by Jack Barnao
The whole thing had taken less than half a minute but in that time, Carla had gone. I wondered if she was searching for Herbie, or if she'd disappeared but I didn't waste any time over it. I frisked the guy with the gun and found a ring of keys. I also picked up his gun. It was a Browning 125 automatic, an adequate piece but its chief charm was the fact it used the same 9mm ammunition as my Walther. Corn in Egypt! I slipped out the magazine and put it into my pocket.
Then I went out, locking the office on the two sleeping beauties and pressed on down the corridor, opening all the doors. All of the locked places were storerooms, filled with cartons of what I assumed to be their purses. No Herbie. It took me about three minutes. Then I came back to the office. Skintop was waking up but when he saw me come in he immediately pretended to be asleep again.
I stood for a few seconds, topping up the magazine of my Walther with the bullets from the other guy's gun. Then I took a chance on using the telephone. I was lucky, you didn't have to dial 9 to get out, and I called the Rega and got through to the room.
Kate Ridley answered, her voice strained. She spoke Italian and I cut in immediately.
"Hi, Kate, John Locke. Is the tenente there?"
She was flustered. "John, where are you, what's happening?" but then there was a rustling on the line and Capelli took over.
"Where are you?" he demanded.
"Right now I'm at the Fabbrica Belladonna. It's a leather factory." I gave him the street and number. "There's some hood here who was expecting me to arrive. He had a gun."
"What have you found out about the boy?" His voice was all business but I could imagine his helpers dispersing right now to send cars over here and collect the guy—and me, if I stuck around.
"It's been set up by the father," I said. "He took out five million dollars' worth of insurance on the boy before we came here. The gangs here knew all about it. Apparently Ridley senior plans to split the ransom money with them."
I realized that my call was being taped but I didn't know who was listening on extra lines attached to the phone. It seemed that Ridley was. I heard a roar at the other end, then a scuffle and then Ridley was bellowing at me. "You lying bastard. I'll sue you for every penny you've got."
"Cut the crap," I told him. "Cooperate with the police and they'll go easy on you."
He began to shout again and then there was another scuffle. I guess a couple of Capelli's men were wrestling the phone away from him. They won. The next voice I heard was Capelli's.
"Where did you hear this?"
"From Carla. She's known about it all along. That's why she approached me on Sunday. Also there's another guy, Mazzerini, he was the driver of the kidnap car. He was in that warehouse we sent the ambulance to last night. Right now he's locked up in a wine cellar in a farm north of the city. I think he told everything he knew to the men you found at the warehouse but if you want to talk to him, you go east from Pedanto a kilometer and a half, turn north and look for a farm with a wall around the yard. There's an old lady there. You'll also find Carla's car in the barn."
"Wait where you are, we must talk." Capelli had a dead man to account for and he wanted me in his office making a statement. I didn't think that would make any contribution to finding Herbie so I refused.
"No dice, tenente. I'm going to find where the boy is, I think I know where to look. If I get close I'll call you for reinforcements. In the meantime, stay on top of Ridley, he's behind all of this."
I hung up, wondering if Herbie had ever been here. Mazzerini had sent me here knowing his buddies would catch me. The only thing I couldn't work out was why Carla had run off. Was there some new fifth or sixth dimension to this crazy kidnapping? Time would tell but I would find out sooner if I was on the outside, reading newspapers, than if I was down in one of the maggiore's cells waiting for Ottawa to get off its bureaucratic backside and send me a lawyer.
None of the women in the plant even looked up at me as I walked out. They were all too busy churning out piecework on behalf of Belladonna. As I passed one of the tables I noticed a rack of needles and thread standing on it, where some finisher was making minor repairs and adjustments to finished coats. I smiled politely at the woman working there and picked up a biggish needle and a spool of thread. My pants were fixable if I could get a few moments of privacy.
I didn't see Carla anywhere and the girl at the front was still taking telephone calls so I nodded to her and walked by, ambling easily, trying not to look as if the police would be pouring in here within another minute, asking if she'd seen the turista. I couldn't wait around for that. I had business to attend to.
Chapter 17
The truck was still standing on the corner and I walked past it to check if Carla was inside. She wasn't. It didn't surprise me, she was conspicuous enough without playing Beauty and the Beast by driving that rattletrap. People were still climbing over the bumper to cross the street and I did the same, ducking away down a maze of crowded side streets where no police car could move faster than I could run. Behind me the familiar see-saw note of the sirens approached the Belladonna and stopped as if some giant had grown angry with the noise and wrapped steel hands round their steel voiceboxes.
The Herald-Tribune was on sale and I bought a copy and carried it casually in my right hand, covering the rip in my trouser seam, until I came to the first tourist attraction I could find, the Museo di San Marco. It was jammed to the walls with tourists, most of them Americans, and I became the closest thing there is to invisible while I mingled, looking for a washroom where I could fix my pants. I found one at last, and sat in the cubicle stitching away while the accents of Texas and New York boomed outside with comments on Fra Angelico's Annunciation and the exchange rate on the dollar and the impossibility of finding a good steak in Italy.
