The Abomination (13 page)

AS SHE WAS
escorted back to the Camp Ederle guardhouse, Kat found herself pleased with the way the interview had gone. She'd achieved rather more than she'd expected to, in that getting any information at all out of the US Army was notoriously difficult. Playing second fiddle to Piola was all very well, but it was nice to handle things herself once in a while.

And it had been satisfying to provoke the little American mouse. She knew that a high proportion of the women in the US Army must be lesbians, but even so she couldn't see why on earth they would put up with wearing those appalling, sexless camouflage suits all the time, even when they were just sitting in an office being unhelpful and there was nothing to be camouflaged against. It would make more sense, she thought, if Second Lieutenant Boland had a desk, a box file and a grey wall printed on her fatigues. Then she'd be almost invisible.

Pleased with this observation, which she was sure would make Colonel Piola smile if she managed to work it into her report later, she turned to the
carabiniere
who was escorting her back to the guardhouse. “Do you always do this?”

“What, ma'am?”

“Escort visitors off and on the site.”

The
carabiniere
shrugged gloomily. “At least twenty times a day. It's all part of the pretence that this is still Italian territory. When the truth is, the Yankees do what the hell they like. Our
comandante
is nominally in charge of the whole camp, you know that? And all they use him for is to wheel him out in his dress uniform when they give each other medals. God knows who I offended to get this posting.”

A thought struck Kat. “Do you keep records? Of all the visitors, I mean?”

“In a manner of speaking. That is, we write down their names and the time. There's not much else to do, frankly.”

“Would you still have the records from 1995?”

“If you'd asked me that a few months ago, I'd have been able to say yes.”

“Why? What happened after that?”

“We had a fire at the warehouse where the Carabinieri records are kept. Not just these, but everything relating to the whole province.” He shrugged. “People are blaming the Mafia.”

“People blame the Mafia for everything.”

“True, but who else could it be?”

“Sure,” Kat said, remembering what the mouse had said.
A period for which we no longer hold records here
. So now no one at Ederle had any paperwork relating to that period. But perhaps that wasn't surprising, given how long ago it had been.

They'd reached the security barrier. The
carabiniere
saluted a farewell, his elbow mournfully drooped at the thought of his own continuing misfortune.

When the
capitano
had gone, Holly cleared up the room, a little annoyed with herself for having allowed the woman to rile her. But most of her anger was directed at the
carabiniere
. Intelligence work and police detection weren't so different, after all – they both depended on analysing the facts coolly and without prejudice. Yet the Italian had swept in, scattering insinuations and allegations almost at random. “How convenient,” she'd said approvingly, when she'd heard about the archives being moved. It had been on the tip of Holly's tongue to retort that if the US Military was as riddled with corruption as the Carabinieri clearly was, they'd never fight a single battle – just like the Italians. But that would hardly have been consistent with the objectives of LNO-3's hearts and minds initiative.

Sighing, Holly shook her head. People like Captain Tapo reminded her that you could speak Italian like a native – could almost think of yourself as one – but there would always remain a gulf between the way your mind worked and theirs.

It occurred to her that now Barbara Holton was dead there was no administrative reason to continue with her FOIA enquiry. She made a mental note to request a copy of the death certificate, so that she could close her file. And she'd better tell Ian Gilroy not to waste his time translating the documents she'd given him.

Back at her desk, she found two emails waiting, both relating to the FOIA. The first was from the CIA section in Milan.

The CIA regrets that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of documents responsive to your request.

The next was from the Office of the Department of Defense.

The DoD regrets that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of documents responsive to your request.

Stonewalled. And with the exact same wording, too. But then, she reminded herself, there was nothing unusual in that. It would have been more unusual if they
had
found something.

Barbara Holton might have been murdered, but there was no reason whatsoever why it should have anything to do with any information she'd been eliciting from Holly.

She shook her head.
Quit thinking like a conspiracy theorist
.

RICCI CASTIGLIONE HESITATED
on the threshold of the church of San Giacomo Apostolo in Chioggia. The interior was dark and silent, the air spicy with candle wax and incense. He dipped his fingers in the holy water by the door, crossed himself, and hurried across the echoing space to a side chapel.

Madonnas, dozens upon dozens of them, looked down on him from every height, crowded onto the walls like posters in a teenager's bedroom. Tourists usually took it for a quaint display of devotion to the Virgin Mary, but this was actually another madonna altogether: Madonna della Navicella, Our Lady of the Seas, whose image appeared miraculously on logs and boats washed up from the depths of the lagoon. She was, the fishermen knew, an older and more potent goddess altogether than the Mother of Christ. Along with her likeness, the chapel walls were crammed with
tolele
– little offerings of gratitude for those she'd saved from the waves.

Ricci stood for a moment, his head bowed, struggling to form into words what he wanted to say to her.

This time I've gone too far. But it wasn't my fault. It was the American
.

As he turned away, his eyes met those of the old priest, sitting patiently in the confessional across the way. “No customers today, Father?” he called, trying to sound braver than he felt.

