Avise, leaning on the van's dashboard, signed the form and handed it through the window to the mechanic. "That should be everything."
The mechanic quickly scanned the form with his pencil torch to make sure that all of the boxes were filled, nodded in satisfaction and tore off the carbon copy underneath, passing it back to Avise along with his Automobile Club d'Italia membership card. "Very good, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Avise experimentally pushed down the accelerator, producing a grating rasp from the van's idling engine. "No, I think we're good."
The mechanic smiled and adjusted his cap in an informal salute. "Right then, Mr. Mancini. Safe travels!" The mechanic walked back to his own ACI van and his tail-lights were soon lost in the bright stream of evening traffic. Avise turned to the other passengers of his vehicle – his cyborg, Amadeo and Giorgio from Section Two's support staff, and two other men from Section One's cleanup-crew – who were currently sitting on the grassy verge by the road. "Well, come on then!"
"Not your most auspicious moment, Mancini." Amadeo grinned as he stood up, joshingly elbowing Giorgio beside him. "Weren't you in the Bersaglieri? Mechanised infantry?"
"I was an officer," Avise growled testily as he got out of the van, "and that meant that I ordered you to do it." He trudged round to the back of the van and pulled out a clothes bag and a groundsheet that the two from Section One were supposed to use in their business. "Come on, Agapita, we may as well take advantage of this – best get changed into our uniforms before we get too close."
Agapita nodded and she and her handler tramped off into the bushes beyond the verge where they laid out the groundsheet and undressed together, stripping down out of their mufti and re-emerging in sharply-cut dark blue National Police uniforms. Despite being transformed into a dignified officer of the Law, Agapita gave a juvenile pout when she saw Giorgio in the van's front passenger seat. "I'm supposed to be in the front."
"Hey now, don't act so spoiled," Giorgio laughed, "and let other people have a turn!"
"But I'm protection!" Agapita whinnied pathetically.
"Come on, stop it with the games," Avise groaned tiredly, "this was an... informal leg-stop. We're supposed to be working."
"Okay, okay, don't be a square." Giorgio had enjoyed the self-consciously childish game, short as it was. He didn't exit the van, rather physically clambered over the seats into the back of the cabin. Avise rolled his eyes – although he supposed that he didn't need to worry about morale if his men were so relaxed – as he moved back into the driver's seat, while Agapita happily slid in beside him.
"My phone's in the right pocket of my tunic," he told Agapita as he began to drive, "be a dear and dial Ferro for me, please?"
Agapita's hand nimbly slipped into Avise's jacket and did so, holding it out in her open and upraised palm like a waitress with a tray of canapés. Avise took it with a nod as he heard Ferro's voice emit from it? "Hello?"
"Milani! Mancini here." Avise spoke briskly. "We're on the move again, just leaving Piacenza. We shouldn't have to delay our appointment with Lehman."
"Delightful." Ferro pronounced it as if it was anything but. "In that case, we'll keep this brief – using a mobile phone while driving is banned and incurs a ninety-euro fine, it would harm civic harmony to see a representative of the law violating it."
Geez, pardon me for ensuring that lines of communication remained open during an operation, Avise grumbled internally but actually said, "Are there any updates before I go?"
"One thing, actually," Ferro responded, "I have been led to understand that it's important." Ferro kept things businesslike and so you could anticipate that what she chose to say was usually relevant – that she felt the need to qualify the statement showed that it was actually her notion of something fun and frivolous. "I also have a message from Doctor Donato. He says, quote," – and from her tone it genuinely sounded as though Ferro had copied down his words verbatim and was now reading them back from some paper – "I know that your Lord Jingo has difficulty understanding new things after one too many bomb-concussions, but impress it on him, with your boot-heel if you have to, that we are getting close to assigning poor Agapita a permanent bed here. It has been six missions in a row now that she has come back with bits falling off of her, and one of them wasn't even a combat operation. Jesus fuck, even Big Croce takes better care of his cyborg, and Rico has been used as a literal punching bag. Exclamation mark." A beat passed. "Unquote."
