xxx
He may wear Brioni but the Varese family wealth probably does not quite extend to this kind of tonnage, Selina observes as she watches Gianfranco trying not to seem too awestruck upon arrival on board the Falcon. He does his best to act uninterested in and unimpressed by the beautiful boat, but instead of making him appear cool and sophisticated, it only makes him look sulky and vaguely comical. It might, of course, be due to the fact that Bruce is meeting with him on his own territory, having invited him to Portofino earlier in the day using wording that was just polite enough to mitigate the fact that it did not invite any argument.
Sitting in the saloon with Bruce and Selina and absent-mindedly sipping the Montepulciano, he waves away Bruce's superficially conciliatory apologies for the abrupt summons to ask directly about the reason and the urgency. He has obviously understood by now that Selina is not, or not just, a business colleague and Wainwright Security employee, but has made no comment on that. Interestingly, the change in Gianfranco's demeanour from their first meeting has an opposite effect on Bruce: he looks so relaxed, it is bordering on pleased.
"I was very saddened by your father's death," Bruce answers, the quiet, level tone doing nothing to conceal the inherent reproach. "And I took it upon myself to look very briefly into the situation around Tessuti Varese to see if, perhaps, there was anything that may have driven him to take his own life. Or may have otherwise resulted in his death." The undercurrent has moved from inherent reproach to inherent menace, casually icy instead of soft and pensive. "And after I'd had that quick look, I came away with a few questions, but also with enough facts to convince me that it wasn't caused by an allergy." Gianfranco's attempt to appear calm looks not far from crumbling.
"What do you mean?" Predictable; and boring. But, she'll grant him, there aren't many options.
"One thing I found was that your father had a stake in a Chinese intermediary that, in turn, is the sole owner of a yarn producer." Clearly, Bruce has decided to start with the remotest, most innocuous charge and ratchet it up. "Which then apparently supplies yarn to Tessuti Varese through another intermediary, as I was able to verify this morning, having tracked their containers from Livorno to Castelletto. Which would be fine, except that from a cost perspective it makes little sense to involve two intermediaries in what would be a textbook case for upstream integration, even allowing for any tax benefit from the current arrangement; so there must have been other reasons why your father or his Chinese partners decided to keep it that way. Another thing I found is that the current majority owners of Tessuti Varese are ultimately owned by a holding company that also owns a pulp mill in central China that is a supplier of cardboard boxes to your father's Chinese investee and, for reasons I am happy to explain later, looks suspect on a number of fronts. And finally," Bruce sits back for the killer blow, cool, measured, impassive; an accountant from hell. He must have been a menace in the boardroom. "I have seen proof that your father's death was not from natural causes." He does not elaborate on this, the most serious charge, apparently keeping his promise to the scared doctor. "I believe that you, signor Varese, are aware of these facts, and I owe it to your father as a former client of mine to find out what exactly happened and why. Hopefully, with your help." The unsaid part is loud and clear; if you don't help, I'll find out anyway.
"I really don't know much about this, Mr Wainwright," Gianfranco ventures, in a frantic last-ditch attempt at plausibility. "I was never involved in my father's business –"
"Non mi dire delle stronzate, signor Varese," Bruce cuts him off sharply if still quietly. Selina bites down on a smile; if only Theo could hear his signature line delivered with such chilling flair, he would be proud.
Assuming that the verbal punch was calculated to throw Gianfranco off balance, it succeeds. He instantly turns from fake-confused to visibly pissed off and defensive.
"Why is it that you're digging this all up? What's in it for you, who are you working for? You installed the surveillance, we paid you, what more do you want?" There is something else lurking in his voice behind the veneer of anger; Selina has learned in her relatively brief but spectacular career to be a judge of people's mental states, and she can sense it now: desperation. But not the bitter desperation of a cornered culprit; more the frantic desperation of a kid scared to death. And apparently Bruce sees it, too.
She expects him to back down and try a different tack now, playing good cop to his own bad cop. But what he says is beyond her assumptions.
