The Absolution Page 16

  She got to her feet and crossed to the window. Below her a topa, a “rat”, a flat-bottomed delivery boat, chugged along the rio, its deck stacked high with groceries: tins of Bassano asparagus and San Marzano tomatoes, nappies, and the phosphate-free detergents that were supposed to protect the fragile ecology of the lagoon. The man at the tiller steered it one-handed, with the deftness of a Venetian who had spent all his life manoeuvring these crowded waterways.

  “Speicher clearly didn’t know about Cassandre’s links with the intelligence services,” she said. “I wonder if that was the escape plan Cassandre was talking about – a desperate attempt to sell out whatever it was the Masons in the black lodge were up to, and buy himself protection that way?”

  “He was clearly a man without loyalties, that’s for sure.” Flavio came and stood next to her. His arm brushed hers, and she felt the tiny surge of emotion and endorphins that his physical proximity always engendered: a swell of affection, a tiny wriggle of lust. “Just as Tignelli is clearly a man without scruples.”

  “Is there any way this could relate to the military training Holly saw?” Kat asked.

  Flavio turned back to the room, frowning. “I can just about buy that Tignelli’s got some complicated scheme that involves taking over Speicher’s bank. I can even buy that Cassandre tried to sell him out, and got himself killed as a result. But military training? Plots dating back to the Cold War? Your friend’s grasping at shadows. Our own investigation is complicated enough, without trying to link it to fantasies.”

  Kat said nothing. It disturbed her that, far from becoming immediate friends and allies, Flavio and Holly seemed to have taken an instant dislike to each other. For his part, Flavio clearly thought that Holly was hysterical. He’d told her bluntly that they’d discuss her theories only when she had some evidence, in a tone which made it apparent he thought that was unlikely to happen any time soon.

  Kat had waited until her friend had gone before patiently pointing out that Holly was just beginning to entertain a possibility that shattered her entire world view; one that meant re-examining every loyalty and principle she had.

  Holly, meanwhile, had been startled to realise how serious the relationship with Flavio was. “What is it with you and sleeping with your bosses?” she’d said incredulously when she’d called Kat later. “I go away for a while and when I come back you’re at it again. As if that one mistake with Aldo Piola wasn’t enough.”

  “I’m not actually sleeping with my boss this time,” Kat had pointed out. She couldn’t help being a little irked at the implication that she was prioritising a selfish relationship with Flavio over loyalty to her friend – not least because there was more than a grain of truth in it.

  “Only your prosecutor,” Holly had retorted. “How’s that going to look in court? It’ll undermine our whole case.”

  “‘Our’ case? We don’t even have a case yet. What do you want me to do? Drop him? That’ll hardly help you to find out what happened to your father.”

  “I just think you might be blinded by your feelings, that’s all,” Holly said darkly.

  And you’re not? Kat had thought. But she’d said only, “Give Flavio a chance, will you?”

  To Flavio she said, “Give Holly the benefit of the doubt, won’t you? At least for a little while. Even if she doesn’t come up with anything, we’ve lost nothing by listening to her.”

  “For your sake, my love. But you’ve already got me chasing after one wild conspiracy. Can we try not to add another to the list?”

  “Of course. Anyway, now that we’ve got confirmation that Tignelli was involved with Cassandre and the bank, I think it’s time to increase the pressure. Make him think we know more than we do, and that we’re closing in. I read that he’s one of the sponsors of the grand reopening of the Imperial Apartments at the Ala Napoleonica. I’m going to go along and try to rattle his cage.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE WOMEN’S PRISON in the small town of Rovigo was a grim, high-walled building in a run-down suburb beyond the train station. The walls were made so high, Holly had read, after an episode in 1982 when four women awaiting trial on terrorist offences had escaped. Accomplices blasted a hole in the wall, tossed machine guns to the women inside, and kept the guards at bay with automatic fire. Three had later been recaptured, though in one case it had taken over ten years.

  That was Carole Tataro, the woman she was there to visit. The same woman who had been part of the Red Brigades gang that kidnapped Daniele Barbo.

