by Eve Langlais
“The one that the city’s elite attends every year in order to keep them at the height of their power. The one that has been hushed over and covered up for the decades, perhaps even centuries. The one that I’m going to expose in a cover story people will be talking about for months.”
The look on Gianni’s face told her that was about the last thing he expected her to say. He recovered quickly, letting the startled expression slide off his face and taking a sip of his wine to give himself time to think. Alex had used that delay tactic enough times herself to recognize it in another.
When he put his glass back down he looked at her and said, “You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am,” she replied.
She explained how she’d put herself on the line in front of her editor and how important it was to go back with a story with some real substance to it.
Gianni waited until she was finished and then laughed. “Same old Alessandra. Always looking for a way to put the men around you in their proper place.”
The remark was said without rancor and so Alex didn’t take any offense, even if it did strike a chord. Gianni had always been one of those “go along to get along” kinds of people and Alex simply wasn’t built that way. If she wanted something, she went after it, just as she was doing now. People like Gianni didn’t always understand what, to them, looked like single mindedness, often at the expense of others.
“Ha ha. Very funny,” she replied. “So are you going to help me out or not?”
He held up his hands, palms up, and shrugged. “I’d love to, Alessandra, really I would, but what you are looking for doesn’t exist. You’re chasing nothing more than rumors and fairy tales.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
She leaned forward, catching Gianni’s gaze with her own. She made sure he could see the steel in her eyes as she said, “Look Gianni, save the B.S. for the tourists, huh? You know as well as I do that there is a lot more going on behind the scenes in this city than most people will ever realize. We’re not talking about the conspiracy theory of the week here; rumors about this group have been around for decades!”
“So what?” Gianna said. “Rumors that the CIA killed Kennedy have been around for decades, too. Does that mean that the CIA really did it?”
Given that they probably did, that would be a yes, Alex thought. She almost said it aloud, too, but then realized it probably wouldn’t go over so well with Gianni and managed to keep from doing so. Gianni was too busy laying out the rest of his argument to even notice.
“Just because people believe it doesn’t make it true. If it did, the world would be even more fucked up than it already is. I mean, think about what you are saying, Alessandra. Do you really believe that there are people out there using some kind of ritual magic to make them successful?”
That was a little too far, even for her. “No, of course not! But what I believe doesn’t matter. It’s only what they believe that’s important.”
Gianni frowned. “Come again?”
“You’re a cop, Gianni. You know better than I do that people believe all kinds of crazy shit. From UFOs to Bigfoot, pyramid power to zombies; the list goes on and on.”
“So?”
“So what’s the one thing that each and every one of those groups has in common? I’ll tell you – they’re all true believers. You could talk to them until you’re blue in the face, show them all the evidence available in the world that what they believe in just isn’t real, and they won’t hear a single word you say. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t real – they believe it is and that belief governs how they think and act and feel about the subject.”
Gianni grudgingly admitted that she was right.
“Back to my point then. It doesn’t matter if we believe that you can gain fame and fortune by participating in an ancient ritual. It only matters that others do. And if they do, they’re probably going to keep doing it, year in and year out. Hence the reason the rumors persist. And where there’s smoke… ”
He stared at her for a long moment and then said, “You’re crazy, you know that?”
At that moment Alex knew she had him but she resisted the urge to celebrate; she didn’t want to annoy him. Instead, she reached out across the table and took his hand in hers.
“Look, I know it sounds nuts, but just dig around a little for me, will ya? You know this city and the people in it better than anyone else I know; if someone can get to the bottom of this, it’s you. You can do that for me, right? For old times’ sake?”
Gianni sighed. “Okay, fine,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender. “I’ll do it but only on the condition that you forget about all this nonsense and spend the week with me here in Venice if I don’t find anything to substantiate the rumors. Deal?”
“Deal!” Alex said, smiling.
He’d find something. She knew he would.
If she wanted to keep her job he had to!
Chapter Three
After parting with Gianni, Alex walked back to the Grand Canal and caught another vaporetto, this time to the Venezia–Santa Lucia train station where she bought a ticket for the next train to Mestre, Venice’s industrial suburb on the edge of the mainland. She waited less than ten minutes and about the same time later she reached her destination.
Once in Mestre she exited the train station and flagged down a cab, asking the driver to take her to the regional offices of Il Gazzettino, Venice’s most prominent daily newspaper. The ride took a little longer than usual, thanks to some unexpected afternoon traffic, but Alex didn’t mind as it gave her time to organize her thoughts for the work ahead of her.
She’d been away from the city for so long that she no longer knew who was who among Venetian society. That made it a bit difficult to write an expose about them and their participation in an ancient ritual, so she intended to use the afternoon to rectify that problem.
