The Abomination (26 page)

“It's not a new pipeline, either,” she said slowly. “Remember Martina Duvnjak? She was smuggled into Italy from Croatia, on her way to the Vatican. Her journey ended on Poveglia.”

“That would make sense. Though in those days organised crime was all about trafficking goods
into
Eastern Europe, of course, not out of it. Back then a pair of Levi's or a Sony Walkman changed hands in Moscow for five times its Western price.”

“Walkmans – they were a bit like iPods, weren't they?” she said mischievously, glancing at him. “Only not as good?”

“So let's say the supply chain operates in both directions,” he continued, getting to his feet and pacing. “And that it's been running for decades. My God!” He stopped. “I wonder. . .”

“What?”

“You remember I told you that one of my very first investigations was a death on Poveglia? A young doctor. His body was found at the foot of the clock tower, full of drugs. But it didn't really make sense – he had no history of drug taking, and it seemed strange that he'd have injected himself with hallucinogens. At the time people were saying he must have gone mad. But what if he'd simply seen something he shouldn't have, and was silenced?” He shook his head. “Poor devil.”

“Where does this leave Jelena Babić and Barbara Holton?”

“I'm still of the view that they wandered into something on Poveglia they couldn't possibly have anticipated, and paid the price.”

“And I still think there's more to it than that.” She told him about her visit that morning to the Institute. “If it was the Order of Melchizedek who locked Martina Duvnjak up on Poveglia, maybe they're somehow connected to the pipeline too,” she concluded.

“The Catholic Church working with organised crime? That's a little far-fetched, surely?”

They were splitting along gender lines, she realised. To him, the Mafia connection was the bigger prize. To her, proving that the Church had in some way sanctioned the murder of a female priest was more important.

“Let's not argue,” he said softly.

She shook her head. “No. Let's not.”

“We'll leave early and eat near your place – somewhere we don't have to think about work.”

“I've got a better idea,” she said. “I'll cook. Perhaps some
bigoli
with
ragù?
But it may not be early.” She ejected Ricci's disc from Piola's computer. “I still intend to go through this video frame by frame.”

Later Piola looked up and saw Kat make a note, carefully, as she peered at something on the screen.

She's tougher than I am, he realised. Less romantic, less likely to get carried away
.

Why she was sharing her bed with him he had no idea. He still didn't know whether he dared tell her how deeply he was falling in love with her.

One reason he'd gone back to tackle Mareta Castiglione on his own that afternoon, without Kat as backup, was that he'd known he'd have to lean on the widow, go in hard about Ricci screwing other women. He wasn't sure he could have done that in front of Kat. He'd have hated for her to see him being a bully. Not to mention a hypocrite. What was it he'd said to Mareta?
Girls who go with other women's husbands? They're nothing but sluts
. He hadn't meant it, of course, but he doubted he could have uttered those words in Kat's hearing.

He caught her eye through the glass wall of his office.
Not long now
, he told her silently in his head.
A few more hours, and we'll be in bed together
.

HOLLY BOLAND APPROACHED
the Education Centre with a box file stashed neatly under her arm. Once inside, she went to the room where Ian Gilroy taught his class on Italian Military History.

There were no other attendees. Gilroy had made sure of that. It was the perfect way to make contact with him: anyone looking through the glass panel in the door would see only a teacher in civilian clothes, and a solitary student seated in the first row.

“I can teach you how to do by-the-book dead-letter drops if you'd prefer,” he'd joked. “But if a US Army base isn't a secure debriefing venue, where is?”

Now she had to tell him that the US Army base was itself part of the trail.

“I went down to Camp Darby, as you suggested,” she said, opening up her file. “Most of the documents from 1995 had already been destroyed, but I found these older ones – this is a set for you.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking them and spreading them on the desk. It could have been any academic receiving a student's paper.

“Looking through, I noticed that one name kept cropping up.
Here
, for example, and
here.
” She pointed. “Villem Bakerom.”

