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  THE AMERICAN

  Nadia Dalbuono was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, where she read History and German. For the last sixteen years she has worked as a documentary director and consultant for Channel 4, ITV, Discovery, and National Geographic. The American is the sequel to her first novel, The Few.

  For my family

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published by Scribe 2015

  Copyright © Nadia Dalbuono 2015

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Dalbuono, Nadia, author.

  The American / Nadia Dalbuono.

  9781925106749 (Australian paperback)

  9781925307023 (e-book)

  1. Detective and mystery stories. 2. Criminal investigation–Italy–Fiction. 3. Corruption investigation–Vatican City–Fiction. 4. Organized crime–Italy–Fiction.

  A823.4

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  Part I

  He felt a sadness; a deep, deep sadness. He felt lonely: my Son in His humanity felt a deeper sadness than anyone could ever feel because He was pure of heart.

  From Mysteries of the Rosary: Agony in the Garden

  1

  It was a bright, clear morning the day they bribed the truck driver. It wasn’t yet 9.00 am, but the fierce sun was already baking the cracked earth, and the humidity clung heavy to Carter’s skin. The fresh shirt he’d put on just an hour before was now pressed tightly against his spine, and the hair at the back of his neck was wet. It was impossible to stay clean in this hole.

  The truck pulled into the stop outside the roadside café, just as they knew it would. Several seconds passed, and then the driver manoeuvred himself out onto the ledge and locked the door of the cabin before springing to the ground, adjusting the belt on his trousers, and running a quick hand through his greasy hair. He turned towards the café — no doubt anticipating the eggs and croquetas, the freshly brewed coffee, and the weekly flirt with the pretty young waitress — but Carter was already waiting for him, barring his path. He stepped right up to the driver’s face, so close that he could smell his nicotine breath, and shoved a hard hand against his chest. They stood like that for many seconds, frozen, staring each other out; the drivers’ eyes alive with fear, Carter’s dancing with excitement. Then, eventually, he looked away and used his other hand to retrieve the wad of cash from his pocket.

  ‘We just need to borrow your truck for ten minutes.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the driver, his eyes still bright with fear.

  ‘Here’s one thousand US dollars. No more questions.’

  The driver looked down at the cash, wide eyed.

  Carter knew that he was holding more money than this man could hope to make in ten years hauling milk around this godforsaken island.

  ‘Deal?’

  The driver nodded, and took the money in a movement so fluid that Carter wondered if it had actually happened.

  ‘Open the back.’

  They walked towards the rear of the truck, and the driver stepped up onto the platform, where he used a key on his belt to release a huge padlock. The doors groaned apart, and Carter was hit by a blast of refrigerated air. It was a relief.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he repeated.

  The driver nodded and jumped down, hastily turning back towards the café.

  Once the driver had entered through the swing doors, Carter hurried to his car and unloaded a sack of cement from the boot. He hauled it onto his shoulder and walked back to the lorry, sweating under the load. He heaved it onto the platform, clambered up alongside it, and stepped into the refrigerated cool, dragging the sack behind him. Ahead of him was the huge silver silo of milk. He laid down the sack and then headed towards the silo. He climbed onto the rack beneath it, took the seven steps to the top, and tried to unscrew the thick black plug. It took several attempts, but when he had finally managed it, he scrambled back down and returned to the doors of the truck to retrieve the sack.

  Pouring the cement into the hole was an effort, but after a minute or so he had succeeded in emptying the bag. He took a few breaths, and then replaced the plug and descended the steps, making for the sunlight and the warmth beyond the truck. He walked out onto the platform and swung the doors shut behind him — grateful for the heat now — and then hopped down and headed back to his car, where he stowed the empty sack and the scissors in the boot. Once this was done, he climbed behind the wheel and waited for the driver to return. The goldfinches were chirping noisily in the trees now, and the morning traffic was building steadily on the highway. He turned on the radio: Fidel was giving a speech, claiming that Kennedy was trying to sabotage the economy and discredit the revolution. He killed the noise and just sat listening to the birdsong, observing the to and fro of tired customers and the listless sweeping of the street cleaners. Then the driver was back, his eyes tightly focussed on the ground, his hands balled into fists by his side, as if he knew he was being watched but didn’t want to acknowledge it. He headed quickly for the rear of the truck and jumped up onto the platform to relock the doors before springing straight back down again. He jogged back around to his cabin and hoisted himself nimbly onto the ledge, unlocking the driver’s door, his eyes still fixed firmly ahead. He climbed in quickly, and after several seconds the old engine hummed and spluttered to life.

  Just a few moments later, the truck and its driver had disappeared from view, and the only sound was the anxious chatter of the birds in the palms.

  Carter leant back slowly against the headrest, closed his eyes, and exhaled.

  Since when did we declare war on schoolchildren? he asked himself.

