A Cold Flame

by Aidan Conway

  Rossi was growing impatient. He wanted to rail against something, anything.

  “Well, are these casual staff legally resident? Do we know who the hell they are? Have you checked that at least? Or maybe they’re scared of being repatriated or of getting their fingers broken? How many of them are Muslims? Do they live in the same areas? We need to go back there and talk to all of them again. From the beginning. All of them.”

  Carrara could sense the change in his colleague like the electricity in the air before a storm hit.

  “Give us a minute, Mick. We’ve been up to our eyes you know. We’re all spreading ourselves thinly at the moment.”

  Rossi gave the desk an almighty bang with the heel of his hand.

  “But it’s not good enough! Is it! We’re not getting anywhere!”

  The noise rang out like thunder.

  “You know there’s the first day of the energy conference tomorrow,” said Carrara. “Goes on for a whole week and there will be bigwigs, politicians, and religious leaders coming every day.”

  Rossi looked up from the desk and the papers arranged without any discernible logic. He snatched up one of them.

  “Heads of state from how many countries?” he said as he scanned the document, furrowing his brow as he did so, his eyes burrowing into it.

  “One hundred and seventeen, on the first day.”

  “That’s one big security op.”

  Carrara nodded.

  Rossi dropped the piece of paper he’d been reading and rereading as if it were an impenetrable code.

  “Yana’s gone,” he said.

  “Gone?”

  “Taking a break. From Rome. From me, I suppose. From this,” he said, throwing a fistful of documents up into the air. They floated down as if in the mocking after-calm of an explosion.

  “Did she give a reason?”

  Rossi reached into a pocket and tossed him over the note.

  “Right,” said Carrara. “Two questions: who’s the friend and what are you going to do about it?”

  Rossi shrugged.

  “It’s not like I can give it my full and undivided attention, when we’re on a permanent amber alert with likely red imminent. And I haven’t even begun to get through my admin backlog.”

  “So let her get it out of her system?” said Carrara. “The break will do her good.”

  Rossi stood up and began pacing the office.

  “You don’t think there’s anyone else?” said Carrara.

  “Who knows,” said Rossi, remembering the throwaway line she’d sprung on him over dinner and then just as quickly retracted. It had been in jest, but wasn’t there always a kernel of seriousness inside every joke? “Think I should go after her?”

  Carrara was chewing on a pen.

  “Don’t know. Let it blow over, I suppose. She’ll come back when she’s ready.”

  “I notice you didn’t say ‘running back’.”

  Carrara shrugged.

  “Better knuckle down then, hadn’t we?” said Rossi. He picked up a newspaper that had been lying half-read at some lower level of his desk strata.

  “Have you seen this guy who wants to send homosexuals to jail for fourteen years,” he said, picking up on an inside page column in Repubblica. “Or have them stoned under sharia law?”

  “So not the Pope then,” Carrara quipped.

  “No! The new president of Nigeria. The human rights crowd here are up in arms. There’s a big demo tomorrow by the Rainbow LGBT Alliance.”

  “As if we didn’t have enough trouble with the Islamists.”

  “Freedom of expression is sacrosanct, Gigi,” said Rossi.

  “But it had to be tomorrow? When we’re already stretched to the limit.”

  “It’s publicity, maximum visibility. This guy’s coming here for other business, to court the government or be courted. Not sure how it works actually.”

  “Well, if it’s Nigeria, they’ve certainly got the oil,” said Carrara.

  “Right, so they have the whip hand now.”

  “It’s no laughing matter there though, is it? I mean with Al-Quaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS.”

  “And ICE,” added Rossi. “Our very own ICE.”

  “Do I detect a note of cynicism, Inspector Rossi?”

  “Far be it from me,” Rossi began in a mock hyper-defensive tone, “to say that a terrorist organization – that no one’s ever heard of before – can put a sophisticated bomb outside the Israeli university and then melt away into the night without a trace. I suppose another black swan moment could be just around the corner.”

