Day of Confession (33 page)

98

IN A BLAZE OF LANDING LIGHTS AND SWIRLing dust, Roscani’s helicopter set down on the driveway in front of Villa Lorenzi.

Ducking the still-churning rotor blades, he crossed the formal gardens and entered into the smoky chaos of the command post set up in the late Eros Barbu’s grand ballroom. Gilded, polished, and dripping with chandeliers, it was the kind of place an invading army might have set up in, which, in a sense, was exactly what it was.

Pushing through the clamor, answering a fusillade of questions as he went, he glanced at the huge wall map with the small Italian flags marking the checkpoints and worried, as he had before, whether what they were doing, necessary as it seemed, was too big, too loud, too unwieldy. They
were
an army, and that made them think and act like an army, and made them subject to the limitations of a large force; while their prey, as they had proven so far, were essentially guerillas with the freedom of daring and creativity.

Going into a small office at the far end of the ballroom, he closed the door and sat down. There were calls waiting—from Taglia in Rome, Farel in the Vatican, his wife at home.

The call to his wife would be first. And then Taglia and then Farel. After that he would see no one for twenty minutes. He would take that time for himself. For
assoluta tranquillità
. His splendid silence. To be calm and to think. And then quietly go over the data he’d received from INTERPOL, to see if somewhere in those pages he could determine the identity of his blond man.

Bellagio. Hotel Florence. 8:40
P.M
.

Thomas Kind sat at the dressing table in his room and looked at himself in the mirror. Astringent had cleaned the deep facial scratches made by Marta’s clawing nails and drawn the wounds tightly enough to apply the makeup that he was now using to cover them.

He’d arrived back at the hotel a little before five after hitching a ride on the Bellagio road from two English university students on vacation. He’d been in a fight with his girlfriend, he’d told them; she’d lashed out, scratching his face, and he’d simply walked off—he was going back to Holland that night, and as far as he was concerned, she could go to hell. A half mile from the police checkpoint, he asked to be let out, saying he was still angry and wanted to walk it off. When the students had driven away, he’d left the road, crossed a field behind some trees, then come back to the road on the far side of the checkpoint. From there it had been less than a twenty-minute walk into Bellagio.

Coming into the hotel, he’d taken the back stairs to his room, then called the front desk to say he was checking out early in the morning and that whatever final payment was due should be added to his credit card and forwarded with the bill to his home in Amsterdam. Afterward, he’d looked at himself in the mirror and decided the thing to do was to take a shower and then change. And change he had.

Leaning toward the mirror, he touched mascara to his eyelashes, then dabbed once again at the eyeshadow. Satisfied, he stood back and looked at himself. He wore heels, beige slacks, and a loose white blouse under a lightweight blue linen blazer. Small gold earrings and a string of pearls finished the look. Closing his suitcase, he glanced once more in the mirror and then, pulling on a large straw hat, tossed the room keys on the bed, opened the door and left.

Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind of Quito, Ecuador, alias Frederick Voor of Amsterdam, was now Julia Louise Phelps, a real estate agent from San Francisco, California.

99

HARRY WATCHED ANXIOUSLY AS THE TWO armed
carabinieri
waved the white Fiat on toward Bellagio, then looked to the next car in line, motioning it forward and then stopping it in the bright glare of the checkpoint’s work lights. Across, two more
carabinieri
worked the vehicles leaving the city. Four more stood in the shadow of an armored car at the roadside, watching.

Harry had seen the lights and knew what it was even before the traffic in front of him began to slow. They’d been more than lucky the first time, when it had been just he and Elena going through the other way. Now, there were three of them, and he held his breath, expecting the worst.

“Mr. Addison—” Elena was looking directly ahead.

Harry saw the car in front of them move off. Abruptly, an armed
carabiniere
waved them forward. Harry felt his heart pound, and suddenly there was sweat under his palms as his hands gripped the wheel. Again the
carabiniere
waved them forward.

