Conspiracy in Kiev (9 page)
L
ater in the day, Alex went to Human Resources where she sat for a series of photographs, changing her blouse for each new photo. She rearranged her hair slightly with each picture so that no two shots were too much alike or appeared to have been taken at the same time. New IDs were being made and new photos were in order. It was yet another indication that this was no ordinary trip.
In the early afternoon, back in her office at FinCen, Alex completed the reassignment of her current caseload to other investigators at FinCen. After lunch she returned to a newly assigned room in the State Department.
Her language instructor, Olga, arrived at a few minutes past four. Olga led Alex through some preliminary ground rules for the study of Ukrainian. The teacher seemed pleased that Alex had a solid grasp of Russian. That gave her entry into Ukrainian. Alex felt like a graduate student getting tutored for a final.
The trouble was, her heart wasn’t completely in it.
She found herself thinking about her assignment that night when she worked out at the gym. There was no basketball that evening, but she did spot a few of the players: Jack, who was an accountant for the IRS; Laura, her old buddy who worked at the White House; and Ben, who was running laps on his prosthesis.
From the locker room afterward she phoned Robert on her cell phone. He wasn’t home yet either.
“Want to grab a pizza?” she asked.
“I’d like to grab you, instead,” he answered. “Or maybe the pizza and then you.”
“I’ve got cold beer in the fridge,” she said. It was the first time all day Alex felt relaxed. Robert had that effect on her.
“It’s a deal,” he said.
There was a Chicago-style pizza place called Jean & Luca’s not far from Dupont Circle where he lived. He said he’d swing by there, get a thick pie, and drive it over to her place.
He did.
She had an ulterior motive this evening, however, and elaborated when they broke open the pie and the beer.
“How would you feel about running a couple of names across your files?” she asked.
“What files?”
“The Secret Service ones that will tell you where someone in the government works.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Michael Cerny, who recruited me for this Ukrainian assignment,”she said. “And this three-hundred-pound woman named Olga Liashko. I want to know if they have any CIA links.”
“Come on,” he said.
“No. Really. Something about them doesn’t smell quite right.”
He considered it.
“Michael Cerny’s been with the State Department for several years. I’ve known him for six years. I’ve never heard of any CIA affiliation.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s
not
connected to the CIA,” she said. “You know that as well as I do. Look, there’s an awful lot of this that doesn’t make sense.”
She was angry. Indignant. She kept going. “Listen, Robert, what are they asking me to
really
accomplish? They’re practically asking me to share a shower and a bedroom with this repulsive East Bloc hoodlum. I don’t know what they think I can find out that all their intelligence hasn’t already given them.”
“I don’t know the answers,” he said. “I agree with you, but I don’t have any answers.”
“I don’t like Cerny and I don’t like this Ukrainian steamroller he works with,” Alex said. “So why don’t you just be the man I know and love and run a check?”
He finished one square slice of pie and started another. He nodded thoughtfully.
“I can’t do it myself,” he said. “I don’t have the authorization. But I can call in a favor. I won’t have an answer right away, but I’ll see what I can do. How’s that?”
She leaned across the table and kissed him.
“That would be perfect,” she said.
T
he
Lt. de polizia
Gian Antonio Rizzo stood with his arms folded across his chest in the small cluttered apartment on the via Donorfio. A tall lean man with dark hair and sharp features, Lt. Rizzo of the Roman city police felt a deep disgust, an outrage, that fed upon the deeply cynical outlook on life that he had developed over the decades.
Lt. Rizzo had had more than enough of the type of scene that lay before him. At age fifty-five, he was contemplating retirement toward the middle of the summer. His final day at this underpaid unappreciated job could not come soon enough. Of course, he still had an enterprise or two on the side, but who knew about that?
Downstairs at the doorway to the street, a crowd gathered. Here, upstairs, police had strung crime scene tape in the hallway. Police techies vacuumed everything for fibers. Forensic photographers took digital shots of everything while busily trampling the rest of the crime scene.
Rizzo’s brown eyes slid uneasily over the death chamber. The
cara-binieri
who busily assisted him, as well as his own detectives from Rome’s homicide squad, had no question about the emotions sizzling within him.
“
Pervertitidi! Degenerati!
” Rizzo said. “Scum! You know what makes me mad? Having to spend time investigating what these people do to each other. Maybe we should let them kill one another, hey? Then these foreign parasites—
questi scrocconi stranieri
—would stop coming to Roma. Wouldn’t that be better for everyone?”
