The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  “‘To go to’? As if she was talking about a party?”

  “Yeah… or maybe a rave. I think she’d been to a few things like that without her parents finding out.”

  When they’d sent Toomer back to his unit, Kat stood up abruptly. “Come on. It’s lunchtime.”

  They walked in silence towards the main gate. “Kat—” Holly began.

  “Yes, I know,” Kat interrupted. “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ And as for threatening to tell his platoon, that probably isn’t in the rule book either. But you wanted my help. So that’s what you’ve got.”

  Their route was taking them through Main Street, the base shopping mall. All around, people were carrying bags from the concessions on either side. Kat was reminded of a medieval citadel: soldiers and their families all billeted together in one defensive encampment, but instead of carrying regimental flags, these were marching behind the banners of modern retail: American Apparel, Gap, Old Navy.

  As they passed a Baskin-Robbins she noticed how the flavours that were available in her favourite Venetian gelateria just then – blood orange, hazelnut gianduiotto, artichoke – were replaced here by over a dozen varieties based on cookies, many proudly proclaiming themselves to be low in fat. Next to it was a Burger King.

  “I take it you don’t want to recommend somewhere to eat on base?” she enquired innocently. Holly only laughed hollowly.

  They found a little family-run trattoria a few minutes away, in Stanga. Inside, there was space for no more than half a dozen tables, and the menu chalked on the blackboard consisted of just three items. One was bigoli al ragù d’asino. “Let’s have the pasta,” Kat suggested.

  “Great,” Holly said, perfectly aware that Kat was testing her. “Which wine, do you think? Would Amarone or Valpolicella go better with donkey?”

  “Valpolicella, for sure.” Kat gave Holly a sideways look. “That’s if you don’t think it’s a crime to drink wine at lunch-time?”

  Holly chose to ignore that. “So… I take it we don’t think either McConnell or Toomer has anything to do with Mia’s disappearance?”

  Kat shook her head. “But it still seems significant to me that she lives this double life – being one thing to her parents, and another to those who really know her.”

  “I think it’s often the case in army families. My dad wasn’t as strict as Major Elston. But you were always made aware that any trouble you got into would go on your parents’ record. So you learn to keep your private life very private.”

  And sometimes it’s a hard habit to grow out of, Kat reflected. But she kept the thought to herself.

  Their wine came quickly, and the pasta soon followed – the sauce dark as duck, but with a gamey tang similar to venison. Rather to Kat’s irritation, Holly ate it with every sign of enjoyment. Donkey and horse meat were considered delicacies in the Veneto, and although tourists tended to turn their noses up at such dishes, it was rare to find a trattoria that didn’t offer sfilacci, smoked shredded horse rump on a bed of rocket, a primo of donkey meat pasta, or a main course of spezzatino di cavallo, a hearty stew made with tomatoes, horse steak and paprika. Perhaps, Kat thought, the second lieutenant was actually more Italian than her uniform would suggest. Not that it made any difference. Their friendship was still definitely over.

  “Not bad,” Holly said when she finished. She took a deep breath. “Kat… I think we should talk about what happened. When I was staying with you, I mean.”

  Kat considered. “Why?”

  “Because I miss your friendship,” Holly said simply.

  There was a long silence. “Then let’s be friends,” Kat said.

  “Great. But we should discuss—”

  “No, we shouldn’t,” Kat interrupted. “Don’t be such a tight-assed American sboro. We had a stupid row over a frying pan, that’s all. And now we’ve made up. So let’s just forget it and find Mia.”

  Holly said nothing. The row had been over rather more than a frying pan, but if that was how Kat was choosing to remember it, so be it. “You don’t still think she’s gone off with a boy, do you?” she said quietly.

  Kat shook her head. The fact was, ever since she’d seen Mia’s too-neat bedroom the certainty had been growing in her that this was more than just another teenage runaway. Daniele’s comments about Mia’s Carnivia account being hacked had only reinforced that.

