by Aidan Conway
Giancarlo continued to listen. He knew what this was now.
“Then the route becomes active and if it there are not hitches we send more and quickly. Then we change. A route rarely has a long life. There are variables, risks. There are informers, checks, rivals and human error. But as you can see the rewards are truly magnificent. Are they not? And then, at some later stage you may like to put your hat in the ring. Grow your capital. But all this will be yours to keep, Dottor Mondo. No tricks. No catches. No strings attached.”
“And with this, we can sign for the exclusive concession for another fifteen years?”
“You read the contract many times. It has not changed. You are a lawyer, Dottor Mondo. You know your stuff, I believe.”
For what seemed like the hundredth time, Giancarlo scanned the documentation.
“And the agreed payments to all parties concerned remain the same?”
“As agreed.”
“Through the offshores, the pre-established ‘system’?”
“And we raise the unit cost accordingly.”
“Show me the other papers again,” said Giancarlo.
The intermediary reached out and handed him a blue plastic file.
“Of course, for the rest, it remains a gentleman’s agreement but as a sign of goodwill we have prepared a down payment, as it were.”
Another official made his way, as if on cue, across the room bearing a briefcase which he placed on the glass table. He turned the golden dials of the combination lock then swivelled the case through 180 degrees.
“Open it, please. It is yours.”
Giancarlo looked at the oxblood leather rectangle before him and in the hotel’s tinted glass saw himself reflected. Your life is one only. Make of it what you will but remember that every action has its consequences and you must be prepared to face them. They were not his words, but the words of one whom he had once considered wise. He placed both thumbs on the locks. They clicked twice. It opened.
***
He stepped out of the office tower in the Centro Direzionale business district and walked across the central piazza. It was night and carrying two briefcases now made him feel rather more self-conscious than he would have liked, quite apart from the matter of their contents. He hailed the first taxi he saw.
“Hotel Rialto,” he said and handed over a large denomination bill. “Take the scenic route. As long as you like.”
He then took out his phone and dialled the pre-arranged number.
“Giancarlo! Good to hear from you.”
“Same to you, Uncle! Are you well?”
“As well as can be expected, as well as can be expected, at my age. And you?”
“Well, very well.”
“And the cousins? Tell me, how are the cousins, Giancarlo?”
“All well, very well indeed.”
“And were they happy to see you?”
“Ecstatic!”
“And were they pleased with their gifts?”
“Delighted.”
“Wonderful.”
“And your mother? How is mamma? Please, tell me everything about your dear mamma.”
“Fine, thank you, Uncle. She sends her love.”
“Good. Good. You send her mine too. Now. You must come to dinner with me? It’s been so long. Are you still in Naples?”
“Yes.”
“Well, drop in, my boy. But don’t bring anything. Leave it all to me.”
“OK, Uncle, it will be a pleasure for me.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll see you in about an hour.”
“Perfetto. See you then.”
He put the phone back in his breast pocket and breathed deeply as the taxi sped south on the lungomare, homing in on the brightly lit, honey-coloured medieval fortress of the Castel dell’Ovo. The wind was picking up a little, and in the distance he saw a few small, silent waves crashing in against the castle where its sustaining bulk nudged out into the bay. Time to change. Call Giulia on the legitimate phone for family and non-suspect business. They could put as many line taps as they wanted on it but they would get nothing incriminating. Then a shower. A clean shirt. Time to stash away the prize and prepare for round two. Time maybe for some diversion too. After all, he had earned it.
Twenty-Three
“Went home, sick,” said the hospital receptionist. Carrara had gone off to make further enquiries and had come back with the confirmation. Exhaustion had been cited and, despite her protests, she had been sent home. Rossi had turned up expecting a routine interview. Time was relative now as no witness to the events of the Prenestina fire could be considered fresh, so a day here or there in this case would matter little. Yet, as they both stood at the desk at the impenetrable distance from their taciturn interlocutor, the same Rossi was becoming irritated and had decided to dispense with the usual niceties.
“Well, if you’ll kindly provide me with her particulars we will go directly to her apartment.”
“I’m really not sure I can do that without clearance,” the bearded receptionist replied in a flat tone.
“You do realize this is a potential criminal investigation, don’t you?” said Rossi. “Or are you trying to obstruct it? I can obtain the information anyway, with a phone call to the records office, just as I can have your particulars, in an instant, if I have reasonable suspicion that you are in some way attempting to pervert the course of justice.”
The receptionist looked back through the thick lenses of his oversized, red-rimmed glasses. He seemed cemented into his seat and, without altering his posture, put out a hand to reach for the phone, as if it were a comfort blanket that might at any moment be snatched away. He rattled off the appropriate commands and then, after a few clicks of his keyboard, presented Rossi with a handwritten slip of paper.
“Here’s her name, address, and telephone number.”
Rossi glanced at the note then handed it back.
“You forgot the mobile number.”
The omission was just as quickly corrected.
“Thank you,” said Rossi, “and good day.”
