Deadline Rome: The Vatican Kylix

By Sari Gilbert

It is 1980 and Clare Phillips, a beautiful, young British free-lance journalist based in Rome and her friend Daniel, a young American priest, visit an Etruscan tomb and make a macabre discovery. Clare realizes that a kidnapping has taken place and, with Daniel’s grudging help, decides to do some investigating on her own.

With a background in archeology, Clare is also covering the announced purchase by the Vatican’s Etruscan Museum of a valuable antique Greek wine cup – a kylix - painted by the world famous Euphronius. A major exhibit has been planned. The purchase turns out to have been engineered by an unscrupulous Argentinian archbishop and a greedy French diplomat, and Clare – with Daniel’s help - uses her contacts to dig deeper. She gets advice from fellow journalists, including Luca, an Italian investigative reporter with whom she’d had a brief passionate fling, works closely with several of Italy’s top investigating magistrates. But her determination to make a name for herself leads her repeatedly to strike out on her own.

Gradually several things become clear. First, that the purchase may have been made with “dirty money”, and second, that a avaricious Christian Democratic politician and his henchmen may also be involved in the kidnapping. Then, once the identity of the kidnapping victim becomes known, that the two events are inextricably linked.

Clare’s ambition puts her at risk on more than one occasion. The kylix will leave a bloody trail and the story, spun out against its Roman background, highlights the life of a dynamic foreign journalist in Italy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sari Gilbert
• Release date: Jul 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220091503

Sari Gilbert

In love with Italy from a young age, Sari Gilbert has been living in Rome since the 1970’s. As a foreign correspondent, Gilbert wrote for a number of American and Canadian publications, including Newsweek and the Washington Post, covering everything except soccer matches and fashion shows. Subsequently she worked, in Italian, for the short-lived daily L’Indipendente and then for the prestigious Italian daily, Il Sole 24 Ore. She now writes for pleasure and edits for a living.

Book preview

Prologue

May 1980

The darkened room, the only light coming from an uneven space between the dirt floor and the wooden door he somehow knew had been padlocked on the other side, smelled of some kind of animals. Goats? he wondered. Or maybe chickens? He was a city boy and didn’t know much about animals except for those rare visits back when they lived in France to his grand-père’s country estate in Bretagne. What he did know was that the left side of his head was hurting like mad and that he was scared. Very, very scared.

For a while he’d been very groggy. Now he remembered how the large sedan had blocked his way as, the evening before, or was it maybe the day before that, he’d walked down a nearly deserted Via di San Valentino on his way to the bus stop. He’d started using public transport only a few months before and was enjoying his independence. But then a rough-looking man had pulled him into the back seat and, holding Alain’s head down on his lap, had put a strong-smelling cloth over his mouth and nose.

When he’d awakened, the side of his head burning and something that might be tape or a bandage pulling the skin there taut, he’d seen that one of his hands was handcuffed to an iron ring in the grey stone wall. The other wrist was circled by a steel manacle attached to a long chain that in turn was also looped around a ring in the wall. But the second chain was long enough to allow him to move his arm freely. Next to him there was a transparent glass container with what looked like urine in it, although he had no recollection of having peed. A bit closer were two large plastic bottles of water, some slices of bread, a chunk of what looked like pecorino cheese and, how strange, a large tin of pâté de campagne.

---

The sight of the food made him realize how hungry he was and he reached out for the cheese and took several bites. After only a few minutes, however, he retched, throwing up the pecorino and spitting out some saliva. His situation had suddenly become clear to him. He was a prisoner. Waves of fear rolled through his gut.

Who would do this to him? What did they want? Money? What else? His father, the Ambassador, would surely pay.

Papa. Maman. Help me, he heard himself moan. And then he felt darkness descend and slumped back against the wall.

Chapter One

They’d been walking for hours. Clare wasn’t sure how much further she could go and was happy when Daniel suggested they call a halt.

