The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4)

by Charlotte Elkins

  As a matter of fact, Alix did. She had been even more eager than Chris to see what that magnificent (before she wrecked it) automobile could do on a wide-open desert road. She was, to put it bluntly, a speed freak. As personalities went, Alix’s was among the more consistent and integrated. As anyone who knew her could tell you, she was conservative in her dress and manner and not given to exhibitionistic displays or flashy behavior. But nobody’s personality is a hundred percent consistent, and in Alix’s case, the outlier, the chunk that didn’t fit, was a passion for speed. She loved fast cars, fast boats, fast anything.

  And she had a previously unsuspected knack for handling them.

  She discovered this—to her surprise—in her early twenties, when she met the son of the elderly master restorer with whom she was studying in Florence. The middle-aged Gian-Carlo Santullo had been an amateur racecar driver in his youth and still maintained a garage full of the cars he’d raced. To be polite, he had taken his father’s star student out for a hair-raising ride in his Alfa Romeo Spider one Sunday morning and Alix had come away from it flushed with excitement. Gian-Carlo had been equally pleased with her response and had offered to teach her sports-car etiquette, skills, and rules of the road.

  A year later, she had progressed to the point at which she was given free access to most of his cars on those weekends, and there were many of them, that she was his father’s guest at their home in Ravello. From then on, the highlight of her week became the heavenly Saturday morning hours she spent cruising down the Amalfi coast in Gian-Carlo’s wondrous Ferrari, or Lancia, or Lamborghini. Even now, when she thought of it . . .

  “Hello-o? Anybody home?” Chris was jiggling a key ring three inches from Alix’s nose. “Do you want to drive that thing or don’t you?”

  “What?” It took a moment for Alix to grasp what was going on. “You don’t mean—”

  “I do mean. This thing here will turn on the ignition to that thing there—”

  “The Lancia? Are you serious?”

  “—which has been rented from its owner for the next two days and is yours to play in as much as you like.”

  “But Chris—renting a Lancia! It must have cost—”

  “It did, but let’s have none of that. We have an arrangement, do we not? Just say thank you.”

  Alix smiled. “Thank you.”

  Their arrangement had become necessary because Alix refused to charge Chris for her consulting services, but also insisted on picking up her own tab on the many things they did together, which left Chris feeling that she wasn’t contributing her fair share. So instead, Chris was “allowed” to come up with an occasional gift, as long as it wasn’t too extravagant. This one, Alix thought, was probably pushing the envelope, but she certainly wasn’t going to argue.

  “Thank you, Chris,” she said again. “This is fantastic.”

  “You’re welcome. It’s all gassed up and ready to go.” She handed the keys to Alix. “What do you say we take it for a spin before we get back to work?”

  Alix hesitated. “We’ll give it two hours, all right? Then I think we’d better get back to Tiny.”

  “Agreed. Come on, I’m anxious to get going. It’s been too long since the last time I risked my life.”

  Other than the double-levered throttle in place of the gear shift lever, the controls on the Lancia were much the same as those on the same brand’s automobile, so handling them had come readily to Alix’s mind when she’d driven a Lancia Powerboat the first time, even if some of the smaller, more esoteric dials were still a mystery to her. To build up her confidence—particularly with that double throttle—she thought it best to refamiliarize herself with it by trying it out in the quiet inner bay for a while before taking it out and letting it do its thing. They were cruising slowly alongside the wharf, with Chris marveling at the boat’s furnishings: “These seats are fabulous. Smell the leather! Wow, look at that paneling—how do you even polish mahogany to a shine like that? Wow, did you see . . .”—when Alix slowed and then reversed a few yards.

  “Chris, did you see that?” She was practically shouting.

  “See what? What’s wrong?”

  “Look!” She pointed at a sign above a rolled-up pull-down door, behind which was a dingy concrete-block interior with floor-to-ceiling freezers along the back wall, a large wire rack with a few cartons scattered on its shelves, and a stairway leading up. The stairway had what looked like gallon bottles of bleach lined up at the edge of each step. A full-sized, red, green, and white Italian flag was tacked to a cabinet on another wall.

