The Abomination Page 9

  “But this is a hospital, isn’t it? I suppose I’m a little surprised to hear a medical person talking in such terms.”

  A hint of a smile creased the corners of his eyes. “The dividing line between the spiritual and the medical is sometimes less clear cut than my purely medically trained colleagues would have you believe. Whether you use the term ‘psychosis’ or ‘possession’, for instance, is often more a matter of your training than any real difference in the symptoms you’re describing. In earlier times, of course, prayer was often the only remedy for such illnesses. But in the modern age, we have powerful pharmacological treatments too. So here at the Institute we use both approaches – pharmaceutical interventions and spiritual ones, working in combination. Quite literally, the best of both worlds.”

  “Interesting,” Kat said, not wanting to get drawn into a general discussion about the Institute. “But it’s your specific expertise with the occult that brings me here today. I’m told you might be able to identify some of these.” Opening her file, she took out Hapadi’s photographs showing the symbols daubed around the Poveglia crime scene.

  Father Uriel scanned the images one by one. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Some of these are very familiar to me.” He pointed. “This one is the upturned cross, obviously. It signals to Satan that he’s being welcomed to a blasphemous space.” He indicated another. “This is the Horned God, a symbol representing the Evil One. And the entwined double S here represents the Salute and the Scourge, a symbol of obedience to evil.”

  “So there’s absolutely no doubt in your mind that these symbols are sacrilegious?”

  “None whatsoever.” He handed the photographs back quickly, as if unwilling to handle them any longer than was absolutely necessary.

  “What about these?” She pointed to two of the symbols he hadn’t mentioned. “They’re very similar to some tattoos we found on the victim’s body.”

  A little reluctantly, Father Uriel examined the pictures again. “Sometimes an individual cult or temple will devise its own iconography, deliberately impenetrable to outsiders,” he said with a shrug. “To record the various horrors perpetrated by an individual member, for example. In such cases, the symbols do have meanings, but they may be unfathomable to us.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, Father. You’ve been very helpful.”

  As she put the photographs away, he said, “You know, some of the older nuns here worked at Poveglia. When it was still a mental hospital, I mean.”

  “Why was it closed?” she asked curiously.

  “Somewhat unusually, I believe it was at the nuns’ own instigation. Many of them had come to believe that it was a place of great evil. According to them, there were apparitions, strange occurrences. . .” He shook his head. “It had been a lazzaretto, of course, a plague island, and there were all sorts of superstitions about it. The diocese, naturally, tried to ignore their complaints at first. Nuns can be terribly superstitious, and it’s not healthy to encourage such fears.”

  “What happened?”

  “Eventually, I understand, it was observed that something was affecting the patients – something that seemed to have no medical explanation. So the decision was taken to move them to sites such as this one, where they began to improve almost immediately.”

  “Can I ask you, Father. . .” She hesitated, unsure how to word this tactfully.

  “You want to know if I actually believe in the occult,” he said quietly. “And the answer to that is complicated, because I am both a man of God and a man of science. As a priest, I certainly believe in the Devil. But as a doctor, I believe that the terrible power the Devil exerts over certain minds stems partly from a weakness within our own natures. People embrace evil because it excites them.”

  “So symbols like the ones I showed you just now – they’re not real? Not in a literal sense?”

  “Oh, they’re real,” he assured her. “And just as prayers have an effect, so do they. I couldn’t tell you whether Poveglia is actually haunted by evil spirits, Captain. But I can tell you that it’s just the kind of place that people who wish to commit the blasphemies we’ve been discussing would be drawn to.”

  Fourteen

  HOLLY SPENT AN hour phoning different departments at Camp Darby, trying to discover where the archives from the tunnels had been taken. Eventually a staff sergeant told her that two truckloads of papers had just appeared outside his hangar without warning, and he was darned if he knew what to do with them.

  “You weren’t expecting them?”

  “No, ma’am. And I can’t find out who ordered them to be brung here, either. That happens plenty, though – stuff just arrives. My bet is, someone up your end wanted the space.”

  “And what will happen if no one tells you what to do with them?”

  “We’ll wait a couple of weeks, then recycle. US Army’s fully committed to a responsible carbon footprint. And what with all the F-16 runs and the phosphorus bombs, we’ve got a bit of catching up to do.” He chuckled at his own wit.

  “Roger that. Look, will you do me a favour, Staff Sergeant? Don’t recycle them until I can find out what’s going on?”

  “Like I say, we generally wait a couple of weeks,” he said, the shrug of indifference audible in his voice. “After that, we gotta do something.”

  She sent out emails using her secure @mail.mil address to the local CIA sections and Department of Defense stations, enquiring whether they had any interest in the Camp Ederle archives. As an afterthought, she added a request for any unclassified documents relating to Barbara Holton’s FOIA application. An auto-reply message indicated that she could expect a response within fifteen working days.

  She phoned the cell number Barbara Holton had left her. It went through to voicemail, so she left a message.

  “Ma’am, this is Second Lieutenant Boland from Caserma Ederle, updating you on the progress of your Open Government application. I regret that I will need an extension of time, as provided for under the legislation, to establish whether we have the information you requested.”

