White Hot Silence

by Henry Porter

  ‘It is possible – yes. But, signor, if they wanted to stop what she was doing they would have simply killed her with the Africans.’

  ‘Can you tell us anything about the phones?’ asked Samson. ‘The immigrants on the road must have used a phone to text the men waiting a hundred metres away. Have you recovered that phone?’

  ‘No, but we know the number and the time the text message was sent,’ replied Fenarelli.

  ‘That means you know one of the numbers the kidnappers were using,’ returned Samson. ‘Does it match either of these men’s personal phones?’

  Fenarelli shook his head; he knew what Samson’s next question would be.

  ‘Has there been any activity on that phone since Mrs Hisami was seized?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has there been any activity on the men’s personal numbers?’

  ‘No, they were all using telefoni usa e getta. How do you say?’

  ‘Pre-paids – burners,’ said Zillah.

  ‘Does that strike you as odd?’ asked Samson.

  ‘No, these people are not stupid. They would not bring their personal phones with them when committing a crime like this. That would make it easy for them to be traced to the scene of the crime.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Samson. ‘But here’s the point. They had no reason to believe that Anastasia had recorded the plate number of the Mercedes and descriptions of them in her voicemails. That means that, once they left the scene of the crime, they were free to use their phones without risk of being associated with the crime. And yet you say they haven’t made any calls to their families, even though one of them is expected at a big family event tomorrow. Seems odd, does it not?’

  Zillah Dee looked at him while he was saying this and nodded slowly, but it was the nameless CIA agent, a crisply dressed young man in tinted spectacles, who spoke next.

  ‘Have you asked for satellite imagery? It was a clear day down here, as I understand it. Shouldn’t be a problem in making an application to our folks – you can do it through me and I will source the material.’

  The kidnap specialist, Dr Fabiano, had said nothing so far. He occasionally made the odd gesture of frustration but had kept his own counsel until the colonel suggested that the investigation was going as well as could be expected at this stage. Fabiano then raised his head and spoke in Italian for a minute or two, then summarised for the room in English. ‘They have nothing, signori. They are at zero and so are we.’

  Samson couldn’t disagree with that. Later, when they were outside, he asked Zillah how she planned to prod the Carabinieri into action. ‘I’ll go through the embassy, but that’s kind of hard with Mr Hisami in jail. News of his arrest has just broken and the broadcast media has picked up the online gossip of two nights ago that he used his military training to rescue some hostages in the Balkans.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of that story being used,’ said Samson.

  ‘Right, but I guess you knew about it anyway,’ she said, without any kind of inflection. ‘You and his wife were both there. People know. Things like that tend to have currency.’

  ‘Maybe we need to focus on the American end of this thing,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. By the way, you were right to ask about the phones. Seems like the absence of calls from those men could be really significant. I will ask about satellite … we could use some confirmation of what happened out there.’

  Early the next day, Samson left the town to visit the place he had imagined so clearly when listening to the two voicemails Anastasia had left for Hisami. There was nothing else he could do. There were no leads to follow and any attempt to talk to the Naples Mafia would be utterly pointless. Whatever the Carabinieri’s lack of progress, they were the only ones with sources in the Camorra high enough to make any sense of their involvement.

  He needed to start at the place where it had all begun, and this he would admit to no one. He wanted to be where she had been on that unexceptional stretch of road and see what she had seen before she gave herself up to save the life of the man who had betrayed her. He passed through the outskirts of the town, noticing several M5S posters calling for an Italy for the Italians and demanding the deportation of 600,000 migrants. He ignored two calls from Zillah, which followed a text from her earlier asking him to keep her informed of his movements.

  As he climbed into the hills, he saw a sign to Spiadino, the village Anastasia had been due to visit, and decided that he would pay a call on her colleagues after seeing the road. It seemed possible that someone in the Foundation, either in Sicily or Calabria, had informed the kidnappers of Anastasia’s movements. He needed to talk to the man Ciccone.

  There was no police tape marking the scene of two murders and a kidnap. He found the exact spot only after noticing the slash of orange-coloured rock Anastasia had mentioned where the road had been blasted through the mountains and then the residue of paintwork from her car on some boulders. All trace of the tracks in the dirt had been eliminated by the police vehicles.

  He parked where the road was wider a little further down the hill and walked back to the boulders in the extraordinary silence of the mountains. There, he crouched and turned. She must have leapt from the car, made straight for the short length of two-rail crash barrier and headed down to the cover, seventy metres away. He stepped over the barrier. Three footprints were still visible in the sand before the slope turned into rubble and waste. They were made by a small shoe and were almost certainly Anastasia’s. He let himself down the slope by holding on to a cable, walked through the dead weeds towards the trees and entered the shade. This must be where the calls had been made from, but there was no sign of her having been there in the carpet of dead leaves. He looked up towards the road. It was hard to see anything unless you were on the ground. He knelt down then moved to the right to work out where the first victim’s body had been pushed over the edge, at a spot where there was no crash barrier. He sat back on his haunches and looked around. Nothing moved. There wasn’t even the birdsong that could be heard on her voicemails.