Let’s go into that last one, he said, setting down his rather worse-for-the-wear Boy Scout’s knapsack on the bramble-covered ground. The low, rectangular entrance had indicated an ‘a camera’ Etruscan tomb, the type in which a long corridor opens up into the burial chamber, with the stone beds where the bodies, or alternatively, the deceased’s ashes, were placed.

Probably cool inside, she thought in passing.

Might be a good place to have lunch, he added, pretending to be tired after the long trek along the uneven edges of the many tree-shaded ravines they’d walked around and through.

Brilliant. I’m right knackered. Clare smiled, amused by his chivalry.

Tall, and rangy in his corduroy pants and checked shirt, his thick brown hair and craggy profile making him a dreamboat in anyone’s book, Daniel didn’t look at all winded.

Clare, on the other hand, was exhausted by their long walk. She dropped her heavy leather shoulder bag on the ground and fanned her face with her free hand. She’d be sorry the next day that she hadn’t thought to wear a hat. Once it had become clear that her English complexion and the Mediterranean sun were not really compatible, she’d gotten into the hat-habit when working a dig. Now that she was doing journalism, she was indoors most of the time and the hat had remained in her closet, almost forgotten.

It was only May, but in central Italy when the sun is shining it can get very hot very quickly. They had been walking, no, scrambling, for two hours through the densely green and rocky terrain around Tuscania, a prime destination for both Etruscan lovers and medievalists as well as for sophisticated tourists.

My view is that the U.S. made a huge cock-up of the rescue attempt, Clare insisted, continuing the discussion that had been going on in fits and starts as they clambered through bramble bushes and around fallen branches. Eight of your squaddies killed for nothing and 52 hostages still in Iranian hands. Our blokes, on the other hand, managed to rescue all 26 hostages at the Iranian embassy in London. And, they killed five of the six terrorists to boot!

She could hear Daniel muttering and decided to change the subject.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist, she laughed over her shoulder and paused. But wasn’t this supposed to be just a short and jolly hike? Clearly, we are a couple of masochists. It is SO hot, she said, pausing for a moment to unzip the canvas gilet she was wearing over a faded blue, long-sleeved Ralph Lauren polo shirt she had stolen from her brother. I can’t believe I actually brought a jumper with me.

Millennia of volcanic activity and the added force of rivers and streams had left the area pockmarked by gorges and caves of multi-colored tuff, over which trees and Mediterranean scrub grew thickly. Here and there they had seen myriad remnants of Etruscan and Roman terracotta. But the major attraction for this weekday jaunt was the innumerable tombs that dotted the region, the older ones with hilltop entrances and the later ones – fourth to sixth century BC, Clare reminded herself – with ground-level entrances.

So maybe we should go back, said Daniel. There must be thousands of these, he mused, walking around a half-buried jumble of tufa blocks to reach out his hand. He helped her over a fallen tree trunk, his touch sending shivers down her back, a feeling she’d had with him before but one she was determined to ignore.

Maybe hundreds of thousands, countered Clare, thinking back a decade to the courses she’d taken on pre-Roman history. The Etruscans were amazing. They had settlements in many other parts of Lazio, throughout Tuscany and even as far north as the Alps. They were everywhere before the Romans. Even Rome’s first kings were Etruscans, she added. But, of course, he knew all that.

Daniel, Clare could see, was now perspiring as well.

I’m really ready for a break, he confessed. They turned and walked the 100 or so yards back to the tomb they’d passed a short time before. One which seemed to be a stand-alone tomb. Not part of a necropolis as one often found in the hills around Tuscania.

I just keep thinking how great it would have been if we had found something valuable.

Yeah, sure, she laughed. We could sell it on the black market and I could immediately move into a penthouse apartment with a huge terrace and you could bring your parents and your eight brothers over for a visit.

Or, she added, still laughing, you could make a huge donation to the Church and they would immediately promote you to bishop. Or even archbishop.

---

Clare had first met Daniel two years before when the pastry-filled basket she was hauling up to her Trastevere window from the café downstairs had got stuck on his windowsill, one floor below.