  After she put the phone down she knew she should really have wiped the whole question from her mind. There were more pressing matters to deal with now. Child and Youth Services had just sent a request for a translator to assist with a series of presentations to families of service personnel on Saying No to Narcotics. The Soldier’s Theatre needed help with local-language posters for their upcoming charity gala. The Dental Clinic was proposing to employ a local assistant and urgently wanted someone to compare Italian dental technician qualifications with American ones.

  But being Holly Boland, who was raised to make her bed neatly every morning, and who likewise preferred to square away every topic neatly in her mind before moving on to the next one, she continued to think about Barbara Holton’s FOIA request while she was performing those other duties, fascinating and important though they were.

  Fifteen

  THE SOUND OF ringing cell phones was not uncommon in the operations room, and it took Colonel Piola a few seconds to notice that this particular phone wasn’t being answered. He glanced around the room incuriously, since the ringing was somewhere nearby, but soon forgot all about it when it stopped.

  A few moments later, however, there was a shrill beep, indicating that the caller had left a voicemail.

  That, too, was easy enough to ignore. But whoever owned this particular phone had set it so that it beeped at regular intervals until the voicemail was listened to. Piola was trying to sift through the evidence they’d gathered so far in order to decide on the most urgent avenues of investigation, and the intermittent beeping was distracting. He looked around again, this time with a degree of annoyance at whichever thoughtless subordinate had left their phone behind instead of carrying it in their pocket.

  Almost immediately, his eye was caught by a flashing light on the table where the evidence from the hotel room was waiting to be logged. The phone they’d found, still inside its evidence bag, had lit up. That meant there
was a message.

  Covering the distance to the table in three quick strides, Piola picked up the phone. Without opening the bag, he touched the screen. The words “Voicemail Calling” flashed up. He held it to his ear, listening through the plastic.

  “Ma’am, this is Second Lieutenant Boland from Caserma Ederle. . .”

  Reaching for his notebook, he wrote down the name. Then he found his own phone and punched in Kat’s number.

  “Pronto?” her voice replied.

  “Kat, how far are you from Vicenza? I need you to talk to someone called Second Lieutenant Boland at Caserma Ederle.”

  Sixteen

  HOLLY BOLAND RECEIVED a call from the guardhouse saying that there was an officer of the Carabinieri asking to see her. While they escorted her unexpected visitor over, she readied a meeting room. This, she had gathered from Mike, was going to be one of her regular duties. Any complaints from the local police about American soldiers getting rowdy in local bars, or committing traffic offences, would be directed to her. It was expected that she would listen sympathetically, in the hope the Italians wouldn’t press the matter too hard. Then it could be dealt with internally. If the soldier had recently returned from deployment in a war zone, the penalties were usually light.

  She was surprised, therefore, when the officer in question turned out to be a plain-clothes detective – although, in truth, the term “plain clothes” hardly did justice to the casually elegant attire of the raven-haired young woman who now took a seat across from her. She was more surprised still to be asked whether the name Barbara Holton meant anything to her.

  She explained that Barbara Holton had come to her with a Freedom of Information request.

  “Concerning?”

  “I would need her permission before I answer that, ma’am. FOIA requests are confidential.”

  Kat Tapo raised an elegant eyebrow. “You should know that Barbara Holton is dead. We believe the bullet that killed her may have come from an American-designed weapon. We’re treating it as murder.”

  For a moment the stark word hung in the air.

  “Even so, the application is still confidential. Smythson vs State Department, 2009,” Holly added, almost apologetically.

  Kat considered. “In that case, I’d like to see the information you would have provided to Signora Holton in response to her request,” she said. “It will help to establish whether the enquiry had any bearing on her murder.”

  Second Lieutenant Boland looked even more discomfited. “That won’t be possible either, ma’am. The archives relating to Ms Holton’s request are no longer held on this site.”

  Again an elegant eyebrow inched upwards. “They’ve been got rid of?”

  “The archives were scheduled for relocation, yes.”

  “How convenient. Congratulations, Second Lieutenant. You appear to have dealt with Signora Holton’s request just as efficiently as the Italian Army would have done.” Kat smiled, hoping to build a rapport with the American, but the Second Lieutenant didn’t reciprocate.

  “The request and the relocation were in no way connected,” she said stiffly.

  “If you say so. Anyway, how shall we proceed?”

  “In what respect?”

  “I’m an officer of the Carabinieri, you’re an officer of the US Army. We’re allies – colleagues – expected by our respective commanders to cooperate as fully as possible. Yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “And I need to establish whether Barbara Holton’s visit here had any possible bearing on her murder. Let’s say you didn’t actually show me that Freedom of Information request, but simply left it on the table here, perhaps while you went to get me some water . . . I’m very good at reading upside down. Particularly if I’m the only person in the room. And then I could leave here reassured that we’re not wasting resources on an irrelevant line of enquiry.”

  “That would still be a breach of confidentiality, ma’am,” Holly said, taken aback.

