Just One Evil Act

thought they’d come to do until the journalist pointed to a mass of cacti and succulents displayed in neat ranks in front of a building and told her that was Azhar’s pensione.

“Time to pay up with the interview,” he said. And when she was about to protest, he played the best card last and with considerable skill: “I’m making the rules, Barb, and maybe you need to think about that. I c’n just leave you here to sort out who speaks English and can help you out. Or you c’n be a bit more cooperative. Before you make up your mind on that one, though, I’d like to point out that the coppers here don’t speak our lingo. On the other hand, loads of the journalists do and I’m happy to give you an introduction to one or two of them. But ’f you ask for that, you owe me. Azhar is how you’re going to pay.”

Barbara said, “No deal. I reckon I can make myself clear to anyone I want to talk to.”

Mitch smiled. He nodded towards the pensione in question. “If that’s how you want to hang the laundry,” he said.

That should have told her, of course. But Barbara wasn’t ready for Mitchell Corsico to be dictating the terms of their working relationship in Italy. So she marched across the piazza with her duffel weighing down her shoulder, and she rang the bell outside of Pensione Giardino. Its windows were shuttered against the heat, as were all of the windows in the piazza save one at which a housewife was hanging pink bedsheets on a line that extended across the front of her apartment. Every place else looked deserted, and Barbara was at the point of concluding this same thing about the pensione when its front door opened and a dark- haired pregnant woman with a winsome-looking child on her hip gazed out at Barbara.

At first, all seemed well. She noted Barbara’s duffel, smiled, and beckoned her inside. She led her into a dimly lit—and, praise God, cooler—corridor, where, on a narrow table, a candle flickered at the feet of a statue of the Virgin and a door opened into what looked like a breakfast room. She gestured that Barbara was meant to place her duffel on the tiled floor, and from a drawer in the table, she brought out a card that looked like something one was meant to fill out in order to stay in the pensione. Fine and dandy, Barbara thought, taking the card and the offered Biro. Sod you, Mitchell. There wasn’t going to be a problem at all.

She filled the card out and handed it over, and when the woman said, “E il Suo passaporto, signora?” Barbara handed it over as well. She was a little concerned when the woman walked off with it, but she didn’t take it far—just to a buffet inside the breakfast room—and when she rattled off a few sentences in an incomprehensible lingo that Barbara reckoned was Italian, it seemed as if what she was saying was something along the lines of needing the passport for a bit of time in order to do something with it, which Barbara could only hope was not sell it on the black market.

The woman then said, “Mi segua, signora,” with a smile, and hoisted her child higher on her hip. She headed towards a stairway and began to climb, and Barbara reckoned she was meant to follow. This was all well and good, but there were questions she needed to ask before she got herself established in this place. So she said, “Hang on just a minute, okay?” and when the woman turned to her with a quizzical expression, she went on with, “Taymullah Azhar is still here, right? With his daughter? Little girl about this tall with long dark hair? First thing I need to do—well, aside from having a wash—is to speak to Azhar about Hadiyyah. That’s the little girl’s name. But you probably know that, right?”

What these remarks did was unleash in the woman a veritable flood. She came back down the stairs firing on all linguistic cylinders. None of them, however, were distinguishable to Barbara.

Immediately morphing into the metaphorical deer illuminated by an oncoming car’s headlights, Barbara stared at the woman. All she could pick out from the inundation of language was non, non, non. From this, she worked out that neither Azhar nor Hadiyyah was in the pensione. Whether they were permanently gone she couldn’t tell.

Whatever her recitation meant, the woman was agitated enough to prompt Barbara to dig her mobile phone from her bag and hold it up, if only to silence her. She punched in Azhar’s number but got no joy from that once again. Wherever he was, he still wasn’t answering.

The woman said, “Mi segua, mi segua, signora. Vuole una camera, si?” She pointed up the stairs, from which Barbara took it that camera meant room in Italian and not an instrument of photography. She nodded and heaved her duffel off the floor. She trudged behind her hostess up two flights of stairs.

The room was clean and simple. Not an en suite, but what would one expect in a pensione? She got herself established in shorter order than she had previously intended—a cool shower would obviously have to wait—and she scrolled through her mobile’s address book to find the phone number of Aldo Greco.

Luckily, his secretary’s English was as good as Greco’s. The solicitor wasn’t in his office at present, Barbara was told, but if she left her number . . .

Barbara explained. She was trying to locate Taymullah Azhar, she said. She was a friend from London now here in Lucca, and she had come because for the past two days she’d been unable to reach Azhar by phone. She was dead concerned about him and, more to the point, about Hadiyyah, his daughter, and—

“Ah,” the secretary said. “Let me have Signor Greco phone you at once.”

Barbara wasn’t sure what at once meant when it came to Italy, so after she gave her number and rang off, she began to pace the room. She opened the shutters on the windows, then the windows themselves. Across the piazza, she saw Mitch Corsico seated at a cafe table beneath an umbrella, enjoying a drink of some kind. He seemed perfectly relaxed and perfectly content. He knew something, she reckoned, and he was waiting for her to learn it for herself.

This she did in short order. Her mobile rang and she snatched it up, barking into it. It was Greco.

Taymullah Azhar had been arrested, he told her, for the crime of murder. He’d been at the questura for the past two days, in and out and off and on, with the arrest coming at half past nine this morning.

God in heaven, Barbara thought. “Where’s Hadiyyah?” she demanded. “What’s happened to Hadiyyah?”

In answer, Aldo Greco said that he would meet her at his office in forty-five minutes.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

She had no choice. She had to take Corsico. He knew his way round Lucca, and even if she set off without him, he would only follow her. So when she left Pensione Giardino, she crossed the piazza to him, sat, picked up his glass, and drained it. The drink was something very sweet poured over two cubes of ice. Limoncello and soda, he said. “Go easy with that, Barb.”

Advice given too late. It hit her directly between the eyes. Her vision felt impaired by a sudden haze. She said, “Bloody hell. No wonder the vita is so dolce in this country. That’s what they do for elevenses?”

“’Course not,” he said. “They’re easier about life, but they’re not insane. I take it you got the word about Azhar?”

She felt her eyes narrow. “You knew?”

He lifted his shoulders in mock regret.

“Goddamn it, I thought we were working together.”

“So did I,” he said. “But then . . . when it came down to it . . . on the matter of interviews . . .”

“Christ. All right. So where’s Hadiyyah, then? Do you know that as well?”

He shook his head. “But it’s not like there’re dozens of possibilities. They’ve got rules to follow, and I expect none of them say nine-year-olds are left on their own to book themselves into the Ritz when their daddies get charged with murder. We need to find her, though. The sooner the better as I’ve a deadline to meet.”

Barbara flinched at the callous nature of the remark. Hadiyyah was nothing to Corsico, just another angle to the story he planned to write. She got to her feet, experienced a moment of dizziness from the drink, and waited for it to pass. She scored a handful of crisps from a basket on the table and said, “We’re heading to Via San Giorgio. Know where that is?”

He threw some coins into the otherwise empty ashtray and got to his feet. “Not far,” he told her. “This is Lucca.”