Midnight In Madrid

THIRTY-THREE

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, NOON

I don’t know how I let them get the bloody drop on me,” Gian Antonio Rizzo grumbled. He was in an understandably sour mood as he sat on the edge of his hospital bed.

Two women attended him. Normally Rizzo might have been pleased with such a development, but not today and not these women. According to their hospital name tags, which they wore on their lab coats, one was a female nurse named Eliza and the other was a doctor named Jenny Morin.

They stood before him, carefully examining the repair work that had been done on him from the night before. But at the moment, Rizzo was talking past them in English, to Colonel Pendraza and Alex, who stood respectfully to the side and allowed the medical people to work.

“I’m getting careless in my old age,” he said, obviously giving no credence to what he was saying. “Well, there’ll be repercussions for those two mutts who mugged me in that bar. I’ll promise you that much!”

“I only found out what happened to you this morning,” Alex said.

“I got my fingernails into one of them, you know,” Rizzo said with satisfaction. “Fingernails!” The Rizzo of the hospital room-seething, aggrieved, injured-was not a happy man.

As the doctor and nurse examined Rizzo’s scalp, he flexed his right hand for the colonel and for Alex. “Took a little of the skin off one of their faces,” he said. “I wonder how he’s enjoying shaving this morning.”

On the right side of Rizzo’s skull, above the ear and visible as Dr. Morin removed a bandage, was a red lump that had the size, shape, and texture of a purple plum. It was still red and angry, wet from a combination of antibiotic cream and blood that continued to seep, and it looked to Alex as if Rizzo had taken a few stitches to close the gash.

Rizzo continued his vent with a torrent of profanity until Dr. Morin, in English, told him in so many words to clean up his vocabulary.

“Sorry,” Rizzo muttered. “Hey. But tell my visitors what happened, how they knocked me out.”

Dr. Morin was a dark-haired lady of around forty with a formidable, intelligent face.

“They put a needle in his left buttock to knock him out,” Dr. Morin said. “If his mouth was as foul last night as it has been since they brought him in, it’s no wonder,” she said. “I would have wanted to knock him out too.”

“Very funny,” Rizzo said.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” she said.

“You don’t know half of what was going on,” Rizzo said.

“I’m not sure I want to,” the doctor said good-naturedly.

Rizzo winced as the doctor examined the head wound with latexed fingers. “Am I going to be able to recite Greek poetry from memory after a shot to the head like that?” he said, his tone becoming mildly flirtatious.

“Could you recite it before?” she asked, sniffing out the old joke.

“No.”

“Then you won’t be able to now,” she said, withdrawing her hands. “But the injury is clean and the X-rays didn’t reveal a fracture. Your AIDS test from the needle came back negative too. You’re lucky. Again.”

“X-rays of my head revealed nothing,” Rizzo said, glancing to Alex. “How do you like that?” Colonel Pendraza snorted slightly.

“Do you still have the headache?” the doctor asked.

“No.”

“Be honest.”

“Okay, I still have it,” he said.

“You probably will for a few days,” Dr. Morin said. She looked back to Alex and the colonel. “Senor Rizzo has a mild concussion also. There’s going to be some discomfort to that.”

Rizzo looked back to the doctor. “Tell them what they gave me in the needle,” he said. “These are my work associates.”

“An injectable form of flunitrazepam,” the doctor said. “Powerful sedative. In America it’s often used as a veterinary medicine for horses.”

“A Mickey Finn with a needle,” Rizzo said. “It’s also one of those ‘date rape’ drugs.” He cursed his assailants and again swore speedy vengeance upon them. The colonel gave a shrug that conveyed the notion that if Rizzo unofficially took out a couple of street felons, it would be a civic improvement.

Rizzo paused, then looked at Alex. “What happened on the street?” he asked. “Did you get that bloody pietà?”

“No.”

“No?”

A glance to Colonel Pendraza from Alex. Pendraza lowered his gaze.

“It was an attempted ambush,” Alex said. “Fortunately there was an extra gun in play and it covered my back. So I’m here to tell about it.”

“Extra gun?” Rizzo asked, squinting. “What extra gun? Who?”

“We don’t even know. When you’re discharged, we’ll give you access to what we know.”

“I’m ready to go now,” Rizzo said. “What do you think, doc? Can I be on my way?”