It took me about ten minutes and I was presentable. The thread was stiff and thick and chestnut brown. My repair job would have broken every heart on Savile Row but I felt spiffy again and I flushed the toilet and left, to the relief of a pale-faced man who was crunching down a Lomotil and shifting from foot to foot outside. "You've sure taken your time," he snarled and dived for the cubicle.
I knew what I was going to do next but I had no idea how to do it, so I spent half an hour going through the museum. It was hard to get up the staircase to the second floor because of the crush of people, women mostly, in front of the Annunciation, but the gentle stop-and-go movement of the crowd gave me a chance to get my thoughts in a straight line and by the time I had spent a minute looking at the fresco, which was so beautiful it almost took my mind off my problems, I knew what to do.
I went back out and found a quiet restaurant on a corner where there was a good view up and down all four streets. I felt safe enough there to order an espresso and I shook out my paper to see what the world knew about the kidnapping. There was a small story on the front page but it didn't mention anything that I didn't already know so I turned to the sports and checked how the Blue Jays were coming. Better than me, it seemed. They'd edged past the Yankees five to four the day before and were six games ahead of the pack in the pennant race. As I read the news a small part of my mind was flying high, looking down on the whole problem, working out what to do. It all came down to finding some way to get back into the house I had been in yesterday. But that was easier said than done. The people inside would be wary now. They had one man dead, and Carla and I were missing. They almost certainly blamed me for all their trouble. If I just knocked on the door they would have a gun on me before it opened. I needed a disguise, camouflage, something.
I paid for the coffee and moved on towards the center of the town, looking for a florist. I found one, small and expensive seeming, on a street close to the Duomo. It had a wonderful wreath in the window, the kind of thing a WASP would never buy, even for a state funeral. I went in and the owner came up to me. He was small and businesslike. Bad news was good news in this line of work.
"Hi, how much is the wreath in the window, please?"
I pulled out some of the Ridley family expense money and paid him and he brought the wreath out of the window, working on it, tilting individual leaves and blooms just so. I thanked him and went outside to look for a cab.
The first two refused me but the third one was a Volvo and he opened the trunk and laid the wreath in it, leaving the lid up. The driver spoke enough English to understand me and I directed him to the house where Carla had taken me the day before.
When we came to the end of the street I paid him off, reclaimed my purchase from his trunk, and set off towards the house, holding the wreath up in front of me like a riot shield. There was enough space between the flowers for me to squint out and ahead, but no chance of anyone's seeing my face. Ideal.
People moved aside as I walked, the younger ones joking, the older ones respectful. One old woman even crossed herself when she saw the wreath. I hoped she wasn't a fortune-teller, I was feeling vulnerable.
I got to the door and knocked firmly, a no-nonsense deliveryman's knock. Still holding the wreath high I turned sideways into the doorway and drew my gun, making sure nobody on the street saw me.
After a few moments the door opened, letting out a blast of bad language, unmistakable, even though it was in Italian. And through my cover I saw Savario, just as natty as the day before, resentful at having to play doorman.
I moved forward into the house. He objected but, just as I thought, he didn't get into a shoving match, in case he damaged the blooms. He just cranked up the volume on his complaining.
When we were clear of the door I closed it with my heel and lowered the wreath. He gasped when he saw my face, and shut up completely when he saw the gun. I set the wreath down on the bottom of the stairs and motioned Savario to lean against the wall. I patted him down, taking his gun and a five-inch switchblade. I unloaded his gun, then opened the switchblade and stuck it into the newel post on the stairs and snapped the blade. That made him flinch. Chalk up another to good old Freud, in his terms I'd just turned Savario into a capon. I nudged him with the muzzle of my gun and he moved ahead into the room where I had waited the day before.
It was empty so I got him out again and marched him back to the office where the boss man had told me his plan. Bingo. He was there again, smoking the twin of the cigar he'd lighted the night before.
I gave Savario a shove into one of the chairs then pointed my gun straight at the older man's heart. His mouth came open, the cigar falling onto his leather desktop where it smouldered, smelling like a burning car tire. He seemed to have stopped breathing.
"Hi. Remember me?" I asked him.
He started to say something but I didn't listen. I reached across the desk and backhanded him across the head, hard enough to send him sprawling into the corner. It wasn't out of revenge, although I owed him one. I just wanted him off balance, all his carefully acquired prestige wiped away. Then he would talk.
He lay there, licking the blood of his broken lip, his eyes wide with horror. I doubt if he'd felt any pain since his father gave up clipping his ear for him, fifty years earlier.
"Get up," I said, and he did, slowly, his hands half up, not quite surrendering but pleading silently that I wouldn't hit him again. I waved the gun at him. "Come around this side of the desk," I told him and he came, nervously. I backed away from him and turned the key in the door.
Boss Man was in front of the desk now. He seemed to have shucked it, the way a dispossessed turtle might shuck his shell. The dislocation had made him shrink. I was aware that he was only about five foot three, with a blue chin and dyed hair. I reached out and spun him around, slamming his face first against the paneling. I frisked him all over. He was clean and I spun him around again and told him, "Take your pants off."
His eyebrows raced up to his Lady Clairoled hair. "What?"
