A flash of yellow caught his eye. The Eagle banner, a two-headed eagle on a gold background, fluttered in the breeze.
The banners lined the Via di Città up to the “border” with the Forest contrada, crackling when the wind rose in the evenings and forming a gold corridor four meters up. Two blocks east, the corridor turned green and orange with the colors of the Forest, and two blocks west, the Panther’s red-and-blue banners proclaimed the switch of an allegiance from one step to the next.
It reminded Dante of those houses up north where the living room was in Italy and the bedroom was in Austria.
He heard the sound of a foot connecting solidly with a soccer ball and the cries of young boys going up in a cheer.
Another generation of kids was playing soccer the next block over in the Quattro Canti, the Four Corners. No doubt they were as delighted to play under the noses of the cops as he had been when he’d been a boy.
By the time the bored officer standing guard duty at the Questura had ambled his way down the Via del Castoro over to the Four Corners, the ball would have disappeared-as would most of the boys-into the labyrinth of streets around the cathedral.
It was a game that had been playing itself out for generations and would continue to do so as long as there were children, and cops, in Siena.
A violin sounded up, then a viola. Palazzo Chigi was only a few rooftops away. The Chigiana Music Festival was about to start and the musicians were practicing. Though he knew he had barbaric tastes in music, Dante had very, very fond memories of a certain Californian viola player.
He leaned out the window for a moment, wishing with all his heart that he were at the San Marco Compagnia Militare, the red-brick building that was the heart and soul of his contrada, with the photographs of his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather up on the wall.
“Siena doesn’t have crime,” he remembered his boss saying to a visiting politician from Rome. “It has the Palio instead.”
But with a sigh he realized that, notwithstanding his best efforts, a crime had been committed and he had to solve it.
He picked up the phone. “Oh, there you are Commissario,” the operator said in relief. “Please hold, you have a call from the Florence Questura.”
A moment later, a deep voice came on the line. “Dante, how are you, you son of a bitch? How are the ladies? You keeping them busy?”
Dante smiled. He always enjoyed the company of Marco Ricci. They’d trained together at the Academy in Rome and had done their best at night to bed all the pretty girls and drink all the white Castelli Romani wine in Rome.
“I do my best. But there are so many of them, Marco, and only one of me.”
Marco’s heartfelt sigh was only a little theatrical. “Lucky you. I remember…” His voice suddenly turned brisk. “Never mind, I’m married now. Listen, I called because I have the toxicology results of that bottle of whiskey you sent over for us to analyze, and there’s a little surprise.”
Dante sat down and picked up a pen. “This case has been nothing but surprises so far, but what can you expect when foreigners are involved?”
“That’s the truth. So listen, I’ll email you the results but right now take note of the fact that the bottle of whiskey had enough Gamma hydroxybutyrate to drop a horse.”
Dante’s pen hovered. “Uh, would you want to repeat that?”
“Gamma hydroxybutyrate. Otherwise known as Liquid E, Organic Quaalude and other cute street names. Sold as Temazepam and Rohypnol. In America it’s what’s known as a—” Dante could hear him shuffling papers “—a date rape drug.” Marco’s voice spoke the English words hesitantly, and he pronounced the words “date rape” as if they had four syllables. “That means—”
“I know what it means, Marco.” Dante was trying to square a date rape drug with the distinctly unattractive man he’d seen stretched out on his cell floor.
“That’s right, I forgot. You’re practically an American.”
“Yeah. So it’s a date rape drug. Hm. How potent?”
Marco’s voice turned grim. “As potent as they come. I checked it out. It’s a hypnotic and an anesthetic. It’s been linked to almost 12,000 deaths in America so far. Mostly young girls whose drinks had been spiked. I haven’t heard of any middle-aged men. It’s been a controlled substance since 2000. A few drops of Gamma hydroxybutyrate added to a drink can make a young girl lose consciousness within a quarter of an hour. A dose of—how much did your guy weigh?”
“Seventy kilos.”
