The Abomination Page 10

  They’d reached the security barrier. The carabiniere saluted a farewell, his elbow mournfully drooped at the thought of his own continuing misfortune.

  When the capitano had gone, Holly cleared up the room, a little annoyed with herself for having allowed the woman to rile her. But most of her anger was directed at the carabiniere. Intelligence work and police detection weren’t so different, after all – they both depended on analysing the facts coolly and without prejudice. Yet the Italian had swept in, scattering insinuations and allegations almost at random. “How convenient,” she’d said approvingly, when she’d heard about the archives being moved. It had been on the tip of Holly’s tongue to retort that if the US Military was as riddled with corruption as the Carabinieri clearly was, they’d never fight a single battle – just like the Italians. But that would hardly have been consistent with the objectives of LNO-3’s hearts and minds initiative.

  Sighing, Holly shook her head. People like Captain Tapo reminded her that you could speak Italian like a native – could almost think of yourself as one – but there would always remain a gulf between the way your mind worked and theirs.

  It occurred to her that now Barbara Holton was dead there was no administrative reason to continue with her FOIA enquiry. She made a mental note to request a copy of the death certificate, so that she could close her file. And she’d better tell Ian Gilroy not to waste his time translating the documents she’d given him.

  Back at her desk, she found two emails waiting, both relating to the FOIA. The first was from the CIA section in Milan.

  The CIA regrets that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of documents responsive to your request.

  The next was from the Office of the Department of Defense.

  The DoD regrets that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of documents responsive to your request.

  Stonewalled. And with the exact same wording, too. But then, she reminded herself, there was nothing unusual in that. It would have been more unusual if they had found something.

  Barbara Holton might have been murdered, but there was no reason whatsoever why it should have anything to do with any information she’d been eliciting from Holly.

  She shook her head. Quit thinking like a conspiracy theorist.

  Eighteen

  RICCI CASTIGLIONE HESITATED on the threshold of the church of San Giacomo Apostolo in Chioggia. The interior was dark and silent, the air spicy with candle wax and incense. He dipped his fingers in the holy water by the door, crossed himself, and hurried across the echoing space to a side chapel.

  Madonnas, dozens upon dozens of them, looked down on him from every height, crowded onto the walls like posters in a teenager’s bedroom. Tourists usually took it for a quaint display of devotion to the Virgin Mary, but this was actually another madonna altogether: Madonna della Navicella, Our Lady of the Seas, whose image appeared miraculously on logs and boats washed up from the depths of the lagoon. She was, the fishermen knew, an older and more potent goddess altogether than the Mother of Christ. Along with her likeness, the chapel walls were crammed with tolele – little offerings of gratitude for those she’d saved from the waves.

  Ricci stood for a moment, his head bowed, struggling to form into words what he wanted to say to her.

  This time I’ve gone too far. But it wasn’t my fault. It was the American.

  As he turned away, his eyes met those of the old priest, sitting patiently in the confessional across the way. “No customers today, Father?” he called, trying to sound braver than he felt.

  It was the old crow’s silence that did it. Ricci had committed many bad acts in his life. Once, he’d burnt a rival fisherman’s boat. On several occasions, he’d cheated on his wife with prostitutes offered to him for free in return for services rendered. He’d stabbed a man in anger, and still believed it was Our Lady of the Seas who had made sure the man didn’t die – a living victim could be silenced with threats, but a dead one meant the police for sure.

  His smuggling, and the other errands he ran, he didn’t count as sins – they were someone else’s misdeeds; all he was doing was shifting them from A to B. But this thing with the woman dressed as a priest gave him a feeling of terror he couldn’t shake off. It was wrong – he could feel it, and not just in the leaden sickness that gnawed at his stomach. Every single one of his crab pots had remained stubbornly empty all week. And now there was news of two Carabinieri officers asking questions amongst the fishermen. If only the American had asked him where to dump the body, instead of just tipping it into the water!

