Surviving Venice

by Anna E Bendewald

  On his way home, Luigi thought the city looked nice with the Christmas decorations everywhere. All the graffiti seemed to be missing.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Luigi was standing at the counter of his favorite caffè bar, watching the news coverage of one of the pope’s youth celebrations while he waited for his drink.

  On the TV, the field reporter was saying, “Pope Leopold the Fourteenth has asked other religious leaders to join him in urging young people to undertake environmental causes, and he’s handed out these little cups and bento-style lunch boxes. Aren’t they great?” She held up a compact metal mess kit. “Part of the pope’s ‘Say NO to Disposable’ campaign. Kids are vowing to ask fast-food vendors to place their food and beverages in these personal reusable serving vessels.”

  “I see the Vatican missed an opportunity to put the pope’s image on those giveaways,” the studio anchor chuckled.

  “Right, they feature a planet earth logo. And they didn’t make nearly enough. The crowds here, mostly of people under twenty, have spilled far outside the stadium, filled the grounds, and even taken over surrounding parks and parking lots.”

  “They must be disappointed.”

  “Not that I can see. They’re all watching his speech on their phones and seem very enthusiastic.”

  “Luigi, you look awful.”

  Luigi turned to the voice at his elbow and saw Marco Falconetti. “Do I?”

  “What’re you up to?”

  “On your son’s case? Actually, I have good news. I got close-up enhancements on the footage from Leah and Sarah’s camera—the gallery assistants who were photographing art on a balcony overlooking where Reynaldo and Salvio went into the alley.”

  “Really?” He grasped Luigi’s elbow. “What does it show?”

  “What we suspected. Salvio did it. The digital enhancements are crystal clear. Salvio walking into the alley, Reynaldo running in behind him trying to catch up. Just eighty-five seconds later Salvio comes stumbling out looking wildly around for possible witnesses and wiping something like blood off his right hand. Reynaldo didn’t come out.”

  “Amazing what technology can do these days. Too bad it can’t show what happened in those seconds—what my son could have done to make Salvio kill him. And there’s nothing you can do with that footage now that Salvio’s dead.”

  The barista was setting Luigi’s espresso cup in front of him when his phone buzzed. It was his friend, the judge’s clerk. He didn’t want anyone to know he was trying to interfere with the court docket, so he said, “Marco, go ahead and get your coffee. I gotta take this.”

  Luigi moved to the far side of the bar with his cup as he answered the call. “Pronto.”

  “I’ve been keeping my eyes open like you asked,” the clerk said. “The Amendola’s private citizen’s request for a court order to grant a search warrant just arrived in court. My court.”

  Luigi felt panic rising. He couldn’t let the Amendolas take Benedetta back, even though they had every legal right to. “Can you stall? Delay it getting on the docket?”

  “It’s on the docket. That’s why I’m calling you. It got past me.”

  “Shit! Do anything you can to derail it.”

  “I’ll give it my all.”

  “I’ll owe you.”

  “Are you kidding? After everything you’ve done for me?”

  Luigi downed his espresso, waved to Marco, who was talking to someone, and decided to take a walk around Parco Savorgnan. It wasn’t his case and he was keeping it off the radar, but Benedetta couldn’t have been that far off the direction she’d run the night she’d escaped from Salvio’s hiding spot. Her naked and bloody body flashed before his mind and he felt he’d do anything to make her parents and Salvio’s conspirators pay for what they’d done to her. Then he thought of what Raphielli’s neck had looked like after Salvio hung her and felt the beginnings of a headache. Fucking Salvio and his savagery.

  Raphielli and Paloma were relaxing over tea when she heard Dante clear his throat.

  “Signora, Cardinal Negrali is here to see you. I put him in the receiving room.”

  Feeling perturbed, Raphielli went off to see her father confessor. She’d started keeping more and more from him, and it was becoming uncomfortable acting innocent and making up negligible sins to tell him. How many uncharitable thoughts could she invent?

  She was hurrying down a long corridor when she heard Negrali say, “Are these by Caravaggio?” The voice came from her late father-in-law’s library.

  Startled because she was unaccustomed to anyone walking around her home uninvited, she did an about-face and looked in Salvatore’s library. Negrali was talking on the phone, looking at paintings. He said, “The connection is terrible in here, but the first one looks like The Denial of Saint Peter, and the second one looks like The Conversion of Saint Paul. But they’re different…bigger.”

  “Padre, I thought Dante showed you to the receiving parlor.”

  He startled and shoved his phone deep into a pocket in his vestments. “Oh! My dear! You don’t want to sneak up on a man as old as I am! Why, I came looking for you. I’ve got a very busy schedule today—calamities worldwide.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nothing that can’t be fixed by returning to strict conservatism. Do you know how the Scortinis came into possession of these paintings?”

  “Salvatore told me all the paintings in here were commissioned by his family from the artists themselves.”

  “Ah, they could use some restoration. Probably haven’t been cared for since the late fifteen hundreds.”

  “They’re fine.”

  “We have the best restorers at the Vatican. I can take them for cleaning.”

  “Do you have any news for me?” she asked.