Dante could hear scribbling. “A dose of four milligrams would induce respiratory distress, seizures, coma and possibly death. The bottle contained enough GHB to administer five milligrams per glass. Someone seriously disliked your victim.”
“A knife in the heart is a pretty good sign of that, I think.”
As he was talking, Dante was flipping through the documentation he’d built up during the investigation. The file was thick and dense, another reason why he hated murder.
He finally found the copy of the autopsy report, and he had to still his stomach as he remembered the autopsy itself. His finger ran down the blood tests.
“Listen, we’ve got a pretty good medical examiner at Le Scotte Hospital, and he didn’t find anything in the blood but alcohol. Actually, more alcohol than blood. How’s that?”
“Well, GHB is called a ‘stealth drug’. Apparently it’s very hard to detect. When was the autopsy performed?”
Dante did a quick calculation in his head. “About thirty-six hours post mortem.”
“That’s it then. It would have been metabolized if—”
“If?”
“Well, that’s the weird thing, Dante. If he’d imbibed any GHB. Which I doubt he did. The bottle you sent us was full.”
“Could the victim have drunk a little bit? Just enough to—you know, push him over?”
“Nope. The bottle was a seventy centiliter bottle and there were seventy centiliters of liquid inside. Someone had eased up the excise tax tab, poured some of the whiskey out, topped it up with GHB, probably with a syringe, and then stuck the tab back down.”
“Did you—”
“Yes, we sent it to Rome.”
They both knew the Rome State Police laboratory was the only place in Italy that could carry out DNA testing. There had been talk of setting up another laboratory in Milan, but so far, like many things in Italy, it had remained just that—talk.
“But this is clearly a guy who reads his thrillers. There were no fingerprints on the bottle—none. Zip. So I think he might’ve had the smarts not to lick the tab. He probably used a wet sponge.
“At any rate, I know the head of the lab in Rome and he owes me a favor. He’ll send me the results as soon as they come in. He won’t sit on it like they usually do.”
“This is strange,” Dante said slowly.
“You better believe it. Someone goes to great lengths to poison a bottle and the victim doesn’t even have the good taste to drink it.”
“It would’ve been overkill. The guy had a three-hundred-and-fifty blood alcohol level.”
Dante could almost hear Marco wince. “Christ.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a weird case, isn’t it?”
Dante sighed. “Yeah.”
Murders weren’t usually weird, not in Italy. They were pretty straightforward, or at least that had been his experience in the four years he’d spent at the Naples Questura.
There had been a murder every three days there, on average, and none of them had been strange. Brutal maybe, but not strange. Most of them were mob killings, the who and the why and the how as clear as a bullet to the back of the neck. The rest were passion killings. In that case, it was the murderer who usually called the police, and they would arrive to find the distraught wife or appalled husband still holding the pistol, crying over the loss of the loved one.
As if the police were priests, the killer would start babbling a confession as soon as they walked in the door, looking
hopefully at them as if they had the power of absolution.
This wasn’t anything like that.
“Foreigners,” he said again.
“Tell me about it. Last March we started getting hysterical phone calls from little old ladies living in San Lorenzo. You know—the marketplace?”
It was the central fruit and vegetable market in Florence and home to the elderly poor and recent immigrants. “Sure.”
“Well, they were shouting about bloodbaths and screaming children, so we got over there real quick. You know what we saw?”
Bloodbaths. Dante’s stomach gave a little warning twinge. “Do I want to hear this?”
“Come on, Dante. Turns out it was Eid Al Adha, the Muslim religious holiday which has to be celebrated by sacrificing goats. Abundantly. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a tiny sixth-floor apartment turned into a slaughterhouse. There was so much blood we had to wear rubber boots.”
Dante’s stomach slid greasily up his throat. He swallowed and it moved back down. Grudgingly. “That’s really, ah, interesting, Marco, but I have to go now. Listen, get that DNA report to me as soon as you have it, okay?”
“Absolutely. What horse did your contrada draw?” Marco loved the Palio, even if he was a Florentine.