"I want justice for your father." He sits up, his face a few inches closer to Gianfranco's now; his shoulders are slumped and his voice quiet and lacking the ice shards. "Because no matter who exactly his murderers are, I'm probably the one who got him killed."
She has heard him imply it before, but watching him say it again does not hurt any less.
Desperate or not, she still half expects Gianfranco to go for his throat after that and half expects him to sag in relief at having another take the blame for his crime; but neither happens. He sits very still, and when he speaks next, it is just as quietly as Bruce just spoke before him.
"Cosa vuoi dire?" he asks again. He has switched from the formal third person to the informal second, either as a sign of contempt or a sign of trust.
Bruce does not seem to care which it is. Instead, he plunges ahead with telling Gianfranco the full story of their landing in Xining, and the fateful mention of Giacomo's name. When he has finished, the anger is gone from Gianfranco's face. If anything, he looks close to tears. And even more scared than before. But on balance, it looks like Bruce has called the right bet.
Gianfranco does not speak at once. When he does, his voice is shaky, and he stumbles over his words.
"I... appreciate you telling me this. I know it must be... trying for you, learning about his death after you mentioned his name. I can understand how you were... compelled to do it in a crisis. And as much as I'd like to blame you, as much as it would be easier for me... I can't. I probably didn't do enough myself to try and talk him out of all this when it became clear that things were... dangerous... but I also know that the way he was, he wouldn't have listened until it was too late. The truth of the matter is, my father dug his own grave, and I don't know who could have stopped him."
It is Bruce's turn to say the quiet What do you mean, mirroring the second-person address.
"I'll tell you," Gianfranco volunteers, the fear creeping back into his face. "But you have to promise to stop and not try to investigate. If you don't, they'll kill me too, they'll kill us all."
She didn't expect to feel sorry for him a few minutes ago, but she does.
"Who?" she asks, joining the conversation for the first time.
"Wu and his men," Gianfranco explains readily. "They run everything there now, and they'll kill anyone who goes against them or who tries to expose them, whatever it is they're doing. My father tried that, and see what it got him. You're right, he didn't die of natural causes," he continues, turning back to Bruce. "He died after a business dinner with Wu and his deputy. The way he'd been opposing them for months before that, I still can't believe he went there. I told him not to go, Mother told him not to go, and he still did. He said he'd had enough of those bastards stealing his company from him, even if he'd invited them himself at the beginning. And he kept saying that he was going to find them out and go to the police. I think he even told them that. Your mentioning his name in China may have been the last drop that confirmed to them that he was trying to dig up things on them, but it was a matter of days or at best weeks as it was, he was going to try it anyway. You were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. So am I, so was my father."
For a while, none of them speaks. The confrontation over, the mood that has settled over them is somewhere between mourning and relief. Selina may be selfish, but she confesses inwardly that her feelings run more toward the relief end of things.
"I can promise you that I won't do anything without talking to you first," Bruce replies eventually. "But I'd appreciate it if you told us what you know. There may be a way of getting them without endangering ourselves," he finishes. Most likely thinking about setting the Interpol on their trail from the Chinese end, Selina suspects. Hopefully without the need for him to go there.
And Gianfranco does tell them what he knows – it sounds like he tells them all he knows, from the moment his father started looking for cash to top up the dwindling working capital when the banks weren't forthcoming and for a minority partner to hopefully help bring new business, or cheaper suppliers, or both, to a sluggish, old-fashioned company that he was too attached to to either drastically reorganise or sell off. He tells them about the first dealings with Wu, seemingly reasonable and businesslike and surprisingly ready with the money; about Wu's offer to invest 25% in Tessuti Varese in exchange for Varese's equivalent stake in Qindgao Jinglian, much smaller in monetary terms due to its mostly-empty balance sheet – Wu's stated reason was to procure beneficial tax treatment for Zhenjiang Zili, the wholly-owned subsidiary yarn producer, thanks to the foreign investment, but Bruce suspects that Wu's real reason must have been to make Varese the fall guy if anything went wrong. He finally tells them how Wu then brought in the Chinese fronts as the new majority owners after briefly convincing Varese that they were purely financial investors... and how, after his stake went down from 100% to less than a quarter in the space of a year, Giacomo Varese found himself a trespasser in his own company.
