The Milan Contract Page 12

  From his kitchen window, he watched the light of a thousand candles as they bobbed along Neumarkt and he knew they were right, at least about one thing. His time was very nearly over. He was twenty-nine years old and his ordered life was being dismantled. It depressed him.

  The following morning, with small wads of gauze pushed into his nostrils, he left Leipzig, returning to his father’s home in Potsdam to prepare for the end of the world.

  41

  The ‘Postbox Café’, Milan, Italy

  Nyala ran out of the café with the phone still squeezed tightly against her ear. “Wait Kadin, I need to go outside.”

  She darted around the back of the building, out of sight of the road.

  “Kadin, where the hell are you?”

  “I had to run away Nyala, but I’ve stopped running now, I’m so sorry.”

  Nyala sobbed pitifully, but a burning anger rose up through her chest.

  “Sorry Kadin? Sorry means nothing right now. What the hell have you got me into? I’m standing in the back yard of a café, terrified. Dad’s been shot and I’ve had to grab Nana and run. It’s me who’s in hiding, Kadin. What have you done?”

  “Nyala, stop, I don’t understand. Who shot your dad? Is he OK? Why are you running?”

  Nyala told Kadin all that had happened since she’d seen him on his Vespa on Sunday morning. When she recounted the tale of the men in the bakery and her father screaming for her to run, she heard a faint whimper. Her grandmother had been standing behind her the whole time.

  “Kadin, I have to go. Nana is with me. I need to find somewhere to hide and I have to find out if my father is alright.”

  Her grandmother was pale with shock and Nyala thought she may faint.

  “No, wait Nyala. My family’s in danger too. But I need your help. I can’t do this without you.”

  “Do what, Kadin?” Nyala asked as she clung to her grandmother’s hand. “I still don’t know what you’ve done.”

  Kadin was dreading this moment but knew it was the first step to some kind of redemption.

  “I killed a man, Nyala. They made me. I can’t explain everything now, but you must trust me, please, I need you to trust me.”

  Nyala looked down at her nana who had started to cry, but she nodded at her granddaughter.

  “All right, Kadin, what do we need to do?”

  42

  Apartment 3, Villa Nuova, Genoa, Italy

  Kadin sat in the apartment and stared at the mobile phone, wishing he could still hear her voice. The news about her father being shot and Nyala being on the run, left him feeling confused and powerless.

  But he’d forced himself to think clearly and eventually, Nyala had agreed to go along with his plan. She trusted him and her faith had helped to restore some semblance of self-belief. But he only had until one o’clock tomorrow to get things ready, and there was much he needed to do.

  Rewinding the film back to the beginning, he began noting down the times and dates of all the key events. He needed to be able to take the police through the film in a planned and logical way. He worked quickly and after an hour, had reached his father’s suicide. He let the recording run on at high-speed, and after the clock had moved forward a couple of hours, the two thugs and Marco reappeared. Kadin pressed play.

  “Find a shovel and bury him out back. It appears Mr Bennani was more emotional than I’d realised. Shame, he was good with a camera.”

  The men disappeared and Kadin saw the man with the pony-tail fetch a shovel from a wooden lean-to at the side of the building. They took turns to dig.

  Kadin watched as they lifted his father’s corpse and half carry, half drag it to the pit.

  ‘He can’t feel anything anymore, they can no longer hurt him.’

  “Can you believe it? He left a suicide message,” said Marco laughing. “Quite moving it was, I watched it live. Shame his family will never get to see it. Very touching,” he added, as the men kicked dirt over the body.

  In the darkest corner of his mind, Kadin imagined shooting Marco between the eyes. The image was brief but made Kadin angry with himself.

  When the three men went back into the barn, Marco turned to them.

  “OK Max, how did it go?”

  “All fine, killed him with the first shot.” Max pointed to the centre of his forehead. “He got the mobile.”

  “Did he get away all right?”

  “As far as I know. We couldn’t follow. He was driving like a maniac and it would have drawn too much attention to keep up with him.”

  “No, that’s fine – he’ll be at home by now. Did you pick up the phone?”

  Max pulled out the grey and silver sleeve.

  “When you’ve dropped me off, take this over to Alex’s contact, he’s waiting for it.” Marco pressed a piece of paper into Max’s hand. “Address is on there.”

  “Did you see him at the station?” Marco asked as they were walking towards the door.

  “I thought so, but I lost him when I went to get the phone out the bin.”

  The men stopped in the forecourt.

  “Excellent, so now we wait until Wednesday. That should be enough time to make them desperate. We tip off the cops about the garage. It shouldn’t take them long to work out the owner is Bennani. On Wednesday morning, wait until the boy’s mother takes the kids out and then go in and put him to sleep. Make it look like suicide. Like father, like son. And Max, don’t forget to leave a bag of something in the boy’s bedroom.”

  ‘Nice and simple,’ said Marco to himself with a grin as he pulled open the car door. ‘Alex will be pleased.’

  43

  ‘Benito’s’, Via Mercato, Milan, Italy

  In the dimly lit bar off Via Mercato, Sergeant Moretti ordered beers and turned to Conza.

