by David Downie
“Well,” she said dryly, “I hope your dad did not use this one to spray Agent Orange. The contamination lingers.”
“Gee, maybe that’s what’s happened to my hair,” he joked. But there was anger in his eyes. “My dad sprayed Agent Orange and your dad escorted war criminals to freedom. So, I guess we’re even-steven. It was all in a day’s work back then, and you know what? The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Twenty-Four
The blue-and-white Kiowa awaited behind the building in the otherwise empty parking lot. It apparently doubled as a heliport.
Uneasy, Daria glanced at the bank of boiling, black clouds on the southern horizon. The temperature and humidity had increased to tropical levels. How strange that a desert rainstorm full of red sirocco sand could feel so muggy, she thought.
The distance from downtown Genoa to La Spezia was exactly 122 kilometers east by southeast on the autostrada, Daria knew, meaning less than one hour in the Kiowa, unless they encountered headwinds or the engine sucked in the fine red sand of Morocco, seized up, and froze. Then it would be a very short flight.
“Where’s the pilot?” she asked.
“Here’s the pilot,” he said, pointing at his breast.
Dismayed, she remembered Willem Bremach’s description of Striker as a damn fine pilot, though reckless. She was even more dismayed to think he would fly without a copilot with a sirocco approaching.
Hesitating at each step but unwilling to show fear, Daria climbed on board and pulled a helmet over her head. It cut the noise of the engine and rotor and acted as a headset.
“Like being my copilot?” Striker asked in his velvet voice, speaking softly into his mike.
Daria did not have time to answer. The copter roared and hopped into the air, then spun on its axis, rising swiftly and heading east over the wharves along the Gulf of Genoa. She glanced down at the port facility with its teetering toy containers and giant fretwork cranes, then turned in her seat looking south at the approaching storm front.
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
“Loud and clear,” he said, accelerating toward downtown Genoa and its touristy, Fisherman’s Wharf–style old port. “No need to shout. The mike is very sensitive.” He raised his hand and pointed. “See that homely little church over there?” Daria recognized the church, perched on the edge of the medieval walls of the city. Directly below it was the notorious elevated freeway that had blighted the center of the city since the 1960s. Immediately beyond the freeway were the defunct refrigeration facilities for what used to be Genoa’s active but now dying local fishing industry. “You ever been in the tunnel that leads from under that church into the old port area?”
Daria waited, then shook her head and, in a soft, defensive voice said, “No.” She sensed what was coming. Everyone in Genoa knew about the “Ratline” escape routes set up by the Allies along with the Italian postwar administration, the Vatican, and the Red Cross, routes to whisk “strategic human assets” to safety abroad after the war. But it was still a taboo subject in Italy, seventy-plus years later.
“That’s where we smuggled them out,” Striker said gleefully. “They, the Nazis and Fascists we wanted on our side.” A triumphant, vindictive look came over his face. He pulled the helicopter up to a higher altitude and hovered long enough to finish what he was saying. “Ever talk to your dad or your godfather about that? Probably not,” he continued before she could shake her head again. He nudged the copter forward, pointing down. “From there, to there, underground, then onto a freighter bound for Brazil, or maybe New York or Montreal. Yep, Montreal, Canada.”
She knew of the tunnel and the ex-filtration activities but had never broached the subject with her father. He had never spoken about his job and, if she had asked, would have denied being a spy. He was a diplomat, a functionary, a little gray man laboring away for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Maybe now was the time, she realized, to ask Willem Bremach what he knew, before it was too late. She swallowed hard.
“Are you trying to tell me Joe Gary was ex-filtrated through that tunnel on the Genoa Ratline and my father and godfather may have been involved?”
“I’m not trying to tell you, Daria, I am telling you. I’m not sure about Willem, he was awfully young, and the Dutch sent him to Borneo or Java or some such place to quell the restless natives after the war. But I know your dad was a low-level agent as of 1946 based in Genoa, and I know he helped get Eichmann out. Nice guy, Adolf Eichmann.
