Black Scorpion (34 page)

Or Davide Schapira.

That truth made the entire farm look and feel different to him, as if he could trust nothing his mind conjured of it. He'd purchased the property, and all the land surrounding it, from the bank years before under the name of an untraceable Hong Kong shell company, never with an eye on doing anything with it other than make sure no one else ever owned it. He had come here for the closing, at which point he'd seen his boyhood home for the first time since leaving Sicily fifteen years before, finding it so overgrown as to be barely recognizable.

It was in even worse shape today, the grounds untended and what was left of the buildings ravaged by time and the elements. Both the barn and farmhouse were mostly shells, most of their roofs having collapsed inward and the walls crumbling visibly as well. It was a beautiful sunny day and the breeze blew softly, rustling the leaves of the trees that had managed to survive. Michael gazed toward the fields where the family's crops of oranges and olives had once rustled in the breeze, too. He half expected the old farmhand Attilio to roll by atop the tractor, taking his hat off and grinning in greeting. His mind drew back the sounds of horses and cows, along with the strangely sweet odor of manure Michael had always hated, but now found himself longing for. He took a deep breath and imagined he could smell the fragrant scent of oranges fresh from the vine piled high in baskets upon the bed of the old flatbed truck his father would drive to market, cursing whenever a bump in the road cost him even a single item in his load.

They were just overgrown weeds and dead brush now; but when he first looked that way, for a moment, just a moment, he saw the neat rows of trees whole again in their groves. His father toiling amid them in his old straw hat. He never looked happy with the labor, as if he'd rather be elsewhere doing something else. And now, finally, Michael thought he understood why.

Because his father was not who everyone thought he was, a mere farmer. He was Davide Schapira, a hero who came to Romania on some secret mission. The missing pieces of a story Michael desperately wanted to understand. And if such pieces still existed, they'd be found somewhere here on the grounds where Vito Nunziato had been gunned down and his son Michele had been born.

In spite of everything else confronting him, Michael had to learn the truth, had to
know
how his father could've been hero and farmer at the same time. Who was Davide Schapira?

Or a better question, maybe, who was Vito Nunziato?

Michael walked under the warm sun to the ruins of the barn, the timber having been swallowed up by the earth that had originally given it life. He had left Scarlett and Alexander back with the Citation at the airport in Catania and proceeded here alone against Alexander's heated protestations, because he knew this was a journey he needed to make by himself.

A journey into not just his past, but also, especially, his father's.

Michael turned his gaze toward what little remained of the farmhouse—just the first floor with the clapboard and studding showing—and thought of himself as a little boy again, listening to the gunshots and watching his parents die. He remembered the night before that, when his father had hugged him tight and urged him to be a king and not a peasant.

Something about him had been different that night, something in his eyes and his manner, that made Michael wonder today if he'd actually caught his first and only glimpse of Davide Schapira. If Vito Nunziato had been nothing more than a guise, a mask he wore to disguise his true self. This was the same man, after all, who'd found the relic in the waters off Isla de Levanzo, who almost drowned trying to retrieve it only to come awake miraculously back on shore.

Maybe it was the relic that defined his heroism. Maybe it really had been meant for him. Michael couldn't know for sure, wouldn't know until he found something more to tell him. On these grounds, somewhere on what had once been a farm.

It was here; he could feel it as clearly as the breeze billowing his shirt over skin that felt clammy with sweat. A chronicle, some documentation, of his father's life apart from his family, before his family. But his father had never even had a safety deposit box, hardly a man to trust secrets or personal business to third parties. He was intensely old-fashioned, believing private matters to be just that.

Michael reflected on that with strange fondness, wondering what his life might have been like if the relic had never existed and Michele Nunziato had grown up to be a farmer like his father instead of the man known as the Tyrant. Would he have been happier?

