“No contest,” I said, watching him measure out round grains of risotto rice. He tipped the rice into the pan, stirred it into the mixture for a couple of minutes, then took a carton out of the freezer.
“Chicken stock,” he said, tossing the solid lump into the pan amidst much hissing and clouds of steam. He kept stirring till the stock had defrosted and the pan was bubbling gently. Then he put a lid on, set the timer for twelve minutes and drained his glass.
“How about a salad to go with it?” I asked hastily as he started to move toward me. “And I’ll mix you another drink, okay?”
His eyes seemed to lose focus momentarily and he shook his head like a bull bothered by flies. He rubbed his hands over his face and mumbled, “Okay.” I’d reckoned about twenty minutes for the drugs to take effect, but maybe the amount he’d had to drink on an empty stomach was accelerating things.
I’d barely got the cap off the gin bottle when there was a sound like a tree falling in the kitchen. I tiptoed back to the doorway to see Gianni spread-eagled on the marble floor. For one terrible moment, I thought I’d killed him. Then he started to snore like a sawmill on overtime. I ran across to the butcher’s block and picked up the knife. It took seconds to saw off the electric cable from a couple of the kitchen appliances. Tying him up took quite a bit longer, but the snoring didn’t even change in note while I was doing it. I took the black box out of his pocket and tucked it my bag.
I found the cellar door on the second try. A wide flight of stairs led down into the depths. One thing about marble floors is that they make shifting heavy loads a lot easier. I got down on my knees behind Gianni and shoved with all my strength. Foot by foot, we slid across the gleaming tiles to the doorway.
One last push sent him skidding over the first step, feet first. He bounced down the stairs like a sack of potatoes, still snoring. I staggered to my feet. For the first time, I was grateful that Gianni’s boss was security conscious. The cellar door had bolts top and bottom as well as a lock on the door. I slid the bolts home and leaned against the door to get my breath back.
When the timer went off, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Automatically, I turned off the gas under the pan. Now the adrenaline surge was slipping away, I realized that I was in fact ravenous. I shrugged. The food was there, I might as well eat. I didn’t think Gianni was going to be knocking at the door demanding his share in a hurry.
He might have been the world’s worst lecher, but he was a fabulous cook. I shoveled the risotto down, savouring every delicious mouthful. Now I needed coffee. It was going to be a long night. I wished I hadn’t chopped the lead off the Gaggia. A search of the cupboards eventually turned up a jar of instant and a Thermos jug. I brewed up and, armed with jug, mug and shoulder bag, I set off to explore.
Whatever Gianni’s boss was, he wasn’t short of a bob. The public rooms on the ground floor were all marble floored, with expensive Oriental rugs scattered around. The furniture was expensive repro, all polished to a mirror finish. There was nothing in the dining room, drawing room, morning room or the TV lounge to indicate that this was anything other than the home of a successful businessman. Even the videos lined up in the cabinet by the oversized TV were completely innocuous.
Cautiously, I made my way up the stairs. It was always possible that Turner was a prisoner somewhere inside the villa rather than the victim of my worst imaginings. Six doors opened off the long landing. The first two were lavish guest bedrooms, complete with en suite bathrooms. If Gianni’s boss ever set up in competition with Casa Nico, the pensione down the valley would go out of business within hours. The third door opened on what was clearly the master bedroom. The wardrobes were filled with designer suits and shirts, the drawers with silk underwear and the kind of leisure wear that has the labels on the outside. No trace of a woman in residence. No trace of any papers, either.
The fourth door opened on to a library. It was obviously a reader’s library rather than one where the books had been bought by the yard. Modern hardbacks lined the shelves. I noticed a sizeable chunk of crime fiction, but most of the books were by authors I’d never heard of. There was also a whole section of legal textbooks, mostly covering commercial and international law. But again, there were no papers anywhere, unless some of the books were dummies. If they were, they’d be hanging on to their secrets. There was no way I had time to go through that lot book by book.
The fifth door was locked. I left it for a moment and tried the sixth. Another guest bedroom. That told me that either Turner was behind the locked door, or something significant was. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my set of picklocks with me. I don’t carry them routinely, and when I’d set off on my pursuit of Turner, I hadn’t expected to be doing any burglaries. I could of course simply smash the lock with one of the dozens of marble statuettes that hung around in niches all over the place. But I didn’t want the villa’s owner to know the extent to which he’d been turned over unless I could possibly help it.
I looked up at the door lintel. Gianni’s boss was not much bigger than me, so the chances were that the key wasn’t sitting up there. I went back to the master bedroom and began a proper search. I got lucky in the bathroom. I’d taken the contents of the bathroom cupboard off the shelves one by one, just to make sure there was nothing behind them. There were two aerosol cans of Polo shaving foam, and one was a lot lighter than the other. I looked more closely at the heavier of the two. Gripping it tightly, I twisted the bottom of the can. It unscrewed smoothly, revealing a compartment lined with bubble wrap. Inside was what looked like a handkerchief. I pulled it out and a bunch of keys tumbled to the floor. “Gotcha!” I murmured.
The longest of the keys opened the locked door. Bingo! Inside was a starkly functional office, a sharp contrast to the luxurious appointments of the rest of the villa. I switched the light on, closed the shutters and took a good look round. A basic desk stood against one wall with a computer, a modem and a fax machine on it. To one side there was a photocopier and a laser printer. Automatically, I switched them on. I noticed a shredder under the desk as I sat down and hit the computer’s power button. The machine booted up and I called up the directories. Ten minutes later, my jubilation had given way to depression. Every single data file I’d tried to access was password protected. I couldn’t get in to read them. All it would let me do was print out a list of all files, which I duly did.
Muttering dark imprecations, I returned to the main directory. Time for some lateral thinking. In the years since I first started working at Mortensen and Brannigan and discovered the wonderful world of electronic mail, the Internet had grown from the home of academics and a handful of computer loonies like me to the world’s bulletin board. The communications software that was running on this machine was a standard business package that I’d used dozens of times before. Even if the files were password protected, I reckoned that the communications program would still be able to transmit them intact to somewhere I could retrieve them later and pass them on to someone who could crack the passwording. All I needed was a local number for the Internet. If I was lucky, there would be one already loaded in the comms program. I started it running and called up the telephone directory screen.
It was my lucky night. Right at the top of the list was the number for the local Internet node-the E-mail equivalent of a postal sorting office. The way the Net works is simple. It’s analogous to sending a letter rather than making a phone call. The network is connected by phone lines, and works on what they call a parcel switching system. What happens is you dial a local number and send your data to it. The computer there reads the address and shunts your data down the network, section by section, till it arrives at its destination. But unlike a letter, which takes days if you’re lucky, this takes less time than it takes to describe the process.