certain parties suggested. No matter, everything has worked out for the best.”
“In this, the best of all possible worlds?”
“Precisely,” he laughed again. “Voltaire, Candide, I wrote a paper about that once.”
“As did I,” she remarked, “and every high school student I know.”
Striker thrust his lantern jaw out, rubbing it pensively, clearly stung, then glanced through the window. “My guess is there will be a cabinet reshuffle in coming days, with the interior and defense portfolios reassigned, and some jockeying for the vice premiership. The Questor will ‘retire’ with full honors and a fat pension, voices will be raised and fists clenched in the air, then everything will go back to normal. Coup aborted. End of story. This has happened half a dozen times in the last, what, fifty or sixty years? Most Italians aren’t even aware of it. A banana republic by any other name wouldn’t be the same.”
“And how many times has it happened in America?” she asked, coloring with pique. “The difference is, when it happens in Washington, no one can stop it and you wind up with a mob egged on by a president, storming the Capitol and…” She left the sentence to hang.
“No comment,” he replied blandly. He turned back to the TV set. Seeing the same images of storm warnings and sirocco sands, he flicked it off. “Want a ride to La Spezia?” Striker’s teeth sparkled as he smiled suavely again. “I’m guessing that’s where you want to go. Can’t go back to your office yet, not until things simmer down. Morbido has gone home to bed taking your car with him. Come on, we can talk about it on the way to La Spezia. Ambassador and Mrs. Bremach and your mom are down there, at San Terenzo, right? Playing bridge with the remarkable Madame la Marquise Augusti-Contini di Mandrella. And Gambero is still in downtown La Spezia, about to snack on some of that excellent local chickpea tart. He’s waiting to hear from you. Very loyal, Lieutenant Italo Gambero, I must say. I wish he worked for us. In fact, I keep wishin
g you would work for us. That offer of an all-expense-paid vacation in Langley still holds, Da.”
“How do you know…” Daria began to ask, rising up in the swivel chair. But Striker put his fingers to his lips, then smiled his patented plastic Ken doll smile.
“You don’t want to know how I know what I know,” he said, winking. With both his hands, he made elephant ears and formed the word “big.” “So, boat or copter, you choose, Daria. As I recall, you get seasick pretty easily. Not sure we ever flew together. We’ve got a big Egyptian freighter detained in La Spezia with some very interesting cargo on board and I need to be there soonest.”
“Copter,” Daria said, motioning vaguely at the blank TV screen. “What about the storm?”
“We’ll beat it,” Striker replied, glancing again at his watch. “But we better get going. You can watch the news while we fly. There are TV monitors in front of every seat. It’s a great little eggbeater, a reconverted military OH-58D Kiowa, not very different from the things my dad flew in ’Nam but a lot faster.”