In the lieutenant’s opinion, there was a struggle under way for the soul of Rome. On one side were the forces of restraint, lawfulness, etiquette, and cultural preservation. On the other, the unswerving desire to use the ancient city for permissiveness, debauchery, and the commission of international crime.
Lt. Rizzo saw it every night on off-duty strolls through the Campo dei Fiori and the Piazza Navona. Why, just two evenings earlier witnesses in overlooking apartments had reported seeing two people shot and killed around the corner from where Julius Caesar used to address the forum, their bodies whisked away afterwards.
The case had landed on his desk and it was most unwelcome.
Well, the city had changed a bit since Caesar’s day, and not necessarily for the better. So Rizzo, who felt himself a guardian of public decency, looked around this room and felt his blood pressure rising.
More murder. More crime. More drugs.
“
Incredibile!
” Rizzo growled as those under his command went about their business. “This is a country that can’t form a government to last longer than the soccer season and can’t do anything about all these foreign degenerates either!”
With retirement beckoning, Rizzo was increasingly free with his opinions. The forensic technicians busied themselves with the details of the double homicide. Why take issue? They agreed with him, anyway. Even his assistant, Stephano DiPetri, knew enough to ignore him.
The dead woman was on the floor of the living room, her arms and legs a tangle, a robe half on, half off, the upper part of it caked with blood. Her face was blue from strangulation, her eyes frozen wide in the pain of her death. Her throat looked as if it had been perforated with a butcher’s knife.
Lt. Rizzo walked to the next room. There, a man, who appeared to have been a musician, had been shot to death while sleeping. He had a couple of guitars by the bed, a collection of sheet music, and the inevitable marijuana paraphernalia, none of which was going to be much use to him now.
The first and second bullets had passed through him. The third had blown apart his skull. Nasty splatter. A crime scene pick-four: Skin, hair, tissues, bone in every direction.
It wasn’t pretty.
The pillow and the worn mattress had caught most of the blood, which was good for the cleanup squad. But his left eye was ruptured and half out of his head, which would make their task messier. And at least the remains of the bullets had already been recovered. That was another good part.
The really grisly detail, aside from the homicides themselves, had been the discovery. For a solid day, starting at two in the afternoon, the dead man’s clock radio had blasted some vile American music.
The downstairs neighbors, after a sleepless night and much pounding on the ceiling, indignantly phoned the
proprietario
over the excessive noise. The landlord had raised the
portiera
, the deaf-as-a-haddock old Signora Massiella.
Signora Massiella had used her passkey to enter the apartment. She had pushed the door open. The door had stopped against the dead woman on the floor.
Then she screamed and fled, crossing herself several times as she ran. She called the police. The
carabinieri
arrived and then summoned the homicide people, which included Lt. Rizzo. Rizzo brought in his attitude, of which he had plenty.
Rizzo stood at the foot of the bed, surveying the death scene and not feeling much compassion. He glanced at the disgraceful film poster above the body, one that turned immorality drug addiction into a joke.
Cheech and Chong.
The Corsican Brothers
. Who was kidding whom? If one of these potheads wanted to meet some
real
Corsican brothers, Rizzo could arrange it. And as for this dead guy being a singer-musician, well, Sinatra and Pavarotti had been singers. Gino Paoli was a singer. The current pop star Zucherro was a singer. This guy was just a dead guy.
Nearby, detectives went through drawers. They found enough illicit pharmaceuticals and “head” equipment to equip a small store.
Rizzo had an opinion: victims like these brought such things upon themselves. So why then should he, Lt. Rizzo, have to spend his life sorting out a mess like this? Elsewhere in Rome there were good God-fearing
local
people who were also victims, good Italian working people who battled every day against immigrants and street thugs. Those
genti
deserved his attention more than this international trash, didn’t they?
A young policeman with chubby cheeks stood next to the lieutenant. His name was Quinzani. In his squad room it was frequently said that Quinzani looked like a hamster in a police uniform. He was of the municipal police and not the homicide brigade. This was his first serious crime scene, and up until now, everyone made fun of him.
He was frightened not just of his boss and the hardened old
bastardi
of the homicide brigade, but he was also scared stiff just of being there. “
Signor Lieutenant?
” the young man asked.
Rizzo’s thoughts were far away at the moment. He liked to tell people that his distant cousin had been police commissioner and then mayor in Philadelphia. It was a good story and played well with his fellow cops, usually accompanied by one of his diatribes about the scheming American government and their outlaw intelligence services that operated across Europe. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Rizzo, despite his likings for Americans personally, loathed anything to do with the US government.
