by Aidan Conway
“OK. Yes. Look, I can come with you if you like.”
“OK,” said Rossi. “But remember your costume, right?”
“Of course. Later.”
“Ciao.”
Some new revelation? Or for his ears only? He opened the drawer and slid his Beretta into his shoulder holster. Better safe than sorry.
Fifty
Only a seasoned cop would have been able to tell that the smoking blonde in dark glasses walking across the piazza was in disguise. She had the knack all right. No self-consciousness. Pure, easy assurance.
“So, Maria, what is it you want to tell me?” said Rossi.
“I want to turn myself in.”
“You mean you want to go public?”
“Expose it all. Come clean on everything. Get Luca out. Get you off the hook. Go to the press. Everything. We’ll take our chances.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“And why the change of mind? Why now?”
“Am I allowed to be less selfish for once? It was wrong, a mistake. I admit it. It was not what I wanted but I was desperate. But now, well. I’ve been thinking. Thinking a lot.”
“Well perhaps you should turn your thoughts to this first,” said Rossi, reaching into his coat pocket and handing her Mott Borrego’s detailed analysis of the notes. “Looks like we might be onto something.”
She scanned the notes and the various theories.
“So there’s a name?”
“We think so.”
“And a face?”
“We’re getting there.”
She handed him back the pages.
“If we go public now,” Rossi continued, “it will all go up in smoke. This is our chance. Despite what I said before, when you sprang your little surprise, if they want to keep Luca inside, they’ll find a way. He wouldn’t be the first person to kill the wrong person by mistake. And even if you said you had seen the murderer it would all be circumstantial. It could have been a junky, anyone. They’ll say you’re protecting Luca, the lover’s prerogative.”
“So this Giuseppe wants to be found. Is that it?”
“He wants something, that’s for sure. Most likely me. Let’s walk and talk and I’ll tell you the rest.”
*
Though they knew little or nothing of where she was, she was suspended somewhere. Waiting, possibly. But the threads that held her? If they were to break, would it spell her release, her return, or her final falling? Rossi stared at her lidded eyes. Then he looked away. The pulse was steady, varying by only one or two beats. Her nails would need to be trimmed again, he noticed. He could do a better job himself. Next time.
Maria was sitting next to him. She didn’t say a word as Rossi read then sat closer and gave his usual chit-chat while holding Yana’s hand, updating her on events in the outside world. It was odd for him, having Maria there but, despite his initial misgivings, he found he appreciated the company. The female company.
“It could have been me,” she said.
“It could have been anybody,” Rossi replied.
“So we do it then? We go for it?”
“It’s the only thing we can do now. We can’t bring anyone back, can we?”
“But it’s on equal terms. I’m not going to be the woman taking a back seat, if you follow. It’s not my style.”
“I’m sure we can work something out,” said Rossi. The clock had come round to the appointed hour. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. I need to get to work on finding out more about Bonaventura.”
He reached over and kissed Yana’s lips. “See you tomorrow.” Nothing in heaven or on earth could fill the silence that followed.
Fifty-One
So, drive he did. The catamaran had brought Iannelli back to Porto Empedocle from where he had hired a car. It had seen much better days but was the best they could offer. He had seen little point in arguing, anticipating the disastrous spectacle likely to greet him when he finally arrived at Palermo airport. Catania was closed indefinitely, and the backlog of flights was creating delays of up to forty-eight hours. He’d set off for Palermo across Sicily’s barren interior as soon as he’d eaten and, after a tedious four-hour drive, had got there late in the afternoon. Hotels were filling up fast, the airport was running out of food, tempers were fraying. Better to be moving was his philosophy and now that he was on the road again he was almost relishing the freedom.
He’d decided not to rush and had spent a couple of hours stocking up on local products, bottles of wine and far too many books. They were stashed in carrier bags on the passenger seat. He had, however, put the attaché in the boot, just in case Palermo’s moped-riding, drive-by merchants did a smash and grab at the traffic lights. His rather uncool mobile sat safe within arm’s reach. No one would be nicking that, and better to have a ready line of communication, given the previous evening’s events.
