The Abomination (23 page)

At the guardhouse she handed over her CAC card to be swiped and asked for directions to the recycling facility. She drove two miles within the base before she reached a huge hangar, situated near the concrete domes that marked, like giant white mushrooms, the lids of the underground missile silos.

In the hangar, sitting at a desk, she found the man she'd spoken to on the phone. She knew the type at once: late fifties, well tanned, the bulging belly squeezed into a uniform two sizes too small that doubled as a corset. Staff Sergeant Kassapian was about two years off retirement, and didn't much care how he spent the time until then.

“I'm looking for the old archives from Camp Ederle that were sent down here,” Holly told him. “You said I could take a look, remember?”

“Sure, you can look. Don't suppose it'll help you much.” He stumped over to where a six-foot high mound of shredded paper stood in one corner. “That's them.”

She stared at the pile, aghast. “They've been shredded?”

“Seems that way,” he agreed.

“When did this happen?”

“Yesterday. Orders finally came through. Shred 'em all, just in case. Took forever, I can tell you, and we've got a pretty big shredder. Fact is, we ain't even done.”

“There's more?”

He gestured with his thumb towards a heap of boxes in another corner. “Over there.”

“Mind if I go through those ones, at least?”

“Well, I guess you can,” he said doubtfully. “Seeing as how they sent you all the way down here. Just don't take anything. 'Cause my orders now is to shred them, see? If you take any, I can't complete my orders.”

“Thanks,” she said gratefully.

Her first task was to try to find any boxes that related to the years of Barbara Holton's request, from 1993 to 1995. Unfortunately, it seemed those had already been shredded.

“Darn it,” she said aloud.

“Got what you need?” Kassapian asked, wandering over. His paunch was so large that he leant forward slightly when he walked, like a dog that had raised itself onto its hind legs.

“Not exactly, no.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Well,” she said, gesturing at the pile, “I'm going to look through every one of these boxes to see if I can find any documents written in Serbo-Croat.”

He made a chewing gesture with his lips, as if he were rolling an imaginary cigar into the corner of his mouth while he thought about what she had just said. “Then what you going to do? Take them away?”

“No, Staff Sergeant, absolutely not. Because you have orders to destroy them, right?” He nodded emphatically. “So, once I have them, if you'll direct me to a photocopier, I'll copy them. And then you'll destroy the originals, and everyone will be happy.”

“Sounds fair to me,” he said. “You go right ahead. It's not often we get visitors in here, tell you the truth.”

She realised that his gruff demeanour was simply a disguise to hide his loneliness. “Thank you, Staff. How about I start with this pile here?” And then, “You know, I pretty much grew up on this base. My father's Ted Boland.”

As she'd expected, his eyes lit up. “Ted Boland! Well, I never did. I've been here fifteen years myself. . .”

He talked non-stop for two hours, by which time she'd pulled about a dozen further documents in Serbo-Croat. There was a photocopier in the office, so she made two copies of each of them, one set for her and one for Ian Gilroy, before handing the originals back to Staff Sergeant Kassapian to destroy, as per his orders.

LIKE MOST OLD
palazzi
, Ca' Barbo's grand main entrance gave onto the canal, designed to make an impression on those arriving by boat. The street door at the side, by contrast, was virtually anonymous – old, and made of weather-beaten carved oak, but with little about it to announce that within lay one of Venice's greatest houses. Only the carved lion's head set into the wall nearby, its open mouth a dark hole the size of Kat's fist, indicated what manner of dwelling this was.

She pressed the brass bell push, and while she was waiting examined the lion's head more closely. There were no more than half a dozen of these
bocca di leone
left in the city, she knew, relics of an age when the greatest maritime republic on earth had found it necessary to spy on its own citizens. Bending down, she put her ear to its mouth. From within the beast's dark throat came a faint whisper; a resonance like the inside of a cavern, or the roar of far-off oceans inside a conch's shell.

“What do you want?”

