The Abduction: A Novel (12 page)

TWENTY-THREE

AFTER THE DOUSING
she’d been left to stand there, naked and wet. Soon she’d started to shake uncontrollably, both from the cold and the pain in her stretched arms.

It was as if they’d been waiting for her to do exactly that. At a word from Harlequin, Bauta lifted the camera and filmed her for a minute or so, before Harlequin gave another command.

“
Quanto basta.
”

Was it her imagination, or did Bauta seem almost reluctant to obey? Whatever the reason, Harlequin had to repeat the instruction a second time before Bauta stopped.

A sound came from the laptop – a familiar four-note bubbling refrain: the Skype call tone. It was so reminiscent of all the times her father called home from foreign deployments that for a moment she thought,
It’s dad
. Hope leapt in her chest. Even if it wasn’t her father, it could be someone trying to negotiate. Her nightmare, surely, couldn’t last much longer.

“
E’ lui
,” Harlequin said. Picking up the laptop, he left the room.

E’ lui.
That meant “It’s him”. So it was a call the kidnappers had been expecting, not an offer of negotiation.

As they waited for Harlequin to return, she could hear Bauta’s breath rasping in his nose. For some reason, it made her uneasy. She suddenly felt acutely aware of her own nakedness.

Bauta moved, coming closer to her, and she tensed. He walked all around her, but without the camera this time, close enough to touch. Her skin crawled as he went behind her, out of her line of sight.

When he appeared in front of her again, his face was so close that she could see his eyes through the mask. Deliberately, his gaze dropped to her breasts. Then he reached for his crotch, closed his hand around it through his trousers, and shook it at her.

She’d seen that gesture before – here in Italy leering old men, particularly in the countryside, used it almost like a wolf whistle. But she’d never experienced it when she’d been helpless like this. She gasped, pulling as far away as the rope would allow.

Chuckling at her reaction, he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. It was calloused and leathery, the hand of a working man. “
Carinissima
,” he breathed. Cute.

She kicked him away. But without shoes on it was hard to inflict much damage, and he only laughed again. The second time she tried to kick him, he simply caught her by the ankle and pulled, forcing her to hop towards him on one leg.

“
Bella sgualdrina
,” he breathed, sliding his hand up her calf.

The door opened. Taking in the situation at a glance, Harlequin spoke sharply, in a stream of Italian too fast for her to follow.

Bauta shrugged sulkily and mumbled a reply. But he let go and took a step back, away from her.

Harlequin came and untied her wrists. “We do not do that,” he said, anger thickening his accent. “Only what is necessary.”

Going to a bag in the corner of the room, he took out some overalls and placed them on the table. “From now on you wear these.” He hesitated. “Unless I order it. But not him. You understand? And if he does that again, you tell me.”

She picked the overalls up. As the full length of them unrolled she realised something she hadn’t before. They were bright orange, made of heavy cotton, like those worn by the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

TWENTY-FOUR

IN THE AFTERMATH
of the second film, the atmosphere in the operations room was feverish. Almost immediately, Saito was summoned to a high-level meeting – to be given a bollocking, Kat suspected. In his absence, the colonels allocated tasks as best they could.

“Captain Tapo. Have you been assigned yet?”

She turned. It was Colonel Lettiere from Internal Affairs. She’d known they were putting every available man on this investigation, so she wasn’t surprised to see him. But it was an effort not to let her dislike of him show.

“Not yet, sir. Why?”

“I need someone to compile a list of all the people who were in Club Libero that night. They will have to be contacted individually, in case they saw anything. Of course, being swingers, some of them may be wary of talking to the Carabinieri, so we should send someone they can relate to… I should imagine that’s a task you could accomplish, isn’t it?”

Behind him, someone sniggered.

“Of course, sir,” she said blandly. “But Club Libero was at full capacity that night. Tracking down all of them could take one person weeks.”

Lettiere’s expression didn’t waver. “Then it should keep you out of mischief for some considerable time, shouldn’t it, Captain?”