Arriving at her destination, she showed her Global News Network press credentials to the receptionist and told her that she was interested in reading back issues to help with research for a holiday story she was doing on Venice. After getting approval from the senior editor on duty, the receptionist showed her to the archives and told her with a smile to take as long as she wanted; the office were open twenty–four/seven.
Alex started with the last two weeks, going through the daily issues with slow deliberation, page after page. She read everything, from the articles to the advertisements, just trying to get a general feel for what was currently going on within the city. She paid particular attention to the Business and Society sections, familiarizing herself with the names that appeared over and over again. Each name represented an individual who might possibly belong to the Saturnalia cult and therefore a potential target. The hard part was going to be weeding out the wheat from the chaff; how was she going to figure out just who was and who was not a member?
She wouldn’t have admitted it aloud, but at the moment she had no idea.
Relax, she told herself. Gianni will come through.
***
Gianni finished typing the parameters of his search query into the computer, sat back and stared at the screen a moment to be certain he’d gotten them all correct, and then reached out and tapped the Enter key with his finger to start the results set running.
The sour expression on his face perfectly matched his current mood.
The truth was that he’d had a thing for Alessandra for years; the school yard crush from their primary school days had turned into all–out lust when they’d become teenagers, but he’d never had the courage to make a move on her. When she’d told him her plans to go to school in New York he’d been devastated, but he’d made certain to keep that from her. She’d been so excited and he hadn’t wanted to ruin that for her.
In the end, her departure had actually been the thing he’d needed to drive him out of his own apathy and set him on the path that had brought him to where he was today. He’d star
ted exercising, which helped him lose enough weight to apply for the carabinierri as his father and brother had before him and the grueling training that he’d been forced to undergo once he’d been accepted had done the rest to mold him into the shape he was in today. With relatives on the force looking out for him and helping him navigate the waters ahead, he’d managed to move quickly through the ranks to his current position as detective.
Cops tended to be the same the world over. Many of the bright, dedicated idealistic people who go into the profession with a desire to uphold the public good soon find themselves faced with the undeniable fact that the world is a very shitty place indeed and that sometimes one needed to go along in order to get along. Gianni was no different. Life as a cop in Italy was full of compromises and he’d learned to compromise with the best of them.
And therein lay the cause for his sour mood.
He’d heard things during his time on the force, unusual things. He wasn’t talking about reports of botched investigations or the use of excessive force; those were almost expected in this day and age. No, the kinds of rumors he was talking about were only whispered late at night, away from the eyes and ears of officialdom, between the men in the ranks who had nothing to gain and everything to lose if they took it upon themselves to interfere. Rumors of police complicency in everything from the sex trade to political assassinations and that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was the oblique references to even dark things hiding in the shadows of the city that really made the hair on the back of Gianni’s neck stand up.
Things like the Saturnalia festival.
He’d been lying when he’d pretended not to have heard about it when Alessandra asked. Truth was, he’d heard the same rumors she had. He’d simply never followed up on any of them because the topic was one of those that were considered off–limits by the rank and file.
As of today though, he didn’t have the luxury of ignoring it any more. If there was one thing he knew about Alessandra Donati it was this. Not only was she sexy, beautiful, and intelligent, but she was more stubborn than a Corsican mule. If she wanted a story, she would move heaven and hell to get it. She would look under every rock, shine a light into every darkened corner, and generally make a pain–in–the–ass of herself to everyone involved until she had what she wanted.
There was no way he could turn her loose in Venice to try to uncover the information on her own. She’d turn over the wrong rock and discover that a lot more than snakes lived underneath! What he needed to do was manage the flow of the information to her. That way he could monitor her progress and be there if and when she ran into trouble.
Nothing like rescuing the damsel in distress to generate some good will and affection.
That was why he was sitting in the office on his day off running search queries and doing what he could to look like he was working on official business. Thankfully he was generally regarded as a workaholic by his fellow officers, so he didn’t think he’d have a problem if someone noted his presence. If someone did and even went so far as to question why he was looking at the particular information in front of him, he figured he could claim that it was part of a legitimate investigation and make up some story to go along with the lie. Alessandra, on the other hand, didn’t have that luxury.
Gianni had started by making a mental list of the prominent individuals in the city who he suspected might be involved in such a group if it did, indeed, exist. He didn’t have any specific criteria, just gut feelings thanks to various comments, remarks, and/or activity he’d witnessed over the years in his official role as a carabinierri officer. By the time he was finished, he had a list of nearly thirty names. He typed the list into the computer and was now waiting for it to provide a summary of the existing police file for each individual that he could then pass on to Alessandra.
What he was doing was technically illegal, but he knew that information was bartered and sold – and sometimes even intentionally lost – around here all the time, so he wasn’t worried about being caught. Nor did the ethics of the issue bother him; he, at least, was only giving the information to a reporter and not some organized crime asshole.