"I have no idea what it is they're doing, and I honestly don't know anything about the yarn or the boxes," Gianfranco goes on, "but Father said that within a month of getting majority, they fired all the old staff and locked access to the production facilities so that no one except them could go there, and put guards around the place. They called them the new workers, but Father said that these workers carried guns, and there were only a couple of them who actually knew anything about weaving and were seen around the weaving machines. And our production dropped to less than a quarter of the old rate but apparently they still got huge profits off the books, mostly from exports. They'd give us a cut, but it kept getting smaller over time, and they kept telling Father to sell the rest of his stake. I tried to talk to him and tell him that it was probably the only option, that we'd be better off out of there, we could always set up another business, but he was too angry at them for what he called ruining his company. The only time he listened and talked to them about selling, they offered him a quarter of the value of our stake, and there was no more talking to him after that, he just kept saying that he was going to the police to nab these robbers."
"I'm sorry," Selina says; she means it.
"I want to get these fuckers," Bruce says, and she is sure he means it, too.
Instead of arguing or pleading, Gianfranco just asks why.
"Your father may have been reckless, but I mentioned his name in China, and I'm not letting go of that." She is not sure if by now it is the reason or a pretext. "I can try and do so in a way that won't get you involved, but I admit that it would be easiest if we worked together."
To her surprise, Gianfranco does not argue; it is as if making the disclosure has helped him find a modicum of courage – or more likely, has reminded him again of the extent of the injustice. "But what can we do? I don't have any position in the company, and we can't even get into the site, it's become a fortress."
"What we can do," Bruce counters calmly, "is walk into their fortress, and ambush them right in it. You said that your father still held a minority stake when he was killed; is that right?"
"Yes."
"And they want to buy it out. They may think that you'll be so scared now as to hand it to them, or that you'll be so scared now as to stay out of it and not say a word even if you still hold it, which is just as good for their purposes. What we can do is make it look like you don't care about the company, or about what happened to your father," he suggests, and Selina is reminded of Gianfranco's attitude in their first meeting seemingly being just that, "and just want to get some money out of selling your stake before leaving them to it. It will give us a reason to contact them and hopefully get into the company site, as I don't think they'll want to discuss this in a public place or at their homes and you can say the same, and it'll make you look mercenary enough not to be a threat while tempting them the prospect of full control. I've mentioned that I speak Chinese, and if the Xining people talked to Wu he'll know it anyway, so I can go with you to translate. You have nothing to lose," he sums up, "in practice you've as good as lost it anyway, and this way we can bring them to justice. Besides," he adds, "I don't just install alarms, I have some... hands-on security experience as well, so it may not be such a lost cause after all."
Gianfranco looks up at that last admission. "You don't seem like you're Mafia," he ventures.
"Never was," Bruce assures him. "But I've fought against the Mafia, not here, in the States. Not unsuccessfully, I may add." She is amused at the newly respectful look in Gianfranco's face.
And now, she figures, is her chance. She may face an uphill battle trying to convince him on his own and in a more analytical state of mind, but now, with Gianfranco looking like he needs all the support he can get and with Bruce inspired by his own plan, is as good an opportunity as any.
"And if you need any expertise from the other side of the law," she cuts in smoothly, ignoring Bruce's alarmed look, "I am a professional thief. Was, until a few months ago. Cat burglar, actually. A good one; you can ask him. And if there's any snooping around needed, I can do it while looking so stupid that they'll never know what hit them until it's over. And if there are any safes that need cracking, it's as good as done."
