The Babylon Idol
Ben Hope.
Even the sound of the name made Usberti want to spit bile. For years, the only thing that sustained him was to dream about the terrible things he would do to the despicable swine who, more than anyone, had destroyed his future. Not just Hope, but all the others too: a list of names that Usberti recited endlessly in his mind and often wrote down by hand, scratching the letters so deep that his pen would wear right through the paper and mark the surface of his desk.
Those filthy pigs thought he was finished. They thought they had stopped him. How wrong, how oh-so-very wrong, they were. And how pitifully they would all squeal for his mercy when he was restored to his former power, one day.
One day.
But he knew that could never happen. Oh, he had the means to take his revenge, all right. He wasn’t broke, not yet, and he still commanded the loyalty of followers who would do whatever he asked. Neither his personal assistant Silvano Bellini nor his administrator Pierangelo Volpicelli were coarse or brutal men, but Usberti had made sure he surrounded himself with others who were exactly that: men such as Ennio Scorceletti, known simply to his associates as ‘the big man’, along with Renato Zenatello, Federico Casini, Aldo Groppione, Luca Iacono, Maurizio Starace and half a dozen others who lived in barrack-style accommodation on the estate, were uncompromisingly vicious thugs from a variety of criminal backgrounds. The hulking Scorceletti was a staunch Catholic who had beaten his estranged wife to death with a hammer after she left him for another woman. Zenatello, a former carabiniere, had done time in prison for his role in the murder of four Afghan immigrants. Convicted rapist Groppione had performed similar tricks against a Nigerian asylum seeker and his wife, killing them in their car outside Fermo with a hunting rifle. Iacono was a computer hacker by trade, who had proved his fealty to God by setting fire to a mosque in his home town of Naples.
The list went on.
For all of these men, the primary appeal of their employer’s brand of Christian fundamentalism was that they could vent as much hatred as they liked against homosexuals, Muslims, atheists, liberals and other filthy servants of Satan. They each loved nothing more than being sent on a vigilante mission of faith-inspired violence in the sure knowledge that they were consolidating their places in heaven. Some of them, like Scorceletti, had been recruited into the ranks of Gladius Domini back in the glory days, before the fall; if anything, Usberti’s topple from grace had only intensified the fierceness of their loyalty to him. He had only to give the order, and he could unleash all manner of bone-breaking, razor-slashing nastiness on those he dreamed of punishing.
So many sleepless nights he’d spent working out his vengeful plans, he knew exactly what form the punishment would take. But as much as he yearned to give the order, he knew that the moment he took any such action against his list of enemies, his involvement would be so transparently obvious to even the most obtuse law enforcement official that he’d be instantly whisked away to prison for the rest of his life. And however much he detested the scum who had brought him down, he wasn’t prepared to give up what little freedom and luxury remained to him.
Then how could he strike back at them? He couldn’t think of a solution. It would take a gift from the Lord above to make it happen. Every day he got down on his knees and prayed for Divine help in making his plans possible. Had he not been a loyal servant of God all his life? Didn’t he deserve just one break?
Usberti seldom ventured from the privacy of his sanctuary. That summer, however, he had taken a rare road trip to visit his last surviving relative, an uncle who lived in a luxury residential clinic for the elderly not far from Assisi in Umbria.
Usberti’s reasons for travelling four hundred kilometres to see the old man, on whom he hadn’t laid eyes in at least thirty years, were by no means sentimental: Fortunato Usberti was two months shy of his hundredth birthday, reportedly possessed barely an organ in functioning condition, had completely lost his marbles and was as rich as Croesus. His devoted nephew therefore felt obliged to rekindle the somewhat lapsed relationship between them, in the hope that the ailing Fortunato might consent to leaving him a little something when he shuffled off to a better place, which with any luck wouldn’t be too long away. This is what it’s come to, Usberti seethed on the journey south.
A double disappointment awaited him in Umbria. On arrival at the rest home he found his uncle disturbingly alive and plenty chipper enough to molest the nurses, while now so senile that he didn’t even know he had a nephew, let alone one he recognised. Usberti didn’t stay long. He got back in the Mercedes and instructed his driver to get him out of here. Soon afterwards, as they passed through a small village, Usberti spied a little church and felt the urge to go inside. Maybe the Lord would grant him some new miracle.
And that was exactly what the Lord did.
Usberti’s heart nearly stopped beating when he saw Gennaro Tucci walk into the coolness of the empty church. Then, of course, he didn’t know the man’s name or anything about him – except that this complete stranger could have been cloned from Usberti’s own flesh and blood. The resemblance was uncanny, quite stunning, although Usberti was the only one who seemed to spot it as the man barely glanced at him with a quick smile.