It was the old crow's silence that did it. Ricci had committed many bad acts in his life. Once, he'd burnt a rival fisherman's boat. On several occasions, he'd cheated on his wife with prostitutes offered to him for free in return for services rendered. He'd stabbed a man in anger, and still believed it was Our Lady of the Seas who had made sure the man didn't die – a living victim could be silenced with threats, but a dead one meant the police for sure.

His smuggling, and the other errands he ran, he didn't count as sins – they were someone else's misdeeds; all he was doing was shifting them from A to B. But this thing with the woman dressed as a priest gave him a feeling of terror he couldn't shake off. It was wrong – he could feel it, and not just in the leaden sickness that gnawed at his stomach. Every single one of his crab pots had remained stubbornly empty all week. And now there was news of two Carabinieri officers asking questions amongst the fishermen. If only the American had asked him where to dump the body, instead of just tipping it into the water!

Evil had attached itself to him, in the form of the abomination washed up on the steps of La Salute. From there it was just a short step to a drowning in one of the inexplicable storms that sometimes appeared in the lagoon out of nowhere. The Madonna della Navicella – she was female: she wouldn't like such a desecration on her patch.

Like many of the fishermen, Ricci had never learnt to swim, and his relationship with the sea was like that of a man who lives on a volcano: in his bones he knew that it was only a matter of time before it claimed him.

He looked around. There was no one else about. Crossing quickly to the little booth, he pulled the curtain shut and muttered in the direction of the face half-hidden by the grille, “
Mi benedica, Padre, perchè ho peccato.
”

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

IT WAS ALMOST
noon by the time Kat got back to Campo San Zaccaria.

“How was the American?” Piola asked.

“Unhelpful. But also irrelevant, at least on the face of it.” She explained about Barbara Holton's FOIA request. As she'd hoped, Piola smiled at her description of the by-the-rules American she'd had to wrest the information from.

“Any progress here?” she added.

“Some, from the forensic team who looked at the Poveglia crime scene. You know the symbols on the wall? Some of them were sprayed
over
the peripheral blood spray.”

She thought quickly. “So they were added
after
the victim was killed.”

His nod told her that he appreciated not having to spell it out. “Exactly. And the way the blood spray was mixed with the ink shows that it was done almost immediately.”

“Meaning what?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps the killer was making a kind of commentary on what he had done.”

“You said ‘some of the symbols'. Which ones were there before she was killed?”

Piola drew a sheet of contacts towards him and circled three of the designs.

“These. Two that match the tattoos on our corpse, and one that's very similar.” He looked up. “What did your expert have to say about these three?”

“Father Uriel?” She thought back. “He never actually gave me an opinion on them,” she said slowly. “I mean, some of the others he identified very quickly as having occult meanings – blessings to Satan, that kind of thing. But when I asked him about these, he didn't really say anything.”

“He didn't recognise them?”

“That's the strange thing. If you don't recognise something, it's pretty easy just to come right out and say so, isn't it? ‘I'm sorry, Captain Tapo, I have no idea what these are.' But he didn't do that. He made a little speech about how occultists sometimes devise their own symbols as badges of rank – he gave me the
impression
they could be something along those lines, but he never actually said so.”

“So we have someone who perhaps recognises these symbols, but doesn't want to say so,” Piola mused.

“Not just
someone
,” she said. “A priest. I think that Father Uriel might be the sort of man who doesn't like to tell an outright lie. So he takes refuge in misdirection instead.”

“What could possibly make a priest want to mislead a police investigation?” Piola asked rhetorically.

Kat nodded. “Something that might embarrass the Church. Oh, and he knew about Poveglia. He was trying to tell me what an evil place it was, how it was just the sort of place Satanists might choose to hold their rituals. At the time I thought it was odd that the conversation had taken a turn in that direction, but with hindsight I think he was trying to nudge me further towards the occult connection.”

“Because. . .?”

“I don't know,” she said, frustrated. “But there's something that isn't right here, isn't there?”

“Your first homicide, and you're telling me you already have an instinct for when something's wrong?” She started to apologise, and he cut her off. “For what it's worth, I agree. There are too many contradictory lines of enquiry – which makes me think that some of them must be smokescreens, thrown up to put us off the scent. But let's not jump to conclusions, Captain. Evidence-gathering first. The theories can come later.”

Her inbox was full of emails, including one from the website that had published the blog about illegal ordinations.

Captain Tapo,

In response to your enquiry, I write to inform you that this organisation holds no information whatsoever regarding anyone involved, however tangentially, with attempted ordinations of women. If we did have information that any of our members were involved in such activities, we would immediately cut all links with them and pass the information to the relevant Church authorities.

Sincerely,

The webmaster

“Arse coverer!” she said out loud.

There was another email below it, from an address she didn't recognise.

Dear Captain Tapo,

I understand you want to speak to someone about women priests. I am a woman, and I am also a Catholic priest. There are, to my knowledge, well over a hundred of us, the Church's current position notwithstanding. Exact numbers are hard to establish – many of us don't even know our own Sisters in Christ, having been ordained through catacomb ordinations.

I would be happy to discuss this further with you if we can establish a safe way of doing so. Do you have a Carnivia account? It would be easier if you did.

Forgive me if I don't use my real name.

“Karen”

Piola, hearing her whistle of surprise, looked up.