Conspiracy in Kiev (14 page)
I
n the evening, Alex had dinner by herself in the hotel restaurant. The food was ordinary but wasn’t bad either; the ex-Soviet states still had a ways to go for business travelers and tourists. The restaurant was on the top floor of the hotel. Though night had fallen she could see the lights of part of the city below.
Afterward she asked the desk staff if the neighborhood was safe for a single woman. “Most times, but not always,” a girl at the front desk advised. A man at the desk advised Alex to stay visible in the park.
She took her cell phone and, just in case, tucked the loaded Walther into the pocket of the heavy coat she had brought. American women were always targets in places like this. Fortunately, she had also brought a pair of durable boots that looked good yet were warm. She walked out into a freezing night for air. There was ice all over the sidewalks and public square.
She could see floodlights and a monument in nearby Khreschatyk Park. She walked toward it, stepping carefully through the ice and encrusted snow. There was little traffic; compared to an American city, Kiev was eerily quiet.
Before her, growing larger as she approached, was a rainbow-shaped arch, reminiscent of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, but smaller. She arrived there and put her knowledge of Ukrainian language to good use. More pre-
glasnost
propaganda in granite and steel. The sculptures had gone up in 1982.
The Friendship Arch
, read the sign.
Underneath the Friendship Arch there were two statues, both illuminated. One to her right was in granite and showed a huddled mass of peasants. It commemorated the great treaty of 1664, the one that sold the soul of Ukraine to Russia. The one to her left was the statue Friedman had pointed out on the ride in from the airport. It was made of bronze and depicted two workers, one Russian and one Ukrainian, as they held aloft the Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples.
A harsh wind kicked up and bit through her coat. It must have been fifteen degrees but the wind chill made it feel even colder. Her face stung from the icy air. She wrapped a scarf around her throat and the lower part of her face.
She gazed at the monuments, feeling very alone as she looked at them. They were creepy in their oppressiveness combined with the deep silence. She was happy that she could leave this place in a few days and return to an America where she could vote as she wished, think as she wished, and worship as she wished. Some people would have called her an old fashioned flag-waver, and she was as aware of her own country’s faults and shortcomings as anyone. But no one was putting up official statues trying to tell her what to think, and even if someone did, she was under no obligation to look at it.
The extreme cold continued to penetrate her overcoat. She remained tired from the travel. She turned to walk back to the hotel.
She smacked into a huge man in a great sheepskin coat and a massive fur cap pulled low above his eyes, a heavy woolen scarf wrapped around his face. Her heart jumped into her throat. She would have fallen, except he reached an arm out and held her. She could only see his eyes and the bridge of his nose. She knew immediately that she had been incredibly careless to let a stranger get so close to her in a place like this.
His eyes bored into her. He looked like he had stepped out of the Czar’s army of a century earlier. He had arrived quietly beside her, coming up out of the ground or the shadows or God knew where.
Then she realized he was not releasing her.
“
Zakordónna?
” he asked. Foreign?
Crunch time for her knowledge of Ukrainian. Sink or swim. No backups here and no interpreter either.
“
Mozhlývo
,” she answered. Maybe.
“
Frantsúz’ka? Anhlíys’ka? Amerykánka?
” he pressed. French? English? American?
She reached for a phrase from Mistress Olga.
“
Ne váshe dílo!
” she said. Mind your own business. Always a useful phrase to have ready. She pulled away, but he held her coat, his grip tight as a vice, an iron fist in a leather glove.
A moment passed. She was a heartbeat away from attempting to kick free and reaching for her weapon at the same time.
Then his grip eased. He laughed. She steadied herself. He released her.
“A monument to ‘friendship,’ yes?” he said, now switching into Russian, indicating the monument: “Äðóæáà.”
She couldn’t help herself in replying. “Friendship enforced by the tanks of the Soviet Red Army,” she said, throwing the same language back at him.
His dark eyes took on a deep burn. Her remark had touched something.
He nodded toward the statue of the workers. “Soviet Order of Friendship,” he said. “In Ukraine, we call that the ‘Yoke of Oppression.’ ”
Another moment passed. He looked both ways, dropped his hands into his pocket, and laughed. Then he slowly turned and walked away into the night. Despite the bright lights illuminating the monuments, her visitor knew where the shadows were. He did not look back as he walked away. Then he was gone, as quietly as he had arrived.
R
ome. Quarter to seven in the morning under a cold gray drizzle. A police car bearing Lt. Gian Antonio Rizzo and his assistant, Stephano DiPetri, drew up outside an inauspicious steel door on the via LoBrutti. The building was set among two warehouses and a closed factory.
