Day Of Confession

40

Noon

The dogs sniffed and strained against their harnesses, leading their handlers forward – with Roscani, Scala, and Castelletti scrambling after them – through a series of dirty, dimly lit tunnels to finally stop at the end of an air shaft above Manzoni Station.

Castelletti, the smallest of the three detectives, pulled off his jacket and crawled into the air shaft. At the far end he found the cover loosened. Sliding it off, he stuck his head out and looked down onto a public walkway that led out of the station itself.

'He went out here.' Castelletti's voice echoed as he inched his way backward on elbows and knees.

'Could he have come in that way?' Roscani yelled back.

'Not without a ladder.'

Roscani looked to the lead dog handler. 'Let's find where he came in.'

Ten minutes later they were back in the main tunnel, following the path Harry had taken when he left Hercules' encampment, the dogs following by the scent from a pullover sweater taken from Harry's room at the Hotel Hassler.

'He's in Rome for only four days – how the hell does he know his way around here?' Scala's voice bounced off the walls, the harsh beam of his flashlight cutting a path behind the dogs and their keepers, whose own flashlights lit the way ahead for their animals.

Suddenly the lead dog stopped, its nose upward, sniffing. The others stopped behind it. Quickly, Roscani moved ahead.

'What is it?'

'They've lost the scent.'

'How? They got this far. We're in the middle of a tunnel. How could they-?'

The lead handler moved past his animal, sniffing the air himself.

'What is it?' Roscani came up beside him.

'Smell.'

Roscani sniffed. Then sniffed again.

'Tea. Bitter tea.'

Stepping forward, he flashed his light on the tunnel floor. There it was, scattered over the ground for fifty or sixty feet. Tea leaves. Hundreds, thousands of them. As if they had been broadcast by the handful for the very purpose of throwing the dogs off.

Roscani picked a few from the floor and brought them to his nose. Then let them fall in disgust.

'Gypsies.'