I reached over and took her phone.
“Faduma Salah is my hostage. I will only release her when my demands are met. I will be in contact soon,” I said before hanging up.
I slid the phone down the side of my seat and stood.
“Come on,” I said.
“My phone,” she protested.
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
I pressed the bell and walked to the exit as the bus slowed. Faduma followed grudgingly.
“Did you really have to do that?” she asked.
“Which bit? The hostage? Or leaving your phone?”
“Both,” she said as the doors lurched open with a pneumatic hiss.
“You gave me the idea,” I said. “It absolves you of any wrongdoing. And you know I couldn’t let you keep your phone. No matter how secure it’s supposed to be.”
She nodded and sighed as we left the bus.
“What now?” she asked while the vehicle rumbled away.
“I need to get the surveillance gear from the apartment,” I said. “No one is watching Milan Verde and the Dark Fates. We have no idea what they’re doing. If I can review the footage, I might be able to see who sent that man to kill us at Baggio’s apartment.”
“I’m guessing the cops followed your friends after Justine was released from custody,” Faduma remarked. “So, the apartment is probably being watched.”
I nodded. “We’ll just have to be careful. And maybe a little cunning.”
“You’re dangerous, Jack Morgan.”
“Hold that thought,” I responded, hurrying toward a payphone beside a petrol station.
I stepped into the booth, swiped a credit card through the slot and dialed the operator.
An automated announcement played in Italian and I handed Faduma the receiver. She listened and then spoke in Italian.
“Who do you want?” she asked me.
“Gianna Bianchi,” I replied. “The attorney.”
I heard Faduma repeat the name along with some instructions in Italian. After a short pause she handed the receiver back to me.
There was a ringing tone and a woman’s voice said, “Bianchi avvocatessa.”
“Gianna Bianchi, please. Tell her it’s Jack Morgan.”
I was connected almost immediately.
“Jack, what’s going on? The things they’re saying on the news—”
“They’re not true,” I interrupted Gianna. “Someone has done a great job of setting me up. Listen, I need you to do me a favor. My colleagues Seymour Kloppenberg, Maureen Roth and Justine Smith have just been arrested at Centro Commerciale Aura. Do whatever you can to get them released. They’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Of course,” Gianna said.
“And you should probably let the cops know one of their own is dead. Bernardo Baggio is hanging in his closet. I think it’s murder staged to look like suicide.”
“Why?” Gianna asked.
“He was on duty the night Matteo is supposed to have tried to kill himself.”
I could sense her putting the pieces together.
“I’ll inform the authorities,” she assured me. “What about you? Come in. We’ll challenge the accusations.”
“Not yet,” I replied. “I can’t risk what happened to Matteo and Baggio happening to me. I need to take care of a few things.”
She hesitated.
“I understand. But I have to advise you to turn yourself in.”
“You’ve done that. Now do whatever you can to get my friends out. I’ll be in touch.”
“Be careful,” she advised before I hung up.
I turned to Faduma.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
I nodded, my mind whirring, my body still charged with adrenalin.
“Just trying to figure out how we get inside an apartment that is probably under tight police surveillance.”
Chapter 70
I tried to encourage Faduma to leave me but she refused to listen, saying she would never bail on a story like this. I couldn’t help feeling there was more to it, that there was a sense of honor guiding her, compelling her not to abandon me. It was a sentiment I shared. I’d never abandoned a case.
She took me to a tiny basement bar in Poggio del Torrino, a neighborhood that lay between the center of Rome and Ostia, and we passed the evening there with a handful of heavy drinkers who spent enough on alcohol to keep the place going. The bar was called Il Tucano and was set beneath a modern apartment block. It was the kind of watering hole where people drank alone and purposefully, determined to achieve oblivion. While I’d hesitate to label strangers alcoholics or problem drinkers, these folk certainly weren’t fair-weather.
Faduma and I sat in a booth in a back corner of the bar, nursing a steady stream of Cokes, coffees and water to ensure the taciturn old barman, who looked as though he’d soaked up many lifetimes of misery, didn’t kick us out.
No one paid us any mind and for a while I was able to forget I was a wanted man whose face had been beamed across the airwaves and the Internet.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said to Faduma.
“You keep telling me that, and I keep telling you I want to be here.”
“You’re risking so much,” I responded.
“And you?” she asked. “Why do you have to be here?”
I hesitated.
“I don’t,” I conceded. “But if I wasn’t here, who would find the truth? Who would protect Matteo from wrongful conviction? I can’t stand by if there’s a chance an innocent man might be jailed.”
She nodded slowly. “Do you know what it’s like to come to a country as a refugee? To be spat on? Told you’re inferior? To be abused? Ridiculed? Told you aren’t welcome? That you have no worth?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine experiencing any of those things and was suddenly conscious of the privilege life had granted me.
“It can break a person,” Faduma said, and I couldn’t be sure in the low light of the bar but I thought her eyes were glistening. “Or it can build strength. It can teach you to know when the crowd is wrong and when those less fortunate than you need help. Rome is hunting you, Mr. Morgan, and for someone who grew up being marginalized by Rome, that is reason enough for me to stay.”
We remained in our booth until the last of the swaying customers staggered out and the barman finally presented us with the bill shortly after 1 a.m. We stepped onto Viale degli Astri, a wide avenue lined with palm trees and modern apartment blocks, and the warm air hit us along with the echoes of drinkers and diners making their way home along the otherwise quiet streets. We walked through a small park that lay to our east and caught a taxi from an office set in the foot of an apartment block on Viale Don Pasquino Borghi.
About five minutes into our journey, as we reached the open highway that would take us to the coast, I noticed the driver, a short, stocky man with stubble and the hungry expression of a hyena, kept glancing at me in the rear-view mirror and every so often his gaze would linger. I could see my face in the mirror, lit up now and again by the headlamps of vehicles coming along the carriageway on the other side of the median.
“Five hundred,” the driver said at last.
“Mi scusi?” Faduma responded.
“For a safe journey,” he explained. “It seems a fair price for your friend.”
And there it was. His eyes were on me not because he was a conscientious citizen thinking of turning me in, but because he was calculating how much he could extort for his silence.
Faduma said something in Italian. She sounded angry, but I interrupted her.
“That’s a fair price,” I said. “I’m assuming it buys your silence forever.”
“That’s another five hundred,” the greedy man replied.
I nodded. “Okay.”