The Malevolent Voyage of the Lorenzo Vittorio

By AnnieMae Robertson

The Malevolent Voyage of the Lorenzo Vittorio is a suspenseful novel about corporate espionage, kidnapping, murder and romance aboard an Italian ocean liner sailing out of Sydney, Australia.

Ending an abusive marriage, Fredi Cooper and her three children head back to the States the long way around. But instead of a rejuvenating leisurely trip to Southampton, England, a series of incidents leaves them confused and endangered. When Fredis life is threatened and one of her children kidnapped she begins to fear they might not survive the trip at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 20, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462067695

AnnieMae Robertson

AnnieMae Robertson is more a journey than a person. She has meandered like the universal string through this life and beyond, inside heads and hearts and dreams. She has twisted through social strata, crossing cultural boundaries to experience the persistence of poverty and the instability of affluence. She has listened to the stories of the birthgivers and the dying, and all manner of people in all manner of situations who taught her compassion first and foremost. Presently the journey has slowed to allow the retelling of all those stories, a task she manages at her computer in a miniscule apartment in Western Massachusetts.She has been a poet, a playwright, a painter, and most important, has raised four wonderful daughters and one wonderful son.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

To my children in gratitude for their support and their willingness to continue this journey with me. With love to Lar-kin—Jackie—Honey—Sandy—Steve, and my childrens’ children, Justin—Sarth—Jesse—Colin—Jamie—Matt—Risa—Adam, and the budding new generation, Patty—Shelby—Eric and….

Also in memory of another ship in another time.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rose M. Bertone and Ermma Gallina for their help with the Italian translation when I first began this work. And to Mario who went over it after I messed everything up doing a rewrite. My apologies to them and to my readers for any additional language errors due to further editing, etc.

Introduction

Settling back into the saddle, I leaned to pat the moist flank of the chestnut mare before removing my hat to allow the fresh mountain air to cool my sweating forehead. We’d been riding too hard just for the sheer pleasure of it, which at that altitude was risky for both the horse and me. It served me right that my knee felt mushy inside the stiff tightness of my boot, a reminder that I should have given in to my age and left such vigorous exercise to my children and grandchildren and their younger more frisky mounts. But that would have been a difficult concession on such a beautiful day.

The scenery in all directions was elegant. In front and above me, the snow on the peaks of the mountains was weeping in rivulets that filled the streams and fed the lower trees and early summer wildflowers. The sound and scent of that view took my breath away every time I reached that spot. Shifting around I glanced back at the pastoral panorama of the valley below. Within the crisp pattern offences I could see the main house and outbuildings of the ranch that had been my home for twenty-nine years. And even from that distance I could make out activity in one corral where my son was teaching his youngest girl to ride. She was old enough and more than willing.

The ranch looked like an illustration for a travel ad and reminded me how fortunate I was, and how narrow the doorway into heaven was. It had been a long time since I thought ofthat amazing journey on the green ship that carried me here. That had been its final voyage, a fact

that was startlingly mystical to me. It seemed as if it had materialized in that space and time solely for my benefit, and then disappeared before its image could solidify into something as mundane as an old ocean liner that had long since outlasted its purpose. That was March in sixty-nine. Remembering flooded me with a melancholy I usually reserved for childhood reminiscing.

Everything was speed related back then—travel—communications—commitments, all thrusting the world beyond the cusp of the computer age. It was before there was a personal computer in every home if not in every lap, when the technical world was flooded with frenzied ambitious minds jockeying for the billions destined for the select few front-runners. The computer industry was the gold rush of the late sixties when i lived in sydney and was married to one of those ambitious minds.

CHAPTER 1

Bud was not happy to be in the Will Goolie Bar. It was in the center of King’s Cross, the location of the blue light district of Sydney, Australia. It was also flanked on one side by a topless dance show featuring grossly overendowed women and on the other side by a topless show where the women were more attractively proportioned but all males. Such places had existed in the States, even in Boston, but his New England puritanical upbringing had never allowed him to frequent them.

And certainly Jennifer with her questionable lifestyle was not someone anyone could ever invite home, or for that matter even discuss in any respectable family’s front parlor. More than once he had heard she was, or had been a high-priced hooker. He believed it, at least the hooker part.

He was meeting her just to deliver a message from the ‘man’ who was, for some reason, involved with the woman. It was a mystery to Bud how anyone with any eyesight left could find her attractive enough to hit on let alone date, even without a price attached. She reminded him of a molting feather boa he had once found in his grandmother’s attic.