A smiling, and very handsome face had peered up at her and a man in his early thirties with very white teeth and an unmistakably American accent had said in English, with a hearty laugh, Hmmm, those look good, can I have one?

Daniel, as he had introduced himself ten minutes later when he bounded upstairs for coffee and a cornetto, was from California and had come to Rome to study at the North American College.

But isn’t that for priests? she had asked, somewhat puzzled and feeling just a twinge of incipient disappointment. She was almost incredulous when she learned that her newly discovered neighbor, then dressed in Dockers and a long-sleeved plaid cotton shirt, was indeed a priest.

Wow, she’d thought.

Even more amazingly, they’d both studied archaeology. He had even been at a dig at Caesarea, in Israel, which is why the summer before they had taken a stressfully chaste trip there and why they periodically went on discovery jaunts to ancient sites in and around Rome. This time they had chosen Tuscania, a key city in what was now being called Tuscia, the northwest part of Italy’s Lazio region, to nose around the Etruscan tombs in the area.

You know as well as I do, that finding something of value is next to impossible today. For that to happen we’d have to discover an entirely new tomb. And then, since we are law-abiding citizens, we’d have to turn it over to the State.

Clare sat down on the tree trunk and took a breath. "A couple of years ago I interviewed a tombarolo, a grave robber. He called himself Umberto er Tolfatano. He was from Tolfa, like my shoulder bag, she said, nodding at the bag that lay at her feet. Apparently, in the old days he managed to make a decent living just from the things he and his mates found in isolated tombs – it’s one of the world’s oldest professions. A friend told me about an ancient Macedonian temple tomb in which archeologists found the centuries-old skeleton of a thief who appeared to have gotten in through the tomb’s roof but who had been unable, for whatever reason, to get out again."

In Italy, the phenomenon was more recent. When archeologists or honest peasants came across tombs, they dutifully sent their finds to places like the Etruscan Museums in Tarquinia or Rome. Thousands of other gravesites – no one knew how many there were – had instead been cleared out by tombaroli.

This is probably a piece of some ordinary amphora, she said picking up a piece of what looked like faded clay and then tossing it aside again. But there were real treasures. All those things – bronze mirrors, gold jewelry, statues, Greek vases, black bucchero ceramic pots, alabaster vials that some 2500 years earlier bereaved Etruscans had amassed for their loved ones’ final journey – must have brought in a pretty penny.

Theirs was no treasure hunt. The plan had been simply to have a day out and to visit some of the unprotected, simpler tombs – the unpainted ones a bit off the beaten track – and soak up some of the atmosphere.

Okay, let’s get out of the sun and eat, she said. Hands outstretched, she felt her way along the tomb’s rough-hewn wall and moved into what the dim light from the entrance showed to be the tomb’s main chamber. Inside, it was darkly cool, the shaded rock compartment refreshing after the overly warm spring sun.

She turned on the large, camping flashlight they had brought with them and waited. Daniel, she knew, had brought some cheese, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, fruit, a bottle of red wine, some paper cups and a corkscrew. Her own bag contained a thermos with water and sandwiches. There were two normal panini with prosciutto and mozzarella, and another two sandwiches, her favorite, of mozzarella, tomato, basil on thick, chewy, supposedly homemade casareccio bread moistened with dark green olive oil.

Remind me where you bought those? Daniel asked. They look yummy.

From Giuliana. You know, the woman with the large grocery around the corner in Via della Pelliccia? I went down there while you were at the basilica saying Mass.

Shining the flashlight around the tomb – best to make sure there were no creepy crawlies around – she was annoyed to see that someone else had recently had the same idea of a tomb-side repast but had, disgustingly, left his or her refuse behind.

As a Christian I hate to say it, but let’s face it, people are often slobs, muttered Daniel as Clare retrieved from a far corner of the chamber a plastic shopping bag in which there were what appeared to be leftovers.

