It was a rude awakening – six thirty a.m., when I still had another half hour on the alarm and felt frankly as if I had been put through the spin cycle of a super-size washing machine – but my phone was still ringing and it was Rose.

  ‘What are those uniforms,’ she used the trade jargon, I noted, ‘doing outside? I asked and they said the Ispettore told them.’

  ‘Well, there you have it.’

  ‘Is that why you were creeping around last night? Were you checking the flat?’

  ‘How are you, anyway? How’s Anna?’

  ‘Grumpy. She’s still faffing about and told me to wait in the lobby. And that’s another thing! There’s Polizia here, too! They say they’re to give her an escort …’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not necessary.’

  ‘What’s going on, Dad? Did you get her into trouble?’

  ‘On the contrary. She sort of got me out of it. I was walking her back to the hotel and someone tried to mug us.’

  ‘Mug you? Oh my God! Was she all right?’

  ‘Yeah, fine. Your boss is armed and dangerous. Fought them off with a stun gun.’

  ‘Oh my God. And that’s why you had that bruise on your jaw. Are you all right, then?’

  ‘Fine.’ The dog climbed onto the bed and looked at me expectantly. ‘You didn’t walk Rufus, I suppose.’

  ‘I didn’t have the time, I thought you—’

  ‘Fine.’ I ended the call, swung my legs off the bed. Rufus jumped down and scampered to the doorway, lingering winningly. ‘And where were you when I was creeping around last night?’ I said, although actually I knew – sleeping with Rose. ‘If it carries on like this, I’ll trade you in for a bloody pitbull.’

  ‘There’s really no need, you know,’ I said to the Carabinieri as they set off with me on foot up Via Paglietta.

  ‘Orders, signore.’

  ‘Orders, okay. But if you could just hang back a bit, make me feel a little less like I’m on a Mafia hit list.’

  They looked at each other. ‘But you are sort of on a hit list, aren’t you, signore?’

  I gave Rufus a tug as he loitered at a trashcan. ‘I suppose so,’ I said, instinctively looking around. ‘But let’s hope not for long.’

  ‘Let’s hope so, signore.’

  I waited at the traffic lights to the Viale, cars hurtling either way, with a cop maintaining a polite metre distance on either side.

  The guy at the news-stand shot me a questioning look, I mouthed – ‘It’s nothing’. The cars pulled up at the red lights and I could feel the eyes of their occupants follow me and my straining Lagotto Romagnolo as we were escorted across.

  It wasn’t until we reached the park of San Michele that the officers gave me a little more space, taking a bench either side while I let Rufus off the leash to have a roam.

  The events of the previous night had raised the stakes to a whole new level. I’d come within a heartbeat of being rubbed out and the thought of it brought me out in the proverbial cold sweat. To be honest, I’d been so focused getting to the bottom of the mystery, I’d overlooked the unpleasant side effect – death – that seemed to afflict anyone involved, and there was no reason why I should be the exception to this rule, except, of course, that everyone is an exception to themself.

  The cops’ phones buzzed simultaneously. They looked at each other and then at me. They got to their feet.

  ‘Signore, we had better go back to the house.’

  ‘Why? What’s the problem?’

  ‘It seems the action, it wasn’t successful.’

  ‘Wasn’t successful?’ I called Rufus. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘This soldier they wanted to pick up. He got away.’

  Chapter 30

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  The Ispettore had sent a squad car to pick me up after I had threatened to make my own way over to the military hospital – he would have rather I kicked my heels at La Residenza, but I preferred to present a moving target.

  ‘Clearly,’ said Alessandro, stepping back from the bar lined with office workers snatching a pre-work caff è. ‘Our bird had flown.’

  ‘This morning,’ I said. He nodded. ‘I thought you were going to pick him up last night.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘In the event, we weren’t able to put the resources in place until the morning shift.’

  ‘Heaven help us if there was a real emergency. Who is he, anyway, this sergeant?’

  ‘Folgore. Well, ex …’

  ‘That means nothing to me, Ispettore.’

  ‘Folgore is an elite parachute regiment, a little like your SAS. But he transferred out to avoid early retirement, probably enhance his pension.’

