Suicide Italian Style (Crime Made in Italy Book 1) (11 page)

The Number 1 tram was running late and it took me an hour to get the dog home. I set him on the doormat and rang the bell. He yipped and whimpered and wagged his butt. A chain rattled and the door creaked open.

“Peter?”

“
Buona sera, signora
,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Oh, my darling,” she said. She didn’t mean me. She lifted Red from the mat into her arms, planted a big wet kiss on his nose and sighed, “I’ve missed you, my sweet.” She rocked him and damn near squeezed him to death. “Please, Peter, come in.”

I took her up on it and shut the door behind me. I followed her down the hall to the kitchen and found her setting out water and dog food. “Are you hungry?”

I eyed Red’s dish on the counter. “Uhh ...”

“Don’t be silly. I’ll make pasta.”

“Terrific,” I said.

“Why don’t you open a bottle of wine?” She nodded at a rack jammed up against a wall. I chose a Marzemino from a winery I liked, rummaged in the drawers until I found a corkscrew and rounded up a couple of glasses. I poured and told her Red was a very fine hound.

“You’re welcome to walk him, whenever you like,” she said. “He seems so happy to be with you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We get along.”

“Good.” She got water going in a pot on the stove, set a paring knife and a fistful of garlic on the table and settled into a chair.

I raised my glass. “To Red,” I said.

“To Red.”

The wine wasn’t bad. It needed some air. I set the glass down and said, “How was your day?”

A slow, sad smile washed over her face. “I spoke to Marco.”

“Mmn.” Marco had been dead for more than four years, but he and his mother still spoke to each other, once in a blue moon or so. The signal was strong on his birthday, she’d said, but certain factors could interfere. Stress. Static on the airwaves. Unspecified events beyond the pale. But I’d been thinking about him, about Marco and Eva and the night they died. Together. “And what did he say?”

“He wants you to look at his files.”

A rush of adrenaline. “Files?”

Marco Romano. He’d had his fifteen minutes of fame when a piece he wrote made a lot of noise. It was all about Swiss bank accounts in the years just after World War II. Some had been opened before the war by people the bank hadn’t heard from since, missing persons whose last known place of residence had been a concentration camp. The accounts were dormant. When a relative showed up to claim the deposits, the bank asked to see a death certificate.

Marco made it personal. He’d gone to a bank in Basel one day to inquire about the money his grandfather had left there in 1934. The answer was delivered with polite regret:
If you can’t prove he’s dead, my dear boy, how can we possibly provide information? We are bound by Swiss law to secrecy. I myself would be thrown in jail if I told you anything at all. And just think what would happen if your grandfather returned and asked what we’d done with his money? What would we say to him? ‘So sorry, we gave it away?’ Please understand, we act in your best interests, too.

Johnny splashed the story all over the paper and the foreign press picked it up from there. The Swiss played it down but the papers in Israel jumped all over it and the next day it made the
New York Times
.

Fifteen minutes goes by fast. Or maybe somebody got to him, said it was time he took a vacation. He disappeared for a while. When he showed up again he was writing under another name for a paper all the Milanese bankers read. He took up forensic accounting at night and got to the point he could do to the books what pathologists did to cadavers. He’d slice them open, take them apart, examine the entrails and write a report: in lucid prose he spelled out where the cash had gone and where to look for what was left.

Once in the days when I still worked for Gigi I called Marco for a favor. Gigi was hounding me for press, so I set up a meeting at the Villa Sofia. Gigi laid the charm on thick and told him the tale of a golden road that ran from Lugano to a fabulous future. Marco smiled and played along, drove back down to Milan that night and wrote up a story for the weekend edition. It was a puff piece starring the King of Spain: playing Queen Isabella to intrepid Columbus, Gigi was opening up the new world, giving away millions to young entrepreneurs, daring explorers at the high-tech frontier.

Thrilled with the coverage, Gigi called Marco and flew him to Paris began to talk. About himself and his high net worth investors and his smart money men and wizened trustees and all those Italians hauling buckets of cash from Milan up to Switzerland’s Silicon Valley. At the end of the night he threw a big arm over Marco’s shoulder, pulled him close and slipped him an envelope. On the way back home Marco tore it open and found a wad of shares in one of Gigi’s companies. The message?
Welcome to the family, Marco. Forget everything I said tonight.

He came over to my place a few days later. “I can’t do this, Pete. I can’t accept them. I couldn’t live with myself.”

