Aaron Elkins: Good Blood

“Paolo,” he heard Marcello say urgently from around the far side of the limo, “the bastard kid’s giving me trouble. Help me out.”

“No, please-” It was the kid’s voice, cut short by a little gasp as Paolo swatted him.

Don’t forget about me, Ugo tried to say, don’t leave me here, but this time not even the mewling sound came out. His chin was on his chest. He couldn’t lift his head; it was as if someone were pushing down on the back of his neck. All he could see were his pants, black and glistening with blood, and even that small field of vision was rimmed with a darkening pink haze, as if he were looking out from a tunnel. The stocking mask was squeezing him, cutting off his air. He couldn’t breathe.

“What about Ugo?” Big Paolo asked. “We’re not gonna leave him here?”

“Forget Ugo,” Marcello said. “Look at him, he’s dead.”

Am I really? Ugo wondered as the pink haze darkened and the tunnel walls squeezed slowly in.

Officer Favaretto waited in the open doorway of Comandante Boldini’s office while his chief finished his not-so-polite conversation with the mayor of Stresa, who could be seen through the window, gesticulating in his own office just across the Corso.

“I can’t help that, Mr. Mayor,” Boldini was shouting into the telephone. “I know there’s a French tour bus on your front steps, all I have to do is look out my window to see it. Have you looked at my parking lot? You don’t seem to understand, we’re going to have to get a crane in there, for God’s sake, and police business will have to come first. We-” He paused, fuming, holding the receiver away from his ear and rolling his eyes. “Well, that’s too bad, but you’ll just have to wait,” he said abruptly and slammed down the receiver. He wiped a wadded handkerchief around the inside of his stiff, braided collar and stared blackly at the telephone. “Some people,” he muttered. “Does he think I’m Superman?”

Favaretto tapped gingerly at the pebbled glass pane of the door. “Comandante?”

Boldini hauled himself up and used both hands to hitch his pants up over his spreading hips. A bad sign. Here it comes, Favaretto thought sourly. Because I tried to do something, this whole thing is going to get blamed on me. Next time I’ll just pretend I never saw anything and stay the hell out of it. Sadly, it wasn’t the first time he’d been driven to make such a promise to himself.

“Favaretto, I thought you told that truck driver to come and see me.”

“I did, sir. I told him-”

“Well, he never did, how do you explain that? He just left the truck sitting out there and walked off, what do you think of that? The worst traffic jam in the history of Italy, and you, you don’t even bother-What, damn it?” he yelled at the telephone, which had just buzzed twice at him, the signal that his adjutant was on the other end of the line.

“You, don’t go away,” Boldini commanded, leveling a finger at Favaretto, who had indeed been thinking about making his exit. “I want to talk to you.” He turned his back, picked up the telephone, and held it to his ear. “What?” he said roughly. “What?”

He fell into his leather chair as if the carpet had been jerked from under him. “What?” he said again, but far more softly. A few moments later there was an even softer, more tremulous “Who?” followed almost immediately by “Oh, my God.”

The phone was falteringly replaced on its base the way an old, old man-and a blind one at that-might, and then Boldini pivoted his chair around to look at Favaretto. His face, which had been dangerous a minute before, was now a dazed, sick white.

“Favaretto,” he said weakly, “tell Maria to get me the carabinieri on the telephone. Colonel Caravale. Personally.”

In Stresa the headquarters of the Polizia Municipale and the offices of the regional carabinieri are separated by only five short, pleasant blocks, but they might as well be in different universes. The Polizia’s office is in the bustling, upscale heart of Stresa, on the lakefront, just off the busy, modern Corso Italia, where it shares a handsome building with the ferry company and the city’s chamber of commerce. Carabinieri headquarters, on the other hand, are hidden away on a little-traveled backstreet, next door to the overgrown garden of an empty, moldering nineteenth-century villa, in an unappealing concrete blockhouse of a building, utterly-almost purposefully-without charm.

But in this case appearances are deceiving, for the carabinieri are an accomplished national police force whose simple black uniforms command universal respect, while the Polizia Municipale, despite their flashier outfits and imposing sidearms, generally (and wisely) confine themselves to matters of local traffic control and minor crimes. They are quick to hand off any hot potatoes to their carabinieri colleagues who are, fortunately, only a telephone call away.

And when the phone call was made person-to-person, on a secure line, from Comandante Boldini of the Polizia to his carabinieri counterpart, Colonnello Tullio Caravale-an event that had occurred but five times in six years-Caravale knew even as he picked up the receiver that it wasn’t just another hot potato, but one of which Comandante Boldini was more than usually anxious to wash his hands and to do it in a hurry.

He was right. The longer he listened, the worse it got. The extraordinary accident that had completely stopped downtown traffic for the last hour, it was now clear, had been a meticulously planned ruse, a clever kidnapping plan that had kept the police cars helpless in their lot, while at the same time forcing their quarry to detour into the narrow, deserted side streets. There the object of it all-a vintage Daimler limousine, no less-had been hemmed in and trapped on Via Garibaldi by two cars with armed hoodlums in them. The kidnapping had been successful but there had been a shootout that had left two men dead: the uniformed driver of the limo, who was sprawled on his back on the blood-smeared front seat, and one of the attackers, apparently left to bleed to death by his accomplices. Still wearing his stocking mask, he had been found mumbling beside the car but had died before the medics could get to him.

“Has anything been moved?” Caravale asked.

“No, no, Caravale, nothing’s been touched. I thought you would want your people to examine the scene.”

“Very good, Boldini, that’s exactly what I want.”

In his mind’s eye, he could imagine Boldini’s grimace of disapproval. In a meaningless ceremony a few years ago, the city council had made the comandante an honorary maresciallo of Stresa in recognition of his “invaluable service commanding the extensive traffic reorganization necessitated by the repaving of the Strada Statale del Sempione.” And in Boldini’s eyes, since marshals outranked colonels, he was entitled to call Caravale by nothing more than his last name-but not the other way around-and he was patently miffed when Caravale didn’t see it that way. And so, of course, Caravale called him “Boldini” every chance he got.

“All right, Boldini, I’m on my way, then,” he said. He began to hang up, then spoke again. “As to who was kidnapped-I take it you don’t know yet?”

Boldini hesitated. “Actually, we do. It was, ah, Achille de Grazia.” His voice was as somber and reverent as a muffled church bell.

“I see.”

“Sixteen years old, the son of Vincenzo de Grazia.”

“Yes, all right.”

“You do know Vincenzo de Grazia…?”

“Yes, Boldini, I know Vincenzo de Grazia. The son, was he hurt?”

“That we don’t know for certain. There is a witness, Carlo Muccia, a grocer-my men are holding him for you-he says the boy was definitely alive, but they had to drag him to their car-it took two of them-so, yes, it appears he may have been injured.”