She drove back to Club Libero in a foul mood – not at Lettiere’s needling, which was no worse than anything else she’d been on the receiving end of recently, but at his instruction. She already knew that Club Libero made its guests sign in, so unless they’d used false names she should be able to trace them easily enough. But to tackle such a huge task on her own meant she’d effectively been once again sidelined from the main investigation. And it wasn’t even likely to generate any leads: Lettiere knew full well that on the night of the kidnap all the patrons had been masked, so the chances of getting anything useful from the clubbers was negligible.

She saw blue lights in her rear-view mirror and pulled over to let a fire engine past. It was rapidly followed by two more. Only as she neared her destination did she see that they’d been heading for the same place she was. Black smoke was billowing from a jagged hole in Club Libero’s glass door. Another fire engine was pouring foam from its hoses through the exit doors that gave onto the car park.

Edoardo and Jacquie stood to one side, watching, their faces ashen. Kat went over to them. “What happened?”

Edoardo gestured. “A firebomb, they think. We got the call an hour ago.”

“Has anything like this ever happened before?”

He shook his head. “Never.”

“Have you ever had any trouble with organised crime? Anyone asking for protection money that you haven’t paid out on?”

If that was what had happened here, she knew they’d be unlikely to tell the Carabinieri. But Edoardo shook his head emphatically. “We’ve never had any trouble. Giù makes sure of that.”

She found Giù at the local Carabinieri station. “I suppose you’ve heard?”

He shrugged belligerently. “It’s not my fault. Someone decides the
scambisti
were spoiling the neighbourhood, there’s not a lot I can do about it.”

“Maybe. But that fire was started right by the front desk. I’m thinking that perhaps they wanted to be sure of getting the signing-in book. And the computer with the CCTV images on.”

“It’s possible,” he said grudgingly.

“The computer you said you were going to take away to fix,” she reminded him. “Where is it now?”

“In my locker,” he mumbled.

“Let’s take a look, shall we?”

As he set the computer up, she said, “Let me give you a hypothesis, Giù. This laptop’s working fine, and always was. You just didn’t want me to see the tapes.”

“I mended it,” he protested.

“Pull the other one. You’ve got a nice little sideline here, and you didn’t fancy having the club’s guests bothered by a Carabinieri investigation.”

“So?” he said aggressively. “Important people come to the club. Why drag them into it unless we have to?”

“Like who?”

He shrugged. “Vivaldo Moretti was in that night.”

She laughed out loud. “The politician? He must be nearly seventy.”

“He’s an old rogue, for sure. But a good tipper. Turns up with two or three girls on his arm and asks for a table on the far side of the dance floor, one where you can see everything without being seen too much.”

“When you say ‘girls’, I take it you mean hookers?”

Giù shrugged. “Hookers, weather girls,
veline
… it’s a fine line these days, isn’t it? Anyway, when I thought we were just talking about a missing schoolgirl, there didn’t seem any point in bringing his name into it. Last night, when I heard about the kidnap, I realised I was going to have to tell you.”

Or realised there was no point in tapping Moretti for a bung to keep his name quiet, she reflected cynically.

The club’s CCTV camera was positioned just over the reception desk, so the images on Giù’s screen showed the patrons coming off the street. But, just as she’d expected, most had put their masks on before entering the club, making identification impossible.

“There,” Giù said, freezing the tape. “That’s the one I was talking about. Dreadlock Guy.”

Kat peered at the screen. The image was relatively high quality, but the wig, along with the mask, obscured the man’s features completely.

“Who’s he with?” she wondered aloud. The woman behind him was also wearing a mask – a Volto, a full-face mask of white plaster decorated with elaborate Venetian gilding, together with an oversized tricorne hat that hid her own hair from the camera. Whoever these people were, Kat thought, either they were consistently lucky, or their planning was remarkable.

Giù let the tape roll. Sure enough, the camera had taken one more image of the couple as they left the reception desk. Dreadlock Guy was almost out of shot, but the woman had been caught in profile.

“What’s that?” She pointed.

There was a tattoo on the woman’s arm, partly revealed by her sleeve as it rode up. Kat made out the bottom part of a skull with two wings emerging from either side, and under that, some writing – it looked like three words, a motto of some sort. “Can we print this?”

