A Deadly Paradise (13 page)

“Commissario, even empty of passengers, this old tub could never catch the DM. Come,” he said pointing to his cabin. “We’ll call ahead to the police on Murano. They’ll meet the DM when it docks and arrest your criminal. We can also call ahead for a police launch to meet you at Sant’Alvise
.
With luck, you might get to Murano before the DM docks.”

To the sailor, in Veneziano, he said, “Let the signora’s doggie go home to his dinner and board the passengers. We’re behind schedule.”

The captain’s admonition to the signora to calm herself worked on Cenni as well. The commissario enjoyed a reputation among his colleagues for judicious, reasoned policing, and his reason had returned. In the seconds it took them to walk to the cabin, Cenni rethought his first wild attempt at doing something, anything. What if the woman at the rail was an illusion, a reflection of his longing for Chiara? No! Chiara’s hair had been the color of corn silk. The mind plays subtle tricks, but he could never have imagined Chiara with black hair.

Where had she been? Who were the two men standing next to her? Twenty years had passed since she had disappeared; she’d made no claims on her inheritance, or on him. What if the kidnapping had been a ruse, a desperate attempt to escape obsessively doting parents and a lover too selfish to give her a few happy days in Venice? He shook his head in disbelief. No sane person cuts off her own finger to convince her parents or her lover that she’s been kidnapped. If the two men on the
vaporetto
were her original captors, they might kill her if the police came at them with guns. Anyone monstrous enough to cut off a young girl’s finger and post it to her parents wouldn’t stick at murder. And although his mind didn’t want to go there, he was forced to acknowledge that she might have her own reasons for not being found.

He decided on a plan while the captain was ringing the police. Two officers dressed in plain clothes would station themselves at the first stop. If she got off, they would follow her and her companions, discreetly. If she stayed on the
vaporetto,
they would board with the other passengers and follow her when she did get off. He would remain in the background so as not to scare her, although the one thing that stood out in his mind was that while he was standing at the rail she’d shown no reaction to him. He would decide on the next step when he had time to study the situation. Perhaps her destination would provide some answers.

Cenni realized that the police were not falling into lockstep as swiftly as the captain had expected. The giant’s tone was becoming combative. Cenni signaled to him to hand over the telephone. Before speaking, he pressed the receiver against his chest. “Carabinieri or civil police?” he asked.

“Carabinieri,” the giant replied and laughed silently when Cenni rolled his eyes.

“
Capitano,”
Cenni began, giving the officer at the other end a higher rank than he was likely to hold. “Oh, I see.Sorry,
Maresciallo,
” Cenni said, correcting himself. “Alessandro Cenni here,
Polizia di Stato,
UST. What’s the UST?” he said, repeating the question that had been asked at the other end.
“Unità della Investigazione del Terrorismo.”
Cenni replied, a level of irritation with a hint of condescension creeping into his voice. Cenni was quite sure that if such a unit existed, it would be called the UST. He then proceeded to explain his purpose for being in Venice, with an artful twist, and ended with, “Good, excellent—ten minutes, at Sant’Alvise.
Grazie, Maresciallo.
”

The marshal had become very cooperative as soon as Cenni explained that he was following a woman who could lead the UST to a particularly dangerous cell of terrorists working out of the Veneto. He had emphasized that she was an invaluable lead and no one—“and I mean no one”—should approach her or put her in any danger. “Be discreet,” he warned. “Better to lose her than put her on the alert,” were his last words after providing the suspect’s description. It was perhaps the most comprehensive description of a beautiful spy the marshal would ever receive.

TWELVE PASSENGERS disembarked at Murano Colonna. None of them looked anything like the woman the UST officer had described. The marshal knew this case could be the making of him; he’d assigned four men to the task of following the woman instead of the two requested by the commissario. Two of them had reported to work in uniform and had to borrow civvies from the glass sellers in an adjacent shop. The marshal directed two of his men to wait behind the yellow line with the passengers who would board the
vaporetto
and two to wait where the passengers would disembark. Of the passengers disembarking at Colonna, four were men—“certainly men,” the two cara-binieri later protested to the commissario—two were children, and six were women. One woman, clearly not a tourist, held the hand of one of the children, and in her other hand she carried a wicker basket from which two large loafs of bread protruded. When Cenni asked them her hair color, they were quick to respond that her hair was hidden by a scarf. “What color eyes?” he asked. “Well, she was looking down, talking to the child, so I never really saw her eyes or her face,” the other explained. “I remember something unusual, though,” the second cara-biniere piped up. “She had four fingers on her right hand. The index finger was missing.”

