The moan of the water garage’s hinge and the familiar chuffing of a boat motor signaled Benjamin’s return. Mateo dried his face with a clean kitchen towel, then spooned espresso grounds into the stovetop pot and took two cups down from the cupboard. Benjamin came in from the water garage, hung up his raincoat, and sat on the bench to remove his boots.
“Can this really be it?” he asked. “Rome commands people to mindlessly procreate until the planet can’t sustain us while they prey on their faithful, pilfering every cent from their pockets, and now after two thousand years they’ve murdered our last tie to Saint Paul?”
“If we doubt, we’re dead. We have to have faith. I believe Benedetta’s pregnant. Salvio made a baby with her. San Paolo’s lineage is safe,” Mateo said.
Benjamin took a deep breath and let it out. “I have faith. But what now?”
“We need to get her back. How’d it go at the police station?”
“A real fiasco.” Benjamin pushed his feet into slippers and stood. He smoothed a palm over his thin pomaded hair and turned frightened eyes on Mateo. “Benedetta’s parents are dangerously unbalanced. We should never have chosen that family to continue Salvio’s holy bloodline.”
“They’ve always been solid, devout, quiet.”
“I wish they’d go back to quiet. You wouldn’t believe the things that came out of their mouths this morning. You’d think they hadn’t been Alithiníans their whole lives, the way they blabbed about being hunted by the Vatican.”
“What?” Mateo was stunned. “They said that to the police?”
“Not to the police. No.” He eyed the coffee pot. “We’ve been up all night. Let’s have some espresso and I’ll tell you.”
Together they went to the stove, filled their cups, and returned to the table.
Mateo said, “It was a simple plan: Report her missing and get the police’s help locating her. How’d things get messed up?” He tossed back his espresso in one scalding gulp.
“Well, by the time I got the Amendolas to the police station, they couldn’t keep their story straight.”
“Oh, no.” Prickles of fear scrabbled up Mateo’s back.
“Right, well, as planned, I stayed outside so the police wouldn’t connect me to them. When they came back out, they’d filed a missing person’s report and spoken to a reporter who arranged a press conference.”
“A what? She’s only been missing a few hours!”
“Well, that’s the thing. They decided since no one has seen her since they’d brought her here to stay with us, there was no harm in saying she’d been missing since then…” Benjamin downed his espresso.
Mateo gave that some thought. “Yeah, it’s true, no one’s seen her for about two weeks, so that would work.”
“But hang on. They told two versions to the police. One, that she’d been missing for two weeks, and another that they’d last seen her twenty-four hours ago when she went out for a jog…”
“A jog? During the acqua alta? Venice is submerged!”
“…near Parco Savorgnan,” Benjamin finished with a groan.
“What? Here? Near the safe house?” Mateo felt himself losing his temper, and he was not a man to lose his temper. “I told them to say she’d last been seen walking away from them in Parco Biennale on the other side of the city! Now the police are going to be crawling around over here! What were they thinking?”
“They weren’t thinking. When they came outside and met me in the Piazza San Marco, they couldn’t keep their voices down and started complaining to me that Benedetta was stolen by the Catholics to get the holy seed from her womb.”
“Dio mio!”
Benjamin returned to the stove to make more espresso. “We made a terrible choice with those two. They’re unstable. You should’ve heard them. ‘You made our daughter a sitting duck! What kind of safe house doesn’t have bars on the windows? The pope’s men broke in and took her and the Messiah’s seed! He’ll kill us all! The Inquisition is happening! Mateo needs to wake up!’”
“They said all this loud enough for people to hear?”
“Sì. You wouldn’t believe how loud those two can talk, but I didn’t see anyone take notice. We were standing a few meters from the door of the police station.”
“What did you do?”
“I got my arms around their shoulders, pulled them into a huddle, and said, ‘We’ve survived the Inquisition for over two thousand years through secrecy!’”
“And?” Mateo asked.
