A Cold Flame

by Aidan Conway

  “We got his phone records,” said Carrara. “We went through his contacts, got the access and read his messages.”

  Rossi took a longer sip then put down his glass.

  “Let’s go over it again. He was a petty criminal in Russia, that much we know. Probably enough to get him sent to a gulag over there, but here he won’t even get a slap on the wrists.”

  “That’s why they all come here,” said Carrara, deliberately provoking his friend. “Get away with murder here, don’t they?”

  “But seriously, what else can we go on?”

  A huge plate of spaghetti alle vongole had just been placed before a now very contented-looking Carrara.

  “Why does yours always arrive first?” said Rossi as the waitress sailed away without giving him even the outside chance of catching her eye. Carrara was already intent on extracting the succulent molluscs and tossing their stripy shells into the extra plate left for the purpose. Rossi was still thinking as the clam shells clacked against the china one by one.

  “I was just thinking about the crank calls, Gigi. Every investigation gets them, right?”

  “Of course. But what about them?”

  “They’re all logged, right?”

  Carrara nodded. The time wasters and attention seekers were to cops like hypochondriacs to doctors – blocking the system, distracting the personnel, obstructing the investigation.

  “And the letters, the notes, the ones written in hieroglyphics, like the Rosetta Stone, in green biro on the back of a sweet wrapper.”

  “The tinfoil hat crew?” said Rossi.

  “Exactly. Ignored usually, if they’re anonymous, but nothing gets chucked, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “In theory, they shouldn’t be,” said Rossi.

  “Yes, then if something outlandish were to come out further down the line they could be dug up.”

  “Right,” said Rossi. “And what do you say if we see what there is? Anything’s worth a try at this stage.”

  “For both cases?” said Carrara, swirling another few strands of clam-coated spaghetti into a tight parcel as Rossi’s primo arrived.

  “Better late than never,” he said inhaling the unmistakable perfume of porcini mushrooms, garlic, and parsley rising from his deep yellow egg tagliatelle.

  “Worth the wait,” said Carrara. “We can get on to it in the morning.”

  “But all the cases,” said Rossi. “The bomb, the body, and the fire.”

  Carrara lowered his fork.

  “You don’t think they’re all linked, all three?”

  Rossi shrugged. The porcini were good. The wine was exquisite. The pasta had been cooked to a perfect al dente.

  “I don’t know,” said Rossi, “but I have this thing about threes.”

  Carrara was making short work of his spaghetti and gave a satisfied smile.

  “And first course, second course, and dessert is another holy trinity, excuse the blasphemy. Here’s the waitress. What are you going for next?”

  As Rossi took up the menu to browse the meat offerings, the TV high up in the corner diverted his attention. The volume was turned down but some of the staff had gathered underneath to watch. Carrara had noticed too.

  “What’s going on?”

  “A shooting,” said Rossi as the strapline below unspooled its information. He dropped his knife and fork and motioned to the proprietor to turn it up, showing at the same time his warrant card.

  “Looks like university area,” said Rossi moving nearer to the screen.

  Carrara meanwhile had got out his phone and was motoring ahead with social media and agencies.

  A call came in for Rossi.

  “OK, OK,” he said. “Seen it. Got it,” and snapped his phone shut.

  “Says here a Professor Bonucci. But, hang on!”

  “What?” said Rossi.

  “It’s been claimed by the Brigate Rosse!”

  “The what?”

  “The BR,” said Carrara. He began to quote from the news agency website. “A telephone call to The Post … The Red Brigades Proletarian Action have claimed responsibility.”

  They both knew that the Red Brigades had been defeated and out of action and all their operatives put behind bars some twenty years previously.

  “But they don’t exist anymore,” said Carrara.

  “Don’t they?” said Rossi, taking a last forkful of his pasta as he simultaneously wriggled into his jacket “Well, it looks like they’re back in business. Come on.”

  Twenty-Six

  The body was sprawled across the pavement in a spreading slick of blood just yards from the front door of the apartment block. A bicycle believed to have been his lay on the ground next to him. Carrara and Rossi had to shove their way through the crowds and the police lines holding back a sizeable and growing collection of the curious. They had got there in a matter of minutes but the local police had been alerted first when residents had heard the shots. It had been too late anyway.

  “Who’s in charge here,” said Rossi to the most efficient-looking officer he could find.

  “Me, I suppose,” he said, introducing himself. “I was first on the scene. We were in the vicinity and heard the shots and when we got here we found this. I called 118 and checked for a pulse but he was already dead.”

  “Did you identify him?”

  The officer nodded.

  “His wallet, on the floor with his ID card inside. I thought it might have been a mugging. I radioed in everything.”

  “Time?”

  The officer checked his notes.

  “Shots heard at 8.07. We were on the scene about two minutes later.”