I said there was nothing to worry about, there was nothing illegal about the shares. Marco said I was missing the point, it was a question of professional ethics. I said I understood but it wasn’t my problem and I didn’t care what he did with the shares. He could bury the story and burn the shares or sell them to somebody for all I cared.  

I didn’t see much of him after that. Eva crossed the landing every once in a while to shoot the breeze with Clementina. Marco was there a lot of the time and she got to know him pretty well. I never knew what they talked about or what it was they saw in each other. One day I ran into him in the street and asked him what he was working on. He mumbled something about Calvi, the Vatican and a bank in Lugano and then he told me a joke.
What do you get when you cross the Pope with a Mafia don?
I said I had no idea.
You get a prayer for the dead with your name on it.

I don’t remember if I laughed. I had other things on my mind.

A year or so later came the night of the staff party. Julia booked the lounge at Campione, the casino across the lake. Eva brought Marco along from Milan, said Gigi had called him for an interview. We met at the Villa for drinks before dinner, but I still had to finish the press release for Gigi’s new-money announcement. I told Eva to go on ahead and said I would join her later. So Marco climbed into the car beside Eva and they sped off into the night that never ends.

It was an accident. Nothing more. 

Unless? Unless Billy Bob was right.

“Aglio, olio, peperoncino.”
Tina’s voice.
“Buon appetito.”

I looked up to see her setting a plate in front of me. Spaghetti with garlic and olive oil and red chili pepper. “Thanks,” I said. “Likewise.”

She sat and I poured her a glass of wine and asked her to tell me about the files. She picked up her glass and said she hadn’t looked at them, not since the day Marco died. It had something to do with smuggling cash out of Italy. He’d tracked down a
spallone
and accompanied the man along a trail through the woods up over the border into Switzerland. There were many trails, the man had said, and his was one of the safest.

“Would you like to see the files?” Tina ran a hand through her hair. No gray at the roots.

“I would,” I said. “Hang on.” I slipped a hand in my pocket, found what I was looking for and lifted them into the light. 

Tina sighed and took them in her hand. Silver, engraved. Earrings. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

“They were Eva’s,” I said. “You’ve seen them before?”

“Of course.” Her eyes searched my face. “They belonged to my mother. Eva liked them so I gave them to her.”

“Ahh. Well. Thank you. She never said.”

Tina lifted one to her ear. For a moment her face resembled Eva’s.

“She lost them,” I said. “She left them behind one night. Somewhere.” I could feel the anger in my voice, simmering down the years.

Tina looked away, into the distance. Maybe she was hearing Marco’s voice, or feeling his presence again in the room. We ate without saying much for a while. When we were done she turned her gaze to me. “Have you discovered something? Is it important?”

“I don’t know. Nothing yet. But it’s important, yes. To me.”

“Why?”

“I always thought it was an accident. That’s what I was told.”

“Yes. That is what we were told.” Shadows darkened her face. Old pain, rising into her eyes. “It’s possible, of course.”

“But you don’t believe it. Do you, Tina?”

She pushed herself to her feet and shuffled out. Red raised his head and looked up at me from his basket in the corner. I wondered how much he knew. Everyone else knew more than me, why not the damn dog? He whimpered. I got up and dropped a hand to his head. “Sorry, boy. It’s been a rough night.” He seemed to understand.

Tina came back to the kitchen with a stack of papers clutched to her chest. I helped her unload. Magazines, clippings, folders filled with ratty notebooks, stacks of ancient data disks. We spread it all over the table. She asked if I wanted coffee.

I nodded and began to sift through the documents. When the coffee was ready she filled my cup and set a bottle beside it. “
Corretto
?”

I twisted the cork out and laced the brew with a shot of fine Venetian grappa. “Good stuff,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“I have a small apartment in Venice, on the Giudecca. Marco used to go there to work.”

“By himself?”

She knew what I meant. She looked away and gave a sad little shrug. “Does it matter, Peter? They’re both gone now. Let them rest in peace.”

“
Magari
,” I said. If only I could.

Tina’s eyes clouded over. “He was working on a story. A big story, he said.”

I took a dusty notebook in hand and flipped it open. The pages were filled with a lopsided scrawl, numbers and notes I could barely make out. I stopped at a page with three words scribbled in caps across the top:
THE DRY CLEANER
. Beneath it were thick lines in black ink, a dense grid filled with names and numbers.

