by John Case
‘When did this happen?’ Lassiter asked, and Bepi translated.
‘Five years ago.’
‘And after that?’
The superintendent shrugged. ‘Niente.’
‘Ask him if he knows where the sister went.’
Bepi did, and the superintendent muttered a string of si-si-si’s. Gesturing for them to follow, he led the way to his office. He took a ledger from the bookshelf, paged through it until he found the names he was looking for, and turned it around for Lassiter and Bepi to see:
Grimaldi #601–03 – 114 Via Genova, Roma
Buccio #314 – 1062 Ave. Cristoforo Colombo, Roma
Thumping the addresses with his forefinger, the superintendent shook his head disapprovingly and made a face. ‘No good,’ he said in English.
Their car was parked, Italian-style, where Bepi had left it – on the sidewalk, just up the street from the apartment house. A pretty girl was watching it for them, standing in the doorway of a produce shop, ready to intervene with the traffic police. ‘Eh, Cinzia,’ Bepi said, displaying his gap-toothed smile. ‘Grazie, eh?’
An older woman, stern, the proprietress of the florist shop next door, surged out onto the sidewalk and began haranguing them. Bepi said something in a high voice and ran forward, his butt tucked in, as if she was whipping him. The girl laughed gaily, and even the old woman smiled. Bepi held up a finger, went into the shop with the old woman and emerged with a small poinsettia plant, the pot wrapped in red foil.
‘I thought – for the sister,’ he said. ‘Flowers almost always get me in the door.’
Bepi took his time arranging the plant on the floor in front of the backseat, getting newspapers and plastic bags from the trunk to make sure no dirt escaped into the car’s interior.
*
It was at least a forty-five-minute drive, and when Bepi stopped the car, they were in front of a shabby high-rise on the outskirts of Rome. The building was a gray monster, totally without ornamentation. There was graffiti everywhere, and litter – and no attempt at landscaping. Not even grass grew around the building; there was only the sunbaked dirt and asphalt.
Bepi pushed a button and spoke animatedly into a battered grille. A moment later the door gave off a harsh buzz and Bepi yanked it open.
‘What did you tell her?’
Bepi shrugged. ‘The truth. We have some questions about her brother Franco. She was excited, in fact. Did we have news of him? I said yes, in a way.’ He lifted his eyebrows and held the poinsettia in front of him. The elevator smelled of urine.
Grimaldi’s sister, Angela, was thirtyish. She wore a pink track suit and a heavy gold chain around her neck and had a haggard look about her. Bepi presented the poinsettia, which was accepted with a lot of fuss. There was a spate of discussion between the two – which seemed to resolve itself when Bepi acceded to her insistence that glasses of limonata were in order.
This took quite a long time, and while they waited Bepi bounced his eyes around the room and back to Lassiter. The place was a mess, the disorder so profound that it spoke of despair. There was a small plastic Christmas tree in the corner, and huge, elaborately framed photographs of children on the wall. Everywhere else there were toys and piles of clothing, newspapers, dirty dishes. From an unseen room came the inane melody of a Nintendo game.
When at last the drinks were brought out on a gilded wooden tray, and they were all seated in the wrecked dining alcove, Angela inclined her head, arranged her body in the chair to its best advantage, and fingered the gold chain at her neck.
Bepi said something by way of introduction, and she tossed him a brittle smile. She twirled a lock of black hair around her finger. Bepi gestured and talked with great earnestness. Lassiter caught the word fratello.
Angela became animated and spoke passionately, her hands accompanying her words in broad, slashing gestures. She sounded bitter, but all Bepi said by way of translation was, ‘She wants to know, what is it now, what has her big brother done now? He has taken away her beautiful apartment. Does he want this one, too?’
‘I don’t get it,’ Lassiter said. ‘What’s she talking about?’
The woman spit out a phrase. Then she sighed and her face took on a resentful expression. She jammed a thumb at her heart.
‘Her brother destroyed her life,’ Bepi said.
More rapid-fire discussion.
‘Franco was very generous,’ Bepi said. ‘He bought her the apartment in Parioli – where we were before. And then, about five years ago, he has a . . . uh, religious experience.’