WITH A SENSE almost of despair, Cenni checked into the Hotel Da Mula at eight o’clock that evening. Chiara
had
seen him on the
vaporetto,
yet she had chosen to stay in hiding. Murano is a small island with a large population, nearly six thousand residents, he learned from the marshal, and that number didn’t include those who worked on the island during the day and left at night for home, in Venice or Mestre, or on one of the other islands in the lagoon, or the thousands of tourists that visited the glass museum, the factories, and the hundreds of little shops that line the quays. Fishing boats, taxis,
vaporetti
, sightseeing cruises, yachts, gondolas, hundreds of opportunities for her to leave, if she hadn’t left already. There was no way he could continue to tie up the Murano police in a sham spy chase to assist in the search. The carabinieri officers working on Murano were clearly not trained to do plainclothes work, and he should have known this before he got them involved. But they had helped in one respect. Two of the four men who had gotten off at Colonna were heavyset businessmen in dark suits. Both were well known on the island, a father and a son, highly respected glass merchants, and Cenni had interviewed them in their offices less than an hour ago. As soon as he’d entered their shop, he knew immediately they were the two men who had stood with Chiara at the railing.

The son had noticed her while they were waiting in line for the DM. He followed her to the rail, and his father followed him. He had struck up a conversation. He lived on Murano, he’d told her, and hadn’t seen her before. He wondered if she were going there to buy glass and offered his assistance. “My father and I know everyone in the glass business,” he explained to Cenni. She’d been friendly but hadn’t responded to his advances, he said sheepishly, looking over at his father, who made a joke about his son, the Murano Casanova.

“She said she was visiting an elderly woman, a relative who was very sick, and she wouldn’t have time to socialize, but she said it nicely, not like some beautiful women who think they’re too good to date fat men,” he said with some bitterness. She had intrigued him, he said, a beautiful woman with a sad smile.

Cenni questioned the glass merchant carefully as to what he and the woman had talked about but avoided any mention of why the police were looking for her. “She’s very beautiful,” the glass man said again. “Her eyes are the intense blue of one of those goblets, cobalt blue.” He pointed to some wine glasses on display. “It’s too bad about her face and her hand,” he added as an afterthought. “Must have been a horrific accident,” he said.

The man’s comment about Chiara’s face took Cenni’s breath away and he couldn’t respond.

The father, thinking his son might have offended the commissario, added, “It’s not that bad, really, her hair covers most of it. A scar, like any other. She’s lucky that whatever caused it missed the eye. Starts at the cheekbone and runs all the way down past the chin.”

CHIARA’S FACE, HER beautiful, perfectly formed face. That’s why she had never returned. Somehow, in some way, she had escaped from her captors but was ashamed to come home. She had to have known that her parents were dead. It had been in all the papers when her father died, and then again when her mother committed suicide. Her kidnapping had been front-page news for months. The guilt that he’d experienced earlier in the day was nothing to what he was now feeling. There was no one else to blame for her reluctance to return home. He had worshipped Chiara’s beauty without considering how such worship might affect her. He knew the moment the glass merchant mentioned the scar that it didn’t matter, and wouldn’t have mattered twenty years ago, that he loved Chiara for her laughter, her irreverence toward everything pompous, her wit, and her gift of loving, in particular of loving him. But how could she have known? His praise had always centered on her external beauty, never on the essentials, perhaps because he’d been jealous. Some of their professors, the important ones, preferred her thoughtfulness and depth to his flashy, impulsive solution to every problem. If they had graduated together, she would have preceded him to the podium.

