Project Rome

by Nicolas Crown

  She beckoned us toward the dining table and we sat. “This is my brother Dino,” she said, although Dino was too far out of it to really acknowledge us. He had lost himself in a bottle ever since the paintings had been stolen. It had been his job to paint them. It had been his job to produce a copy, but Coulson wasn’t satisfied with a copy. She escaped with the originals and the mafia gang who had been making a fortune selling art to rich Americans wanted to make someone pay.

  The picture was beginning to fit. I could see how they would have taken her to Lake Garda and would have staged her death. “Do you know how she was killed?” I asked. “I don’t know how, but I know that my brother and I are in danger as well. The mafia has sent men here to search, but they know that we don’t have the pictures. They were the most precious pictures in the San Lorenzo collection. As soon as Janine saw them, she was under their spell.”

  There was something magical about the pictures. I had seen it on the faces of Mama Amoretto and I had seen it on the face of Marco. They had been pulled into the pictures as if they were holy. Apparently Janine felt the same way and hadn’t been happy that these should remain with the San Lorenzo family. She was rich. She was powerful and yet this game of selling art to the highest black market bidder had been fun for her. In fact, I could tell from the look on Dino’s face that it was more than that.

  “What was your relationship with Janine Coulson?” I asked him. He lifted the bottle to his lips. There was sadness in his eyes that told stories, great stories of passion - stories of love that would never be a reality. “She loved him,” interjected Alessa. “My brother and Janine were lovers. She had been to Italy many times, but their affair had to remain a secret.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “My brother and I belong to a family that has a history here. We are not permitted to do the things that we want to do. The day that I met you on the quay, I came to warn you. I didn’t want you getting hurt by the mafia. However, I was too late. They knew where you were. I told them that I would question you and that it wouldn’t take brute force. However, they got impatient for answers.”

  “The trouble was that on that particular day, I had no answers.” I said. “I hadn’t even discovered the artwork then.”

  “Then what’s the connection with Lake Garda and how come my client’s daughter ended up drowned?”

  “The problem became huge. They had gone to all this trouble to steal the artwork and Janine was a devout Catholic. She decided that although she didn’t mind shifting artwork from one country to another, she had limits. When she told Giovanni that she was not prepared to give the drawings back, he had no option but to try and force her to tell him where they were.”

  Alessa looked filled with admiration for Janine. It was as if this American woman had taken on the mafia and had defied them. Rather than getting drunk and falling overboard, she had been forced to drink so that her blood levels would show a huge intake of alcohol. In a forced drunken stupor, she was thrown overboard in the central area of the lake and her body had washed up on shore the following week.

  “What will you do with this information?” asked Alessa, concerned for her brother.

  “I will not implicate you, don’t worry.” I assured her. I would work out a way that I could tell Janine’s story without doing that. Alessa’s eyes looked at me in that same way they had the first time I met her. Women like Alessa don’t go for balding cops with a beer gut, but if I could have held her in that moment, I would have. Marco noticed and mentioned it later that night.

  “You have the hots for her!” he shrieked, as if he had discovered something amazing.

  “Who wouldn’t?” I said, closing the door to my bedroom, where I needed time to wrap this up and to think.

  Chapter 9 – Public Acclaim

  It wasn’t for me to stick around and take on the Mafia. That wasn’t my mission. As I stepped onto the train to Rome, I knew that the newspapers would have hold of the story by the time I left Italy and that by lunchtime on Friday, it would be international news. I could see it now.

  “Janice Coulson saves religious drawings and returns them to Rome. Murder victim reveals her story.”

  The paintings were safe. They were where they were supposed to be, but the story hadn’t quite ended there. I didn’t get to say goodbye to Alessa before leaving Venice though part of me I wished I had. I knew that she would see me in the story that hit the paper. She had given me all of the information that I needed to write a story that the people of Italy were unlikely to dismiss. When it came to religion, they took it seriously. Yes, they would allow a little bit of corruption, but when it came to something as serious as the drawings, there was certain awe. I had seen it in Momma Amoretto. I had seen it in the face of Marco and Alessa. There was a humbling admiration for the works of Michelangelo that all Italians shared, regardless of other differences. They bowed down in reverence to it. Anything to do with the Sistine chapel was hailed as holy in the eyes of believers and the drawings were no different, held by the hands of masters in days gone by.

  Standing on the piazza San Pietro in the Vatican City, I watched the tourists flocking into a part of Italy that gave the world a little bit of hope. In the past week, I had visited Lake Garda. I had seen where Janine had died. No doubt, flowers would be strewn on the lake in memory of this lady over the coming month, though I wasn’t sure what the overall outcome would be. I had done my job. I had cleared Janine Coulson’s name. There was a certain amount of apprehension in my next move though as I dialed the number of the San Lorenzo household. This was to be my last call. “I need to speak to Giovanni,” I said, and they instantly knew who I was. I heard them running around in the background mentioning the Americano.