  Kat sighed and crossed one leg over the other. Her foot swung, scything the air with impatience. Both the shoe and the skirt – and the leg that connected them – were immaculate. Holly found herself envying the other woman’s dress sense, along with the opportunity she had to display it. The US Army hadn’t even gotten around to designing separate fatigues for women, although they were always promising them.

  “Of course,” Holly added, “if there is any evidence at all that connects your investigation to Caserma Ederle, and you provide us with it, we will investigate it ourselves to the very best of our ability.” Determined not to be intimidated, she held the Italian’s gaze, although she suspected she wasn’t quite matching the scorn that Captain Tapo appeared to be able to convey with a simple curl of her upper lip.

  “On my way here today,” Kat said, “I had someone look up the record of investigations carried out by the US Army on the Carabinieri’s behalf here at Ederle. It was interesting. But hardly encouraging.” She leant forward and stabbed the table with the ends of two fingers for emphasis. “In the last five years, there have been twenty-four investigations. And to date, the number of convictions in Italian courts stands at zero. I assume you know about the cable-car deaths at Cermis?”

  Wrong-footed by the sudden change of subject, Holly shook her head.

  “A US Military jet was flying through the mountains just north of here on a training mission. Except that the pilot of this particular jet had made a bet, on video, that he could fly his plane between the two lines of the cable car that cross the valley. He sliced one of the cables with his wingtip and the car plummeted sixty feet to the ground. The occupants died, all twenty of them. The US Army refused to hand over the aircrew, saying they’d be investigated and tried in a military court. Guess what? They were acquitted, every single one. Even the pilot. Over a decade later, the Italian warrants for their arrest are still outstanding.”

  Holly couldn’t take her eyes off Captain Tapo’s hands, which throughout this speech had been conducting a separate, even more bravura performance of their own, as if the Captain were a mime artist juggling a dozen invisible balls at the same time.

  “Ma’am, I’m not authorised to comment on that particular—”

  “Of course you’re not. Or on the sniper with post-traumatic stress disorder who decided to hone his skills on civilians here in Vicenza. Or the man who was beaten to death in a bar in Venice because he dared to challenge three GIs who were hitting on his girlfriend. And you wonder why people object to the fact that you’re doubling this base in size! Ten thousand US personnel in the Veneto alone, twenty thousand in all Italy. You know what? In any other country, that would be considered a good size for an army of occupation.”

  There was silence. Then Holly said, “Ah, getting back to this FOIA request. . .”

  “Forget it,” Capitano Tapo said with magnificent disdain. “You’re not going to do anything. Why should you? It’s only a dead civilian, after all.”

  Irked as much by the other woman’s clothes as her haughty manner, Holly said, “I can tell you that the FOIA request relates to a General Dragan Korovik and his command during the Bosnian war – a period for which we no longer hold records here. Barbara Holton ran a website called Women Under War. She made the request in that capacity. And that is the total extent of her involvement with this post.”

  Just for a second there was a glint of triumph in the captain’s dark eyes. “That’s what I had assumed,” Kat said. “Thank you for your help, Lieutenant. It makes things so much easier when we cooperate, doesn’t it?”

  Seventeen

  AS SHE WAS escorted back to the Camp Ederle guardhouse, Kat found herself pleased with the way the interview had gone. She’d achieved rather more than she’d expected to, in that getting any information at all out of the US Army was notoriously difficult. Playing second fiddle to Piola was all very well, but it was nice to handle things herself once in a while.

  And it had been satisfying to provoke the little American mouse. She k
new that a high proportion of the women in the US Army must be lesbians, but even so she couldn’t see why on earth they would put up with wearing those appalling, sexless camouflage suits all the time, even when they were just sitting in an office being unhelpful and there was nothing to be camouflaged against. It would make more sense, she thought, if Second Lieutenant Boland had a desk, a box file and a grey wall printed on her fatigues. Then she’d be almost invisible.

  Pleased with this observation, which she was sure would make Colonel Piola smile if she managed to work it into her report later, she turned to the carabiniere who was escorting her back to the guardhouse. “Do you always do this?”

  “What, ma’am?”

  “Escort visitors off and on the site.”

  The carabiniere shrugged gloomily. “At least twenty times a day. It’s all part of the pretence that this is still Italian territory. When the truth is, the Yankees do what the hell they like. Our comandante is nominally in charge of the whole camp, you know that? And all they use him for is to wheel him out in his dress uniform when they give each other medals. God knows who I offended to get this posting.”

  A thought struck Kat. “Do you keep records? Of all the visitors, I mean?”

  “In a manner of speaking. That is, we write down their names and the time. There’s not much else to do, frankly.”

  “Would you still have the records from 1995?”

  “If you’d asked me that a few months ago, I’d have been able to say yes.”

  “Why? What happened after that?”

  “We had a fire at the warehouse where the Carabinieri records are kept. Not just these, but everything relating to the whole province.” He shrugged. “People are blaming the Mafia.”

  “People blame the Mafia for everything.”

  “True, but who else could it be?”

  “Sure,” Kat said, remembering what the mouse had said. A period for which we no longer hold records here. So now no one at Ederle had any paperwork relating to that period. But perhaps that wasn’t surprising, given how long ago it had been.