  “News? Well, no. But I understand that you do. Planning to expand your Porto delle Donne endeavor here at the palazzo.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “You?”

  “Sì, help you with the management and oversight of the project. Take care of the hassles for you.”

  “I did fine last time. I actually enjoyed it.”

  He gave her a look of pious concern. “I was remiss in supporting you when you created that little shelter. And now that you’re a widow, who has suffered such calamity, you need someone to fight the daily battles with the builders. They can be so…”

  “My builders have exceeded all my expectations.”

  “Ah, but as a mere girl, your expectations must be very low. The permits alone could hold up any changes to an historic landmark of this pedigree.”

  Inwardly she bristled, but she kept her tone respectful. “I didn’t know you were in construction.”

  “Oh, certainly. The project of restoring Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli took years, and…oh! The logistics! Also, I’m going to assist at the helm of Verdu Mer.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that. It seemed too much like Salvio’s predatory interest in Verdu Mer. “Padre, I’m not feeling well. I hope we can postpone my confession.”

  He brightened. “Of course! Most certainly! You go lie down. You should take it easy. You push yourself too hard. I can handle everything if you’d just assign me authority…”

  She pretended not to hear him and walked off, leaving him staring at a painting of a pregnant woman in a boat by Titian. Dante was waiting in the hallway, and she asked him to show the cardinal out.

  An hour later, Raphielli sat astride Gio, who was looking up at her with a peaceful expression. She asked, “Will you always be honest with me?”

  He wrapped his arms around her. “Always.”

  “Are you a bad man?”

  “I’m a businessman.”

  “A businessman with a gun.”

  “A businessman who does business with men who carry guns, and doesn’t carry one himself, doesn’t stay in business for long—or alive, for that matter.”

  “You men…of La Co
sa Nostra…you all carry guns to level the playing field?”

  His brows lowered. “What are you talking…nobody says that name.”

  “How did the Sicilians get the reputation for being violent?”

  “Our reputation as happy-go-lucky fishermen got us conquered by the Greeks, the Normans, the Moors, the Germanic Vandals, you name it.”

  “How did La Co…er…your association come to be?”

  “At first, they were smart business people, good politicians who unified Sicily and made us a force to be reckoned with. But by the time I was a kid, they were all corrupt. Obsessed with money, drugs, and sex.”

  She clenched her loins, causing him to groan.

  “They didn’t have what you and I have.” He stroked her thigh admiring her.

  “What kind of sex?”

  “Prostitution. They forced pretty much everyone they could into selling it, they took over buildings and turned them into brothels, they forced the sex slaves to sell drugs. It was ripping Palermo apart when I was a kid.”

  “Is it still like that?”

  “What? No. You’d love it. Blue sea, fresh food, clean air, and good people.”

  “How’d it change?”

  “I took over.”

  “As a kid?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How?”

  “It started when an animal named Meagri killed my father. My pop had been a quiet man, a fisherman who owned his own boat. Meagri wanted him to run some cargo and he refused. We found my pop dead on the beach. When I started fishing to support my family, Meagri told me to run cargo. I couldn’t refuse, so I agreed.”

  “What was the cargo?”

  “Kids.”

  “Kids?”

  “Ah, you’re so innocent, Raphielli. The sex trade was just as big then as it is now, just not in Palermo where I’ve put a stop to it. If you see a poster for a missing kid anywhere else in the world, they’re probably somewhere on the sex-trade route.”

  “It makes me sick.”

  “Me too. So, I picked up the cargo. Eight kids between six and ten years old. I sailed in the direction of Alicudi Porto until I got to the coordinates I’d been given out on the open water. Meagri’s guy was waiting on his fishing boat. He was a big guy, but he was alone. I acted friendly and not too bright. He relaxed when he thought he had me intimidated and bragged that he was gonna try one or two of them out before he set sail. He said I could use one before I headed back to Palermo. We could have a little party to test the merchandise.

  “I came up behind him, and when he reached for a kid, I took the gun off his hip and killed him. Then I tied him to a heavy toolbox and the kids helped me shove him overboard. I put the kids back on my boat, except one. I tied a rope around his waist. I rigged the steering wheel of the pervert’s boat to point into the middle of the ocean, and I had the kid pull the throttle all the way back, then go sit on the side of the boat. When the rope played out to the end, he dropped into the water and all the kids cheered as we pulled him aboard my boat.”

  “Did Meagri ever find the man or his boat?”

  “No, and everyone assumed he ran off with the kids.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “I took ‘em to my grandmother on Isola delle Femmine.”

  “What did she do with them?”

  “They’d have been caught if they went back to their families, so she saved ‘em.”

  “Saved them?”

  “You ask a lot of questions for a woman who has me inside her.”

  She stroked her hands along his stomach, feeling his hard muscles. “How’d you get so powerful?”