He was finding it difficult not to drift back to the bizarre situation he had found himself in the night before. He’d been followed, his movements tracked by someone, or something. But who? Checking in to the guest house, he’d had to fill-out the registration card, as always, and that would, as a matter of course, have been made available to the local police. But they’d also known about his meeting with Rita. Well, she was being trailed too, judging by the anonymous phone calls that had so unsettled both her and her father.
The office, not content with his brief message, had called. He’d kept details to a minimum and given them a ballpark figure regarding his estimated time of arrival. Traffic was minimal, however, and he began to relax as for large stretches of the way he had the road to himself. It was only the winter darkness now and some of his hard-to-shake-off thoughts that troubled him. As far as the dossier was concerned, he’d ended up devouring most of the papers in his possession, so captivating were its contents which, in many ways, confirmed several of his own deepest-held suspicions. He took some photos of what he considered key elements, but the sheer volume of material was such that he couldn’t copy them all.
As he flicked around again with the unfamiliar radio, the phone beside him began to vibrate. “Not again!” he said out loud, surprising himself a little to hear his own voice. He cast a glance sideways.
Unknown caller.
Perhaps he’d take it. He flicked it on to hands-free. The battery was running down. Two bars. He’d keep it brief.
“Yes.”
“Dottor Iannelli?”
“Yes.”
This time the voice was Sicilian, perhaps even familiar to him.
“Dottore, you must listen. There isn’t much time.”
Iannelli did a double take. Was this some joke or another threat? But the voice, though tense, very tense, seemed benevolent.
“Where are you? Tell me? You are in grave danger.”
“Who is this?” demanded Iannelli, more anxious now and deciding that whatever it was, it was no joke.
“You don’t need to know. Where are you? On the road? I know you are on the road to Messina but where?!”
Iannelli was in the middle of just about nowhere on a state highway. On each side there were rocky slopes and low mountains with irregular tree cover. Up ahead he was able to make out the road curving away into what must have been a thickly wooded glade or forest.
“The kilometre markers on the side of the road,” the voice now urged, “at what point are you?”
The signposts were posted at 100 metre intervals. He remembered he had just passed the 97 kilometre marker. For some reason it had stuck in his head as three short of a hundred. He studied the roadside. There it was. His headlights flashed it up. VIII/97.
“I’m approaching 98, anytime now. 200 metres to go.”
“How fast are you going?”
Iannelli checked quickly.
“About 100, but who is this?”
“You have a minute, a minute and a half at most. I know the road like the back of my hand. There is a roadside bomb in a truck. It’s huge and will
obliterate every trace of you and your car. Listen. And slow down. Is there anyone behind you? They may be following. They’ll have traced your hire car or attached a transmitter.”
Iannelli checked his rear-view. Clear. The voice continued.
“You have three choices: stop the car and take your chances on foot. Not recommended. They will know you are alive. Go back to Palermo. Suicide. Three: jump from the car while going through the woods. There is a blind spot. They will see you enter the woods and when you emerge they will detonate the bomb. You have less than a minute, forty seconds maybe. Are you approaching the trees? Reduce speed and put a weight on the accelerator and jump! Leave your watch. It’s steel. They’ll find it. Leave coins, jewellery, rings if you have any. Take cash, you’ll need it. Are you in the woods yet? Dottore? Dottore?!”
As Iannelli listened, his hands, which had been gripping the wheel tighter and tighter began to loosen their hold. He felt his mind becoming clear, very clear. He saw Rita’s smiling face, his hometown, his family. Through the sunroof, he saw the black, sinewy canopy of the woods rushing now over his head and at the furthest visible point in the distance he could see an opening, a just discernible arch. A door out of the dark.
“Dottor Iannelli! Are you there? Are you there?”
