A Cold Flame

by Aidan Conway

  But what if something had happened to him? More than once he had alluded to enemies back home, saying that he had escaped from political persecution but without being specific. Who his co-nationals in Rome were she couldn’t really say. This much she knew, although the world of Nigerian politics was complex and contradictory. And now there was the battle with the oil companies. For Jibril, they were raping the Delta and its Igbo people, that same people who had been the more progressive, democratic, and forward-looking group and who had then lost out when their opponents seized power. And these were the same opponents all too often involved in complex and profitable double plays with the foreign oil companies. But he had spoken too of the Islamist groups in the north not having a pure agenda. It was confusing. He seemed to be saying so many things and it worried her to hear how intensely he felt about it too. Was he just a jumble of contradictions? Unstable even?

  She cut across past the back of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore and then wandered up the slight incline of Via Liberiana turning right then on Via dell’Olmata. She passed The Fiddler’s Elbow pub where a slender, red-haired barman was finishing a cigarette. She thought again about what she knew of that world Jibril had explained to her, the one he had left behind. Exasperation and the orphan’s unceasing will to endure. He had been a child when his brother was killed but had been a witness to it. His father had left in mysterious circumstances, perhaps for his own safety, but there was something in the story he had held back from her. He had then renounced his wish to continue his education and go to university, in Lagos or even abroad, opting instead to head for the oil fields, where his own father had worked as an itinerant labourer. He had hoped to find him and find work. He had found only the latter and then as the reality of that life sank in, he had become politicized.

  These stories, Olivia remembered, had been like some great nineteenth-century novel for her, for Jibril had a storyteller’s skill. She had met few with his linguistic gifts, and the rapidity with which he had mastered Italian was a joy to behold. When he couldn’t find a word he would throw in an English equivalent and so the story would continue. How he had begun to doubt the real motives of the political leaders guiding the rebels. He had realized there was a lot at stake and profits could be made. In the name of Igbo independence and to strike a blow against the corrupt national government and foreign interlopers, they sabotaged the pipelines. But there was also a flourishing black market in stolen oil. Rumours quickly became reality when it was clear that certain individuals were consolidating their individual power bases with the capital they had accrued. Weapons and narcotics were both currency and a means to an end.

  When things had come to a head, Jibril had had no choice but to head north. He might have taken a tourist visa to Europe but he was also on a list of wanted men and had already changed his identity. Better to take the hard way across the Mediterranean and begin from scratch. She felt now, as once more she played the film of his life, that she was looking for certainties, islands of truth and dependability.

  She crossed another piazza, passing another medieval church she had never seen before then walked on through the sudden cool shade cast by the Torre delle Milizie with its warlike, crenellated fortifications. She knew his religion was important to him. He had been brought up as a Muslim and yet he had initially identified with the largely Christian people of the Delta in their pursuit of freedom. He had made many friends, some of whom he had travelled to Italy with or met on his journey. But then in other moments he had railed against the Church, as if those same Christian friends had been secondary, casualties of a hatred towards an institution which he saw as corrupt and even evil. It had been strange too for her to see him behave like a completely different person when confronted with the bigoted views of some of his classmates. Was he not free now to speak his mind? It was not that simple he had told her. But why, she asked, why?

  She realized she had been wandering the streets without any destination. She didn’t want to go home but she felt alone and confused. She looked up and saw she was in Via in Selci where she had also just passed a police station. She remembered that among her documents she had a copy of Jibril’s identity card that the school had requested. If she went to the police to report a missing person? But she didn’t even know where Jibril worked. She had never been to his house as he would always come to hers. She had accepted it all, until now. But as she stood there debating whether or not to go in, it was her contemplation of this mysterious nature of his that began to get the better of what she had thought was her reason. What if he was leading some double life? Was she then an accessory to his activity? The friends he had, some of whom she had seen but never exchanged even a greeting with. His absences, and now this disappearance without explanation. She walked on and made her way towards the Metro station. A discordant note now had broken the long melody of her reminiscence. How quickly the happy present could become the troubled past.

  Forty-Four

  The Traffic Police had placed temporary and permanent cordons at Piramide and the beginning of Via Ostiense and Circo Massimo, as well as along Via Aventino and Via delle Terme di Caracalla to facilitate the arrival of various heads of government and their motorcades. Many had come directly from the military airport of Ciampino in the south-east of Rome, ushered at high speed from the suburbs along Via Ardeatina and then in through the gates of the old city walls at Porta Latina, the police outriders stationed periodically like pressure locks in a hermetic system siphoning their charges from A to B.

  Rossi and Carrara breezed in and parked up outside the headquarters to the UNAF building.

  “Why here?” said Carrara. “For the conference, I mean.”

  “Roma Caput Mundi,” replied Rossi. “Where else?”

  “You mean everyone wants a nice little holiday?”

  “And the shopping.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And it’s like Italy’s at the forefront in energy saving and efficiency, isn’t it?”

  “Should be,” said Carrara looking up at the cloudless blue sky. “Can you believe Germany produces more solar power than we do?”