  Many of Tataro’s former comrades had since turned pentito and incriminated others in return for lighter sentences. But either because Carole had been amongst the last to be captured, or because she still held firm to the ideology of her youth, she hadn’t been one of them. According to what Holly had read online, Tataro had trained in prison as a paralegal and now campaigned against overcrowding within the penal system.

  Inside, the place stank of disinfectant and institutional food, and the corridors had the cavernous, echoey quality of a busy train station. Holly was taken to a small visitors’ room, itself little bigger than a cell.

  The woman who was shown in a few minutes later was surprisingly petite. Next to the overweight female guard, she seemed frail and almost childlike. It was hard to believe she had once fired an Uzi or hurled petrol bombs at policemen.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Holly said, extending her hand.

  Carole Tataro sat down without shaking it. “I never refuse a meeting. Talking to outsiders keeps my brain sharp. But I have to tell you that if I did refuse anyone, American army officers would be high on my list.”

  “May I ask why?”

  The other woman shrugged. “There are over a hundred US military installations in Italy – more per capita than almost any other country in the world. And Italy pays more towards their upkeep than any other country. Over thirty per cent of the running costs, plus generous tax breaks and provisions to pay for so-called ‘improvements’ should you ever leave. You’re like leeches on our economy.” She considered. “No, not leeches. Leeches can be burnt off with a cigarette. You’re more like a cancer.” She spoke calmly, her dark eyes fixed on the wall behind Holly’s head. It struck Holly that her speech patterns were not unlike Daniele’s – strangely uninflected and monotonous.

  “Perhaps we can agree to disagree about that. I want to talk to you about one particular episode in your terrorist career.”

  “Former career,” Tataro corrected. “My activism is directed at a different target now.”

  “Former career, then,” Holly said impatiently. “I’m talking about the kidnap of Daniele Barbo.”

  It was extraordinary how Tataro’s self-assurance seemed to evaporate at the mention of that name. “Why?” she said bluntly.

  “Why do I want to talk about it, you mean? Does it matter?”

  “Of course.” Tataro had quickly recovered her bravado. “Everyone who comes to talk to me has an axe to grind. A theory they want to prove, an article they’ve pitched to an editor, a thesis they need quotes for. It would save us both time if you told me what your angle on the Barbo kidnap is, and I’ll tell you whether I’m prepared to help you.”

  Holly looked at her. “I’m a friend of Daniele’s,” she said simply.

  “I . . . I . . .” Tataro blinked. “How is he?”

  “Still destroyed by what you did to him.” There seemed little point in sugaring the pill.

  Another pause. “Of all the actions we carried out . . . That one was a disaster from first to last.”

  “In what way?”

  “You have to understand, we thought of ourselves as disciplined revolutionaries, not criminals. We kidnapped business executives, judges, NATO generals – the class enemy. If the ransom was paid within the stated time, the hostage was returned alive. If it wasn’t, he was killed. We had no reason to terrorise the general public, who mostly understood that industrialists and politicians were never going to give up their power unless they were
forced to. Freedom for the people meant death to the capitalist hegemony. Communism or destruction: that was the simple choice.”

  “So why Daniele?” Holly said, impatient with all this propaganda. “Why kidnap a seven-year-old child?”

  “At the time, our leadership was in prison and the network was being run by people who hadn’t held power before. My cell was led by a comrade called Claudio. Not his real name, of course: we all used noms de guerre. Mine was Maria.” She hesitated. “There was another comrade called Paolo. There was tension between Claudio and him . . . Sometimes they egged each other on. Like children, to see who could be the most revolutionary.

  “On paper, the Barbo family were a legitimate target. They were wealthy, aristocratic, and they’d recently acquired a large interest in Alfa Romeo cars, which up until that time had been owned by the Italian government. Alfa Romeo was an important part of our strategy. If we could unionise the factory and then radicalise the union, we would have acquired a key political lever.

