The Absolution (7 page)

THE BANCA CATTOLICA
della Veneziana was housed in the magnificent surroundings of Palazzo Dolfin-Manin, just east of the Rialto bridge. If they were a relatively small bank, as their website had implied, it certainly wasn't apparent from the splendour of their surroundings. The vast entrance hall was decorated with extravagant eighteenth-century murals, and bust after bust of solemn Venetian nobles peered loftily down their noses from niches in the walls.

Kat showed her warrant to a startled receptionist and asked to be taken directly to Alessandro Cassandre's office.

“He's not in,” the receptionist said. “He doesn't usually come in at this time of day. And it'll be locked—”

“Then call your security manager and open it,” Kat said equably. She pointed at the four-man team of
carabinieri
, one armed with a door-ram, that she'd brought along to show she meant business. “Please ask him to hurry, though. Those old doors of yours look rather valuable, and I'd rather not break one down unless it's absolutely necessary. You've got five minutes.”

Cassandre's office, when it was unlocked for her exactly four minutes and thirty seconds later, turned out to be as elegantly appointed as you might expect an office on the first
floor of a
palazzo
overlooking the Grand Canal to be. More to the point, there was a laptop open on the ornate old
scrivania
that served as a desk. She touched it to see if it had been left on standby and discovered that was as far as her luck went: it had been properly shut down.

Amongst the framed photographs on the desk was one of Cassandre being presented with a medal by the previous Pope. She picked it up. A caption on the back read:
Presentation of the Cross of Honour Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice to Sig. Alessandro Cassandre, September 1997.
The picture had been placed further forward, and more centrally, than the photograph of the expensively dressed middle-aged woman who was presumably Cassandre's wife.

The warrant, she had been pleased to find, authorised her to take away “computer equipment” rather than just a laptop, thus legitimately allowing her to search Cassandre's office for anything fitting that description. In the first drawer of the desk she found eight identical memory sticks, which struck her as being unusual. There were more in an envelope, while another bag contained high-denomination chips from the Casino di Venezia. She put the memory sticks into an evidence bag but left the chips where she'd found them.

The next drawer contained two boxes of business cards. One gave the address of the bank and Cassandre's title of Senior Partner. The other set, which appeared to be newly printed, bore the words:

Alessandro Cassandre

3°

Grand Lodge of the Venetian Order De la Fidelité

Underneath was a symbol she vaguely recognised, a cross inside a circle, like a sniper's sights.

They looked like some kind of Masonic calling card: the first actual evidence she'd had that he really was a Mason. She slipped a few into the evidence bag as well.

“May I ask what you're looking for?”

She looked up. The security guard who'd unlocked Cassandre's door had gone off to locate a higher authority; the man hurrying towards her now, buttoning up his expensive suit as he did so, was presumably the result. Without stopping what she was doing, she said calmly, “Carrying out a search to locate and remove Signor Cassandre's computer equipment.”

“I'm Hugo Speicher, the bank's chairman. Do you need any help?”

Surprisingly, he didn't get angry or bluster at her, as many people might have done on finding a senior partner's office being searched by the Carabinieri. But then, she reflected, the bank's chairman was presumably no fool. He'd know there was little point in arguing with a warrant. Better to give the appearance of cooperation and hope to find out what she was after that way.

“When did you last see Signor Cassandre?” she asked, opening the next drawer and methodically going through its contents.

“Three nights ago, just before our last board meeting. Why? Is he in trouble?”

“A body answering his description was found this morning at the Lido,” she said, looking up to catch Speicher's reaction.

“My God.” His shock certainly seemed genuine. “And you think his death was connected to the bank?”

“It's too early to say. But tell me, what exactly was the nature of Signor Cassandre's work here?”

“Well, he was . . .” Speicher frowned. “It's quite hard to explain to a layman, actually. Essentially, he dealt with sophisticated financial instruments for off-setting risk. Along with tax planning for high-net-worth individuals, charitable institutions and so on. But he was on the brink of retirement. Most of his day-to-day work had long since been taken over by younger staff.”

“How old was he?” Kat asked, surprised. The man on the mortuary table hadn't looked much over fifty.

“Fifty-four, I believe. But he had other interests besides banking.” Was it her imagination, or did she detect the faintest hint of distaste in the chairman's tone?

“Your receptionist seemed to know his daily routine quite well,” she pointed out.

“She's got a very good memory,” Speicher said blandly. “I wouldn't read too much into that, if I were you.”

She recalled the name Dr Hapadi had given her as a possible member of the black Masonic lodge, and decided to do some fishing. “Did Signor Cassandre still deal with Count Tignelli's accounts?”

Speicher hesitated. “Unless your warrant specifically covers it, we can't confirm any details of Signor Cassandre's clients.”

She noted that he hadn't denied it. “I quite understand.”

Back at Campo San Zaccaria, she took the bagged laptop and the memory sticks to Giuseppe Malli, the Carabinieri IT
technician. Long ago, when the Carabinieri headquarters was a convent, this attic had been the novices' dormitory. There was even a faded fresco depicting the Annunciation along one wall. Now the room was a mess of computer equipment. Leads and connectors dangled from pegs that had once held coifs and scapulars, while shelves built for vestments contained a jumble of hard drives.

“In theory, we're looking for anyone who might have had a reason to murder the man who owned these,” she told him. “In practice, I want to find out everything about him that I can. His chairman just did a very slick job of distancing his bank from whatever it was he did for them, and I'd like to know why.”