“So, God knows, Roberto Vinci may have taken Joe Gary’s hand and led him through that tunnel, then given him a one-way ticket to Montreal not to mention a Canadian passport. Gary had people there, you see. Big old Italian community in Montreal. The cathedral or whatever it is has this great mosaic of Mussolini on horseback way up under the dome. You ought to see it, Daria, it gives you pause for thought. Then from Canada we eventually moved him into the U.S. as a Navy Intel officer. It was cleaner that way, like laundering rubles. It’s fascinating stuff, Daria. I’ve got your dad’s file if you want to see it one day. You’re all grown up now. Drop by. I’ll take you to lunch.”
“I’ll find out,” she said stiffly. “Willem will know.”
“Oh yes, Willem will know. Willem knows everything,” Striker laughed, but seemed to be growing angry again.
“Willem says you know everything.”
“Well, then we’re even again,” he snapped.
Accelerating away from the old port area toward the Portofino Peninsula, Striker pushed the Kiowa to top speed. She wondered if he were purposely trying to scare her. From this unusual angle, the fearsome promontory looked like an immense Gothic cathedral studded with pinnacle spires of conglomerate stone. On the saddle leading to it from the mainland stood the local answer to the Eiffel Tower—a microwave broadcast tower hundreds of feet high, covered with dozens of parabolic antennas ranged in clusters at various levels. The dishes halfway up were used by DIGOS and the Polizia di Stato, she knew. Those below them belonged to the Carabinieri. Each law enforcement agency spied on the other, intercepting communications and keeping watch. She wondered how many of the other dishes were leased out to Homeland Security and the various other espionage agencies feeding into the NSA’s Big Ears network.
“Let me give you a little history lesson, Da…” Striker said in his velvet voice. “Skipping blithely over the country’s Fascist heritage, the foundation myth of modern Italy begins with the end of the monarchy by referendum and the creation of the Italian Republic in 1946, right? Skip again to the elections of 1948, when the Italian Communist Party looked like it might win outright and create a bridgehead for the Soviets. That’s where the Allies’ benign interference comes in.”
“Benign interference?” Daria interrupted, incredulous. “More like unabashed vote rigging, vote buying, and political violence by about ten thousand U.S.-paid agitators and thugs,” she scoffed. “America invented the Christian Democrats to fight the Commies off. Who cared how many Christian Democrats were undemocratic and un-Christian and had been Fascists or were corrupt and in cahoots with organized crime?”
Striker laughed dismissively. “Why the righteous wrath? We had happily worked with the Mafia during the Italian campaign in 1943 and ’44. So why feign surprise we would again after the war? Our policy goal at the time was to coopt the war criminals and Mafiosi and keep the Commies from taking power, and at the same time avoid the reemergence of a Mussolini-style authoritarian. And our writ has not changed much over the last seventy-odd years, despite the disappearance of Communism and the coming and going of seventy governments in as many years. Seventy, Daria. Think about it. Less is more, weakness is strength. This is what we want.”
Daria felt her cheeks flush. She knew from her political science courses at the police academy that the Italian Constitution had been drawn up by Allied fiat. The victors worked in concert to make the country ungovernable. Instituti
ons were pitted against each other. The Polizia di Stato belonged to the Ministry of the Interior, for example. The rival Carabinieri were under the Ministry of Defense. Other police and secret service corps were controlled by yet other branches of government. A Byzantine balance of powers had resulted. Onetime fanatical Fascists like the Lomelli-Centauri family were exemplars of the reinvented post-Mussolini political landscape. They were ductile, virulently anti-Communist, and conveniently if falsely pro-American—and often in bed with the Mafia.
In his own way, Joseph Gary Baldi was also an exemplary postwar Italian, she knew, but he’d been drawn from the lowest caste—the peasantry. He had a dirty past and a bright future, because he had morphed into a dedicated anti-Soviet friend of America. He was the perfect recruit for the CIA.
“The country is still on training wheels,” Striker continued, seemingly pleased by the sound of his own purring voice so clear in his helmet and Daria’s. “It’s a strange country unofficially administered in many places by the Mob. You know that better than I do.”
