Just One Evil Act

Ottavia raised an eyebrow at the Birgit part, but she nodded. She shot a look at the detective sergeant that managed to convey an Italian woman’s incredulity that a member of the same gender would wander about thus garbed, but then she went about her business. She would find someone and she would do it quickly.

Salvatore ushered the detective sergeant into his office. He said politely, “Un caffe? ” to which Sergeant Havers went on at some length. Among her words, Salvatore caught one: time. Ah, he thought. She was telling him they did not have time. Bah, Salvatore thought. There was always time for caffe.

He went to make it after gesturing her into a seat. When he returned to his office, she’d set up her laptop in the middle of his desk and she was standing at the ready. She’d lit a cigarette, which she looked at, gestured to, and said, “Hope it’s buono with you.” Salvatore smiled, nodded, and opened a window. He indicated the caffe he’d brought her. She put two sugar cubes into it, but during the course of their meeting, she never took a sip.

As he stirred his own caffe, she said, “Ready?” with lifted eyebrows. She pointed to the laptop and smiled encouragingly. He shrugged his acceptance. She left-clicked on the laptop and gestured Salvatore over to join her at the desk.

She said, “Right. Well, watch this, Salvatore,” from which he presumed she meant guardi, so that was what he did. In short order he found himself viewing the interview of Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar that had appeared on the television news. It contained their appeal for the safety of their child and their appeal for her return. It also contained Piero Fanucci’s frothing rant about bringing the malefactor to justice one way or the other. Salvatore cooperatively watched the sequence, but he gained absolutely nothing from it. When it was over, he looked at Barbara Havers, frowning. She pointed upward with a finger and said, “Wait,” and she directed him to watch the screen where the film continued.

The sequence comprised conversation that was mostly inaudible during which people removed their microphones. Salvatore didn’t see what any of this had to do with anything. Then Lorenzo Mura appeared with a tray. On it were an array of wineglasses and plates that he began to hand out to the film crew. He then set a plate and a glass in front of Fanucci, gave the same to the reporter, and then to Taymullah Azhar. To Angelina he gave only a plate.

Barbara Havers froze the picture at that moment. She pointed to the screen and said with excitement in her voice, “There’s your E. coli, Salvatore. It’s right there in the glass he gave to Azhar.”

Salvatore heard “E. coli.” From where she was directing his attention—her finger pointing to the glass sitting in front of the professor—he understood what she meant. He was less clear when she went on, her voice so rapid that only individual names were clear to him. She said, “He intended Azhar, not Angelina, to drink the wine with the E. coli in it. But he didn’t know that Azhar’s a Muslim. He has one vice that he shouldn’t have—he smokes—but he doesn’t drink. And he does the whole Muslim bit from A to Z otherwise. The hajj, the fasting, the almsgiving, whatever. But he doesn’t drink. He probably never has. Angelina knew that, so she took the wine from him. Here, watch.” And she showed the next sequence of the film. In it, Angelina took the wine meant for Azhar and Barbara Havers said with a wink at him, “Just like bloody Hamlet, eh, mate? Mura tried to stop her from drinking it, but she thought he was just worried because she was pregnant. So what the hell was he supposed to do? I expect he could’ve leapt over the table and dashed the glass out of her hand. But it all happened too fast. She just knocked the vino back. And then? That’s what you want to ask, eh? Well, he could’ve made her sick it up, I s’pose, or he could’ve thrown himself on her mercy and told the truth, but he was never completely sure of her, was he? No bloke ever was. She loved ’em and she left ’em and sometimes she had three of ’em at once and that’s just who she was. It’s what, I expect, made her different from her sister and God knows they wanted to be different from each other. But let’s suppose he goes ahead and tells her what he’s done—sorry, darling, but you’ve just knocked back a glass of deadly bacteria—and then what? How does she view him then, eh?”

Nearly all of which Salvatore did not follow. So he was more than grateful when Ottavia appeared with the questura’s translator, a multilingual and distractingly buxom thirtyish woman showing so much cleavage—Dio, was it eight inches?—that he momentarily forgot her name. Then it came to him: Giuditta Something. She asked how she could be of assistance.

She and Barbara Havers spoke at some length. After an equally lengthy translation from Giuditta, Salvatore asked only two questions. Both were crucial to building a case if, indeed, a case even could be built on something that seemed so speculative. How? he wanted to know. And why?

Barbara Havers went with the why first: Why would Lorenzo Mura want to kill this man Taymullah Azhar? Good question, Salvatore. He, after all, had won Azhar’s woman. He had taken her from the Pakistani man. She lived with him in Italy, far from London. He had made her pregnant. They were to marry. What was the point?

“But who could ever be sure of Angelina Upman?” was the Englishwoman’s explanation. “She’d messed about with Esteban Castro while she was with Azhar. She’d left them both for Lorenzo Mura. Anyone could see there was still a bond between Azhar and her, and beyond that, they shared Hadiyyah. Once Azhar appeared on the scene, he was going to be a permanent fixture in their lives. She might have decided to return to him. Who the hell ever knew what she would do?”

“But ridding their lives of Azhar would not have made his own position with Angelina secure,” Salvatore pointed out.

Barbara listened to the translation, then said, “Sure, but he wasn’t thinking like that. He wasn’t looking at the big picture of If Not Azhar, Then Who Else Might She Leave Me For? He just wanted Azhar gone and he was doing it the best way he knew: make him good and ill and hope he keels over and there’s an end to the problem. Salvatore, when people are jealous, they don’t think straight. They just want the object of their jealousy gone. Or ruined. Or devastated. Or whatever. But what did Lorenzo Mura have? The return of the rejected lover, Hadiyyah’s dad back in Hadiyyah’s life, Hadiyyah’s dad back in Angelina’s life.”

“Men survive that sort of thing all the time.”

“But those men aren’t entangled with Angelina.”

Salvatore considered this. It was plausible, he thought. But it was only plausible. There still existed the biggest sticking point: the E. coli itself. If what the sergeant was saying was true, how had Lorenzo come to put his hands upon it? And not just E. coli but a deadly strain of it.

He spoke to the detective sergeant about this: about the how of the E. coli’s acquisition. She listened but could offer him no advice. They—along with Giuditta—meditated in silence upon this thorny issue. Then Giorgio Simione came into Salvatore’s office.

For a moment, Salvatore blinked at him in absolute incomprehension. He’d given him an assignment, but he couldn’t recall what it was, even when Giorgio said helpfully, “DARBA, Ispettore.”

Salvatore said, “Come?” and repeated the word. When Giorgio said, “DARBA Italia,” Salvatore recalled.

“It’s here in Lucca,” Giorgio told him. “It’s on the route to Montecatini.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Mitchell Corsico had to be dealt with first. He’d done her an enormous favour in getting the entire, unedited television news film via one of the contacts he’d made with the Italian journalists. He was going to want the payoff for this, and he was going to need to pass along a juicy and otherwise significant detail to the Italian who’d helped him in the first place. Quid pro quo and all that. So Barbara had to tell him something, and she had to make sure it was something good.

When she understood from the translator that Salvatore’s intention was an unannounced call upon DARBA Italia, she fully intended to accompany him there. But she couldn’t have Mitch Corsico tagging along with them. She and Salvatore needed time to pin down their information. What they didn’t need was any of it leaking to the press.

She’d left him in the cafe down the street from the questura, across the road from