These Dark Things (26 page)
“I lost control. May God forgive me.”
“What happened then?”
“She screamed once. The blood poured out. A fountain of red. I like to believe she lost consciousness. I held her. ‘At the hour of our death,’ I whispered. She died in my arms.”
They sat for a long moment. Someone knocked on the mirror. Not Pino. He’d never do that. She ignored the signal.
“You carried her back inside,” she said.
“Yes. Yes, I knew about the tunnel to the crypt. A gardener had told me. I carried her down to the ossuarium and recited the last rites over her body.” He looked straight into Natalia’s eyes. “We were lovers, Teresa and I,” he said, almost proudly. “Benito hurt no one. I am the guilty one.”
Army units accompanied Bianca Strozzi’s trucks as they removed the trash from the city’s streets and plazas, from the sides of the highways leading out of town, and hauled the fetid refuse away. Far away. Hamburg, Sicily, China, wherever. Natalia never wanted to see another garbage bag in her life and volunteered this information to Pino as they cruised along the waterfront, backing up the soldiers following Strozzi’s rolling armada. The garbage piles were shrinking away, the tide of garbage was going out.
Natalia leaned against the headrest and closed her eyes. Yesterday the phone had rung off the hook following their arrest of Teresa Steiner’s murderer. The mayor had called, the prime minister’s office. There was talk of a commendation. She and Pino had retreated to her bed for the night, hiding out from the world. They feasted on cold pasta and a chocolate cake from Dapolito’s Bakery. They indulged themselves with food and love and slept peacefully, phone disconnected. The instant it was reconnected in the morning, it went off again and didn’t stop. So she was happy to have escaped from it to her duty hours and the day’s mindless chore of shadowing the Army guarding Strozzi’s drivers and equipment.
The morning’s paper lay discarded on the back seat, its front-page headline screaming
KILLER PRIEST CRACKS
UNDER INTERROGATION
. Somehow Luca had managed shots of them leaving the brothel, Father Pacelli in black suit and collar, Benito Gambini in cuffs, but by midmorning the monk had been dropped from the later editions that plastered the news kiosks along their patrol route.
Life was going on semi-normally. They passed a
trattoria
where waiters were setting up tables. Crisp white cloths, napkins and silverware. Natalia, hungry, imagined a freshly grilled
branzino
, her favorite fish, glistening with olive oil.
“What is going on over there?” Pino asked.
A truck was parked across the road, backing the traffic up. Horns blared. Drivers got out to see what was happening. Pinto too. Natalia pushed her door open and stepped out.
The truck’s cab door was open. No driver in sight. “There,” Pino said, pointing to the driver slumped against a light post across the street. They were walking toward him when the truck exploded, strewing garbage everywhere: paper, peels, cans, vegetables, coffee grinds, the bodies of rats foraging seconds earlier. Windows imploded and shattered in the building behind them. More blasts followed, echoing across the city.
“Where was the Army escort?” the colonel demanded.
“Stopped for a break,” Natalia answered.
“Break. I’d like to break.…” Donati tapped his desk blotter nervously. “Meanwhile, reports are coming in of addicts overdosing all over town, nodding off in public toilets and abandoned buildings and not waking up, passing out at their desks, at lunch, in the middle of treating patients. So far, there are nine of them. Each one dead.”
“Testers?”
“No. These weren’t coke whores and junkies test-driving the first shipments to see if they were properly cut and wouldn’t kill you. These are mostly middle-class consumers who cashed in. Francesca ran a quick analysis of their heroin. It’s been cut with the usual—benzocaine—but laced with strychnine. All the heroin is from Gambini distributors. All poisoned.”
Natalia pushed back her hair. “Payback for the truck bombings. We should get a warning out to addicts.”
“Dr. Francesca’s called a press conference for one o’clock. What I want you to do is get word out on the streets immediately. And I want Gambini to withdraw his … product.” Donati rapped the desktop. “Be fast.”
They needed to split up to speed things up. Pino went off to see the duty officer to have the news communicated to the carabinieri on patrol and spread the word through the battalion. Natalia set out to persuade Gambini to stop killing his customers.
It wasn’t far. The Via Chiaia ran northwest from downtown, parallel to the shoreline of the bay, fronted by a beautiful strip of parkland. In the distance, six kilometers east, brooded Vesuvius.
Huge plate-glass display windows of exclusive shops filled medieval arches made of Roman quarry stones. Versace, Cartier, Rubinacci. Gentlemen shopped at Marinella and Eddy Monetti’s while their ladies rested their expensive selves at posh sidewalk cafés and gossiped. Once upon a time, the Chiaia district had housed a ruling Spanish elite in baroque mansions overlooking the water. Its dilapidated villas and stately art-nouveau apartment houses were in a state of perpetual restoration. The lavish palazzos again sheltered the
dolce vita–nouveau riche
crowd once referred to by the press as jet-setters, the beautiful people, Eurotrash—esteemed subjects all, of the Kingdom of Naples. The idle rich had been joined by the professional classes: doctors, dentists, lawyers, and the Camorra chieftain Aldo Gambini, enjoying the fruits of
la mala vita
. In among the restored façades of their gentrified domiciles and offices were slummy residences of the poor. Their kids played in the streets, beneath endless lines of drying laundry strung across the narrow lanes and blind alleys, and skateboarded along the well-maintained streets. Bent old women trudged past the cafés, carrying groceries home, grimy youngsters in tow. A woman openly sold taxfree contraband cigarettes and lottery tickets at the corner, and two African peddlers offered knockoffs of designer handbags and watches. A young man sold gelato beneath a cheerful red-and-white-striped awning. It was a fashionable area reclaiming its past splendor, made all the more popular by its views of the water.
