by Aaron Elkins
"Non c'è di che."
By eight-thirty I had settled my bill, made arrangements for a room when I got back on Sunday night before flying on to Amsterdam the following morning, and left my bags with the bell captain, who wrote out a receipt and placed them with the rest of the luggage that lined one wall of the reception lobby. Then I went into the dining area and had breakfast, a good one: juice, a bucket-sized cup of strong caffè latte, and a basket of crusty, warm rolls, toast, jam, and cheese.
All the same I didn't linger over it. This was, in fact, the first meal I 'd had there. The Hotel Europa, as Calvin had implied, was not big on ambience. The building was an early nineteenth-century palazzo that had been reasonably well- maintained, with large public rooms, head-high paneling, and decent nineteenth-century fakes of good eighteenth- century paintings hung high on the walls. But there was a depressing, anonymous feel to the place, perhaps from the 1950s imitation-leather sofas, or from the total absence of amenities like flowers, or vases, or rugs, or ornaments on the tables. If you've ever stayed in a Moscow hotel, you know the feeling. Everyone else in the place seemed to be a businessman in for the trade fair, which apparently had to do with mattress and cushion manufacture, or so it seemed from the snatches of conversation I heard around me.
I finished the last of the coffee and walked to the Municipal Archaeological Museum a couple of blocks away on Via Archiginnasio. It was the only museum in Bologna I'd never been to, and I was anxious to see the well-known head of the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV it had on display. Well, moderately anxious. And once I'd seen it my interest in the remaining Egyptian exhibits quickly waned. There is, you have to admit, a certain numbing sameness about pharaonic heads. After you've looked at them for a few minutes, you're no longer sure if you're looking at Thutmose II or Thutmose III, or maybe even Amenhotep I. You don't much care, either.
There I am, being provincial again. I apologize. Pharaonic heads can be terrific, but I guess I just wasn't in a museum mood for once. After a few more minutes, with over two hours to kill, I walked several hundred feet farther down Via Archiginnasio, sat down at an outdoor table at the crowded Caffe Zanarini, ordered an espresso that I didn't really want, and thought about how to pass the time.
The café looked out over the Piazza Galvani, already buzzing with streams of well-dressed people, mostly women, mostly elegant, who had the steely look of serious Saturday shoppers in their eyes. At the center was a modest statue of the locally born Galvani, and beyond that, at the corner of Via Farina was an ancient but ordinary-looking apartment building with a marble plaque that was too small to read from where I sat. I knew what it said, however: Guido Reni had died there on August 18, 1642. At the other end of the piazza loomed the facadeless back of the basilica with its crazy jumble of 600 years' worth of changed plans, there for all the world to see in the stops and starts and metamorphoses of its naked brickwork.
It was the kind of scene that ordinarily would have occupied me for a reflective hour, but this morning I was restless, impatient to get on to Sicily. I jumped up after a few minutes, went to a telephone, and called the airport. Yes, I was told, there was an earlier Aer Mediterranea flight to Catania, departing at 10:15 A.M., and yes, they would be happy to reassign me to it.
That left an hour. I walked quickly back to the hotel, picked up my bags, and got the desk clerk to get me a taxi. I was at the Borgo Panigale Airport at 9:45, which left barely enough time, because security precautions in Europe, and in Italy in particular, are painstaking. If I'd been on an international flight, or had had anything but carry-on luggage, I wouldn't have had a chance to make it. As it was, I had to stand in a men-only line (the women had their own) to enter a booth where I was patted down and gone over with a metal-sensitive wand. Then I was directed to another line, this one heterosexual, first to have my bags go through the X-ray scanner, and then to put them on a counter where they would be opened like everyone else's and meticulously gone through.
Almost. I got as far as the X-ray machine. My suit bag had just come through the scanner without incident, and I was waiting for my old red duffel bag, when the conveyor belt stopped moving. A few seconds passed.
"C'è una problema?" I asked the woman behind the machine.
She stopped her whispered conference with a guard. "No, davvero, " I was told with a cheerful smile. "Va bene."