Crossing the room Bud avoided a waitress toting a tray piled with drinks. He moved between the crowded tables toward one close to the back exit where he could see Jennifer sitting in the midst of a

wave of smoke from a cigarette on which she was peevishly or nervously puffing. She was easy to spot. Her carrot-colored hair made no pretense at being natural. The roots were visibly darker, enough so he decided the woman didn’t give a damn, or judged her own appearance through eyes so blood red they probably acted as filters. She was also made up more flamboyantly than he considered being in any taste at all. Thick purple fringed her eyelids, dark brown stripes were painted under her puffy cheeks, and her lips were thickly rouged. They were the same fuchsia as her low cut, too tight sweater that made it intrusively clear where she carried her extra pounds.

The fact of the matter, he hoped only to leave the message and get out of there before someone saw them together. But when he did reach the table her relief and the enthusiastic way she pushed a drink toward him blunted his impatience enough to allow him to join her—just for one short one.

So the bloody bastard isn’t coming, she said. Her tone of voice did not indicate the anger her words implied. Ta, Bud, take a load off. Have a Teweys.

Hell, Jen, he soothed, you know what he’s like. Said tell you he’ll be along later if you’ll wait.

I’ll wait if you’ll keep me company. A girl shouldn’t drink in this bloody hole without a bloke for protection.

I can only stay a bit.

You shy worse than a dingo on a sheep station. Pack it in, cobber, and relax. I won’t bite, she grinned. And if I did you might like it.

Christ, he thought and blushed. He smiled and settled back and blew the foam off the beer, poured a bit too warm—a bit too fast for his palette. Jesus, a manhattan would taste good, he thought. Next time the bastard could run his own errands.

He didn’t notice the two men leaning on the bar close to the kitchen door. They looked like any two Aussie construction workers in for a brew after a day in the ditches. They were dressed in the typical grimy sleeveless tee shirts, and shorts that were so stiff with dirt they had taken on the leathery look of leiderhosen. He didn’t even pay much attention when they moved up to the table and slid into the vacant chairs, a couple of Joes looking for a bit of action. As a matter of fact he shifted his things, ready to stand so Jennifer could do business if she wanted.

When you get right down to it, Jennifer’s face should have warned him. She had turned so white her makeup looked frescoed. Her mouth gaped to a wide frightened ‘o.’

Don’t worry, Jen, one man said. We’re not here for you. It’s your mate here we’re after.

Leave him alone, she said, her voice thinning out. Leave him alone. He ain’t done a thing.

Stuff it, Jen!

That was when Bud began to sweat. They were big guys and whatever they wanted they looked damn serious.

Don’t make a sound, Yank! the man closest to him said in a burr of words pushed out through the corner of his lips. We can take you out right here, a sticker quick in the rib cage, or you can move nice and easy when I tell you. We’re going through that door there, sweet and slow, no panic, and on out into the alley where a couple of mates can talk without being overheard. Your choice, Yank. And you, Jen, you just keep your bloody ass sitting where it is. If I catch one word of you gabbing to the coppers I’ll cut you up for some Abo poacher’s pot.

He touched Bud on the elbow. Now, mate, move easy!

Jennifer looked as if she was about to loose it. Too damned scared to do anything. And there was nothing Bud could do except pray. That would give God and his father a good laugh. He thought about his father, concentrated on that to keep from shaking while he tried to measure distances, figure a way out. Everything was happening too fast. When he slowed at one point, the Aussie behind him put one fist of a hand in the small of his back. Bud could feel the knife blade.

Everyone in the bar looked in the other direction. He was sure they all knew what was going on but for all intents and purposes he had become invisible. Even the cooks in the kitchen turned the other way.

The alley was empty except for mountains of trash, crates—two old chairs—a row of garbage cans. He saw an old cigarette wrapper wadded into a gold brown ball, last cigarette, Christ. Jesus, man, what did I do? What the hell do you want? My wallet? If that’s what you want, take it!

You owe us more than a few bloody bucks, Yank. Don’t play stupid! You were paid fair price. Now, matey, here’s what we figure. You’ve been waltzing with Jen in there. For a dumb sheila she’s got interesting connections and you’ve decided to go for the whole bundle. That’s not how it works.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not the one you want!

That was when the smaller man reacted. Shut your mouth! Give a bloke credit for brains! he said and landed his first punch. Bud doubled over, his stomach smashed against his backbone. Spewing spittle and beer, he gasped for air as he crumbled to the disintegrating blacktop. Hold him up, Jimmy Boy!

The larger man dragged Bud to a crouching position and held him there while his companion retrieved a baseball bat from where it had been placed behind one of the cans. The man with the bat waved it. Bloody apt, don’t you think, Yank? Without slowing down or telegraphing his intent he swung the heavy wooden club around and down, connecting just on the bulges of Bud’s pant legs. He crushed both kneecaps simultaneously.

