Just One Evil Act

the nubs by the end of their confab.

They were meeting in Wapping at Emily’s suggestion. With what they were up to, she had insisted, they could no longer risk any location where the cops had shown their faces and might do so again or any other location in a public place. That left her flat. Hence their presence in a conversation grouping of low-slung leather furniture surrounding an even lower glass-topped coffee table, all of it overlooking the river. She’d placed a stainless steel coffee service on this, along with cups and a plate of bakery items supplied by Bryan. He—Dwayne—was enjoying an apricot-filled croissant and meditating on how to score an apple tart next, knowing that Emily wasn’t about to touch any of it.

Dwayne was also aware of the fact that Emily’s insistence upon meeting elsewhere had to do with the disintegrating nature of the little trinity of malefactors that they comprised. She wouldn’t trust him not to document their every word in some fashion in his office, and she wouldn’t trust Bryan Smythe not to do the same in his palace in South Hackney. Here in Wapping she had some semblance of control. Dwayne had decided to give her that.

Their purpose in meeting was to make certain they were all on the same page, in the same loop, and dancing the same dance when it came to what they had begun referring to as the Italian Job. Much of what was being done was being done by Bryan, so he had the floor. Despite being miles away from anyone who would have been remotely interested in what they had to say to one another, the three of them hunched round the coffee table, speaking in murmurs and looking at what documents Bryan had generated in order to spot any weaknesses in them.

What Bryan Smythe had created, with the participation of hackers and insiders whom he knew by the dozens, was the necessary trail, which illustrated the veracity in the claims Doughty had made and was continuing to make about one Michelangelo Di Massimo. Thus, for their delectation, he was presenting to them the invoices that showed all the payments that had been made to Di Massimo for his ostensibly brief search for Angelina Upman and her daughter in Pisa, Italy. Additionally, however, they were examining the documents that would allegedly prove that—having reported his failure to find the missing people while all the time knowing where they were—Di Massimo had begun moving sums of money from his own account to Roberto Squali’s account in supposed payment for Squali’s planning and kidnapping of the child. Thus actual bank transactions from London to Pisa proved that Doughty had been paying small amounts for Di Massimo’s expenses—petrol, mileage, meals, et cetera—and for his hourly billing, while Smythe-created bank transactions from Pisa to Lucca looked as if Di Massimo had been paying large amounts to Squali for something questionable about which, alas and despite anything Di Massimo might be saying, Doughty knew nothing at all. Bryan had gone so far as to create the receipts as well.

The reliability of this information, of course, depended upon the Italian coppers not delving into too many layers of the British banking system or any British system, for that matter. For of course there were backups, counter-backups, and massive storage systems in hundreds of locations. But Doughty et al. were depending upon the general incompetence and known corruptibility of all Mediterranean countries when it came to complicated legal, political, and technological issues. This, they reckoned, would allow the team of Cass-Smythe-Doughty to carry the day.

The Di Massimo Problem of the Italian Job massaged into a form that the Italian police were likely to swallow, what remained was the DS Barbara Havers Problem. The infuriating woman still had in her possession the backups that could sink all of them, and because of this, she had to be dealt with. This was more difficult but not impossible: Sums matching what Di Massimo had transferred to Squali were shown to have been earlier wired from the account of one Barbara Havers to the account of Michelangelo Di Massimo. And sums matching this amount were shown to have been wired from the account of Taymullah Azhar to the account of Barbara Havers in advance of that movement. Thus, Barbara Havers would soon discover that she was now complicit in the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman.

Wasn’t techno-wizardry incredible, mate?

13 May

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Bah! was Salvatore’s reaction when the packet of information from London arrived on his desk. It was—merda!—entirely in English. But Salvatore recognised the name repeated on nearly every sheet: Michelangelo Di Massimo.

Salvatore knew he was meant to turn this material over to Nicodemo Triglia. Nicodemo was, after all, in charge of all matters relating to the kidnapping enquiry. As it was, though, he decided to hold on to it until he better understood its contents. For this, he needed an English speaker who had nothing to gain from reporting Salvatore Lo Bianco’s activities to il Pubblico Ministero for personal gain. That left out everyone associated with the police. Remaining, once again, was Birgit.

His ex-wife would not allow him at her house, she told him briskly when he phoned. He couldn’t blame her. Just as she had no wish for Bianca and Marco to see his beaten face, so also did he not wish it. They agreed to meet across the street from Scuola Dante Alighieri. There, a children’s park contained benches for their parents as well as swings, slides, roundabouts, and such, and Birgit would wait for him on one of those benches. He was to make certain that their children were fully enclosed in the embrace of the scuola before he arrived, chiaro?

Chiaro, he assured her.

He found her on the bench farthest from the school, shaded by a large sycamore tree. Nearby, two women with toddlers in pushchairs sat on opposite ends of a bench in the pleasant sunlight, smoking and speaking on their mobile phones. Their children dozed in the warm morning air.

Salvatore walked to join his ex-wife. He eased himself onto the bench. He’d wrapped his chest tightly with elastic bandages, and while they did something for the pain in his ribs, they constricted his movement and made his breathing shallow.

“How is it?” she asked. “You look even worse.” She shook a cigarette from a pack and offered him one. He thought the taste would be nice and the nicotine nicer. But he didn’t believe his lungs could handle the experience.

“It’s the bruising,” he replied. “It has to go purple first, then yellow. I’m fine.”

She tutted. “You should have reported him, Salvatore.”

“To whom? To himself?”

She lit her cigarette. “Then you should beat him senseless when you have the chance. What’s Marco to think if his own father won’t defend himself when he is set upon?”

There was no good answer to this question, and after their years of marriage, Salvatore liked to think he was wise enough not to engage Birgit in these sorts of vague philosophical debates. So from a manila envelope he took the report and he handed it to her. He understood the bank statements, the receipts, and the telephone records, of course, he informed Birgit. It was the larger reports he needed her help in translating.

“You need to work on your English,” she told him with a scowl. “How you’ve got this far without more than one language . . . And don’t tell me that at least you have French, Salvatore. I remember rescuing you from trying to speak to the waiters in Nice.” She began to read.

For some minutes she did this in silence. He watched one of the toddlers struggling to get out of his pushchair as the poor child’s mother continued her chat on her mobile phone. The other woman had ended her conversation, but she’d promptly begun texting and her child went ignored. Salvatore sighed and silently cursed modern life.

Birgit flicked ash from her cigarette, flipped the page, continued reading, made a few hmphs, gave a few nods, and looked up at him. “This is all from a man called Dwayne Doughty,” she said, inclining her head at the document, “sent to you as directed by an officer of New Scotland Yard. This Doughty gives you an account of hiring Michelangelo Di Massimo to assist in the finding of a London woman who disappeared with her daughter. He tracked them himself to Pisa airport by means of their ticket