“That name's not familiar to me.”

“Nor me. And when I ran it through Intellipedia, it didn't ring any bells either. Then I thought, why not try putting it into Google Translate? Turns out it's the same as this name that's already in the file in English –
here.
” She showed him.

“William Baker?”

“Exactly.”

“And who exactly do we think this William Baker might be?”

“That's the problem – I've no idea,” she confessed. “I've checked all the databases I can think of – Inprocessing, the dental centre, even the auto repair shop. There's no record of any military personnel of that name. No civilian employee, either. But whoever he was, he was at Camp Ederle a lot – look at all these dates. He seems to have organised one large meeting in particular – it's here in the documents,
Srpanj 1 – 4 Devetnaest Devedeset Tri
. That is, July 1st to 4th 1993. The location is given in the Croatian documents as
Kamp Ederle, Italija
. But after that, I draw a blank. I can only assume William Baker was his cover name.”

“Unless he isn't a person at all,” Gilroy said slowly.

“What do you mean?”

“You're probably too young to remember the old phonetic alphabets—”

“We use phonetic all the time. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. . .”

He nodded. “That's the standard US-NATO set. But before that was introduced, every service had its own, slightly different version. The Navy alphabet started with ‘apples' and ‘butter', for example. The British Royal Air Force said ‘ack' for A and ‘beer' for B, so ‘anti-aircraft fire' became ‘ack-ack'. And in the old US Army alphabet, the phonetics for W and B were William and Baker.”

She stared at him. “Of course. Why didn't I think of that? But we still don't know what WB stands for.”

“Perhaps not, but we do know that the military at that time had a penchant for codenaming operations using the old service alphabets. Operation Victor Charlie was an offensive by the US against the Viet Cong in Vietnam. Able Archer was an A-bomb simulation back in the 1980s.”

“So ‘Operation William Baker' might have been a codename for—” She stopped, staggered by the implications.

“Exactly. ‘Operation War in Bosnia'.”

AT THE TRONCHETTO
car park, Aldo Piola climbed into his car with a weary sigh. It was well after ten o'clock. Only the fact that Kat had made him promise to be at her apartment by eleven at the latest had made him leave when he did. The results of the forensic tests from the crime scenes, which always took a week or so to process, had come through. Most simply told him what he already knew, but even so the reports, which were written in a dry scientific language that often required the use of a dictionary, had to be gone through line by line in case he missed something.

The traffic, which would have been light if he'd made the journey a little earlier in the evening, was dense again now. A new production of
Rigoletto
had recently opened at La Fenice, and many of the drivers heading back to their homes on the mainland were in black tie. Once over the Ponte della Libertà he indicated right for his turning, glancing automatically into his rear-view mirror as he did so.

A carnival mask, a blank white Bauta, loomed up from the back seat like a ghost. For a moment he couldn't process what was happening, thought it must be some kind of joke. Then he felt a leather belt slipping round his neck, the reek of sour food as a gruff voice spat into his right ear. “That's it, Colonnello. Keep driving. I'll tell you when you can turn off.”

The accent was Venetian, working class. Piola steered back onto the carriageway. It was difficult – his head was being wrenched back and up by the tightness of the belt, making it hard to see the road.

“What do—” he croaked, but the belt jerked impatiently against his windpipe.

“No talking.”

After five hundred yards his assailant said, “Turn here.”

He took the exit the man indicated. It led off the dual carriageway to an industrial estate. There were several open patches of ground where developments hadn't yet taken place – roundabouts with access roads that petered out into wasteland, where one day warehouses or light industrial units would be built.

The man pointed. “That one.”

When the road ran out, Piola had no option but to slow down.

“Turn off the engine.”

He was aware that his heart was pounding. He focused on the fact that his assailant was wearing a mask. Why do that if he was going to kill him? To his left, he saw a single headlight approaching across the rough ground.
Thank God
. Then he realised that of course the man would have brought an accomplice. Hit-men always used motorbikes to escape.

