Supernotes (12 page)

Over the course of not many years, Victor became one of the most powerful men in Cambodia. His greatest coup was having an old container ship sent down from China and tied up at a wharf on the Tonlé Sap, not far from the Royal Palace and the neighborhoods where the people who matter live.

This he transformed into
Naga,
the pleasure ship, a floating casino and brothel.

But synthetic drugs—the “substances,” as he calls them—and money laundering are Victor Chao's real businesses, and to that end the
Naga
is crucial. The “substances” are floated on the various manufacturers' barges and transferred to her hold, ready for distribution. On Sunday mornings, in a room on the main deck, calculations are made to determine the amount of the prime minister's weekly kickback. The money usually changes hands in his private residence, a villa of French origin that stands next to the North Korean embassy.

The sign on the right indicates that they've arrived at the Marksmen Club.

They pass through the gate of the shooting range and head up the long drive bordered by lavish flowerbeds and perfect lawns. It would be like entering the park of one of the Palladian villas of the Veneto, were it not for the Russian antiaircraft tank parked not far from the gate and the large, circular pool inhabited by half a dozen crocodiles.

Victor Chao comes to meet them, thin and sinewy in his black uniform. He embraces Kasper and immediately reminds him of his promise to help with his pet project. “Stop with the globe-trotting, you Italian asshole,” Victor says. “Stay here in Phnom Penh and work for me.” He laughs and winks at Clancy, who nods placidly.

They go to the conference room. For this meeting, Victor Chao has called together some collaborators—who look like clones of himself—and an extremely young female assistant who assiduously takes notes. There's also a special guest: Ian Travis, a New Zealander, an ex-colonel in the Twenty-second SAS (Special Air Services) regiment, and a frequent visitor to the shooting range. Ian's the owner of the DMZ bar in Phnom Penh. After spending some time as a military consultant, he became involved in the most reckless kind of financial dealing. He's always very well informed about large movements of money, and he runs a “boiler room” in Bangkok. Kasper and Clancy see him frequently at Sharky's.

“You've got the floor,” declares Victor Chao, and Kasper begins detailing a complex training simulator known as a Killing House. It's a mini urban environment comprising one or more buildings with rooms, windows, and hallways. Every detail is a hidden danger; an enemy can be lurking around every corner.

Kasper emphasizes the need to operate while avoiding both enemy and friendly fire. The norms to be followed, he specifies, have been established at the international level. He expatiates on the necessity of building walls that include staggered double layers of sand-filled truck tires—a long, costly process, but one that facilitates training with high-caliber assault rifles and live ammunition. He demonstrates some of the possible courses an operation may take, sketches the structures the training requires, discusses hypothetical scenarios with tactical variables involving paper and metal cutouts.

Kasper speaks for more than an hour to an almost completely silent audience. When he finishes, Victor Chao rises to his feet and applauds. The others quickly stand and join in the ovation. Ian Travis flashes a thumbs-up. Clancy's clapping too. Kasper has the vague impression that his American partner is finding this surreal scene immensely enjoyable.

“Excellent! Fantastic!” Victor declares. “You'll all be my guests at the Manhattan this evening. And now let's go and do a little shooting.”

It's not a nightclub, it's one of the circles in Dante's
Inferno.
The eighth circle, the one with all the ditches for liars and thieves, the false and the corrupt.

A man approaches their table. A tall, lean German, former special forces. He's opened a shooting range in Phnom Penh to compete with Victor Chao's Marksmen Club, he trains some Cambodian military units, and he's trying to hire Kasper to conduct a course in Krav Maga. Most of all, he likes to piss off Victor Chao, who has just finished a raging drum solo and is looking in their direction.

Clancy draws the German off into a private conversation as Victor Chao, preceded by a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, arrives at the table. “It's your favorite, am I right?” he asks, shouting into the din.

Kasper gives him a thumbs-up. Victor may be an outlaw of the worst sort, but he's an awfully amusing one. If you want to catch outlaws, Kasper thinks, maybe you need to genuinely like them a little. Luckily, though, Victor's not his target; he's just someone who can give Kasper entry into the world the ROS is interested in: the world of the Italian criminals who launder money in Southeast Asia.

Victor looks at Kasper, seems to guess his train of thought, and raises his glass in a toast, smiling in his peculiar way. “Don't believe a word that arrogant Kraut says,” he tells Kasper.

“Actually, he's not much of a talker,” says Kasper, veering off again.

“He's a dick,” Victor says summarily. “All he does is flatter himself about that Mogadishu operation, when everybody knows if it hadn't been for the two SAS guys, the Germans would all be in the ground right now. Geez, Germans, ugh! What are they good at? Cars, sausages, and dollar-printing machines. That's it.”

“Dollar-printing machines?”

“You don't know? How do you think American banknotes get printed? On machines made in Germany. When it comes to that, the Germans know what they're doing.”

“Interesting.”