Yeah, and so much for the starving children in Africa, Clare half joked in return.

Balefully, she eyed two partially stale rosettas, a half package of what looked like caprino, the Italian version of cream cheese, a few ham slices that may have been meant for sandwiches and a jar that looked to be of some kind of pâté or spread.

We’ll take it with us when we go and throw it out, she said, only then noticing that further in the corner there was something else. A fragment of pottery, which she instinctively put into a pocket of her photographer’s gilet, and a second plastic bag as well. When she picked that up, a sloppily wrapped yellow packet fell out, opening as it hit the floor.

Daniel, what is this? she cried drawing back in disgust and fear.

"Madre di Dio!" the priest in him had exclaimed.

They both looked down, terrified, at what was clearly a bloody human ear.

Chapter Two

An hour later, after a mostly silent madcap dash back to the road where they had parked Daniel’s battered green Fiat 600, Clare and Daniel sat wordlessly sipping cheap grappa at a rickety iron table outside a small café on the town’s outskirts. A radio, presumably belonging to the owner of the Caffé Bel Riposo , was playing the Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall,’ one of Clare’s favorites. But with their macabre find nestling in an empty yogurt pot in her purse, neither of them was in the mood to sing along as they normally would.

What next? asked Daniel, whose face was still ashen.

Go to the police, I guess, Clare answered hesitantly, aware somewhere in the back of her mind that there’d recently been some kind of scandal in the area with local law enforcement. "No, it’s the Carabinieri. I always forget that for historical reasons the Pubblica Sicurezza or police, are generally present only in the major cities. Everywhere else, I mean in all the smaller towns, security concerns are handled by the Carabinieri."

Neither of them moved.

I don’t know, Daniel, Clare said after a pause and several more sips of grappa. This may have something to do with a kidnapping. I wasn’t in Italy yet when John Paul Getty the Third was kidnapped, but it was all over the news. He was only 17 and they cut his ear off and sent it to his grandfather in California who refused to pay.

Remind me when that was?

Eight or nine years ago? Maybe 1972, 1973? But I think there have been other times kidnappers here have cut off a body part. A finger? Can’t remember.

That’s disgusting, said Daniel, shaking his head.

Clare continued. In fact, there have been so many kidnappings in Italy they are now calling it ‘Kidnappings Inc’. or something like that. When I first got here, everyone was talking about that Duke in Florence who was kidnapped and probably murdered even though a ransom was paid. Oh, and wait. A few years before that an 18-year-old girl from Milan, Cristina Mazzotti, was kidnapped. The parents paid something like a million dollars. But they killed her anyway and threw her body into a garbage dump.

Yes, I read about that. I prayed for her.

That doesn’t happen a lot fortunately. Most of the victims are released when the families pay up. I guess relatives feel it’s better to pay than to wait and hope that their loved ones will be freed by police. As I understand it, the police often try to block families’ bank accounts to keep them from paying, but somehow the families generally find the funds they need.

They sat in silence for a while and then Clare, whose Italian was far better than Daniel’s, went inside to pay and asked the owner, a stocky balding man whose white polo shirt with pictures of horses could have used a wash, for directions to the local stazione di Carabinieri.

Two blocks down that way and then turn left and keep going straight. There should be a sign saying ‘Carabinieri’. Have you been robbed?

No, nothing like that. But I need to report something suspicious.

"Have a look. But I think Roberto, the commandante, is in Viterbo today. Or was it Rome? We’ve had some trouble here recently. One of the top officers here was arrested for corruption. Or so they claimed."

He said it’s not too far, Clare told Daniel as they got back into the car. But he thinks they may not be around. It’s as I told you: some sort of scandal. One of the top rozzers ended up in the nick when it turned out he’d been taking bribes.

Following the café owner’s instructions, they arrived in front of a small two-story yellowish postwar building surrounded by a high steel fence with a mechanized gate. Clare was about to ring but then noticed a handwritten sign that said:

For any and all problems

please call 212121

or contact the

Carabinieri Command

at Sorano

Un oh, said Clare. The bloke at the café was right.

