Just One Evil Act

continue.

He did, he told her. He wasn’t about to go Fanucci’s route. He wanted to know it all, inside and out, before he made his next move. To Salvatore, indagato meant more than just naming a suspect. Indagato meant that the investigators were certain they had their man.

PISA

TUSCANY

In the end, it turned out that flying into Pisa was the easiest. Barbara could have flown into one of the regional airports, utilising one of the many budget airlines that appeared to pop up every month or so, but she wanted the peace of mind that came with a brand-name airline unlikely to lose her limited baggage and an airport labelled with the word international.

When she landed in Italy, she was assaulted by the foreign experience. People shouted at one another incomprehensibly, signs made announcements in a language she couldn’t read, and—once she worked her way through customs and baggage claim—scores of tour guides awaited their charges, while jostling crowds appeared to be bargaining with illegal taxi drivers offering quick trips to the Leaning Tower.

Luckily, she didn’t need to do anything other than look for her ride to Lucca, and he was as easy to spot as an albino chimpanzee at the zoo. Despite being in Italy—the veritable home of la moda —Mitchell Corsico was garbed as usual. He’d eschewed the fringed jacket—probably because of the heat—but the rest of him was vintage Wild West. For her part, Barbara had set aside slogan-bearing tee-shirts in favour of tank tops, anticipating exactly what she found the moment they stepped from the arrivals hall: blistering heat.

Mitch was on his mobile when Barbara glimpsed him among the hordes. He continued on his mobile as he led her to his hire car. Barbara caught only snatches of his conversation as she hauled her duffel along behind him. It was mostly along the lines of “Yeah . . . Yeah . . . The interview’s coming . . . Hey, it’s in the diary, Rod. What more can I say?” When he ended the call, he said, “Lard arse,” in apparent reference to his editor. At that point, they’d reached the side of a Lancia, and Barbara was sweating profusely.

She squinted in the bright sunlight and muttered, “What’s the sodding temperature in this place?”

Mitchell gave her a look. “Get a grip, Barb. It’s not even summer.”

Their route to Lucca consisted of a terrifying drive on the autostrada, where speed limits appeared to be mere suggestions that the Italian drivers chose to ignore. Corsico seemed to be in his element. Any faster, Barbara reckoned, and they’d be airborne.

As he drove, he informed her that the first story had run in The Source that morning, in case she hadn’t had time to pick up a copy at the airport. He’d moulded it, he said, along lines that would generate a dozen follow-up stories. He hoped she appreciated that, by the way.

“What’s that mean, exactly?” Barbara asked him. “What sort of follow-up stories’re we talking about? How’d you write the first one?”

He glanced at her. Someone passed them in a blur of silver. He increased the Lancia’s speed and wove round a lorry. Barbara increased her grip on the side of her seat. He said, “The usual format, Barb. ‘This E. coli situation is either a cover-up by the Italians to avoid tanking their economy while the source is being searched out among all the products they sell, or it’s a deliberate poisoning by a suspect unnamed . . . with an upcoming charge of murder in sight. Stay tuned.’”

“As long as you keep away from Azhar.”

He looked at her, his expression disbelieving. “I’m on a story. If he’s part of it, he’s part of it, and I’m putting him into it. Let’s get something straight, you and me, now we’re working hand in hand: You don’t climb into bed with a journalist and expect him not to want to feed the beast.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors,” she informed him. “I’d think that’s a very bad thing for a writer. Or am I stretching things to actually call you a writer? And who said we’re working hand in hand?”

“We’re on the same side.”

“Doesn’t sound like that to me.”

“We both want to get to the truth. And anyway, like I said, Azhar’s name’s already come up.”

“I made it bloody well clear—”

“You can’t be thinking Rod Aronson would let me hang round Lucca on the strength of some pregnant Englishwoman keeling over in Tuscany. The UK reader needs a hell of a bigger hook than that.”

“And what? Azhar’s become the hook? Goddamn it, Mitchell—”

“He’s part of the story, like it or not, darling. For all I know, he probably is the story. Bloody hell, Barb, you should be glad I’m not going after the kid.”

She grabbed his arm, digging her fingers into it. “You stay away from Hadiyyah.”

He shook her off. “Quit interfering with the driver. We get in a crash and we’re the next story. And anyway, all I’ve done so far is go the route of ‘By the way, our good professor of microbiology is assisting the police with their enquiries, and we all know what that means, don’t we? Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.’ Rod wants an interview with the bloke. You’re going to be my route to that.”

“I’ve given you what you’re getting from me,” she told him. “Azhar’s not on the table. I’ve told you that from the very first.”

“Look. I thought you wanted me here to get to the truth.”

“So get to the truth,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Azhar.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

The outskirts of Lucca made it seem like any other overdeveloped place in any other country in the world. Aside from the fact that the street signs and advertisements were in Italian, everything else was fairly standard. The streets held apartment buildings, inexpensive hotels, tourist restaurants, takeaway food shops, assorted boutiques, and pizzerias. There was a great deal of traffic and congestion. Women with pushchairs took up too much room on the pavements, and adolescents who should have been in school were instead hanging about engaged in the three activities common to adolescents nearly everywhere: texting, smoking, and chatting away on mobile phones. Their hairstyles were different—far more elaborate and excessively gelled—but other than that they were the same. It was only when the centre of the town was reached that Lucca suddenly became unique.

Barbara had never seen anything like its wall, encircling the oldest part of the town like a medieval rampart. She’d been to York, but this was different, from the enormous grassed-in ditch that lay before it and could at one time have done duty as a moat, to the roadway atop it. Mitch Corsico drove them round it on a shady boulevard whose purpose seemed to be to show the wall to its best advantage. Half of the way round, however, he made a quarter circle in a huge piazza and turned into a short length of roadway that took them beneath and through one of the wall’s huge gates.

Here, there was another piazza. Here, they vied with tourist buses debouching elderly people in Bermuda shorts, sun hats, sandals, and black socks. Near a shop hiring bicycles, they found a parking bay. Mitch climbed out of the car with “It’s this way,” and he left her to wrestle with her duffel once more.

She thought she’d packed light, but as she struggled to keep up with him, Barbara gave serious thought to dumping everything in the nearest wheelie bin. There was no wheelie bin in sight, though, so she was left heaving and dragging the thing as Mitchell led her out of the piazza, past a church—“First of hundreds, believe me”—and into a throng of people who appeared to comprise tourists, students, housewives, and nuns. Lots of nuns.

Thankfully, she wasn’t in Mitch’s wake for long on this narrow thoroughfare. Ahead of her, she saw him make a turn into another street, and when she finally got there, it was to find him leaning against the wall of a car’s-width tunnel. This tunnel, she saw, led into yet another large piazza upon which a merciless sun was blazing.

She thought he was taking a rest in the shade or perhaps even waiting to offer her help. Instead, when she reached him with her heart pounding and sweat dribbling into her eyes, he said, “Don’t travel much, eh? Basic rule, Barb. One change of clothes.”

He ducked through the tunnel, then, and into the piazza. It was circular, she saw, and Mitch told her it was the town’s ancient amphitheatre. Shops, cafes, and habitations formed its perimeter. In the bright light of the day, Barbara wanted to head for the nearest shade to buy something very cold and very wet. In fact, that was what she