‘A what?’
‘He becomes very devout. He takes Angela’s apartment back. He sells it and gives the money to charity. The same with her car. And his car. And his apartment. He gives everything to one of those religious groups – and says everyone should live like a monk. Then . . . nothing. He rents a room in the slums. She fights with her husband. Her husband walks out. She’s homeless. Then she’s here. With the bambini. She says’ – and here Angela’s voice began to rise – ‘she says the pious shithead ruined her life. He might as well have shot her.’ Bepi took a deep breath and offered Angela a handkerchief.
Lassiter shook his head. Grimaldi’s sister was obviously telling the truth, or the truth as she knew it, but she was just as obviously mistaken. Monks didn’t slaughter children in their beds, and once they’d taken a vow of poverty, they sure as hell didn’t walk around with $20,000 in cash hidden in the false bottom of an overnight bag. That’s what Lassiter thought. But what he said was, ‘Tell her I’m trying to find out if her brother had some connection to my sister. Tell her my sister’s name is – was – Kathy Lassiter.’
More discussion. Lassiter caught the words ‘Stati Uniti,’ but the woman looked baffled and shook her head decisively.
Bepi shrugged. ‘No.’
‘Tell her the “pious shithead” murdered my sister and her little boy,’ Lassiter said. ‘Tell her he’s wanted for murder.’
The discussion that followed was punctuated by one explosion of skepticism after another. Angela’s eyes flew back and forth to the ceiling as she shook her head dismissively. Non e possibile. Fantastico. The woman finished with an odd little praying gesture with her hands, rolling her eyes like a Goya.
‘She says it’s true, Franco was a very hard man in the past – very hard – but what you are saying? This is impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s – practically a priest, she says. He took vows of chastity, of poverty. He . . . em’ – Bepi made quotations marks in the air – ‘“polishes his soul.” He lives in another world. He no longer cares about his poor sister. He no longer cares about his nephews or his nieces. He says God will provide for them.’ Bepi shrugged expressively. ‘She doesn’t mean to speak ill of the Church, of course.’ He finished with a shrug. ‘She says you have the wrong person.’
The woman had still more to say, and it was equally emphatic and emotional.
‘He cannot have murdered anyone,’ Bepi translated when she finished. ‘This is not possible because it would send him to Hell. She says her brother is a fucking saint – that’s a quote – and that he – I don’t know this word – hits himself for impure thoughts.’
‘Whips himself.’
‘Yes! He whips himself for very small sins – so a great sin – a mortal sin – naturally, this is not possible.’
There was nothing else to say. Angela glanced at her watch and got to her feet, signaling that the interview was over. There was an exchange of effusive thank-yous – for the poinsettia plant and the limonatas – and then Lassiter and Bepi were back on the grubby street.
‘So what are you thinking?’ Bepi asked as they walked back to the car.
In fact, Lassiter was thinking of the wire-transfer slip that had fallen from Grimaldi’s passport. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘why someone like Grimaldi, who’s taken a vow of poverty, would have a Swiss bank account.’
17
HE AND BEPI shook ha
nds outside the Hassler.
In the car they’d agreed that Bepi – continuing to be discreto – would chase down a few loose ends on Lassiter’s behalf. For one thing, the Italian would call the ‘estranged’ members of Grimaldi’s family that were listed on the State Department’s dossier. Maybe they were back in touch.
As for Lassiter, he planned to fly to Switzerland in the morning, if he could book it.
‘Not to check out Grimaldi’s Swiss bank account!?’ Bepi said, shocked. ‘Because, you know – it’s . . .’ He wagged his head hopelessly.
Lassiter said, ‘Of course not,’ although he wasn’t being entirely candid. ‘Grimaldi owned a house there, too.’
‘Oh, that’s right,’ Bepi said, distracted by the pretty girl collecting signatures for the Spanish Steps petition. ‘I remember – near St. Moritz. And then?’
Lassiter said he didn’t know.
The girl was tugging on Bepi’s arm, cajoling him, flirting, and Bepi allowed himself to be dragged toward the young man holding a clipboard. He turned and looked back at Lassiter with a shrug and a grin.