  “The problem is, we don’t have enough on Zeffirelli to arrest him. All we’ve got at the moment is a theory.”

  Conza agreed. “Forensics will have a field day at the bakery. Let’s hope he was there. I forgot to ask you; how did you get on with Stolz’s sister?”

  “Katherine Harper. She’s a nice lady. Educated, rich, married an English guy, moved back out to Germany when she became a widow, a couple of years ago. Told me she’d only been reunited with her brother since last Autumn. They’d been separated as kids. Sad story.”

  “Tell me, I need cheering up.”

  “No, really. Her mother worked in the East Berlin underground, helping families escape to the west over the wall. Brave woman by all accounts.”

  “Sounds it.”

  “She was shot by an East German patrol one night. Katherine was with her. Apparently, a woman with a child was less likely to be stopped by patrols. They managed to get to a hospital in West Berlin, but she died a few days later.”

  “Shit, that really is sad, Georgio. Sorry. How old was Katherine?”

  “Ten. From what she told me, she was lucky to get out alive. When her mother died, she was taken in by the family they’d helped escape. They took her to England in ’69. She wasn’t allowed to return to Potsdam. Too dangerous.”

  “So she lost contact with the rest of her family?”

  “There was just her father and brother. She used to get the odd message from her father, via escapees.”

  “So how old was Lukas when his mom died?”

  “He would have been sixteen. She said her father never told Lukas how his mother died.”

  “That’s strange. Why not?”

  “She said her father was trying to protect him. The less Lukas knew, the less danger he was in. Apparently, he told him his mother and sister had been killed in a car accident.”

  “You would think he would have been told the truth when he grew up though, wouldn’t you?”

  “I asked her that. She was a bit vague. I got the impression that there’d been a rift of some sort, between Lukas and his father.”

  “But she knew she had a brother. Why didn’t she contact him after the wall fell?”

  “She did,
kind of. Well, she met her father Dieter Stolz in Berlin in 1990, just before he died.”

  “Lukas wasn’t with him?”

  “No, just Dieter. They hadn’t seen each other for more than twenty years. Very tearful reunion by all accounts. They visited Mrs Stolz’s grave together and laid flowers. But something happened in Berlin that day, I’m certain of it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because her brother wasn’t there. When I questioned her about it, she became really defensive. Kept saying it was a family matter.”

  “But she must have asked why Lukas wasn’t there to see her. Father and daughter reunited after God knows how long, surely she would have asked where her brother was.”

  “I’m pretty sure she did, but whatever the old man told her, it was enough to keep brother and sister apart for another twenty-eight years.”

  “That’s terrible. What do you think happened?”

  “I’ve no idea. She just refused to talk about it. I didn’t press her. She was still in shock over Lukas’s death and it sounded like a family matter.”

  “But eventually they were reunited. How did that come about?”

  “She wrote to him. Tracked him down via Skyguard.”

  “When?”

  “Last summer.”

  “It must have been a hell of a shock for Lukas to find out his father had lied to him all that time.”

  “Must have been. She said the story of how his mom died hit him pretty hard too.”

  “I bet it did.”

  “It would have broken me, I think,” said Moretti earnestly. “All those lies.”

  The two men sipped their beers in silence for a few minutes.

  Conza had been thinking.

  “Why last year? Why did she contact him after all that time? What had changed?”

  “I asked her that. All she kept saying was that it was ‘the right time’.”

  “That’s odd.”

  Conza took out his notebook.

  “So, her brother was brought up in East Germany. Did she tell you anything else about him?”

  “Not much. They only met once. As adults, anyway.”

  “And she couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would want to kill him?”

  “It’s funny, but when I asked her that, she took a long time to answer. She did say he was a gentle man. Abhorred violence. But she never did answer the question.”

  “When’s she going back to Germany?”

  “Tomorrow evening. His body can’t be released yet, so there’s no point in her hanging around.”

  “I’ll talk to her. Where’s she staying?”

  “The Castello.”

  “Expensive tastes. I’ll drop in on her in the morning.”

  Conza ordered another beer while Moretti went outside to take a phone call.

  44

  9th November 1989

  Stolz Family Home, Potsdam, East Germany

  Lukas Stolz hurried past the excited crowd congregating on the steps of St Nicholas Church in the old market area of Potsdam. A hundred candlelit faces singing about a new world, a new life, a new Germany. Their collective voice depressed him, and he avoided looking up as he shuffled across the road.

  The Berlin Wall was about to fall.

  For weeks, at the library, in shops and in cafés, he’d heard them whisper about their secret meetings, their ambitions, their plans. Then they’d stopped whispering and they started talking; openly. And they no longer went silent when he entered a room. Then they stopped talking and they started shouting – and singing.

  East German society as he’d always known it was being vandalised. By the talkers, the shouters and the singers.

