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8

Brick Wall

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Palazzo della Farnesina, RomeSeptember 2008

The young functionary looks tired; his face is drawn.

The office is immense, with two big windows open to let in the light of a sparkling September day in Rome. The sounds of the capital are carried on the northwest wind, with the eternal drone of traffic along the Tiber in the background.

Barbara Belli finishes her coffee and reflects upon the fact that she finds herself in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the third time in the past four months. No, it’s the fourth time. Maybe even the fifth. The futile pilgrimages of a lady lawyer to the Farnesina Palace.

Since the first meeting, everything—apart from the coffee, which has clearly improved—has gone downhill.

Things had started off so well: at the end of July, the minister himself had written her a letter in which he guaranteed that he’d look into the case. It was an official letter, a registered document with all sorts of reference numbers.

Barbara had thanked His Excellency; the letter was an important gesture on his part. Nevertheless, in a subsequent meeting she had felt duty bound to point out to His Excellency’s courteous staff that the letter unfortunately contained some rather significant inaccuracies.

To begin with, her client had not been arrested; he’d been kidnapped. Furthermore, her client wasn’t being held in a prison, but in hiding places in various tiny, scattered villages, a fact that seemed to demonstrate the serious irregularities of his detention. Insofar as no official document regarding his case had been issued by any local Cambodian authority whatsoever, her client could not be said to have a legal situation. And finally, it was a little difficult for her client to enter into contact with the local Italian diplomatic and consular authorities, as his days were rather full: he was spending them being tortured and undergoing decidedly harsh interrogations conducted by members of the Cambodian military; from time to time, interestingly enough, such sessions took place in the presence of individuals who were United States citizens.

“Pardon me, but how do you know all this?” the ministry functionary had asked her.

“I know it because his family is sending extortion money to a Cambodian officer. And thanks to those payments, every now and then my client manages to communicate with his loved ones.”

“Have you got proof?”

“I have records of the money transfers his family has made. I’ve given you copies of all that, you’ve got everything. . . .”

“That money could have gone to anyone.”

“Anyone . . .”

“Even to your client himself . . . you understand me.”

“Are you suggesting that my client has invented this whole story in order to extort money from his mother while he’s in Cambodia?”

“That’s not what I said,” the functionary had replied, backing down. “But my dear Ms. Belli, you must admit that the situation is clearly very complicated.”

Clearly.

And besides, as the same ministry official had explained to her with a self-satisfied smile, a letter personally signed by the minister for foreign affairs was not a thing to be sneezed at. As if to say: we’re not the United States, we may not even be France or Great Britain, but if our government takes a step, however small, then something must surely happen.

Since that meeting, another two months have passed. Two months of futile pilgrimages to the Farnesina.

Until this late September day.

“My client’s in a hospital,” Barbara Belli says, placing her espresso cup on the table in front of her. She takes a page of notes out of a folder. “He’s been in Preah Monivong Hospital in Phnom Penh for weeks and weeks.”

After gazing briefly at his assistant, who’s staring at his computer and raising an eyebrow, the ministry official—the same young functionary she has dealt with from the start—says to Barbara, “In a hospital? Is he wounded?”

“He’s very sick.”

“How do you know that?”

“An American friend managed to see him and then reported to his family.”

“An American friend. What kind of friend?”

“A pretty normal kind of friend. A mechanic, if I’ve understood right.”

The assistant looks up from the computer. “It says here it’s actually a prison hospital.”

“That’s a piece of good news,” the ministry functionary points out.

“Good news? Good in what sense, if I may ask?”

“Well, if nothing else, he’s being held in an official facility now.” The functionary spreads his arms. “Therefore, evidently, the local authorities have brought the case back into the legal system.”

Barbara scans the assistant’s equine features and points to his computer. “There’s nothing about the fact that humanitarian organizations consider that hospital a concentration camp?”

With an expression of mild skepticism the assistant checks some of the other results of his Google search. His expression becomes rather less bored. “Mm-hmm, yes, in fact I am seeing something like that,” he confesses. “But still, these sites aren’t . . . I mean, we know nothing about them. We’d have to look into how trustworthy they are. . . .”

“We’ll talk to our representative over there,” the young ministry official says. “Within a week, the honorary consul—”

“Honorary consul? Fucking hell!” cries Barbara, unable to contain herself. She slams her briefcase down on the table. The espresso cup overturns, but it’s empty; various documents escape the case but do not fall.