  Puzzled, Chris shook her head. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  “The sign, dummy! Read the sign!”

  Chris read it, half aloud.

  COASTAL SEAFOODS

  CRAB, SHRIMP, SQUID

  WHOLESALE ONLY

  EST. 2001

  PROP: CELESTINO PALUZZI

  “Celestino!” she exclaimed. “Tino!”

  “Right!”

  “But this isn’t a restaurant, Alix, it’s a wholesaler.”

  “True, but Waldo didn’t say ‘restaurant,’ he said ‘seafood place.’”

  “Are you sure?” Chris looked doubtful.

  “Yes. ‘Seafood place.’ Which this certainly is.”

  “Yeah, but he meant restaurant.” She frowned. “Or at least I thought he did.”

  “So did I, and maybe he did,” Alix said, “because he thought that’s what Tiny meant.”

  “But we don’t know what Tiny actually meant, or even what he actually said, and Waldo probably doesn’t remember either. Maybe . . . what?”

  “Why are we arguing about it? Let’s just go in and ask. It’d take less time.” Alix was already maneuvering the boat into an empty berth along the wharf.

  No one was in the warehouse, which smelled about the way you’d expect a wholesale seafood distributor to smell, so they climbed the splintery wooden steps to an upstairs office, which was nothing fancy, but nicer than they’d anticipated: a neat row of filing cabinets, a stack of cardboard file cartons in the corner, a nautical map of the central California coastline, and a gigantic old maple desk with two up-to-date computer monitors. In front of the desk was a low table with a chess set on it, at which a man sat, deeply absorbed in playing a game against an iPad.

  “Hello?” Alix said from the doorway. “Excuse us, we—”

  The man, a grizzled old-timer who had a three-day growth of stubble and was wearing a frayed denim shirt and dungarees, and could have served as a model for a picture of the Ancient Mariner, held up his hand. “Give me a minute,” he said, tapping with one finger on his only remaining rook. A moment later, he gave it up, sitting back with folded arms and scowling at the tablet. “They did it to me again,” he said with a shake of his head. “I can’t believe it. Hoist by me own petard. Again.”

  Chris offered a friendly smile. “Whatever a petard is.”

  “It’s a bomb devised by the French in the sixteen hundreds, mostly to breach walls,” he said absently, and then finally looked up at them. “If it goes off prematurely, the soldier placing it gets blown up in the air—‘hoist,’ which was the past participle of ‘hoise,’ which is an archaic form of the current verb ‘to hoist.’ The actual phrase, which is of course from Hamlet, is ‘hoist with his own petard.’” He stood up, smiling.

  “Wow,” Chris said, “did I just get blown away.”

  Alix simply stared mutely at him. Will you ever learn not to judge people by their appearances? she was asking herself. Grizzled he was, she saw now, but hardly ancient, probably in his early sixties, and with a clear, lively intelligence in his eyes.

  Their reactions made him laugh. “I used to teach seventeenth-century lit at UC Santa Cruz,” he explained. “Until I found my true passion.”

  “Which is?” Alix said, because it seemed to be expected.

  “Squid, naturally. How can you ask? Now, how can I help you ladies?”

  “Are we speaking to Mr. Paluzzi?” she as
ked.

  “Tino, yes.”

  “My name is Alix London, Mr. Paluzzi—”

  “Tino.”

  “—Tino, and I really need to get in touch with my uncle, Beniamino Abbatista.”

  Tino turned serious, chewing at the inside of his cheek and shaking his head. “Sorry . . .”

  But Alix, with plenty of practice the day before, kept going. “Sir, I know he doesn’t want to be found because he thinks he’s in trouble, but he’s not, and that’s part of what I want to tell him—if I can only find him.”

  “I hope you do find him, Ms. London—Alix—but I don’t see what I can do to help you.”

  Chris chimed in. “Tino, let’s be honest here. We know Tiny’s working at a low-profile job in Monterey, in the seafood industry, and a friend or a relative named Tino helped him get the job. So—”

  Tino, obviously a man who laughed easily, did so again. “So here you are, in Monterey, at a seafood wholesaler’s, talking to the owner, who happens to be a fellow named Tino. And you suspect there could be a connection, do you?”