She jumped. Standing at the now-open door was a man of about forty. He was casually dressed in T-shirt and chinos, despite the chill of the north-east wind that was whistling up the narrow
rio
. His eyes were bright and piercing, and his hair reached well down his neck, hiding his ears. But it was his nose, inevitably, that caught the attention. Where the nostrils should have been there was a smooth stump of scar tissue, a swirl of flesh like a second belly button.

“Capitano Kat Tapo, Carabinieri.” She reached for her wallet, but he cut her short.

“There's no need to show me ID, Captain. It makes no difference to me whether you're who you say you are or not.”

“I sent you several emails—” she began.

“I know.”

“But you didn't reply.”

“I decided I didn't want to see you.”

“Even so, I need half an hour of your time,” she said firmly. She recalled reading in his Wikipedia profile that he had some kind of Social Avoidance Disorder, and decided to go in hard. “We can do it the official way if you'd prefer, with a warrant and a trip down to the Carabinieri headquarters. But it will take a lot longer, and you may have to wait in the holding cells for a while. We get quite a backlog at this time of day.”

A flicker of distaste crossed Daniele Barbo's sensitive features. “Very well,” he said abruptly. “Half an hour. No more. I'm busy.”

His voice, she noted, was curiously accented – not quite American, but devoid of the usual sing-song inflections of Venetian. Perhaps that was something to do with being partially deaf. “Thank you,” she said, softening her insistence with a smile. Barbo only grunted.

The hall he led her into was dark and bare. This didn't surprise her – the ground floors of these palaces were built for trade and storage; the grand reception rooms would be on the
piano nobile
above. There was a noticeable taint of damp in the air. “May I see the inside of the
bocca
?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I'm curious, that's all. One doesn't often get the chance.”

He seemed about to say no, then shrugged. “It's your half hour. So long as you're gone at the end of it, you can spend it how you like.” He led her to a door at the end of the hallway. “Down there,” he said, gesturing.

I'm not flirting
, she told herself.
Just building a rapport with a difficult interviewee
.

She stepped down into a long, low room lined with leather volumes. A counter ran along the length of one wall. The only light came from grilles set into the walls, a little above the counter but at foot height for those walking on the
fondamenta
. Everything glistened with damp.

She knew roughly how it worked. Citizens would post their notes – anonymous denunciations of fellow Venetians, morsels of information, gossip, whatever – into the lion's mouth outside, from where they would fall down a chute to this room below. Down here, a dozen spy-masters would have worked night and day by the light of candles, analysing and collating them, building up a secret file on every citizen.

“And thus did the ten great families of Venice maintain the so-called serenity of their so-called Republic,” Daniele Barbo's voice said laconically behind her. He reached past her to one of the pigeonholes and tugged: the wood came away in his hand, rotten. “Now it won't last another decade, let alone another three hundred years.”

“The damp's from the
acqua alta
, I take it?”

“Not exactly.” Again he hesitated, then said abruptly, “Come, if you're so interested. I'll show you.” He went to another door and pulled it open. The oak shuddered and protested on the stone floor where it had warped.

Cold, dank air hit her – cellar air. Darkness, and the sloshing of a sea-cave. He flicked a switch and stood back from the door. Stone steps led down to another, even bigger room. Sturdy columns reached up to the roof – supporting all that marble above, she supposed. But where the floor should have been there was nothing but brown water, rippling uneasily, as if the whole room were a tray being tilted in some giant's hands.

“Twice a day this is under water. Although it generally dries up in summer.” He pointed to the wall, where, as if to record the height of a growing child, dates had been scrawled in charcoal. High-water marks. “These go back to 1776. Some of the oldest have already been washed away. When Ruskin wrote that Venice was melting into the sea like a cube of sugar in a teacup, it was Ca' Barbo he was talking about – his name's in the visitors' book.”

She could just reach the nearest shelf without stepping down into the water. Pulling out a brown folder, she saw that the pages were covered in handwriting, the ink now fuzzy with damp and mould. “Shouldn't these be moved?”