Michael recalled so much gruff coldness, so few smiles or warmth. Perhaps it was hard for his father to settle into such an ordinary life after whatever experiences had defined him during his mission in Romania. And how did Vito Nunziato end up a farmer anyway? What happened in that Transylvanian village that brought him to this land where his previous life became a secret never to be shared? No medals on display, no framed commendations or other memorabilia.

What had happened?

So, too, as a boy, overly curious at times, Michael had explored every nook and cranny of the farmhouse that today looked gobbled up by the ground; it was how he had found the medallion tucked in his father's sock drawer the fateful morning of the massacre. And none of his explorations had ever revealed anything passing for secret documents, pictures, letters, passports—the kind of material a man with dual identities was certain to have. The farmhouse had no secret chambers, loose floorboards, or hollowed walls in which to hide such things; if it had, Michael would've found them.

So what then?

Michael continued to walk the grounds, as if in search of some cosmic inspiration, but his thoughts were consumed by his father. Every memory recaptured and reframed because now he saw the man entirely different from what he ever had before. And suddenly the world morphed around him in a surreal vision that left seeing the past through the prism of the present and all its conflicting emotions. He was a young boy again. His sister Rosina holding his mother's hand as they traipsed through the gardens. Michael busy in the fields and mimicking his father mopping the sweat from his brow with his kerchief. Working the hoe just as his father had taught him.

“Like this, Papa?”

“Like that, Michele.”

Rewinding those memories as if they could be relived. Searching them as they unfolded before him for some,
any
, indication that Vito Nunziato was more than just a farmer.

But there was nothing. His father was his father, demanding and distant. Worn down by life. Smelling of the fresh paint staining his fingers and the manure Michael remembered roosting in the grooves of his shoes.

Michael froze halfway between the remains of the farmhouse and the barn, holding onto that memory. Because, he realized now, those dark stains hadn't been paint at all, but ink. Even as a boy, Michael had wondered why his father wanted to paint the root cellar because he always had the dark stains on his fingers when he emerged from it.

The root cellar,
Michael thought, moving fast for the refuse of the farmhouse.

 

SEVENTY-SEVEN

C
ALTAGIRONE,
S
ICILY

Michael stood outside the shell of the house briefly before continuing on, long enough to see the inside again as he remembered it. His mother always seemed to be cooking in the kitchen, his sister Rosina either crying loudly or totally silent, his father at the kitchen table paying bills and keeping a running tab of the transactions on a piece of loose-leaf paper with the fringe carefully peeled off.

It was another long-forgotten memory, though, that stirred him now. Of finding a padlock on a heavy plank door angled over the ground at the farmhouse's rear, the one spot the sun never reached. His father had caught him and slapped him across the face, telling him it was dangerous, that he'd closed up the old root cellar after a particularly wet spring had flooded it and left only mold and mildew behind in place of the ruined crops.

But one night Michael remembered being roused from bed by a strange creaking sound while he sat reading by flashlight under the covers. He'd gone to the window and spotted the last of his father's frame disappearing through the same plank door, leaving it hoisted open behind him. Maybe it had only happened that one time or, perhaps, other memories of it had merged into this one.

Michael pulled more of the thick brush, bramble, weeds that had grown into thickly knotted vines and moss aside to reveal that plank door, now faded to a sickly, washed-out gray color. The lock was still in place, all rusted over, and broke apart as soon as Michael tugged on it.

The doors resisted at first but then gave with a jolt that pushed dust and grime into the air behind a gush of rancid air escaping from below. Dry and spoiled, laced with must and decay, from being trapped for so long.

No food had been stored down here for a very long time. And, even before he shined a flashlight about and descended a set of plank stairs into the darkness, Michael doubted food storage was ever the root cellar's primary purpose. One of the wooden steps gave under his weight and two others cracked audibly before he reached the bottom, sweeping his flashlight around to find piles of petrified refuse that had once been freshly harvested crops. Just enough to throw anyone coming down here in search of something else off the track. The root cellar was cramped and claustrophobic, no more than ten feet square with a ceiling just high enough to accommodate Michael's six-foot frame. He continued to shine his flashlight around the earthen walls and kicked at the petrified remnants of crops that must've been stored down here in the days before the massacre.

