As Ahmet began, Alex quietly brought a notepad and pen out of her purse. Peter sat with his arms folded, elbows on the table. Rizzo sat next to her on the other side, his arms folded across his chest, his facial expression a tight scowl.
Ahmet Lazzari had a stricken look as he launched into his story. He had a prison pallor about him and behaved at times like a stray dog, not knowing whether he was going to be fed or whipped. But he had worked for Federov’s companies since 2001, he said, as a warehouseman first, then as a deck hand, and eventually as a member of a crew on the outbound freighters. He’d been clear of trouble for the entire time of his employment, up until about two months ago.
“That’s when hell broke loose,” he said. “That’s when we made some mistakes, my brother, Hassan, and me. Bad mistakes. I regret them.”
His eyes darted to Federov and then around the table. Hell breaking loose, he explained next, was when he, his brother, the shipping company, and a ship known as El Fuguero-Liberian registry-all came together under the same unlucky star.
Ahmet and Hassan had worked together for several years, each one watching the other’s back, working intermittently as merchant seamen for various companies. They were in Genoa two months earlier when the Fuguero was signing on crew. They signed on together. The bursar and much of the staff were Arabs, many Libyan, a few Saudis. The brothers had Sicilian names and Italian passports but were Arabs. So they got special treatment and were hired.
Two nights before sailing, the purser, a man named Abdul, approached them in a café near the docks. He wanted to put an offer to them, Ahmet recalled, something that would earn them some extra money. Ahmet had drawn his attention because he was an Arab and because he had experience working in shipyards and knew how to weld the inner structure of a ship. So would they be interested in listening? And would they be able to keep their mouths shut if they said no.
The brothers looked at each other and didn’t think too much about it. Extra money was important, whatever the job, so they said yes. It had to do with taking some panels off the wall and sealing some material back in. The brothers looked at each other and laughed.
“Half the boats in the Mediterranean are running drugs,” Ahmet said to the table full of his visitors. “The other half are running guns. People in suits in offices are getting rich. Men who have yachts and seven mistresses. So why shouldn’t we get some crumbs from the rich guys’ table?”
So they agreed.
Two nights later they were aboard the ship. It had been cleared of local crew. The brothers were asked to go into the bursar’s office with an array of tools and take out one of the panels on the wall. They did so. Behind it was a hollow area, about a meter wide and half a meter deep. It was perfect for storage. They left the new hole in the wall open and reported back to Abdul.
Abdul came in and inspected their work. He was pleased. The panel lay on the floor with the bolts that had held it. There wasn’t much of a mess and nothing had been damaged. The brothers had done good work.
“Next, we were told to go below decks until summoned back,” Ahmet said. “When we came back down below, the atmosphere on the ship had changed. The crew was gone, almost all of it. In their place, there were some Middle Eastern guys. They had the scarves. Dark glasses. They looked like Egyptians, and they looked like they wanted trouble. They all had Uzi’s. They didn’t bother us, but they knew we were welders.”
“We understood that this was when a delivery was made,” Ahmet said. “They didn’t want us seeing whoever got on and off.”
“We sat in the ship’s kitchen, my brother, Hassan, and me,” Ahmet said. “We opened a bottle of wine and smoked cigarettes. It must have been less than an hour. One of the gunman came for us. He spoke to us in Arabic and told us we could go back upstairs and finish our work. He asked us if we had more cigarettes, so we gave him a pack. We wanted him to be our friend, you know?”
He searched the table nervously and looked for some interaction from his audience. None was forthcoming.
“We went back upstairs and Abdul was standing there. He was looking into our secret compartment. There was a bag in it. A sack. Rough material, like burlap. The type of thing tools are kept in. He motioned with his head at the hiding place. ‘Close it up now!’ he said to us. So we did. We put the steel plating back in place and used an automatic drill to put the bolts back. He didn’t let us look in the bag. We had no idea.”
He drew a breath. Alex interrupted him.
“Ahmet,” she said. “What was the exact date that we’re talking about?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Try harder than that, if you will.”
After some consultation he claimed it was June the twenty-first of this year. Or thereabouts. He wasn’t certain.
“Why is the exact date important?” Federov asked.
“Dates are always important,” Alex said.
She thanked the Arab and he continued.
“Abdul paid us in cash. So we had some fun with the money in port. Liquor. Women.”
“Well, that’s not a strict Muslim lifestyle now, is it?” Rizzo chipped in.
Ahmet hung his head a little. He had no idea who Rizzo was and didn’t know whether to spit or salute. He did neither. “No,” he said. “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble if we’d been strict,” he said, “but we weren’t.”
Federov made a motion with his hand that suggested Ahmet should move the story along. He did. He said they sailed in two days as scheduled, and everything was fine on board. Then after two days at sea, his brother came to him. Hassan had purchased this little electronic tracking device, he said. It had only cost twenty euros. But Hassan had this bold idea. He was going to go into the compartment and slip it into whatever was in the bag. Then they could follow the bag to its ultimate destination.
“For what purpose?” Alex asked. “To steal it back or to blackmail the recipient?”
“I didn’t want to go along with this,” Ahmet said. “It was my brother’s idea. Hassan’s. Completely.”
“That’s nice, but it’s not what I asked,” she said.
“Blackmail,” he said.
“It turned out that he and his brother were stealing from my cargo too,” Federov said with bitterness, staring at his prisoner. “They’d break into shipping containers and skim merchandise. They’d smuggle it off the ships and fence it, then the insurance companies would come back to me. Prosecutors in Italy brought charges of fraud against two of my companies two years ago.”
“As for these brothers creating problems for me…,” Federov continued, “we’re going to discuss it later in the evening.”
“My brother’s idea,” Ahmet said again. “It wasn’t me. It was my brother,” Ahmet said. “We have an expression in Sicily,” he said. “A cani tintu catina curta. For a bad dog, a short leash. Hassan should have been on a very short leash.”
“But you went along with all of it,” said Alex, first in English and then in Italian. “Doesn’t that make you equally guilty? And apparently you had been doing this sort of thing for years.”
“Exactly,” Federov said.
Ahmet looked very ill at ease with the notion, and Federov looked vindicated. Rizzo glanced at his watch. Not that he was going anywhere. But fatigue was starting to take a toll on all of them. “Let’s get on with it,” he said.
“We waited until we had access to the purser’s office,” Ahmet said. “We went in one night. We had a shipmate give him too much to drink.” He paused, looked at Alex as if he couldn’t decide whether to elaborate, then decided to go with it. “There were some women on the ship. Women who worked the freighters in the area. There was a Dutch girl. We made sure she kept him busy one night. We had a whole warning system. She was to signal us if Abdul left his suite.”