  “Every monster who tried to use me ended up dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “Even Salvio.” He paused for a moment and seemed mesmerized by her breasts as he stroked his thumb across the areas above her nipples and hefted them gently in his hands, feeling the weight of them. “But my real business started when a nice old guy asked me to save his building from becoming a brothel. A drug kingpin had his eye on it. The old guy signed his building over to me as owner. I kept the place clean till the day the old guy died. I started buying old buildings and fixing them up. I paid my construction crews fairly and on time from the money I was earning on my boat taking tourists out to the best fishing spots. By then the old-guard kingpins were killing each other off in a drug-fueled wave of paranoia. I put the word out that I’d run for local president.”

  “President?”

  “A euphemism.”

  “Ah, oh, sì.”

  “Residents all showed up with tributes they’d given to the other bosses, but I refused ‘em. Told them to clean up our city and our coast, keep their noses clean. They did. When someone was trying to get strong over someone else, I let ‘em know preying on someone weaker wouldn’t be tolerated in Palermo.”

  “You’re more than a local power now.”

  “I met with Italy’s president about some laws affecting Sicily. He and I got along, he took me to the United Nations, and I’ve been a representative there ever since.”

  “So, you still need to carry a gun, even though you’re legitimate?”

  “What a word…legitimate. I need to keep my guard up now more than ever. People want to break apart what I’ve created.”

  “Why? If it’s good for Sicily, for Italy?”

  “People are easy to victimize when they’re alone, not connected. And these days all the greedy bastards want victims.”

  “So, you’re a hero?”

  “I’m just a man.” He rolled her onto her side, and she gave herself to him.

  Hiero saw a message at the bottom of his computer screen.

  NEGRALI IS HERE

  He’d have to put a stop to this, Negrali feeling welcome to pop over for a chat. He typed:

  I’LL GIVE HIM 4 MINUTES THEN COME GET HIM

  When Hiero pressed the button that unlocked his office door, Negrali yanked it open and sailed through leading with his hawkish nose, his expensive crimson material hissing all around him, embroidered skull cap perched on his head, and massive cross glowing ostentatiously.

  “Waiting with your hand on my door handle?”

  “I’m a man in a hurry.”

  “You should read Proverbs 9:2.”

  “Haste makes waste? Or are you calling me an ignorant zealot?”

  “Take your pick. What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve identified two paintings at the Scortini palace, both incredible works and, as far as I know, never before seen by the public.”

  “Oh? You have three minutes to entice me.”

  “The paintings are on the wall of Salvatore’s private library and appear to be versions of The Conversion of Saint Paul and The Denial of Saint Peter, both by Caravaggio!”

  “What condition are they in?”

  “It’s a remarkably dry room for being in Venice and the light is filtered, so from what I can see they’re masterpieces in exquisite condition.”

  Hiero considered rejecting the offer as Negrali kept talking, but he liked the idea of owning masterpieces.

  “I’ve got to work on Raphielli. The idiot girl asked me to grant her an annulment, of all things. I’ll keep her in place as head of that household so I can manage the estate. I’m confident I can have them to you by spring.”

  “After you hand over the paintings, I’ll get to work on what we discussed.”

  “Wait that long? You have to consider how delicate my work regarding Raphielli is!”

  “Delicate? You just called her an idiot. Lost your touch, have you?”

  “Certainly not. But I need the Verona situation handled before spring if I’m to get Verdu Mer.”

  “You were at Gabrieli’s funeral. You saw that tidal wave of grief. The grip that family has on the emotions of everyone in power is nothing short of witchcraft. It’s grotesque, and my team will need to move with extreme caution. Every time Gabrieli came into contact with one of my operatives, he’d unravel logis
tics it’d taken years to put together.”

  “Well, I want you to move now and consider it a promise that I’ll get you both Caravaggio’s in return.”

  “I don’t care about your promises.”

  “At least send someone to France to deal with Giselle.”

  “There’s nothing her unborn child can do to you at the moment. Get back to work on Raphielli.”

  His operative was standing at the door to show the cardinal out. When Hiero was alone, he allowed himself to contemplate sitting with a couple of masterpieces to keep him company. He wanted to be rid of the Veronas as much as Negrali did, but he wasn’t going to let that greedy bastard know it.

  Giselle was hard at work making solar panels and letting her mind wander while her hands moved. As they counted down the days to Christmas, Giselle found herself enjoying country life. The abbey’s dray horses pulled sleighs and tourists came from all around to drink spiced cider and go for rides. The enormous Ardennes and Belgians were energetic beasts whose winter bell harnesses jingled as they pranced down snowy tracks across fields and into the forest.

  While she still couldn’t mix with any of the visitors, when the tourists were gone, she and Markus had been allowed to take moonlight rides through the countryside. They cuddled under woolen blankets and warmed in each other’s arms as she listened to stories about his childhood. She shared hers, and together they planned how they would raise their family. She felt no danger during these moments and more than a twinge of guilt that the Veronas were still in open danger while Juliette had arranged for her to enjoy what felt like a pristine vacation with Markus and Yvania.

  And then there was Daniel. What a great friend he had turned into. His ties to Juliette made him feel like family and he was completely devoted to her safety. Although, what could a monk do if a couple of men came racing onto the property like they’d done in Gernelle? That had been a close call even though she and Markus had gotten a warning from Fauve. Even with the head start, they’d still ended up sprinting for their lives with two armed killers just steps behind them.