  Below him the vegetation was much denser and lusher. In the shade were some large plants with big, fleshy leaves. If she had gone just a little further down, they would never have found her. He walked towards the plants and noticed it was muddy – water oozed under his feet – and a few metres on there was a small stream. Remembering that in one of the reports sent to Zillah before they arrived in Italy there was mention that the second body had been in a culvert and hard to retrieve, he parted the vegetation and followed the tiny watercourse back up the slope until he found a metre-wide crack in the limestone rock, not obvious until you were on top of it. He looked up. It was just possible that a man shot while fleeing for his life would end up there. Then he noticed strands of rope on the side of the crack, which might indicate that the police had hauled the body up from the crevice. He lowered himself into the dark space and was surprised to discover how deep it was and, once he’d got to the bottom, how wide. Using the light from his phone he searched the silt either side of the tiny stream and found the impression made by the body, also the footprints left by the officers who had presumably secured the body before raising it into the daylight. There was nothing more to be found, so he began to climb, having picked out the holds before he left the ground. The rock crumbled in his hands but he moved quickly from one hold to another until he was nearly at the top, when, pausing for breath, he noticed something flat and grey caught on the edge about a metre to his left. He shifted and reached for the object. It was a phone. It must have either fallen from the victim’s body as it crashed to its resting place or dropped from his pocket as the police officers brought him out of the crevice. He slid it into his back pocket and continued to climb.

  At the top, he scrambled over the limestone lip, grazing his stomach a little, then jumped up. The phone had run out of power and there was no way of telling what was on it, and he knew that the charger brought for his own collection of phones wouldn’t work. He looked around some m
ore, particularly on the bank she must have climbed, but soon realised that the place held nothing more for him. He got back into the car and headed for the village, the phone beside him on the passenger seat.

  Spiadino was a pretty hill-top town that was abandoned at the edges, with many houses deserted and falling down, but evidently thriving in the centre. He parked his car in the main square, in the shadow of a run-down seventeenth-century church that reminded him of the empty Venetian churches he had toured with Anastasia.

  The Aysel Hisami Therapy Centre was just off the square, in a renovated building that once belonged to the Partito Communista and still bore slogans in relief on the façade. A woman with a pile of braided hair was crocheting at the reception. He said George Ciccone’s name and gave his own, then, guessing she was West African, continued in French. He was with a client, she replied with a radiant smile, and would not be available for half an hour. There was a café on the piazza and he could wait there. As he turned to leave, he slapped his forehead and asked, ‘Mademoiselle, avez-vous des chargeurs pour les téléphones mobiles?’

  ‘Bien sûr, monsieur.’ She lifted a plastic container full of chargers. ‘Pour tous les modèles de téléphones.’

  He found one that fitted and asked where he could plug it in.

  She pointed to a locked cabinet behind the desk. ‘Les clients ne sont pas autorisés à conserver les téléphones pendant leur traitement.’ She opened the cabinet and he saw three phones on charge inside. He handed her the phone.

  It was a while since he had smoked but, sitting in the brilliant light of the piazza, with a good coffee, he felt the need of a cigarette. In Venice, they had started smoking a cigarette after dinner every evening and it became a thing with them, smoking out of the window after sex or at the back of Cedar after eating. They never talked in these moments and regarded each other with amusement and, it had to be said, some wariness. It was all part of the silent struggle between them, which, with hindsight, he suspected he had been losing from those first days in Venice.

  The waiter gave him a cigarette and proffered an old-fashioned Pearl lighter. ‘Where’s everyone?’ Samson asked in English. It turned out there were workshops producing pottery, leather goods, glass and lampshades on the outskirts of the town. Spiadino had more or less full employment now, plus a choir of twenty, two football teams and a dance group. People were making a great life there. The native townspeople loved the minestrone of different cultures and said the annual celebration of Ferragosto had been the best for fifty years. Yet populist politicians were now implementing harsh new policies on migrants and they might all soon face deportation.

  A man in sunglasses, tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt and trainers materialised in front of him. ‘Hi, I’m George. Is there any news?’

  Samson got up and shook his hand. ‘I am afraid not.’

  Ciccone sat down and nodded to the waiter for his usual. ‘Forgive my appearance – we have soccer training at midday. So, what happens? How does this go?’

  ‘We have to find out why she was abducted. That’s the first step.’

  ‘Isn’t it just for money?’

  ‘Nothing’s been heard from the kidnappers.’

  He looked at him intensely. ‘You’re the man … I’ve seen you before – in Lesbos, in the harbour café one night. You came along and dragged Anastasia from our table to ask about the Syrian kid, remember?’ Samson nodded, but he didn’t remember Ciccone. ‘I worked on her team in one of the camps on the island.’ He removed his sunglasses. ‘Can I ask you in what capacity you’re here? As I recall, you and Anastasia had a relationship.’

  ‘I’m here to find her. I’m working for her husband. Finding people is my job.’