Daniele Barbo shrugged. “Who's interested in them now? They're just old secrets. Shall we go upstairs? You're wasting your thirty minutes.”

He led her up the main stairs. The transformation couldn't have been greater – here, the floors and walls were delicately marbled, lit by Gothic arched windows as intricately carved as barley-sugar twists. But she couldn't forget that it was all perched precariously on top of that sloshing seawater, those rotting, stagnant offices for spies. But that was Venice for you: beauty built on filth; brackish water overlaid with gorgeous perfume; cut-throat commerce jostling for space with the greatest glories of Italian civilisation.

“What an amazing place,” she said conversationally. “You must feel very privileged to live here.” He didn't bother to reply.

He led her along the
portego
, the main upstairs hallway, into a salon. The carved cabinets and elaborate glassworks one might expect in such a room were conspicuous by their absence. Instead, it had the feel of a college seminar room. The furniture was cheap and functional, and there was a large whiteboard covered in what looked like mathematical equations.

“So,” he said, taking a seat. “What did you want to ask?”

“I need to access some conversations that I believe took place on your website.” Sitting down opposite him, she pulled out the list from the hotel. “The person who logged on at these times was killed soon afterwards. We want to know who she was contacting on Carnivia, and why.”

He barely glanced at it. “This is one of the women the newspaper claims were Satanists?”

“We believe the media speculation is unhelpful.”

His eyebrows flickered, as if she had finally said something he hadn't expected.

“If you were able to assist us in our inquiry,” she added, “we could provide a character reference. It might influence the sentencing in your trial.”

His upper lip curled. “I doubt that.”

“I could write to the judge—”

But he had already interrupted her. “I'm afraid you've had a wasted journey, Captain. I can no more access a conversation that took place in Carnivia than you can. Everything that's said there is encrypted.”

“But you could tell how often she was going online, and for how long,” Kat persisted. “You could tell whether she was communicating with one individual or many. And then there's all the data you scrape from your users' computers – that's the correct term, isn't it, ‘scrape'? Email addresses, geographical locations, shopping habits, who her friends were . . . that information could be incredibly useful to us.”

“Even if I could give you that information, if I did so without a warrant valid in her home jurisdiction I'd be in violation of international privacy laws. You'd be better off trying the hard drive of her own computer.”

“We did. It was found in the canal, where it had been lying in salt water. There was nothing on it we could retrieve.”

“Hmm,” Barbo said non-committally.

“In addition,” she continued after a moment, “I've discovered that women priests – that is, Catholic women who say they've taken Holy Orders – are using Carnivia to hold Masses. Do you know anything about that?”

He shrugged. “What people do in Carnivia is up to them.”

“But you don't seem surprised.”

“Not everyone who needs privacy is a criminal, despite what the government would have us believe.”

I'm getting nowhere
. She leant forward a little, pulling her shoulders back while simultaneously opening her eyes a little wider. The effect she was after was eager awestruck disciple rather than raging nymphomaniac, but it was possibly a finer distinction than she would have liked.

“Daniele,” she said, “your help would really mean a lot. To me personally, I mean.”

He looked at her stonily. “Do you really think
that
will make a difference?” he said witheringly.

It wasn't just her words, she knew, that he was referring to. She felt a little ridiculous. Not for the first time in her life, a sense that she was at fault turned into a sudden flash of temper.

“Oh, fuck this,” she said. “Why am I even trying to be nice to you? You're a sad geek who's going to prison. Where, by the way, I hope you rot. I'll solve this case without you.”

He blinked. “Are you done?”

“It appears so.” She stood up. “Thank you for your time.”

“I didn't say I wouldn't help you,” he said calmly. “Only that it couldn't be done in the way you suggested. It so happens that our interests coincide, Captain. I'll get you the data. But not from Carnivia. I'll retrieve it from the laptop.”