The American screamed as he fell. His own sound was a natural release that kept him from instantly dying from shock. He lay on the ground curled into himself, his mouth stretched tight with wails of pain. The two assailants stared down at him for a minute as if they were admiring a bush they had just trimmed.

Don’t know how you Yanks ever won the bloody war, the smaller man said. You better deliver that package you promised, mate, or next time we use the bat on your brains. Come on, Jimmy Boy. We’re done here.

Two weeks later on the fifth day of March 1969, everything in the neighborhood of number 533 Cherry Street, in Warrawee, New South Wales was settling into a pleasant early autumn. The house was quiet, red bricks almost dry after moistening along the corners with morning condensation. Birds had settled in a line across the moss patterned tile roof. Two butcher-birds with their black opalescent feathers, their dark eyes rotating, searched for some tidbit to hang in the branches of their thornbush.

A smaller wren tended to its early morning preening. On the post just paces from the corner of the roof a kookaburra watched a tabby approach. The cat crept to the trellis fronting the garage, and with a quick release of hind muscles propelled itself to the top of the cross structure and from there to the roof of the porch. The butcher-birds waited, leaving the wren like a judas goat, unaware—vulnerable, a lure to compel the cat to leap across the open space to the low eaves of the house. And from there to the peak.

With its body elongated the feline predator moved slowly toward the wren, too preoccupied to see that in those final moments it, the cat, had become the hunted rather than the hunter. The two butcherbirds had fluttered up and settled again on the length of roof necessary for the cat’s victorious retreat. From there they flew attack maneuvers intended to draw the cat into an even more precarious position. The kookaburra inched closer.

The house seemed to join in this major shifting of the food chain. Time stopped for that fragment of readjustment. Then in the next tick-time release the house exploded, bricks flying out and up, raining like hail on rose bushes—cockscomb—lilac hedges. Hundreds imploded into the expanded cellar hole. The roof tiles became shat-tered missiles smashing down on neighboring roofs, piercing car tops, bursting through windows. Seconds after, aftershock.

The cat lay twitching under splinters of plaster, of cabinet tops and bricks. Within minutes, when the dust had settled, the two butcher-birds, stunned by the impact of sound and debris, wobbled shakily on the end of a sliver of back door and waited for the world to right itself and for the cat’s tail to stop its final movement. The kookaburra was nowhere to be seen.

In front of the rubble that once had been the home of Jack and Jennifer Ricco, suspected racketeers, the battered Hudson Ford family car sat. In the front seat the red haired woman, like the cat, twitched her last twitch, a section of roof tile sitting in her lap along with a recognizable piece of her nose.

It took five minutes for the first fire engine to arrive. People in doorways as much as half a dozen streets over had directed it there. Clinging to the sides and back of the truck the firemen, part of Her Majesty’s 107 Fire Brigade, tightened the chinstraps on their copper helmets, and readjusted their grips on the beautiful brass axes they would use to cut through any doorway left intact. It was the firemen who discovered the woman in the car and later the cat, and the remains of a young girl in the remains of her heavy burgundy bathtub.

The first thing the Warrawee Police detective ordered was the evacuation of all the families in that section of town, from the train station to the milk bar on the Pacific Highway, just in case it had been a gas leak or some such thing that might recur without warning. The second was the cordoning off of the more central location with Her Majesty’s Police sawhorses and yellow crime ribbon. The ribbon wound from ten feet on the street side of the battered car, along the perimeter of the front and side gardens to the far side of the back garden. As this was being accomplished, police at the evacuation line turned back curiosity seekers and began their process of people detaining.

The forensic team in their black van arrived with their load of equipment and descended on the scene. They gingerly stepped and examined car door to car door, brick to brick, victim to victim.

CHAPTER 2

The Lorenzo Vittorio towered over the dock. From where I stood it looked like it towered over the whole world for that matter, since I had never imagined an ocean liner being so large. The main gangway leading up from the open door of the customhouse to the rectangular opening in the side of the ship was extremely intimidating. It rekindled in my already tumultuous psyche an old horror of heights. My children provided ballast, fortunately, and for their sake I allowed myself to be guided, luggaged to the ears, up that precariously mobile slope and into a spacious room where I was welcomed by a purser young enough to be one of my own issue.

The room, as large as an average school classroom, was crowded with a convergence of passengers and ship’s personnel that provided vibrant texture to that opening scene of my journey. But they could have been large-eared African elephants or longhorn steer and I’d hardly have noticed because I was too busy trying to extricate my own brood and propel them forward.

Benvenuto! Presente vostri biglietti d’entrata, the young man requested then studied the sheets of paper I handed him. "Ah, Americani, he said. Welcome, aboard, Madam Cooper."