“Lina.”
“Good horse. And who’s your jockey?”
“Nerbo.”
“He’s the best,” Marco said approvingly. “Nasty, with a lot of dirty tricks up his sleeve. Well, this might be the Snail’s year,” Marco said genially.
Dante hung up on Marco’s chuckle. He tapped his pen against the desktop once then twice, sharply.
The bottle of whiskey Sara Pellegrini swore she hadn’t delivered to Roland Kane’s door had been poisoned. But not drunk. What the—? He let the possibilities settle in his mind, then lifted the receiver of the phone and dialed the first number on the sheet of paper in front of him.
Fifteen minutes and three phone calls later, he put the phone back down. Paolo Tucci, the owners of Stella Catering and Sara Pellegrini’s parents all swore Sara had left the Certosa at 5:30 p.m. If it was a conspiracy, it was a seamless one.
When he stuck his head back into the interrogation room, he saw Cini behind the young woman, his arms crossed over her waist. Dante narrowed his eyes. “Cini?”
Cini jumped and moved three meters away from Sara. He stood stiffly at attention.
“Sir. I was just…just showing Sara—Signorina Pellegrini—how we in the police force…how we subdue criminals. Sir.” He was beet red.
“Well, you might want to show Signorina Pellegrini how we in the police force walk out the door.” Dante wondered if the police force had a special hold for that. “Accompany her up to the Certosa and have her wait in the archive room. The receptionist will show you which room it is. Wait outside, and when we’re finished, you can accompany Signorina Pellegrini back to Florence. To the—” He switched his gaze. “—to the hospital?”
She nodded.
“To the hospital at Careggi. Is that clear, Cini? Cini? You might want to look at me when I’m giving you orders.”
Cini’s head swiveled and he turned an even deeper shade of red.
“Yes, sir,” he mumbled. “Very clear.”
Dante walked out to the little ante chamber which held the gun lockers and entered his combination in the lock. He reached into the little tray and, for the first time in days, put on his shoulder holster. He hated the damn thing because it meant he had to wear a jacket in this heat.
Dante sprinted down the stairs. Nick was waiting for him at Ugo’s corner bar.
Dante parted the long plastic strings that served as a transparent door in the summer and peeped in. Ugo was regaling Nick with a blow-by-blow account of the Eagle’s victory two years ago. Dante had heard it at least three hundred times.
“Nick,” he said, “let’s go. Sorry, Ugo.”
Ugo had his hand in the air, which meant that he was now imitating the jockey on the third lap of the track. In three years, the words and the gestures had remained as unwavering as a liturgy.
Nick dug into his pocket and paid for his cappuccino, then met Dante at the door. “So—what’s up?”
Dante started up the Via di Città. “What’s up is that the bottle of whiskey brought to the murdered man’s cell by a maid, only Faith Murphy saw, was poisoned.”
“Hey,” Nick stopped in his tracks, frowning. “That doesn’t mean Faith poisoned it.”
Dante nudged him forward again, not an easy thing to do with someone Nick’s size. “Maybe. Maybe not. To tell the truth, I don’t see her doing that either. But there’s something really screwed up here and I hate it when it’s like that.” He veered left into the Via delle Terme, going as quickly as Nick’s knee would allow. Nick followed obediently.
“Where are we going?”
Dante hesitated, knowing Nick wasn’t going to like what was coming.
“To where it began,” he said. “To the Certosa.”
Faith’s in there, Nick thought, as they pulled into the graveled driveway of the Certosa. He’d been in a bad mood all day, only partially lifted by the autopsy, which had been fun. Particularly the part where Dante turned gray. But now the thought of seeing Faith, even if she was going to ignore him, made him…what? Happy?
It put a spring in his limp, that was for sure. Just seeing her made him feel better and he thought that he stood a better than even chance at spending the night with her again. It was uncomfortable sharing a cot, but what the hell? Better that uncomfortable cot with Faith than a king-sized luxury bed with anyone else. He hadn’t gotten Faith out of his system, not by a long shot.