Breathing deeply, Harry eased the clutch out. The truck moved ahead, then the policeman motioned him to stop. He did. Then two
carabinieri
came toward them in the purple-white of the checkpoint lights, one from either side. Both carried heavy flashlights.

“Christ!” Harry’s breath went out of him with a rush.

“What is it?” Elena asked quickly.

“The same guy.”

The
carabiniere
saw Harry, too. How could he forget? The old truck with the priest who had nearly run him over earlier that same morning.

“
Buona sera
,” the
carabiniere
said carefully.

“
Buona sera
,”Harry acknowledged.

The
carabiniere
lifted his flashlight and played it over the inside of the truck. Danny was still sleeping, still wearing Harry’s black priest’s jacket, slumped against Elena.

The other
carabiniere
was at Elena’s window. Motioned her to roll it down.

Ignoring him, Elena looked to the
carabiniere
beside Harry.

“We went to a funeral. You remember?” she said in Italian.

“Yes.”

“Now we are coming back. Father Dolgetta,” she gestured at Danny, then lowered her voice as if trying not to wake him, “came from Milan to say the mass. You see how thin he is. He’s been ill. He should never have come, but he insisted. And then what? A relapse. Look at him. We are trying to get him back and into bed before something worse happens.”

For a long moment the
carabiniere
stared, his light playing over Harry again and then Danny.

“What would you like us to do? Get out and walk around? Wake him up? Make him walk, too?” Elena’s eyes flashed angrily. “How long does it take for you to let people you already know pass?”

Behind them came a honking of horns. People impatient, waiting in line. Traffic backing up. Finally, the
carabiniere
snapped off his flashlight, nodded to his partner, then stepped back and waved them through.

100

ROSCANI BROKE OFF A PIECE OF CHOCOLATE, bit into it, then closed the INTERPOL file.

Section one, fifty-nine pages, detailed twenty-seven men and nine women as active terrorists with histories of Europe as a workplace. Section two was twenty-eight pages of murderers still at large and thought to be in Europe: fourteen altogether, all men.

Any of them could have blown up the Assisi bus. And any of the men could be the charred body misidentified as Father Daniel, the person who carried the Spanish Llama pistol. But in Roscani’s estimation, none of them had the same ingenious, erotic, and purely sadistic feel of his blond, scratch-faced, ice picker/razor man.

Frustrated—damning himself for ever having quit smoking—he stood and opened the door of the tiny office he’d retreated to and went back into Villa Lorenzi’s grand ballroom. Walking through the tumult, looking around, he realized he had been wrong earlier. Yes, Gruppo Cardinale was an army. It was too big. Too unwieldy. Called too much attention to itself. Made mistakes. But considering the situation, he was glad to have it. This was not a game he would like to have played alone, leading the search personally with the attitude of his father, as if he and he alone were capable of finding a solution. This was an arena where you needed a saturation force, a thousand eyes, open, alert, crawling over every inch of land. It was the only way to snap closed the trap and guarantee your quarry would not slip away again.

Bellagio. The Church of Santa Chiara. 10:15
P.M
.

Harry sat with Danny in the dark of the parked truck waiting for Elena. She’d been gone for nearly half an hour, and he could feel the uneasiness building inside him.

Across the street, several teenagers walked by, joking and laughing, one strumming a guitar. A few moments earlier an elderly man had passed the same way, humming to himself and walking two small dogs. Now the sound of the teenagers faded, and quiet took over, heightening the isolation and raising the level of anxiety and the fear they would be caught.

Turning slightly, Harry looked at Danny sleeping on the seat beside him, his legs in the blue fiberglass casts pulled up under him in a fetal position. It was innocent and unknowing, the way a child might sleep. He wanted to reach out and touch him, tell him again that it would be okay.

Looking away, Harry glanced back up the hill toward the church, hoping to see Elena coming toward them. But there was nothing but the empty street and cars parked along either side of it. Suddenly a wave of emotion passed over him. It was deep and from far inside. It was the realization of why he was there. It was something still owed, a deliverance, the working out of a karma.