  “Selling a stake to Matteo Barbo was a smart move on the government’s part. Although Matteo had been something of a playboy in his youth, he strongly favoured left-leaning, progressive industrial relations, and he was popular with the workers. Claudio argued that by kidnapping Barbo’s son, we would force him to sell his stake in order to raise the ransom.”

  “But it didn’t work out like that?”

  “Right from the start, everything was fucked up. Don’t get me wrong: I’d killed people by that time, many people. Sometimes violence is necessary. But this was a child. A frightened child. And he was . . . vulnerable, that much was obvious. Not autistic, like they later claimed in court, just a bit unusual. I talked to him a lot, actually. I suppose I wanted him to know that we weren’t cruel, only determined, that we had reasons for what we did. And as the weeks went on and the ransom still wasn’t paid, I tried to keep him distracted.”

  “I don’t imagine that was easy, given the circumstances,” Holly said drily.

  “It was, actually. We both liked number games – magic squares and so on.” Seeing that Holly didn’t understand, Tataro held out her hand for Holly’s pen and drew on a page from her notebook. “If you add any column, row, or diagonal of the square, they all come to the same number. He loved that . . . he started seeing how big he could make his squares so that they still had the same properties. I told him Benjamin Franklin, the US president, once devised a square with sixty-four boxes, and Daniele spent days trying to beat that. Or we’d play age riddles. You know: ‘In fifteen years’ time I will be the square of my age fifteen years ago. How old am I now?’” She smiled at the memory.

  “Very nice. Who gave the order to mutilate him?” Holly asked coldly.

  There was the briefest of pauses. “It got very difficult. We knew it was only a matter of time before the police located us. But the parents still wouldn’t pay . . . We had to do something to step up the pressure on them.”

  “But who gave the order?” Holly persisted. “And who carried it out?”

  “The tensions within the group had got worse by then. Claudio was panicking, Paolo was saying that we had to have a new plan. And there were rows – stupid rows about things that shouldn’t have mattered.” For the first time, Tataro looked embarrassed.

  “What sort of things? Oh,” Holly said, understanding. “You.”

  Tataro nodded. “Claudio was my lover for almost a year before Paolo came along. It wasn’t exactly a normal situation. Going outside of the group for a partner was considered a security risk. Somehow, I came to feel it was my duty to sleep with both of them. I think that contributed to the arguments about what to do with the boy.”

  “And?” Holly asked quietly. “Who did it?”

  “I wasn’t there. I was so disgusted by the idea that I walked out when they started discussing it.” She shook her head. “Perhaps if I’d stayed . . . But I doubt it would have made any difference by then.”

  “What happened to them both?”

  “Claudio was killed by Italian Special Forces when they rescued Daniele. Paolo managed to escape. I did too for a while, but in the end I was betrayed . . . All the other members of our group were killed or captured during the raid. Of course we refused our lawyers, on the grounds that they’d been appointed by the state. Not surprisingly, the trials didn’t go too well for us. We all got life imprisonment.”

  “What if I told you that your group had been infiltrated by the CIA?” Holly said, watching her intently. “Would that surprise you?”

  Tataro shook her head. “I came to the same conclusion myself, a long time ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I said, the kidnap was misconceived from start to finish. It discredited us in the eyes of the workers – it made us look like criminals, no better than the ’Ndrangheta gang who’d kidnapped the Getty boy a few years earlier. By extension, it discredited the whole radical left. Who benefited? Not us, that’s for sure.”

  “You seem very relaxed about it,” Holly said. “I suppose you think that if the CIA were involved, it lessens your own responsibility.”

  “Don’t tell me what I think,” Carole Tataro snapped. “I’ve paid for my actions. I’ve spent my life locked up with child killers, because what my comrades did to that boy disgusts even the people who are sent to places like this.” She gestured around her. “You see how small this room is? I share a space the same size with two other women, neither of whom speak Italian. We take it in turns to stand up, and when they shit I can hear every sound. That’s been my life. I accept it’s what I deserve. But don’t tell me that I’m any worse than those on the other side of the political spectrum.”

  Holly waited a moment. “So who was the double agent, then? Paolo or Claudio?”