***
“Go straight to her flat next time,” said Carrara as they pushed through the swing doors and into the car park.
“Yes,” Rossi replied, “but I like to have a witness in situ. It helps me to complete the picture and makes it more likely that they might remember the details. Not to worry.”
“Where are we going?” asked Carrara
“Viale Marconi, Piazza della Radio. Lucia Rinaldi.”
***
Carrara had jacked the air-conditioning up as high as it would go despite Rossi’s displeasure.
“Just until it cools down. Then we go for old-fashioned windows open, if you really must. I did say we should park out of the sun,” said Carrara as beads of sweat continued to roll down both their faces and he negotiated their way out of the labyrinthine car park. “Is that your phone?” he said, detecting a muted buzzing from Rossi’s direction.
Rossi reached round for his jacket that lay crumpled on the back seat.
“Great,” he said. “Message from Gab. Out of the city till September. The new computer will have to wait.”
“So that’s your new code, is it?” said Carrara with an air of gentle mockery.
“Would you rather he said ‘let’s break into the Israeli university when I’m back from Sardinia? Why isn’t anyone available in August?’”
“To be fair, he’s not just anyone,” Carrara replied. “He’s your private hacker and all-round gadgets man. Consider yourself lucky.”
But Rossi’s day had not been going according to plan.
“Well I hope you’ve got some bright ideas if this one draws a blank,” said Rossi. “Otherwise it’s going to start looking like we’re becoming ineffective, or irrelevant.”
“A cop’s only as good as his last collar, is that what you’re saying?”
Rossi shrugged.
“We’d better come up with something. When you least expect it, that’s when the shit
hits the fan. And there’s still talk going around of ‘changes’, efficiency audits, performance-related career incentives and the like. Downsizing. Putting out to grass.”
“All talk,” said Carrara, dismissing it but knowing that there was always an opportunist ready to step in, especially if it served someone else’s agenda.
The telltale point of white light and the faintest of clicks told them someone was looking at them through the spyhole.
“Signora Rinaldi, we are police officers,” said Carrara in as reassuring a tone as he could manage. The door was opened by a nervous-looking middle-aged woman, in a green dressing gown and with plenty of slightly greying hair tied back. Rossi first apologized for the inconvenience, then explained the nature of the situation and the relative urgency of matters.
“Thought you were selling something, or Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she said as she gave a cursory glance at Rossi’s badge. “Seen plenty of those in my time. You get all sorts coming in to the burns unit, and all sorts of stories going out with them.”
They followed her down the narrow hallway and into the living room.
“Well, can I offer you coffee, officers? Or perhaps something cool?”
“No, thank you,” said Rossi, seated now on the sofa in the rather kitsch and old-worldly apartment. Little or nothing had been done to alter the effect it gave of stepping back in time to an Italy without chrome kitchen fittings, parquet floors, or LED spotlights and lowered ceilings. Here was well-worn Formica, and terracotta tiles, a few thin rugs and flimsy-looking single-glazed windows thrown open to allow the air to circulate and let the non-stop traffic noise in. The bulky, once-modern TV was turned down. On a heavy dark wood sideboard, a plaited Easter palm rested against one of several black-and-white framed photos.
“Give me one moment please,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”
She came back only a few moments later wearing a light wrap-around flower print dress in place of the dressing gown. Rossi deduced that she had either dressed hurriedly or that the dress had been chosen to deliberately display her more feminine attributes. He tried not to let his eyes stray.
“My mother used to always do the serving if there were guests, but she left us, I’m afraid, not so long ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Rossi, as a large ginger cat made its presence felt at his foot before slipping away again. So this was “us”, he wondered. Probably. Hers had all the hallmarks of a life lived in a world on permanent pause, suspended at some key moment in the past. He wondered about her and her late mother, speculating as to when and how they had been left alone.
“So,” the nurse began, addressing Rossi, “you wanted to ask me some questions, I believe. My friend told me you were at the hospital yesterday.”
“The cleaning lady?” said Carrara, flicking back through his notes for a name.
“That’s right,” she said, “My friend, Barbara.”
“It’s about Ivan, the Russian,” said Rossi. “Did he ever say anything? Was he even able to speak?”
She shook her head.
“You didn’t see the state of that poor man, the extent of his burns. The pain he was in and the infections, all the strain it must have put on his heart. Any normal human being would have left this world the night he came in. He must have had a great will to live, or a need to hang on for as long as possible. I’ve seen a lot in my time, Inspector, but when you see someone resisting like he did it has an effect on you. But I told the other officer all that, the last time, when Ivan was still with us and then when he passed on.”
She appeared to shudder then despite the heat.
“So there’s nothing you can add, nothing you might have remembered in the meantime?” Rossi asked again.
“Only what I told your colleague, like I said. He must have had very strong faith or belief in a higher power. Maybe that’s what helped him for so long.”
“How did you know?” said Carrara. “How did you know he had faith, if he couldn’t speak?”
Rinaldi turned to look straight at Carrara.
