A Deadly Paradise (12 page)

Book Three

Venice 2007

1

THE TRAIN JERKED forward a short distance, then stopped, causing Cenni to spill his thimbleful of coffee. “
Vaffanculo!
” he uttered, just loud enough for the matron sitting across from him to overhear. She looked up from her magazine in surprise. “
Scusi,
Signora,” he said, “but I really needed that coffee.”

Another twenty minutes at least before the food trolley makes its return trip, Cenni thought mournfully, as he settled back into his seat and smiled again at the woman seated across from him. Milanese, he decided, judging from her clothes (expensive) and her expression (haughty). Husband is probably a fan of Milan, not cock of the walk this week, though, not after Juve scored the winning goal on Sunday in extra time, he thought vindictively. The woman smiled back and shyly looked away. He watched as she twisted her wedding band around her finger. Maybe he was wrong about her. Maybe she was just nervous. She probably needs a coffee as much as I do, he decided, and smiled in sympathy.

Another forward jerk and the train started up again, and this time it kept going. He checked his watch. They had waited in the station for the train from Milan to arrive and had departed Bologna ten minutes late, but with any luck they’d arrive in Venice no later than four, and he’d still have time to interview Marcella Molin and Saverio Volpe and get back to Bologna for the night. He’d return to Perugia in the morning. It’d been a long two days, with a particularly tedious start this morning. The questore had insisted on a meeting at nine o’clock, even though Alex had informed him that he had nothing new to report. Then the mad rush to catch the 9:58 train from Perugia to Venice, and the main business of the day was still before him. The countryside flashed by, and he drifted back some thirty-odd years, to his first solo train ride.

IT HAD BEEN a hot, dreary, aimless summer. He and Renato had been stuck in Perugia since school let out, mainly because their mother was quarreling with their grandmother and had refused to let the twins spend any time with her at the family’s farm on the outskirts of Bevagna. Then Renato got the mumps and was put to bed, and Alex was packed off for two weeks to his mother’s uncle in Bologna.

Zio Riccardo, who refused to answer to “uncle,” lived in the center of Bologna, in a cavernous apartment on the third floor of a converted palazzo. He was a writer of inflammatory pamphlets, an implacable Leftist, which had apparently escaped his mother’s notice, perhaps because her uncle belonged to no registered political party and echoed no official party line, or more likely because he had money and no wife or child to leave it to. “Your mother’s a throwback to the Neanderthals,” Riccardo had told Alex when the nine-year-old had piously quoted his mother on the importance of personal hygiene. Riccardo never washed his hands after he flushed, when he could flush, as the three toilets in the apartment were almost always backed up. Alex had pictured his mother in a leopard skin wielding a club and laughed. Another day, Alex had quoted his mother on the evils of cursing, and Riccardo responded by calling her “a frustrated nun and a courtesan of the pope,” a paradox too complicated for a ten-year-old to grasp. Alex had pictured his mother in a nun’s habit wielding a crucifix and hadn’t laughed.

“You’re here to secure my money when I kick off,” Ric-cardo had told Alex amicably a few days later, asking his great-nephew if he wanted another coffee. They were sitting in the corner café where Riccardo spent most of his days and nights debating all comers on sex, politics, and religion. At the end of one of those debates, Alex, who’d not yet learned
not
to echo other people when he had something to say for himself, had quoted his paternal grandmother on the evils of religion. “Now, there’s a woman who likes to sweat in bed,” Riccardo had responded, grinning. “I love those Swedes.” Riccardo had met Hanna Falkenberg only once, at the wedding of his niece ten years earlier, but he worshipped Anita Ekberg, and therefore all Swedish women. He had a poster of the Swedish movie star, wading in a Roman fountain, pinned above his bed. When Alex left Bologna to return to Peru-gia at the end of the two weeks, he was carrying a fistful of lire to spend on the train. “On nothing sensible, mind you,” his uncle had warned, “just coffee and sweets.” Ric-cardo had totaled up a thousand lire each time Alex said
vaffanculo
on their last day together
.
“That’ll teach your mother to treat me like a babysitter,” he’d said when he handed Alex the money.