He was carrying out a promise made to Danny years before, just as he was leaving to go away to college. It was a time when Danny was more rebellious than ever, in constant trouble at home and at school and with the police. Harry’s first year at Harvard was beginning in two days, and he was in the downstairs hallway with his suitcase, looking for Danny to say good-bye, when Danny came in. His face was dirty, his hair disheveled, the knuckles on his right hand raw from a fight. Danny looked at the suitcase and then at Harry, then started to push past him without a word. Harry remembered his hand snapping out, grabbing Danny hard and pulling him around. He could still hear his own words—“Just finish high school, all right?” he’d said strongly. “When you do, I’ll come back and get you and take you with me…. I won’t leave you here. I promise.”

It was more than a promise, it was an extension of the covenant they had made years ago after the deaths of their sister and father and the too-soon, too-wrong remarriage of their mother, to help each other get out of that life and that family and that town, and to never come back to any of it. It was a pledge. A given. Guaranteed, brother to brother.

But for so many reasons it had never happened. And though it had never been talked about—or that circumstances had changed and Danny had gone off to the marines the day after he graduated high school—Harry knew nonetheless his not coming back was the real reason for their long alienation. He’d made a promise and never kept it, and Danny still held it against him. Well, he was keeping it now. Finally, he had come for his brother.

10:25

Another glance up the hill.

The street still dark and empty. The same as the sidewalks on either side. No Elena.

Suddenly the muted ringing of a telephone cut the silence. Harry started, looked around, wondering where it was coming from. Then he realized it was his cell phone stuffed inside the glove box, where he put it when he had gone into the grotto with Elena to find Danny.

Abruptly the ringing stopped. Then started again. Reaching over, opening the glove-box door, Harry took the phone out and clicked it on.

“Yes,” he said carefully, knowing there was only one person who knew how to reach him.

“Harry—”

“Adrianna.”

“Harry, where are you?”

Her voice had an inflection, a probing. Not of concern or warmth or friendship. It was business. She was back to the original deal, the one she had arranged for Eaton and herself—they got to talk to Danny first, before anyone else.

“Harry?”

“I’m still here.”

“Is your brother with you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me where you are.”

10:30

Quick glance up the street.

Still no Elena.

“Where are
you
, Adrianna?”

“Here in Bellagio. At the Du Lac. The same hotel you’re still checked into.”

“Is Eaton with you?”

“No. He’s on his way here from Rome.”

Suddenly headlights turned the corner at the top of the hill and started down. Police on motorcycles. Two of them. Cruising slowly, the streetlights glinting off their helmets, they were looking at the parked cars, the sidewalks. Looking for him and Danny.

“Harry, are you there?”

Harry heard Danny stir beside him. Christ, Danny, not now! Not like before, in the grotto.

“Tell me where you are. I’ll come to you.”

Danny stirred again. The police were almost there. Car lengths away. Less.

“Dammit, Harry. Talk to me. Tell me where—“

CLICK
.

Harry snapped off the phone and slid his body over Danny’s in the dark, below window level, praying he would be silent. Then, from somewhere under him, the phone rang again.

Adrianna was calling back.

“Christ,” Harry breathed.

The ring was loud. Shrill. It sounded as if it were being blasted through a speaker. Desperately he fumbled under him, trying to find the phone in the dark. But it was caught between the folds of his shirt and Danny and the seat. Pulling his arms in, he tried to smother it with his body. Hoping to hell that in the stillness of the summer night the police couldn’t hear it.

An eternity passed before the ringing stopped. And then there was silence. Harry wanted to look up, see if the police had passed. But he didn’t dare. He could hear the thump of his heart. The thud of his pulse.

Suddenly there was a sharp knock on the window. A chill shot through him. His senses froze. The knock came again. Louder.

Finally. Terrified. Resigned. Harry raised his head.

Elena was looking in at him. A priest was with her, and they had a wheelchair.