All the same, the conveyor wasn't moving. I checked my watch, wondering if I'd make the flight after all. Well, no real problem if I didn't. I'd just catch the one I'd originally planned to take. I realized I'd forgotten to call Ugo about the change, so it might not make a difference anyway. Still, I would have preferred to be up and away rather than waiting around the airport.
My thoughts were going along in this lazy manner when the area erupted into noise and activity.
"Everybody out!" one of the nearby guards shouted suddenly in Italian. "Hurry, back to the lobby!"
Travelers in this part of the world do not need to be told such things twice. The orderly line flew apart as people scrambled helter-skelter for the main terminal. The woman behind the X-ray scanner turned and fled with the rest of them. I started to do the same thing but found myself tangled up with my neighbors, as did many others. There was quite a bit of yelling going on now as people tried desperately to unsnarl their arms and legs from other people's luggage straps.
"Scusi, " I shouted above the noise, and tugged hard to free my arm. It didn't budge. The grip on it tightened. So did the grasp on my other arm. Startled, I glanced around and found a uniformed guard, a big one, on either side of me, holding tight.
"Che c'è? " I stammered. What's the matter?
For answer I was pulled roughly out of the line and pushed down the passageway in the opposite direction from everyone else.
"Faccia presto! " I was told. Hurry up.
It wasn't as if I had any choice. They had never let go of my elbows, and now they hustled me down the aisle between them. I can't say my heels were actually dragging on the floor, but if I'd tried to hold my ground they certainly would have been. These were big men, and they meant business. I could see two other uniformed guards trotting close behind us with semiautomatic weapons unslung and at the ready. Not teenagers this time, but grown men, square jawed and intense. Their eyes roved nervously, looking for—what? Fellow terrorists trying to rescue me?
Another guard, a senior officer from the look of him, also moved grimly along with us. Five armed men, for God's sake, and all of them convincingly out of sorts. A bomb, I thought dazedly. Somebody's planted a bomb in my duffel bag.
"Che c'è?" I pleaded again. I tapped my chest. "Sono americano! "
This had all the effect it deserved, which was none, except possibly to increase the tempo of the quick-marching. At such times one's life flashes before one's eyes. In my case it was the previous two hours, starting with the request from Mr. Marchetti that I leave early. Even at the time, it had struck me as unusual, and now all I could think about was how my bags had lain in the packed lobby for almost an hour, nominally under the supervision of the bell captain, but in reality available to anyone who chose to tinker with them. The duffel bag would have been especially easy prey. I'd lost the key to the tiny padlock years ago, and had never bothered to get another. I used the bag for underwear, socks, and shoes; nothing valuable.
I was brought to a jolting stop in front of a gray metal door that said PRIVATO on it, then made to wait while one of the guards unlocked it, and then shoved roughly inside. The older officer and the guards with the semiautomatics crowded into the bare little room with me. There was only a metal table in the center with a couple of battered chairs around it. These were not put into immediate use. Instead, I was jammed up against a wall and patted down again, this time more harshly.
"Il passaporto," the officer said and stuck out his hand.
I handed it to him. He barely glanced at it before putting it in his pocket. He was a bulky man of about fifty, tense and breathing hard.
"
Parla italiano?" he asked. His lips barely moved when he spoke. He was keeping a tight rein on his anger. With each breath his nostrils flared.
I nodded. I was feeling less flustered, more pointedly frightened. The room was very small and private, the guns very big, the men hard-bitten and tough-looking. I knew that one of the reasons the police forces of Italy had put together their admirable record against terrorists was that they did not always observe the same niceties of behavior toward accused or suspect persons as did, say, the police in America.
If you had asked me how I felt about that a few minutes earlier, when I was just another passenger at an airport in a city that had suffered more than its share of terrorist horrors, I would have told you I felt just fine about it; no problem. But now that I appeared to be a suspected terrorist myself, I seemed to have developed a finical concern for the civil rights of detainees, or prisoners, or whatever it was.
"I don't know what you found in that bag," I began in Italian, "but—"
Sit down, I was told.