“Any idea where I should start?”

“Apparently he worked for both charitable trusts and high-net-worth individuals in need of advice on tax planning, which strikes me as an odd combination.”

He considered. “Well, I'm no expert, but that sounds like money laundering to me.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Charities collect donations in cash. That's the first stage in cleaning dirty money – having a legitimate explanation for where it came from.”

“Could money laundering also involve casinos?” she asked, remembering the chips.

He nodded. “You take the cash to a casino, you buy some chips, then after a few bets you go back to the cashier to redeem them. But this time you ask for an electronic transfer instead of cash. It'll look to anyone following the money trail as if you won it at the tables.”

“And the memory sticks?”

“Let's take a look.” He took one of the USB sticks and
plugged it into a reader attached to his computer. “I'm just making an optical image, so I don't actually disturb the contents,” he explained. “Ah—”

“What is it?” She watched his fingers fly over the keys.

He turned the screen towards her. It contained a row of numbers. “It's money. Electronic money. Easy to transfer, impossible to trace.”

“How much?”

His fingers tapped again. “The exchange rate for bitcoins is pretty volatile at the moment. But at today's rates, there's the equivalent of about a quarter of a million euros on this stick alone.”

Bagnasco, meanwhile, had brought back printouts from the cruise ships' radar logs and started to identify the boats entering or leaving Venice. The logs showed one boat with no LOCODE: either its transmitter was broken, it was too small to require one, or it had deliberately turned off its equipment in order to avoid identification.

Two separate records, twelve minutes apart, showed it moving from south to north along the Adriatic shore of the Lido shortly after 3 a.m. Another, thirty minutes earlier, showed what looked like the same boat
inside
the lagoon, heading south towards the Bocca di Malamocco, the more southerly of the two openings into the Adriatic.

In other words, Kat thought, it had set off somewhere south of Venice but north of Malamocco.

She looked again at the map. There were around half a dozen small islands in that area. Most were long since abandoned, the sites of former military garrisons, plague hospitals and leper colonies. One of the very few that was inhabited was La Grazia, the island owned by Count Birino Tignelli.

It wasn't enough for a search warrant, not by a long chalk. But at least it meant she now had a legitimate reason for calling on Count Tignelli and asking if he'd seen anything.

But not today. Today she needed to set up the operations room, assemble a larger team of
carabinieri
and put out requests to other crime agencies for information. She also needed to arrange for Cassandre's wife to identify the body at the mortuary. Unlike some officers, Kat had no problem with doing that; in fact, she found it strangely satisfying that even in the midst of such raw emotion she could stay detached and professional. It was one of the things that made her believe she was in the right job, but it nevertheless required some thought on how best to approach it.

In this instance, she concluded, the person she was trying to put pressure on wasn't just the wife but the forensic examiner too. She had a suspicion that at some point she might well need more information from Dr Hapadi about his Masonic brethren.

“Can I ask something?” Bagnasco said as they grabbed a couple of tuna
tramezzini
at the bar round the corner. Without waiting for a reply, she continued, “Do you have any feedback for me?”

“Feedback?” Kat said, surprised.

“I know I've made some mistakes,” Bagnasco said. “I really want to improve, and I think continuous assessment is the way to do it. Plus I'm really pleased that I'm being mentored by a woman. I'm very ambitious, and I think the prosecutor's right: I could learn a lot from you as a role model – how to get ahead in the Carabinieri as a female officer, I mean.”

Kat waved the suggestion away. “You're doing fine. Don't worry about it.” She never knew what to say when people
described themselves as ambitious. You got promoted because you were good, not because you announced to everyone that you wanted it.

“But on a score of one to five?” Bagnasco persisted. “It's good to have a number. That way I'll be able to keep track of whether I'm improving or not.”

Kat sighed. “Look, let's get one thing clear. You work for me, not the other way round, and the job we're both trying to do involves finding out who stabbed a man through the heart, cut his throat open and ripped out his tongue. If you're doing something wrong, I'll tell you. But I haven't got the time or the energy to review your performance on a day-by-day basis. And the fact that we're both women is pretty irrelevant to me, frankly.” Although a male assistant, she thought wistfully, would surely have been a lot less needy than Bagnasco was proving to be. Or did all the younger officers spout management-speak like this? The idea made her feel old and cynical.

She thought back to something Hapadi had said earlier. “Don't be too hard on her,” he'd said quietly, when Bagnasco was out of earshot. “She wouldn't be the first officer to vomit at a crime scene.” And he'd given her a pointed look. Somehow, she realised, he must know about the time when she herself had done exactly that. It had been an equally gruesome murder: a fisherman, killed and tipped into a concrete holding tank for his own crabs to feast on. On that occasion, Aldo Piola had sluiced the vomit away before the forensic examiner got there. He must have mentioned it to Hapadi later.

Even Flavio had said something similar about Bagnasco, just as Kat was leaving his office. “Go easy on her, won't you?” he suggested. “It'll be tough on her, being your number two.”

“Why? Am I such a monster?” she'd demanded. He'd only laughed.

She glanced at the second lieutenant, who was now looking somewhat crestfallen. “Look, I didn't mean to sound harsh. But I've made far too many mistakes to be a role model for anyone. The best advice I can give you is to concentrate on doing your job. Oh, and not to sleep with any senior officers.”

“Like you did with Colonel Piola, you mean?”