The Babylon Idol

Chapter 16

The villa was fronted by a grand paved circular courtyard with an ornate baroque-style fountain as its centrepiece, all illuminated in the hard glare of the swirling blue lights and the softer glow from the house’s many windows, all of them lit up. Ben hurriedly parked the BMW away from the cluster of police cars, got out and ran towards the boil of activity, taking in the scene. There was only the single ambulance, accompanied by five blue Florence police Alfa Romeos and a Lamborghini fast pursuit car belonging to a pair of swaggering plain-clothes guys who had taken charge of the dozen or so uniformed cops present.

The paramedics had nearly reached the ambulance. Pushing his way closer, Ben saw that the body on the gurney was covered in a bloody sheet. His stomach twisted up at the sight. Anna.

But as he pressed onwards through the police cordon he saw that the sheet wasn’t pulled up right over the victim’s face the way they did with dead bodies — and that the face, wearing an expression of agonised pain, wasn’t Anna Manzini’s. It was a male, youngish, dark-haired, thirty or less. He didn’t look fatally injured, but he’d been pretty badly cut up.

Ben felt a presence and turned to see one of the plain-clothes men approaching. He was thirty-something, dressed in an immaculate Burberry trench coat, and looked like he spent more time in the gym and at the hairdresser’s than chasing bad guys. Eyeballing Ben suspiciously he took an ID badge from the right hip pocket of his coat and flashed it. ‘Detective Tito Bellomo. Who’re you?’

‘I’m a friend of Anna Manzini, the owner,’ Ben said. ‘Where is she?’

‘This is a police crime scene,’ he said. ‘You’ve no business here, so move on, please.’

‘Is she here?’ Ben insisted. ‘Is she all right?’

‘I said move on,’ Bellomo said, giving Ben a scowl that he probably practised in the mirror every day. ‘Or I’ll arrest you for loitering.’ He tucked his ID badge back in his coat pocket.

Ben held up his hands. ‘No problem, officer. Hey—’ He pointed at the sleek blue-and-white police Lamborghini that was gleaming in the villa’s lights. ‘Is that your car? Wow, that’s really something, isn’t it?’

Bellomo couldn’t resist looking round to admire it himself for a moment, before he turned back to Ben with the scowl. ‘Are you still here?’

‘On my way, Detective. Sorry I troubled you.’

Ben made as if to head back to his car, but the moment he saw Bellomo walk off, he slipped into the shadows and watched the scene unfolding. From here he could see through the tall front doors of the villa and into the entrance hall, twice the size of Le Val’s living room and gleaming with marble, a broad sweeping staircase in the background.

Observing the crowd of people in the hall, Ben couldn’t see Anna among them and wondered where she could be. There were two young women dressed as though for a night out, bare-armed in flimsy dresses and shivering and hugging themselves in the cold from the wide-open door. Both were crying and being gamely consoled by the pair of men they were with, who looked about the same age as the victim being loaded aboard the ambulance and just as traumatised as their female companions. The four of them were being questioned by Bellomo’s plain-clothes partner and a team of patrol officers.

If they were witnesses to whatever had happened here tonight Ben wanted to speak to them, but there was no way he could get close.

Then he noticed a third young guy, dressed similarly smart-casual as the first two and about the same age, who had wandered outside to sit on the low wall surrounding a little patio or barbecue area off to one side of the house, half-lit by the swirling blue lights. The cops either hadn’t noticed him, or for some reason they were less interested in speaking to him than to his friends. He didn’t seem particularly upset by the evening’s drama, more concerned with the cigarette he was trying to ignite from a lighter that was sparking but wouldn’t produce a flame.

Ben walked over, sat next to him on the wall and offered his Zippo. ‘Try mine,’ he said in Italian.

The young guy puffed ferociously on the lit cigarette, passed Ben back his Zippo and muttered, ‘Thanks, man.’ He was in his mid-twenties or thereabouts, with a scrappy beard and long black hair that kept flopping into his eyes. He paused for a moment to glance Ben up and down, then pointed at the villa. ‘Look, I already told Detective Franciosa in there all I could. I was barely involved in this whole thing, you know?’

Ben nodded sagely, took out the ID card he’d just lifted from Bellomo’s trench-coat pocket after distracting him and let the young guy have a quick glance at it, keeping his thumb over the mugshot photo. ‘Detective Bellomo, Florence CID. Just a minute of your time, Signor—?’

‘Morante, Luciano Morante. Where you from, Detective? If you don’t mind my saying, your accent’s kind of weird.’

‘I worked abroad a long time,’ Ben said, taking out his notepad and jotting down Luciano’s name, just like a real detective would.

‘That’s what I’d like to do, you know, see the world. Hey, man, that police Lambo is the coolest car. What’s it like, being in your job? You get to shoot a lot of people?’

Ben looked at him. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

Luciano’s eyes twinkled. ‘You got a gun? Can I see it?’