Then the ears belonging to the voice discerned what sounded like a loud, dull thump. Then a crackly, hissing silence followed by the percussion perhaps of a car repeatedly striking the cat’s eyes or the chevrons on the side of the road. And then there was nothing as the phone and everything else with it went dead.
PART III
Fifty-Two
They were all talking about it now. The cold spell that had transformed itself into the severest winter experienced in Rome since before many people had been born. The TV weather maps showed a distorted target shape with wavy concentric rings in deepening shades of blue. Its dark heart was inching closer to the peninsula from the east and the whole affair, according to the Air Force weatherman, could plant itself slap bang over the country for weeks. Snow was now also the word on everyone’s lips. From the eager skiers to the feeble pensioners to the commuting office workers hoping for a day off work. According to your source, be it the chattier-than-usual colleague at the coffee machine or the know-all in the corner bar, it was either a dead certainty within days, a soap-bubble story hyped up as click-bait for the newspapers’ jaded readership, or welcome light relief from the recent horrors. What was certain was that the Romans were having more than a few problems adapting to a northern-style inverno.
“Thought it was in the genes,” said Rossi.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. The ones who survived guard duty on Hadrian’s Wall. Didn’t they pass on their superior cold-resistance to successive generations?”
Carrara gave a knowing smile. Most in the city today had their roots in the southern reaches of the peninsula. They were the Calabrians, the Sicilians, the Puglians, who could in turn all have been descendants of the peoples that once constituted the Greater Greek Empire of Magna Grecia, thus attesting to a multiplicity of ethnic origins.
They were sipping boiling hot cappuccino’s that were cooling fast. The first rays of early morning sun were having no noticeable effect. Nonetheless, their decision to take an outside table had not been altogether unwise. The cold had also decreed that Rossi’s coffee be corretto with a shot of something stronger from behind the bar.
“As long as there’s no wind. That’s what the wife says,” Carrara muttered to no one in particular it seemed, so sleepy was his demeanour. They had the air of men with time on their hands, but they had been burning the midnight oil, after having left Maria to follow up what lines of enquiry she could by means of her access to intelligence data. The fresh air was a godsend after hours on end cooped up in storerooms and archives tossing around ideas and strategies, going over and over the case. They had then forced themselves to meet early, like betting-oriented drinking companions taking the rash decision to go hunting or swimming at first light only to find that they can’t back out.
They had got their hands on some photo records but, as Rossi had feared, there was no standard archiving procedure. There was one grainy image from a sporting event which a well-intentioned head-teacher had given them the chance to unearth in a jumble of old school memorabilia that had escaped being thrown away by its having been forgotten in a junk room. Junk room. Rossi laughed. It was a condemned classroom with peeling walls and a sagging roof, deemed unfit and too dangerous to be used, one of countless examples in the state school system.
They had matched the year to written records of Bonaventura’s school attendance and had then identified him with a reasonable degree of certainty. The image was old and small and even when blown-up and computer-enhanced they could only come to the conclusion that it had scarcely been worth the effort and the copious inhalation of dust, and while Rossi hadn’t mentioned it, he had sensed that the graft was getting to Carrara. He had made veiled references to the method’s being outdated, that they should have been concentrating their energies on the technological side of things, the databases, taking a fresher approach. Rossi knew Carrara, and knew when his jibes were good humoured. Now he had a sneaking suspicion that there was more. He could have been wrong but his instinct was alerting him to something.
Other attempts had focused on family members but they’d had to tread carefully. Rossi was pretty sure that the family was well-to-do Roman bourgeoisie, in part due to details dropped into conversations and clues picked up from certain aspects of Giuseppe’s lifestyle. The military service could be “influenced” by the contacts one held or could draw upon. He’d certainly never been a Conscientious Objector, a CO. Indeed, violence must have been an early feature on his horizon. Along with drugs and sexual deviancy these were his main vices, despite his academic excellence, his one-size-fits-all bonhomie. Rossi remembered something, too, about a parachute regiment with strong fascist associations. Then there was his taste for certain wines, his clothes, a particular way of speaking he had tried to camouflage with a rough-edged, hipper Romanesco but which emerged nonetheless from time to time. Yet, despite this, he had also been reserved, perhaps even to the point of secrecy. Even then Rossi hadn’t trusted him. The dark heart had been there somewhere.