"I'll take it under advisement." Avise muttered. He could tell that Ferro wasn't treating Donato's hectoring as anything of significance and was trying, in her own indirect and inexplicit way, to amuse Avise with gossipy shop, blinking through the eyepieces of her outwardly cold mask – that was why it was being brought up over the telephone and not in an office back at the Agency compound – but the fact that someone was complaining about him still rankled. "Thanks anyway, I'll see you later."
Agapita apparently lacked the wit to recognise any implication – or was perceptive enough not to waste energy worrying about hidden meanings when there were none – but in the back seats of the van, the four other men exchanged intrigued glances. Not just 'Mancini, out?' Ooh-la-la.
The van turned back onto the A1 Autostrade leading north towards Milan, and while the gathering evening promised dusk on the Motorway of the Sun, the lights lining the way would continue to bathe the road in a summer yellow.
Despite the delay from the van's faulty engine, the Agency detachment did arrive at Lehman's home on the outskirts of Guihono on-time, although some difficulty finding the right junction for the A8 towards Varese meant that Amadeo had to take over the driver's seat for the part of the way and demonstrate some of the Advanced Driving that Avise, used to twenty-ton Dardo APCs, still hadn't quite got the hang of even after over eighteen months in the Agency's employ. They almost were late when Avise insisted on taking the wheel back for the cruise to Guihono.
"I'm supposed to be in charge – I am in charge – and it would look suspicious if I'm not driving." Avise pressed.
"But it's a hassle to move," Amadeo complained, "and I can be your chauffeur if image is an issue."
"Do you want to be my chauffeur?" Avise cocked an eyebrow.
"...fair point." Amadeo pulled up and switched seats.
Lehman's residence was a detached house, not large enough to be considered a villa (and as Lehman had divorced a few years ago, maybe too big for him even now), set in a small plot of land surrounded by a wall; far from a grand estate – he was a policeman, not the Prince of Belmonte – but enough of a green belt to ensure privacy and discretion. It was not an extravagance; it was a feature that served the government's purposes... and in more ways than just protecting him from rebels, too.
Someone carrying a rifle was standing guard at the gate. Under the street lights it was easy to see that he was wearing a policeman's uniform, but as a military man Avise could immediately tell from the gatekeeper's slouched, insouciant posture that he was just a private security guard with a police tunic thrown over his shoulders to keep things official. Italy was notorious for having the highest proportion of law enforcers in Europe, even before the emergence of 'transient irregularities' in the north, but when the pressure to bulk out numbers meant that most recruits were turned out with little more formality than sturmabteilung brownshirts, Avise doubted that they provided the most efficient investment of resources, to phrase things most diplomatically. The Garibaldi Brigade had been one of the first to fully professionalise following the liberation of Eastern Europe from the communist yoke, so Avise hadn't often had to control conscripts, but his interactions with them during his early years as an officer – and, indeed, spending over a year with bullets being vaguely slung in his general direction by the bravos and braggodacios of the Five Republics – left him unenthusiastic about the typical citizen's vim and fibre.
The guard did firm up his stance and grip his weapon tightly as the van drew up to the gate. He surveyed the plain white people-carrier a little doubtfully when Avise announced that he was an investigator from DIGOS here to see the chief, but the appointment was in the diary, Avise's police credentials did check out, and privately he was pleased that here was one senior officer who didn't flaunt his salary with a fancy Mercedes when he still had a year of payments left on his Fiat Punto. The gate was cranked open and the van advanced along the paved driveway towards the house.
A second guard answered the front door – he seemed surprised at there being half-a-dozen people waiting on the steps, but there had been no indication that anything else was amiss so he assumed that the others were simply part of the delegation. Avise motioned Amadeo, Giorgio, and the two Section One staff into a front parlour while he and Agapita moved on to the rear of the house and the main living room.
The living room was comfortably furnished, with the walls lined with bookcases with lights on top of them in recessed fittings that lit the room gently, a carved antique-looking bureau and a glass drinks cabinet, with soft leather settees arranged around a glass coffee table. A large set of patio doors led out to the garden, and Marcel Lehman looked out to it. He turned away to face the fratello as they entered the room. Despite the late hour and the fact that the meeting was occurring in his own house, Marcel was dressed in his police uniform as well, although an irritated scratch of his sleeve indicated that he would rather not be. Marcel's handshake was respectfully firm enough as they made their greetings, but his face frowned as he said, "Was it necessary for this meeting to be held at this hour?" Truthfully he was eager and enthusiastic – this is what he had worked towards for months now – but to display that too openly would be suspicious.