  Evil had attached itself to him, in the form of the abomination washed up on the steps of La Salute. From there it was just a short step to a drowning in one of the inexplicable storms that sometimes appeared in the lagoon out of nowhere. The Madonna della Navicella – she was female: she wouldn’t like such a desecration on her patch.

  Like many of the fishermen, Ricci had never learnt to swim, and his relationship with the sea was like that of a man who lives on a volcano: in his bones he knew that it was only a matter of time before it claimed him.

  He looked around. There was no one else about. Crossing quickly to the little booth, he pulled the curtain shut and muttered in the direction of the face half-hidden by the grille, “Mi benedica, Padre, perchè ho peccato.”

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Nineteen

  IT WAS ALMOST noon by the time Kat got back to Campo San Zaccaria.

  “How was the American?” Piola asked.

  “Unhelpful. But also irrelevant, at least on the face of it.” She explained about Barbara Holton’s FOIA request. As she’d hoped, Piola smiled at her description of the by-the-rules American she’d had to wrest the information from.

  “Any progress here?” she added.

  “Some, from the forensic team who looked at the Poveglia crime scene. You know the symbols on the wall? Some of them were sprayed over the peripheral blood spray.”

  She thought quickly. “So they were added after the victim was killed.”

  His nod told her that he appreciated not having to spell it out. “Exactly. And the way the blood spray was mixed with the ink shows that it was done almost immediately.”

  “Meaning what?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps the killer was making a kind of commentary on what he had done.”

  “You said ‘some of the symbols’. Which ones were there before she was killed?”

  Piola drew a sheet of contacts towards him and circled three of the designs.

  “These. Two that match the tattoos on our corpse, and one that’s very similar.” He looked up. “What did your expert have to say about these three?”

  “Father Uriel?” She thought back. “He never actually gave me an opinion on them,” she said slowly. “I mean, some of the others he identified very quickly as having occult meanings – blessings to Satan, that kind of thing. But when I asked him about these, he didn’t really say anything.”

  “He didn’t recognise them?”

  “That’s the strange thing. If you don’t recognise something, it’s pretty easy just to come right out and say so, isn’t it? ‘I’m sorry, Captain Tapo, I have no idea what these are.’ But he didn’t do that. He made a little speech about how occultists sometimes devise their own symbols as badges of rank – he gave me the impression they could be something along those lines, but he never actually said so.”

  “So we have someone who perhaps recognises these symbols, but doesn’t want to say so,” Piola mused.

  “Not just someone,” she said. “A priest. I think that Father Uriel might be the sort of man who doesn’t like to tell an outright lie. So he takes refuge in misdirection instead.”

  “What could possibly make a priest want to mislead a police investigation?” Piola asked rhetorically.

  Kat nodded. “Something that might embarrass the Church. Oh, and he knew about Poveglia. He was trying to tell me what an evil place it was, how it was just t
he sort of place Satanists might choose to hold their rituals. At the time I thought it was odd that the conversation had taken a turn in that direction, but with hindsight I think he was trying to nudge me further towards the occult connection.”

  “Because. . .?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, frustrated. “But there’s something that isn’t right here, isn’t there?”

  “Your first homicide, and you’re telling me you already have an instinct for when something’s wrong?” She started to apologise, and he cut her off. “For what it’s worth, I agree. There are too many contradictory lines of enquiry – which makes me think that some of them must be smokescreens, thrown up to put us off the scent. But let’s not jump to conclusions, Captain. Evidence-gathering first. The theories can come later.”

  Her inbox was full of emails, including one from the website that had published the blog about illegal ordinations.

  Captain Tapo,

  In response to your enquiry, I write to inform you that this organisation holds no information whatsoever regarding anyone involved, however tangentially, with attempted ordinations of women. If we did have information that any of our members were involved in such activities, we would immediately cut all links with them and pass the information to the relevant Church authorities.

  Sincerely,

  The webmaster

  “Arse coverer!” she said out loud.

  There was another email below it, from an address she didn’t recognise.