Aldo Gambini had recently relocated to Chiaia from the old Forcella neighborhood that had given rise to him and from which he seemed to be withdrawing, piece by piece. The modern four-story building was a far cry from the bare offices in the abandoned button factory behind the railroad station and the seedy social club next door. The new offices were on the top floor, with a view of the water. The male receptionist didn’t look like much of a typist. Neither did the male secretary who came out to take her to their boss.
The décor in the office suite was ultra-modern: gray and black drapes, furniture, and rugs, with one spot of contrasting color: a bright red-lacquered vase holding stalks of dried opium poppies. Gambini appeared in matching gray suit and black shirt, with a deep-red silk tie. Tan and fit, he directed her to a gray couch and sat down in the charcoal armchair alongside. He crossed his legs. His shoes, expensive, had been recently shined.
“I’ve come to warn you, Mr. Gambini. We have a new health crisis, and we need your help.” She explained about the dead junkies and the poisoned dope.
“Sabotaged, no doubt, but what has this to do with me?”
“Given your wide range of contacts and knowledge of the city, we were hoping you might reach out to whoever is in a position to have these recreational drugs removed from the market and have the entire supply tested.”
“I see. Of course, I will make every attempt.”
“There is also the matter of the attacks on the trucks hauling away the piled-up garbage.”
Gambini nodded nobly. “I heard about that, on the news.”
“Do you suppose there is any way to negotiate a cessation of the hostilities that brought this about?”
“I couldn’t say definitively. But offhand I’d say … no.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Is there more I can help you with?” he said.
“We’ve made an arrest in the Steiner murder case and released your nephew from custody.”
“I was pleased to learn of his vindication.”
“The matter is closed, but I keep wondering about some aspects concerning the victim.” Natalia took out an envelope of Luca’s telephoto snapshots of Gambini and Teresa Steiner enjoying themselves on the town. She passed them over to him.
“Why are you giving me these?”
“I didn’t think you’d want them seen by others and possibly made public at some point. Or misconstrued.”
“Misconstrued?”
“And I thought you might want them as mementos.”
“When did you figure it out?”
“That she was your daughter? You weren’t entirely forthcoming about how often you’d seen her in Naples, and it raised suspicions. We finally received the report from Berlin on your activities and movements there. Nothing in the German records linked you to her or her mother. But on nearly every trip to Germany, you visited Ulm, although you had no business interests there whatsoever. Ulm—where Teresa was raised and lived with her single parent. Ownership of the two German firms that paid for her care and education doesn’t trace back to you either, but both proved to conduct considerable business with your shell companies. Or am I a victim of my own imaginings?”
Gambini closed his eyes, massaged them with his fingers, then said, “No, you’re not wrong. I met her mother when she was seventeen. We were young. I was just married and unprepared to be so taken with her. And she with me. By the time I came to my senses, she was pregnant. I made arrangements, got her out of Naples, out of Italy. Married off to Herr Steiner to give the child a name. Then divorced. It was all through lawyers. Her mother and I—we didn’t meet again.”
“The visits to Ulm?”
“Anonymous. I only saw my daughter from afar. In the park. Coming out of school. Playing soccer. She played rough. Sliding into opponents, red hair flying.”
“Did she know all along that you were her father?”
“No one knew. She didn’t, until her mother confessed it on her deathbed. Soon afterward she showed up in Naples and approached me. I never had other children. With Teresa, I thought we might actually have a relationship. Instead of being appalled by my … work, she seemed excited by it. She wanted to know everything.” He looked out onto the vista of the bay. “It was wonderful to have a daughter. At first.”
“At first?”
“Before she got angry. Angry at my abandoning her, missing her childhood. Angry that I wouldn’t publicly acknowledge her even now. She’d love me one moment, erupt the next—shouting, carrying on. I was generous with her. It didn’t help. She tried things no one else would have dared. Skimmed the take from the shrines. Attempted sabotage of my business in Germany. Conspired and plotted with everyone she came in contact with. As if they wouldn’t inform me. It was unbearable. And personally painful in the extreme.”
Gambini took out a cigarette but didn’t light it.
“To the point that now I find myself thinking maybe Father Pacelli did me a favor. Killing her.” Gambini lit his cigarette. “She had to be killed, of course. But I couldn’t face doing it.”
“But Frankie and his young son—
that
you could face?”
Gambini inhaled deeply. “You looking to solve another murder? What’s your interest in Frankie’s death?”
“Safety—for his wife and her two children.”
“Your oldest friend, right? Go on.”
“I will keep the secret of your paternity if you guarantee they’ll stay safe from you.”
Gambini laughed. “Sure. You have my word,” he said, and laughed again.
Natalia took out the negatives to the pictures on the coffee table. “I’m missing the joke.”
“The joke is that I didn’t have Frankie dealt with. We weren’t on good terms at the moment, but not bad enough to.…”
“I’m … confused.”
“And their kid,” Gambini said, “he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. They didn’t see him. His head was below the window.”
“What are you saying?”
“Your oldest and dearest, Lola, came to me when things were shakiest between me and Frankie. She had a proposition. She’d ingratiate herself with Strozzi’s bunch and spy on them for me, if Frankie left the scene.”
“Why would she?”
“You know too much for your own good, Captain Monte.” The words came out with the smoke. “That’s unhealthy in this town.”
“Why are you telling me, then?”
“I didn’t want you thinking ill of me.” In one motion, Aldo Gambini rose. Elegant. His party’s next nominee to the Chamber of Deputies.
“Good-bye, Captain Monte.”