Daria pondered before speaking again. “So, has your algorithm determined that it was the Mob that did it?”
“Did what?”
“You know what. Snatched Joseph Gary! Extraordinary rendition, kidnap, murder, you choose.”
“If they did, then I don’t know about it and don’t want to know about it,” Striker said.
“So,” Daria countered, “correct me if I’m wrong. Joe Gary switched from being a true-blue Fascist to an American operative and therefore in recent years was by default pro-Russian and pro-Mafia. He and Centauri may have been plotting something, a palace coup, possibly with the backing of seditious groups in my ministry, plus the Carabinieri and God knows who else around the country.”
“God knows? Naturally you mean us, me, we, the Americans?” he laughed. “Ridiculous!”
Daria shrugged. “No, not you. That seems unlikely.” She slipped another mint between her lips. She sucked. “A coup d’état is messy. Why support one when a soft touch has already done the job? Washington has the kind of government they have long wanted in Italy, a new Christian Democrat Party without Christian charity or democracy. My guess is the Oval Office is queasy about Centauri and his ilk.”
“Queasy is a wonderful word,” Striker said, “but I want to go on the record as saying I have no idea what you’re talking about. What happens in the Oval Office is a mystery to everyone, starting with the people in that office.”
“Well,” Daria continued, undaunted. “I’m guessing some in American officialdom would probably like to see a coup over here, but the smart people, the top advisers, are against it, and if the Russians are trying to engineer the coup with a madman like Centauri, the Americans will subvert it to maintain the balance of power with a subservient, moderately reactionary, moderately authoritarian regime friendly to Russia and the Mob, and it’s already in place.”
Striker laughed and snorted again. “Are you really expecting me to confirm your outlandish theories, Daria?” he asked. But she could see he was doing precisely that. He even nodded his head and winked.
“They don’t want Putin to be entirely in control of the world’s eighth largest economy,” she pursued. “Italy may be a strange, ridiculous little country, but it’s still dotted with NATO bases and bristling with Euromissiles. They are watching, nudging, pushing, and thwarting, as usual. But they—you—aren’t actually doing the heavy lifting or dirty work yourselves. Therefore, they or you did not kill Gary.”
“They or we certainly did not,” Striker said with another sardonic laugh. As if sensing what Daria was thinking, he picked up the thread he had let drop in his office. “Other than releasing useful information at strategic points, we actually had nothing to do with it and have no idea who accidentally or willingly killed Gary, and frankly we don’t care. You might want to seek closer to home for that. It might turn out to have been a freak accident no one wants to dig too deep into.” He winked exaggeratedly, so she could see he was being ironic, then paused long enough to make his studied Hollywood grimace from under the helmet, his teeth gleaming. “Gary’s convenient departure has flushed out Centauri and his pals in Rome, and that’s all we care about. Gary and Centauri were useful to us in the past, but they were always loose cannons, and this time they stepped too far out of line. By the way, do you really think the Questor is senile or merely has delusions of grandeur?”
Daria glanced nervously down through the wraparound Plexiglas section of the cockpit and nodded her head. “Senile, yes, probably,” she said. “If not senile,” she added a moment later, “delusional. Ever since the League got in after the elections of 2018, he has not been himself.”
“You mean,” said Striker, laughing, “he has been himself, his real self, like so many people in this beautiful country. Haven’t you noticed how the mood has changed? The sweet-tempered, sunny, happy-go-lucky Italians of La Dolce Vita are reverting to their true, dark default as nationalistic racists, lovers of authoritarianism, brutality, thugs, Mafiosi. Even the meretricious mercenary restaurateurs and salespeople of the Riviera who are usually so solicitous of tourists with fat wallets have begun to show their hand. It’s a black hand, Daria, black as in the Black Shirts.”