I flattened the page with a fist and stared hard at the grid. A list of names on the left, lined up to match long strings of numbers. The first was an acronym: BGSB. Easy enough. It was the
Banca del Gran San Bernardo
. The bank where Sarge Ungaretti worked, where he’d gone to work when the markets crashed and Gigi threw him overboard. Or maybe Sarge had run down the ropes with the rats, jumped ship just in time. I couldn’t remember.

I stared at the pages for a good long while, poring over the names and numbers. I jabbed a finger at a grid and counted. Sixteen. Sixteen accounts at the BGSB. To the right of each was a name, and to the right of each name a set of initials. A thick black line split the BGSB from a section listing two accounts at a bank in San Marino. A third named a bank in Zug, a special tax zone south of Zurich. The list spilled over to the following page, and to another after that. I counted more than twenty banks and twice that number of accounts in countries all over the world.

I asked Tina what she thought. She told me she had a very good friend, a tax lawyer downtown. Ninety percent of her clients, said the friend, had exported assets from Italy. “To Switzerland, because it’s close, and Monaco, Liechtenstein, Jersey, Guernsey—“

I remembered something. The file at the library in Lugano. “Vanuatu?”

“There too, but there’s no need to go so far away. Lugano is offshore to Italy, London to France, Liechtenstein to Germany.” More than seventy territories around the world made a business of hiding cash from the tax man.

It dawned on me that Marco knew what he knew because he’d got it from his mother and her lawyer friend. The friend helped her clients fly under the radar. The ones that got caught saw Tina in court.

“Why don’t you take it with you, Peter?”

I dragged my eyes from the notebook and looked up at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s very late and I have to be in court tomorrow.”

“Of course. Yes. Are you sure?”

“If you prefer, you can leave it all here and I will give you a key. You can come in and take what you want.”

“Sounds like a plan, Tina.” I got up, stooped and said goodbye to the pup and picked up the notebook. “Say thanks for me, will you? Next time you talk to Marco?”

A worn-out smile creased her face. “With pleasure, Peter. Good night.”

I slipped out and padded over the landing to my door.

For the rest of the night I nipped at
grappa
and worked my way through Marco’s notes. Things came slowly into focus as the names and numbers turned into a web of knotted cords. Every node signified a transaction point. The net ran all around the world, but the heart of it all was the
Banca del Gran San Bernardo
in Lugano:
X marks the spot where treasure lies.

Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzzzzz.
I fell out of bed and stumbled to the front door. Tina stood there, fussing with her purse, full of apologies, Red at her side. He gave me a look that was puzzled and hopeful at the same time. Tina handed me a set of keys.

“There’s food for the puppy in the kitchen, Peter. Thank you!”

“Don’t mention it.” I took the keys, pushed the door open wide for Red and closed it after him. He bounded off to explore the place, happy to be alive and sniffing up the world while I woke myself up with a shower. I picked up a cd and put it on—Antonio Zambrini on piano, Lee Konitz on the sax,
Alone and Together.
They put me in the mood to sort through the driftwood that sleep had washed up on my shores.

Over coffee in the kitchen I sat back down to the map I had drawn up the night before. It had Marco’s banks linked by arrows and lines that spread from Lugano all over the world and zigzagged back to the
Banca del Gran San Bernardo
. In the light of day it made me think of a pinball machine. You fired a black ball into the maze and kept it bouncing from one bank to the next. It hit bells in Lugano and lights in London and whistles in Vaduz and Vanuatu and careened from there to the Caymans and Jersey and Liechtenstein. The longer you kept it bouncing the better as the black ball faded slowly to gray and the gray turned lighter and whiter.

I sat there, listening to the music, thinking. There was something wrong. The pinball thing wasn’t working. Or maybe it just didn’t go far enough. It said nothing about where the balls came from, who fired them into the maze and what happened when they finally stopped bouncing around. And it told me nothing about the names.

Names. I flipped through Marco’s notebook again, found the grid and stared it down. Banks in the first column, accounts in the second, names in the third. I didn’t recognize any of them. None of Gigi’s investors, at least none that I knew. But maybe that was the point. Maybe they were stand-ins, fronts for the real names of flesh and blood clients. Maybe Marco knew the real names and was planning to publish them. Maybe those were the names that got him killed.

And Eva?
Collateral damage
.

I waited for the memory to fade and when it was gone said, “Hey, Red?” Red lifted his head from his paws and whimpered. “Time for a walk, buddy.”