  For Rossi, the priority, as always, was preserving the integrity of the crime scene. The past was crystallized here: what had happened previous to the crime and how it had all played out. He dispatched the available officers in search of material witnesses as more personnel from AT pulled up in unmarked cars. “Anyone who saw anything,” said Rossi, “get their particulars and let’s try to find some leads. Any vehicles spotted leaving the scene, for starters. Anyone running away,” he shouted after them. “And don’t let anyone out of these buildings,” he added, indicating the three apartment blocks that made up the residential complex.

  “How do you think the press got it so fast?” said Carrara as they moved in with care to see the body for themselves before the Forensics team arrived.

  “They’ll have had an accomplice, probably two or three, watching and ready to send a message. Mission accomplished. They wanted to make the evening news for sure.” Rossi was thinking now as he surveyed the scene. Body and head shots, not to the heart as far as he could see but he was stone dead. Twenty minutes after. They would be away, melted into the Roman night.

  “I take it they’ve got blocks up on all the roads out,” he said then as he knelt down next to the lifeless body. The slick of blood had stopped spreading now but issued mainly from a neck wound. He’d been shot in the back and in the face several times.

  “So, who was he, this Bonucci? What did he do to deserve this?” said Carrara conscious of the past tense he now had to employ.

  Rossi shook his head. It was like the bad old days again.

  No one inside the building had been expecting him. No one had come yet to mourn, there were no tears or keening, hands raised to heaven, or tearing of clothes. He’d seen that in his day. Carrara would have seen it too during anti-mafia in the deep south, in Calabria and the Neapolitan hinterlands.

  The victim’s house keys were inches away from his outstretched right hand.

  “Any family we know of?” Rossi asked.

  Now it was Carrara’s turn to reply wordlessly in the negative before adding,

  “I heard the locals say they’d seen him come and go. Said they thought he lived alone.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Rossi was sitting opposite Iannelli in the apartment on Via Merulana, with tumblers of whisky and a jug of iced water the only other props on the tabl
e apart from books.

  “Well aren’t you the lucky one,” said Rossi. “Fancy being the man given the privilege of receiving the first declaration of the Red Brigades, version 2.0.”

  The call from Iannelli which had brought him there had come in while Carrara and himself were at the Questura trying to piece together the jagged edges of the new development now presenting itself to them.

  In times past, in such cases, a journalist would have had to go to a predetermined drop off in a railway station and been directed towards a left luggage locker or an isolated waste paper basket, to retrieve an envelope. This time the newspaper had received an e-mail from an untraceable server.

  “Well, for a start,” began Iannelli, “it’s a bloody world record my being in the same place for more than a few weeks, though I rather fancy that might now be about to change. What with my ever increasing fame, or notoriety. You know they actually sent it to Iovine, but he decided I deserved the scoop. Generous of him, wasn’t it?”

  “Not sure they’ll like that approach to protocol,” said Rossi. “But it depends how you look at things. At least now you may be more than a footnote in history.”

  “That too depends on how ‘things’ play out. I mean do you think we’re heading for another twenty years of low-level civil war and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary terrorism?”

  “That’s a bit like saying should I bother taking a photograph of my street even though it isn’t actually very interesting. In twenty years’ time you’ll regret not having done it. Any moment could be the beginning of history.”

  “At least it might take the pressure off me.”

  “Until they start hitting journalists again,” Rossi reminded him.

  “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Iannelli had printed out the declaration which, true to the form of the old BR, combined an analysis of Byzantine complexity of the current sociopolitical moment with a meticulous explanation of the reasoning behind their decision to embrace the armed struggle and sentence to death an academic with a background in labour law liberalization and drafting laws tailored to certain politicians’ personal needs.

  “I thought I’d tell you first, anyway. Pleased?” said Iannelli continuing to leaf through the pages hanging from his hand.

  “Well, it’s nice to get a peek before it goes to the counterterrorism boys. Not that they would alter it for the public consumption. All this revolutionary stuff about taking the power back and stopping transnational big business usurping national sovereignty.”

  “Dread to think.”

  “So where do you see it heading?” said Rossi, reaching out to take the declaration with its unmistakable, elongated five-point star crowning the first page of text. “We’ve got them coming at us from all angles now. Islamist, Marxist – who the devil’s next?”

  “Well, you’ve got the energy summit at the UN next month,” said Iannelli. “That’s high profile. Somebody might like to put something in that shop window.”

  Rossi handed the papers back and then rubbed his own face. He’d been burning the midnight oil again and now, sitting there with Iannelli, there was something almost monastic about their twin obsessions. Men dedicated to a cause at the exclusion of almost everything else. They had given themselves all sorts of avenues to explore but this bombshell had really sent things flying. He had also let things slip again with Yana since she had moved back into her own place. He knew he had promised some weeks before to set aside a weekend for them both, but the way events were unfolding, it was going to take some sort of miracle. He didn’t know how far it could bend before something would snap.

  “It’s going to be all shoulders to the wheel now for sure,” said Rossi, “but I don’t see anyone breaking cover for a big one, at least not now when the world’s watching. They’ll hit when we least expect it or where we haven’t massed our forces. At which point,” he continued, getting to his feet, “the inspector realized he’d better be catching up with his various lines of enquiry.”

