The extreme cold continued to penetrate her overcoat. She remained tired from the travel. She turned to walk back to the hotel.
She smacked into a huge man in a great sheepskin coat and a massive fur cap pulled low above his eyes, a heavy woolen scarf wrapped around his face. Her heart jumped into her throat. She would have fallen, except he reached an arm out and held her. She could only see his eyes and the bridge of his nose. She knew immediately that she had been incredibly careless to let a stranger get so close to her in a place like this.
His eyes bored into her. He looked like he had stepped out of the Czar’s army of a century earlier. He had arrived quietly beside her, coming up out of the ground or the shadows or God knew where.
Then she realized he was not releasing her.
“Zakordónna?” he asked. Foreign?
Crunch time for her knowledge of Ukrainian. Sink or swim. No backups here and no interpreter either.
“Mozhlývo,” she answered. Maybe.
“Frantsúz’ka? Anhlíys’ka? Amerykánka?” he pressed. French? English? American?
She reached for a phrase from Mistress Olga.
“Ne váshe dílo!” she said. Mind your own business. Always a useful phrase to have ready. She pulled away, but he held her coat, his grip tight as a vice, an iron fist in a leather glove.
A moment passed. She was a heartbeat away from attempting to kick free and reaching for her weapon at the same time.
Then his grip eased. He laughed. She steadied herself. He released her.
“A monument to ‘friendship,’ yes?” he said, now switching into Russian, indicating the monument: “Äðóæáà.”
She couldn’t help herself in replying. “Friendship enforced by the tanks of the Soviet Red Army,” she said, throwing the same language back at him.
His dark eyes took on a deep burn. Her remark had touched something.
He nodded toward the statue of the workers. “Soviet Order of Friendship,” he said. “In Ukraine, we call that the ‘Yoke of Oppression.’ ”
Another moment passed. He looked both ways, dropped his hands into his pocket, and laughed. Then he slowly turned and walked away into the night. Despite the bright lights illuminating the monuments, her visitor knew where the shadows were. He did not look back as he walked away. Then he was gone, as quietly as he had arrived.
TWENTY-NINE
Rome. Quarter to seven in the morning under a cold gray drizzle. A police car bearing Lt. Gian Antonio Rizzo and his assistant, Stephano DiPetri, drew up outside an inauspicious steel door on the via LoBrutti. The building was set among two warehouses and a closed factory.
The two policemen jumped out. Rizzo walked at a quick pace. He knew this place too well. DiPetri followed close behind, pulling his coat close against the elements.
Miserable weather. A miserable place. There was a sign beside the door. It read, “L’Obitorio Municipale-Città di Roma.”
Rizzo pulled the door open. He barged purposefully into the municipal morgue. For the next half hour, he and his assistant stood in a basement chamber that was barely warmer than the outside air. Noxious fumes assaulted their nostrils, the scent of death and chemicals everywhere. They eventually stood over two marble slabs where a pair of decomposing bodies in yellow canvas bags were set forth for their examination.
An emissary of the mortuary’s office presided. He was a chubby bearded man named Bernardo Santangelo, pleasant and jovial, considering his line of work, well known for his unending courtesy and attention to detail. A meticulous well-groomed man, he looked more like a jolly chef than a technician of mortality. In his handsome pudginess, he moved like a big pampered cat.
Nearby, with her arms folded behind her back, stood a young assistant, Neomie, a woman with dark hair, thick glasses, and a complexion as pale as the resident cadavers. Rizzo gave her a quick glance and a nod. Neomie couldn’t hold a candle to Sophie, so Rizzo’s attention bounced back to the business at hand.
Like the corpses, Neomie remained silent.
Lt. Rizzo had worked with Bernardo Santangelo previously and knew him to be an intelligent man who did his wretched job with an air of earnestness. Santangelo adjusted the thermostat in the room to below freezing before he began to talk.
“We may now proceed,” Santangelo said. “Please open the bags.” Neomie unzipped first one bag and then the other.
Rizzo winced. DiPetri retched. Neomie ignored them and the dead folks.
Rizzo had seen many corpses in his career, including those of people he had known personally. But these were particularly horrendous. There had been just enough time since death-perhaps a couple of weeks, he assessed-for advanced discoloration and decomposition to set in. Death had been caused by gunshot, and the gunshots had raked the heads, necks, and upper chests, and caused particularly horrific effects.
The bodies were those of a man and a woman. Half of the woman’s face had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was filled with brains and blood. The man’s face had been smashed in by gunfire so brutally that the features almost looked as if they had been turned inside out.
Gravely, his voice muted to low tones, Santangelo explained how the man and woman came to lie in his place of business.
A band of children had been playing near some old Roman ruins in the campground at Villa di Plinio. Rizzo knew the area. It was a sandy swampy region twenty kilometers east of Rome and two kilometers south of the massive airport at Fiumicino. It was a place where unusual things were known to surface.
The bambini piccoli had been kicking a soccer ball when it bounced into the marshes. The ball rolled to rest against qualcosa non comune -something unusual-sticking up out of the ground, something that looked like a broken branch of a tree or a strange piece of driftwood that had washed up from the Mediterranean.
The children pushed away the wet dirt and dead grass. They discovered that the “something unusual” was the arm of a human being. The arm was attached to the rest of a decomposing body, that of a man. The body had been stripped of clothing, jewelry, or any other pieces of identification.
The children ran off and told their parents. One of the fathers phoned his brother, who was a policeman in Castel Fusano on the Mediterranean coast. The brother drove to the area, saw the body with his own eyes, and used his cell phone to file a report.
The local police discovered that the dead man had been buried with a female companion, one body stacked up on top of the other. It was as if those getting rid of the bodies had been too lazy-or in too much of a hurry-to dig two graves and weigh them down with stones, the normal procedure in the area.
Not long afterward, federal police were called, notably the anti Mafia brigade. The Castel Fusano police were happy to get rid of the remains.
The bodies were shipped to Rome where they were stored here in the central obitorio where more experienced technicians could examine them. They were also frozen at a temperature of thirteen degrees below zero centigrade to arrest the decomposition and assist the forensics units.
Lt. Rizzo listened to all this very thoughtfully, saying nothing until Santangelo had finished. Then, “Have these victims been identified yet?” Rizzo asked.
“No,” Santangelo answered. “We received them here only two days ago. We have some leads that may help us soon, however. Perhaps within the next day or two.”