  “It does seem possible,” Alix said.

  “Mm.” Tino shrugged, tipping his head first one way, then the other. “I suppose I could ask around for you, see if anybody knows him. I don’t see how that would hurt.”

  A shiver ran up Alix’s spine. It was the first real flash of hope she’d had since they’d started looking. He knows! she thought. “Tino, how about this? If you do find someone who knows him, then perhaps he could pass along to Tiny that I’m trying to find him, and leave it to Tiny to follow up if he wants to. If he doesn’t, then that’s that . . . but he will! Could you do that?”

  “I could do that.”

  “That’s wonderful! Thank you so much. Here’s my card with my phone number, and we’re staying at the Monterey Plaza if he wants to get hold of us there.”

  Tino took the card and examined it. “Sure.”

  “We won’t bother you any more now—you’ve been more than kind—but if you could let us know one way or the other, we’d really—”

  “I have some free time right now, ladies, and I am not about to subject myself to the humiliation of another checkmate by an idiot machine that’s only capable of binary calculations. So why don’t you two take a little walk on the wharf, perhaps stop in for a cup of coffee at the Sand Dab, and come back in half an hour or so? I’ll see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The life of Doryteuthis opalescens, the common California market squid, is no bed of roses. They are as close as makes no difference to the bottom of the marine food chain, barely above plankton and krill. Just about everything they run into would like (and will probably try) to eat them. Against this multitude of predators, they have but one defense, the release of clouds of bluish-black ink in hopes of concealing themselves.

  It is not the world’s most effective defense mechanism to begin with, and is of no use whatsoever against an enemy for which evolution has not prepared them: the voracious purse seines—vast, ringed nets—used by most of the world’s squid boats. If their brains were just a little bigger, they might get at least a little solace out of realizing how unpleasant they make life for the seamen tasked with manhandling these great, slimy, squirmy, dripping, heavy nets—a ton would be a relatively meager haul—from the winches that lift them out of the sea and onto the decks of their boats. From the decks the squid are pumped down into the refrigerated holds, there to begin their transition to calamari.

  The work is not merely arduous but odious as well, not least because of the mucus-laden gouts of ink that the squid spurt in every direction in their desperate, hopeless effort to defend themselves.

  It was after one such exhausting battle aboard the 23 Squiddoo, fifteen miles northwest of Monterey and five miles out to sea, that Tiny Abbatista, aka Santo Mamazza, stood on the deck with his four crewmates as they sluiced themselves down and took off the blue foul-weather gear they had put on over their sweats for protection, and plucked off the fiery, agonizing strands of jellyfish that always managed to get through. Tiny stood a little apart from his joshing and cursing crewmates. He’d only come aboard a few days ago, under somewhat odd circumstances (Why was it so sudden? Why hadn’t they gone through the usual hiring channels?) and he seemed inclined to keep to himself, a favor they willingly granted.

  Frankie, the sixteen-year-old son of the boat’s captain and owner, who had begun to go out with them occasionally (but had yet to offer to take part in the work), came aft, treading gingerly on the slimy deck. “Call for you, dude,” he said, holding out a cell phone to Tiny.

  Tiny stared at it as if it might attack him. “For me? Are you sure? Who is it?”

  “Paluzzi.”

  “Tino Paluzzi? Are you sure?”

  Frankie snorted with impatience. “Dude, what is your problem? You don’t want to take it, don’t take it.”

  “No, I’ll take it,” Tiny said, putting out his hand. He held the phone a cautious six inches from his ear. “Hello?” he said warily. “Tino?”

  “You’re all set. He wants to talk to you,” said the beaming literature professor cum squid wholesaler Celestino Paluzzi. “He’s out near the top of the bay, working on a netter, the 23 Squiddoo, but he’s on a break, and he says this would be a good time to call him.”

  “Thank you so much, Tino,” Alix said. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are.”