She can see Bruce preparing to shoot her down, and readies her killer weapon. "Besides, when we had our emergency landing in Xining, Brandon had to tell the Chinese that I was your fiancée having an affair with him to get me off the hook, didn't you, caro? It will make a perfectly plausible cover story."
The effect, if anything, is more devastating than she expected. Bruce just stares at her, dumbfounded by her stealthy offensive, his face a perfect illustration of an et tu, Brutus moment.
Gianfranco, however, is probably too encouraged by this discovery of a new and accomplished ally to realise the lapse of judgement he is about to commit. "I've never been so happy to discover I had a new fiancée," he beams. "I'm glad Chiara is still in Bali or else she'd be giving me –"
The look Bruce gives him in the next instant makes Selina wonder if Gianfranco is facing a swim in the harbour... or worse. In fact, she is glad that he has apparently managed to keep control of his bowels. "I mean... as a business partner," he bleats.
Bruce subjects him to the stare for two more long seconds before seemingly relenting.
"Just to make things clear," Bruce answers in a deceptively soft voice, "Céline here is my fiancée, and she only gets involved to the extent that is necessary." She does her best not to show how much she is savouring this. Apart from her strategic victory, being called his fidanzata, even as a deterrent to others, even if he will never actually propose and she does not expect him to, is quite flattering.
"The story will be that I insisted on being part of the talks because my family lent you money and I want to make sure that we get it back, and that I'm your pretend fiancée so Brandon and I can't do anything... risky to avoid being found out, but we still carry on when you aren't watching," she cuts in before tempers get too frayed.
"And the reality is that she is my real fiancée so you can't do anything risky either if you want to keep your balls," Bruce remarks, seemingly as an idle comment.
"Yes, of course," Gianfranco nods hurriedly.
"I'd bet there will be safes there that we may want to look into," she interjects to stop Gianfranco from ruining it with his fear of Bruce.
"I can figure out ways of opening a safe," Bruce mutters, still noticeably put out.
"Using what?" she presses.
"Explosives," he admits reluctantly, and she feels perfectly justified in making a face.
"Quod erat demonstrandum," she replies, unable to resist the taunt. She figures she'll make it up to him... later.
xxx
"Insomma, ragazzi," Bruce calls out to them from the bar where he is looking for a whisky bottle; given the alliance they've forged and the planning they've had to do, it probably isn't surprising that Gianfranco ended up staying for dinner; and to Selina's relief, he has managed to avoid tempting Bruce into chucking him overboard up to this point, "we have a day to get ready and just under two days before we meet in Prato." Before they sat down to dinner, Gianfranco called Wu to suggest a meeting to discuss the buyout, and to their relief, was given an appointment at Tessuti Varese on the afternoon of the day after next. "You meet Cèline at 1 pm at Santa Maria Novella, off the train from Milan. I meet you both at your house, and we go from there to Castelletto. In the meantime we go back to Lugano tomorrow, get Céline her Italian ID, get the fabric and the translation device, and you find a trustworthy girl with an industrial sewing machine and bring her to your villa by the time we're there. Tutto chiaro?"
"Yes, yes, it's all clear," Gianfranco responds. "Perhaps you could get me another one of those translation gadgets..?" he starts, but seeing Bruce's sour look, thinks better of it.
"With all due respect," Bruce retorts, pouring himself a tumbler, "Céline is a professional thief who knows her way around this kind of situation, and she'll manage to keep a poker face no matter what. I am not going to jeopardise our advantage by the risk of your eyebrows twitching when you hear something you aren't supposed to know the meaning of. You're getting the Kevlar, that should be good enough." Gianfranco purses his lips but decides not to press the point.
"The important thing to remember," Bruce concludes, "is to avoid any business dinners with Wu, or else we'll all end up with a severe peanut allergy."
xxx
.
As you may have guessed by now, the little pest is here to stay for a while; but he will be of some help. And the story of both the (real) Kevlar and the (fake) translation device will be explained in excruciating detail in the next chapter; consider yourselves warned ;)