The two policemen jumped out. Rizzo walked at a quick pace. He knew this place too well. DiPetri followed close behind, pulling his coat close against the elements.
Miserable weather. A miserable place. There was a sign beside the door. It read, “
L’Obitorio Municipale—Città di Roma.
”
Rizzo pulled the door open. He barged purposefully into the municipal morgue. For the next half hour, he and his assistant stood in a basement chamber that was barely warmer than the outside air. Noxious fumes assaulted their nostrils, the scent of death and chemicals everywhere. They eventually stood over two marble slabs where a pair of decomposing bodies in yellow canvas bags were set forth for their examination.
An emissary of the mortuary’s office presided. He was a chubby bearded man named Bernardo Santangelo, pleasant and jovial, considering his line of work, well known for his unending courtesy and attention to detail. A meticulous well-groomed man, he looked more like a jolly chef than a technician of mortality. In his handsome pudginess, he moved like a big pampered cat.
Nearby, with her arms folded behind her back, stood a young assistant, Neomie, a woman with dark hair, thick glasses, and a complexion as pale as the resident cadavers. Rizzo gave her a quick glance and a nod. Neomie couldn’t hold a candle to Sophie, so Rizzo’s attention bounced back to the business at hand.
Like the corpses, Neomie remained silent.
Lt. Rizzo had worked with Bernardo Santangelo previously and knew him to be an intelligent man who did his wretched job with an air of earnestness. Santangelo adjusted the thermostat in the room to below freezing before he began to talk.
“We may now proceed,” Santangelo said. “Please open the bags.” Neomie unzipped first one bag and then the other.
Rizzo winced. DiPetri retched. Neomie ignored them and the dead folks.
Rizzo had seen many corpses in his career, including those of people he had known personally. But these were particularly horrendous. There had been just enough time since death—perhaps a couple of weeks, he assessed—for advanced discoloration and decomposition to set in. Death had been caused by gunshot, and the gunshots had raked the heads, necks, and upper chests, and caused particularly horrific effects.
The bodies were those of a man and a woman. Half of the woman’s face had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was filled with brains and blood. The man’s face had been smashed in by gunfire so brutally that the features almost looked as if they had been turned inside out.
Gravely, his voice muted to low tones, Santangelo explained how the man and woman came to lie in his place of business.
A band of children had been playing near some old Roman ruins in the campground at Villa di Plinio. Rizzo knew the area. It was a sandy swampy region twenty kilometers east of Rome and two kilometers south of the massive airport at Fiumicino. It was a place where unusual things were known to surface.
The
bambini piccoli
had been kicking a soccer ball when it bounced into the marshes. The ball rolled to rest against
qualcosa non comune
—something unusual—sticking up out of the ground, something that looked like a broken branch of a tree or a strange piece of driftwood that had washed up from the Mediterranean.
The children pushed away the wet dirt and dead grass. They discovered that the “something unusual” was the arm of a human being. The arm was attached to the rest of a decomposing body, that of a man. The body had been stripped of clothing, jewelry, or any other pieces of identification.
The children ran off and told their parents. One of the fathers phoned his brother, who was a policeman in Castel Fusano on the Mediterranean coast. The brother drove to the area, saw the body with his own eyes, and used his cell phone to file a report.
The local police discovered that the dead man had been buried with a female companion, one body stacked up on top of the other. It was as if those getting rid of the bodies had been too lazy—or in too much of a hurry—to dig two graves and weigh them down with stones, the normal procedure in the area.
Not long afterward, federal police were called, notably the anti Mafia brigade. The Castel Fusano police were happy to get rid of the remains.
The bodies were shipped to Rome where they were stored here in the central
obitorio
where more experienced technicians could examine them. They were also frozen at a temperature of thirteen degrees below zero centigrade to arrest the decomposition and assist the forensics units.
Lt. Rizzo listened to all this very thoughtfully, saying nothing until Santangelo had finished. Then, “Have these victims been identified yet?” Rizzo asked.
“No,” Santangelo answered. “We received them here only two days ago. We have some leads that may help us soon, however. Perhaps within the next day or two.”
“Then why did you phone me?” Rizzo asked.
“Please follow me, if you would,” Santangelo said.
Neomie rezipped the bags and summoned more help from the next room. The team at the morgue would return the bodies back to their own deep freeze.
Santangelo walked his visitors to a computer at a desk in an adjoining office. He sat his guests down at chairs which afforded a view of the screen. A few entries on the keyboard and Santangelo brought up the information that he wanted.
On a split screen, there were photographs of bullet fragments, courtesy of the central Roman police CSI records. Thumbnails first, then enlarged images.