  “No,” she said. “There’s something more to this. I’m sure of it.”

  But she wasn’t yet ready to admit that her own reaction to that growing certainty wasn’t simply alarm at the fact that a young woman was missing – at least, not entirely.

  What she felt was, in part, a reaction to all the faceless men back at the Carabinieri headquarters, the ones who scrawled “Piss Off Whore” across her locker, or who thought that investigating fake handbags was a productive use of her time.

  What Captain Kat Tapo of the Carabinieri was feeling at that moment was a mounting sense of excitement.

  Mia Elston, you may just be the opportunity I’ve been waiting for.

  THIRTEEN

  “PROFESSOR TREVISANO?”

  The man who had opened the door to Piola nodded. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Piola said. “Dr Iadanza suggested I talk to you about a skeleton that was found this morning near Vicenza.”

  “Of course. Come in.”

  An affable man with a shock of curly black hair, Professor Trevisano ushered Piola inside his room at Ca’ Foscari, Venice’s university. Books lined the walls, and more books and files were piled high on the floor, but in the middle, like an island, was a group of three armchairs. Piola sat in one, amused to discover that he felt as if he should be producing an essay, and explained why he was there.

  “A withered left hand, you say?” Trevisano interrupted. “And wearing a khaki jacket, as well as a red neckerchief?”

  “Yes.”

  “Max Ghimenti. Commander of the Marostica Garibaldi Brigade,” the professor said promptly.

  “You’re sure?”

  Trevisano nodded. “As Dr Iadanza will have told you, the Second World War is my period. Uniform was scarce amongst the partisans, though they all wore the neckerchiefs, of course: red for communist, green for republican and so on. But to have had a jacket would have marked him out as an officer. And the twisted left hand is mentioned in several accounts. It’s definitely him.”

  “Can you tell me anything that might explain how he came to be buried at the old airfield?”

  “Well, that’s the interesting thing,” Trevisano said. “I can’t. Ghimenti’s death is one of the great mysteries of the months before Liberation. It was a chaotic time, of course: the Allies had invaded from the south and the Germans were retreating yard by yard, but here in the north, things very much hung in the balance. Together with a few of his officers, Ghimenti had left his base in the Marostica hills to attend a meeting with the American OSS unit that was coordinating resistance activity in this area. According to the OSS officer, they never made it.”

  Trained in the nuances of presenting evidence himself, Piola caught the implication. “‘According to’?”

  Trevisano shrugged. “The story was, they were surrounded while they were sleeping and, after a brief firefight, gave themselves up. There’s even a plaque on the wall of the church where it’s supposed to have happened. They were never heard of again – it was suggested they’d been sent to a death camp, back in Germany. But almost immediately, questions started being asked. If the Germans had really captured a partisan commander, they wouldn’t just send him away. He’d have been tortured for information, and if – when – he died, his corpse would have been hung from a lamp post for everyone to see. To simply vanish like that… it was highly unusual, to say the least.”

  “This meeting they were on their way to – do we know what it was about?”

  “According to Ghimenti’s men, Allied weapon drops to them were more often than not landing in the wrong place. Yet at the sa
me time they were being ordered to undertake missions so hazardous that large numbers of casualties were inevitable. Ghimenti had asked for a meeting with Major Garland, OSS’s most senior agent in Italy, to discuss what they perceived as a deliberate attempt to sideline them in favour of other partisan groups.”

  “Were they right, do you think?”

  Trevisano smiled ruefully. “Well, it’s certainly possible.. We Italians are understandably attached to the idea that, after the shame of the Mussolini years, we all rose up as one against the Nazis. But partisan politics were in some respects even more messy, and more ruthless, than what had gone before. You had socialist brigades, Catholic brigades, republicans, monarchists – and the biggest grouping of all, the Garibaldini.”

  “Who were communists.”