“He wore a crucifix. We removed it, of course, along with his identification tags, but I sterilized it and left it near the bed out of harm’s way. I thought it might help him to have it near.”
“But many men wear a crucifix,” said Carrara. “It’s just jewellery, usually.”
“Was it an Orthodox cross?” said Rossi leaning forward. “With the extra bars, at the top and the bottom?”
Carrara leant back as he saw Rossi warming to the enquiry now that it was getting theological.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe it did. Well, he was Russian, wasn’t he?”
“But that doesn’t explain how you knew it was important to him,” said Rossi.
The nurse appeared to reflect for a moment, as the cat made another appearance at her ankles.
“Well, there was something about it,” she said, “and now I think of it, I don’t know what it was exactly but it’s just that he would try to look at it occasionally, in one of his moments of lucidity. I was there most of the time and at least that’s what I remember. I used to watch over him and it was almost as though he was drawn to it. I’d be on one side of the bed and he would try to move his head or his eyes in the other direction, where the crucifix was.”
“So he must have had the last rights,” Rossi continued. “That would be normal procedure, based on the assumption that he was religious.”
“Well, now that you mention it, that’s a thing that struck me,” she said, becoming more animated. “He got very agitated one day when a priest came round. They’re often in, giving blessings, and last rights, as you said. I don’t like that lot snooping around at the best of times but this one gave me the creeps. Anyway, off he goes, this one, old fella, and he makes his way over to the bed. I had to tell the priest that Ivan wasn’t a Catholic, as far as we knew and that with his burns he hadn’t signed any papers, of course. I even showed him the Orthodox crucifix, but he was dismissive of it, said the man would be meeting his God soon enough and it was his Christian duty to give absolution. But Ivan did seem agitated by it. Agitated by him even, by his presence.”
“He can’t have been able to move much,” said Carrara, “with the burns.”
She turned to him. “In this job,” she said then, as if remembering in a moment a career’s worth of memories, “after a while you begin to learn a new language. It’s a sign language of sorts. When you’re with a person for a long time, even in that state, you’ll notice the slightest thing – a twitch, a gesture, or an attempt to move.”
Carrara looked at Rossi whose hands were joined as if in prayer in front of his face.
“And you know,” she said, “you’d be surprised sometimes what you can hear.”
Part Two
Twenty-Four
It had been the best part of a month since Francesco had given up on the career he had glimpsed for himself in Italy, the career he had envisioned with Paola, the life they had planned. And here he was with nothing in his hands but the fragments of broken dreams. Dashed hopes like the snarled steel confetti of a bomb blast flung across a piazza. Against the backdrop of such a scene, surely all action was useless. All action? Not quite.
“If we don’t move now, then when? If we don’t strike at the heart of the Establishment, the powers that be, the blind forces stealing your future, my future, the future of all the young people and of all the disadvantaged, the discriminated, the stigmatized, the scapegoats, when do we do it? I tell you, comrades, the time is ripe for action.”
Francesco sat at the back, his arms crossed. He had taken another step, albeit a small one, even if his position remained tentative, reserved. The door of the meeting room was near, symbolically and literally. But he had come. On the pressing of his friends, he had agreed to set foot inside the collective. He was not a member. He wasn’t a joiner by nature but rather an observer. He was not planning on being a pawn in anyone’s game. If he played, it would be his
game, by his rules, whether they knew it or not.
“Direct” was the word now on their lips, as in direct action, although no one had dared make an explicit public call to armed struggle. “This was a country at a crossroads, a stalled reality.” Not that they didn’t have a point and, while it had helped to take his mind off other things, he was also there to make a reasoned choice. Was there no other way in this country? Did attempts to change the order by peaceful political means always have to run into a brick wall?
The speaker touched also on the MPD, derided as a movement “put there” to absorb the social tensions and draw off like puss from a wound the anger and vital energies of the populace.
Francesco weighed the words in his mind. He was working. That was true. Not in the job he wanted but reasonably well paid even if with no job security. It was the usual story of renewable contracts, no holidays, no sick pay, minimum pension contributions. But it bored him to go over his own hardships both because it was futile and because it led then to other thoughts feeding into a dark cycle he had to break.
His depression following Paola’s death had been bleak. After the funeral he had closed himself off from everyone. Even if they’d had time for him, they had soon given up trying, sucked back as they had been into the all-consuming domestic obligations of their own lives.
And then he had experienced his first moment of revelation. He realized that he had found it easier to fall in with those friends who had hitherto occupied a zone on the fringes of his life, the life he had envisaged as a journey towards a form of bourgeois respectability: the house, the family, the career.
It had started with drinks in the clubs they had frequented before he had met Paola, then pizzas in the old haunts, and before too long he had been tagging along to the odd political get-together at the social club, the centro sociale. It had released the pressure for him. It wasn’t nostalgia and it didn’t provoke melancholy but when he looked in the mirror he didn’t see his failure but rather his other, older, untainted self. Perhaps it had been the weight of recent events, and he had heard it said, but he now also saw something else. He saw his father.