  “I can believe it,” said Rossi. “And we pay them to take our rubbish to their incinerators because we can’t get our act together.”

  Protestors were massing beyond the police lines well away from the main entrance to the UNAF building. There were green associations, radical environmentalists, and various national groupings.

  “Who’s public enemy number one today then?” said Carrara. “The Iranian president? The Americans?”

  “Looks like the LGBT crowd want to pick a fight with our Nigerian friend and his antediluvian attitudes to gender equality. He’s even making the Pope look like some sort of liberal in comparison.”

  Agents posing as journalists were already getting all the close-ups they needed which would then go on file and add to the growing database of possible insurgents and troublemakers. Rossi didn’t exactly approve but he was in no situation to make quibbles. He and Carrara scanned the crowds.

  Among the very heterogeneous placard-waving crowd there were the old bourgeois liberal lefties who’d spent decades on the barricades as well as an array of younger and more militant centro sociali types, gay and straight alike. There were plenty of black Africans too, and their slogans weren’t pulling any punches.

  YOU DON’T REPRESENT US!

  BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!

  WORSE THAN HITLER!

  “Don’t like their president much, do they?” said Carrara.

  “No,” said Rossi. “Seems he garners a lot of consensus with the gay bashing. It’s a transversal issue. In the north, where they’ve got sharia law, I’m afraid stoning’s the order of the day.”

  “Just for being queer?” said Carrara.

  “Homosexual, Gigi, surely. Or gay.”

  Carrara accepted the correction with a quizzical look.

  “So you’ve got queer culture but I can’t call them queers?”

  “It’s
like if I say a joke about the Irish or the Neapolitans, it’s allowed. But if you make the joke, it’s racism.”

  “Because I’m from Puglia and you’ve got mixed ancestry?”

  “Right.”

  “If you say so. I’m not a homophobe, Mick. If that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Rossi smiled and noticed a friendly face on the edge of the crowd.

  “Roberto!” said Rossi approaching a photographer who was busy checking through his photos on a pre-edit. “Safe to talk?”

  “Vatten!” said the stocky and prematurely grey undercover cop with mock irritation. He had once been a falco, a plainclothes motorbike agent, penetrating the organized crime networks of Naples and Rome, until an accident that had nearly cost him his life. He was sending the images straight back to base via a Bluetooth connection.

  “They get these in real time and if there are any faces, we’ll all soon know about it.”

  “Wouldn’t mind getting a look at them myself,” said Rossi. “For a little side project of mine.”

  “Another of your way-out theories, is it?”

  “I do get the odd result, from time to time,” said Rossi, smiling. “Are you getting them at the back too?”

  “Doing my best. Look out, he’s on his way,” he said then gesturing to the fleet of black-clad carabinieri outriders heralding the arrival of a series of limos and black security vehicles. “The president of Nigeria.”

  The crowd noise became focused, tripling in intensity then as the motorcade swept through the main entrance, barely slowing on the curve in to the parking area.

  “Didn’t get much of a look at him, did they?” said Carrara, relaxing his grip on the Beretta beneath his jacket as the first key moment of tension had passed.

  “There was an orange alert out on him,” said Roberto, letting his camera dangle by his side, his job done for now at least.

  “So what’s the answer?” said Rossi. “Do I get the goods or do I have to buy you dinner too, at Rosario’s?”

  “See what I can do,” his old friend replied in thick dialect, as another, more senior, plain-clothed operative drifted past with a walkie-talkie clamped to his jaw.

  Rossi gave Carrara the signal and they moved in.

  “Get a shot of that, will you, before they leave,” said Rossi, indicating a home-made placard tied onto a crash barrier and referring to a pressure group called “List of Shame”. It was one of those placards that protestors rolled out demo after demo and it detailed a series of deaths in suspicious circumstances and summary executions going back some twenty-five years. There was a Web address too and a contact e-mail. Carrara snapped it with his mobile while Rossi continued to scan the crowd. He did a brief double-take when he recognized the familiar face of Professor Okoli. They smiled and waved to each other. The demonstrators were too tightly packed for him to get forward but Rossi saw that the prof looked his usual self – content and going about his business.

  Behind him, unseen by Rossi and the photographers’ lenses, stood Jibril – anonymous, a protestor like anyone else.

  Forty-Five

  “Here it is,” said Carrara coming back from the print room with a list of suspicious and politically motivated homicides in Nigeria for the last twenty-five years, names in alphabetical order and background information to each case. He handed it to Rossi.

  “I’ve sent you a digital copy too. It’ll make it easier to search online. And Rinaldi?” he added.

  Rossi was already deep into studying the grisly inventory.

  They had returned to the office after a working lunch at Rosario’s feeling very happy with themselves, if only because they had had perfect calamari and a glass or two of very cold Falanghina on the terrace followed by homemade granita sorbets and fresh figs. But the feeling was fading as they contemplated the gravity and complexity of the task ahead of them.

  Need to know what it is that makes them tick, Rossi said, half to himself and to no one in particular. Carrara knew what it meant. Rossi’s various threads and disparate lines of enquiry were either on the point of overload or a stunning breakthrough.

