Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Ruggiero drove a hard bargain. It cost me seven hundred thousand lire — more than five hundred dollars — for a few hours of his time. He called his contact at Castelbianco and informed him that the last order of Florentine marble they had delivered, three days before, was short, as it turned out. An employee who’d since been fired had made a dreadful mistake. The remainder of the order would be delivered immediately.

It was unlikely that anyone at Castelbianco would argue over the quarry’s willingness to supplement the earlier order, and indeed, no one did. In the worst case — if, somehow, Orlov’s staff became suspicious, tallied up the marble already delivered, and learned that no mistake had actually been made — then Ruggiero would simply say that he’d been misinformed. And nothing would happen to him.

Minutes later we were at the gate of Castelbianco. The guard emerged from his stone booth, holding a log sheet on a clipboard, and approached the truck, blinking in the sun.

“Sí?”

His intonation and accent were such that, had we been a few hundred miles to the north, I could quite easily imagine him saying “Da?” with just the same brusqueness. With his close-cropped yellow hair, his healthy, ruddy complexion, he was unmistakably of Russian peasant stock, the sort of complaisant, beefy thug so often employed at the Lubyanka.

“Ciao,” Ruggiero said.

The guard nodded with recognition, made a check mark on the visitors’ log, glanced at the load of marble slabs we were hauling, then saw me.

And nodded again.

I gave him the barest shrug of acknowledgment and scowled as if I could hardly wait for this shift to be over.

Ruggiero revved the engine and guided the truck slowly between the massive stone pillars. The dirt road wound past a few small stone houses with slanted roofs, which I assumed belonged to workers. Chickens and ducks roamed the tiny brown yards in front of the houses, chortling and honking angrily. A couple of workers were spreading white powder from a large sack of fertilizer over a sparse patch of lawn.

“His people live there.”

I grunted, not wanting to ask who “his people” were, if indeed Ruggiero knew.

A small flock of sheep was scattered on a hillside on our left. They had slender pink faces, quite different in appearance from any sheep I had seen in America, and bleated suspiciously, in chorus, as we passed.

Up ahead, the house loomed. “What’s it like inside?” I asked.

“Never been inside. I’ve heard it’s nice, but a little rundown. Needs work. The German got it cheap, I heard.”

“Good for him.”

We rounded a bend above a narrow ravine, passed another low stone building. This one had no windows.

“Rat house,” Ruggiero said.

“Hmm?”

“I’m joking. Half joking. It’s where they used to keep the food garbage. It swarms with rats, so I stay away from it. Now they use it to store stuff.”

I shuddered at the image. “How do you know so much about this place?”

“Castelbianco? My friends and I used to play around here when we were kids.” He shifted into neutral, coasted the truck up next to a terrace where several hunched, sun-bronzed middle-aged men were cutting and fitting limestone tiles in an ornate pattern of concentric circles. “In those days, when Castelbianco belonged to the Peruzzi-Moncinis, they’d let kids from Rosia play here. They didn’t care. Sometimes we helped out with chores.” He reached behind to the backseat, pulled out two pairs of coarse canvas gloves, and handed me a pair. As he pulled at a lever that mechanically lowered the load of marble to the ground, he said, “If you get someone to buy it from the German, try to find someone who’ll get rid of the barbed wire. This place used to belong to the whole comune. ”

He jumped out of the cabin, and I followed him around to the back, where he began to lift marble slabs and set them gently down in a neat pile near the terrace.

“Che diavolo stai facendo, Ruggiero?” one of the masons shouted, turning toward us and waving a hand, asking what the hell he was doing.

“Calmati,” Ruggiero said, and kept working. Take it easy. “Sto facendo il mio lavoro. É per l’interno, credo. Che ne so io?” Just doing my job, he was saying. I joined him in unloading the marble. The thin slabs, rough on one side, smooth and finished on the other, weren’t heavy, but were fragile, and we had to set them down carefully.

“No one told me anything about a delivery of marble,” the same mason, who appeared to be a foreman, continued in Italian, his hands gesticulating. “The marble was last week. You guys fuck up or something?”

“I just do what they tell me,” Ruggiero said, and gestured to the house. “The last delivery was short, so Aldo offered to make it up. Anyway, it’s none of your fucking business.”

The mason picked up a trowel, smoothed a line of cement, and said resignedly, “Fuck you.”

We worked in silence for a while, lifting, carrying, setting down, finding a rhythm. I said quietly, “The guys know you, huh?”

“He does. My brother worked for him for a couple of years. Real asshole. You want us to finish unloading this stuff?”

“Almost,” I said.

“Almost?”

As we worked in silence, I surveyed the house and grounds. Up close, Castelbianco was no palazzo; it was large, and in its way magnificent, but at the same time shabby and in disrepair. Perhaps a million dollars of renovation would restore it to a grandeur it hadn’t seen for centuries, but Orlov was barely spending a fraction of that. I wondered where he had gotten the money, but then, why should the former head of Soviet intelligence not have found clever ways to pocket some of the unlimited budget he once controlled, divert hard currency funds to Swiss accounts? And what was he paying his security guards, who might number half a dozen? Not much, I suspected, but then, he was providing these fellows asylum, protection from the arrest and imprisonment they’d face back home in Russia for having so faithfully served the now-discredited KGB. How quickly things had reversed course: the feared, mighty officers of state security, the sword and shield of the Party, were now hunted down like rabid dogs.

But it bothered me that I had been able to get into the grounds of Castelbianco so easily. What sort of security was this for a man in fear for his life, a man driven to strike a deal with the head of the CIA to give him protection, like some shopkeeper in Chicago buying protection from the minions of Al Capone?

The security was modest: there appeared to be no snipers, no closed-circuit cameras. Yet this made a certain sense. His real security system was his anonymity, which apparently was so successful that even my own employers didn’t know where he was. Too much security would have been a... well, I could not help thinking “red flag.” Too thorough a system would have attracted undue attention. An eccentric rich German might employ a few guards, but too sophisticated a system would have been risky. So I was inside, and according to the information I had received, Orlov was inside, too. The problem was, how was I going to get into the house? And more to the point, once inside, how would I get out?

For what must have been the twentieth time, I mentally rehearsed my plan, and then signaled to my Italian accomplice to put down the marble slabs and follow me.

“Aiutatemi!” ’ Help me! “ Per l’amor di Dio, ce qualcuno chi aiutare?” Knocking wildly at the heavy wooden door that opened directly from the outside to the kitchen, Ruggiero was bellowing, “For the love of God, can someone help me?” His right forearm was a frightful mess, a long gash bleeding profusely.