The flight to Zurich was only an hour, and it took Lassiter almost that long to find a hotel. The major hotels were booked. In the end he took a room at the Florida, a pleasant if slightly seedy older hotel, just up the street from Limmat Quai. He’d stayed there once before, when Lassiter Associates had worked a case involving the Steelworkers Union and a West Virginia aluminum foundry owned by a reclusive Swiss billionaire.
The room was much like the one he remembered from that trip: unexpectedly large, with a single plate-glass window that looked out toward the Zurichsee, a few blocks away. It might have been a beautiful view of the lake, but the glass was fogged with moisture, and the air with snow.
Zurich was one of Lassiter’s favorite cities, though he couldn’t say exactly why. Gray and stony, ancient and aloof, it crouched at the edge of a dark lake, its icy waters fed by the Alps. It was a city in love with high culture, more German than Swiss, and made for walking. Lassiter tossed his overnight bag into the armoire and left the hotel to wander along the quai. A light snow sifted out of the colorless sky, settling on his shoulders. Heading in the general direction of the Old Town, he watched a pair of swans gliding on the cold, black river. Maybe it was the neighborhood he was in, but it seemed as if Zurich’s biggest industries were lithographs, books, and antique musical instruments, with herbal remedies close behind.
Before long he crossed the Münster Bridge into the narrow and cobblestoned streets of the Old Town, with its supernaturally expensive shops. He was hoping the walk would raise his mood, and it did – for a while – but in the end he just felt colder. The shops were beautiful, but under the circumstances, pointless: he needed nothing, and there was no one to give anything to.
He took a turn onto the Bahnhofstrasse and walked for blocks past a series of brilliantly illuminated Christmas windows, until he found himself standing in front of a building that he hadn’t realized he’d been looking for: the Crédit Suisse branch where, four months earlier, Franco Grimaldi had received a wire transfer.
He wasn’t sure why he’d wanted to see it: it was just a bank. But standing there on the dark Zurich street, knowing that it was a part of Grimaldi’s world, that he’d come and gone through those very doors, gave Lassiter hope. Like the bare room on Via Genova, this was one of the killer’s places – and Lassiter felt close to him here.
He ate an uninspired dinner in the hotel’s dining room, and asked the concierge about the best way to Zuoz. The concierge recommended against driving all the way. ‘You’ll be quicker on the train, at least to Chur, and perhaps drive from there.’ He would arrange the journey, arrange for the return of Lassiter’s rental car. The Swiss were famously incurious, but the concierge, perhaps buoyed by Lassiter’s generous tip, made small talk. ‘Zuoz is beautiful. You go for the skiing? Yes?’
‘Yes.’ What else was he to say?
‘It’s not so good this year – for the snow – but there is always the glacier at Pontresina.’
They talked like this for a few minutes, after which Lassiter returned to his room. Reaching into the minibar, he came up with a miniature of scotch, and tumbled its contents into a water glass. Then he sat back, and dialed Max Lang.
Max was president of the International Brotherhood of Bank Clerks and Financial Services Workers – a Geneva-based trade secretariat with more than 2.3 million workers in countries as far apart as Norway, India, and the U.S. – which meant that Max spent most of his time, as he put it, ‘flying through the night from one speech to another, one airport to the next.’
The steelworkers’ case had been different. Max hadn’t been asked to give a speech, but to end a war in which fifteen hundred workers had been locked out of their jobs in Emporia, West Virginia. Lassiter Associates had been hired by the union to investigate management. From West Virginia, where the plant was located, the paper trail led to Switzerland. This was surprising in itself; further investigations showed that the plant was secretly owned by a Dutch industrialist – a right-wing playboy who liked nothing better than busting unions.
Lang’s secretariat – which, after all, represented bank tellers, clerks, cashiers, actuaries, and insurance workers, among others – had nothing to do with the steelworkers. But as ‘a fraternal courtesy,’ its president had gone out on a limb to intervene with the billionaire’s bankers – now there, Max had a lot of clout. Those bankers were persuaded that union-busting was really not in their best, long-term interests.
The bankers had listened, and in the end they came around. The deadlock was broken. The workers got their jobs back. And Max Lang looked like a hero.