  ‘And you expect to do this without getting emotionally involved?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I hope so. She’s a great woman and she has done immense good here, and at other places. This centre is turning people’s lives around in a way that even I did not believe possible. You look around this town. People seem happy, and that’s because they are safe and have a roof over their heads. But they carry dreadful burdens inside, experiences that you and I cannot imagine. They now have the prospect of happiness – or, should I say, a regular life? – because of the therapy we offer them.’ He leaned forward. ‘You know – we love her. Everyone does. She’s taught us all to listen, and I mean really listen.’

  Samson nodded. This was the part of her life that she had always kept separate from him. He was the entertainment – the distraction – and she rarely talked about her work.

  ‘These two men who tricked her into stopping on the road, did you know them?’ he asked.

  Ciccone shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Were you expecting them to join the community in the village?’

  ‘No, and anyway, that’s not my job. I run the Aysel centre – that’s all.’

  ‘When did you hear that she was coming here?’

  ‘It was my idea. I mentioned it in a call about three or four days before she was taken. I told her about some of the successes we’ve had and I really wanted her to come. There was a village dinner that night and I thought she would enjoy it. A lot of this is my fault.’ He dragged his hand through his hair and looked away across the square.

  ‘But she was expecting to be here for the day only. She had a flight from Brindisi that evening.’

  ‘We were hoping to persuade her to stay,’ he said, still with his eyes on the far side of the square. ‘I mentioned it to her, and I knew she would. I feel really bad about this. If I hadn’t asked her to come, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘You shouldn’t feel bad. They would have tried to seize her somewhere else.’

  ‘What the fuck is this about, Mr Samson? I mean, who’d want to kidnap her?’

  ‘We have to think about the feeling against migrants. Do you have any trouble with that here? Any extremist activity?’

  ‘A few incidents – young men driving into town, causing trouble, threatening the women. It was unpleasant, but the community is solid and the majority of the Italian folk love what has been happening here, so the extremists are told to get lost. Local people feel proud of the sanctuary that’s been created in Spiadino.’

  ‘Did she encounter any problems in Sicily that she told you about?’

  ‘No, I just asked her to bring the damned car and she was a bit worried about finding her way here.’

  ‘Who knew about these arrangements – anyone here, for example?’

  ‘Just me. I didn’t tell anyone because I wasn’t sure she was going to make it. At the other end, in Sicily, there would have been more people who knew, maybe five or six employees of the centre.’

  Samson’s gaze lifted to some brightly coloured hangings that were draped from the first-floor windows of three old buildings. Below these were two children waving a wand that sent a stream of bubbles across the square. Two dogs played in the shadow of the church and an ancient Italian man sat in the shade of the only tree, hands folded on top of his cane. Spiadino was peaceful. Anastasia would have liked it.

  ‘The banners are stunning, aren’t they?’ said Ciccone. ‘That building there has been restored and houses single female migrants. The banners give thanks to the town.’

  ‘When she called you from the road, what did you do?’ asked Samson.

  ‘I phoned the Carabinieri and then called again repeatedly because they weren’t taking me seriously. Then I had the town’s mayor call them and he got a better response, but it took a long time. Eventually, I phoned Denis’s office, but by that time they already knew.’ He paused as an espresso with a side of milk was set down. ‘It must be awful for Denis, and I guess it can’t have been easy for him to call on your services.’

  There was an edge in Ciccone’s voice that suggested possessiveness about Anastasia. Samson guessed he was being cast as the disreputable ex-lover, summoned as a last resort. ‘Denis employed me to look for Aysel in Northern Iraq and Syria,’ he
said quietly, ‘the woman your organisation is named after.’

  ‘I didn’t mean …’

  ‘That’s okay, Mr Ciccone. But I want you to know I’m not here as a concerned friend. I have a job to do – you understand? How did you discuss her arrangements – phone, text or email?’

  ‘We spoke on the phone. The broadband is really unreliable in the town.’

  ‘Anyone overhear you?’

  ‘No, I was in my office.’

  Samson watched a familiar BMW enter the square and pull up next to his by the church. Zillah Dee got out with one of the men working for her. She spotted him and made for their table.

  ‘And this must be Mr Ciccone. Hello, sir,’ she said, offering a hand. ‘Zillah Dee, we spoke on the phone. Look, I need a word with Mr Samson. Would you mind?’

  Ciccone sat back and downed the coffee. ‘Sure.’

  They walked into the centre of the piazza, where Zillah stopped and turned to him. ‘A body has been recovered in the southern Adriatic by an Italian naval vessel that was heading to Brindisi.’ Samson’s heart turned over. ‘The body was of a male. There was a slip of paper in the back pocket of his pants that suggested the victim was Italian – a receipt for gas bought at the beginning of the week.

  ‘And?’

  ‘The man had been shot in the back of the head. The paper was photographed and sent to the Carabinieri, who checked out the receipt. It was Niccolo Scorza’s debit card, one of the two men who kidnapped Mrs Hisami.’

  Samson searched her eyes. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘That we are dealing with people who are prepared to eliminate every witness to the kidnap. We must assume that Bucco is at the bottom of the ocean. There were signs that Scorza’s body was weighted because a small length of chain was attached to his legs. The weight must have come free when he was dumped. The ship that picked up the body is about to dock at Brindisi, and DNA tests will establish whether it is in fact Scorza. But it seems very likely that it is.’