The man wrapped the belt around his fist, tightening it further, the edges biting painfully into Piola's windpipe. Piola could hear his captor breathing as he worked it tight. Something metallic and very solid tapped his head, just behind his right ear. A gun.

“You should keep your nose out of other people's business,” the man's voice said.

The gun came into his field of vision, the barrel turning so that it was pointing directly into Piola's forehead. He fought to breathe. Was he going to die after all? Here, on a piece of wasteland, like so many policemen before him? Involuntarily, he flashed on all the bodies he'd seen that were found exactly like this. Two bullets in the head. Bloodspray on the driver's side window, away from the gunman's clothes. No witnesses.

He held his breath, waiting for it to happen.

There was a click.

Relief flooded his limbs. Not dead. Not dead after all. Mock—

“Next time,” the voice said, “it'll be loaded.”

Pain exploded through his skull. He jerked forward, only to jerk back again as his neck tightened against the belt. Not a bullet into his brain, he thought, but a pistol-whipping. The gun smashed into his head again – the man was using the pistol like a club, hammering him with the heavy grip.
God, the pain
. More blows rained onto his skull, each one threatening to shatter it like a walnut. His vision closed into a long, dark tunnel as consciousness slipped away. Another blow, this time to his forehead. He felt the skin splitting open like a laddered stocking, the numb sting as air met blood.

A final blow to the back of his head, and everything went black.

Kat liked to cook, although she didn't own a single cookbook and had little interest in learning new recipes. To her, the pleasure lay in doing what she'd done a thousand times before; processes learnt as a child in her mother's kitchen, requiring absolutely no thought. To make duck
ragù
she first sliced an onion, softened it for five minutes in oil while she chopped the duck giblets and liver, and then, while those were frying too, chopped the rest of the duck. A glass of red wine was added to the sauce and allowed to evaporate. Meanwhile she boiled water for the
bigoli
, the fat tubes of buckwheat-and-duck-egg pasta that are to Venetian cuisine what spaghetti is to the South. Finally, a couple of bay leaves and some chopped tomatoes went into the sauce. Then she washed two lovely whole radicchio from the neighbouring town of Treviso marbled with red veins and perfect at this time of year, and put them to one side, ready to sauté as soon as Aldo arrived.

She wasn't surprised that he was late, and in any case the
ragù
would only improve with more simmering. She opened a bottle of Valpolicella, a nice
ripasso
, hearty enough to pair with the duck but not as overwhelmingly heavy as the more traditional Amarone, and poured herself a glass.

While she was waiting she booted up her laptop. And then, because she thought it would amuse him when he arrived, she went to Carnivia and typed in his name.

A
LDO
P
IOLA
, C
OLONNELLO DI
C
ARABINIERI
, V
ENEZIA
–
THREE ENTRIES
.

“Only three?” she said out loud. “Aldo, you disappoint me.” She clicked again, and stopped short.

A
LDO
P
IOLA
. T
HE WORD IS THAT HE HAD AN AFFAIR WITH
A
UGUSTA
B
ARESI
.

A
LDO
P
IOLA
. C
URRENTLY PURSUING THE FORENSIC TECHNICIAN
, G
ERARDINA
R
OSSI
. . .

A
LDO
P
IOLA
. S
O
,
HAVE HE AND
A
LIDA
C
ONTI
SLEPT TOGETHER YET
? T
HERE
'
S
CERTAINLY BEEN A LOT OF FLIRTING GOING ON
. . .

Kat stared at the entries. Two of the names meant nothing to her, but she knew and liked Gerardina, a dark-haired, pretty forensic technician. Piola had worked a case with her, over a year ago.

She'd known about his wife, of course, but this was different. Somehow, discovering that she wasn't his first affair disturbed her.