“I told them you and I would handle this. We aren’t alone, we have the Alithinían faithful who’ll help us get Benedetta back.”
“Did they calm down?”
“Sì, but they told me they’d deviated from our plan in other ways.”
“Oh, Dio. How?”
“Instead of just reporting Benedetta missing and letting us handle the rest, they called all her friends, both hospitals…”
“You and I already searched the hospitals. Did you tell them we peeked into every room dressed as orderlies? She’s not hospitalized.”
“…before deciding she must have run to Porto delle Donne.”
“No!” Mateo jumped to his feet. “They’ve got to stay away from Raphielli’s shelter! We lost two men there yesterday! And since we killed her staff, the place is hot!”
“I told them exactly that. Their response was, ‘The police expect us to look everywhere for her!’ I reminded them that Raphielli’s shelter is private, and they’d have no chance of bullying their way inside without a court order.”
“Did that shut them up?”
“Sì, they headed home to get some rest before their press conference.”
“Sweet Jesus, a press conference. Let’s pray it doesn’t amount to anything. Listen, Benjamin, we can’t stop now. We can still do this. I’ll bail your brother out of that French jail.”
“Grazie.” He looked relieved. “Maybe the French police don’t have anything on him. It’s not as if he was at Giselle’s estate, he was just coordinating logistics.”
“So, a slight change of plans. Now, you’ll go to France and dispose of Giselle and her child while I stay here and get rid of Vincenzo. I mean if you can’t take out a skinny little artist in stilettos, and I can’t dispatch a pretty-boy whose idea of exerting himself is dabbing his oars in the canals, then we aren’t trying.”
“Salvio already took out Gabrieli, and that alone may be enough to topple the pope. Once Vincenzo dies, Leopold XIV won’t have a crutch to prop himself up with, and that whole rotten cult of personality in Rome will implode. We’ll get Benedetta back and Paul’s bloodline will live on. Do we know what happened to Salvio’s ring?”
“According to Lydia, Detective Lampani gave it to Raphielli.”
“We’ve got to get Paul’s ring back.”
“First we’ve got to get our little Madonna—Benedetta.”
“Call Lydia and find out what the police know.”
Taking his cup back to the stove, Mateo felt tears spring to his eyes. “This must be what the disciples felt when Jesus was killed. What I wouldn’t give to have one more day with Salvio. We never got to know him.”
They were silent for a while, and then Benjamin said, “All right, I’ll arrange to get on the next plane to France and make a new plan to get Giselle.”
“I’ll try to get a grip on Benedetta’s parents and form a plan to get at Vincenzo—he’s been so erratic lately.” It wasn’t lost on Mateo that it was probably due to them killing his father.
“Faith without works is dead,” Benjamin said as he got to his feet.
“And God helps those who help themselves.”
Detective Luigi Lampani was in a foul mood that matched Venice’s weather. He’d been working on the case against Salvio Scortini for weeks now, and the more puzzle pieces he clicked into place, the more unbelievable the picture became—like he had it all wrong. This case of one founding family apparently trying to wipe out the other was making him doubt his instincts.
His headaches were increasing in ferocity and regularity, threatening to incapacitate him. Hungry and exhausted, he went down the hall to the vending machine and stared at slot F6 where the Pocket Coffees were supposed to be. In their place were something called Marshmallow Fling! Like a true addict, he craved the rich, caffeinated hit of espresso and dark chocolate of his Pocket Coffees. But, incredibly, he was staring at a neon blue wad of sucrose that looked like it could choke a goat.
Robbed of his preferred energy source, he stalked back through the relatively quiet headquarter halls to the hive of activity that had become the homicide department. And not an orderly hive—it was a hive someone had jammed a stick into.
