“And?”
“Why does an old rabbi who clearly doesn’t like our murderous friend from the past, Brother DeVaux, have the number of another Franciscan monk in his personal telephone book?”
“Was there an address?” Finn asked. They had reached the traffic circle for the Autostrada. They could go either west toward Rome or north to Milan.
“Yeah, there was an address.”
“Where?”
“Lausanne, Switzerland. The Monastery of St. Franзois. Where Vergadora spent the war with Signore Olivetti, remember?”
Finn turned north.
20
Finn Ryan, still fully dressed, lay on the bed in her hotel room and listened to the sounds of the sleeping city. She and Hilts had driven straight through from Venosa, stopping only once for a quick bite to eat at a roadside restaurant. The made the journey in a little less than eight hours. They spent another hour and a half getting thoroughly lost in the two-thousand-year-old metropolis, finally dumping the rental car in what seemed to be Milan’s last available parking spot, then walked until they found a relatively inexpensive hotel willing to rent them rooms without reservations and almost no luggage.
The rooms turned out to be tiny, perched under the eaves on the top floor with a view out over the dusty street instead of the hotel courtyard, with its newly renovated open-air garden and restaurant. Both of them were too tired for food, so they’d simply said good night and gone to their separate rooms. But sleep had not come. She was worried, and even the warm night air seemed charged with apprehension. She longed for a bath, but to strip and slip into the welcoming heat would somehow make her too vulnerable. Visions from old Alfred Hitchcock movies swarmed through her mind like buzzing bees.
Through her open window Finn could hear the distant sound of traffic, and closer, the echoing of tapping, high-heeled footsteps on the hard cobbles of the street and the sound of shrill female laughter. Someone made a comment and the woman laughed again, while a male companion made a mocking, hooting sound. Suddenly she started as she heard the muted shriek of a train whistle cutting through the dark night air; Milan’s gigantic and brutal Stazione Centrale hunched like one of Mussolini’s stone nightmares only a few blocks away, the huge white granite hulk proof of the clichй that if nothing else Il Duce had made the Italian trains run on time.
Milan, Finn knew, was a smaller and considerably more decrepit version of Paris, and like Paris it was almost completely empty of skyscrapers. Scaffolding seemed to grow from buildings constantly being refurbished like permanent exoskeletons. It was the place where thirties fascism had been born, where Leonardo’s and Dan Brown’s Last Supper was doled out to ticket holders for roughly a buck and a half per minute, and it was the place where thirties fascism had finally died at an Esso station in the Piazzale Loreto with Benito Mussolini hanging from his heels while half a dozen GIs looked on. It was home to the finest Italian fashion, the most extreme Italian politics, and the best-equipped riot police in the world. It’s duomo, or cathedral, was the third largest church in all of Christendom, but the city’s true religion was soccer, second only to the pursuit of money. It was a city far too brash and industrious to be charming, and certainly its vast slums and sometimes choking smog were not what the average reader of the New York Times thought about as he dreamed of a holiday in Tuscany.
Finn jumped as her door burst open and Hilts appeared, shirt unbuttoned to the waist. His hair was all over the place and his eyes were wide and hot.
“Turn on the TV!”
“What’s the matter!?”
“Just turn the damn thing on!”
Finn picked up the remote from the bedside table and pushed the ON button. The screen on the big console TV on the bureau at the end of the bed blipped on to CNN, which was the last channel she’d had on before trying to sleep. They were showing a weather map of Eastern Europe. It was raining in Prague.
“Not that! Switch it!” barked Hilts. He came into the room and closed the door. Finn did as she was told, flipping through the channels.
“There!” he said. “Hold it!”
It was channel six, Telelombardia, a local news show. A well-dressed dark-haired woman with a serious look on her face was reading a report as she stood in the middle of a futuristic set constructed of something that looked like chrome-plated scaffolding. There were keyed-in inserts showing an old black-and-white photograph of two smiling middle-aged men, one of whom looked vaguely familiar.
“Turn it up! What are they saying?”
“Calm down and I’ll tell you,” said Finn, using the remote to adjust the volume. She listened. The news anchor kept on with her story. Finn translated for Hilts as the story continued, thrusting her feet into her running shoes as they watched.
– Here seen with his friend Adriano Olivetti, Vergadora was a well-known and well-liked member of the academic community and a noted historian. His sudden, violent death at the hands of what are reported to be members of the terrorist group Third Position came as a shock to the people of Venosa, the farming community where he made his home.-
The scene on the television changed to an idyllic shot of rolling hills and vineyards from the station’s stock footage library, then more footage of the town itself, and finally a floodlit shot of the villa among the poplars, surrounded by efficient-looking police unreeling tape while the bubble lights on their patrol cars skipped frantically over the scene. This was then shockingly overlaid by two grainy black-and-white pictures that clearly showed Hilts and Finn shot from a high angle standing outside the door of the villa.
– These pictures, taken from Rabbi Vergadora’s security system, show his attackers shortly before the elderly professor was slaughtered in his library…-
“I didn’t see a camera,” said Finn, shocked and horrified by what she was seeing.
“They murdered him,” muttered Hilts, staring at the screen. “And they’re putting it on us.”
“They?”
“This is Adamson and his pals.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“You think it’s a coincidence?”
“The camera got us on tape. There’s been a misunderstanding, that’s all,” said Finn. “We’ll just go to the police and explain.”
“Where do they get this stuff about us being members of Third Position?”
“Who are they?”
“The Italian version of al-Qaeda. We’re being set up.”
“It’s a mistake.”
“It’s no mistake. Vergadora is dead. If the news is saying it’s Third Position, that probably means Vergadora was killed violently. Their weapon of choice is a cut-down shotgun, a Mafia lupara. This is not Boy Scouts, Finn. This is hardball. These people are out to kill us.”
“But why kill Vergadora?”
“Because he obviously needed killing as far as they were concerned, and because blaming it on us turns you and me into lepers-untouchables. With this hanging over us there’s nobody we can go to for help.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“That we get the hell out of here. Fast. We’ve got to regroup.”
“If they’ve got our faces on tape they probably have a description of the car. Maybe even a plate number.”
“The train station then.”
On cue there was the sound of two-tone sirens wailing and the screeching of tires. Finn jumped off the bed and raced to the window. She looked out and saw the dark street below littered with blue-and-white polizia Alfas. A black-and-white van thundered up behind them and half a dozen special police poured out dressed in camo blouses, black helmets, and loose fatigue pants. All of them were carrying compact Beretta machine guns or short-barreled Benelli shotguns.
“SISDE,” muttered Hilts, looking over her shoulder. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her away from the window.
“Who are they?”
He started dragging her toward the door. “Italian Secret Police, come on!”
“My clothes! My things!”
“No time!”
She barely had time to grab her wallet and watch off the nightstand before Hilts pushed her out into the narrow hall. There were two rooms to the left, three to the right, the same across the hall, and the single old-fashioned cage elevator in the middle. Even as they stood there the mechanism began to grind.