I sat. One of the guards moved behind my chair, out of my sight. The other continued to watch me coldly from across the table. I could smell the oil from the guns.
"This morning," I said, "my bags were left in the lobby—"
Abruptly the senior officer took off his cap and slammed it on the table. I jumped.
"I want to know what activates that bomb," he said tightly. "I want to know how to dismantle it."
So there actually was a bomb. In my old red duffel bag, traveling companion since my college days. I'd understood that, of course, yet I hadn't really believed it. I still didn't really believe it. A single, cold drop of sweat rolled down my side.
"I don't know anything about a bomb," I said numbly. "All I know—"
He leaned forward suddenly and twisted the collar of my jacket in his hand. "You bastard, I've got two good men on that thing, you understand?" He was a squarish man with close-cropped gray hair that grew low on his forehead, and thick, curled ears. When he spoke, knobs of gristle shifted and crackled in his cheeks like lumps of tobacco. He gathered more material into his fist and twisted, hurting my neck, forcing my face closer to his. "Do you have any idea what's going to happen to you if they get hurt?"
You will understand when I tell you that I felt very much alone at that moment, and scared, too. Big, angry, powerful men and brutal weapons seemed to fill the anonymous little room. I felt like a character in a Kafka story, intimidated and confused and acutely aware that the situation was not under my control. But I was offended, too, and that stiffened my spine. I stared steadily back at him, waiting for him to let go of my jacket.
When he did, I spoke. "I don't know anything about a bomb," I said as coolly as I could. "My bag was left in the lobby of the Hotel Europa for an hour this morning. This was at the instruction of a Mr. Marchetti—or somebody who called himself Mr. Marchetti—the assistant manager."
"You left it open?" Even the skepticism was an improvement. At least he was listening.
"Unlocked. There wasn't anything valuable in it. Look, I'm an art curator. I'm here working with the Pinacoteca and the Ministry of Fine Arts. The carabinieri will vouch for me. You can talk to Colonel Antuono."
His heavy gray eyebrows unclenched themselves for the first time. "You're working with Colonel Antuono?"
"Uh . . . well, yes, you could say that."
It was delivered with less than perfect assurance. The heavy eyebrows drew ominously together again.
Antuono had given me his card, on which he'd penciled his Bologna telephone number. I took it out of my wallet and handed it to the officer. "Go ahead and call him."
There was a telephone on the wall. He went to it at once, but turned and leveled the card at me before picking up the receiver. "If you're wasting our time, if one of my men is harmed . . ."
"Look, if I knew there was a bomb in that bag, do you think I'd calmly walk up, put it on the X-ray counter, and just hang around waiting to see what happened?"
He considered this for a moment, then picked up the telephone and spoke without dialing. "Cristin, get me a Colonel Cesare Antuono, two-three-nine-two-eight-five. I'll take it in the west office."
The receiver was slammed back into its holder. "You wait here," he told me, and headed for the door.
"I have a ten-fifteen plane," I said, not very hopefully.
"Not today." He turned to the guards. "Stefano, you stay here. Be careful. Don't speak to him. Call me each ten minutes until I return. Maurizio, I want you outside. Both of you, be alert; we don't yet know what's happening."
Stefano followed his instructions to the letter. He pushed one of the chairs against the far wall, about ten feet from me, and sat down to watch me relentlessly, holding the semi-automatic in his lap, one hand on the barrel, the other at the finger guard; a posture that did not encourage conversation. His eye never left me, even during the telephonic check-ins. There were four calls in all; forty slow, silent minutes, lots of time to think.
With more than enough to think about. Somebody wanted me dead. Enough to blow up a few hundred innocent people who happened to be on the same airplane. There were other possibilities, of course: that someone else on the plane was the target, or that this was a terrorist action not aimed at any individual, and that—in either case—the selection of my bag for the bomb was random, or if not quite random, then merely a matter of convenience and accessibility.