We can go to Sorano, Daniel said. It’s only a few kilometers.

You know, said Clare, whose mind was racing, I think we should wait till we get back to Rome to hand it in.

Why? We shouldn’t waste time. Someone’s life may be in danger. The quicker we report it the more chance they have to save him – or her.

Yeah, if he’s still alive, Clare thought to herself.

I dunno, she said aloud. I guess I would really prefer to hand it over to someone I know and trust, like my friend Silvano in the secret service. Maybe you’re not aware of how iffy things can be in Italy. If whoever’s responsible is from around here, the local cop might be a friend of his. Then there are the turf wars among Italian police forces – Polizia di Stato, Carabinieri and even the tax police, the Guardie di Finanza. It could be a mess. And, thought Clare, although she dared not say it out loud, if we leave it here I could lose a chance to be involved in a really big story.

I thought you were a caring person, Daniel snapped, almost as if he’d been reading her mind.

I am, I am, you know I am. But if we get it sorted tomorrow morning it’s only a question of a day. No, half a day, she hurriedly corrected herself. Clare knew Daniel thought she sounded heartless, but she couldn’t help it. She’d only been the Post’s correspondent for a year and she knew they weren’t totally pleased with her. Now, she thought, I can do something truly original and earn a lot of points.

Furthermore, she continued, any Italian journalist, or lawyer, will tell you that local law enforcement in these parts is not necessarily something to write home about. A few weeks ago, the mayor of Montefiascone and his building commissioner were arrested for corruption. The arrests had been carried out by police from the provincial capital, Viterbo, some 16 kilometers away. Why? Because the top Carabiniere – who may well, she thought, have been the officer who recently had been arrested – was suspected of having closed an eye to what just about everyone else knew was going on.

She opened the passenger door to the car, pausing to knock some dirt off her boots, and climbed into the passenger seat.

Trust me on this, she added and he grimaced and, very grudgingly, nodded in agreement.

The bag they had found with the remains of someone’s lunch was still in the car and Clare suddenly had an idea. Wait a tick, she said opening the back door to retrieve the bag from which she extracted a soiled receipt with the name and address of a grocery store. "Prosciutto, rosette, pâté, she read aloud. This must be where they bought this stuff. Let’s go have a look."

His expression darkened and she put her hand on his arm, soothingly. Look, even if we started driving back now, we’d get back too late for me to ring Silvano. So come on, let’s go have a look and do some investigating on our own.

---

The small supermarket on the longest side of a trapezoidal piazza was not crowded. A stock boy in a blue coverall was busy stacking cans of cat and dog food. The dyed-blonde cashier – Why do so many Italian women dye their hair blonde? Clare wondered – was taking advantage of the lull in business to file her nails.

Deeper in the store, Clare could see the bancone, the deli department, its racks filled with whole, dry-cured prosciutto haunches, a variety of already started prosciuttos, and what appeared to be an infinite number of salamis, sausages and cheeses. A stocky, grey-haired man in a beige smock, his back towards them, was taking down what looked to be a giant-size mortadella sausage from one of the higher shelves.

I’m going to talk to him, Clare said, nodding in the man’s direction and setting off towards the back of the store, clutching her purse with its various pieces of evidence.

"Buongiorno. She smiled at the man behind the counter and continuing in Italian. That looks awfully good. Is it from Bologna?"

No, not on your life. This, my little dear, is mortadella from Amatrice, right here in Lazio, the man turned, showing a clean-shaven face, blue-grey eyes and neatly parted hair. His smock was newly pressed and someone had taken pains to stitch the name Adolfo on the top of its breast pocket. Want to taste it? I was just going to cut some samples.

He peeled back the skin on the salami’s first few inches, sliced a couple of thick slabs, and in a few deft movements, cut them into cubes. These he put on a plate that he set on the counter-top next to a small glass with toothpicks in it.

Ah, go ahead, don’t be shy.

