Cries of the Lost (28 page)

Rodrigo’s men.

They both reached inside the pockets of their long jackets.

I stood up and flipped the table over, umbrella and all. Laudomia yelled,
“Ma che stronzo che sei!”

I pulled Natsumi to the ground and told her to jump in the lake and swim against the quay. Screams ignited from the other guests. I heard a splash, then the coughing sound of suppressed semiautomatics. Bullets punched through the table. Laudomia was doing the fastest military low crawl you can achieve in a tight skirt. Other tables fell around us.

I rolled clear of the table and saw the men barely ten feet away. One held a gun aimed at our table, the other was drawing a bead on the crawling Laudomia. She looked up and screamed, covering her head. I stood up and yelled. He turned the barrel toward me and shot.

He missed. They both came toward me, taking slower aim with both hands, sighting down the barrel. The screams faded as the guests ran clear. Laudomia disappeared behind an overturned table.

Tires squealed out on the street. An unsuppressed gunshot came from the car as it lurched to a stop. The men whipped around and fired back. The first loud shot from the car was followed by a deafening fusillade that tore into the two men. They were literally blown off their feet. Blood spray filled the air and bullets rattled into the metal railing above the quay. Seconds later all movement had stopped, and the car, a powerful Alfa Romeo, roared away.

The screams only got louder.

I stepped over the dead men, their faces now mostly mashed-up flesh and blood, and called for Laudomia. She didn’t answer, but I knew where she was.

I looked around her overturned table and saw her curled up in a ball, her elbows and knees bloodied and speckled with dark gravel from the paved patio.

“It’s okay,” I said. “They’re dead.”

I knelt down and asked her if she’d been shot. She gave her head a sharp little shake. I saw that she was crying. I touched her shoulder and said, “You’re safe. They’re all gone.”

Then I left her and ran over to the quay. I leaned over the railing and saw Natsumi gripping the stone wall about twenty feet away, her soaked hair accentuating her beautiful round face. She smiled at me.

I shoved my way through the tables the fleeing guests had jammed against the railing, and dropped to my stomach, reaching down to grab her hand.

“I’m glad you can swim,” I said.

“If you count clinging to a wall swimming,” she said, as I hauled her up and through the bottom of the railing.

The singsong Italian sirens floated into the air, increasing in volume as they sped toward us.

“How’s Laudomia?” she asked.

“In shock. Elbows and knees chewed up. How’re you?”

“Wet.”

I grabbed a tablecloth off a wait stand and put it over her shoulders. Then, with my arm around her, moved quickly away from the scene, hugging the railing which allowed us to walk behind the café building and into a parking lot. The sound of the sirens, painfully loud, suddenly snapped off. I guided Natsumi across the street and into a narrow alley.

“Run,” I said to her.

We made fast time until reaching the end of the alley which opened up on a street that had been closed to car traffic and turned into a promenade. We walked briskly past a few shops and cafés until we came to another cut-through. Again we ran, this time two blocks, at the end of which we stopped so I could check the GPS.

The Ford Galaxy was still a few blocks away, but now we were too far west. We ran back a block and turned right onto a broad street, but luckily it was residential, with little pedestrian activity. We risked a fast walk, and in minutes were at the Ford. Soon after that we were heading south toward the city of Como.

Natsumi dug her bag out of the back of the car. I turned on the heater as she wiggled out of her wet clothes and used a T-shirt in a weak attempt to dry off. I concentrated on driving within Italian speed norms while keeping a constant eye on the rearview mirror.

“What the fuck was that?” she asked, once reasonably clothed.

“A gift of divine luck,” I said.

“Not everyone would look at it that way.”

“The first two shooters were Rodrigo’s boys. We were seconds from being killed.”

I explained the sequence of events, including the fortuitous arrival of the Alfa.

“They saved us,” she said.

“They did. But probably not on purpose.”

“So who were Rodrigo’s guys trying to shoot?” she asked.

“All of us, I think. I guess I shook the tree a little harder than I meant to.”

“What are we doing now?”

“Changing cars and disappearing into a hotel in Switzerland. I want to stay in the area, but things have to cool off. Including my impatience. It’ll get us killed.”

She didn’t argue with me, just patted my knee. Another way of saying, “you’re right, but I understand.” I felt a little nauseated and my hands had a slight tremor, as the adrenaline drained away and full awareness of what almost happened settled in.

The severity of the reminder was equal to the importance of the lesson. Anything short of extreme, paranoid vigilance was stupid and reckless. I hoped I’d never have to be reminded again.

C
HAPTER
17

W
hen I was about fifteen, I was transferred to a new high school, the consequence of a consolidation in the city where I grew up. It was a new school, still filled with the smell of fresh tile and sheetrock. The preceding schools, three of them, now closed, were local institutions, reflecting the demographics of their neighborhoods. Mine was heartily white middle class. Unadorned, rough-textured, but solid and tolerant of oddballs like me, if only because I wasn’t noticed.

One of the other high schools was in a place they liked to call, euphemistically, under-resourced. If you’ve ever lived in or near a city, big or small, you know what that meant. Fucking tough.

