The Abomination (17 page)

She thought about Second Lieutenant Jonny Wright. Was he capable of taking part in an operation like the one Gilroy had described – an operation that ran counter to everything that the US Army was supposed to stand for? Of course he was, if someone else planned it and told him what to do. And who would stop people like that, if not her and Gilroy?

Do not presume to think that because this mission is easy and safe it is unimportant or without valour
, Major Forster had said to her. Well, now she was being offered a mission that was surely more important to the honour of the military than any task she had ever been given.

I'll do it, Dad
.

She recalled something Gilroy had said, just before they parted. She'd asked him why he cared so much about these secrets of the past. Surely he should be enjoying his retirement now?

It was just as they were leaving the restaurant. Venice was foggy and the lights along the canals were fuzzy with mist. At their feet, the black waters stretched away like a gently rocking dark mirror.

“I've realised that there are three things I care about, Holly Boland,” he'd said at last. “One is my country, which I served for thirty years. The second is my former Agency – its probity and its reputation. And the third – well, the third is this place. It gets under your skin, Italy, doesn't it? Hell, I've lived here so long, I've probably gone a little bit native by now. If some of our people were screwing with this country, and they did it on my watch, I want to know about it. And if I can, I want to put it right.” He laughed, and patted her shoulder. “Or maybe it's just more interesting than giving lectures on Roman military history.”

Despite the difference in their ages, she'd recognised in him a fellow outsider, one who could, like her, see this situation from a broader perspective. But now, thinking the evening over, she realised how cleverly he'd hooked her. He'd said he'd help her – made it look as if he was agreeing to be enlisted by her. But a part of her acknowledged that it might have been the other way round: that it was actually her who'd just been recruited, and to a cause she still didn't fully understand.

“LOOK AT HIM
! Such an adorable
bambino
! He gives her such pleasure, doesn't he?”

Kat sighed. Much as she loved her mother, she sometimes wished she could be just a little more subtle. When every sentence came freighted with innuendo like this, it made a family lunch exhausting.

Mamma was talking about Kat's thirteen-month-old nephew Gabriele, who at that moment was sitting on the lap of Kat's grandmother, Nonna Renata. Gabriele clutched a teaspoon in a pudgy fist that was already greasy with
ragù
. His fat little face was also liberally plastered with it, like a lipstick that had gone horribly wrong. In addition he wore a huge, delighted smile, as Nonna Renata combined feeding him with jiggling him on her knees.

“Eighty-nine years old, and she's lived to see her great-grandchildren,” her mother said. “Well, her first great-grandchild. Of course, she'd had me
and
all your uncles by the time she was your age.
And
she'd taken four years out before that to fight in the war.”

The subtext, of course, was that Kat's sister Clara had succeeded in producing a baby, whereas Kat had not. And Clara's perfectly round watermelon of a bump, not to mention a radiant smile to match little Gabriele's, was a constant reminder that another was on the way. Despite being the older sister, Kat was a disappointment. She hadn't so much as brought a boyfriend home since college, let alone produced a child. Her mother had been uneasy about her career choice from the start, and the continuing lack of anyone permanent in Kat's life only reinforced her fears.

For her parents' generation, the Carabinieri were simply the butt of jokes. Even now, her mother would happily trot them out after a grappa or two . . . A farmer sees a Carabinieri car driving backwards up a mountain. “Why are you driving backwards?” he asks. “We're not sure there'll be anywhere to turn round,” comes the answer. A little later the farmer sees the same car driving backwards down the mountain. “Why are you driving backwards now?” he asks. “We found somewhere to turn round after all,” the
carabiniere
replies.

How do you burn a
carabiniere
's ear? Phone him while he's ironing.

A motorist asks a
carabiniere
if the indicators on his car are working. “Yes they are,” comes the answer. “No they're not. Yes they are. No they're not. . .”

