Dressed as I was in a pair of somewhat rumpled pants and a heavy woolen sweater, they probably didn’t know what to make of me. If I were one of the foreigners (most often British) who owned or rented the nearby Tuscan villas at exorbitant rates, why hadn’t they seen me before? And what was this crazy foreigner doing awake at six o’clock in the morning?
I ordered an espresso and sat down at one of the small round plastic tables. The workers’ conversations slowly resumed, and when my coffee arrived, a small Illy-Caffè cup filled with steaming dark espresso topped with a golden-tan layer of crèma, I took a long, appreciative sip and felt the caffeine do its work in my bloodstream.
Thus fortified, I got up and approached what appeared to be the most senior of the workers, a potbellied, round-faced, balding man whose face was covered with gray stubble. He was wearing a grimy white apron over a navy blue work uniform.
“Buon giorno,” I said.
“Buon giorno,” he replied, regarding me with suspicion. He spoke with the soft, gentle accents of Tuscany, in which a hard C becomes an H, a hard ch becomes a soft sh.
In my rudimentary Italian, I managed to say: “Sto cercando Castelbianco, in Volte-Basse.” I’m looking for Castelbianco.
He shrugged, turned to the others.
“Che pensi, che questo sta cercando di vendere l’assicurazione al Tedesco, o cosa?” he muttered: Think this guy’s trying to sell the German guy insurance, or what?
The German: Is that what they thought Orlov was? Was that his cover legend here, a German émigré?
Laughter all round. The youngest of them, a dark-skinned, gangly man in his early twenties who looked like an Arab, said: “Digli che vogliamo una parte della sua percentuale.” Tell him we want part of his commission. There was more laughter.
Another one said, “Pensi che questo sta cercando di entrare nella professione del muratore?” You think this guy’s trying to get into the rock business?
I laughed companionably along with them. “Voi lavorate in una cava?” I asked. You guys work in the quarry?
“No, è il sindaco di Rosia,” the youngest one said, slapping the oldest on the shoulder. “Io sono il vice-sindaco.” No, he’s the mayor of Rosia, he was saying, and I’m the deputy mayor.
“Allora, Sua Eccellenza,” I said to the balding man, and asked whether they were doing stonework for the “German.” “Che state lavorando le pietre per il… tedesco… a Castelbianco?”
He waved his hand at me dismissively, and they all laughed again. The youngest one said, Se fosse vero, pensi che staremmo qua perdendo il nostro tempo? Il tedesco sta pagando i muratori tredici mille lire all’ora!” If we were, you think we’d be wasting our time here? The German’s paying stonemasons thirteen thousand lire an hour!
“You want veal, this is the guy to see,” another said of the older man, who got up, brushed his hands against his apron (which I now realized was spattered with animal blood), and walked toward the door. He was followed by the man who’d just spoken.
After the butcher and his assistant had left, I said to the swarthy young man: “So where’s Castelbianco anyway?”
“Volte-Basse,” he said. “A few kilometers up the road toward Siena.”
“Is Castelbianco a town?”
“A town?” he said with an incredulous laugh. “It’s big enough to be a town, but no. It’s a tenuta-an estate. Most of us kids used to play at Castelbianco years ago, before they sold it.”
“Sold?”
“Some rich German just moved in there. They say he’s German, I don’t know, maybe he’s Swiss or something. Very secretive, very private.”
He described for me where Castelbianco was located, and I thanked him and left.
An hour later I found the estate on which Vladimir Orlov had gone into hiding.
If, indeed, the information I had “gotten” from the cardiologist was right. At that point I didn’t know for certain. But the talk at the bar about a reclusive “German” seemed to confirm it. Did the townspeople think Orlov was some East German grandee who had gone into hiding when the Wall came down? The best covers follow the contours of reality.
Set on a hill overlooking Siena, Castelbianco was a magnificent ancient villa built in the Romanesque style. It was large and somewhat shambling; restoration was obviously being done on one wing. The villa was surrounded by gardens that were probably once beautiful but were now overgrown and in disarray. I found it at the end of a winding road in the hills above Volte-Basse.
Castelbianco had no doubt been a Tuscan family’s ancestral home, and centuries before that had probably been a fortified bastion of one of the many Etruscan city-states. The forest that surrounded the disheveled gardens overflowed with silvery-green olive trees, fields of enormous sunflowers, and grapevines, great cypresses. I realized quickly why Orlov had chosen this particular villa. Its location, the way it was set high upon a hill, made it easy to secure. A high stone fence surrounded the estate, topped, I saw, with electrified wire. Not impenetrable-virtually nothing was impermeable to someone skilled in black-bag jobs-but it did a fairly good job at keeping out the unwanted. From a tiny stone booth, recently constructed, at the only entrance, an armed guard checked all visitors. The only visitors seemed to be, just as I’d learned that morning, workers from Rosia and the area, stonemasons and carpenters who arrived in dusty old trucks, were carefully looked over, and proceeded in to do their day’s work.
Probably Orlov had brought this guard with him from Moscow. And if one got past this guard, there would certainly be others within. So crashing the gates seemed like an eminently bad idea.
After a few minutes of surveillance, from the car and on foot, I devised a plan.
A few minutes’ drive away was the sprawling town of Sovicille, the capital of this area, this commune west of Siena, but as unassuming a capital city as I had ever seen. I parked in the center of town, in the Piazza G. Marconi, in front of a church, next to a San Pellegrino bottled-water truck. The square was peaceful, disturbed only by the lewd whistling of a bird in a cage in front of a Jolly Caffè, the chatter of a few middle-aged women. There I spotted the yellow rotary-dial sign of a public telephone, and as I walked toward it, the peace was broken by the loud ringing of the town bell.
I entered the café and ordered a coffee and a sandwich. For some reason, there is no coffee in the world like Italian coffee. They don’t grow it, but they know how to brew it, and in any truck stop or cheap dive in Italy you can get better cappuccino than you can in the finest so-called “Northern Italian” restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
I sipped, and I thought, which is something I had done quite a bit of since leaving Washington. Yet for all my cogitation, I still had no idea where things stood.
I was in possession of the most extraordinary talent, but what had I been able to do with it? I had tracked down a former head of Soviet intelligence-a neat bit of espionage that, frankly, the CIA would certainly have been able to accomplish, given more time and a little ingenuity.