  “What?” said Rossi.

  “Rinaldi,” said Carrara again. “We need to see if she’s got something.”

  “Right,” said Rossi. “Shall we go? Just give me half an hour with this first.”

  ***

  Rossi’s attempts to match some of the names he’d picked up from the placard with news stories had so far produced nothing. There wasn’t a comprehensive online archive of the media he’d been looking for, but he had got some fragmentary leads. Yet he didn’t really know what he was looking for. He just felt the list was significant. They were on their way to the car but had brought paperwork with them to maximize their productivity.

  “And I’ve got the rest of those statements in,” said Carrara, “from the Brell case. I’ve highlighted anything new. See what you think.” He handed Rossi another folder which he leafed through as they headed out of the building.

  “Let’s go and see the nurse,” he said, as he opened the passenger door and tossed the folders onto the back seat of the Alfa.

  This time she was ready for the visit, dressed in a dark, knee-length skirt and white blouse, with a string of pearls and matching earrings.

  “I’ve finally managed to track you down, Inspector,” she said, addressing Rossi as she brought a tray of coffees into the living room. “I heard you were looking for me but we had another urgent burns admission.”

  “Yes,” said Rossi, finding himself drawn to the curves that the well-coordinated outfit now exalted. “We’ve been very busy, as I’m sure you will understand. We’ve been reinterviewing anybody who might be able to help us in our enquiries.”

  “Well,” she said, proffering a cup to each of them in turn. “I did think of something. Unusual, like you said, and I wanted to be of assistance.”

  “It all helps,” said Rossi.

  “It has to do with Ivan,” she continued. Her lips, Rossi noticed, were delicately glossed and she looked ten years younger. “It was something he tried to say. You will remember I said he didn’t say anything. That was not entirely true. From time to time he did attempt to communicate. And he was often floating in and out of consciousness.”

  Rossi nodded. The nurse smiled, perhaps from embarrassment, as she began again.

  “At one point we thought he wanted to drink. There was a jug and a glass next to the bed. And he appeared to be saying ‘bicchiere’. Glass. But because of his pronunciation and because he could barely move his lips, we spent a long time wondering what he was trying to say. It came out as Vik. Vik-yer. Something of that nature. You know the way the V and the B can be close, like in Spanish. It was odd and we thought he wanted to drink, but every time he refused the glass we offered him. And that’s it really.”

  Rossi sat there thinking. Not much to go on. He wondered if it hadn’t all been a ruse. The attention-seeking. The skirt, the lip gloss, the way she sat now on the sofa, slightly sideways, offering herself even?

  “Interesting,” he said. “And nothing else?”

  “That is it, Inspector. Sorry to drag you over here but you did say ‘anything’ at all, didn’t you?”

  “Quite right, Nurse Rinaldi,” said Rossi.

  Rossi gave a glance at Carrara and collected his folders from the coffee table. He stood up and reached out to shake hands.

  “So soon, Inspector? But you have only just arrived.”

  “A hundred things to do,” said Rossi.

  “But I’d made a cake.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said. “If we need to speak to you again.”

  “Anytime, Inspector.”

  “And thanks for the coffee,” said Carrara.

  “So?” said Rossi when they were back in the Alfa.

  “She’s definitely taken a shine to you,” said Carrara hitting the accelerator before another light changed to red. Rossi was flicking through the pages of the statements again for want of somethi
ng better to do. There was plenty of bumf and boredom-inducing monotony in them, and he was about to stifle a yawn when something leapt out of the page in front of him.

  “Hang on,” he said. “Pull over.”

  Carrara swerved into a slip road and stopped.

  “Look at this,” said Rossi holding out a sheet. “What is it?”

  “A transcript, of a phone call.”

  “Anonymous? Right?”

  Carrara nodded.

  “We get a lot of calls,” said Carrara. “They’re all logged. No use in court though.”

  “OK. But it says Brell knew ‘V’. But what the hell is it?”

  Carrara studied the transcript:

  CALLER (UNKNOWN): hello

  Officer: yes.

  CALLER: I want to report a crime.

  Officer: Yes. Where are you?

  CALLER: (pause)

  Officer: hello

  CALLER: Father Brell knew V. He knew him.

  Officer: Can you repeat please.

  “Some five second phone call from a crank. What does it mean to you?”

  “But Ivan,” said Rossi, “Ivan said ‘Bik-yer’, or Vik-yer. The B and the V thing. Don’t you see? What if it’s a name? What if it’s a connection.”

  ***

  They were back in the office and Rossi was scribbling down names and arrows and dates as Carrara made a heroic stab at catching up with a backlog of paperwork.

  “House fire. Ivan. Vik-yer. The priest killing. The letter V from the anonymous call. The priest. The painting and Marciano. The cardinal. A murdered African. The same day. The Nigerians. Maybe the Nigerian mafia. Are you seeing anything?”

  “Maybe,” said Carrara. “And maybe not.”

  “Ivan didn’t like Catholic priests. Remember his reaction? Marciano was pimping African rent boys, to the Church, according to his widow. Doesn’t it all add up to something?”