  A PLANE HUNG LOW in the sky on its approach into Fiumincino, its pale trace blending with the few fragile clouds still clinging to the hills after the night storm. There was a freshness to the streets this morning, a sober cleanliness, that lifted Scamarcio’s mood and made him feel that this day could prove significant; that it might offer some kind of compensation. Even the starlings in the plane trees of Via Fratte sounded newly energised, plumped up, and primed for their impending exodus.

  Along the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the early-morning sunlight was setting the faces of the angels aglow. Kaleidoscopic teardrops of rainwater fell from the Angel with the Cross, dripping softly onto the stonework below, pooling and then breaking, as if quietly mourning the corpse awaiting Scamarcio beneath the Angel with the Whips.

  To his left, the Tiber was bright and pulsing — an infinity of crystals dancing and splintering far out into the horizon, and from under the bridge beneath him, knots of autumn branches sped by, their russet and gold tendrils marking time. A new salty tang replaced the usual mossy musk, and he breathed it in, trying to draw it deep into his lungs, hoping that it might clear his mind.

  After he’d stood for many seconds with his eyes shut, he returned his gaze to the scene some twenty metres up ahead: strewn across the bridge were the metal cases of the CSIs, glinting in the sun like discarded chocolate wrappers at a late-summer picnic. Manetti, stooped and balding, was down on both knees, his gloved hand searching for something below the balustrade. As Scamarcio drew closer to the blue tickertape of police ribbon, he saw that the chief CSI was reaching for the noose; he was trying to stop the blond head from swinging like a pendulum.

  Scamarcio flashed his badge at the uniform guarding the scene, and then lifted the tape, making for the edge of the bridge. Manetti was to his right now, and Scamarcio joined him on his hands and knees, head bent low so he could survey the tableau below.

  A man with light, greying hair was hanging from the lower railing, a fat noose of rope tied around his neck. He wore an expensive-looking grey suit and a white shirt, the top four buttons wide open. A blue silk tie was pushed off to one side, the front panel snaking across his shoulder. His feet were spinning above the water in grey silk socks. There was no sign of any shoes. The stranger’s eyes had rolled back in his head, as was customary with the victims of hanging, but it was his thick hair standing up in strange tufts that was disquieting, that gave the sense that this was a man who would normally be combed down and salesman prepped, who would never allow himself to be seen in public like this. What an invasion of privacy death is, thought Scamarcio, not for the first time.

  Manetti called over to the police photographer, standing a few metres away: ‘You done here?’

  The guy nodded. ‘Yeah, he’s all yours.’

  Manetti motioned to two of his assistants. The more muscular of the two stepped onto the thin platform above the water and began slowly hoisting the body onto the ledge. It took a considerable effort, despite the CSI’s strength. Once he’d cut the rope free from the ironwork, Manetti and the other assistant leant over the balustrade, and the three men carefully manoeuvred the body up over the railing. When they’d got it clear, they laid the corpse out on the pavement.

  M
anetti began patting down the arms and legs. He stopped at the trouser pockets, and felt them again on both sides before reaching into a pocket with his gloved right hand and pulling out a fistful of something bulky. When Manetti opened his hand, Scamarcio saw that he was holding cracked and broken chunks of brick — masonry rubble.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ asked the chief CSI, who had sensed his colleague’s silent approach but had been too absorbed in his work to acknowledge it.

  ‘Reminds me of something.’

  ‘In the sixteenth century, this bridge was used to expose the bodies of the executed.’

  ‘No, that’s not it.’

  With his left hand, Manetti pulled a plastic evidence-bag from his pocket and poured in the rubble from his right. He then extracted the debris from the man’s other pocket and repeated the process.

  ‘Probably another poor sod who couldn’t make it to the end of the month. There seems to be a suicide a day at the moment. You hear about that guy who set fire to himself in front of the tax office?’

  Scamarcio ignored the question — he was sick of the constant talk of ‘the crisis’. Just because some parasite bankers had placed a bad bet on Italy, why should they all be castrating themselves to settle their casino tab? The German chancellor and her cronies had the country in a stranglehold, and people were starting to pay with their lives. At a dinner party the other day, someone had said that it was the new nazism for the twenty-first century. He had smiled at the time, but had gone home and quietly wondered about that.

  ‘You find any ID?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing as yet. We’re getting the frogmen out, but there’s quite a current after the storm.’

  ‘He doesn’t look Italian to me.’

  ‘Hmm, now you say it …’ Manetti gently patted the corpse again before lifting the collar of the man’s suit. ‘Saks, 5th Avenue.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘Enlighten me then — what does it remind you of?’

  Scamarcio took a cigarette from his pocket and lit up, breathing out into the cool air and then sucking it back in. After a few seconds, he said: ‘God’s Banker.’

  Manetti inclined his head slowly to one side, thinking it over. ‘God’s Banker,’ he repeated, trying it for size.

  They both looked out across the river to their right, where the dome of St Peter’s Basilica rose up, resplendent in the early-morning sunlight.

  ‘Yeah, now you say it …’ said the chief CSI eventually. ‘And I thought it would be a home-by-six day.’