Avise suppressed a frown himself. "Chief Lehman, with all due respect, you have been making constant representations to the central directorate to be informed of the findings of the DIGOS investigation at the earliest possibility. We're merely honouring that."
"I'd have settled for first item on the agenda at the morning meeting, but fair enough." Lehman grunted as he eased himself down into a chair. Agapita made to sit on one herself, but moved back a step when Avise shot her a glance. Lehman noticed that with curiosity. Well, maybe they intended to keep things brief. That suited Lehman's purposes – he already knew what results he was going to given, and he already knew exactly what arrangements he would put in place.
"Nice place you have here." Avise offered conversationally, his gaze ranging around the room. "It must be worth a lot."
Or maybe he wasn't keeping it brief, he was a ramrod with a permanent crick in his back. Oh well, never mind. He just had to get through this and then the ball would be rolling. "Don't I know it." Lehman laughed dryly. "I had to remortgage it when my wife absconded. She's living on the Amalfi Coast with the proceeds now."
"Isn't it lonely?" Agapita blurted.
The sudden question caught Lehman flat-footed and he didn't have time to think about whether it was even appropriate or not. "Sorry, uh, what?"
"Being here on your own, without your wife? Without someone with you?" It emerged as an almost plaintive whine.
Lehman's gaze hardened as he processed Agapita's words. He was going to bite out that personal matters were none of the nosy bitch's fucking business, but something about the naked intensity of her piercingly concentrated, painfully desperate stare of earnest entreaty dissolved his anger and prevented him from tightening his jaw into his intended snarl. Instead, words slid out as an abashed, embarrassed laugh and he patted his knees as a form of applause at a good question. "When you're my age, and you're a shrivelled prune with all the juice wrung out of him – like me – that sort of thing loses its lustre. I'm just enjoying my liberation. The reward for long service is release from it."
"Shame that only one of you gets a pension afterwards, though." Avise laughed sardonically. Lehman turned his head to listen to Avise, and as he did so something strange passed across his vision. Agapita had seemed to, well, shrink. An anxious expression opened her face, she hunched her shoulders and arms to her body, and twitched away from Lehman, across the room towards Avise. She seemed actively intimidated. Curious girl – women were emotional after all. His ex-wife was court proof of that.
"Anyway, you were saying?" Lehman motioned hopefully to the file that Agapita held under her arm.
"Yes." Avise motioned to Agapita again, who extracted a wedge of paper from the file – a copy of the plans discovered in the Guihono safe-house – and placed them down on the coffee table before Lehman. "I regret to say that yes, there has been a plot to perpetrate an atrocity on the citizens of Guihono. We are in the process of shutting it down."
Something in the back of Lehman's mind tripped with disconcertion over the use of the word 'process' – surely it was over, after the bloody confrontation that had wiped out the dumb heavies that Costanzo had rustled up? – but at the fore of consciousness was private pride as he admired the comprehensiveness and quality of his own handiwork. Even though he had been a loyal policeman for decades, he could immediately understand the heady thrill of conspiracy.
"Marcel Lehman. It is a strange name for an Italian, if you don't mind my saying so." Avise made a little small talk as Lehman flicked through the document.
"My grandmother married a Frenchman, and my father comes from Bolzano-Bozen. You know, the German bit of Italy." Lehman murmured. He was unsure why the visitor was asking such a question, which didn't seem to have anything to do with business, but saw no harm in answering.
"Ah! How international!" Avise declared lightly.
"I suppose so." Lehman shrugged.
Avise's gaze hardened suddenly. "Also irredentist."
Lehman blinked, and looked up. "Uh, sorry, what?"
"I spent most of the last few months fighting the Tyrol Bridge-Builders over there." Agapita declared. "It was pretty hot work." She added for emphasis.