Wishing he'd donned gloves first, Michael then began pulling the collection of spoiled rot away to see what the floor and walls might reveal. Something inside him expected to find some secret passage or doorway into the clandestine world his father had forged. He imagined a closet-size chamber full of secrets stacked and catalogued in alphabetical order to ease the sorting process.

What he uncovered in a rear corner beneath the pulpy remains of stench-riddled turnips and radishes was a single metal footlocker covered in a cheap tarpaulin that had weathered the years reasonably well. Michael peeled away the plastic, having to pry some of it from the metal, to reveal a lid which caught stubbornly until Michael wedged a pen into the narrow gap and pried it open.

He saw the weapons first: World War II vintage, a pistol and a rifle. Then cardboard boxes packed with old pictures and letters dating back, it seemed, to his father's own childhood, left hidden down here along with the never-revealed secrets of his life.

Under the spill of his flashlight, an assortment of pictures greeted Michael first, all capturing his father around the same time as the mug shot of Davide Schapira. There were more weapons too—old pistols, rifles manufactured by a long-bankrupt Italian gun manufacturer, even a Thompson machine gun—all sheathed in a coating of dust that hid the rust the moist air had draped over the old weapons.

It was all here, the secret life of Vito Nunziato from tattered birth certificate missing two edges and browned through the middle forward. Pictures of him as a boy, a teenager, one that looked like it had been taken on Isla de Levanzo around the time an ancient gold relic had cried out to him from the shallows.

The last thing Michael spotted was a thick notebook missing its cover to reveal the yellowed pages within. The pages of the notebook were full of notations of addresses, descriptions of places and people coming and going, each entry ending with a bold strike being drawn through a name.

A German name. They were all German names.

All written in Italian in his father's scratchy scrawl. Regarding that handwriting again now, for the first time in so many years, sent a chill up Michael's spine. He hadn't thought about his father very much in a long time. Right now, though, Vito Nunziato was all he was thinking about.

Or Davide Schapira, that is.

The notebook sat upon a stack of larger, ledger-size journals bound in cheap leather or vinyl. He eased the journal from the top of the pile to him and thumbed it open to find the same familiar handwriting, the dark paint-like ink a bit faded by the years but otherwise intact. Michael started to run his flashlight over the contents, then spotted an old oil lantern on a nearby ledge. He pulled his cigar lighter from his pocket and touched it to the wick, then turned the knob to increase the flow of oil.

Surprisingly, the oil still burned. The light came up instantly in surprisingly bright fashion, just as it must have for his father all the times he'd sneaked down here to lose himself in the past. When Michael realized the lantern was dulled by its dust-encrusted glass, he swiped it clean as best he could to let the light better sift through. He imagined his father positioning the lantern to maximize the spill before he started writing, just as Michael did before he started reading.

The journal, all in Italian, looked to begin in a period around 1958 and opened on the first page with a title in capital letters:

OPERATION SLEDGEHAMMER

 

SEVENTY-EIGHT

F
ROM
V
ITO
N
UNZIATO'S
J
OURNAL

That's where this all starts, an odd name for a secret operation but they had to call it something.

See, as the war neared its end, and the Nazi war machine fell, an estimated thirty thousand Nazi soldiers and cadre managed to flee Germany ahead of the coming Allied invasion. In the wake of the surrender and ensuing armistice, the United States Department of Justice, working in concert with the Organization of Special Services, OSS (that would soon become the CIA), formed the Office of Special Investigation. Though its existence was not acknowledged until decades later, the OSI joined forces with similarly formed French and British bureaus to bring as many of these Nazi war criminals to justice as possible. In the early years following the war, this mandate was carried out in the spirit of Nuremberg, an overriding obsession to parade as many Nazis before public tribunals as possible.