  Dear Captain Tapo,

  I understand you want to speak to someone about women priests. I am a woman, and I am also a Catholic priest. There are, to my knowledge, well over a hundred of us, the Church’s current position notwithstanding. Exact numbers are hard to establish – many of us don’t even know our own Sisters in Christ, having been ordained through catacomb ordinations.

  I would be happy to discuss this further with you if we can establish a safe way of doing so. Do you have a Carnivia account? It would be easier if you did.

  Forgive me if I don’t use my real name.

  “Karen”

  Piola, hearing her whistle of surprise, looked up.

  “An email from a woman priest,” she explained. It was curious, she reflected, that despite the wary tone of the first note, it could only have been that writer who’d forwarded her own email to “Karen”.

  “So they do exist?”

  She gestured at the email. “She claims they do. She mentions Carnivia, too. That’s the second time that name’s come up. I wonder why?”

  Piola shrugged. “I’m too old to figure out all this internet stuff. I’m going to leave that part to you and Malli. Make it a priority, though, will you?” Giuseppe Malli occupied a windowless room high in the attic of the Carabinieri headquarters. Long ago, when the building was a nunnery, this had been one of the more austere novice’s cells. Now it was crammed with bits of electronic equipment: hard drives, partially disassembled laptops, lengths of cabling and portable monitors.

  “Ah, Capitano,” Malli greeted her. “I’ve just been examining your little mermaid.” He held up a laptop hard drive in a clear plastic bag. “It’s no good, I’m afraid. The waters of Venice have taken everything she knew. Want me to throw her away?”

  “Better not,” Kat said, taking the bag from him. “Useless or not, it’s still evidence. Do you have the paperwork?”

  Every item of evidence in the building was accompanied by its own chain-of-custody file. In theory, it should be possible to account for every minute it had spent since coming into the Carabinieri’s possession.

  Malli waved a hand at the mess on his workbench. “It’s here somewhere. I’ll send it on.”

  “Thanks.” She found a place to perch. “I’d like to ask you something else, actually. What do you know about a website called Carnivia?”

  “No more than anybody else, I suspect. Why?”

  She explained about the two links the investigation had thrown up – first, from the victims’ hotel room, and secondly in the email from the woman who claimed to be a priest.

  Malli considered. “At a guess, they’re using Carnivia as a kind of secure communications network. That’s pretty clever, actually.” Seeing her look of incomprehension, he explained. “Carnivia uses encryption technology to keep its users anonymous. Daniele Barbo wrote the algorithm himself, and amongst hackers it’s recognised as being about the best there is. So once you’re inside Carnivia, your communications are safe. It’s like having your own military-grade communications channel. Better, actually. The US Department of Defense’s systems have been hacked in the past. Carnivia never has.”

  “Didn’t I read that Barbo’s in some kind of trouble?”

  He nodded. “Refusing to allow the government access to monitor website traffic is an offence now. His sentencing’s in a few weeks’ time. Most people think he’ll go to prison rather than let the authorities into Carnivia.”

  Her mind was working overtime. “So if he were to tell us whatever it was our victim was using Carnivia for before she was killed, it might help him with the judge?”

  Malli laughed. “I see where you’re going with this, Captain, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope if I were you. No one’s ever persuaded Daniele Barbo to do anything he didn’t want to. And the one thing he really, really doesn’t want to do is to give people like you and me access to his website.”

  She replied to “Karen”, saying she’d meet her wherever and whenever was convenient. Then she set about opening a Carnivia account.

  It was barely more complicated than registering with an online retailer. First, she had to choose a Carnival mask in the “mask shop”. As a Venetian, that took her no time at all: she always wore a Columbina, a smiling half-mask decorated with feathers and lace. Meanwhile, with her permission, the site was searching her computer for information.

  After a minute or so, a message appeared.

  GOOD MORNING, INSPECTOR KATERINA TAPO

  CURRENT LOCATION: CARABINIERI HEADQUARTERS, VENICE

  IS THE FOLLOWING CORRECT?

  There followed a long list of everything Carnivia had learnt about her. She read it, astonished. It had divined not only her job, rank and age but who she worked with, who her friends were, where she lived, what school and college she’d been to . . . the list went on and on.