"Uh... right." Lehman looked between Avise and Agapita. While he had been reading they had moved several paces apart so that he was now between them. "But I haven't lived there since... Hell, since I was eight, so I'm afraid that I don't keep up on local politics."
"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, though, as they say." Avise intoned darkly.
Feeling needled by this haughty disdain, Lehman raised his voice suddenly. "Look, what's this got to do with anything? Besides, who says? And what makes him right?"
"We say," Agapita announced, not hiding a smile and evidently enjoying the position of confidence, "and this makes it right." She now took the complete file from underneath her arm and flopped it down onto the floor, between Lehman's feet.
Lehman did not react immediately. Trepidation began to condense a lead weight in his stomach, and its heavy inertia rooted him to the spot. Creeping realisation steadily constricted his lungs, sapping the energy to move. After a strain of effort which was as much keeping composure as moving, he bowed his head down before Avise and Agapita, reaching for the file.
It was a plain manila colour and did not have any of the stamps, provenance marks or other identification details that you'd expect to see on an official police document. Instead its title was only printed in regular black type: "SWA.S1 DOC. C541-09 - OP. HEIMDALL POSTOP EVIDENCE COLLECTION."
"Operation Heimdall? Like, the god? Bit extravagant for just mopping up a bunch of low Padanian thugs, huh?" Lehman laughed weakly, trying to make light of it all, in the faint hope that he could just float away.
"It's random, just what the computer spat out, nothing more." Avise and Agapita droned together in a tired toneless unison.
Lehman opened the file. He flicked through several pages of photographs of the aftermath of the battle, many of them images of bodies plastered against walls or splayed out over floors, the gory focus oddly juxtaposed with dry annotations in the margins pointing out identifying marks, like someone inferring a commentary on eighteenth-century mercantilism out of a Jackson Pollock painting. He then came to a page dense with black bars of text. Lehman squinted and stared, and the ink wavered into a statement – from Costanzo.
"He's being arrested for tax evasion," Avise explained, "which is a sight more preferable than aiding and abetting terrorism."
There it was finally. The word.
"If you're here to ask for my advice on sentencing, I can't agree with that," Lehman said carefully, "there is little point to law if we cut deals, people will not show respect for them if they know they are pliable."
Avise brayed a nasty, pummelling laugh. "Ah, Guiseppe, that's a legal conundrum that you've obviously considered deeply."
"My name's Marcel, you were asking about it earlier. A bit of a Freudian slip, Mr. Mancini? Is Guiseppe a friend of yours?" Lehman knew that it was a particularly feeble ploy to needle Avise into making a mistake, and it gave him little solace – like how clawing at loose, shifting soil only emphasised that you were sliding into the pit.
Agapita drew her Tanfoglio and levelled it at Lehman. "Now that's just rude." She pouted.
The muzzle of Agapita's pistol held the black hole that Lehman had tumbled into, and now he had hit the bottom. A jolt ran through Lehman and spurted energy into his limbs – while he raised one arm in a warding gesture, the other dove into his pocket and activated the personal alarm there.
The wail that erupted from that small plastic capsule was strident, deafening, almost a physical bludgeon that battered you to blindness in the way you squinted and reeled to try and shut it out. It also brought absolutely no assistance from his bodyguards.
Agapita winced, looking pained. "Mister Lehman, can you put that away, please? My ears a bit more sensitive than most."
Thoughtlessly, sightlessly, Lehman did as he was told, retrieving the small white cylinder of the alarm and twisting it shut so that the banshee and her shriek were trapped inside again.
Lehman sat numbly there for a few moments. Another person would be estimating how quickly he could be launching up off the settee to make a grab for the gun, gauging whether the weapon was a bluff and whether they'd shoot or grapple him if he tried to run, or racking his brains for a titbit of intelligence that he could release to help lubricate and loosen the noose. Nothing came to Lehman's mind. He had exercised discretion, used judgement and collected favours over the years, but he had for most of his career been a decent policeman – the conspiracy born out of him had not nested through natural means. All that throbbed in his mind, a series of explosions bursting in his mind through the pressure of his heartbeat, the pulses waves that drowned out all else, was that he had been engaged in criminality; and now, he had been caught.