Then again, on a recent trip to America, Gian Antonio Rizzo had had himself photographed in front of the mural of the world famous Frank Rizzo at the Italian market in South Philly. And if you asked him, the two
paesani
had a strong facial resemblance! Aside from that, like many excellent stories, this one had no basis in truth.
His thoughts drifted further, and he wondered what his mistress, Sophie, a nice young French woman in her late thirties, was doing. Sophie worked in a dress store near the Piazza San Marco, dealing with pretty feminine things and cultivated customers, while he was engaged in this muck.
“
Signor Lieutenant? Scusi?
” young Quinzani repeated.
“
Cosa che?
” snapped the lieutenant, breaking out of his reverie.
“
Guardi
,
signor Lieutenant
,
per favor
,” the young policeman said. “I found this.”
“
Dove?
” he asked. Where?
“In an envelope. Behind some books,” the young man said, “in the living room.”
A hand covered in a surgical glove extended three passports to the lieutenant, plus a thick handful of Euros and dollars.
Rizzo looked around for DiPetri. The man was gone, as usual, leaving Rizzo to the mercy of this overanxious young laddie. Rizzo eyed the passports and the money.
“Let me see this,” Rizzo said.
He put the money in his pocket for safekeeping. He would turn it over at headquarters. Or maybe he’d take Sophie out to dinner. He’d decide later.
Then he looked at the passports: an American one and two Canadian ones.
The lieutenant didn’t grasp the significance at first.
Then he opened the top one. The picture showed the woman who lay dead on the floor. Her name on the passport was Angelina Mercoli. Then he opened the next one, issued in Ottawa in 2006. Same woman, different picture. Now her name was Diana Gilberti. A trend emerged. He looked at the third. Now the dead girl had born in Toronto and her name was Lana Bissoni.
He looked at the passports, at their bindings and their printing. Good fakes but fakes nonetheless. Probably good enough to cross a porous border. Not good enough for entry into the United States, Japan, or China but workable for almost anywhere in Europe. Once you got into a country of the European Union you could travel freely to any other, with a handful of exceptions like Great Britain. Such as Italy, where they were now.
He grunted as young Quinzani looked over his shoulder.
He closed the passports, then looked down. He drew a breath. His blood pressure must have been three hundred over two hundred right at that moment, he reasoned. He was going to have to learn to calm down, or he’d have a stroke and Sophie would end up with some young punk her own age who didn’t deserve her.
He focused: first this had looked like a drug hit or some snap of jealousy among lowlifes. But now there were fake passports. No way Rizzo was going to be able to sweep this one away.
This case was going to be a pain. What was this city coming to anyway? Rome was starting to remind him of the wide-open city of the seventies where the loathsome Red Brigades and their criminal friends had the whole country in fear.
Rizzo looked back to Quinzani. He gave the young man a nod and was suddenly back on his game. “What’s happening with the old woman downstairs?” Rizzo asked. “That old deaf woman who lives by the elevator and always has her door open? Was that her name?
La portiera
?”
“Massiella,” Quinzani answered.
“Are they talking to the old
vacca
? Did she see anything? Does she remember anyone enter yesterday morning?”
“She says she doesn’t always have her hearing aid in,” Quinzani said. “She’s very frightened. She says these people had a lot of visitors she didn’t like, but she never asked questions.”
“
Altro che!
” Rizzo answered. “Of course. That’s always
our
job, eh? To ask the bloody questions?”
“
Si
,
signor Lieutenant
.”
Rizzo thought for a moment. “Is there anyone in particular she remembers?”
“
No
,
signor Lieutenant.
”
“No. Of course not,” he fumed. He thought further. “All right. Good work for now. Maybe you’ll have my job someday soon because I’m old and senile.”
“
Si
,
signor Lieutenant.
”
“Oh, you think so, do you?” Rizzo snapped.
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, I don’t, sir. I mean I never considered it, sir.”
Rizzo winked at him. “Go do your job,
ragazzo
,” he said gently. “And I’ll do mine.” He actually liked young Quinzani. For a kid, he was okay.
The young man looked at his superior with uncertainty. Then he gave a nod and a slight smile, not knowing what else to say.
Rizzo knew what to say, however, but it was wildly profane. So, defender of public morals that he was, he kept it deep inside.
