“I beg your pardon?”
“You said that first I should decide whether or not to cooperate with you. All right, I’ve agreed to cooperate. What next?”
“Next, I would strongly advise you to employ a professional negotiator to deal with them. I can put you in touch with several good ones.”
De Grazia seemed surprised. “What is there to negotiate? Colonel, I’m not about to bargain for my son’s life. ‘Yes, I’ll give you a million euros to spare him.’ ‘No, I won’t give you two million, go ahead and shoot him.’ Is that what you want? Absurd. I will not have it said that the boy was killed because Vincenzo de Grazia was reluctant to part with his money.”
There it was again, Caravale thought-the presence of anger, of pride; the absence of anything that came across as deep human feeling. Another man might have said, “I won’t let the boy be killed because I was reluctant to part with my money.” But Vincenzo had said, “I will not have it said…” To Vincenzo de Grazia, the big problem was what people might say about him, about the de Grazias.
“Let me understand,” Caravale said, “whatever they ask, you’re prepared to pay?”
“Well, not if they name an impossible amount, naturally. But whatever is necessary, yes, of course. And the sooner it’s over with, the better.”
“They may ask a great deal. You’re a rich man, you have a big company.”
De Grazia gave him a wry smile. “I’m not as rich as you might think, Colonel. But this is Italy, and I’m like any other sensible businessman. I have kidnapping insurance. The policy is for ten million dollars-twelve million euros. I’ve been paying regular premiums for years, damned big ones. A Bermudian company, Argos Risk Management. Now it’s their turn to live up to their obligations.”
Caravale shook his head. “All right, I can’t make you hire a negotiator, but one thing you’d better understand right now is that it’s not going to be over and done in a day or two. These people don’t work like that, it’s not to their advantage. Three weeks, a month-that’s more like it. And all kinds of unexpected things are going to happen, because they just do. Believe me, it’s very much to your benefit to have someone who isn’t emotionally involved representing you, someone experienced-”
“I’m not bringing some stranger into it, Colonel, someone I don’t know and don’t trust with my son’s life. I’ll deal with them myself.” The skin under his eyes tightened. “We de Grazias are not known for being overemotional.”
Caravale shrugged. How unemotional would “we de Grazias” be when they threatened to send him one of the boy’s ears to convince him to be more forthcoming? The man was hard, but was he that hard? Well, he just might be. In any case, it was up to de Grazia, not him. Besides, he probably did have enough money to meet their demands, so the chances were that it wouldn’t come to that.
“Fine,” he said. “If you change your mind, let me know. In the meantime-”
“What about you?” de Grazia said.
“What about me?”
“Didn’t you say you had some experience in these things?”
“Yes, I was assigned to the crisis management unit in Cosenza for a year. I handled a few cases.”
“All right, will you negotiate in my behalf? You, I would trust.”
Automatically, Caravale began to jerk his head no. Such a thing was out of the question. Policemen and negotiators had different goals, conflicting priorities. A negotiator was a middleman, a facilitator, a neutral. He wasn’t an adversary of the kidnappers any more than he was an ally of the police. His overriding objective was to bring the situation to an end without harm coming to the abductee or to anyone else. If the prisoner was released without anyone’s getting hurt, he had successfully done his job, and whether or not the kidnappers got the money or got away were distant, secondary concerns. But as a carabinieri officer, the priorities were necessarily reversed. These men were not only kidnappers but murderers, and his primary objective had to be their apprehension.
It was impossible to do both. In Cosenza he’d been part of an experimental unit that had been kept scrupulously independent of the carabinieri ’s law enforcement arm. But in Stresa there was no experimental unit. There was only law enforcement.
“I’m sorry, that’s impossible,” had already formed itself in his throat and was on its way to his lips, when he surprised himself by a sudden reversal of gears.
“All right, if you want,” he was amazed to hear himself say.
But on second thought, maybe not so amazed. There was no rule, after all, or at least nothing in writing, that prohibited a carabiniere from negotiating a kidnapping. And Silvestri, his regional commander in faraway Turin, had happily given Caravale his head in just about all matters a long time ago, so there would be no difficulty there. (Silvestri was the nephew of his older sister’s husband, after all.)
Why shouldn’t he try it, then, given that Vincenzo had explicitly asked him to? Serving as the contact with them would likely provide valuable information for later that he’d otherwise have to try to get secondhand. So where was the problem? If he didn’t take it on, Vincenzo had made it clear that he would do it himself, and surely that was the most dangerous path of all.
One thing was sure. It wasn’t going to get in the way of his catching the bastards.
FOUR
Through the living room’s bay window they watched the gray, red, and white Coho Ferry in the distance, pulling stern-first away from the Port Angeles dock, slowly turning, lumbering into the sunshine, and starting on its stately 5:15 P.M. run around Ediz Hook and across the Strait of San Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island, visible through the sea haze some seventeen miles away.
“Il battello… um… parte a Victoria,” Julie said. “No, per Victoria. ”
“Very good,” Phil Boyajian said. “And what about you, Gideon, my man, how’s the Italian coming?”
“Muy bien, gracias,” Gideon said.
Phil shook his head. “Wrong language.”
“Oh. Sehr gut? ”
“Um, you’re not quite there yet, Dr. Oliver.”
“Don’t let him kid you, Phil,” Julie said. “He speaks it almost as well as you do. He has this knack with languages. It’s very annoying.”
“What can I say, it’s true,” Gideon said immodestly. “I spent a couple of summers on an Etruscan dig up near Tarquinia. I guess Italian just stayed with me.”
Actually, it hadn’t come that easily to him-he’d been learning Spanish not long before, and the two languages were close enough to confuse him-but he’d loved the lilt of those long, high, singing Italian vowels and he’d worked at it, continuing even after he’d gotten back to the States. He’d kept it sharp by occasionally reading Italian articles on the Web, but now, for the first time in years, he’d have a chance to put it to real use. The three of them would be flying to Italy in a couple of days; Phil was going over the details one final time.
“We arrive in Milan at six-fifty in the morning, pick up the rental car, and drive up the lake. A day and a night on our own in Stresa to get over the jet lag, and the next morning we go on back down to Milan to meet our flock at the airport. And so the merry adventure begins.”
The “flock” were the eighteen venturesome, pennywise travelers who had signed up for the “Italian Lakes Country Pedal and Paddle Adventure,” the week-long kayak-and-bicycle tour of Lake Maggiore and Lake Orta that was being put on by Travel on the Cheap, the thriving tour and guidebook company headquartered in Seattle. Phil, a frequent tour leader for On the Cheap, would lead it. One of Gideon’s oldest friends (he had been a fellow graduate student at the University of Wisconsin), he had sweet-talked them into helping out on the trip almost a year before. Or rather, he had talked Julie into it; for expenses, she would serve as the tour naturalist and assistant “host.” It hadn’t taken much sweet talking. A supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park’s headquarters in Port Angeles, it was the kind of thing that she enjoyed doing anyway, and it gave her a chance to study the natural history of a new area.