The dog scrambled to his feet and ran up to the door and back, yelping. It was time to get us both some fresh air.

I stopped at the table to pick up the letter and the check from New York, signed the check on the back and walked the dog to the bank. They said it would take them six weeks to clear it, New York was a long way away and all. Thieves. I cleaned out my account and took the dog on down to the end of the street. The
carrozzeria
was at the end of a driveway that led to a courtyard back from the street. Red and I ambled down the drive and found the old mechanic hunched over a keyboard and squinting at a dusty monitor.

“Ciao, Sandro.”

“Pescatore,” he said without looking up. “You’re not dead.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Has it been that long?”

“Couple years.” He punched a key and a printer clacked and began to whine. “What you do, rob a bank?”

“Good idea,” I said. “They could use the competition.”

“Damn right.” The old man looked up from the computer. “I hope you brought cash,” he said, tossing a nod to the junkers in the yard.

I stepped to the door. “Sure.”

He lifted a set of keys from a hook on the wall and led the way past a battered blue and white cop car and a washed-out
Deux Chevaux
to a cream colored beauty with a canvas top, my old FIAT 500. “Should be ok, I start her up every once in a while.”

“She looks great. Wonderful. Thanks a lot, Sandro.”

He nodded and pulled open the door and slumped down into the shiny leather seat and sighed and ran his worn hands over the wheel. He turned the key. The engine sputtered and settled into a low rumble. Perfect. He hauled himself out. “Don’t push her too hard, she’s getting on.”

“Aren’t we all.” I handed him an envelope. “I’ll get you the rest as soon as I can.”   

He ripped it open, extracted the bills, counted and tucked them away. “Soon as you can, Pescatore.”

I picked up the dog and let him scramble up on the back seat and squeezed in behind the wheel and drove him home.

“Sorry, dog. Wasn’t much of a walk.” I dug out my keys and shooed him on inside. In the kitchen I filled a bowl with water and set it in front of him. He lapped for a while and loped off again.

I picked up the phone. Two missed calls. One was from Johnny. And Anastasia? Nothing. I dialed the other number. Bruno Vittadini at the med school picked up. He’d been in touch, he said, with the lab in Locarno. The Italian doc had come up Sunday morning and left again that afternoon. The doc had worked fast. Death had been caused by a bullet fired at close range that left a big hole in the back of the head. Nothing else of note. Signed and dated.

“Which means?”

“The wound is compatible with suicide. Unless the cops come up with something else, that’s the story he’ll take to his grave.”

“Doc worked with a knife, I take it. No CAT scan, no MRI.”

“Nope. Old school, Pete, like I said.”

“What about your lady friend at the lab?”

“I gave her your number.”

“Does she want me to call her?”

“She’ll call you.”         

“Name?”

“Heidi.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Heidi Kirsch.” A low, rumbling laugh rolled down the line. “She’s a looker, Pete. A stunning Swiss miss.
Stupefacente
.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I hung up on his laugh and called Johnny. “Boss,” I said. “Where have you been?”

“Save the bullshit, Pescatore. Where the hell are you?”

“We need to talk.”

“That makes two of us.”

Something about that slowed me down. I shook it off. “What’s up, boss?”

“It’s past nine.” He paused. “Monday.”

“Great,” I said. “What year?”

Nothing. “The Masons, Pescatore.”

“I’ll be there by noon.”

“You finish the story?”

“We can talk about that later.” I hung up.

Time to go. I chased down the dog, hauled him over to Tina’s place and let myself in. The kitchen table was littered with files. Tina had set a green folder aside and left me a note:
More from Marco about our friends in Lugano.

I opened the file and read the first page, dropped into a chair and read the page after that. Two hours later I was back home typing up the story. It was perfect. From Marco’s notes for a feature on the Masons I worked up a description of a dark blood brotherhood—a secretive, hyper-exclusive club whose members ran a nice little operation helping find good homes for illicit cash. There were lawyers, accountants, bankers and fiduciaries, local and national politicians, a TV presenter—and a mystery man known as
Ali Baba
.

When I was done I yawned. Same old, same old paranoia. A nefarious Masonic conspiracy, born again with a demented Swiss twist.

I smiled. Johnny would go ape over it, even if we still didn’t have the real names. On my way out I looked in on Red at Tina’s and opened a can and spooned horsemeat into his dish on the floor. Then I locked up, traipsed down the stairs to the street and caught the Number 1 tram to the office.