The last son of the beloved Scortini building family had gone berserk. For weeks he’d evaded Luigi while relentlessly hunting his own wife and the Verona family—even sending hit men to France hunting Giselle Verona—and murdering innocent bystanders like young Reynaldo Falconetti. Raphielli Scortini had only survived his attempt to hang her because she was young and strong enough to cling to the rope until her maid found her.
But now Luigi was certain that Salvio had been able to elude him since early fall because there was an informant inside the department. From now on, he’d keep everything close to his chest, and to that effect he’d asked the head of the French investigation to communicate exclusively with him. At the same time, he was withholding key information from the French, that the amber-colored rope they recovered from the hit men’s murder kits was the same special rope used to drown Count Gabrieli Verona here in Venice at the Verdu Mer construction site yesterday morning.
For privacy, Luigi went out onto the balcony to call the mother of one of the French hit men who’d just died while attempting to kill Contessa Giselle Verona. He’d been systematically going through the list of associates his French contact had given him. He spoke excellent French and had spoken it more since eleven o’clock last night than he had since his year as a foreign-exchange student in Nice.
Halfway through the conversation, the storm strengthened and rain started coming at him sideways as he stood with his phone pressed to his ear, and his notebook pressed flat against the wall, scribbling notes as fast as the woman on the line could talk. And she was a fast talker. Never mind that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept, he silently cursed the bad reception, the foul weather, and the fact that his pen was only emitting ink sporadically. He knew from years of experience that when a material witness talks, you capture every word and you don’t ask if you could call them back on account of weather or faulty writing implements.
He’d been lucky to get the woman on the phone, and now that she’d answered some of his questions she was starting to repeat herself. He cast his net wider. “By any chance, was your son Catholic?”
“I didn’t raise Miguel to be religious,” the woman’s voice crackled via satellite. “He went through a phase of trying to find God as a teenager and decided he couldn’t stand Catholics. ‘A bunch a crooks,’ he said. I agree. Not that he wasn’t a crook, too. Such a disappointment to me.”
The disapproving mother apparently didn’t live in a glass house, the way she threw stones at the Catholic Church and her ne’er-do-well son.
Luigi glanced through the window at the police running around inside headquarters. Lydia, a detective on loan from the bullpen, was looking at him. When their eyes met, she waved and made some gestures asking if he wanted coffee. He nodded and turned away to concentrate. Privacy aside, he stood a better chance of hearing over the thunder outside than he did over the raised voices and ringing phones of the investigation that was currently sending shockwaves across Italy and France like a bomb—his office was ground zero. And he knew in his bones Salvio Scortini had thrown it…before he’d gotten shot in the head. Luigi was as far under the roof overhang as he could manage, but his shoes were getting soaked.
“What’d you say killed him?” Miguel’s mother asked.
“He ran into a sculpture studded with a lethal chemical.”
“Leave it to Miguel to die in a stupid way, always reckless. When he was eleven, he…”
By the time Luigi hung up and went back inside, he was drenched from the knees down and his shoes were ruined. On the short trip to his desk, his socks squelched inside his shoes. He sat down and completed his notes by tracing over the partial letters with a fresh pen as his pants dripped a puddle under the desk. Investigators came and went, dropping reports in his inbox and giving him staccato updates on their progress.
“Prelim forensics from yesterday’s four murder scenes,” Lydia said as she turned away, then yawned and called over her shoulder, “Coffee’s on the way. Going to order some breakfast panini. Want one?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
She paused mid-stride. “Hey, did the Porto delle Donne team miss something?”
“I haven’t read the report yet.”
“Just asking cuz I saw you coming out of there this morning…you went back over.”
He quirked his head and gave her a dead stare. He didn’t know her from Adam, and he didn’t like being probed. “You worked the Scortini palazzo crime scene with me. What were you doing over by Raphielli’s shelter?”
“My boyfriend lives in that sestiere. I’m pulling a triple shift, so when I got my one-hour break I went there to take a quick nap and a shower. I was surprised to see you going inside as I happened past the shelter.”