  “And I’m equally grateful to you, Alix. He hasn’t confided in me as to what the problem is, and I haven’t pressed him—you know how he can be, I’m sure—but I can tell you this: when I said your name, I heard the first smile in his voice since he arrived. Here, I wrote the number on your card. Oh, but be sure and ask for Paolo; he’s going by Paolo Zamboni while he’s down here.”

  Chris was shaking her head and laughing as they walked back out onto the wharf. “Zamboni? I swear, Alix, this guy has more names than a character in War and Peace.”

  “Ah, can this really be il mio tesorino?” Tiny said huskily when he was handed the phone, and whatever doubtful feelings Alix was having about him dissolved on the spot. My little treasure. She felt suddenly as if she were four years old again, and Tiny’s big palm was ever so affectionately patting her head, and from his immense height, he was smiling and murmuring, “Il mio tesorino,” and she knew that with him there, there was nothing in the world that could harm her. Emotion so flooded her throat that she had trouble speaking.

  “It’s me, all right, Tiny,” she whispered. “Zio Beni.”

  “Are you all right? How did you find me?”

  “Yes, I’m all right, and I’ll tell you how we found you when we see you. We will get to see you, won’t we?”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Chris. My friend. You know Chris.”

  “Does Geoff know I’m here?”

  “Nobody else knows, Tiny, just us. Now: Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, everything’s fine.”

  “Is that right? Everything’s fine? And that’s why you disappeared without a word and I had to ask for Paolo Zamboni to talk to you?”

  Low in his throat, he chuckled. “Well, hey, that’s kind of a long story. I didn’t have much choice. I know I probably worried everybody—”

  “Oh, a little, maybe.”

  “—and you’re probably wondering what the hell’s going on, but I think it’s better, you know, for the time being—”

  “To tell you the truth, Tiny, we already know an awful lot about what’s going on.”

  “You do, huh? Don’t worry,” he said off to one side, “I’ll be there in a minute. I still got ten minutes coming.” And then back to Alix: “Okay, what do you think is going on?”

  “It’s a long story. How about waiting until we get together? Only when will that be? We’ve got our own boat here, a pretty snazzy one; we’re sitting in it right now. How about if we just come out and get you?”

  “You mean right now, this minute? Well, I don’t know . . . No. No w
ay, no. We still gotta process the catch down in the hold. It’s kind of lousy work, and I don’t like to leave the other guys to do it. Give me, say, three hours, okay?”

  No, it wasn’t okay, Alix thought, but she also thought it was unwise to push Tiny, who still sounded a little skittish. She didn’t want to lose him again. “Yes, all right,” she said. “Where are you? Can you give me the map coordinates?”

  “Yeah, give me a minute.”

  “He’s game,” Alix said to Chris with her hand over the phone. “I think it’s all going to work out.”

  “Never doubted it.”

  “Alix?” Tiny was back. “Okay, you got a pen and paper?”

  Alix made scribbling motions to Chris, who went rummaging in her purse and came up surprisingly quickly with a miniature notebook that had a toothpick-sized pen attached with a little chain.

  “Yes, let’s hear them.”

  “Okay, if you’re still near Paluzzi’s place, then we’re about fifteen miles north of you, way out in the bay. What?” he said to someone on the Squiddoo, and then to Alix, “Okay, north-northwest, I guess. Here’s the GPS coordinates.” He read them off with painstakingly slow clarity, while Alix repeated them for Chris, who punched the location into the digital chart plotter built into the Lancia’s console: 36° 51’ 43.1964” north, 121° 56’ 43.7856” west.

  “All right, Tiny,” Alix said, her optimism beginning to sprout again. “Look for us in three hours. And don’t worry, we’ve got good news for you. You’ll stay right there, right?”

  He laughed. “Where am I gonna go? I’m lucky if I can dog paddle twenty feet.”

  “That’s great,” Chris said when the call ended. “We should go in and thank Paluzzi, and then maybe get that cup of coffee we were talking about. And then maybe you ought to call Ted instead of waiting for his call. I think he’ll want to know we actually found Tiny for him.” She smiled. “We did, didn’t we? Congratulations, partner.”

  “We sure did. I wonder how happy Tiny is going to be with that, though. He’s not exactly going to be wild about the idea of meeting up with the FBI.”