  “We need to be one step ahead,” said Carrara. “Remember the school in Russia? Those kids with bombs suspended above their heads.”

  “Well, we plan against such events,” said Rossi. “Security exists to ensure it doesn’t happen.”

  “But then when it does happen we’re not really prepared psychologically or pragmatically to deal with it and its consequences.”

  “And we go into a form of denial. Like the 9/11 witnesses who said they saw a light plane not a jumbo hit the twin towers.”

  “Right,” said Carrara. “So are you?”

  “What?”

  “In denial. It’s not like with all this you’re trying to say something. About Yana, I mean.”

  Rossi reflected for a moment. The silence in his life was uncanny. Even if he could go twenty-four hours sometimes without contacting her, this silence that she had imposed on their relationship felt sudden and tomblike.

  The conquistadors had thought nothing of riding up in the New World on horseback in full armour, but to the Aztecs they were like men from Mars. Rossi too felt there had been no warning, only the discussion about his attitude the other evening, which he had presumed had been laid to rest.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “These are uncharted waters.”

  For a second he imagined being on a beach somewhere. Then he got up and went to the fridge.

  “Share a beer?” he asked over his shoulder as he hunkered down to get a Moretti. Carrara gave him a wordless negative. Rossi craned his neck round to see he had his head down, suddenly intent on some detailed task. Rossi snapped off the top and took a decent swig. No glass. Carrara was in absentia. A thoroughly male approach to affairs of the heart.

  He sat down and took another long draught. It was beginning to feel good as he stared at the mute phone on his desk. Then, as if on a whim, he snatched up the receiver and dialled Yana’s number. He let it ring well into double figures. She wasn’t answering from this one either. Feeling slightly foolish with himself, he thrust it back down.

  Then just as quickly he picked it up again and punched in a different number. This time he got an answer on the first ring and, putting it on speakerphone, sat back to finish the still cold enough beer.

  “Katia?”

  “Yes. Anything the matter?”

  “No,” said Rossi. “Where are you?”

  “In my office. You dialled my office phone.”

  Rossi mumbled an explanation. Carrara had stopped what he was doing but was trying not to betray his interest.

  “OK,” said Rossi. “Look. I’m coming over. Fancy showing me what you’ve got so far?”

  “Sure,” said Katia.

  Rossi left the bottle on the desk, picked up his jacket and breezed out.

  “Reports?” said Carrara.

  “Later,” replied Rossi. “I’ll call you.”

  Thirty-Seven

  Giancarlo was sitting in a chair which, in itself, afforded some small comfort. His hands, however, were numb and his wrists were beginning to ache. The muscles at the front of his shoulders and the adjoining tendons were being stretched, Christlike, by his position. He wanted to be able to move his legs too, but each was as one with a leg of the chair, bound to its squared wooden limbs by repeated circlings of insulation tape. Tight loops of rope also held his upper body and wound around his windpipe and wrists. He had to wait until he was untied to be able to urinate, but at leas
t he could still cling to that small measure of dignity.

  Then it was back for the same rigmarole again until they had finished for the day – if it was day – and he was returned to his room.

  He had hesitated to use the word cell, and had opted for room, knowing even so that if where he spent most of his time was a room it was such only by virtue of its having a floor, a ceiling, four walls and a door. It was no more a room than a murderer was a member of the human race, or a dope dealer was a neighbourhood grocer.

  His eyes, of course, had long since ceased to be free. They too were twin detainees and had their own special arrangements, bound as they were behind a soft mocking wall of perfect, inscrutable darkness.

  The door into this second room he now occupied would open from time to time and, amidst the boredom of constant monotonous terror, that opening in itself would be an event. An event in the same way that a butcher’s swapping the bow saw for the filleting knife is an event, but an event nonetheless. And there would be voices and languages, their assorted owners chopping between them or sticking stubbornly with their one and only weapon of choice. Arabic, English, Italian and a broad jumble of unrecognizable tongues. He feared that the latter were used only when what was being said was not meant for his ears and was thus a cloak covering other vile intentions or possible consequences.

