When I stopped on my way through the foyer to ask Reception if my old mate Adel was around, I got the same answer I’d been given on the phone.
I summoned up my biggest shit-eating grin. ‘He told me he’d be here quite often over the summer. He’ll be back any day now, right?’
The guy behind the desk was as warm and friendly as TripAdvisor could have wished for, but he wasn’t about to give me access to the future plans of the Romeo’s elite guest list either.
It was time for me to rejoin Planet Earth.
I crossed Via Cristoforo Colombo and turned left. It didn’t take long to move from the Gucci end of town to where the real people hung out. A few were wrapped in minging old blankets, sleeping bags and sheets of cardboard up against the wire. A bunch of others sheltered in the lee of one of the storage depots. The woman running the flower stall close by didn’t give them a second glance. She’d seen it all before.
I remembered having a chat with a lad in the 82nd Airborne who’d once been a Los Angeles street cop in South Central. He told me that crimes whose victims were hookers or crack addicts or hopheads – or simply below the breadline – were classified as NHI. No Humans Involved. These sad fuckers would come under that heading for sure.
I didn’t expect any of them to have come in off the boats from Africa or Eastern Europe. The asylum seekers would either be locked up in an immigration facility, or legging it north as fast and invisibly as they possibly could. But maybe they could tell me if Minerva rang any bells, or if anything unusual had been happening around there.
I stopped by the second group of dossers I came to and asked if any of them spoke English. A few five-euro notes brought forward a young guy with zits, bad hair and a piercing who nodded a lot and said, ‘Si, si, si …’ but his version of English turned out to be nowhere near the same as mine. Whatever had come out of the bottle he was clutching was probably to blame.
A few of his mates clustered around me, but only because they liked the look of the euros. They stank of piss and none of them had anything useful to say in any language.
I backed off and carried on past a row of warehouses and several stacks of empty containers, until I reached where the real security began – five-metre-high railings topped with razor wire, which separated nosy fuckers like me from the working parts.
I paralleled it as far as the boat I’d spotted from the Romeo, with ‘NETTUNO’ painted across its side. When I was near enough to be able to read the lettering on its arse end as well, I could see it wasn’t Minerva. This one was Juno. But I decided to get as close as I could and try to grab a word with one of the crew.
Juno was moored beneath three cranes mounted on a giant mobile gantry. There was a lot of very energetic unloading going on. I couldn’t believe how many containers you could fit on one of those things. So it took a while for me to grab anybody’s attention. And even when I did, I was given the finger the first two times.
Ten minutes later another couple of guys came down the gangway. They were younger and bouncier than the ones who’d exited earlier. Judging by their banter, they seemed to be more in the mood for a chat. I gave them a wave and they wandered over to my stretch of railing.
‘Parliamo inglese?’ It was pretty much the only Italian I knew.
One of them shrugged his shoulders and looked embarrassed but the other nodded. ‘Sure. Who doesn’t?’ His accent carried more than a hint of American. Maybe he’d spent some time with the US Navy, or watched a load of Hollywood movies.
‘I’m on the lookout for a mate of mine who’s working on one of your boats.’
‘Ships.’
‘What?’
‘We call them ships.’
Fair one. I remembered telling Stefan we called bullets rounds. ‘Whatever. Not Juno. Minerva.’
His eyes lit up. ‘Lucky guy. She’s, like, awesome. Not massive, like some of those Maersk monsters, but the newest ship in the fleet. Word is she’s on her way back from the Bosphorus, along with Diana and Vesta.’ He grinned. ‘Kind of funny naming container vessels after Roman goddesses, don’t you think? I mean, they’re cool, but you wouldn’t call them beautiful.’
‘Will she park right here?’ I indicated Juno’s slot.
He shook his head. ‘Anything from the east goes east. Brindisi, I guess. Bari, maybe. Head Office would tell you.’
I was staying well away from there. For now, anyway. I needed to keep my powder dry.
I thanked him and turned to leave.
‘It’s “berth”, by the way.’ He couldn’t resist correcting me again. ‘She doesn’t park, she berths.’
I went back through the first available hole in the chain-link fence and took a wide loop to the parking garage, running through the usual anti-surveillance drills en route. The hairs were still in place on the Seat so I picked up my day sack and headed for the RV with Luca.
3
I walked up the steps to the yellow church’s entrance. They gave me a vantage-point diagonally opposite my target. I scanned the length of the street while appearing to concentrate hard on the laminated cards that introduced tourists to the history of the basilica and the paediatric hospital that were part of the complex. Back in the day there’d been an orphanage too.
I gave it ten minutes. No one seemed to be paying me too much attention, or bending over backwards to avoid looking at me at all.
A young couple was pointing at stuff in the window of Luca’s mate’s store and I joined them as they went inside. I spent some more time trying to decide which pillow to go for, then made my selection and took it to the till. As soon as the lad behind the counter heard my voice, he motioned me towards the back office.
I caught a stream of turbocharged Italian when I was still a couple of paces away from the door. The room was filled, floor to ceiling, with ledgers and fabric samples, some on wire hangers, some just piled on whichever work surface was nearest. A guy in his late thirties with tortoise-shell glasses on the top of his head sat facing me, waffling into a mobile.
Luca’s dark hair was longer than it had been when his Il Diavolo mugshot was taken. It was almost shoulder-length. He wore a brown moleskin jacket, immaculate jeans and a crisp white shirt. His feet were up on the only desk, and a laptop open on his knees. There was no air-con in here, and not much air, but he looked like he never broke sweat.
I had, big-time. I took off the baseball cap and wiped a small river of it off my forehead.
He waved me towards one of the two remaining chairs without pausing for breath. After a lot of ciaos and one or two bellos he pressed the red button, slid the laptop and the phone on to the table beside him and swung his feet to the floor.
‘You must be Nico.’
He sprang up, gave me the world’s warmest handshake and clapped me on the shoulder. Close up, his cheekbones and chin looked like they’d been carved out of granite, then polished, and his piercing blue eyes missed nothing. ‘All clear?’
‘Yup.’ I nodded. ‘I stopped by the church to make sure.’
‘Ah, yes. The Santissima Annunziata. Did you see the infamous ruota?’
‘The revolving basket in the wall? I just read about it. Is that shit for real?’
‘Sure. Desperate mothers used to put their babies in it. The nuns plucked them out once they were inside, washed them, labelled them, baptized them. And saved their souls, of course.’
‘Where I come from, they just dumped kids they didn’t want in carrier bags or wheelie-bins and did a runner.’
He chuckled, not knowing that I was speaking from personal experience. ‘They had to close it down when people started forcing their unwanted teenagers into the basket as well.’