Ben hesitated. ‘If I show it to you, will you answer my questions?’ He was wondering if it would be quicker just to put the gun to this twerp’s head and give him three seconds to spill what he knew, but maybe even Italian detectives didn’t behave that way towards members of the public.

‘Sure.’

Ben slipped out the Taurus, dropped the magazine, jacked the round from the chamber and let Luciano fondle the unloaded weapon. Satisfied, Luciano passed the pistol back to him, took another draw of his cigarette, blew out a gigantic cloud of smoke and motioned towards the house.

‘Man, what a scene, huh? Never even met Gianni Garrone before. Poor bastard. I only came along for the ride; I’m a friend of Pietro there, you know?’ He pointed. Pietro was one of the two men in the hallway, still talking to Franciosa and the uniforms.

Luciano went on, shaking his head, ‘It’s unreal, man. I’m new in town, first party I get invited to, next thing I know I’m walking in and there’s the host, this Garrone dude, tied to a chair and some big psycho maniac carving him up with a knife in one hand and a fucking digital recorder in the other. One glance at us, and he takes off. The sicko probably gets his kicks playing back the screams of his victims. I saw that in a movie.’

It felt like history repeating itself. Another Manzini villa, another sadistic knife attack. As though Franco Bozza was back, and up to his old tricks. But that couldn’t be. In his mind, Ben was seeing the bloodied, ripped shower curtain at Luc Simon’s apartment in Lyon. Picturing the blade shearing through thin plastic and slicing into vulnerable, naked flesh. He asked, ‘Did you get a good look at the attacker? Would you recognise his face?’

‘No way, man. He was wearing a mask, like a ski mask?’

‘You said he was a big guy.’

‘No, not big. Huge. Definitely over two metres tall. All bulked up like he was a powerlifter or something, but fast on his feet. He disappeared into the woods on the other side of the house. A minute later we saw a car go speeding off. Might’ve been a van, probably dark-coloured or black, hard to say.’

It was a usefully detailed description. Ben jotted it down. ‘Your friend, you said his name was Pietro—?’

‘Rossi. We work at the International Film School together. I just started there a couple months ago.’

Ben’s list was growing. He scribbled the name Pietro Rossi next to Luciano Morante, circled them together and wrote beside them, FLORENCE INT. FILM SCHOOL. ‘So the victim, Gianni Garrone, he’s a buddy of Pietro’s too?’

‘Yeah, though like I said, I never saw him until tonight. It’s my first time coming here. Pietro’s been to a few of Garrone’s get-togethers. Said there were going to be girls. Well, I count two. For three guys, plus Garrone makes four. Some night this turned out to be. Can you believe I’ve been here two months and I still haven’t got laid?’

Leaving aside Luciano’s frustrated love life, Ben asked, ‘Does Garrone live here?’ Thinking that maybe Garrone was Anna’s current younger male squeeze, who could have moved in with her. That didn’t seem like Anna’s style to Ben, but it occurred to him that perhaps he didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. That still wouldn’t explain where Anna was now.

Luciano shook his head. ‘He lives here, but not like, it’s his place. He works here. The owner’s a woman. Hot stuff, too.’ He grinned. ‘Pietro said, first time he saw her, he thought she was Valentina Del Cuore. You know, the movie star? Absolute dead ringer.’

Ben grunted, pretending to have heard of her.

‘This Manzini chick’s a writer, apparently. Gianni’s, like, her assistant. Helps with research and stuff, makes phone calls, runs errands. Lives over there, in the annexe next door, but she lets him have parties and stuff in the big house when she’s away.’

‘And that’s where she is, away?’

Luciano blew more smoke. ‘I guess she must be, yeah. She’s not here, anyhow. If she was here, you guys would’ve found her when you searched the house, no?’

Ben’s relief was outweighed by his frustration. ‘Did Pietro happen to say if he knew where she’d gone?’

‘Nah, man, not to me.’

‘But if Gianni’s her assistant, he must know where she is.’

‘I guess so, yeah,’ Luciano said noncommittally, puffing like a steam train. ‘What’s the deal with her? She in trouble or something?’

Ben put away his notepad, stood up and offered his hand. ‘You’ve been a big help to the investigation, Signor Morante. I’ll know where to find you if we need to talk again.’

‘Detective Bellomo, right?’

Ben walked away. He wanted to confirm what he’d learned with Pietro and perhaps find out more, but Pietro was still deep in conversation with the cops. Meanwhile, the paramedics had finished loading the injured Gianni Garrone into the ambulance and were closing the doors. If Ben wanted to find out where they were taking him, now was his only chance. If he drew a blank, he could always pay a visit to the Florence International Film School later to catch up with Pietro Rossi.

Making his choice, Ben trotted to the Alpina and fired it up. He waited for the ambulance to go first, making its way down the villa’s driveway with its headlamps burning beams through the mist.

He followed.