The second telephone call hadn't been made yet before I rejected this as not credible. If I were just a tourist, or on some other business, then maybe it might have happened that way. But I'd been asking a lot of questions about the thefts, I'd been seen with Antuono, and I'd already been involved in a murderous street assault—during which, as Max had pointed out, I'd seen the faces of our attackers. I'd even tried to identify them at the police station. With all of that going on, it was asking too much to treat the finding of a bomb in my bag as no more than an unhappy coincidence. There was no question in my mind that I was the target, and that it was related to the thefts.
Yet the idea of killing so many people just to get to me was so monstrous I couldn't make myself believe that either. What could I know that anyone found so dangerous? Max's idea that I could identify the two thugs didn't hold water; I'd already failed to do it once. Did someone think he'd told me the names of the five people who knew his security arrangements? Well, he hadn't, not that I hadn't asked, and even if he had, how was anyone to know I hadn't already been to Antuono with it? So what did I know? What did someone think I knew? Or was someone afraid of what I might find out? Well, like what, for instance? And if it wasn't something I knew or might find out, then what was it?
This got me nowhere. I took a different tack. Who knew that I was flying to Sicily this morning? That question gave me more answers than I knew what to do with. When I thought back over my conversations of the last few days I realized I'd blabbed to everyone about it. I'd told Salvatorelli, I'd told Luca and Di Vecchio, I'd told Clara, I hadn't missed anyone. I'd told Max, I'd told Calvin, I'd told Tony. Not that I entertained any suspicions about the last three, but who knew whom else they'd mentioned it to?
Of them all, in fact, there was no one, even Salvatorelli, whom I could seriously cast as a murderer in my mind. Certainly not as a mass murderer. Yet one of them must have . . .
Croce. Filippo Croce, the sleazy art dealer from Ferrara, the man with the pointy-toed shoes who'd come to Antuono with his story about the Pittura Metafisica paintings in the Salvatorelli warehouse. Had he still been in the room when I'd told Clara I'd be visiting Ugo, or had he already left? No, he'd been there. It had been right at the beginning; he hadn't yet delivered his harangue on revolutionary perspectival structure. Filippo Croce .. .
When the door finally opened, it wasn't the senior officer who came in, but Colonel Antuono, in his natty uniform, but looking cross and tired in spite of it. "You can go," he muttered to Stefano, who rose meekly and left. I heaved a sigh, grateful to see the last o
f the semiautomatic.
"You understand I have no jurisdiction here, in this matter of the bomb," he said. "My official concern is with the pictures."
"I understand." Whatever the reason he was there, I was glad to see him. Under these circumstances he qualified as an old friend.
He pulled the vacated chair up to the table and wearily sat down. The tunic strained across his stooped shoulders. He undid a button. He tapped slowly on the table, regarding me with something close to resignation.
"Why do you do these things?" he said at last, very quietly.
"Do what? What did I do?" I said, not that he seemed to expect an answer. "All I know is, at eight o'clock this morning I got a call from a man who said he was Mr. Marchetti, the assistant—"
"There is no Mr. Marchetti. The name of the assistant manager is Pugliese."
"Well, sure, it was just a ploy. I've already figured that out. It was just a way for someone to put a bomb in my bag." When I heard my own words, I came perilously close to letting out a nervous giggle. What was I doing in a situation like this?
Antuono wondered the same thing. "And why," he asked with testy patience, "would someone wish to do such a thing?"
"I have no idea why, but I think I might know who." I told him what I'd been thinking about when he came in.
"Again you persist with Croce," he said when I'd finished. "Why would Filippo Croce want to do you harm?"
"I don't know, goddammit! Didn't I just say that?" I was getting a little testy myself. It hadn't been my idea of a wonderful morning, and the idea that someone had tried to end my life—and was likely to try again—was still filtering through the unreality of the last hour. "But he was right there when I told Clara I'd be on that plane."
"And no one else knew? Only Croce and signora Gozzi?"
"Well, no, I also told Salvatorelli—"
"Ah? Is that so?" He took out a little notebook and scribbled in it.
"—and Benedetto Luca and Amedeo Di Vecchio."
"Luca . . . Di Vecchio. " He nodded without looking up and kept on writing.