“All five million euros?”
“Yes,” Vincenzo said shortly. “Now, if that’s what you wanted to know, I’d like to get back to work. And you, I believe, have a ten-year-old homicide to solve.” Caravale considered pressing him a little more-Which stocks did he borrow against? What exactly was the lending arrangement? Who was his broker?-but he could sense the workings of the gears in Vincenzo’s mind, a step ahead of him, already framing ambiguous replies to whatever he might ask, so he let it pass. Besides, if the man, in desperation, had done something not-quite-legal to get the money to ransom his son, Caravale wasn’t about to go after him on account of it.
All the same, his cop’s soul told him that there was something here that didn’t add up, and he made a mental note to have his people look a bit more closely into the financial end of things as they pursued their investigations.
“All right, signore,” he said pleasantly. “As you say.”
Back in Stresa after dropping Phil off at Camping Costa Azzurra, Gideon was in a rotten mood. He picked at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant meal of pollo alla cacciatora, watching with ethnocentric and unanthropological disapproval as a five-year-old was encouraged to sip his father’s red wine (but had his hand slapped when he reached for his coffee). The dinner was good, but he had little appetite and left half of it on the plate. His hands hurt. He had unthinkingly done his digging that morning without the benefit of gloves, and although it hadn’t bothered him at the time, it now felt as if the gravel had inflicted a hundred tiny paper cuts. Stupid.
On his roundabout way back to the hotel, he stopped at a gelateria on the Corso for his usual dessert. For the first time, however, he found himself annoyed rather than charmed by the baffling Italian custom of adding two inexplicable steps to the purchase. Going up to the gelato counter, he was required to tell the woman behind it what he wanted, in return for which she gave him, not his two-scoop cone of chocolate and pistachio, but a piece of paper on which she’d scrawled some arcane symbols. This he had to take back to the cashier near the door, to whom he gave his 1.30m; and from whom he received a receipt. The receipt was then taken to the counter (again), and the gelato finally given to him. The process had never bugged him before, but it did tonight.
And the standard, useless, plastic gelato spoon that came with it-not only absurdly minuscule, but spade-shaped rather than spoon-shaped (why, to make eating the stuff more of a challenge?)-was one more irritant.
He knew what it was that was really bothering him, of course. While his solitary, footloose dining arrangements had been enjoyable at first, after five evenings they were getting depressing. So were his solitary sleeping arrangements. He missed Julie; missed her company, missed her presence through the night. Next time, if there was a next time, he’d be less finicky about his demands for material comfort. He thought briefly of checking out of the Hotel Primavera in the morning and joining the group after all, but there was only one more night to go after this one, and he’d be spending it in a tent with two or three other men anyway, so what was the point?
Unable to focus on the International Herald Tribune or a book, and too lazy to go out for another walk, he kicked off his shoes and turned on the television set. The Primavera brought in only one English-speaking channeclass="underline" Eurosport, a British import that was showing cycling at the moment, but was promising, with barely controlled enthusiasm, to move on to an exciting weight-lifting competition from Sofia at the top of the hour. There was a German station with talking heads and a French one that had a noisy, laughy game show. The rest were in Italian: another couple of game shows, including a homegrown version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a Judge Judy-type program, two dubbed American sitcoms with the usual weirdly assorted families and creepy children, and Law and Order (La Legge e le Forze dell’Ordine) with Jerry Orbach chasing down perps in Italian (“Alt! Polizia!”).
He watched the last twenty minutes of La Legge e le Forze dell’Ordine, and at nine o’clock he switched off the TV and went to bed.
FOURTEEN
At 3:22 that morning a remarkable telephone call was received at Stresa’s Polizia Municipale headquarters on Piazza Marconi. According to the caller, Sister Susanna, the nighttime receptionist at the hospital, there were strange sounds coming from the morgue in the basement. “As if,” she whispered, “something is trying to get out.”
“No, no, Sister,” said Ettore Omodeo, the police dispatcher, with a reassuring laugh. “After all, how could anyone get out of a morgue? But it’s chilly out tonight, it might be someone trying to get in, to keep warm. You stay where you are, Sister. I’ll have someone there right away.”
Omodeo contacted the lone patrol car on duty and gave them the message. Then he shook his head.
What kind of a person would want to break into a morgue?
Gideon had always been an early riser, often earlier than he wished, and going to sleep at 9 didn’t help any. By 5:00 A.M. he was awake and restless, itching to get moving. And he needed coffee. He did some stretching and enough push-ups and sit-ups to get some blood into his muscles, showered, shaved, slipped on a windbreaker against the predawn chill, and trotted downstairs, feeling a bit more positive about the world in general. He nodded to the teenaged nighttime desk clerk, who greeted him with a mournful shrug.
“No breakfas’ yet, signore. Seven o’clock.”
“I know. See you then.”
He walked past shuttered shops and restaurants to the quiet Corso Italia and crossed it to the Lungolago, the lakeside promenade. Near the ferry terminal there was an espresso and snack stand that he knew from past experience would be open for the benefit of early-arriving ferry workers.
By now the barista knew him by sight. “Buongiorno. Cappuccino. Doppio. Senza cioccolato.”
“Si, grazie,” said Gideon, smiling. It was practically like being in Seattle.
Relatively contented now, he walked along the promenade, slowly sipping coffee from a giant Styrofoam cup. The only other people he saw were a couple of elderly men walking their dogs and looking lonesome and pensive in the way of early-morning dog walkers everywhere. The ornamental fountains had still to be turned on, and with no traffic whizzing down the Corso yet, he could actually hear the gentle lapping of the lake against the stone bulwark on which the promenade had been built.
It was very peaceful, very pretty. The air smelled of camellias and lemon oil, cut by the pungent, not unpleasant scent of creosote from the ferry terminal pilings. The globe lamps along the promenade were still lit, but the sky had begun to lighten, so the perfectly pruned trees, the brick walking paths, and the dark lake itself were all highlighted with streaks of rose and gold. After a while he stopped to lean on the balustrade and look out over the water, waiting for the sun to top the mountains on the other side, shoot out its brief explosion of brilliant yellow rays, and touch the graceful towers and parapets of the Borromean Islands with the day’s first light. He’d watched it before, and with a still-warm double cappuccino in his hand, it was about as good a way to start the day as any he could imagine; given, that is, that he had to start it without Julie.
It was the smell that brought on the first trickle of apprehension. Old sweat, stale clothing. Someone was standing too close to him. This was Italy, of course, where the perception of personal space wasn’t as expansive as it was in the States, but it made him wary all the same. And now he could even smell the person’s breakfast on his breath-a ham and cheese panino, espresso laced with grappa… Even for Italy, this was getting a little-
As he began to turn, there was an intake of breath startlingly close behind him, and then his cup went flying and the hot coffee was in his face, the crushed Styrofoam jammed up against his mouth by a bare, muscular forearm pressed against his throat. At first he thought someone was trying to shove him over the balustrade into the water a dozen feet below, but when a knee was forced into his lower spine to bend him over backward, he realized he was being strangled. Somebody had a choke hold on him from behind, clamping his neck between upper arm and forearm and tightening the resulting vise by pulling on his wrist with the other hand.