It was not often that anyone accused Clare of being shy but she could see that the deli man, that is, Adolfo, liked the fact that she was so interested in his produce.

"Delizioso, she almost purred, after eating a couple of the tidbits. How about we take a half-kilo, and if you can recommend some good local bread we’ll take that, too. And maybe some local cheese. We were out exploring some of the tombs – she said more loudly – and didn’t have any lunch."

Daniele, she called, Italianizing Daniel’s name for the occasion, are you hungry?

The priest, who, dressed as he was looked nothing like someone the Italians would recognize as a man of the cloth, looked over at her. He had, seemingly, been reading the labels on the bottles displayed in the vini locali, local wines, section, but was still very upset, she thought, knowing him. But now he moved quickly to her side with one of his dazzling California smiles and then, pretending not to speak Italian, told her quickly in English to remember to ask about the spread.

Ah, si, Signor Adolfo, Clare said scrounging in her shoulder bag for the half-empty jar. I think you sell this French pâté. We found a leftover half jar of it in one of the tombs we visited and look here, she said proffering the bit of white paper, it seems to be on this receipt from this very store. It’s an odd item for Italy, isn’t it? I didn’t know Italians liked this?

"Vero, vero, very true. You are one smart little lady. Maybe you should be a detective. Then, lowering his voice, he leaned across the counter towards her. There’s only one customer who always buys that stuff. I think they get it in just for him. He’s a friend of the owner."

Huh. Interesting. And what kind of a guy is he?

I don’t know his real name, but they call him ‘Voltaire’.

Really? Why?

Well, he hates priests and can talk for hours about why the Church should be abolished. But there’s more to him than that. I’ve heard – and here he lowered his voice – he has a tendency towards violence. I think he’s originally a blacksmith from Corsica, he added, suddenly looking over his shoulder and then busying himself with a salami Milanese.

"Adolfo. Basta. Enough chatting with the customers. Uncle wants you back here." A young man with dark hair and Elvis-type sideburns, maybe in his early 20s, had stuck his head out of a back room and was glaring in their direction.

I think it’s time we should get out of here, Daniel muttered, taking their purchases and heading quickly towards the cash desk. Clare followed, with a half-wave and an apologetic smile in Adolfo’s direction.

Voltaire? she mused. Shouldn’t be that hard to find someone in the area with an unusual nickname like that.

Paying somehow took longer than they’d thought. Wonder where she’s gone? Clare asked Daniel, noting that the blonde cashier with the lacquered nails was strangely absent. They waited for what seemed like almost ten minutes. Clare looked around but there was no one in sight. There were muted voices coming from somewhere in the back and at one point she thought she heard someone, possibly talking on the phone, say, …if you wanna have a look, better make it quick.

Finally, the cashier returned, smiling and apologizing for her absence began ringing up their purchases. Sorry, but this time of the day we’re not usually busy so I was helping back in the stockroom.

But after a few seconds she left her post once again, mumbling "scusate, scusate and saying something, Clare thought, about needing to get some change."

Daniel looked at Clare, raising his eyebrows in a ‘something is weird’ expression. Finally, the blonde returned and tallied up their bill.

Clare paid and then, as they were leaving the store, two stocky men dressed in faded blue work pants and long-sleeved denim-typed shirts, the one in front with oily brown hair and a rough, pockmarked face, pushed their way in, glaring. Clare, glancing back over her shoulder thought Adolfo – who in the meantime had emerged from the back room – was looking at her meaningfully, making an almost imperceptible upward movement with his chin.

Uh oh, Clare thought, I bet that’s him.

The men had left the buzzing motor of their dark green, three-wheeler Bee running and the passenger door of its cab ajar. Walking to their own car, Clare pulled her notepad out of her purse and jotted down the Bee’s license plate number.

I saw that! bellowed the pockmarked man, running out of the store after them. Better watch yourself, girlie! he yelled, making an Italian ‘fuck you’ arm gesture as Daniel, who had already slipped into the driver’s seat, put the Fiat into gear and headed out of town.