"Chief Constable of the National Police for the Novara Region, Marcel Lehman," Avise declared, with a baritone intonation the resounded off the walls like a judge confirming the charges, "for several years now you have struggled – and failed – to maintain order in the increasingly fractious town of Guihono. This was brought into relief by the death of Clara Lamio, a policewoman from your force, during a riot there over a month ago – raising an edge that cut into your systematic failure. You arranged a substantial cell of discontents to attract our attention, and deliberately planted evidence there to suggest that they planned to use Guihono's reputation for public disturbances as cover to inflict heavy casualties on the police, knowing that security forces would have to respond to such an obvious group and thus uncover it. You would then use it to rile your own officers up with threat and hostility to the extent that you legitimise gunning down potentially dozens of civilians if anything similar was even vaguely threatened in a future clash – and you would ensure that they would."
"That sounds about right, yes." Lehman croaked like a rusted door being pushed open.
"So, only one question remains," Avise sighed, "why?"
Lehman glanced at Agapita, who continued to cover him steadily with a dispassionate expression. All throughout Avise's statement of the case Lehamn had been sitting there with the personal alarm still cradled in his cupped hands. He now placed it down on the cushion beside him and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers – concealing his mouth, expression and their cues behind his hands seemed to make things more neutral, objective and definite. When something sinks to the bottom, it will be compacted and concreted, and Lehman the policeman put his case before justice.
"You'll say that it's revenge, a vindictive, wounded indignation, visiting sufferings on my enemies a hundredfold. Or that I've run out of intelligence, and that the only way I can think to make the vile little pukes that populate Guihono - like effluent backdrafting up from the sewers! – not break any more laws is to make them corpses. There's some truth in both of these. But really, truthfully, cutting through to the heart of the matter?
"I'm sick of it. I'm sick of the scrawl on every alley wall. I'm sick of having to tie the shoelaces of half-trained incompetents, just to make up manning numbers that I can never, ever reach. I'm sick of noisy morons ranting on corners and who know their rights, but no-one else's. I'm sick of someone being shot in the spine in a tavern and left in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, while twenty-eight other drinkers were 'using the toilet' while it happened. And, most of all, I'm sick of thirty stabbings, forty bludgeonings and fifty arrests – and bailouts – every fucking Saturday night."
Avise looked away. He leaned forward to grip the back of the settee he was standing by with his hands with a creak of leather. Agapita glanced quickly over at him, worry momentarily twisting her mouth, although her aim remained steady on Lehman. Avise drummed his fingers on the back of the chair for a few moments, marshalling himself, and then he looked up at Lehman.
"Do you know what makes this the worst possible thing?
"I agree with you. I fully empathise with you. I understand your frustration, I feel your bitterness, I know the bite of the wire of impotent rage constricting around you. Everything you have said is something that I would say, and mean - and have said, and done." He looked at Lehman with open, soulful compassion.
"And that's why I know, more than anyone else, that you have to die."
Lehman tried to protest, to speak, to declaim an ultimate pronouncement with the fundamental, instinctual authority that would speak to the reason of every human.
"I did what I had to do." Lehman rasped, in a small voice.
Avise shook his head in sorry agreement. "Don't we all?"
Lehman bowed his head, and exhaled. "Okay, let's get on with it then."
The handler nodded. "Agapita, please take Chief Lehman outside."
"Can't we do it in here? It's warm." It was absurd and indulgent, but as last luxuries went it was hardly much and Lehman figured that there was no harm in asking.
"It'd be inconvenient." Agapita said as she motioned Lehman towards the patio doors with her Tanfoglio pistol. "Indoors would make it an undignified mess to clean up."
"I suppose so." Lehman laughed weakly and stood up with a show of effort. As he reached the doors, though, he stopped.
"One thing." Lehman croaked.
"Go on." Avise said wearily.
"Avise Mancini." Lehman gave the name not so much to address Avise as a statement to the air. "Agapita...?"
"I don't have a surname." Agapita said simply. She did not move from covering Lehman, but having no concern with the almost theatrical finality of the situation and the men's attitudes, her ever-vigilant eyes flicked from side to side in case this was a stalling tactic of some kind.