Among them is a photograph of her client. It’s a close-up taken some years ago, and it probably doesn’t correspond very closely to the way he looks today. She picks it up with both hands and shows it to the two men, brandishing it theatrically. This time she’s pissed off. “God damn it!” she says. “Don’t you realize this man has been kidnapped? Unlawfully detained since last March! An Italian citizen, abducted in a foreign country! They’ve imprisoned him, they’ve tortured him, they’re extorting money from his family. What else has to happen before Italy takes some steps to help him?”

“I really don’t understand your reaction,” the functionary objects. His assistant shrugs and curls his lip.

Barbara snatches up her purse and heads straight for the door while the functionary is still reminding her that His Excellency the minister wrote her a letter and even signed it with his own hand. “You tell me, do you think that’s something to be sneezed at?” he asks.

Fuck His Excellency the minister too, Barbara thinks, stepping out into the interminable corridor.

—

The sun is setting when Barbara and the senatore take a table in Piazza del Popolo. He takes a deep breath and gestures at the cherry-colored sky: “What a spectacle. Why do people ever leave Rome? Why travel, when you can stay here, in this fabulous city?”

Barbara nods and sips her drink. She knows all too well how this meeting will go. She’ll obtain neither redress nor consolation from her former mentor. So she takes what’s on offer: several quips, some observations, a few more or less verifiable theories. And questions. One of them takes her by surprise: “This kidnapped, arrested, or disappeared Italian citizen, rotting away in that shithole of a place—have you at least been able to form some sort of idea about who he really is?”

“His girlfriend maintains that some magistrates are persecuting him.” Barbara sighs and raises both hands. “I’m reading all the documents I’ve been given so far. Maybe what she says is true.”

“How about the mother? What does she think?”

“I’ve never been able to speak to her again. She’s sick, and she’s gotten worse recently. I know she’s withdrawn a lot of her savings and sold some property to send money to the people holding her son. . . . I’ve seen the transfers. She’s already paid more than a hundred thousand dollars since March.”

“My goodness!” the senatore says in surprise. “What do our magistrates here in Rome say about all this? They should be taking some steps as a matter of course . . .”

“They say our man has had various run-ins with the law in Italy. He’s got a right-wing past and dangerous friends, they say. They’ve been watching him for years. I get the impression that there are some judges using him to catch bigger fish. People in the upper echelons of the intelligence community that the judges want to settle accounts with.”

“What a fantastic country this is!” the senatore says, chuckling.

“I read everything I could find about him on the Internet,” Barbara continues. “Confused information. Many contradictions. But I’ve realized I can’t delay any longer. Manuela . . . I must see Manuela. She probably knows him better than anyone. I can’t explain to you why she knows him, but I have my suspicions. . . .”

“So this is a guy with nine lives, so to speak?”

“Maybe not nine, but . . . Look, I have the distinct impression that he’s not simply a former Carabiniere who became an airline pilot and did some consulting work for the ROS.* He’s something more than that. Maybe a lot more.”

She pauses. The senatore seems less distracted now. “Go on,” he says.

“Well, I found several newspaper articles, including a recent one in the Phnom Penh Post, which is published in English. It reports the arrest of an Italian and an American, our man and the guy they call Clancy. According to the newspaper, the two of them were investigating something . . . something odd.”

“Investigating? A pair of bar owners who investigate. Strange.”

“They were investigating something, that’s what it says. The other guy, Clancy, is described as an ex-CIA agent. And there’s a word that keeps recurring: ‘supernotes.’”

“Supernotes. And they are . . .?”

“Supernotes are counterfeit U.S. banknotes, hundred-dollar bills, very high quality, practically perfect. Significant quantities of them are circulating in various countries, apparently, for example, Cambodia and North Korea. The only big Western paper that has done any reporting on this topic is the Frankfurter Allgemeine. The articles were all written by the same journalist, Klaus W. Bender, who also wrote a book on the subject a few years ago.”

“So somebody’s producing this fake money,” the senatore murmurs.

“Fake, but very well done, apparently. So perfect they seem real.”

“You think our ex-Carabiniere may be in trouble for having discovered . . .”

“I don’t know yet,” Barbara replies. “But I remember what Giovanni Falcone used to say . . .”

“‘Follow the money.’”

“Exactly. Why shouldn’t that apply in this case too?”

* Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, the Special Operations Group of the Carabinieri, the Italian national police force. The ROS specializes in investigating terrorism, organized crime, and drug and arms trafficking.