The 30-kilometer drive to the Autostrada was done mostly in silence. Daniel was clearly still cheesed off about her decision to delay going to the authorities and for most of the ride he had barely spoken a word, his strong, movie-star profile unmoving and soundless.

Stop at the next petrol station, Clare finally said, scrounging in her purse for a telephone gettone or token. I am going to ring Silvano and at least leave a message to tell him what we found. You can come listen in if you don’t believe me.

Daniel didn’t answer but about ten kilometers after the toll booth he turned off into an IP gas station and drove to one of the pumps. I’m going to fill her up. I’ll wait for you outside the Autogrill.

About ten minutes later, Clare came out of the restaurant and handed him a can of Coke and a box of biscotti. Peace offering? she said getting into the passenger seat. As the car pulled onto the highway, she tentatively put her hand on his thigh and patted it. You can rest easy. I’ve left a message for Silvano to call me at my house between ten p.m. and midnight. I said it was urgent and that there is something I need to give him immediately. I told him it was a question of life and death.

Daniel looked at her and then, with a nod, took out one of the biscuits and bit into it. He proffered the bag in her direction. You can have one, too. Now, I guess, you deserve it.

Chapter Three

I believe you have something for me. The unsmiling man, short hair with an unfashionable side part, glasses, checked jacket and neatly pressed white shirt, was totally anonymous except for the bright red tie that made Clare wonder if he was secretly a Communist Party member.

When she’d cracked opened the door just after dawn to give him the packet, now wrapped in several plastic bags, he’d stretched out a hand and turned away towards the stairs.

"Il Dottore expects a call from you later today," he added tersely, disappearing as quickly and as silently as he had arrived, leaving her to tumble back into her bed for a couple more hours of badly needed sleep.

Before going to bed she’d unwrapped her grisly charge and taken some pictures. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d done that. Silvano was totally trustworthy, or so she thought. But in the Italian justice system, things had a way of disappearing and she wanted to be sure.

The result was a lot of tossing and turning and an awakening characterized by a pounding headache, possibly caused by the most recent of the disturbing dreams she’d been having lately.

This time it was the one about the tiny cats she’d tossed in the garbage and then, repenting, had tried to bring back to life. Two were lost causes but the other two, each small enough to fit in her open palm, curled up there like serpents, – or kind of like a couple of human ears – started breathing again and bringing her to tears of joy.

Does a normal person have dreams like this? she asked herself, wondering if she should take one of those pink Optalidon painkillers but decided against it since she’d been told that they also contained lots of caffeine.

A few hours later, sitting at her breakfast table, red-blonde hair tousled, and badly needing to brush her teeth, Clare slowly sipped her Lapsang Souchong tea.

At her feet, Cleopatra, the grey and white cat she’d found frantically licking the tablecloths of the corner trattoria, lay stretched out like an elongated comma on the hexagonal black and red Liberty cement tiles she loved so much.

Outside the barred window – Rome boasted thieves aplenty – an unruly ivy vine climbed up to who knows where, seeking light. The vintage, waist-high fridge whose freezer compartment had played overnight host to what Clare now thought of as the ear in inverted commas, hummed merrily. And in the distance, the bells of Santa Maria in Trastevere rang the quarter hour as they did day in, day out, nights included.

The hushed silence with which Silvano had greeted her story in the previous night’s phone call had convinced her that she really and truly may have stumbled across something significantly criminal.

Leaving her tea cooling, groggy as she was, she now went to her desk and pulled out her folder on what had come to be known as Italy’s kidnapping industry. She seemed to remember that in one recent year – maybe 1977? – the kidnappings for ransom had hit a high of seventy, eighty? The totals over a decade were in the hundreds. Something like that. She’d have to check. And they’d continued almost unabated even after the political kidnapping – and murder – two years before in 1978 of the former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro, an unprecedented event that had shaken the country.