Daria swallowed hard. What Striker said was true—but it galled her. She shifted uncomfortably in the bucket seat and bit her lower lip. She did not enjoy flying in the best of circumstances, not even in fixed-wing aircraft. To be racing across a sultry sky full of thunderheads with a hothead jilted lover at the controls was a bridge too far. She felt the helicopter accelerate again dramatically, veer north, and dive low over the crags and spires of the promontory.
“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Striker asked. “A natural fortress. When the Fascists and Nazis were hunkered down in those bunkers waiting to kill us, at least they had a nice view, eh?”
Daria nodded, feeling sweat break out and prickle her brow. She heard the echo of her own words to Gianni Giannini in the bunker above Rapallo, and wondered if Striker had heard them. How? “I’m concentrating on my composure,” she said after a minute of leaden silence, watching fascinated as a group of hikers clinging to guide chains on a sheer cliff turned to glance, then wave, at them.
“They’ll have fun in half an hour, when the storm hits,” Striker chortled, shaking his head. “You’d think they’d have the wits to check the weather report before going out hiking on those trails. That’s a great place to die, isn’t it?”
“You’re being sardonic again,” she snapped. “Why not call the Civil Defense people instead and warn them that climbers are on those cliff faces and might need to be rescued?”
“Not my table,” he scoffed. “This way they’ll learn. That’s the only way. The hard way.”
“Andrew, that’s cruel and just wrong. By the same token we should not be flying here.”
“Wrong? You’re wrong. Hiking with a storm on the way is foolhardy and foolish. We are taking a calculated risk, fully aware of the dangers.”
Daria pulled out her smartphone instead of answering him, but he shook his head. “No go,” he barked. “Won’t work. Relax and enjoy the ride. Isn’t it breathtaking?” He pointed at the landscape. “That’s the Cala degli Inglesi, the Englishmen’s Cove, where the ladies and gentlemen of old used to bathe,” he added, mimicking a hoity-toity British accent. “Now some fancy duchess has torn up the protected parklands and has planted her vineyards.” He pronounced it vine-yards. “Everyone says she’s a royal pain in the Portofino Peninsula, a real alpha female of the regal variety.” Striker chuckled and chortled, shaking his head.
Daria was too agitated and too angry to enjoy the view or anything else, especially Striker’s strange, juvenile sense of humor. But, she had to admit to herself, this was some of the more spectacular scenery she had ever seen. Pine trees leaned from crazy escarpments hundreds of feet high. Vineyards and orchards spread behind villas and gaily paint
ed houses above the famous horseshoe-shaped bay of Portofino. But her head was beginning to spin, and she could tell she was blanching.
“Speaking of alpha,” he said. “I heard Centauri describe you once as an alpha female.” Striker laughed savagely, as he had earlier. “He said you ought to drive an Alfa Heifer,” he added, “not an Alfa Romeo.” He guffawed, louder, provocatively. “If only he could see you now. You’re whiter than a sheet. Relax. Enjoy.”
“Andrew,” she warned, “this is no time for displays of machismo. Centauri is senile and went around saying things like that. But you’re not senile, are you? Maybe you are!”
Instead of answering, Striker accelerated again, then veered back out to sea, straightening their flight path moments later, aiming for the island of Palmaria facing Portovenere and the Gulf of La Spezia. “This happens to be the fastest way to get there, Daria, so hold on tight. The lightning and wind and sand are only a couple of miles behind us now and it’s no time to dither.” When she didn’t answer, he added, “You want me to drop you at the villa or at the heliport in La Spezia?”
Daria hesitated, wondering what affect her dramatic entry by helicopter onto the scene at the marquise’s villa would have, and if it might not be better to call Italo Gambero and arrive with him at the villa by car after resting and eating something. “Let me phone Italo,” she said a moment later, brandishing her smartphone again.
“I’m telling you, your phone won’t work,” Striker said. “There’s too much interference from the equipment, and we’re flying too fast and too low, and most of all we jam anything not recognized by our system. I’ll call Gambero for you. Just talk into your mike when he comes on.”
“I want to call his private number, not the DIGOS number.”
“No worries,” he chortled.
“You have his private number?”
“I have his private number,” he chortled again. “I have everyone’s private number.”