That was when the idea had come to him, in a flash. It was so simple, so blindingly obvious; and Usberti realised that God, in those mysterious ways of His, had provided His loyal servant with the perfect means to take his long-sought revenge.
The decision that followed was an easy one to make. Gennaro Tucci lived alone, a poor man with a simple life and few friends. That much had been easy to find out, and it was all Usberti needed to know.
Two days later, his men Casini, Zenatello and Scorceletti seized their victim at his home and brought him back to the Lake Como estate. There Gennaro was kept locked in a disused wine cellar for a week, while Usberti quickly and secretly, through a defunct company name, allocated a substantial part of his remaining fortune to the purchase of a small island off the Sicilian coast. The moment the sale went through, it was time to move briskly to the next phase. They brought the hapless prisoner up from the cellar, forced cognac down his throat until he was half unconscious, dressed him up in some of Usberti’s own clothes, then dragged him to the boathouse where the motor yacht was launched for the first time in years.
The rest was history. When the disfigured body was dragged from the water later that day, it was an open and shut case: death by misadventure. Nobody would lament the passing of the disgraced former archbishop, just as little was made of the disappearance of a retired, penniless carpenter from Umbria. Even if it had, nobody would ever connect the two.
And now Usberti, whisked off in the night to live in hiding on his island off the coast of Sicily, was ready to strike back at his enemies from a position of absolute safety, where nobody would suspect him, let alone come looking for him. Vengeance would be his, and it would be carried out from beyond the grave.
He couldn’t wait.
But what Massimiliano Usberti couldn’t possibly have known back then, six months ago, was that his revenge quest would lead him to a greater reward by far. A treasure he couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams of wealth and power.
Usberti was soon to make the discovery of his life.
Chapter 15
As Ben drove away from Saint-Jean, he considered his priorities. The first of which was to understand who was doing this. Was someone else carrying out these attacks on Usberti’s behalf, or was Usberti alive? If he was alive, where was he?
If the situation had been different, Ben could have picked up the phone and talked to Luc Simon. Now that the one cop he trusted in the world was gone, he might have been thinking about driving east, over the Italian Alps, to pay an unscheduled visit to Usberti’s home estate. But that wasn’t his only or even his main priority, because there still remained one name on the hit-list to be ticked off. Ben had to find Anna Manzini and make sure she was safe.
He checked his email – still no reply to the message he’d posted via her author website. Looking again at the site, he noticed the name and number of Anna’s literary agent in Florence on the ‘contacts’ page. It was worth a try.
‘Agenzia letteraria Carlo Scanzi,’ said a gravelly voice.
Ben hadn’t spoken Italian in a while. He politely introduced himself, explained that he was a friend of Signor Scanzi’s client Anna Manzini, said he urgently needed to contact her and asked if he could have a number or address, preferably both.
The agent responded with a snort. ‘Sure. If you’re such a close friend of my client’s, why are you calling me? You people will do anything to get your little feet in the door, won’t you?’
It wasn’t a good start. Ben asked, ‘What people?’
‘You’re the second one today. What’s it this time, trawling for a free signed copy? A referral to a publisher? Help with some crappy project you think’s gonna make you rich? Dream on. Wait, I know who you are. You’re not Italian. You’re that freaky Dutchman who tried to shove your manuscript on Signora Manzini at the Turin book fair and chased her into the ladies’ bathroom. I’m onto you, pal. You breach that restraining order and I’ll have the carabinieri down on you so fast it’ll make your head spin.’
‘I told you who I am,’ Ben said coolly. ‘And when I said this was important, I meant it. Anna knows me. Call her, tell her I’m trying to get in touch with her and that it’s urgent. Give her this number.’
‘Stick it.’ Scanzi hung up.
In truth, Ben couldn’t blame the guy for protecting his client. What troubled him the most was that he hadn’t been the first one to call that day, trying to find out Anna’s details. It appeared that he had competition, and perhaps from more than just an overzealous book fan.
Which meant two things: first, if he couldn’t get in touch with Anna by phone or email, he was going to have to travel the 750 kilometres to Florence and reach her in person; and second, he was going to have to get there before someone else did.
The quickest flight he could find online from Montpellier Méditerranée to Peretola Florence was a one-stop with Alitalia that was going to take over eight hours all told, with a long connection in the middle, on top of which would be the extra time-wasting hassle of hiring a car at the other end. He reckoned he could drive there in a little over six hours, if he kept his foot down and avoided police entanglements.