She put the folder aside – after all, she couldn’t be 100 percent sure the ear was related to a kidnapping – and noticed that the red light on her new answering machine was blinking. She pushed the listen button and to her dismay heard the Tennessee accent of her foreign editor, Howell Prescott.

Clare. I haven’t heard from you. What’s going on? I saw a story in the Times about the growing political violence in Italy, but you haven’t filed anything.

She sat down on the edge of her still unmade bed and sipped her tea while listening, her heart sinking.

You’d better call me, the voice continued. If you want to keep on writing for us, you’ll have to get it through your head that journalism and academia are two different things.

Maybe I should have stuck to archaeology, she thought gloomily while he was in the midst of his tirade. On the other hand, if a kidnapping was underway, she would be in a good position to have a real scoop. As soon as I know for sure, I’ll call him back, she promised herself.

Listening with one ear to the BBC, Clare learned that some volcano on the west coast of the United States, Mount St. Helens perhaps, had erupted, killing 56 people, Yugoslavia’s Tito had died, and back in London, pundits were going on – and on – about the first-year anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s reign as Europe’s first woman head of government.

She was reluctantly turning the pages of the previous day’s Corriere della Sera to see what she should have been filing stories on when the downstairs buzzer sounded.

The garbage men, she thought, ignoring the ring, and reading on about the Red Brigades claiming responsibility for kneecapping a local Christian Democrat politician and neofascists firebombing a Communist party branch office in Bologna. Surely another tenant would take care of buzzing open the downstairs door. When it rang again, more insistently, she dragged herself to the door and jiggled the intercom circuit breaker so the portone, the main door two floors below, would open.

But before she could get back to her tea, the buzzer sounded for a third time, this time in several short, staccato bursts.

"Chi è," she’d snapped, picking up the receiver and hearing a tinny voice say something about a messenger service and a package.

Can you leave it in the mail room, please? I’m not dressed.

But the disembodied voice went on, this time explaining it was something she had to sign for.

Clare took a quick look down at the pale green jersey pajamas she’d bought at Christmas and decided she was decent enough to open the door. "Va bene, Salga. Ok, come on up," she said.

The young man standing on her doorstep with a hefty brown manila envelope under his left arm looked like all the young guys in post-1968 Europe, Rome included. Knit hat, scraggly medium-brown beard, the khaki green parka the Italians for some inexplicable reason called an Eskimo, and a beat-up brown Tolfa leather bag similar to her own.

He thrust a flat brown package, a clipboard and a pen at her with one hand. This was what messenger services generally did so she took it from him without protest. But there was one big difference. When she looked up – the point of the ballpoint was stubbornly refusing to stay in the out position – she saw that in his right hand he was holding a gun fitted with a silencer like those she had seen in countless movies and TV shows, except this one was pointing right at her middle.

Rooted to the spot, she stood speechless, time truly standing still while the figure on her doorstep stared silently back at her. Later she would wonder whether things would have gone differently if the boy had spoken, given her some kind of an order? Threatened her verbally? But what did that matter?

He didn’t speak and as they stared at one another, suddenly she emerged from her reverie and lunged forward, throwing the clipboard in his face and screaming, "Fuori di qua, get out of here, get out of my house!"

Her unwelcome visitor, clearly startled by this unexpected outburst, turned on his heels and pounded down the two flights of stairs while Clare rushed to the window, screaming out to the near-empty piazza below, Terrorists, terrorists! Stop him, stop him!

She felt something wet on her hand and she down in dismay at her bloodstained pajama top. What was this? After all, no shots had been fired. Then she saw the shattered window and realized that when calling for help her arm had gone right through the glass.

Bloody hell. Whatever is going on? she wondered, as sirens sounded outside and, moments later, footsteps thundered up the 17 th-century gray slate steps to her second-floor walk-up.

Chapter Four

Clare had still been at the window when tires squealing, several blue and white Alfa Romeo police cars – the Italians called them gazelle , gazelles – had driven into the small piazza. Someone, probably