The Dante Conspiracy - By Tom Kasey Page 0,36

Guardia di Finanza, colloquially known as the Grey Ghosts, is the organization set up by the Italian government to stamp out undeclared cash transactions and ensure that any income earned by a resident of that country was both declared and, more importantly, taxed. In the face of the lawless mentality of most of the inhabitants of Italy, the organization had always faced an uphill struggle.

‘Right. Anyway, I did the research the two men had requested. Usually, I can guarantee the accuracy of my work, but in this case there were too many gaps in the records for me to be completely certain of my conclusions, though I think I did finally obtain the correct answer. I wrote out a brief report for each man, and delivered these to the two clients in two different cafes on the outskirts of the city, on the same evening. They both paid my fee immediately, as they had agreed to do. One was Russian, I’m almost certain, because that accent is unmistakable, and the other man probably came from somewhere in the Balkans. That struck me as being a bit unusual.’

Spagnoli paused for a moment.

‘You don’t normally do research for people from those parts of the world?’ Perini asked. ‘I presume that the nationality of these two clients isn’t the reason you’re sitting here now?’

The researcher smiled slightly and shook his head.

‘No, inspector, it’s not. The reason I’m here is because this morning I tried to follow my usual route through Florence but I couldn’t, because there’d been what the police officer I spoke to described as an “incident”. It looked to me like rather more than that, because the shape of a body lying in the road was quite unmistakable.’

‘There was a death in the city last night,’ Perini said. ‘I can confirm that.’

The newspapers would be carrying the report within hours, so there was no point in not admitting what Spagnoli clearly already knew.

‘But I’m still not certain why you’re here. Do you think you know the victim?’

‘I’ve never met him in my life, but if it’s who I think it is, his name is Paolo Bardolino. And I only know that because of one address in that street. He is – or possibly he was – the owner of the house outside which the body was lying, and that’s how I know his name. You see, inspector, that address was the end-result of the research I did for these two men.’

Spagnoli stared at the puzzled expression on Perini’s face and smiled again, enjoying the moment.

‘I know it’s just an old house in a back street in Florence,’ he said, ‘but that was what those two clients wanted me to discover for them. The request they made was quite simple: they just wanted me to find the last property in Florence that was occupied by Dante Alighieri before he went to Rome and was then exiled. And that house, to the best of my knowledge, is it, and that’s what I told those two men.’

Chapter 24

‘You were right about there being a fire-fight,’ Cesare Lombardi said, when he walked into the office about half an hour after Spagnoli had left the building. ‘We’ve found six nine millimetre shell cases outside the house and pulled one slug out of a wall further down the street. It’s pretty badly deformed, and the techies doubt if they’d be able to match the rifling marks to any particular pistol. Assuming that at some point we find a pistol, of course. And we found some bullet fragments as well, but they’re not going to help us very much. The only good news, if you can call it that, is that the bullet which killed the old man is still inside him, so that might provide a match if we do find the weapon that fired the shot.’

The sergeant sat down heavily in his chair and out his feet up on the desk.

‘You said you’d had a bit of a light-bulb moment over the Dante thing,’ he said. ‘Care to enlighten me?’

‘You remember the last thing I said before I left the crime scene this morning?’ Perini asked, and Lombardi nodded. ‘Well, I was wrong again. That killing is inextricably linked with everything that’s gone before, and we’re dealing with two different groups of criminals. They’re both on the trail of Dante, or something to do with him, at least.’

He outlined what Spagnoli had told him that morning and, just as the researcher had done, he saved the