His English sounded far clearer than my Australianese, an abortion of my American dialect which had, in the four years we lived on that island continent, become saturated with assorted Australian words such as bloke and ta. His accent only softened the words, brushed them with Mediterranean silk.

Follow the left corridor to the. He stopped, losing his verbal direction, his gaze fixed on my older daughter. His expression suggested that he was smitten, plunged into the center of some glorious fantasy where nothing and no one existed except that most exquisite creature that had just appeared before him. And my daughter, Robyn, the love of my life—at least, the oldest of the three loves—was as aware of him. She lowered her dark eyes demurely and pursed her lips into bows, like a young geisha at her first tea ceremony.

The left corridor? I coaxed in an attempt to cut short that moment of budding young love. I could understand his trauma. With her wild brunette hair and exotic features, my daughter resembled an illustration from the original publication of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. She instantly transformed young men into frenzied pseudo-princes trying to hack their way through briar patches, or classroom doors, or whatever was the barrier at any given time. It was a growing problem.

What cabin number and how do we collect our other luggage? I persisted. Luggage? Where?

The purser never shifted his gaze. Luggage will be delivered to your cabins—163 and 165, he responded robotically, clutching papers and cabin keys tightly against the front of his jacket.

Behind us the gangway was clear, a lull in the passengers boarding. And of the remaining individuals in the room seven were clearly ship’s personnel, distinguishable by their high-collared white uniform jackets trimmed with black epaulets. They were all tan, and crisply formal—the men and their suits—and smiling as though their faces were not becoming fatigued.

It was the first time I had traveled by ship. During every other journey home to the States I had been crammed into a narrow airline seat for hours watching movie reruns. Unfortunately Doris Day was never sufficiently electrifying in Glass Bottom Boat to eclipse my rigid belief that tons of metal and three hundred passengers could hardly remain airborne just because the little flaps on the edges of the wings were raised or lowered. on our last flight it was even tougher for me to believe the kid flying the thing was paying enough attention to which way the flaps were flapping. He seemed far too busy walking up and down the aisle, looking at my daughter with the same glazed expression that was on the face of the ship’s junior purser.

My kids had been solidly involved in the choice of an ocean liner for transportation. They were as weary of air travel as I, and definitely not up to another landing at Mexico City, the usual halfway stop. Bad enough there were always crosswinds so on every approach the plane sashayed in and threatened to pivot on a wing impaled in the concrete runway. But it was the mantric singsong of the other passengers reciting a Spanish version of Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee…Blessed art thou amongst women… and the click of Rosaries that set my teeth on edge. Worst of all, I found myself reciting along with them, synchronizing my English to their Spanish. Hail Mary full of grace… Mexico City airport religion.

Deciding to travel home on the Lorenzo Vittorio had been easy. The leaving itself had been the scary decision, even if it was grimly overdue. As I had written to my friend Barbara, things had gotten dangerously complicated with Edward. He had become increasingly secretive about his life away from home, and abusive if I so much as expressed an interest. In spite of that, I had learned a number of things that were hard to ignore. one regarded his very visible liaison with a woman I’d been told was deeply involved with Australian racketeers and lord knew what else, a woman who had died in a suspicious house explosion not far from our home in Warrawee. I understood that his frequent business trips had been with her as part of the baggage.

If it were as simple as his getting himself into a singular mess I might have hung in with him. I was not one of those wives who felt death bound that their husbands had to be without fault, if such a thing were ever possible, but he had been subjugating and corrosive for years. The final insult, the one that pushed me into disregarding his possible reformation or more probable retaliation if I did decide to leave him, was his flagrant disregard for the children’s embarrassment. That, and poor Bud’s broken knees. Edward’s refusal to explain any of it was more intolerable than his threats.

At first he had given us no argument regarding our planned exodus. He even seemed relieved, setting his coffee cup down and looking at me with more appreciation than he had in months. I wondered if possibly my decision provided a solution to some perplexing problem that had become a major complication in his recently expanded lifestyle. His response had certainly surprised me. It contradicted the nature of the man who, until that moment had always brutishly elected to have his cake and eat it too. I had to assume he was backed against the wall, that he didn’t want the company or his working cronies to know anything about anything, certainly not about his double life or his abuses.

It was only at the last moment when we were waiting for the car to the ship that he had requested the right to meet us in London. I was impressed by the firmness of my refusal. There would be no purpose, I responded, keeping my voice threaded out, as unemotional as possible.

Then he reverted to self. He shouted out those long, narrow, piercingly familiar expletives at me. You bitch, you goddamn fucking bitch, don’t tell me what I can and cannot do! You can’t survive without me! I’ll make sure you don’t!

They were old words in his