A CSI techie who had been working on recent crimes had been looking for links among several shootings in the central and southern parts of Italy. The techie had grouped the homicides in the area in the last month by weapons and then, among the gun crimes, matched the subgroups by caliber. He had struck gold.
“The ammunition on the left,” Santangelo explained, “are the bullets that were used in the shooting in Rome,” he said. “The musician and a young woman. I believe you were the ranking investigating officer at that scene.”
“Yes, I was,” Rizzo said. “The musician was a local guitarist with links to local drug traffickers. The young woman had three passports. We’ve determined that she was a Canadian named Lana Bissoni from Toronto. She was the signatory on the apartment. How and why she had three passports is a question as yet unanswered.”
Santangelo nodded.
“But here is what should interest you, Gian Antonio,” Santangelo said. “The fragments on the right were recovered from the bodies in the marshes,” Santangelo said. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that they match the fragments shown on the left. These four murders are linked. Find the person or people who committed one of these crimes and most likely you’ve resolved the other case as well.”
For the first time since he had stood in the cluttered apartment on the Via Donorfio, Rizzo began to grasp the possible scope of the various murders before him. Could it be that there were not two sets of two, but rather one set of four?
That, in and of itself, suggested a methodology, as well as motivations that were not easy to explain. The fact that the dead girl at the musician’s apartment had three passports suggested some sort of international spin—dirty international business or espionage of some sort. And then there had been precision execution of two Americans on the streets of Rome the evening before the musician and the girl. Now, this carnage in front of him, plus where their corpses had been dumped, suggested killers who did this for a living, not for amusement or as a hobby.
He lost himself in thought for a moment, trying to tie it together. Gut instincts? His guts were exploding with them.
“How long can you keep these bodies here?” Rizzo finally asked. “I’ll probably require further tests and examinations.”
“Under the law, if they remain unclaimed, and if you get me the proper papers,” Santangelo said, “forty-five days.”
Rizzo then went into an adjoining room and filed the proper warrants.
“Now do me one more favor, if you would,” Rizzo said as he placed his fountain pen back into his pocket.
“What would that be?” Santangelo asked.
“If anyone else expresses any interest in these corpses, if there are any inquiries out of the ordinary, please give me a call immediately.”
G
ian Antonio Rizzo sat quietly in his car. His assistant DiPetri drove silently through the cluttered Roman roads back to his office on the via Trafficante.
All right. Bernardo had given him something more that he could work with, although the next part of pulling things together was not yet in sight.
Traffic was jammed. Morning rush hour in Rome. DiPetri was muttering about the truck in front of them. Rizzo had half a mind to tell DiPetri to slap the flashing blue light on top of the car and drive up on the damned sidewalk if necessary, but just get them out of there.
Why didn’t DiPetri think about the blue light and the siren? Because DiPetri didn’t care, that was why.
Increasingly, DiPetri irritated Rizzo. It had been a long time since DiPetri had contributed in any way to a case. DiPetri was burned out worse than he was. He had been a good cop years ago, but few people could remember that. These days, he had two loves: drinking and fishing. Some day, they were going to find DiPetri dead in a bathtub of beer with a drunken tuna fish.
On the other hand, the traffic jam afforded Rizzo time to think outside of the office. At least DiPetri could be counted on to keep his trap shut.
Rizzo pondered a new angle. As far as the ballistic links were concerned, the lieutenant had another idea that might play out. There were a couple of younger people working in the homicide bureau these days, a couple of new hires and a pair of interns from the university. They were amiable kids in his opinion, both the boys and the girls. The boys had funny haircuts that looked like someone had used an electric mixer and whipped up their hair like meringues. But the girls dressed cute and Rizzo liked to flirt with them.
No contact. Just harmless flirting. Nothing wrong with that.
The real value of these kids, however, was their willingness to crunch statistics and poke around various computer systems. They knew all the new computer games and websites and could hack just about anything. Not just in Rome, but for a few Euros on the side they could even hack Interpol across Europe and some of the American sites in Washington and Virginia.
So, good. He would feed this new information to the kids in the office. He would do it individually with each of them, the girls first, so that each would think he or she was working on something special. Then he’d see where that would take them.
Who knew? He might get lucky.
After twenty minutes of sitting in traffic, which seemed like twenty days, DiPetri broke the silence in the car.
“I’ve got an idea,” DiPetri said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He turned on the siren, threw the blue flasher onto the roof, and jumped the car onto the sidewalk. He navigated an armada of frightened pedestrians and within a minute had accessed the main boulevard, pointed back to headquarters.
“Good thinking,” Rizzo said sullenly. “What would I do without you?”
Rizzo, however, was already thinking ahead. He had a plan.
He was going to make a return trip to the
obitorio municipale
and this time not with this fool at his side.