"You heard me. Take your pants off."
He did it, a nervous tremor starting in his hands and racing through his whole body. This was the worst insult in the world, which was why I was doing it. I didn't have time to use any fancy interrogation techniques. I wanted facts, fast, with a minimum of violence. This way works. A man takes off most of his sense of manhood and all of his self-confidence when he takes off his trousers.
I reached out and took his trousers away from him. "Good boy. Now sit on the floor with your hands on your head." He did it, trying to avoid Savario's eyes. All his pride had vanished. He was mine. I went around his desk and opened it, carefully.
There was a gun fastened under the knee slot that he would have used on me if I had wasted any time striking postures in front of him. I pulled out each drawer in turn, glancing at the papers then emptying them on the floor, checking underneath the drawer for anything attached, any secret compartments. He watched me, not speaking, fear and anger fighting in his eyes. Fear won. He stayed silent.
There was nothing that made sense to me. A lot of ledgers full of figures, some letters, but that was all. There was nothing in English, nothing with a name I'd ever heard of. I emptied the last drawer, checking underneath it to see if anything was taped there. Nothing was. Then I took out the wallet I'd removed from the man with the gun at Belladonna.
"I'm just going to ask you once, then I'm going to start kicking you," I told him. "Who is—" I read the name from the license in the wallet, "Giorgio Speroni?"
Savario's mouth opened but the boss spoke. "He works for a friend of mine."
I embroidered a little. "Right now he's in the hospital with a team of doctors trying to put his jaw back together. I broke it for him."
He licked his lips but didn't speak. I went on, smiling the way he had smiled at me from this side of the desk the night before.
"He tried to shoot me. That was after somebody else tried to shoot me, last night when you set me up alone in that warehouse. You'd better tell me what's going on or the doctors will have to work on your jaw as well."
He started to speak, slowly, obviously making up his story as he went along. "You are a very dangerous man, Signor Locke. We were afraid you would hurt us. You are working for the boy's father. When you took the woman last night and disappeared, we had to put you out of the fight."
I came around the desk and kicked him on the shin, not hard, just swinging my leg as if I was bored. But my toe hit him precisely on the nerve. He yelped and rubbed the hurt, his eyes clouded with pain.
"Who are you working for? Is it Scavuzzo?"
"I do not work for anybody," he said angrily. I'd reached his pride. He considered himself a wheel. Good. I would use that.
"Don't lie to me. Scavuzzo sends his woman to your house to give you orders."
He looked as if he was going to spit. "That American whore. He sent her to me because he was tired of her, he thought she would amuse me."
I wondered if he was telling the truth now. It would explain Carla's anxiety to make Scavuzzo suffer. But she wasn't some kind of white slave. She was a Mafia princess, she could have gone back home if things didn't work out here. Couldn't she? I felt like I knew all the players now but I couldn't tell which team they played for, not without a program.
"Where's the boy?" I asked him.
He shrugged but it was a micro-second too slow. I could see he was lying and I snapped the question at him again. "Where's the boy. Tell me now and you'll save yourself a lot of pain."
"All I know is that the man who drove the car and the boy were in that warehouse yesterday, when you went there with Savario. And poor Giacomo."
"Don't lie to me. The police already told me that all the men in the kidnap car were killed, shot."
He lifted his hands from his head to gesture. "Three men were dead, that's what they found. But Mazzerini was not one of them. He killed the other two men and the man who let them into the garage where the car was found."
Was Mazzerini hard enough to car
ry out that kind of action? He didn't look tough to me, but maybe knowing how much ransom was involved he had worked up whatever guts it takes to back-shoot three colleagues. Honor among thieves? Tell me about it.
"Then why wasn't the boy with him when I found him in the warehouse?"
"They moved the boy before you got there." He shrugged and went to lower his hands but I tapped his shin again and he yelped and put them back on top of his color-corrected hair.
"How do you know that?"
He glanced at Savario, then at me, then licked his lips. "Signor. That man there went into the building when you came out. He spoke to the man you left there. They told him everything."
I glanced at Savario. He looked as if he was afraid of wetting himself. He was more scared than he should have been. But he spoke no English, it was no good working on him. I continued with the boss.
"You're lying," I said. "I am going to have to get the truth out of you some way."
"I tell the truth. Believe me." He was starting to sweat, his forehead glistening.
"I wouldn't believe you if you were on fire and shouting for help," I told him. I reached down and grabbed his left hand off the top of his head, rolling his fingers between finger and thumb so he shrieked and sprawled towards me, trying to ease the pressure. "Tell me where the boy is or I'll break your fingers, one at a time."
It had happened to one of my men in Ulster. Not an SAS man, he would never have fallen for the trick, a young Guardsman, innocent enough to go for a quiet beer without making sure he had five or six buddies with him. The Provos had trapped him, using a girl to suggest he go home with her. He had gone, and had ended up in a basement being interrogated by four of them. They were after the names of his officers, me and my lieutenant, so they could send their gunmen calling later when we'd been rotated back to England. They had broken seven of his fingers before we found him, but he hadn't talked. I didn't think this man was as tough.