She must have been aware of his jealousy; she was too intelligent not to have known. Even today, she had outwitted him. The merchant said they’d been talking about the need to change the transportation system if Venice were going to save its canals when she’d abruptly excused herself. He and his father had left the rail at the same time, wondering if she was unwell. A few minutes later, he had seen her approach a woman sitting inside the cabin. He assumed the woman was local, as she was carrying a market basket filled with groceries and was accompanied by two school-age boys, both wearing football jerseys and carrying book bags. He saw the two women exchange parcels, and later, when they were disembarking, he noticed that the woman with the sad smile was talking animatedly to one of the young boys. They were discussing last Sunday’s game.

3

HE GOT BLIND drunk that night, the kind of drunkenness that comes only with age, depleted blood cells, and a completely jaundiced view of the world. When he awoke the next morning in a tiny single bed, on its foam-rubber mattress, he had no idea where he was, what had poisoned him, or whether it was true that life was worth living. At the moment it wasn’t, and he groaned loudly as he got out of bed. The bathroom was so small that he had to go inside and close the door before he could climb into the shower. Never, never stay in a cheap hotel if you plan to get drunk the night before, he resolved, as he danced under tepid water trying to catch a few drops. The towels only added to his suffering: two thin scratchy pieces of cloth, two feet long, with the hotel’s name written in indelible ink along the hem. Ordinarily, he’d feel compassion for anyone who had to steal towels from the Hotel Da Mula, but he had none left after succoring his own misery.

With one hand shielding his eyes, he unlatched the shutters, opened the window, and looked out upon the day. “Beautiful,” he groaned and sat down on the bed to reflect on the previous evening. He’d begun his descent into Dante’s Third Circle at the trattoria next to his hotel. He vaguely recalled ordering two carafes of local wine with his meal. It had continued in a bar frequented by locals in Campo San Bernardo where he drank gin for two hours, but it was in an after-hours dive on Fondamenta Vetrai that he’d finally gone under. An elderly fisherman decided to teach him how to drink grappa as it’s drunk on the lagoon. The questore was always affronted by Cenni’s capacity for strong liquor. He’d have been pleased to learn—not that Cenni planned to enlighten him—that his future vice-questore had feet of clay. “Grappa, 120 proof, clear un-aged alcohol, not that aged sugar water you call grappa in Umbria,” the fisherman said when calling for their last round, at least Cenni hoped it had been their last round. He always dealt better with hangovers when he was unaware of actual numbers.

Reason had deserted him the previous evening, and it appeared not to have returned. He was hearing voices: “
Signor Poliziotto . . . Signor Commissario . . . dottore. . . .”
In general, at least in Italy, civilians don’t scream at—or for— senior police officials. They present themselves and their bona fides at the front desk and wait for admittance to
l’onorevole’s
office. But someone was definitely calling him from the street.

He pulled himself up gently from the bed, returned to the window, and looked out and down. An old man, dressed in a tattered windbreaker and knee-high rubber boots, was standing below, looking up and smiling. Cenni took a long look at the old man and groaned again. It was his drinking buddy from the previous evening. The man’s name came slowly, but it did finally come:

“Si, Signor Dolfin. Che Cosa c’è?”

“I found her, your beautiful signorina.”

Always discreet, Cenni hesitated before responding. “I don’t understand. What signorina?”

“The beautiful signorina with the four fingers. Dottore
,
I’ve found her!”

Cenni realized that hanging out a hotel window with tourists snapping pictures of him engaged in the quaint Italian custom of hanging out of a window was unwise. He told Signor Dolfin to stay where he was. He’d be right down.

Signor Dolfin, Antonio to everyone on the island, was a throwback to another time, when men fished the lagoon for their livelihood and relied for extras on the occasional tourist buying their wives’ handmade lace. He was eighty-one years old, healthy as an ox, and renowned for drinking younger men under the table. Certainly, he’d drunk Alessandro Cenni under the table and later, at three o’clock in the morning, put him to bed.

Cenni dragged Antonio to the nearest café where he could get a coffee or, to be perfectly honest, a
caffè corretto,
to get him started.