Nuri felt the weight of Frau Gerste’s sigh all the way to Rome.
He also felt the weight of Gregor’s shoulder, as they sat next to each other on a Euro C Flight direct from Berlin.
The C, Nuri was sure, stood for “cheap.” The seats were so narrow a mouse would have felt crowded.
Gregor had insisted on coming, following a call from her supervisor. Apparently the Bureau was now worried that the CIA would crack the case and they wouldn’t get any credit. On the bright side, she managed to get an appointment with a member of the Office of Special Magistrate, the antimafia police, that afternoon. Hence the flight.
She was uncharacteristically quiet for much of the flight, and Nuri tolerated her presence, if not her bad breath, until just before they were landing, when she began talking about Frau Gerste.
Why, she wondered, had Nuri found her attractive?
“Who says I found her attractive?” he asked.
“You were practically leering. ‘Frau’ means she’s married, you know.”
“I’m sure.”
“She had a wedding ring.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Because you were too busy staring at her boobs. I hate it when men do that. Treating women like sex objects. It’s disgusting.”
You have nothing to worry about, Nuri thought to himself, but he kept his mouth shut, concentrating instead on the dossier MY-PID had provided on the man who apparently ordered the murder in Berlin.
The Italian newspapers had played up the tobacco shop owner’s death, calling Giuseppe DeFrancisco one of the “grand old men of Rome,” an appellation that not even his most faithful customers could ever remember hearing during his lifetime. Established in 1956, his small shop had been a dusty holdover from an era that had passed as surely as the Caesars and chariot races. But his untimely death transformed it into a symbol of all Italy, which was being overtaken by the rapacious thieves of international finance, who cared not a wit for the ability of an Italian to buy a good cigar and catch up on the latest gossip of the neighborhood, be that neighborhood in an obscure Abruzzi town or Rome itself.
Giuseppe’s connection to his mafia grandson was not mentioned in any of these feature stories. The obituary contained only the broadest hint: Giuseppe had only two surviving grandchildren, one in the U.S. and the other in Naples. Neither was named.
The grandson was Alfredo Moreno, a mafia chief well-known enough in Interpol circles to have a nickname — the Car Thief. He had not lived in Naples for more than a decade, preferring to spend most of his time at his hilltop estate thirty miles away in a town named Fuggire. So small it didn’t show up on most maps, the town consisted of three buildings at an intersection of two rugged roads, an abandoned monastery building, and Moreno’s hilltop property.
The estate had once belonged to a religious order, willed to them by a wealthy cardinal who had established the monastery. It had passed back into private hands somewhere in the sixteenth or eighteenth century. Sometime after that it had become the family home for the Morenos, and was passed down on Alfredo’s father’s side of the family for at least eight generations.
Its connections with the mafia were well-known and documented in the media. Alfredo had, of course, made all of the pretenses of going “straight,” supposedly denouncing his mobster roots and becoming in the Italian phrase, uno mano moderno—a modern hand.
Alfredo was indeed modern, but then so was crime. Where his forebears had depended on handshakes and backroom conversations, he preferred encrypted BlackBerries and pay-as-you go cell phones.
He made a great deal of money importing and exporting — he brought in olive oil and other goods from Turkey, Syria, and Libya, and exported cars to northern Africa and occasionally the Middle East. The cars were stolen; the oil and food were generally mislabeled and occasionally transported in defiance of various international sanctions, such as those requiring inspections and others forbidding trade with places like Iran, which Libya was particularly good in circumventing.
Alfredo also supplemented his income by importing heroin from Afghanistan; it was a small amount of his overall business, but it did pay for the annual Christmas and Easter parties he threw in the town at the foot of his hilltop. It went without saying that he did not pay much in the way of taxes, though in Italy this was merely a sign of his smart business sense.
Nuri realized that while many Italian magistrates would have loved the headlines that would come from arresting a mafioso, they could not stomach the obituaries that would inevitably follow. But he wasn’t counting on an arrest. He was hoping he could interest the Italian antimafia police in a visit to Alfredo’s estate, at which time he might talk to Alfredo about the Wolves — a conversation he assumed would go nowhere — but also borrow whatever home computers he had in his house. For the intercepts that had yielded the conversations led to other conversations indicating he was making financial transfers via the Internet; one of them was surely going to the Wolves’ account. With the murder so recent, there were likely to be traces of the payoff somewhere in the computer.
With Western countries under pressure from the U.S. and the UN to do something about the Afghan heroin trade, which had thrived despite the apparent demise of the Taliban, Nuri decided to use that as his opening. He focused on the evidence connecting Alfredo to the trade and skipping any mention of the murder in Berlin, which he guessed the Italians weren’t too likely to care about.
A tall, thin man in his mid-thirties met them at the ministry. He introduced himself as Pascal La Rota, the magistrate who specialized in the Naples-area mafia. He had a military air — close-cropped hair, wide chest, and a nose that seemed to have been broken when he was a young man. He offered the two Americans caffè—in Italy, this meant espresso — then began looking at the evidence Nuri had brought along.
In the Italian justice system, a magistrate was closer to an American district attorney than a judge. They had a wide range of investigative powers and could be extremely unpleasant when crossed. Those who worked in the antimafia commission were reputed to be among the toughest in the nation — or the craziest.
La Rota impressed Nuri as neither. His manner was mild, almost studious. He put on a pair of glasses and began reading the information Nuri had brought, while Gregor spooned sugar into her coffee.
MY-PID had collected ships’ manifests and various information on different shipments connected to Alfredo’s empire. It showed that a middle-level heroin dealer in Florence who supplied a British network received yearly deposits into an Austrian bank account from one of Alfredo’s companies. It connected a truck stopped at the French border with a hundred kilos of heroin to another of Alfredo’s firms. And best of all, it included the transcripts of three phone calls between Alfredo and two contacts in Iran referring to shipments of flowers, which circumstantial evidence indicated was a code word for heroin.
The transcripts were clearly the smoking gun, a direct link between the mobster and the drugs. They had been recorded nearly eighteen months before, as part of an NSA program collecting raw intelligence from Iran. But they weren’t of sufficient priority for even a computer transcription, let alone to trigger a human review. MY-PID had found them listed along with three thousand other files that it judged might have a connection to the heroin trade and Italy, and had done the brute translation work itself.
As valuable as they were, they proved a sticking point for La Rota.
“Interesting,” he said, leafing through the papers. His English was good enough that he could read the summary sheet in the original without referring to the translation that had been prepared for him. “But, as far as this is concerned for evidence — I must tell you, Italian laws are very strict about wiretaps.”