  As he stood up, a book on the floor under the far corner of the chaise longue caught his eye.

  “Petrolio,” said Rossi.

  Iannelli glanced askance and nodded.

  “Pasolini’s unfinished masterpiece.”

  Rossi bent down to pick up the weighty volume. Although never finished, it still came to some five hundred pages of notes and work in progress.

  “Could have been the great Italian novel,” said Rossi. “Our Ulysses. What do you make of it?”

  “Well, they reckon he was onto something and not just at the artistic level.”

  Rossi was flicking through the work. There were numerous Post-its and coloured markers at key points. That was Iannelli. No surprises there.

  “Like he’d hit the nail on the head?” said Rossi. “This is what we’ve really become or what we were going to become.”

  “Prophetic even,” said Iannelli. “He saw it all and then knew how to articulate it.”

  Rossi read a bookmarked passage. It spoke of a postwar petit bourgeoisie that instead of being liberated by newfound affluence had become instead a kind of enslaved homogenized mass, shaped by desires and frustrations and destined for existential oblivion.

  “So is that why he was killed?” said Rossi. “So he couldn’t finish it?”

  Iannelli raised his hands in a sign of exasperation while giving a simultaneous conditional confirmation of the probable truth of Rossi’s observation.

  “He was the one person able to cut this society open and then put it on display and at the same time reach a pretty broad audience. Think about it. Why was Mattei killed when he was? Is it an accident when our leading oil entrepreneur’s plane goes down just when he’s on the verge of making Italy independent of the USA in energy terms and free to get our oil from whoever we want? He was going to throw off the shackles of postwar dependency on the States. You tell me. And you tell me where we’ve got to today, fifty years later.”

  Rossi closed the book and left it down on the corner of the chaise.

  “And now,” he said. “Where does all this leave us?”

  “What?” said Iannelli, picking up the declaration again. “This?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Well, the ground is fertile, shall we say. There are plenty of people out there, especially the young, who just aren’t seeing the fruit of their labours. And as economic realities begin to bite harder they all tighten their grip. And all this austerity,” he added, getting up now and pacing about. “All this tighten your belts bullshit. It’s always the same ones who have to stump up and go without.”

  “And we end up laying the blame where they tell us to lay it.”

  “Exactly. First it was the communists – by which I mean social democrats – and now it’s the foreigners taking your jobs, then the Muslims, the Travellers and the Roma, and always our friends the Jews.”

  “The Jews?”

  “They always get a kicking when the far-right gets going, sure,” said Iannelli. “Especially if they’re supposed to be in cahoots with the banks.”

  “But not the Church? Leave them out of this?”

  Iannelli smiled wryly.

  “They’re always ready to step in. Always. And they can take a hammering, but they’ll give as good as they get.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Olivia had been delighted that Jibril was making changes, making waves, and that it was all paying off. She had thrown her arms around him and hugged him with delight. He had been more than a little embarrassed, playing it down and saying that it was only a beginning, that he had other dreams, other plans.

  “But that means you can get any job now with a permesso di soggiorno. You are free to do what you want.”

  “Until it expires and then I must go to renew it again like everyone else, queuing up at six in the morning to get an appointment, if I’m lucky, and then paying too for the privilege.”

  “But all that is in the future,” she had said. “Forget ab
out it for now. Live for this moment and we will cross that other bridge when we find it.”

  We. She had said it. So, did she already envisage that this was going somewhere? Or was it still the collective we of friendship and solidarity? He suspected both in actual fact. She was driven by the urge to do good and to be of use to others and to society. But she was also sensual. He had felt that from the moment they had met in the classroom. For now that was certainly not a problem for him. In fact, it could all fit together very well. He refused to let himself be drawn too much either way. The attraction was real but it was always part of the plan.

  He was aware that he had rehearsed his reactions well but experience had shown him what the others had had to go through, were prepared to put up with, in order to get that prized piece of paper. The document that said that you weren’t unwanted rubbish to be swept back to where you came from. His permesso, of course, was a skilfully produced fake. In counterfeiting terms, it was an easy enough document to duplicate, as was his identity card. Careful scrutiny would reveal that but they would give him the time he needed to bring things to fruition. He had seen the bigger picture all right and was growing ever more sure about the importance of striking a blow.

  Now as he sat in the flat, the safe house, and began to outline his intelligence strategy, the others listened. He had won them over with his calm authority. He had slowed them down, told them that time was on their side. The longer they kept the infidels waiting the more they would fear what might befall them. Now, with their contacts in the cleaning and care agencies and the cooperatives, they were spreading their net wide and quickly. It was ideal. They and their many contacts within the community were working as domestic servants and everyone could find someone who had access to the homes of the rich or powerful. It was a capillary network and one that required a certain kind of person: either willing, corruptible, needy, or all three.