sat next to each other on a Euro C Flight direct from Berlin.
The C, Nuri was sure, stood for “cheap.” The seats were so narrow a mouse would have felt crowded.
Gregor had insisted on coming, following a call from her supervisor. Apparently the Bureau was now worried that the CIA would crack the case and they wouldn’t get any credit. On the bright side, she managed to get an appointment with a member of the Office of Special Magistrate, the antimafia police, that afternoon. Hence the flight.
She was uncharacteristically quiet for much of the flight, and Nuri tolerated her presence, if not her bad breath, until just before they were landing, when she began talking about Frau Gerste.
Why, she wondered, had Nuri found her attractive?
“Who says I found her attractive?” he asked.
“You were practically leering. ‘Frau’ means she’s married, you know.”
“I’m sure.”
“She had a wedding ring.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Because you were too busy staring at her boobs. I hate it when men do that. Treating women like sex objects. It’s disgusting.”
You have nothing to worry about, Nuri thought to himself, but he kept his mouth shut, concentrating instead on the dossier MY-PID had provided on the man who apparently ordered the murder in Berlin.
The Italian newspapers had played up the tobacco shop owner’s death, calling Giuseppe DeFrancisco one of the “grand old men of Rome,” an appellation that not even his most faithful customers could ever remember hearing during his lifetime. Established in 1956, his small shop had been a dusty holdover from an era that had passed as surely as the Caesars and chariot races. But his untimely death transformed it into a symbol of all Italy, which was being overtaken by the rapacious thieves of international finance, who cared not a wit for the ability of an Italian to buy a good cigar and catch up on the latest gossip of the neighborhood, be that neighborhood in an obscure Abruzzi town or Rome itself.
Giuseppe’s connection to his mafia grandson was not mentioned in any of these feature stories. The obituary contained only the broadest hint: Giuseppe had only two surviving grandchildren, one in the U.S. and the other in Naples. Neither was named.
The grandson was Alfredo Moreno, a mafia chief well-known enough in Interpol circles to have a nickname—the Car Thief. He had not lived in Naples for more than a decade, preferring to spend most of his time at his hilltop estate thirty miles away in a town named Fuggire. So small it didn’t show up on most maps, the town consisted of three buildings at an intersection of two rugged roads, an abandoned monastery building, and Moreno’s hilltop property.
The estate had once belonged to a religious order, willed to them by a wealthy cardinal who had established the monastery. It had passed back into private hands somewhere in the sixteenth or eighteenth century. Sometime after that it had become the family home for the Morenos, and was passed down on Alfredo’s father’s side of the family for at least eight generations.
Its connections with the mafia were well-known and documented in the media. Alfredo had, of course, made all of the pretenses of going “straight,” supposedly denouncing his mobster roots and becoming in the Italian phrase, uno mano moderno —a modern hand.
Alfredo was indeed modern, but then so was crime. Where his forebears had depended on handshakes and backroom conversations, he preferred encrypted BlackBerries and pay-as-you go cell phones.
He made a great deal of money importing and exporting—he brought in olive oil and other goods from Turkey, Syria, and Libya, and exported cars to northern Africa and occasionally the Middle East. The cars were stolen; the oil and food were generally mislabeled and occasionally transported in defiance of various international sanctions, such as those requiring inspections and others forbidding trade with places like Iran, which Libya
The C, Nuri was sure, stood for “cheap.” The seats were so narrow a mouse would have felt crowded.
Gregor had insisted on coming, following a call from her supervisor. Apparently the Bureau was now worried that the CIA would crack the case and they wouldn’t get any credit. On the bright side, she managed to get an appointment with a member of the Office of Special Magistrate, the antimafia police, that afternoon. Hence the flight.
She was uncharacteristically quiet for much of the flight, and Nuri tolerated her presence, if not her bad breath, until just before they were landing, when she began talking about Frau Gerste.
Why, she wondered, had Nuri found her attractive?
“Who says I found her attractive?” he asked.
“You were practically leering. ‘Frau’ means she’s married, you know.”
“I’m sure.”
“She had a wedding ring.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Because you were too busy staring at her boobs. I hate it when men do that. Treating women like sex objects. It’s disgusting.”
You have nothing to worry about, Nuri thought to himself, but he kept his mouth shut, concentrating instead on the dossier MY-PID had provided on the man who apparently ordered the murder in Berlin.
The Italian newspapers had played up the tobacco shop owner’s death, calling Giuseppe DeFrancisco one of the “grand old men of Rome,” an appellation that not even his most faithful customers could ever remember hearing during his lifetime. Established in 1956, his small shop had been a dusty holdover from an era that had passed as surely as the Caesars and chariot races. But his untimely death transformed it into a symbol of all Italy, which was being overtaken by the rapacious thieves of international finance, who cared not a wit for the ability of an Italian to buy a good cigar and catch up on the latest gossip of the neighborhood, be that neighborhood in an obscure Abruzzi town or Rome itself.
Giuseppe’s connection to his mafia grandson was not mentioned in any of these feature stories. The obituary contained only the broadest hint: Giuseppe had only two surviving grandchildren, one in the U.S. and the other in Naples. Neither was named.
The grandson was Alfredo Moreno, a mafia chief well-known enough in Interpol circles to have a nickname—the Car Thief. He had not lived in Naples for more than a decade, preferring to spend most of his time at his hilltop estate thirty miles away in a town named Fuggire. So small it didn’t show up on most maps, the town consisted of three buildings at an intersection of two rugged roads, an abandoned monastery building, and Moreno’s hilltop property.
The estate had once belonged to a religious order, willed to them by a wealthy cardinal who had established the monastery. It had passed back into private hands somewhere in the sixteenth or eighteenth century. Sometime after that it had become the family home for the Morenos, and was passed down on Alfredo’s father’s side of the family for at least eight generations.
Its connections with the mafia were well-known and documented in the media. Alfredo had, of course, made all of the pretenses of going “straight,” supposedly denouncing his mobster roots and becoming in the Italian phrase, uno mano moderno —a modern hand.
Alfredo was indeed modern, but then so was crime. Where his forebears had depended on handshakes and backroom conversations, he preferred encrypted BlackBerries and pay-as-you go cell phones.
He made a great deal of money importing and exporting—he brought in olive oil and other goods from Turkey, Syria, and Libya, and exported cars to northern Africa and occasionally the Middle East. The cars were stolen; the oil and food were generally mislabeled and occasionally transported in defiance of various international sanctions, such as those requiring inspections and others forbidding trade with places like Iran, which Libya
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