But he couldn’t do it without getting some rest first, or he risked falling asleep at the wheel. Kipping in the car in a cold December was inviting hypothermia, so he hammered up the coastal A9 motorway as far as Montpellier, located a little hotel called the Ibis in a pine forest off exit 32 and crashed fully dressed into bed, where he tossed and turned for a couple of hours. He awoke feeling as refreshed as he was ever going to, whether he slept two hours or twelve. After a fast shower and a change of clothes he checked his email once more: still no reply. Committed now, he jumped back into the Alpina munching on a brioche and raced eastwards, stopping only for fuel and coffee. The French and Italian Rivieras flashed by unnoticed. Marseille, Cannes, Monaco, Genoa. By eight that evening, he was arriving in a wintry-looking Florence.
Carlo Scanzi’s office was on the top floor of a handsome old apartment building off Via dell’Agnolo, near to the historic centre’s limited traffic area. Ben drove slowly past the building to check that the upper windows were in darkness, then parked two blocks away, grabbed his bag and walked back. The temperature had dropped below zero and a freezing mist cloyed the narrow streets, but the cold night air wasn’t Ben’s sole reason for having slipped on the pair of Blackhawk light assault gloves that he kept in the car.
Ben waited in a shadowy doorway across the street from the apartment building, watching the windows and the entrance until a young couple came out and hurried off, arm in arm, braving the chill. Before the door had swung shut, Ben was across the street and inside.
Nobody was about. He padded silently up the spiral stairs to the darkness of the top floor. From his bag he fished out the mini-Maglite and turned it on. He shielded its bright, thin beam with his gloved hand as he hunted for the agency office’s door and quickly found it, marked by a brass plaque. Ben reached back into his bag and took out the small pouch that contained his lock picks. If Scanzi didn’t want to talk to him, then he’d have to access the agent’s client files by other means.
But when Ben went to pick the lock, to his surprise he found the door was already open. He put away the picks and stepped quietly inside, pausing to listen and let his eyes adjust to the dark. He was in a short hallway with a door at its far end. He moved towards it in absolute silence, gently turned the door handle and slipped through.
Scanzi’s office was in pitch blackness and utterly still. The torch beam swept back and forth like a laser, picking out glass-fronted bookcases, artwork and tasteful furniture until it landed on what Ben was looking for, the antique desk cluttered with papers, piled-up books and a shiny Dell laptop. On the wall behind Scanzi’s desk chair hung a framed blow-up taken at some book event, where a small balding man in his sixties, wearing a rumpled suit and with skin the colour of tea stains, was shaking hands with a tall, immaculately dressed younger man baring perfect teeth at the camera. Ben was no authority on Italian authors past or present, but he figured the glamorous one was some famous writer and the small rumpled unhealthy-looking one must be Scanzi.
As he approached the desk, Ben’s torch beam picked out something else that made him stop in his tracks.
He said, ‘Hm.’
It seemed that Carlo Scanzi hadn’t gone home after work that day. Because he was lying twisted on the rug in front of his desk. And he looked even less healthy than he did in his photo. In the photo, he hadn’t had his throat cut and his chest and belly perforated by at least a dozen knife wounds that had turned his white shirt black with blood. Scanzi’s glassy stare seemed to be aimed right at Ben. His face was contorted with terror and agony. He hadn’t died pleasantly, but there didn’t seem to have been much of a struggle. His murderer was evidently a much larger, more powerful man. Whoever he was, he was long gone. Ben didn’t feel the need to draw his pistol.
Ben crouched by the corpse, cautious not to step in the blood that had saturated the rug and was still drying, telling him that Scanzi hadn’t been dead for too long. That impression was confirmed by the rigor mortis that had frozen his face in a mask of horror but not yet fully spread to his limb muscles, which could take five or six hours. Scanzi had probably died sometime that afternoon. Stepping over the body and exploring further with his torch beam, Ben could see none of the pictures of wife, kids and grandkids that a man of Scanzi’s age might have added to the clutter on his desktop. The agent wore no wedding ring, either: not a family man, then. Which could account for why nobody had come looking for him when he hadn’t returned home that day. If nothing else, Ben could at least rest easy in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be disturbed in the next few minutes while he searched for what he needed.
The Dell laptop had gone to sleep, and flashed into life when Ben touched the power button. What came up on-screen was the most recently opened file. It was an agency agreement, a kind of document Ben had never seen before but which he guessed must be a standard boilerplate contract between authors and literary agents. It was dated two years earlier. The bold print header read AGENZIA LETTERARIA CARLO SCANZI. On the line below was the name and address of the client who had signed up to be represented by him.
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