  Tataro laughed hollowly. “Isn’t it obvious? It must have been the one who got away. The one who went on to kidnap Aldo Moro. The one I fell in love with, and who told the security services where I would be hiding. Paolo.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The Ala Napoleonica had one of the best locations of any building in Venice, in the central section of the three enclosed sides of Piazza San Marco. The colonnades on either side had originally been built to frame the façade of San Giminia, one of Venice’s most beautiful Renaissance churches. Napoleon had it demolished partly because he thought there were too many churches in Venice, but also because he wanted to bring the Empress Josephine to the city, and he knew she would expect a ballroom.

  As she approached the palace steps, Kat wondered at the self-confidence that could lead a man to take such big decisions, and at such speed. Had it been megalomania, ruthlessness, or a bit of both? Napoleon’s army occupied Venice for less than nine years, yet during that time the city had changed utterly. Canals had been paved over to make boulevards, whole districts were pulled down to make formal gardens, the political stranglehold of the Venetian aristocracy was destroyed, and dozens of convents and monasteries were dissolved and turned into hospitals, prisons and administrative offices. The Carabinieri’s own headquarters at Campo San Zaccaria was one such former convent, just one example of how, in Venice, the past and the present were always intertwined.

  Normally, Kat wasn’t a great fan of Piazza San Marco. Napoleon had famously called it “the drawing room of Europe”, but these days it usually felt more like Europe’s sixth-form common room, so crammed was it with groups of bored, milling schoolkids, along with the hawkers who sold them hair braids, glow-in-the-dark yo-yos, fake tattoos, and all the other tat indispensable to an educational visit to her city. Tonight, though, even she had to admit that it was looking spectacular. For the grand reopening of the Imperial Apartments someone had arranged for a double line of flaming torches to snake through the square, guiding the guests towards their destination. On one side an orchestra played, and a red carpet flickered beneath the flashbulbs of half a dozen paparazzi.

  She was wearing her latest acquisition for the occasion, a dress by the Venetian designer Laura Biagiotti; a k
nee-length sheath of diaphanous cotton that could be paired with a belt for elegance or left to flow free for a more sensual effect. Tonight she was wearing it with a belt, along with a matching clutch bag from Malefatte, the leather goods cooperative based in the women’s prison. But compared with the other women on the red carpet, she was underdressed. Many were wearing ball gowns. Some were masked; all were plastered in jewels that undoubtedly cost more than she earned in a year. On the other hand, most were at least a decade older than her, the middle-aged men on whose arms they hung exuding the sleek self-importance of the powerful. Tonight, Venice’s moneyed classes had come out to see and be seen.

  She walked up the grand staircase, an overwrought confection of balusters, pilasters and scenes from ancient history; all of which, she couldn’t help noticing, featured famous military triumphs. Doubtless the intention had been to flatter the French conqueror. At the top, in the throne room, she accepted a glass of prosecco from a uniformed waiter. The bottle bore the flamboyant swirling T that marked it out as Tignelli’s own brand. It was excellent, the bubbles fine and soft, the nose with a pronounced aroma of peaches and honeysuckle.

  She was still looking around, trying to fit names to faces, when a handbell was rung and the waiters began urging the guests into the ballroom. A man with a mop of grey hair stepped onto a dais and started to speak, introducing himself as the professor in charge of the restoration and thanking the sponsors for making the project possible. He saved Count Tignelli’s name until last, gesturing dramatically into the crowd as he made the scale of his gratitude clear. Other guests parted to clear a space around the stocky figure of their benefactor, who acknowledged their applause with a slight bow.

  “Napoleon, it is fair to say, will always be a controversial figure in Venice,” the professor continued. “Yet his brief tenure here coincided with a necessary rebirth. He dredged the canals and rebuilt the port; he swept away a corrupt, enfeebled government and the stultifying effects of the Church; he drove out the gypsies and beggars who were living like parasites off the ordinary people. Above all, he recognised that this part of northern Italy was a kingdom unto itself, distinct from the rest of the Italian peninsula.”