  Throughout autumn, civil unrest spread through towns and cities like a virus. By mid-October, Potsdam’s military curfew collapsed. People congregated without fear, unopposed by the soldiers sent to suppress and disperse them. Trepidation had been replaced by resolve and there was no one willing to stop them. There were simply too many dissenters and too few soldiers. ‘Freedom’ and ‘liberty’ were on the lips of every East German. ‘Self-determination’ was the returning Messiah. Lukas Stolz didn’t understand.

  “As far as I can see, freedom,” Lukas preached to his father, “is the right to act as criminals. To destroy the fabric of society. To sow disorder and dissent. To bite the hand that feeds.”

  His father didn’t respond, he’d been in the congregation of too many of his son’s sermons. Dieter Stolz was dying. But by will alone if necessary, he was determined to drag his tumour-ridden body on one final journey before it succumbed. He would make that journey soon.

  But tonight, along with the rest of East Germany, Stolz and his father were fixed to the television news. The unusually awkward presenter was close to tears as she announced that the government would, with immediate effect, permit all citizens to cross the border into the west.

  Lukas Stolz clenched his fists in fury. East Germany had been betrayed, exposed and thrown to the EEC and the Americans. He scowled as the cheers of his neighbours rolled down Schlaatzstrasse.

  He didn’t notice that his father was smiling or that his eyes had filled with tears of joyful relief.

  45

  ‘Benito’s’, Via Mercato, Milan, Italy

  Conza had ordered their fourth beer by the time Moretti returned, still holding his mobile.

  “That was my wife. I’ve only known you a couple of days and she hates you already.”

  Conza looked at his watch.

  “Sorry Georgio, but between you and me, your wife’s in good company. I seem to have that effect on most women.”

  Moretti grunted as he retook his stool at the bar.

  “She knew I was a policeman when we married. She’ll be all right.”

  He emptied his glass.

  “This case, Raffy, so many holes. The evidence going missing for a start. I’ve been thinking.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We’re presuming Salterton ordered Zeffirelli to dig around for the killer. But Zeffirelli doesn’t have the clout to remove evidence from a police station, and even if he did, it wouldn’t help him.”

  “I know. So why was Stolz’s stuff taken?” Conza agreed, as the beers arrived.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking and drinking.

  Conza suddenly set down his glass.

  “Let’s start from the beginning. Just forget Salterton for a second. A visiting maths professor is shot. It looks like a planned hit, but oddly, his cash and mobile are taken. In the absence of a reasonable motive, we would have to conclude that it was a botched, albeit pretty odd, robbery. Do you agree?”

  Moretti fingered the top of his glass and nodded.

  “Subsequently, the victim’s luggage goes missing – so what? There must be two hundred pieces of evidence passing through the station every day. If whoever killed him needed Stolz’s belongings, they would have taken them when he was shot. That would still apply even if the wrong man was murdered. If it was a robbery, what was left behind is hardly relevant. Either way, they’re just the personal possessions of a murder victim. If other things hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t spend a second wondering who took them. We would conclude that they’d been misfiled or put on the wrong shelf. It happens all the time. The widow, or sister in this case, would receive a letter of apology from the commissioner, blaming budgetary cutbacks for the loss of her brother’s washbag and a few shirts.”

  “OK,” said Moretti, “so the missing evidence is just a distraction, an unfortunate coincidence?”

  Conza waved at the barman and pointed at his glass.

  “That’s what I think. Forget the missing luggage. Stolz was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. We need to find out who wanted Salterton dead. We also need to find Zeffirelli.”

  “Maybe.”

  On the bar, Conza’s mobile vibrated. He looked at his watch, sighed and answered the call.

  “Lieutenant Conza.”

  “Is
my father dead?”

  Conza clutched Moretti’s arm. “Nyala. Where the hell are you? Are you all right?”

  “We’re going where they can’t find us. Is my father dead?”

  Conza held the phone from his ear so that Moretti could listen in.

  “He’s been seriously injured. I’m so sorry. He’s got a collapsed lung and there’s a lot of damage to his spleen. He lost a lot of blood. They’ve put him in an induced coma, but he’s under police protection. He’s safe for now.”

  “Will he live?”

  “Doctors say it’s not looking so good, Nyala. I’m so sorry.”

  The phone went quiet and Conza could hear her trying to draw breath.

  “Nyala, were you at the bakery when the men came today?”

  “Yes, I was there, but I had to run. My father was screaming at me and they started shooting.” Conza could hear regret in her voice.

  “Nyala, did you recognise the men who came to the bakery today? Had you seen or met them before?”

  “No, I didn’t know them and nor did my father. They said they were policemen. Colleagues of yours. They wanted to know about the Vespa rider.”

  “Colleagues? Did they mention me by name?”

  “Yes, they said Lieutenant Conza was due to visit me, but you’d been held up and had asked them to come instead.”

  Moretti closed his eyes and shook his head in despair.

  “They were trying to find the man on the Vespa. To kill him, I suppose?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I think they intended. They came to the bakery because they think you’re the only person who knows who he is and where he is.”

  “I do know who he is. The man on the Vespa. I’ve spoken to him, but I don’t know where he is. That’s the truth.”

  Conza didn’t speak. He needed her to fill the void, break the silence, help him to save her life.

  “He wants to speak to you.”