I was used to benign neglect, so I’d never been a target just for existing. For a chubby kid with little sense of physicality, who never played sports—more out of indifference than lack of fitness—moving schools was an unnerving experience.

The kid who had the locker next to me was marginally bigger, but more physically mature, in that he had a scruffy ill-shaved beard and glossy skin. He was also a low-grade sadist, who on the few occasions we stood there at the same time, would slap my locker shut, nearly slamming my fingers in the door. It was such a blatantly cruel and meaningless thing to do, I could barely comprehend it.

When I pointed that out to him, he’d just laugh and say things like, “Fuck you, freak bag.”

One day when I was unloading my books, he appeared from nowhere, shoved me into the edge of my locker door in a way that split my lip, then suggested sexual things regarding my mother.

I felt my lip, looked at the blood, then knocked him to the floor with a single wild, ferocious punch.

It cost me a week’s suspension. I spent the time deconstructing my father’s abandoned stereo components. Never was a penalty more gratefully received.

The kid never taunted me again. Though already absorbed by more important concerns, I took note.

W
E
SELECTED
the hotel in Castagnola—a village in Switzerland on the Italian border—based on the availability of a balcony overlooking Lake Lugano. I set up the computer gear, but after a quick glance at my various email accounts, we dedicated the bulk of our time sitting on the balcony composing ourselves. I even napped for two hours in the middle of the day, something I hadn’t done since recovering from the bullet wounds.

“There is such a thing as nervous exhaustion,” said Natsumi, after I woke up and expressed my surprise. “We’re not immune from excess adrenaline. It can actually deplete a person’s energy.”

I was never big on letting down, but she was making a good point. So, for both our sakes, I practiced calm restoration, albeit fitfully, for a whole day.

The next morning I called Laudomia.

“Signor Fortnoy, my God, where did you go?”

“There is no Signor Fortnoy. Or Signora Fortnoy,” I told her, though I stuck with the British accent.

“I told the carabinieri everything I know about you.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s all made up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The men who tried to kill us worked for Rodrigo Mariñelarena. You need to tell this to the police. They should investigate the villa in Cardano. It was undoubtedly being used for illegal purposes.”

“Who are you really?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you. I was the one they wanted to kill. You and my wife would have been taken out for good measure. It’s unlikely you’ll ever hear from Rodrigo again, but I’d get out of town for a couple weeks, just to be on the safe side. Take a vacation. You’ll be glad you did.”

“He was about to shoot me when you called attention to yourself,” she said. “You saved my life.”

“Or almost got you killed, depending on how you want to look at it. Though I would like a favor.”

“If I can.”

“I want everything you have on Rodrigo. Email, phone numbers, signature. And everything on the villa—contracts, deed of sale, and everything pertaining to the corporate owner. Name, address, and whatever official ID was required at the time of sale. I feel that when a client tries to kill you, it invalidates the rules of confidentiality.”

“You are chasing this man?” she said.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“How do I do this?”

“Scan the documents and make
PDFS
. But don’t use your office scanner. I’m sure there are places where you can pay a per-scan fee. Use cash. Then email me the
PDFS
. Again, don’t use your own computers. Go to an Internet café or library, or whatever you have here in Italy.”

“This is so I can claim the documents were stolen from me, if necessary, am I right?”

“You are.”

“You are a spy, no?”

“I’m not sure what I am, Laudomia, quite honestly. But if you could do this for me, it would be a good thing.”

“I will, for sure. And pray it isn’t an evil thing.”

C
ASTAGNOLA
,
APPENDED
to the city of Lugano, possessed all the beauty and charm of the Como region in a more compact size. So there were worst places to commit to R&R.

The only extra effort was putting on a reasonably comfortable disguise, which we achieved before crossing the border. Natsumi assumed her Japanese boy persona. There were no carabinieri or Swiss National police at the border to greet us, which was fortunate, since there was no easy way of getting around a wanted person description such as, “Caucasian travelling with Asian.”

We each took a separate trip into Lugano, but otherwise were content to hang around the hotel, which was only accessible by foot or motor launch. Natsumi read novels from a bookcase well-stocked with English editions, and I did desultory research on the Internet, which for me represented the most soothing form of relaxation.

I ignored my email inboxes, relying on the alerts I’d set up to keep track of the important stuff. That’s how I knew Laudomia had come through.

It was an email from internet.paradiso. Subject line: “Documents. A Good Thing.” Attached were a dozen separate
PDFS
.

I clicked on
“Atto,”
Italian for deed. The owner of the vineyard in Cardano was United Aquitania, Inc., and the address was a post office box in New York City. The company was also registered in New York State. There was a U.S. Federal Employer Identification Number, but no other information was required, since the notary who signed the deed had presumably performed the appropriate due diligence on both buyer and seller.

The information contained in the
compromesso
—a contract laying out the deal prior to a vetting of the counterparties and the ultimate closing—offered nothing additional. It looked like the transaction sailed through without a hitch.

Didn’t matter. I had what I needed for the next step.

I used one of my most secure email addresses to write the New York Department of State to request a copy of the Certificate of Incorporation registered by United Aquitania. This would give me the name or names of the people doing the incorporating, and their nationality. It would also describe stock ownership and the purpose of the company’s business, which could be bullshit, but might provide some insight.