  ‘From the Italian SAS to recruitment fairs, quite a comedown.’

  ‘He has two ex-wives and seven children, mostly school age. A lot of responsibility, a lot of bills.’

  ‘And his name?’

  ‘Davide Greco.’

  ‘“Greek David”. Well, at least now I know the name of the man who wants to kill me.’ Alessandro laid a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t worry, Daniel. I won’t let that happen.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’ll have much say, Ispettore.’

  The military hospital was one of those buildings that would have probably been the centrepiece of any city outside Italy, but here the former monastery that had been converted into a hospital after the Napoleonic era was just another vast, impractical, rose-pink, porticoed edifice fronted by a cobbled space large enough to parade troops, accessible through a modest arch built to accommodate a horse-drawn carriage which one might pass without a second glance as one hurried along the obscure Via dell’Abbadia.

  We crossed the parade ground accompanied by two uniforms.

  ‘The name of the man they admitted?’ I asked Alessandro.

  ‘Bruno Mano. A corporal, retired.’

  ‘That old?’

  ‘Fifty.’

  ‘But – retired,’ I said. ‘Then why the military hospital?’

  ‘Still an auxiliary, apparently, but in truth, someone probably pulled some strings.’

  ‘Why the frown, Ispettore?’

  ‘He was one of us – a Carabinieri, with the Tuscania regiment.’

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘Parachutists.’

  We entered a lobby far removed from most public hospitals. For a start it was absent of crying kids and ailing old people, shops and vending machines, the general bustle that greeted you on arrival at Maggiore or Sant’ Orsola.

  On either side of the grandiose, columned entrance were huge oil paintings depicting nineteenth-century battle scenes, while alongside them chiselled stone plaques commemorated the fallen of campaigns from ‘Ethiopia, 1895’ to ‘Russia, 1943’, who had presumably made it back to this Bologna hospital, but no further.

  The usual duo of the Italian tricolour and EU flag stood behind a massive oak desk where a pair of nurses wearing flat black headpieces with a black veil down the back of their necks like vampiric Emirates air crew, along with starched white uniforms featuring a blood red cross on their chest, were incongruously, given their antique getup, engrossed by whatever was on their computer screens.

  They looked up at us only when the Ispettore clapped his hands. Startled, they shot to their feet.

  ‘Mano. Bruno. Corporal,’ he said, holding up his ID. The nurses bent to check their computers.

  ‘Third floor,’ said the first.

  ‘Mario Berti Wing,’ said the second. ‘It’s on the right as you get out of the lifts.’

  ‘Room seventy-three,’ said the first. They snapped back to attention.

  ‘As you were,’ said the Ispettore.

  The four of us entered the lift. ‘I posted a guard here last night,’ he explained. ‘Apparently, the corporal suffered a pierced lung and severe internal bleeding.’ He nodded at me. ‘Whoever stabbed him might very well have killed him.’

  ‘Lucky,’ I said.

  ‘For whom?’ said the Ispettore. ‘In any case, he appears to be making a good recovery and is assessed well enough to speak.’

  The lift doors opened to a Carabinieri sergeant, who stepped back and saluted.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Alessandro.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ispettore?’ Alessandro stopped the lift door from closing and stepped out.

  ‘Why are you here and not at your post?’

  ‘Because you relieved me.’

  ‘I relieved you?’

  ‘Yes, Ispettore. You called to say I would be relieved. A Carabiniere has just arrived to take over.’

  ‘This Carabiniere,’ said Alessandro, reaching into his jacket and producing his pistol, ‘was he from the Tuscania?’

  ‘Now you mention it, he may have been.’

  ‘The room – where is it?’

  We took off after the sergeant along the corridor. Alessandro stopped, framed by the entrance of the room, and swore.

  Mano had gone.

  The Ispettore and uniformed Carabinieri bolted off along the corridor.

  I found myself alone at the doorway.

  In contrast to the antique grandeur of the corridor, the empty room was as modern as in any other hospital.