  “Indeed. To say that the different groups didn’t always get along is something of an understatement. But in the case of the communists, there was another problem too. Long before the end of the war, the Americans started turning their attention to the new threat posed by Russia. Officially, of course, the two countries were allies. But in practice, both were trying to grab as much territory and influence as they could before hostilities came to an end. Some historians even believe the reason the Americans invaded Italy in the first place wasn’t just to drive the Germans out, but to deny it to the communists. After all, communist partisans under Tito already dominated Yugoslavia; if they’d got Italy too, the whole strategic balance in the Mediterranean could have shifted in Russia’s favour. If the Americans saw an opportunity to weaken a communist brigade’s influence, they might well have taken it.”

  “Interesting.” Piola stood up. “Well, thank you for your time, Professor. I’ll see if we can trace one of Ghimenti’s descendants and get their DNA compared with the remains. Doubtless they’ll be pleased to give him a proper burial after so long.”

  Trevisano put out a hand to stop him. “Wait, Colonel… I just want to be sure you’ve understood the implications of what you’ve told me. According to your forensic examiner, Ghimenti couldn’t have died in a firefight. That means the original version of his death can’t be correct.”

  “That may or may not be the case, Professor,” Piola said, doing up his jacket. “But it’s a matter for historians like yourself now, not for the Carabinieri.”

  “Ah,” Trevisano said quietly. “That’s where you may be wrong, Colonel. Tell me, how much do you know about the Hague Convention?”

  Delayed by his conversation with Trevisano, Piola was late getting back to Campo San Zaccaria, where he was meant to be in a meeting with Internal Affairs.

  “There you are, Colonel. Shall we make up for lost time by beginning immediately?” Colonel Lettiere said without looking up as Piola took a seat, muttering apologies. He gestured to his sidekick, Endrizzi, who took one of the half a dozen files in front of him and opened it at a page marked with a yellow Post-it note, placing it reverently in front of his master.

  Piola knew his lateness would look like arrogance and, arrogantly, found he hardly cared. Colonel Lettiere’s investigation into the allegations of sexual misconduct made by Piola’s former subordinate, Kat Tapo, seemed to have been going on for ever now, an endless labyrinth of questions and insinuations. “I suggest to you, Colonel…” “Do you see how it looks when…” “Are you really claiming that…” Lettiere insisted on harvesting every detail, no matter how intimate – how often Piola and Kat had slept together, the dates and times, whether Piola had stayed the night; even whether the complainant had exhibited, as Lettiere prissily put it, “signs of sexual fulfilment”. When he’d asked that one, Piola had simply stared at him, in mute fury and outrage, until Lettiere, unabashed, had moved on to his next question.

  “Today I intend to focus on a particular discrepancy between your statements and those of Captain Tapo,” Lettiere continued. “The captain says here that on one occasion, the night of January 21st, she resolved to break off the relationship. Yet your own recollection of that evening…” Here he turned to another page, also marked with a Post-it. “Is that you went to her apartment and had intimate relations as usual.” He peered at the page. “Along with bigoli con ragù, cooked by Captain Tapo herself. How charming.”

  “If you say so,” Piola said, trying to suppress a sigh.

  “What I’m wondering, Colonel, is how you persuaded her to change her mind. What inducements or pressure you might have exerted.”

  “None whatsoever. If Captain Tapo had wanted to end our…” Piola hesitated. “Our affair, she would of course have been free to do so at any time. She did not express any such intention to me on the evening you refer to, or indeed any other occasion. It was ultimately me, not her, who broke it off.”

  “Yes… So it follows that she didn’t tell you why she intended to end it?”

  Piola shrugged. He had long since given up trying to work out what tortuous chain of logic Lettiere’s questions were following. “No.”

  Lettiere’s eyes glinted as if he had scored an important victory. He gestured to Endrizzi, who placed a new file in front of him, open at yet another Post-it. With a sinking feeling, Piola saw that there were at least half a dozen more yellow slips protruding from its pages. “Can you tell me how Captain Tapo came to assist you on the investigation in the first place?”

  “I requested her.”