Lehman didn't react to Agapita's strange admission, and continued, "Are they your real names, or...?"
"Yes, Chief Constable Lehman. They are our real names." Avise nodded. The early sneering and cutting tone with which he had opened the condemnation was in no evidence here, and the answer came with a solemnity that recognised the respect of the gesture.
"I see." Lehman afforded a slow, wan smile. They had given their real names because there was no risk of him telling them to anyone – at least they were honest. "Thank you." He nodded to Agapita. "Both of you."
"It is appreciated." Avise nodded. Lehman then pushed through the patio doors into the garden beyond.
The patio was a stone square bordered by a small shin-high wall, with the garden lawn extending out on three sides. With the light spilling out from the house affecting his vision, though, everything of the garden beyond the bright square of the patio dissolved into a black curtain, rising up and around him in empty folds until the silhouette of the tree-tops against the sky defined their arc.
All the world's a stage... Lehman was never a particularly artistic person, his knowledge limited to a small amount of trivia and aphorisms so that he could pepper conversation with the impression of erudition. Still, here in this setting, Lehman was conscious of it being apposite – and his part was inevitable as following the script.
"Move out six paces onto the lawn ahead, and then turn around to face me." Agapita instructed Lehman.
Lehman turned his head and glanced back at Agapita. "Are extra-judicial killings always this formal?"
"I like the occasion of it." Agapita said, a reflective tone entering her voice as her head wandered slightly in thought – but that pistol arm never so much as twitched. "It elevates it. Dignifies it. No effort may be necessary, but to exert it anyway ensouls it with conscious human agency. It's not a process, it's a fulfilment."
She'd put some thought into that. "A hitman with a sense of ceremony!" Lehman cried aloud, shaking his head in awed wonderment. "I'm privileged to live in interesting times!" Suddenly feeling bold, Lehman strode out onto the grass. Then he stopped.
Lehman turned around slowly, and locked eyes with Agapita. His face was pulled into a tight grimace of grim satisfaction.
"All flesh is as grass, Agapita."
"Just as well that I don't have any, Chief Constable Lehman."
Agapita hammered a rapid double-tap which punched two rounds through Lehman's forehead, ripping off the top of his head like tearing Velcro as they passed through his skull. Lehman swayed briefly, and then fell backwards, landing heavily on the ground. The thud of him hitting the earth disguised the patter of gristle rustling the lawn.
Agapita remained still for a moment, and then closed her eyes before exhaling slowly. After a moment's reflection she re-holstered her Tanfoglio, turned around and walked back into the light of the living room. "All done, sir!" She said brightly.
Avise smiled warmly, reaching over and giving Agapita's arm a familiar, affectionate squeeze. "Good girl." The fratello moved back into the hallway, where they noticed three rifles propped up against the hat-stand like tightly-folded umbrellas, and the front parlour, where Amadeo and Giorgio had rounded up the three policemen who were Lehman's house-guard. The two support staff leaned against the wall apparently preoccupied with the pattern of the wallpaper. Their submachine guns hung on their lanyards, as they rested their forearms on the tops of the weapons – a deceptively relaxed pose which could slip down the side to the trigger in a frictionless instant. The two Section One wetworkers, already changed into battleship-grey boiler-suits and drab olive wellington boots, were sitting on armchairs in the armchair's bay windows, quietly and unobtrusively clinking through their equipment bags.
If it wasn't for the policemen, you would have doubted that the reports that had cracked out scarcely a minute ago had even been heard. All three men were sitting beside each other on a couch, their hands cuffed behind their backs. Two were continually glancing around them, looking doubtful and uncertain, while the third was simply miserable, his eyes unreadable slits behind puffy swellings that were already buffing up to a brilliant ebony shine that would have been the pride of any parade-ground sergeant-major.
"They doubted the authenticity of our government credentials," Amadeo smiled without prompting, following the fratello's gaze, "so I demonstrated something that a limpid northerner swollen fat by all the green Alpine fields could never hope to manage himself."
"Very good, carry on." Avise said in a businesslike manner, before turning to the pair from Section One. "It's done – go work your magic."