To escape, Kat went and sat next to Nonna Renata, whom she liked. She'd long suspected that her grandmother wasn't quite as keen on babies as her mother assumed, and she wasn't surprised when Gabriele was quickly handed to her because he was “getting a bit heavy”. So she took over the feeding and the wiping of sticky fingers while they talked. Nonna Renata loved to tell stories of her days amongst the Garibaldini, the partisans who decamped to the mountains when the Germans occupied Italy, and for her part Kat never tired of hearing them.

“We couldn't get married, of course,” Nonna Renata said with a cackle. “There were no priests – they'd all run away. So we lived like people who were married, even those of us who weren't. But no babies, not if we could help it. It was a time for fighting, not for wiping bottoms.”

“And which did you like better,” Kat asked slyly, “the war, or wiping Mamma's bottom?”

Nonna Renata's eyes darted to check her daughter wasn't listening. “The war! It was the best time of my whole life. Afterwards, we thought everything was going to continue like that, but of course the priests and the other men wanted things the way they were before. So it was back to babies and baking after all.”

“I think I'd have liked the war.”

Nonna Renata nodded. “You take after me, I've always thought so. Now tell me, how's
your
war going?”

“I'm doing my first murder,” Kat confessed proudly.

Just for a moment the old woman looked confused. “You're going to kill someone? I didn't think that was allowed any more.”

“Sorry, Nonna – I meant, I'm on my first murder investigation. I'm under a really good colonel, someone who's done at least a dozen homicide investigations—”

Later, as she was helping carry the dirty dishes into the kitchen, her mother commented, “So, when will we get to meet this Aldo Piola?”

“You were listening?”

“I could hardly help it – you talked about nothing else for twenty minutes. He's good-looking, I hope?”

Kat groaned. “Mamma, he's my boss.”

“The two aren't always mutually exclusive, are they?”

“And he's married.”

“Married!” Her mother looked shocked, as if she'd caught out Piola in some terrible crime.

“Of course. Why wouldn't he be?”

Her mother didn't answer directly. “I remember a time when the Carabinieri didn't allow women officers,” she said tartly.

“That was over ten years ago. And before you say anything, no, he's a perfect gentleman. Not a lech, not a grabber. And very respectful of my work.” Even before the words had left her mouth she knew her mother would make that face, the face that said Kat was still twelve years old and knew nothing about the real world. She wanted to shout,
I'm an officer of the Carabinieri, Mamma! I see dead bodies that have been shot and then dumped in canals! I deal with gangsters and criminals! I think I know how to look after myself!

But instead she just sighed and said, “I'll go and chat to Papà, shall I, before he falls asleep?”

SHE'D MEANT TO
go straight home from her parents' apartment in Sant'Elena, but the conversation with her mother had left a residual irritation that Kat knew from experience couldn't be fixed by an evening of TV and Facebook. So she took a detour.

She told herself she was just going for a walk. It was true that she loved Venice on these winter afternoons, when the
bora
, the cold north wind, whisked tiny flakes of snow down from the mountains and the air seemed to sparkle as if filled with specks of gold. This was the empty month, the brief low season when the city's sixty thousand residents were for a short time not hopelessly outnumbered by the six million tourists who filled its narrow pavements the rest of the year, and Kat took full advantage, striding purposefully towards Campo San Zaccaria without even realising at first that was where she was heading.

She made her way up to the operations room, expecting to find it empty. She'd spend a couple of hours catching up on paperwork, she decided, writing up her reports from the previous week, so she'd be ready to face the new week unencumbered.

To her surprise, there was a woman in Piola's glassed-off office. As the woman stood up, nervously examining her surroundings, Kat saw she was wearing a low-cut top under her leather jacket.

Piola re-entered with a bottle of wine and two plastic cups. He set them down on the table, and the woman touched his shoulder and said something. He smiled in acknowledgement. Although Kat tried not to leap to conclusions, there was no mistaking the intention with which the woman was arching her breasts towards his gaze.

Just then he looked up and saw Kat. He waved for her to come and join them.