They walked through the big stone gate with the huge wooden doors, now open. Last night, Nick hadn’t been thinking of much beyond keeping Faith safe and, well, getting into bed with her. But now he looked around at the place which had been a ruin when he spent his teen years breaking and entering.
The Certosa had only been turned into a conference center in the past ten years. Dante had dated the chief restorer of the Certosa a few years ago, a pretty girl who had been much too sweet for him. Nick remembered her saying that the restoration team was proud nothing structural had been changed—not even the lock on the gate.
The restored Certosa was soberly elegant now, but it had had a wild and glorious ramshackle beauty all those summers ago, when he and Dante had climbed the walls to explore the abandoned monastery. The cousins had run wild in the cloisters, avoiding the rats’ nests and piles of bricks lying untouched since the Middle Ages.
Nick winced now at the thought of running his hands along powdery painted walls, enjoying the feeling of crumbling stucco. He realized now that he’d probably destroyed whole strips of priceless frescoes, just as they’d dumped the shards of what had been centuries-old terracotta vases in corners so they could play soccer undisturbed along the corridors.
It had been wild and wonderful then just as it was cool and beautiful now.
To tell the truth, all of Siena was dotted with warm and wonderful memories for him. He couldn’t ever remember being unhappy here.
Is this where I belong? Nick wondered as he gimped along behind Dante through the arcades of the main courtyard. Was his family’s adventure in America about to run its course?
Nick’s father and mother were talking more and more about moving to Siena when his father retired next year. If they did, Lou would follow. Without making an issue of it, she would probably find a way to get a job in Siena or Florence for a year or two, which would stretch into forever. She was so good at her job they would fight over her services in the Gobi Desert. And Lou being Lou, she’d be knee deep in suitors before the year was out.
Nick would be left alone over in Southbury.
He had plenty of friends, but most of them were hockey players or sports writers or managers. He knew the score. Overnight, he had gone from being the big man in the game to being a has-been. Everyone would try hard to keep in touch, but the pull of the game
would tug them away.
Nick shook his head. He hardly recognized his own brain. He never ever thought about the future until it was right on top of him. It wasn’t like him to have such somber thoughts. It was as if the Nick-shaped slot he’d inhabited all his life had suddenly disappeared.
He followed Dante through a narrow archway into a smaller cloister. A burst of laughter came from an open doorway in the eastern corner. He stopped in the doorway as another burst of laughter echoed in the hot, dusty air, and stared at the tableau.
It looked like Faith had found a slot all her own.
She was surrounded by men, and damned if they didn’t look a lot like admirers. He recognized Professor Gori—Dante had dated his daughter, too—and that slimy creep, Tim something. Her other colleague—what was his name? Something dumb like Griffin. There were two weedy-looking guys and a Japanese man, nodding and bowing and grinning.
Nerdy geeks, all of them, except for Gori and that Griffin guy. They looked like elegant geeks.
They were crowded around a laptop showing an overhead PowerPoint presentation. Faith held a laser pointer and was going down a graph. “And here we have tipping,” Faith said and, crazily, there was an audible murmur of approval. Like a flock of very odd birds, all the men bent their heads and tapped into their tablets.
Nick couldn’t take his eyes off Faith. Her big, light-brown eyes were alight with intelligence and humor, and Nick was suddenly floored with how wildly attractive she looked just then, hair a red-brown cloud around her face, cheekbones and forehead slightly sunburned, wide mouth curved in a smile.
In the throes of lust when first dating Dee Dee, Nick had once commented on how gorgeous she was. Lou had shocked him by saying Faith was prettier. Nick had laughed at the time, but it was true.
He’d rarely seen Dee Dee without makeup, not even in bed. The few times he’d managed to catch a glimpse of her unadorned face, she seemed like a different person. Eyes small and too close together. And her nose—well, it was definitely a bit…piggish. Dee Dee made up for it with good makeup, tight clothes and pretty hair out of a bottle.
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