The wetworkers stood up together. One asked, "Can someone bring the stretcher round while we're working? It'll save time."
Avise nodded and fished the van's keys out of his pocket before passing them back to Agapita. "Get on that, will you, my dear?"
Conditioning was designed to let a cyborg follow orders without question and coolly kill the enemy without suffering psychological trauma – it did little to suppress the glint that sparked in Agapita's eyes like the completion of an electrical circuit when the talisman of adult authority clinked in her fingers. She liked the sense of responsibility – it wasn't a desire for independence, more a welcoming of rapport and trust tangibly condensed down into a physical artefact; that it was – however small and outwardly mundane – a token of worth, and thereby fulfilment. As meaningful and affecting as the gesture was for Agapita, though, her reaction was less soulfully awed and more giddily gleeful. She walked to the front door, although that was because layers of deportment protocols were inhibiting her desire to skip.
Avise shook his head with a wry, fatherly smile. "Still like a girl in so many ways."
Amadeo and Giorgio skittered askance glances across each other's line of sight. 'Like a girl'. With his background? How'd he ever know? Practised hands of the Other Ranks as they were, though, any suspicious manner had vanished completely by the time Avise turned around towards them. The handler opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted when one of the house guards, no longer able to handle the strain, rocked crazily in his seat and blurted in shrill panic, "For God's sake, man! I'm not Padanian! I don't know if the Chief was involved in anything dodgy but I swear I'm not!" Avise noted the singular 'I' as opposed to the collective 'we' of his neighbours and tipped his head back slightly. No sense of fraternity there. Was there a reason why? "What do you want?" The guard bleated helplessly.
Further investigation could be handled later – for the time being, Avise had more specific needs. He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket – causing instinctive flinches from the policemen who half-expected him to draw a handgun – and pulled out a rounded sheaf of gently-folded papers. He unrolled one to present a pre-prepared witness statement to the speaker. "For now, your signatures."
The diener had drawn the graveyard shift again, but it didn't trouble him too much. It was an extra bung to his salary, and he was rarely disturbed; people that passed in the dead of night were mostly the ill or elderly and had no need for autopsies, and so were the responsibility of private undertakers rather than the municipal mortuary. It was true that the cloak of night shrouded men's sins, but men who wished not to stumble were only abroad during the day, when they'd discover and report any frozen drunk or bludgeoned victim. All in all, while the cot in the mortuary's bedroom wasn't the most comfortable ever built, a mattress stuffed with money was a delectable downy cushion to recline on.
The diener was too careful in his manner to ever be called smug, but he was undeniably self-assured. It seemed fitting, then, that as soon as he had filed away the last of the night's paperwork and began brewing a coffee, the phone rang.
"Novara Provincial Mortuary. How may I help?" The diener cunningly masked an involuntary sigh by lengthening his words.
"Please prepare to receive a body. We should be arriving in ten minutes." The voice was curt.
"Very well." The diener reached over the desk and pulled out a form from the pigeon-holes mounted above the desk. "Your name and ambulance number, please."
"This is a private vehicle" the voice sounded testy and impatient.
"In the absence of an ambulance code I will take your license plate number instead." The diener actually hadn't meant to say that – even he knew that he could only push his pricking and pointedly deferential bearing so far – but the trouble with wearing a mask for so long is that it sometimes became stuck to your face.
There was silence on the end of the line for a few seconds, and then a murmur of what might have been people conferring. Then a different voice ventured, "CD 472 VA, Roma."
"Thank you." The diener was thanking more than the man on the other end of the line. "Please come straight round to the rear service entrance." The call ended.
The diener thought for a moment, and then craned his neck over to the list of official phone numbers pasted up against the wall. He dialled the direct number for Guihono's National Police precinct.
Even though it was late at night, the response was prompt and the female voice at the end of the line was aware and alert. "Good evening, can I help you?"
"Yes. I'm calling from the public mortuary on Via Giovanni Battista. I've received a suspicious call from people who claim that they're delivering a body, without proper credentials. Could you send someone round to supervise the matter?"
"Ah, we are already aware of this, sir – they telephoned the emergency services first, but the ambulance on hand had to be called to another emergency. Please assist them when they arrive – I appreciate that it's irregular, but tragedy doesn't need to be compounded with confusion."