  The click and whirl of the machines beside the bed with the transparent plastic tubes that may have been connected to Bruno Mano. A toppled drip, a crimson-brown drainage sack plopped on top of the sleep-creased sheets like a puddle of poo.

  I crouched to peer beneath the bed.

  Nothing. I stood up and moved around to the other side, surveying the medical wreckage Mano had left in his wake. He might have been able to talk, but I doubted he was in any shape to move fast or far.

  A gentle breath on the back of my neck.

  I swung around.

  Nothing – just the window.

  Wait: a stuttering, shimmering line of liquid crossing the pale green linoleum toward blinds rattling in the breeze.

  Yes, the window had been opened. I walked over and parted the blinds.

  Tore them aside. They came crashing down.

  Behind me, the sound of rushed footsteps, but it didn’t matter – I was leaning out of the window, looking down at the corpse of Bruno Mano in his hospital gown, his bare back and arse exposed as it lay on the cobbles.

  Chapter 31

  ‘Ruthless,’ I said, looking back up at the open window, nurses, auxiliaries, doctors and patients, now gathered at the other windows or in the courtyard beneath the portico while the Carabinieri taped off the crime scene. ‘If what your guy is saying is accurate, he only stopped off for a piss before heading to the lift. In which time Greco was able to reach the room, grab Mano, launch him out of the window, and make good his getaway. And bearing in mind that Mano was a trained para himself …’

  ‘He may have been taken by surprise,’ said the Ispettore as if to defend the branch’s honour. ‘Possibly even sleeping.’

  ‘I doubt it by the time Greco was tipping him out of the window, though. In the end, they would have been better off leaving Mano to “fester and die”, as you suggested.’

  The Ispettore shrugged. ‘It’s a sign we’re winning.’

  ‘Is it? It doesn’t feel like it.’

  ‘They’re panicking: they can’t afford the luxury of keeping people alive.’

  ‘Whoever “they” are. Who are “they” Ispettore?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’ He took in the scene as if concerned we were being watched. I was wondering the same thing.

  ‘Well, they certainly know you – well enough to imitate your voice.’

  ‘Perhaps it was just this Greco. Perhaps he’s a good mimic.’

  ‘And a popular guy, apparently, whose friends like to keep him informed. Did you ever trace that Carabiniere who put the frighteners on Patrizia Bussoni, by the way?’

  ‘I …’ He shook his head. ‘No.’

  I crouched beside the corpse. ‘Have you got a pen?’

  ‘Don’t touch the corpse, Daniel.’

  ‘A pen?’

  ‘Here.’ He gave me a pair of latex gloves.

  Mano was lying on his front as if he would have had plenty of time to contemplate the ground rushing up to meet him, and his hands were splayed aside at odd angles. This meant that despite his face being flat on the cobbles, his palms were tilting upwards, and on one wrist I had seen something familiar: two small black spades.

  ‘He’s been to war, this one,’ I said. ‘Or are these Mafia kills? I know you use the special forces for that kind of thing down south.’

  ‘Afghanistan,’ said the Ispettore.

  ‘And Greco?’ He nodded.

  ‘When were you going to share this nugget?’

  ‘Things have been moving quickly. I assumed it would come up in our interrogation.’

  We watched a navy-blue Carabinieri forensics van emerge through the arch.

  ‘We should get you back home,’ said the Ispettore. ‘I am stepping up your security.’

  ‘Just tell them to be wary about taking any calls from you.’

  Alessandro looked grim. ‘This is a serious business,’ he said. ‘Certainly not just cops and robbers. We must all be on our guard.’

  He asked the Carabinieri who had been stationed outside to deliver me back to the Faidate Residence. Before I got in the car, I remembered something.

  ‘That captain I met at the Lido.’

  ‘Oh?’ The Ispettore stood there, three uniforms hovering around him. I shook my head.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He just asked I pass on his regards.’ My phone buzzed: a message from Jacopo, the frame of a video featuring Paolo Mestre and Elettra Fausto together in the van.

  Just in, it said.

  Everyone meet at the Residence, I wrote.

  No problem, he replied. I haven’t got up yet.