  When he came on the line, I knew this was the man that had killed Janine. “I understand that Janine Coulson had a parcel that you were particularly interested in.” I said. There was silence for a moment at the other end of the line.

  “I know who you are. I know where you are. If you don’t want to end up in the bottom of Lake Garda like she did, you will tell me where the package is.” He said.

  “Before I do can you tell me why you would steal a religious work of this stature?” I asked. It baffled me, when there was so much choice of other European work of significance. Janine had died for it. I needed to know the reason. “When something is this rare,” said Giovanni, “people will pay millions for it.”

  I was surprised at his candor. I was surprised that he would even speak to me, though the mafia in this part of the world fears no one. The local politicians in their pocket and the police chief as part of their set-up, I suppose that they saw themselves as safe. No one poached their territory for fear of reprisals.

  In my packaging of the pictures, I had been careful in my choice of recipient. I had written one letter to the Papal palace explaining that the paintings had been saved by Janice Coulson, for which she had lost her life. In the other package were the pictures themselves, a letter of explanation and a tape recording of my conversation with Giovanni – sent to Interpol who had no such relationship with the San Lorenzo family. Not even trusting the Italian postal service to be reliable, I had posted the Papal letter at the Vatican and the letter to Interpol at the American Embassy in Rome, having explained that it was a top priority letter that needed to be sent by courier.

  Janine would receive public acclaim and her parents would be able to bury their ghosts, knowing that their daughter was neither a drunk nor a partygoer, but that she had been a devout Catholic to the end. As for Giovanni, I had sent him on a wild goose-chase that would keep him busy for a while. My job here was done. My passport safely in my pocket, tomorrow I would fly out of here and go back to a place that I was more familiar with.

  I did what all good Americans do when visiting the Vatican area. Sitting in the piazza, I let the warm, Italian coffee caress my taste buds, thought sweet thoughts of Italy and of the time spent there. It was almost ironic that when I was being paid by the Poli
ce Force, I could never have afforded this voyage and now it was being paid for by one of the richest families in America.

  Chapter 10 – Adio

  In French it’s Adieu though in Italian it’s spoken as Adio. It means farewell. The sun was sinking fast across the square. I hadn’t said a prayer, though my heart thought of Janine for a moment as I wrapped up my paperwork and recounted the time spent with Momma Amoretto and Marco. I could imagine the look on her face as she opened my package. She had been generous of heart and the least I could have done was to send her a photocopy of the original drawings. I knew it would thrill her, that she would frame them and invite her neighbors in to see them. I knew that in her heart as a true Italian catholic, she would remember the originals and say prayers of “thank you” for having let them grace her home. As for Marco, he would go on being a bellboy, but he was a good one – he cared about his clients. I could almost hear the waters of Venice as I thought of him.

  Lost in thoughts about a very rewarding trip, I sat down to write a letter to Alessa. The pen wavered over the paper, just like it does when you try to write postcards and can’t think of anything original to say. I wanted it to be in Italian. I wanted it to mean something, even if I was an old balding cop from New York. I wanted her to look back on our acquaintance with positive thoughts. I also needed to know that she and her brother, Dino, were safe. I got as far as writing “Cara Alessa” but the words were not coming. How do you write a letter with no emotion to someone who made parts of you spring to life again. It had been a long time since school crushes, but that’s what it felt like. She was like a flower you can’t pick because it’s too beautiful. You are awed by it and stand staring like the village idiot at its wonderment. The coffee tasted great. The waiter didn’t seem to mind that I was taking my time. I looked toward the setting sun, over the top of the Vatican City and was lost in a moment of time.

  I heard the voice from behind me "Vuoi qualcos'altro signore?” I didn’t want anything else, but a good meal and a night’s sleep. I turned and found myself looking into her eyes. She had already seen the letter I was trying to piece together and as I crumpled it into my hands, her eyes smiled. She had made one aging cop very happy indeed just being there. “I couldn’t let you go without at least showing you Italian hospitality.” She said this with a huge smile on her face, a smile of compassion, rather than one of invitation. “I will take you tonight to the best restaurant in Rome, a secret from the eyes of the tourist,” she said.

  Walking through the streets of Rome together, I wanted to grab her hand, but it wasn’t about that kind of thing. It was a “goodbye” to a friend. She led me down a little back street and we mounted the stairs together, which wound upward to where the rattle of plates greeted us. There, above the city, you could see for miles. She had reserved a table by the window and the waiter ushered us toward it. “I bet you take all your tourist friends here,” I said, though her smile told me that this was reserved for people who were special. “The last time I came here was when my poppa died. He wanted us to dine here after his funeral.”

  The glasses of Ruffini looked almost royal and as we toasted each other, I knew that Alessi didn’t have to fulfill my fantasies. They could go on deep into the night without her actually being there, and would probably be more loving and caring and certainly less clumsy than in reality.

  I told her that she was safe. I told her that I would leave Italy but that I would always remember her. As I said these words outside my hotel doorway that night, Alessi disappeared into the evening mists, never to be seen again.