  Lettiere raised his eyebrows. “By name?”

  How else? Piola thought irritably. “Indeed.”

  “Because she had previously caught your eye, as it were?”

  “Because she’s a Venetian. I’ve lived here a long time, but it isn’t the same. I thought having a local person on the team would be an asset.”

  “A local person with no previous homicide experience, I understand?”

  “We all have to start somewhere.”

  “Indeed. And you must have known she would be grateful for the opportunity.”

  “I had no intention of seducing her at the time, if that’s what you’re implying,” Piola said coldly. Which was the truth, almost. Certainly, he’d had no expectation on that first day that the relationship between them would ever be anything other than professional. But he’d felt himself falling for her almost from the start, when she’d taken off her galoshes to wade barefoot across the flooded pavement in front of Santa Maria della Salute to examine the body of a murdered woman; a woman who was dressed in the robes of a priest. He’d caught a glimpse of the bright red polish on her toenails as she stepped without fear or hesitation into the freezing salt water, and his heart had skipped a beat.

  And that had been the real problem, of course. Love, a word that hadn’t been uttered once during this pointless postmortem. If the two of them had simply slept together, regretted it, and resolved to pretend that it had never happened, everything would have been fine. It had been precisely because of the strength of their feelings that continuing to work together after the affair was over would have been impossible. When the criminals they were investigating had sent photographs of the two of them to his wife, in an effort to undermine the investigation, it had worked; given an ultimatum at home, he’d been forced both to end the affair and to ask her to step aside. It had deprived her of an important step up in her career, but he still believed he couldn’t have come up with a better solution.

  “Look,” he said, suddenly weary. “None of this was her fault. So if you want me to say I put pressure on her, or abused my position, then just put the statement in front of me and I’ll sign it.”

  Lettiere smirked faintly. “If only it were that simple, Colonel. The reason such relationships between ranks are forbidden is precisely because of the complex issues they throw up. It may be, for example, that you thought you were exploiting her for sexual favours, whilst she simultaneously believed that she was manipulating you for reasons of professional advancement. The breaches of discipline here are not in question. But it is the motivations behind those breaches that will determine my recommendations.” Almost cheerfully, he reached
for another Post-it. “Turning now to your relations with other subordinates—”

  The door opened, interrupting him. “Ah, Piola. And Colonel Lettiere. How are you getting on?” General Saito said. Lettiere started to answer, but Saito simply continued over him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to finish this another time. I need a word with your victim here, and although I’m sure the details of his love life could occupy us for days, the Carabinieri do have some other matters to attend to.”

  “Of course, sir.” Lettiere stood up, motioning to Endrizzi to gather up the files. “As it happens, General, my report is almost complete. And although the outcome will of course be up to the disciplinary board, I will be making some very clear recommendations. What happened here is a familiar story. A woman scorned; rejection turning to thoughts of professional revenge… I think you can rest assured that Colonel Piola will be back to his regular duties very soon.”

  Surprised, Piola said nothing. He could only assume that Lettiere had been waiting to see which way the political wind was blowing before revealing his hand. Saito’s tone had provided, at last, a clear indication of what his superiors actually wanted to hear, and Lettiere had seized on it.

  “Indeed,” Saito said carelessly. He turned to Piola. “It seems everyone is pleased with you, Aldo. The Americans have lodged a small complaint, more for form’s sake than anything else. Fallici’s Lega della Libertà has done the same. So you have succeeded in upsetting both sides equally, without making either feel that there is anything to be gained from kicking up a real fuss. A delicate balance, elegantly achieved, and hardly any loose ends. Given that the archaeologist is attached to the consortium, I suggest that we now leave it between her and her employers to negotiate how long she should continue her remaining investigations. Our job there is done.”

  “Not exactly,” Piola heard himself saying.

  Saito looked surprised. “Oh?”

  “I was talking to a historian a little earlier. A man who’s made a study of the war years. The thing is, the victim was wearing a khaki jacket when he died.”