  The dominant lexicon was limited. Coke, oil, payment, money, two birds with one stone. Did he, then, represent “the two birds” – both a lucratively marketable ItalOil man and a Western infidel hostage? But was it his death or his captivity that the stone stood for? They hadn’t told him other than to say that he was a captive, and then when the film crew moved in he knew that the game was not yet up but that it was most certainly on. It had already become a tiresome ritual. The jabbering on about all that was wrong with the West. All that while an apocalyptically sharp scimitar was poised below his throat.

  Then it would be over and they’d shunt him back into his cell till the next time.

  There. He’d said it. Cell. So cell it was. And a prisoner he was then. But a criminal? He had stolen from criminals, true enough, but that was no crime. Smuggling cocaine, liquid cocaine, into the country camouflaged as barrels of petroleum was a crime against the state. These jailers did not represent any state. So he was a player in a private game, an immoral game, an amoral game; one in which, however, he had few if any moves available to him.

  His error had been greed. Greed at the wrong moment. Bad timing. Everything had been going smoothly, perfectly even, but he had wanted more and it had all seemed so easy. Then the approach had come and it had been to all intents and purposes a business move.

  Someone had known. Someone had talked. They had discovered what he was doing and for whom – for the Nigerians. They, the Camorra, had approached him and complimented him first and simply assessed him on the strength of his curriculum vitae as “the man for the job”. They had flattered him, tempted him, and he had succumbed – whore that he was. They had piggybacked on the dope route into Europe and offered him even greater rewards and a slice of the profits, a seat on the board, if you like.

  But when he had wanted out, they had played their ace. There was no way out. They had him by the balls, and while it continued to pay they were not going to pass up their cash cow, so he was in it for the duration.

  And then the bust.

  Even then they hadn’t needed to touch even a single hair on anyone’s head. It had all been so unexpected, so well planned, such a perfect inside job, and such a slick deception. The police shields and halyards, the flashing lights, the firepower – real or staged, it hardly mattered.

  He had escaped with his life, incredulous to his own good fortune but the goods had gone. The Nigerians had lost their biggest consignment yet and he had lost it for them.

  The approach hitherto had always been the same. The dummy run to check the route, no risk. The next would be a real run. Next time we go big. Maybe one more. Two max. Then checkout. The route closes down for good. We move on to the next one. And so on ad infinitum.

  He’d bluffed it at first with the Nigerians. They’d come from nowhere; there must have been an informer; they must have followed him, put a tracker, a bug, whatever. There were crooked cops on board, maybe one of the President’s men had sold them out.

  Then they’d taken him in. Why didn’t they arrest you? No newspaper, no journalist, no nothing. He’d been shafted and he hadn’t felt a thing. He’d been ejected from the board in a bloodless coup and nobody had even raised their voice. He hadn’t materially stolen from the President and his men. But by his incompetence he had allowed the Camorra to carry out the biggest snatch in the history of Italian drugs wars. All cold comfort. That they might need to keep him alive for their other projects was cold comfort again. The method was everything. Better a bullet than the sliced jugular of a stuck infidel pig.

  So, he was friendless. No “uncle” now to help him. First, when Giancarlo had still believed, he had not returned his calls. Then his number had been no longer active.

  He thought of his wife, his son. He clung to hope there, not for himself but for them. His humanity existed now only through the hope of seeing them again.

  Thirty-Eight

  On the way back home Rossi had dropped in at a bar. To think. That was the excuse at least. He flicked through a paper, creased and softened by use until it almost felt more like fabric. He was fully aware that he still hadn’t completed a single report but he’d been going over everything with Carrara. He wasn’t exactly optimistic but he was sifting and resifting in the hope of finding some small nugget of a clue. He had even thought about talking to Nurse Rinaldi again despite there being nothing solid in her evidence to go on. He checked his phone for her number, but it wasn’t saved. He searched through the scraps and old receipts in his wallet and pockets but realized he must have managed to mislay it. He’d have to take a trip over to her house or contact the hospital.