“I checked on the manager,” he lied. There was no way he was going to divulge that he’d been interviewing a victim of serial rape that’d been orchestrated by her own parents.
Another detective dropped his report on top of the inbox stack and said, “Prelim from the medical examiner on Salvio. All three bullets from one gun. He bled somewhere else on the calle, the rain erased it. He was down about a liter from the bullet to his gut when he took two more bullets to the head.” That detective started to leave Luigi’s desk and had to dodge another cop approaching with more folders.
“Photos from the women’s shelter, statements from the resident women and Kate the manager. But you know the place is owned and funded by Salvio’s young widow, Raphielli Scortini, right?”
“Sì.” Luigi was watching every cop with suspicious eyes now.
He didn’t need to look at the photos from Porto delle Donne. He’d never forget the bloody scene he’d walked in on there. He’d questioned the residents who’d survived the attack, coming away with a great respect for those women.
When Kate had called him later in the wee hours of the morning asking him to come back to the shelter, he’d arrived after the crime scene team had left and as the private cleaning contractors were starting to mop up. He found Kate in a back room with a frail girl with long flowing hair and big pouty lips, who was wrapped in a blood-spotted sheet.
He introduced himself to the girl. “I’m Detective Lampani, but you can call me Luigi. What happened to you?”
Kate was bent over the girl, using a powerful lamp as she tweezed splinters of glass from the tender skin of the girl’s hands, arms, neck, legs and feet. She didn’t look up. “Thanks for coming, Luigi. This is Benedetta Amendola. She’s sixteen and was a virgin until her parents locked her up with Salvio Scortini to get her pregnant. I haven’t called SVU yet, but they’ll need to do a rape kit on her.”
The cop in him was elated. This girl is the key! The next breath, his heart dropped into his stomach and he felt a sad sympathy for her. Her innocence ripped away by a madman. “Benedetta, how long were you trapped with Salvio?”
“I lost track of time. They kept me locked in a back bedroom without any clothes,” she complained. “My parents said I’d be treated special.”
“Can you estimate the time?”
“About two weeks. They made me tell all my friends I was going to visit my aunt in Pisa so nobody’d miss me. But Salvio’s crazy. He hated me, threatened me, it was awful. The first time I was sure no one was in the house, I broke out.”
“It
wasn’t just your parents helping Salvio?” He held his breath in suspense.
“He has helpers, but I was blindfolded so I don’t know who they were.”
He clamped down on his disappointment. “How many?”
“A bunch. But from what I overheard, only like, a handful who are willing to kill for him.”
“Any helpers with French accents?”
“No.”
“If I call your parents and we tell them…”
“NO!” The girl flew out of her chair, causing Kate to fall to the floor. The sheet fell away, and his heart broke looking at the girl’s skinny frame covered with blood and bruises. She held one hand awkwardly as if she’d broken it. Kate picked up the sheet and covered her again.
Luigi held a hand up. “Okay, you’re safe here if you can keep all of this a secret for a while. The police can’t be involved at this point or they’ll return you to your parents, so swabs and photos will have to be taken by Kate.”
Kate nodded, and the girl looked relieved.
“How does that sound?”
“All right.”
“Why would your parents hand you over to Salvio? Money?” He watched a veil of disinterest descend over her eyes that told him he wasn’t looking in the right direction. “Are you guys Catholic?”
Boom, just like that he’d lost her. She pretended not to hear and instead appeared to be consumed in Kate’s ministrations, and then made a hissing sound. “Ssss-Ow!”
He’d left so Kate could do an examination, but Benedetta had profoundly touched him.
Now Luigi spread the reports across his desk then unlocked the drawer where he kept his Salvio file. Reaching all the way to the back, he retrieved the last square of Pocket Coffee. He savored it as his eyes devoured the information in the new reports. It was half an hour later when he heard Chief Inspector Laszlo bellow, “Lampani! I need what you’ve got!”
Surviving Venice Page 3