Knowing that Alessandra would ask for a missing persons report for the suspected time periods if he didn’t include it with the rest of his data, he decided to run it and get it out of the way. He set the timeframe to cover the last ten years overall but narrowed the focus to include only the two weeks before and two weeks after the Christmas holidays. He figured that was enough; if the group really was offering up “sacrifices” as part of this alleged ritual, then they wouldn’t want to hold onto their victims any longer than necessary.
Venice was a major tourist city and as such it had its share of missing persons. Most turned up a day or two after they were reported missing, the result of miscommunication between the parties involved and not victims of foul play, but some did not. Although the incidence of violent crime was considerably lower in Italy than in the U.S. it did still happen, so Gianni was surprised when the printer spit out several sheets of paper with the basic information – name, age, height, weight, photograph, and last known location – for each of the individuals who had gone missing during the selected time period.
He grabbed the sheets of paper off the printer and stuffed them into a manila envelope with the rest of the information he had compiled on Alessandra’s behalf. When he was finished he turned back to his desk and was just in time to see his computer screen suddenly fill with white snow, flicker several times, and then restore itself.
In between the flickers, deep in the heart of that electronic snow, he thought he’d seen a face staring back at him.
It was there and gone again in the space of a heartbeat. If he hadn’t been looking right at the center of the screen when it happened, he probably wouldn’t have seen it.
But he had.
He could hear his pulse pounding in his ears, could feel his hands trembling as his adrenal glands dumped adrenaline into his system in response to his surprise.
Any other day he would have dismissed the situation out of hand. He was using antiquated equipment and Windows wasn’t known as the most reliable platform after all. But given his line of thought for the last hour his mind seized on a thought that came floating up unbidden from the depths instead.
What if they were watching?
He paused, frowning.
One side of him was wondering just who THEY were while the other side was more than happy to chase that particular errant thought right back down the rabbit hole.
What if they were watching? What if they knew he was onto them? What would they do? How far would they go?
He could feel his heart rate speeding up and he suddenly felt like the eyes of everyone in the junior detective’s bullpen just outside his office window were focused in his direction. He could practically feel their gazes burning a hole through the back of his head.
He spun around, only to find everyone going about their business without even a first, never mind second, glance in his direction.
Gianni looked back at the computer screen to find everything normal. It was almost as though he’d imagined it.
Relax you idiot, he told himself, it was just a computer glitch. Happens all the time with crap this old.
He forced himself to take a few deep breaths and to focus on getting his heart rate back under control. By the time he had, his fear over the malfunctioning computer screen had passed. He was convinced that he had imagined it all. Still, that didn’t keep him from clearing the computer cache before shutting down the machine; better safe than sorry.
When he’d finished with that, he picked up the phone and dialed the number Alessandra had given him earlier at lunch. He waited until she answered and then said, “I’ve got the information you asked about.”
“Great! That was quick. Where do you want me to pick it up?”
“I’ve got a few things to take care of around here,” he said, “but how about we meet for drinks later and I’ll
bring it to you then?”
“Okay, that sounds good. Where?”
He gave her directions to a small café within easy walking distance of her hotel. “How does seven o’clock sound?”
“Perfect. And thanks for doing this, Gianni. I owe you one.”
He smiled at that, thinking, And I intend to collect, as he hung up the phone.
Chapter Four
Alex hung up the phone with Gianni and then looked around her at the papers stacked like the walls of a mini–fortress. If she didn’t start putting it all away, she’d never make the meeting with Gianni on time.
Thankfully one of the research assistants working in the archives offered to pitch in and help and together they were able to get every issue back where it belonged – after she’d made copies of what she needed on GNN’s dime, of course – in less than thirty minutes.
Since she was already on the mainland, it was a simple matter for her to catch the local train from Mestre back to Marco Polo Airport and from there to walk the few blocks to her hotel. She checked at the desk for messages and was surprised to find one waiting for her from her editor, Jones. It didn’t say what he wanted, just that he’d called and expected her to get back to him at her earliest convenience.
Alex laughed when she saw it; she didn’t have time to be micromanaged from two thousand miles away and she damn well knew that he wouldn’t be treating a veteran – read male – reporter like that.
Let him wait, she thought. When she had something worth passing on, she’d get in touch with him.
The train had taken longer than she expected, thanks to some problem on the tracks, so she didn’t get back to the hotel until close to 6:15. She didn’t have time for a bath so she took a quick shower and then got dressed, opting for something a bit fancier than she’d worn to brunch that morning. She chose a silk blouse and a form–fitting skirt that came down to a point just above her knees, paired with a pair of black high heels. Checking herself out in the mirror, she nodded in satisfaction; she looked sexy but still classy.