  A pang of hunger hit him. How long had he been there? He picked up the menu and as he did so looked around to see what everyone was eating. There had been a generous aperitivo menu which he had picked at a little while other diners were clearly making it an apericena, an aperitivo bulked out into dinner by multiple visits to the buffet table, in lieu of a formal meal. He preferred to go traditional and ordered a saltimbocca alla romana with potatoes and salad. And another large glass of Primitivo.

  Carrara had cited family commitments, which was understandable, and besides, they now had to just slog it out until something turned up. He was counting on Katia. She at least exuded rigour and knife-sharp intelligence. He wondered whether he should have invited her for dinner but when he’d dropped in she was so absorbed by her task that he had thought it wiser not to. Always better not to mix work and pleasure, but she was making that rule troublesome. Apart from whether it was an infatuation or not, he was just getting to like being around her, but she hadn’t given anything approaching a clear sign that it might be reciprocal and he wasn’t going to make a fool of himself.

  She’d begun by giving him the low-down on her day spent criss-crossing the city, going from gallery to gallery, rustling up archivists and curators and auction house contacts in the not-yet-vain hope of getting a match. The office was strewn, but orderly, with all manner of prints and copies, books and catalogues. She’d got coffee for them both and had returned to find him taking a longer than necessary look at some erotica and had given him a teasing half-smile, but only that. Then back to the work. The program she had hoped to use had in the end come to nothing. But she at least was optimistic and had promised to ring if there was anything of significance before the evening was out.

  He took a sip of the Primitivo. Apt name. The primal instincts. The red-blooded male. And it was going down well, a little too well, but his head still felt clear so he asked the waiter to leave the bottle. His food arrived and, despite the circumstances, he began to eat heartily, relishing the sage-scented veal and cured ham combinatio
n.

  What the hell, he thought, abandoning the Katia rebus for the time being. There shouldn’t be anything too demanding tomorrow. He could probably write the first couple of hours of the morning off.

  Thirty-Nine

  Amal woke with a start. The same dream. This was evil, she knew it, and she had played her part. She looked at the small clock by the bed. It was nearly time. So early and cold now on these mornings. This was Europe, a cold and damp world compared to the home she still remembered well enough despite the years having passed so fast. She got out of bed, dressed and went to the bathroom. She was the first up today. Her father had come in late from work and they wouldn’t see him till mid-morning.

  She splashed her face with cold water then went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Today she had to go back there, to the monastery where it had all happened. They said the police might call again and that if they did, to say nothing if she didn’t want to be incriminated, if she didn’t want to have “problems”. And these were not problems? Waking in a sweat, knowing that she had perhaps allowed a terrible crime to happen. They had told her to get any information and to relay it to the contacts she would meet at the station on the platform at the same appointed times. She thought first that they had only wanted the information so that they could then go there to steal – a lesser evil. An evil nonetheless but they had threatened her. She had told no one else and now her only hope was to leave them. She was looking around for other work to be free of them even if in the community it was hard to ever be free of them completely. But she had her Italian friends. Their hold was not so strong; the ghetto was not like Paris or Brussels and she felt not quite so alone when she thought of that. So she had hatched her plan. She had held back the one thing she now felt had been what they really had wanted to hear: an initial and maybe a name. She slipped out and went to find a working phone.

  Olivia woke in the half-light. Jibril was worrying her. She felt she had had some revelation, lying there at night and waiting, willing sleep to come. She didn’t like what she saw. These friends of his who rarely greeted her or did so begrudgingly as if she were some unfair exception to a rule that made life difficult for them. They had planned to go to an exhibition and it had been his suggestion, but then he had given her the sign – the very fact that they had a sign – that all had changed. He turned her on and off like a tap. He wasn’t using her sexually or otherwise but he had priorities. Priorities which were so far removed and so secret. Secret because she knew nothing and still had not asked.