"I see." The diener acknowledged.
"Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention anyway. Public vigilance is sadly lacking in this day and age." Claes hung up.
The diener drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk, twisting his mouth into a grimace at the half-finished form beneath him. With a rasping, frustrated, dissatisfied growl of a sigh, he pushed himself up and grabbed his jacket from the coat-stand.
It was a clear night - even despite the orange loom of the town surrounding the mortuary, bright stars were still visible in the sky above. That also meant that it was bitterly cold. The diener stamped his feet while his fingers squirmed in his jacket pockets, and his breath didn't even have time to fog – the low temperature quickly clamping on the ribbons of condensation and straining them to thready nothings. For a long time the diener had affected a cold manner, but on a night when things seemed to be out of his control Nature had come to remind him of the real thing.
Three periods of 'within ten minutes' had passed before the private vehicle, registration CD 472 VA Roma – a plain and unmarked white Fiat people-carrier with tinted windows – finally rumbled around the tarmac to the mortuary's rear entrance. It reversed to the service door and coughed to a stop, and two men in National Police uniforms got out of the front seats and moved to the rear. The only acknowledgement that the diener received was a curt command from the driver, "Get the elevator ready." The diener complied, although mainly because he had to walk across the back of the van to reach the control box for the service door's shutters, and that let him get a look at what was inside as the two men opened the van's rear doors together. A third man began pushing out a simple metal stretcher bearing a body completely concealed in a thick white shroud, and its handles were grabbed by the front passenger – the diener couldn't determine an exact impression of the man's muscle structure under his uniform, but from the light ease with which he hefted the stretcher up – which could be a lot heavier than people realised, even without a twelve-stone cadaver atop it – he could guess that none of the people here were office workers, to put it mildly. There were more people in the back of the van, but he was prevented from discerning detail as the driver shut the doors smartly once the two stretcher-bearers and their load had cleared it.
The elevator to the mortuary basement was a metal case, as were all of its fittings. Nothing could simply shut – the door and its frame gnashed together with a rattling crash that stabbed into your ears shook the fillings in your teeth; even the three other men in the compartment flinched as the diener heaved the grille across. The descent button did not click but thunked as it was depressed, as if something had been dropped onto it from height, and the cable growled like a chainsaw as it ran through the pulleys lowering the elevator compartment down – not the most auspicious of allusions seeing as bodies were hacked up for autopsy on the floor below. Oddly though, this discordant cacophony was actually somewhat soothing – it actually made the handling of bodies easier, as the complete lack of conscious regard for decorum or awkward inarticulate stumbling around what might constitute respect deflated the elephant in the room; everyone's eyes turned up to the grinding and chewing above them, not the shroud at their feet.
As soon as the elevator finally clunked down at the basement, the two stretcher-bearers immediately squatted down and picked up their load, carrying it past the diener and to the closest of the long room's examination tables. The diener circled around them to the far side of the table, while the driver went around the other end to brush up against the diener's side. The diener jolted from the contact and turned round quickly to face the driver, but he was silent, only holding an expectant look on his face.
The diener suspected that this was a deliberate ploy to keep him off-balance and not give him the ability to sink and brood on the irregular activity of the night. The diener suppressed a scowl – he had spent many years carefully cultivating a calm persona behind which his private derisions could play freely, and he was not about to let some interloper's swagger bash against and crack it. The diener turned away and began pulling the shroud back from the cadaver's face.
His resolution promptly failed as he lurched back from the excavated skull of Marcel Lehman.
"He died of a brain haemorrhage." Avise explained breezily, while reaching past the diener and placing his government credentials on top of Lehman's chest. "It's very tragic, how all of our grand plans and lofty ambitions can be undermined by such a miniscule flaw that it is impossible to seal. Ah well – when God wants you, he'll take you."
"A brain haemorrhage." The diener repeated, as much to steady himself as to confirm Avise's requirements. He looked down to Lehman's body, the jagged-edged cavity carving out his cranium, and the oozy dribbles of gore clinging to the side of his head like gelatine. "That is true."
THE END