‘Max – it’s Joe Lassiter.’
‘Joe . . . heyyyy!’
‘How you been?’
‘Excellent. You have another case? Like Ravenswood?’
‘No.’
‘Too bad. We really fucked him, didn’t we?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, we focked him.’
‘In fact, Max, that’s what we did.’
‘Because he deserved it!’
‘Right.’
‘Okay! So fock him.’
Lassiter laughed: he’d forgotten about Max’s penchant for imitating Al Pacino in Scarface.
‘Oh, Joe,’ Max said, chortling at the memory. ‘That was a good time. The best time! Happy endings.’
‘Indeed.’
‘So . . .’
‘I need a favor, Max.’
‘Whatever –’
‘It’s kinda big. You can say no.’
Max grunted. ‘Ask.’
‘It isn’t something we can talk about on the phone.’
‘Okay.’
‘Lemme ask you something: you still use PGP?’
‘Until something better comes along,’ Max replied.
‘Same key as before?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I’m going to send you some E-mail – still got the same address?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Great. And then . . . maybe we can get together in Geneva.’
‘Wunderbar!’
‘Maybe in a couple of days. I’ll call ahead.’
‘Good.’
‘And like I said, if this is something you don’t feel right about – I mean, it’s important, but –’
‘Will you send me the fockin’ file?’
‘I’ll send it!’
‘So send it!’
When they’d hung up, Lassiter took out his portable computer, created a file – grimaldi – and typed a short letter:
max –
it’s a heavy-lift, but . . . i need a history on an account at the bahnhofstrasse branch of the credit suisse in zurich. i thought one of your members might be able to pull it up. (!) anyway . . . the account belongs to an italian. his name is franco grimaldi. the account number is Q6784–319. and what i’m particularly interested in is a wire transfer that was made in july. the amount was $50,0
00, and i need to know who sent it.
joe
Lassiter saved grimaldi to his hard disc and changed directories, switching into In-cipher, pgp. This was a proprietary version of Pretty Good Privacy, a powerful, public-key encryption program that was all but unbreakable. And it had better be. What he was asking Max Lang to do wasn’t just a crime. It amounted to an act of war – an attack on Switzerland’s very raison d’être: bank secrecy. For Max to even discuss the possibility could cost him his job, and so Lassiter encrypted the message on his hard disc. It was a simple matter: he called up the Main Window, clicked on Encrypt, and selected grimaldi as the file to be encoded. A dialogue box flashed onto the screen, and he scrolled through a long list until he came to [email protected]. With Lang’s E-mail address highlighted, he hit the carriage return, and Working appeared in the center of the screen, blinking on and off. When the word disappeared and the file had been encrypted, he returned to the first menu and clicked on Settings. What he was about to do was more for Max’s protection than his own: to make sure that Max didn’t decrypt the file and save the plain-text copy to his hard disc, Lassiter selected Advanced Options and flagged the file ‘Eyes Only.’ This meant that, once decrypted, the plain text could be displayed and read on the computer screen, but it could not be saved as a file.
With these precautions in place, he sent the file on its way. When he got to Geneva, the answer would be waiting for him. Or maybe not. It was, after all, a heavy lift.
The next morning, Lassiter had breakfast in his room and telephoned Riordan.
‘You shouldn’t of bothered,’ Riordan said. ‘Update? How we doin’?’ He snorted. ‘I got nothin’. I got zero. The only thing I can tell you is, they found the nurse’s car in a ditch, somewhere north of Hagerstown.’
‘And Grimaldi?’
‘Vanished. That’s the word the papers are using, and that’s what I’m using. The guy vanished, okay? And it’s a fucking disaster. We got an officer murdered in the line of duty – second one in a week. It’s Christmas, and there’s two funerals. Two! Think about it: we got brave mother No. 1 over here, brave mother No. 2 over there, a sobbing young widow, a fatherless baby all over the place – and what are we lookin’ for? A perp with a face like a pork rind!’ He snorted. ‘Not that anyone’s seen him – ’cause they haven’t.’ Riordan paused to catch his breath. ‘So, how ’bout you? You gonna brighten my day with a lead? Where the hell are you, anyway?’