  ‘Well,’ I said, leaning down from our balcony where the Comandante was having a cigarette and my hands were cupping a mug of tea, ‘the Ispettore wasn’t kidding when he said he’d up security.’ Apart from the squad car that was to be stationed on the corner of the street, a pair of Carabinieri had also set themselves up at a folding table inside the gates beside Alba’s house, where one was currently cradling the unchristened Daniela, while the other was being talked through Claudio’s plans for converting the studios on the ground floor into additional living space for his expanding family, which seemed a little premature seeing as he hadn’t yet discussed these plans with the people who actually owned the space. In the meantime, the cops would use one of the former Faidate workshops to shelter if it rained, and during the night. Ominously, they had already unpacked a portable stove and a pair of heaters. It seemed like they were preparing for a long stay.

  There was a buzz at the front gate and I was about to go into the kitchen to let them in, but the Comandante said: ‘They’ve disconnected it. People can only enter via them.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘We’re like prisoners.’

  ‘I think you exaggerate,’ said the Comandante. ‘It could be considerably worse.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Don’t even go there.’ I knew what he meant: joining the hundreds of Italians in protective custody – usually from organised crime – moved between Carabinieri barracks every few days in a sort of living purgatory.

  The Carabiniere had returned the baby to Alba, and the other left Claudio, unharnessing the machine gun slung over his shoulder, while the first went to the pole set a couple of metres back from the gate where you could open it manually. It all seemed a bit over-the-top – our visitor would have already received the once over from the occupants of the gazzella parked outside, but uniforms liked to do things by the book, especially if they were on parade.

  Dolores wheeled in her bike dressed all in black, with her orange bob looking more Berlin than Bologna. She rested the bicycle against the pole, raising her arms and scowling at the Carabiniere as he tentatively zipped a handheld metal detector up and down. Heaven help him if he had actually attempted to frisk her.

  The ‘core’ team of myself, the Comandante, Jacopo and Dolores now assembled, we sat at the kitchen table and took another look at the video on Jac’s laptop.

  It was night – 21:22, said the time stamp – parked at Villa Ghigi, Bologna’s vast countryside park according to the corresponding map, which would make sense if Mestre had picked up Elettra Fausto near her grandfather’s villa in the hills. But it could have been anywhere: only they were visible, bleached by the cabin’s light, mirrored in the van’s dark glass.

  There had been no touching, signs of affection. But there had remained something seedy as they drove: Elettra Fausto with her straight black hair, dark, darting eyes, skinny arms wrapped defensively around herself in a too-big white denim jacket, sitting beside this hulk of a man in his tight khaki T-shirt, muscles bulging with every turn of the steering wheel. Part of me had almost hoped that when they came to a halt the tension would break with a passionate embrace, the only creepy thing the four of us watching from home. But no, it was clear that whatever occurred between them would have an uncomfortably transactional character.

  Paolo took a final turn – the thunk and rumble as he came off the road and pulled into the dirt parking area.

  Elettra released her seatbelt, wound down the window, shifted to the corner of the cabin to face him, while he visibly tried to compose his features. As Mestre unknowingly looked into the camera, it was still possible to detect a trace of ‘Harry Potter’ in the mix of fear, hope, and inadequacy that shaded his face before a smile elevated its corners and the would-be tough guy asserted himself. But I wasn’t sure it would convince Elettra – she was a professional actor after all, and knew all about masks.

  He reached down and produced a rectangular presentation case. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Open it.’

  We saw the black back of the case as she lifted it. ‘It’s a knife,’ she said.

  ‘Not just any knife, it came in this week: a Röhm SS Honour Dagger. Fully authenticated, you don’t see them often.’

  ‘That’s … very nice.’ She closed the lid, made to hand it back to him.

  ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘I remembered,’ he said, ‘when we were kids … you were always interested when you came around, used to ask me to take you to the back of the shop where we stored the memorabilia. We used to spend hours back there, just going through it all. You loved the daggers with their death’s heads, insisted they were skulls and cross bones, “pirates’ swords” you called them, and were convinced there would be a treasure map hidden somewhere, too. Anyway, I thought, well, I thought, I mean – it’s worth twelve thousand …’

 

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