Jeff Carson - Foreign Deceit

Another pause hung between them.

Burton picked up his coffee mug, looked in it, and set it down. “I hear Sarah is back from rehabilitation. You seen her yet?”

“Yeah, saw her and Jack this morning.”

“Well, we’ll keep an eye on things.” Burton grunted as he got up.

“I know sir. Thanks.”

Wolf was jolted awake by the ping of the seatbelt sign and a loud voice in Italian over the Boeing 777’s intercom. He was in Milan. Milano. He looked out the window and saw green fields and countless red roofed buildings. Anything tall enough to be hit by an aircraft was painted in a red and white candy cane striping.

He had absolutely no clue what to expect in Italy. While in the army, he’d been stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington, never serving any missions in Europe. His experience of foreign cultures was all much further east of the Prime Meridian — China, Vietnam, Laos, The Philippines, Australia — in a much less pedestrian manner.

He’d seen the pictures on his brother’s blog, read a few of his posts about life there, but he really didn’t have a sense of what he was getting into at all. For him, the word Italy conjured up thoughts of pizza. Spaghetti, meatballs. Calzones. Food. Mario and Luigi.

The plane came to a halt at the Malpensa International Airport gate. The air was startlingly humid, feeling about seventy five degrees Fahrenheit. His mind came up blank trying to convert it to Celsius. He knew it was nine fifths plus thirty two to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit, but the other way around? Screw it. It was pleasant.

Looking out the terminal window past the docked planes revealed a flat landscape with a dense hazy sky. There was no view other than a copse of green deciduous trees in any direction he could see. He knew the Alps were very close by. He’d gotten a good look at the Matterhorn before the rough dive into Milan, but the Alps hid behind a veil at the moment. His mental compass was spinning wildly — Rocky Points had the Rocky Points in the west, and Denver had the towering mountains to the west — it added to his unease.

A sea of people chattered all around him in a language he had little experience with — one semester class in high school before he changed to Spanish. Everyone was using the same voice intonations along with the same hand gestures. Grandiose was the word that came to his mind.

Passing through the customs line, the officer asked him why he was in the country.

“Vacation,” he said. No sense causing any confusion.

The customs officer said something else to him, looked at him with an expectant look, then shooed him onward. Wolf couldn’t begin making an educated guess to the topic of what was said.

Signs throughout the airport were in Italian, English underneath. He strained listening to the people around him, noting not a single person speaking English in the vicinity. He thought back on the phone calls and how difficult it was to communicate with the few people he’d spoken to.

A wave of nauseous second-guessing hit him for a split second. What was he expecting here? Sure, he was getting his brother’s body and bringing it back, but he had much larger aspirations for this trip. How the hell was this going to go down?

Pushing the doubt out of his mind, he set out to find the train.

The next two hours were an exercise of faith. Never once had he been completely sure he was on the right train, or going in the right direction. The air outside was a dull gray, ground revealing no shadows. Coupled with the flat landscape and towering buildings, there was still no way to get a bearing on direction.

Two trains later, however, he was now reasonably sure he was on the right route. Twice he caught a glimpse of the word Lecco on signs, and the Alps finally came into view amid the haze ahead, indicating he was at least heading north. The train stopped often, slowly weaving its way into the green hills. A large slow moving river flitted into view on the left hand side. There were boats pulled up along the shore on each dry river bank, looking like the water line was a few feet lower than it had been in the recent past. Still, the amount of water sliding by looked to be more than a few of the largest Colorado rivers combined.

Brightly painted buildings of sorbet orange, sky blue, purple, lime yellow, and other electric shades were everywhere; next to the river, halfway up the steep inclined hills, even directly on top of the mountain peaks. Nature was choked out by thousands of years of settlement, but the foliage was rampant at the same time. It was thick, dense, wiry and thorny. Grass grew in feet, not in inches.

Vibrant shades of painted stucco gave way to a consistent powdery gray stone color as the train continued north. Each roof on the thousands of buildings of all shapes and sizes was topped with the same tangerine-hue clay tile.

Moving steadily north, the gaping river widened into smaller lakes, then narrowed into a tighter bottleneck before ultimately opening up into a gigantic lake.

Towering steep mountains, densely green with deciduous trees, calved with talk chalk-white cliffs, lined both sides.

Lake Como, he recognized from his Googling. The lake was one of the deepest in Europe, and looking at the steep mountains that dove straight into it, it wasn’t hard to imagine.

The train was now in a the city of Lecco, where his brother had been living for the last five months. Wolf recalled his study of Google Maps on the internet from the other night. Lecco sat on the geographical lower right tip of the lake, which was in the shape of an enormous upside down “Y”. They were on the southeast tip, and the northern most end was nowhere near in site.

“ Dahveed Vowlf ?” The Caribinieri officer pulled his cell phone slightly away from his ear. He was no older than twenty five, dressed in a dark blue, sharp looking uniform with white leather belt and shoulder harness for his Baretta, a sharp billed military style hat in his left hand, cell phone in the right.

“Yes.”

“I am Tito, come with me.” He turned, resuming his phone conversation.

Wolf thought back on the phone conversation he’d had with Tito and resisted the urge to drop kick him.

Stepping out of the station, Tito’s hair glistened in the sun — hat still tucked under his arm. His sideburns were shaven to a precise point halfway down the sides of his face, a pencil thin goatee was etched on the skin around his mouth. It looked like it took him well over an hour to get ready in the morning.

Wolf felt his own hair, a greasy mat, painful to the touch, and surmised he wasn’t in a place to be making any sort of judgments on appearances.

Tito talked on the phone, walking painfully slow, finally coming to his Alfa Romeo Caribinieri cruiser. It was sleek looking, with three cylindrical lights on top. Wolf sat down and appraised the car with an internal thumbs up.

He gave Tito’s driving, however, an emphatic thumbs-down as he drove half brained; cell phone still in his right hand, shifting gears cross-over with his left, narrowly missing pedestrians and other cars through tight streets and roundabouts as he shifted.

Ten minutes later, they thankfully came to a stop, pulling into a parking lot along the lake shore to the rear of an old looking gray building; how old, Wolf couldn’t tell.

A strong damp breeze came off the lake, and the air wasn’t as hazy as just a few miles down towards Milan had been. There was a train of criss-crossing sails in the distance moving at high speed — kite surfers and sailboarders.

They walked the short distance to the back of the building and entered into what seemed to be hell, or a waiting room for it. A cram of people poured out of a steamy room that wafted the spicy odor of human sweat immediately to the right. The room’s collective impatience and despair was a palpable force.