  It ended with the words:

  DON’T WORRY, IN CARNIVIA YOU WILL BE COMPLETELY ANONYMOUS. YOUR NEW IDENTITY IS COLUMBINA7759.

  WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

  From the options, she selected “Enter Carnivia”.

  Twenty

  AN HOUR LATER, Kat finally logged out. She was aware that her cheeks were burning. Her head was spinning.

  Whatever she’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this.

  To begin with, she’d just walked around, delighting in the fact that the 3D world of Carnivia was an exact replica of the city she knew and loved. Every detail was perfect, right down to the sleepy ginger cats sunning themselves on the windowsills, and the way the water in the canals glittered in the late afternoon sun, rising and falling slowly with the tides. But this was a Venice without grime and without tourists – unless you counted the masked figures who walked the pavements, slipping into doorways and gondolas on business of their own.

  Unsure what to do next, she’d followed a stream of people into the Doge’s Palace, where they seemed to be consulting huge ledgers laid out on tables. Going over, she saw that each book contained a list of names. As she opened the ledger nearest to her, the names changed. Now they were all of people she knew – names the website had gleaned from her hard drive. Against some were brief notations.

  DELFIO CREMONESI – FOUR ENTRIES.

  FRANCESCO LOTTI – TWO ENTRIES.

  ALIDA PADOVESI – SIX ENTRIES.

  Alida Padovesi had been in her year at the Carabinieri training academy. They’d lost touch, although Kat kept meaning to Facebook her. She clicked on the name. Pages riffled.

  ALIDA PADOVE
SI. BODY 6/10, FACE 5/10. NOT GREAT IN BED – STRANGE SINCE SHE’S HAD SO MUCH PRACTICE. I KNOW SHE’S BEEN WITH AT LEAST TEN OTHER MEN SINCE SHE TRANSFERRED TO MILAN. . .

  ALIDA PADOVESI. THE OTHER NIGHT WE WERE ALL AT A RESTAURANT AND SHE TOLD ME SHE WANTED TO GO TO BED WITH A WOMAN. I THINK SHE WAS HITTING ON ME. . .

  ALIDA PADOVESI. WHY IS SHE SLEEPING WITH BRUNO CORSTI? COULD IT BE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE AMERICAN EXPRESS GOLD CARD HE’S GIVEN HER?

  It was horrible – but Kat couldn’t tear herself away. She understood now why Carnivia and its creator aroused such strong passions. She hated the fact that she was reading this tittle-tattle, but to stop was almost impossible. Every time she resolved to walk away, she spotted another name she knew, another entry that begged to be read. A part of her simply wanted the names to disappear, so she wouldn’t have to summon the willpower to stop reading of her own volition.

  Then, in a sudden moment of horror, it occurred to her that there might well be gossip like this about herself as well.

  She checked.

  KATERINA TAPO – EIGHT ENTRIES.

  When she clicked on her name, though, the website brought up a message.

  ARE YOU SURE?

  She hesitated, then clicked “Cancel”.

  Twenty-one

  DANIELE BARBO LOGGED onto Carnivia, just as he’d done a thousand times before. At the log-on screen, with its picture of a grinning Carnival mask, he typed an administrator password. Nothing changed on the screen, except for a two-line option for administrators only that appeared below the log-on:

  DO YOU WISH TO BE:

  A) VISIBLE

  B) INVISIBLE?

  He clicked “b”, then “Enter”.

  He was inside a gorgeously marbled Venetian palazzo – the exact same palazzo, in fact, in which he was sitting in the real world. The main entrance to Carnivia was modelled on Ca’ Barbo, although the modernist sculptures and paintings installed by his father had been expunged from the online version. A few pundits had had a field day with that particular detail. In fact, as he’d patiently tried to explain at the time, it was simply easier to model the three-dimensional parts of Carnivia on a place he was familiar with, and removing the Giacomettis and Picassos avoided problems with the Foundation, which owned the copyrights.