“This is Spira,” he explained as she entered. “It seemed like a good day to bring her in for a chat. Spira's a little shy.”

Spira laughed dutifully. Her sly dark eyes darted across to Kat's face, assessing her. Now that Kat was closer, she could see how much make-up the other woman was wearing, how cheap the leather jacket was. Of course. A prostitute.

“On Sundays her boyfriend goes to church, followed by lunch with his mother, so Spira gets a few hours' rest,” Piola went on. Spira nodded, apparently happy with this description of her pimp's schedule. “I was curious about this,” he added, holding up the page torn from the back of
La Nuova Venezia
that had been found in the hotel room shared by Jelena Babić and Barbara Holton.

“I know some of these girls,” Spira interjected, pointing at the small ads that had been crossed out. Her accent was thick – probably East European, Kat thought; like hotel chambermaids, the majority of the sex workers in Venice were also illegals from across the Adriatic.

“Is there anything you can tell us about them?” Piola asked.

“
Da
. This one's blonde, this one's brunette. This one, her pimp's got her on smack—”

“I meant, anything about this group of girls in particular. Anything they have in common.”

Spira scrutinised the page more closely. “They're all Croats,” she announced.

“You're sure?” Kat asked.

Believe me or not, it's all the same to me, Spira's shrug implied.

“What about these two women? Have you seen them before?” Piola asked, placing photos of Jelena Babić and Barbara Holton in front of her.

“
Da
. This one.” Spira tapped Jelena's picture.

“When?”

“She was looking for a girl. Round Santa Lucia.”

“She tried to pick you up?”

“
Ne
. I mean she had a picture of a girl. She wanted to know if we'd seen her.”

“What was the girl like?”

“Dark hair, dark eyes. Also
Ustasha
,” Spira said, using the Serbs' derogatory term for a Croat.

“Get someone to take a look through the possessions we bagged from the hotel room,” Piola suggested quietly to Kat. “See if the picture's there.” To Spira he said, “And had you? Seen her, that is?”

Spira regarded him as if he were an idiot. “It was on the street. You think I want to end up in a canal with my throat cut?”

“But if you
did
see her again . . . Would you recognise her?”

Spira shrugged. “People all look the same on the street. The dicks look the same. The money looks the same. After a while the faces look the same as well.”

Piola sighed. “If you like, we could arrange for you to go from here to an organisation that rehabilitates girls like you. They'd help you get clean, arrange for you to go home. . .”

“If I go home now, my family will throw me out. And the people who brought me here will find me. At least in Venice I'm working. I'm paying off my debt. And my pimp looks after me.”

Piola said nothing, giving her the chance to change her mind. Eventually she said, “Can I go now?”

“Yes,” he replied, just as Kat said, “One more thing.”

“What?”

Kat went to her desk and found the sheet of symbols from Poveglia. “Do you recognise any of these?” she asked, putting them in front of the prostitute.

“These, no,” Spira said, pointing at the symbols Father Uriel had already identified. Her finger moved along to the ones that matched the tattoos on Jelena Babić's body. “But these are
Ustasha.
”

“Croatian? You're sure?”

Spira nodded. “The old women have them. It's a Catholic thing. You don't see it so much now.”

Kat and Piola exchanged a glance. “Thank you, Spira,” Piola said, getting to his feet. “You've been very helpful. I'll show you out.”

By the time he returned, Kat had already trawled through Google Images. Using the keywords “Croatian”, “Catholic” and “tattoo”, she'd found some pictures that confirmed what the prostitute had told them.

“Look,” she said, spinning her screen to show Piola. “They're called
stećak
symbols. According to this, Catholics in Bosnia originally tattooed their children with these markings in the hope that the Turks wouldn't take them as slaves – they couldn't be forcibly converted to Islam if they had Christian symbols on their skin. After the fall of the Ottomans, the tattoos remained as symbols of the underground Church in Croatia.”