  2

  SCAMARCIO REMEMBERED VERY LITTLE about the case at the time it first broke. His memories were more of his late father’s reaction, his certainty that Roberto Calvi had been ‘done in’, that he’d been stupid enough to embezzle funds from Cosa Nostra. Now, as he googled the story, the basic facts came back to him: Calvi, dubbed ‘God’s Banker’ by the press, had been chairman of the ill-fated Banco Ambrosiano, of which the Vatican Bank was the main shareholder. In connivance with Paul Marcinkus, the American prelate who ran the bank, he had been laundering billions of lire for the mafia and Italy’s corrupt elites. When, in June 1982, Calvi had been found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London, his pockets filled with masonry rubble, many had claimed that his shadowy clients had finally come for him. Money had gone missing, and they wanted answers he was unable to provide. Later, when it emerged that Calvi had been a member of the right-wing P2 Masonic lodge, suspicion fell on the lodge’s grand master and his mafioso chums, but the judges threw out the case, citing lack of evidence.

  Now, more than thirty years on, it seemed that a foreigner, possibly an American, had died in similar circumstances. Why? thought Scamarcio. And, more importantly, why now? The Ponte Sant’Angelo was an interesting touch, being so close to Vatican City. He rubbed his eyes and looked up from the computer screen. He reminded himself that there was a compelling argument for listening to Manetti. Despite the rubble in the pocket, it was possible that this was simply another suicide, another small businessman caving in to financial pressures, another anguished father unable to carry the guilt of having been fired. There was no confirmation yet that their guy was a foreigner. The smart suit might just attest to a successful executive fallen on hard times. And the masonry rubble might just be coincidence — the nearest thing he could find to weigh himself down with. But Scamarcio knew the banks of the Tiber, and masonry rubble was not that easy to come by. General garbage, used condoms, and needles, yes, but masonry? Had the guy simply brought it with him from somewhere else?

  Scamarcio picked up a small green paper clip, unwound it, and straightened it before doing the same with another one — white this time. Then he got up from his desk and headed for the coffee machine. Was the rubble there as a message, and did the Ponte Sant’Angelo hold some significance? Those were the key questions. He fed in his 50 for an espresso, and when it popped into the tray he loaded it with extra sugar from a grimy bag on the shelf before returning to his desk, from where he could call up the latest national and Interpol alerts.

  He scanned in the fingerprint data that Manetti had provided; the computer buzzed through the thousands of entries in the system, but, after several minutes, no matches appeared. Even a general trawl failed to retrieve anything promising. He searched his contacts for the telephone number and email address of their police liaison at the US embassy; when he’d found them, he sent them a photo of the corpse and a brief explanation of where and when the body had been found. For the moment, that was the best he could come up with.

  He glanced up from his screen and saw that Garramone was standing in his office doorway, waving him in. ‘Can you give me five minutes?’ asked the chief.

  Scamarcio wasn’t really in the mood, but he wasn’t in a position to refuse. They were both still testing the waters with each other after the disturbing events of the summer — Garramone keen to shift things onto more orthodox ground, and Scamarcio still unsure quite how he felt about the whole matter, where it left him. Whether or not he had been compromised by his involvement, chosen or not, was still unclear. Whether the powerful figures implicated in his investigation now had him in their sights remained to be seen.

  Garramone was wearing a dark-grey pullover with leather patches on the elbows. It fitted him well across the shoulders, and Scamarcio felt sure his wife had chosen it for him, having tired of his total absence of interest in all things sartorial — almost a crime in itself in Italy.

  As Scamarcio entered his office, the chief rubbed at the grey rings beneath his right eye, and eased back into his swivel chair. Scamarcio noted that the plastic was peeling from the back: he could see yellow sponge beneath.

  ‘That stiff under the bridge this morning …’ Garramone began rolling a biro up and down a small patch of desk in front of him, taking turns with either hand.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Murder or suicide?’

  ‘Jury’s out for the moment, but instinct says suicide might not be the whole story,’ said Scamarcio, pulling out a seat.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Might be a murder made to look like a suicide. Might be a forced suicide.’

  ‘Forced?’

  ‘They might’ve made him do it, helped him up there, and given him a hand with the noose. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘Are there any signs of that?’

  ‘Not yet. But Manetti tells me it was an expert noose. We’ve not found any ID on the victim. Most interesting thing so far is masonry rubble in the pockets.’ Scamarcio knew that the connection to Calvi would not be lost on the chief.

  ‘That so?’ Garramone looked up at the ceiling for a moment. Scamarcio followed his gaze, and saw damp patches, maybe mildew.

  ‘Ponte Sant’Angelo, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said the chief. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a hubbub at the Vatican this morning.’

  ‘Hubbub?’

  ‘Obviously they’re not going to let us anywhere near it, but the scanner chat suggests a corpse. Nothing official out yet, of course; we’ll probably have to wait a few days for that.’