“I can’t keep you here,” she said, placing a fresh bandage on the wound and then stepping back from the patient. “But I’d like to. At least for a day or two for observation.”

“Two days? Forget it.” Rizzo said.

“It’s your choice if you want to check yourself out. I can’t stop you, but I’d advise against it. If a blood vessel broke suddenly in your brain, you’d be dead before an ambulance could get you here.”

“And if one breaks while I’m here, I’ll be dead before the nurse can get in from the coffee machine,” he said. “I can sign myself out?”

“If you wish to,” she said. “And again, I emphatically advise against it.”

“Thank you. Show me where to sign,” Rizzo said.

He got to his feet but was unsteady. Alex reached forward and extended a hand.

“You really want to check yourself out?” Dr. Morin asked.

“Bloody right, I do,” Rizzo snapped. “The coffee here this morning was unbearable. I think they were trying to poison me.”

Half an hour later, Colonel Pendraza, Alex, Rizzo, and their armed escorts were back on the street in front of the hospital. They climbed into the colonel’s car, Rizzo sitting up front riding shotgun, Colonel Pendraza again in the rear with Alex.

Rizzo continued his diatribe. It was difficult to tell for whom he had the greater anger, the men in the bar who had assaulted him or the hospital staff that had treated him.

Nonetheless, another twenty minutes of weaving through morning traffic in Madrid and they pulled up at the side entrance to a nondescript brick building on the outskirts of the city, about two blocks from the Plaza de Toros de las Ventas, where the great bullfights were held.

The building was set between a dental office and a Chinese restaurant, on a busy narrow street that was cluttered with traffic. With no external marking other than a small sign, this was the office of the medical examiner for the Policia Nacional.

The car doors opened. Pendraza jumped out and walked at a quick pace, a phalanx of bodyguards around him, Alex, and the unsteady Rizzo.

A few minutes later, the three of them stood over two steel slabs where a pair of male bodies in red canvas bags were set forth for their examination.

Alex winced. Pendraza and Rizzo stood stony faced.

The wounds had been stitched shut and the dried blood had been cleansed away. But the gunshots had smashed into the heads, necks, and upper chests, ripping away flesh and pounding the bones of the recipients. Each corpse was missing part of the skull. Each man had been shot through the heart and neck. Alex had seen many corpses in her life. Too many, in fact, and the events of Kiev came rushing back to her as she looked at these. And yet these, in their own way, were particularly horrifying.

Never mind the fact that they might have killed her. The gunman who had covered her back had dispatched these two men with an unholy precision.

One half of one man’s head had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was hollow. The other man’s face had been completely smashed in by gunfire so horribly that Alex wondered whether it had been done intentionally to make identification difficult, or pathologically out of some unknown vengeance.

“These were the two men in police uniform?” Pendraza said. “To the extent that you can recognize them.”

Rizzo looked at the corpse that had half a head remaining. His eyes slid back to Alex. He gave her a nod.

“I agree,” she said. “That’s one. Not much question really if you picked up the bodies at the scene of the shooting. Any identification yet?” she asked.

“No,” Colonel Pendraza said. “They weren’t police; you know that. Exactly who they were and why you were targeted, we don’t know. I can only assume it has something to do with the pietà, but you’ve been in this line of work. It could have been left over business from something else.”

“Possibly,” she said.

“We’ll do DNA and fingerprints to the extent possible,” the colonel said. “Dental isn’t possible because the oral cavities have been destroyed. We have some bullet fragments. Those might tell us something. Anything else here?” he asked. “Either of you? Any thoughts at all?”

“Just the machinelike precision of the shooter,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. And I’m not sure I will again.”

“Unless it saves your life again,” Rizzo added. “Good Lord.”

“Unless it saves my life,” she said, “yes. Point well taken.”

“And then there’s the picture that begins to emerge,” Alex said. “Two men posing as police officers, another two in the bar, along with a woman. Whoever we’re dealing with begins to look like part of a fairly extensive organization. And then there’s the actual museum thieves who probably were none of these people.”

“I like the way you think,” Pendraza said. “I agree with you.”

Colonel Pendraza motioned to a lab technician, a young woman in blue scrubs. She rezipped the bags, then summoned more help from the next office. The team at the morgue would return the bodies back to the deep freeze.