“C’mon,” said Rossi, “let’s go and see how the artist’s impressions have come out. There should be some workaholic in the office by the time we get there. And let’s see if we can get them to do anything with this,” he added, getting up and wafting the photo without any great conviction. He gestured to the waiter to bring the bill as he zipped his coat a little tighter. “Your shout, I believe, Gigi,” he said as he began to move away.
“Again?” Carrara replied. Rossi turned around, surprised by the lack of humour in Carrara’s response.
“Are you keeping count?” said Rossi.
“No, no,” said Carrara. “I just don’t remember. Whatever.” Without meeting Rossi’s eyes, he deposited the notes and coins on the table.
As they walked away, they didn’t have any cause to notice the proprietor putting down his cloth to turn up the volume on the sputtering transistor radio. The hourly news bulletin then related an astounding litany of yet more deaths: a cardinal in the Vatican, due to natural causes; in a far less salubrious part of the city, an African in rather less natural causes; and in Sicily, a body vaporized by the roadside detonation of a truck packed with explosives. None of these dead, however, was a woman and an hour or two later, this same TV nation began swallowing and digesting the first reports from the near-apocalyptic scene of the explosion. They’d managed to keep a lid on it for as long as they could, happening as it had, in the dark early evening in the middle of nowhere and also thanks to a thick blanket of silence. Complicit silence? Sicilian omertà?
Theory and counter theory and all manner of rumours abounded. Were they sure it was a bomb? Had it not been a collision? It must have been a fuel tanker that had exploded. Who’d b
een first on the scene? Why had it taken so long to be reported? Subsequently, the press had been informed and then they had been able to get close and set up their arc-lights and their outside broadcast unit. Then the truth had begun to emerge, or had then been allowed to emerge.
Fifty-Three
Rossi made his hand into a fist and in a paroxysm of rage dealt a blow to the table sending an explosion ringing round his empty flat. He had the right to grieve for his friend. He had the duty to drink to his memory and to swear vengeance for his killers. It was personal, and it was another blow against him. He thought of the last time they had spoken. He had perhaps given Iannelli short shrift and now here he was, the survivor, while they would probably never even find Iannelli’s remains, vaporized by the intensity of the blast. They were coming at him now from all directions, piling the pressure on, knowing, surely, that there was only so much he could take. Yana suspended between this world and the next, his friend gone, and two more murder victims to add to the list. First a local scumbag’s decapitated torso and then an African migrant with his throat cut, trussed-up like an animal and left in a bin bag on the side of the Via Tuscolana, with a pig’s head thrown in for good measure.
Rossi tried to massage the accumulated lack of sleep out of his face and then, resigned, held his head in his hands. He had tried to sleep during the day to make up for the all-nighter, but it had been useless. How could he sleep now? He put on a CD of the saddest, most plangent songs, the ones his Irish grandfather had sung by the fire and which he had learned by heart, too, as a child. Some died by the roadside, some died with a stranger. And wise men have said that their cause was a failure. The whiskey bottle beside him was half empty but he knew he still needed more. What was happening to his country, this city? Iannelli. Dead. It couldn’t be. The device on the Palermo-Messina road was so huge it had left a crater 30 metres wide and 5 metres deep. A lethal mix of several hundred pounds of diesel and agricultural fertilizer, it had annihilated all in its path. Rossi, of course, had been among the last to know. Didn’t you see the morning news? I was busy dammit! Why did nobody inform me? We thought you knew. Yeah, right.