His uncle died four years later, but the visit had achieved something of his mother’s purpose. Riccardo left his apartment, his money, and his inflammatory pamphlets to his great-nephew, in trust until he turned thirty. “It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but at least it stayed in the family,” Alex overheard his mother say to a friend after the funeral.

“Scusi,
Signore.” Alex looked up and saw the matron that he’d slandered in his thoughts standing over him. He had fallen asleep. “We’re here,” she said, smiling. They alighted together, and he offered to buy her a coffee in the station bar, but she refused graciously. As she walked away, he called out to her. “
Scusi,
Signora, but who does your husband root for?” She turned, looked puzzled for a moment, and then said, “You mean football
,
I assume. Milan usually, but I’m a Juve fan myself.”

HE DOWNED TWO coffees at the station bar instead of the usual short one. It was surprisingly good coffee and the first positive thing he could remember about Venice since a school trip there at the age of seven. He and Renato had detached themselves from their class to ride the
vaporetti
for four hours, terrorizing passengers, changing lines whenever a deck hand threatened to throw them overboard. They had finally become bored and disembarked at San Marco where, after climbing to the top of the bell tower twice and screaming at the top of their lungs to those below, they had settled into chasing pigeons from one end of the square to the other. An officer in the cara-binieri had collared them late in the afternoon and dragged them to the police station, where Signor Lancioli was waiting. He had stayed behind to look for them while the rest of the class went on to Milan.

The fun they’d had that day lost its flavor when they were grounded for a month. By listening through the heating grate, he’d heard his mother abusing him to his father: “I think we should send Alex to military school. Renato only does these things when Alex drags him along. He broke his leg last summer jumping off the barn roof because Alex dared him.” She never lets anything go, he remembered thinking. That might also have been the occasion on which he resolved never to marry, a resolution he abandoned less than a month after meeting Chiara in their first year at university.

Chiara had dragged him to Venice the second time, in lieu of going to Elbe to scuba-dive with friends, and he’d made her pay dearly. His complaints were incessant and petty: the lamb, the polenta, and the wine were vastly inferior to anything you’d get in Umbria, and vastly overpriced. He hated fish and refused to try any Venetian specialties, and their pension had bedbugs, although Chiara insisted that he’d made that up. He had saved the bill from the Caffè Florian for two coffees and an ice cream. “A family of ten could live on this for two months,” he told anyone who’d listen. He still hated Venice, but for a different reason: that had been their last trip together, and it could have been his warmest memory of Chiara. Instead, it was her last memory of him, a selfish sodding bastard.

THE CROWDS WERE exactly as he remembered, loud, pushy, and self-advertising. One woman, with an Oxford accent, was particularly audible. “Definitely Cannaregio. San Marco is strictly for the tourists,” she shouted back at the harried woman who followed in her wake. “We want
Linea Quaranta Due,
” she added, throwing in the Italian to impress her friend. It wouldn’t impress the natives, as her accent made Cenni wince. Can’t afford San Marco, Cenni concluded, as he gracefully dodged the hustlers pushing cheap hotels, visits to glass factories, and boat rides around the lagoon. He was headed to
Ponte delle Guglie,
a stop on the same line, and observed that the woman doing the talking carried a small weekend case while her companion inexpertly balanced two huge suitcases mounted on a roller cart. A porter offered his services, but the imperious one dismissed him and said
sotto voce
to the other, “They steal you blind,” a remark he found unreasonably irritating, considering that he had made it often enough to Chiara.

They reached their destination just after the deck crew had closed the gates. The waterbus was about to depart. Cenni pushed ahead of the two women.

“
Polizia,
” he said.

The mariner shrugged his shoulders as though he didn’t believe it but didn’t really care and opened the gate so Cenni could enter. He tried to close the gate again but the English women pushed right past him. He shrugged and let them board.

Cenni’s destination was just one stop from the station, so he remained on the open deck and thought again of Chiara, who had refused to shelter in the cabin no matter how ferocious the weather. He and Renato had loved riding the boats when they were seven, but Chiara had been twenty-two when they’d visited Venice, and she had loved the
vaporetti
more than the most excitable child. Even during a squall, she’d lean precipitously into the wind, calling out the names of poets and painters and pointing to the buildings in which they had lived.