“Sure.” Giù pressed a button.

Mia and her date were on the tape a little later. It was hardly surprising that the club had accepted her ID at face value, Kat thought. While most of the clubbers were in their thirties – she recalled from her own brief experience on the scene that it mainly consisted of married couples battling domestic boredom – there were plenty of younger patrons too. With her feathered mask on, Mia didn’t stand out in the least.

Again Kat thought how well planned it all was. Dreadlock Guy and Tattoo Woman were already inside when Mia arrived. Which meant there would probably have been another team on the outside, tracking them in.

“Who’s that?” she asked, noticing a young man on the tape who wasn’t wearing a mask.

“Him? That’s Roberto, the podium dancer.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“Sure – he lives just behind the hospital. I could drive you there in ten minutes.”

“Thanks, I’ll talk to him. Maybe he saw something no one else did.”

Roberto was extremely pretty. He was also somewhat stupid, his inanely cheerful smile oddly robbing his face of the attractiveness a sulkier expression would have lent it.

He was only doing the dancing, he explained, to support himself through his personal-trainer exams. But it was a good job – after all, if he wasn’t being paid he’d still be out dancing anyway. “This way I get into clubs for free!” he exclaimed. “And most of them charge forty euros for admission!”

“Is Club Libero the sort of place you normally go?” Kat asked.

Roberto shook his head. “I’ve got a steady girlfriend. But if you don’t go into the back rooms, it’s not much different from anywhere else. In fact, in some ways it’s better. At Libero, no one has to try too hard to get laid, so people aren’t bothered if you tell them you’re not interested.”

“Did you see this girl on Saturday night?” Kat asked, showing a picture of Mia. “She may have been wearing this.” She added a picture of a feathered Columbina mask she’d printed out from the internet.

He studied them, frowning. “Maybe… Yes, while I was doing my first shift. I remember because she was kind of flirting with me, you know? Copying my moves.”

It was interesting, Kat thought, that Mia had flirted with the only unavailable young man in the whole club. It seemed to confirm Holly’s theory that she’d only gone there as a kind of dare. “Then what?”

“I saw her with a guy with blond dreadlocks. They went outside, through the fire door.”

“Could it have been a drug deal?”

Roberto shook his head. “The usual dealers weren’t around on Saturday.”

Kat’s ears pricked up. “What do you mean?”

“There are a couple of dealers who are always there – they don’t give any trouble, but they make sure everyone’s got what they need, you know? On Saturday, I couldn’t—” He stopped short.

“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “I don’t care if you’re in the habit of getting yourself a little pick-me-up from time to time. But I need to know if you’re sure – the usual guys had vanished?”

He nodded.

“Thanks, Roberto,” she said. “You’ve been very useful.”

Back in the car, she turned to Giù. “You didn’t tell me you have an arrangement with the local Mafia as well.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he blustered, starting the engine.

“Yes, you do. I thought it was crap, when you said dealers know better than to come to the club when you’re there. Which suggests to me that it’s you who lets them in. That’s why you search people so thoroughly, isn’t it? Not to keep drugs out, like Edoardo thinks. It’s to make sure no one else brings anything in, so your friends can maintain their monopoly.”

“A man’s got to live,” Giù said truculently. “I’ve got less than two years to go, and my Carabinieri pension won’t feed my family.”

“Correction,” Kat said. “You’ve got less than two days to go. Just as long as it takes you to write out a letter of resignation, in fact. A moonlighting
carabiniere
’s one thing. Moonlighting for the Mafia’s something else.”

“Everyone does it,” Giù said with a snarl. “You will too, one day.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Want some advice?” he said, pulling abruptly into the traffic.

“Not really.”

“Don’t chase this one too hard. You don’t know where it’ll lead you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the local
spacciatori
don’t turn up to Libero’s biggest night of the year, it’s for a good reason. Someone put the word out – someone who gets listened to.” He gave Kat a sideways glance. “That means someone who knows how to shut up nosy bitches like you, as well.”