We leave Esther and Tabone looking over the edge of the cliff to the broken body I know must be on the rocks far below, and we go back to the place where Anna Stanhope lies. A doctor from the crowd attends to her, and I hear the comforting wail of a siren nearby. For a minute her eyes open and she sees me. She reaches for me, and with surprising strength pulls me down to her. Then she laughs a little, coughs, and grasping my hand very firmly whispers, “There is no fool like an old fool.”
FIFTEEN
My gorge rises. When will this end? My people have been enslaved, betrayed, converted, deserted, patronized, anglicized. They’ve fought other people’s battles, died for other people’s causes. Leave them be. Let them choose their own future. Those who worshipped Me best.
“So what have we got?” Rob asked. It was the day after the disastrous event, and we were sitting once again in Vincent Tabone’s office.
“We’ve got a real mess, that’s what we’ve got,” Tabone replied morosely. He sighed. “But perhaps you were hoping for more detail than that.”
“Indeed,” Rob said. “Like who, what, where, why, and how, for starters. Something a little more concrete than mess, or Lara’s contention that it was Galizia in a fit of ambition.”
“Well, we’ve got one of the who, at least,” Tabone replied. He slapped a photograph on the desk in front of us. It was fuzzy but recognizable. “Marek Sidjian, alias Victor Deva, along with a long list of other aliases. Not Italian, but a master of disguise, and someone who seems to have acquired many convincing accents along the way, to say nothing of passports. We believe he learned his craft with the Russians in Afghanistan. He is a suspect in other similar plots, some unfortunately more successful than this one. Do you recall the shooting of an Italian businessman, a banker, in broad daylight on a crowded street in Milano just a few months ago?”
We both nodded.
“He’s a suspect in that, and others like it I’ve been working with Interpol, and Rob with U.S. and Canadian authorities, all night, and we’ve learned a good deal about how Sidjian operated. He was not only the killer, but quite the businessman, the one who dealt with the clients, and who used his charm to insinuate himself into a position to carry out the deed. He actually studied acting, wouldn’t you know? Perhaps he should have stayed with it. On the face of it, at least, he would have been good at it. Usually he had an accomplice, an assistant, which brings us to cousin Francesco, whoever he is. I’ll have some photos coining in soon I’d like you to look at for me, Lara. Essentially Sidjian was a hired gun. I do not believe that he selected targets himself, nor do I think he had any particular political agenda. He was not burdened by any philosophical or religious convictions that I can see. He was just a thug. He did what he did solely for the money.
“We know, thanks to Lara, that Marek got into Malta from France, disguised as a priest…”
“I keep kicking myself that I didn’t remember him sooner,” I interjected. “If I’d realized he arrived in disguise, I’d have known there was something wrong, even if I didn’t know exactly what it was.”
“Don’t do this, Lara!” Rob said sharply. “You said yourself you only saw him in profile, and you saw him when you’d been up all night on the flight over. In fact you’d been up for almost twenty-four hours straight!”
But I couldn’t let it go. “My friend Alex said we should have known, in a way, about Victor, because of the name he chose for himself. In the ancient Roman and Persian cult of Mithra, a Deva is a creature of darkness, vice, and suffering. I wonder if Victor knew mat, or if it was just a coincidence.”
“He may well have known,” Tabone said. “He is apparently a well-educated man. Choosing a name like that would suit his style. In addition to being intelligent, well-educated, and gifted with a sense of irony, he was also supremely nasty. He prided himself on thinking up innovative ways to kill people.
“As to your other questions,” he said, turning to Rob, “we definitely have the where and how down. Where? The play at Mnajdra. How? We’re told that Sidjian was noted for planning his hits down to the last detail. He would be out scouting for possible locations. He meets Anna Stanhope at the site and he gets an idea. One of the students remembers Dr. Stanhope telling Victor or Marek about the play, about all the notables who would be attending, and even about Mifsud, the caretaker who was supposed to be helping with the production. Mifsud gets taken out of action—a neat fall down a flight of stairs— and miraculously, Victor Deva appears to save the day. Old Mifsud still can’t remember anything much about the accident, but he does recall seeing Sidjian around the school the day he fell—we showed him a photograph this morning. Mifsud’s a drinker, of course, but he seems pretty definite about this one, and if it was early enough in the day, he might still have had his wits about him.”
“The play and his role in it—those large boxes of sound and lighting equipment—gave Marek the opportunity to hide the weapon,” I said. “He couldn’t carry the gun in directly; all the boxes were searched. But he, and possibly Francesco too, simply come back at night before there’s the full contingent of soldiers and police on twenty-four-hour guard duty. They have to break into the storage shed, because they don’t have the key, but they don’t need to break into their own boxes. That’s why their boxes looked untouched, but it is undoubtedly where the weapon was stashed. Then, to cover their tracks, they make it look like vandalism, the work of angry parents.
“It also gives Marek a chance to show Francesco the site in daylight,” I added. “He brought him along to help paint the shed. So he could look around for somewhere to land the helicopter,” I added.
“Don’t remind me!” Tabone said sharply. “There’ll be hell to pay for that, I expect. They stole a police helicopter right from under our noses. If it hadn’t been for the fact they radioed me about the chopper right away, those two might have got away.”
“I’m surprised they would think they could get away with it, in such a public place,” Rob said.
“Sidjian prided himself on his rather spectacular killings. I mentioned that murder of the Italian banker. Do you recall it was carried out right in front of one of those huge and expensive shopping complexes in Milano, at the height of Christmas shopping season?” We nodded. “I think he banked on the fact that there is so much chaos after one of these shootings he had time to slip away.
“Another characteristic of this fellow is that he is truly ruthless about anyone who gets in his way. Which brings us, I think, to Ellis Graham.”
Tabone reached into the bottom drawer of his desk. He extracted a large plastic bag in which rested a hat. Not just any hat. A broad-brimmed safari-style hat, one side turned up, with a leopard skin band. “I remembered that conversation we had over coffee, and lo and behold, the missing hat, I think, is found. Look familiar to you, Lara?” I nodded. It was Ellis Graham’s hat. It seemed unlikely there would be two like it on this tiny island, and I said so.