“I’m going to live in Venice before I die,” she’d said on their last day.

“Not as my wife,” he had replied.

“I never heard anything so outrageous! What about him?” Cenni tried to ignore the autocratic tones of the English woman who was standing behind him until he realized that she was quarreling with one of the crew and referring to him.

“
Che cosa c’è?
” Cenni asked the man
.

“The English ladies don’t want to pay their fares and they keep pointing to you, but I don’t know what they’re saying.”

Cenni addressed the two women: “Is there a problem?” The companion seemed relieved when Cenni spoke to them in English, but the leader seemed to consider it her right.

“He wants eighteen euros for traveling one stop: six for me, six for my friend, and six for our luggage. Now I ask—”

Cenni stopped listening when he realized that the
vaporetto
had halted in mid-canal just a few hundred yards from the Ponte delle Guglie. An unusually wide transport barge was approaching from the opposite direction, and all traffic in the canal had to wait for it to pass under the bridge. Another waterbus, also traveling north, was idling some ten meters from theirs, and many of its passengers had crowded against the rails to see what was happening. Policemen have a notorious dislike of gawkers, so Alex was amused to find that, without thinking, he had joined the other passengers at the railing. Directly across from him on the adjacent vessel, tightly pressed between two men, a woman leaned into the wind. She had straight black hair cut to her shoulders and a face that was etched in sorrow.

It was twenty years since he’d last seen Chiara, and he would have known her anywhere.

2

HE HEARD A muffled shout behind him and the whirring of the engine, and they began to move. The
vaporetto
that had idled next to theirs was already under the bridge, headed toward its next stop. Years ago, in a gunfight with car thieves, Cenni had seen a rookie cop freeze for fewer than fifteen seconds, just long enough for him to die, and Piero had once described to him a condition called sleep paralysis, where a person wakes from a deep sleep to find that he can’t move any of his limbs. Cenni wasn’t sure what had just happened to him, but he had looked at Chiara for a minute, perhaps longer, and been unable to say or do anything, not even raise his hand or call out. And then she was gone from the railing, and so were the two men in the dark suits who had surrounded her.

They were drawing near to the landing dock. Cenni grabbed the sailor by his arm and demanded to know where the other boat was going.

“You mean the DM?” the crewman asked, shaking him off.

Cenni nodded yes, remembering the two large black letters painted within an orange circle.

“
Diretto Murano.
No stops before Murano.”

“And this boat, where does it go?” Cenni demanded, with no attempt at civility.

“Here,” he said motioning to the dock and the passengers waiting to board. “After that: Crea, Sant’Alvise, Madonna dell’Orto, Fundamente Nove, Cimitero San Michele, Murano Colonna, Murano Serenella, Murano Venier, Murano Museo,” he said, calling out names as though reciting a litany to the Virgin. “Five stops between here and Murano,” he added, just in case his interlocutor couldn’t count.

“Don’t let those people board, and tell the other passengers this is the last stop,” Cenni said with some heat. “I need to get to Murano now.”

The mariner who’d begun throwing ropes around the steel beams on the dock turned and looked at Cenni in disgust.

“Signore, I was very patient when you pushed your way onto my boat at the Ferrovia playing policeman, but now you go too far.” He nodded toward the front cabin. “I will call my captain!”

“
Polizia di Stato,
” Cenni snapped, this time pulling out his wallet and displaying his badge, “and I’m commandeering this boat for police use.”

Three passengers were lined up to disembark and one of them, an elderly woman carrying a small dog in a basket, said something in dialect that sounded nasty.

“’
Cosa?
”

Cenni turned to find a giant of a man in a stained captain’s hat standing behind him. Before he could reply, the old lady repeated her nasty comment, this time to the giant.

“
Calmati, calmati,
Signora,” the giant responded, and then, to Cenni, “Why are you harassing my crew?”

Cenni repeated what he had just told the sailor.

The giant looked at Cenni, then at his credentials, and then to the heavens. He didn’t bless himself, which under the circumstances was fortunate, as Cenni was about to explode.