“Right, very interesting.” He laughs. A little too hard, to tell the truth. He's all wound up on liquor and coke, after putting so much energy into his drumming. It's too much, even for a bundle of nerves like him.

He looks around and grabs the bottle. Then he changes his mind and leaves it where it is. “Come with me,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

Kasper follows him. They exit the club, escorted at a discreet distance by an indefinite number of goons in black jackets. The only member of the company wearing light-colored pants and a T-shirt is Kasper. A casually dressed interloper in a parade of elegant criminals.

They enter the casino, walk down a hall that leads to the Manhattan Club's executive offices, and reach the so-called “control room.”

Victor Chao opens the door of his immense office and asks Kasper to take a seat on a bright leather sofa in front of a little crystal table. It looks custom-made for doing lines of cocaine. Before closing the door, Victor orders his men to bring another bottle of champagne. “A ‘Widow'!” he shouts into the hallway. “Cold, not frozen, fucking idiots!”

He sits—sprawls, really—in an armchair, eyes half-closed, smiling moronically. He runs a hand over his face. “I need a shave,” he murmurs. There's a knock at the door, and in comes a little bucket containing a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The girl carrying it is Chinese, very beautiful, with a doll's glassy eyes. She uncorks the bottle and pours champagne into the flutes. Then she leaves the room, as silent as a butterfly.

They drink more. Victor opens his eyes for a few seconds and then closes them again. He returns to the subject of Rudolf, says that one of these days the German's going to take a bath in the crocodile pool. He wonders why Rudolf doesn't drink his beers somewhere besides the Manhattan Club and tells Kasper he once managed to dilute one of the German's beers with a little of his very own, still warm urine.

“I don't believe that,” Kasper says, shaking his head.

“And you're right not to,” Victor laughs. “I'm a Chinese gentleman from Taipei. I don't act like one of these Cambodian shits.”

They go on like this for at least half an hour, in an escalating, concentric delirium, until Victor abruptly bounds out of his ivory-colored leather armchair, opens his eyes wide, and says, “I want to show you something. It's why we came here.”

Kasper thinks, here we go. He doesn't have the slightest desire to snort any coke. Therefore he prepares to decline politely, but Victor Chao bends over the little crystal table and puts two $100 bills on it. He smoothes them out and lines them up carefully, side by side.

“One of these is genuine. Which one?”

They look identical. Kasper shrugs. “I couldn't say. You'd need a machine to…”

Victor moves to a closet, pulls out a professional counterfeit money scanner, and places it on the table. “Be my guest,” he says.

It's a device Kasper's fairly familiar with. In the days of Operation Pilot, he often had occasion to use such a detector. He tests the first banknote. Genuine. He tests the second one. Genuine.

He looks at Victor Chao. “So?”

Victor laughs like a fool. “Amazing, right?”

“Amazing,” Kasper repeats. “But what does it mean?”

“Same-same but different,” Victor says, and then he picks up the first $100 bill. “This note was produced by the U.S. Mint.” He points to the table. “But that one comes from a different place. A place
much, much
closer to where we are now.”

“Namely?”

“Guess.”

“Your house.”

Victor bursts out laughing, contagiously. The combination of alcohol and sleepiness is a great propellant; they both laugh until they cry.

“You haven't guessed correctly.”

“Too bad.”

“This is an Asian bill,” Victor says calmly, pointing to it and pouring himself another glass of champagne. “Printed in an American mint in Asia. That's right. And in an enemy country to boot. An ugly place, filled with bad guys. Oh, yes!”

He picks up the two banknotes, one in each hand, and holds them up beside each other.

“You're completely wasted,” Kasper laughs.

“It's true,” Victor admits. “I'm out of it.” He throws himself backward into a chair, still holding the two bills out in front of him. Slurring his words, he repeats, “Same-same but different,” and then he lowers his arms as well as his eyelids.

“Good night, Victor.”

Kasper opens the door and calls the escort leader, who's camped out in the hall. “He's asleep,” Kasper says. “Put him to bed.”

Bellamonte, Rolle Pass, Trentino

December 2008

It's a color photograph. Standard format. Four forty-year-olds smiling under the peaks of the Pale di San Martino, a mountain range in the Dolomites, on an August afternoon.

Kasper's the first on the left. Next to him, with one arm around his shoulders, is Marzio De Paoli, beardless, his sunglasses pushed up on his forehead.

Marzio studies Barbara's expression. “That picture's from about ten years ago,” he explains. “We were outside the Malga Venegiotta. The other two guys are Marco and Salvatore. They were with me in the Group. In fact, they're still in it. I'm the one who's not anymore. The one who had to quit.”

Barbara hands the photo back to him and pretends not to notice the hint of bitterness in his voice. She nods and says, “This part of the Dolomites is really beautiful in summer. But in winter it's positively spectacular.”

Venturing all the way to Bellamonte in the middle of December has been a real undertaking for Barbara. She drove her car, climbing through a heavy snowfall amid a steady stream of ski parties, which are still arriving. But she couldn't postpone the trip. A few days earlier, while talking to Kasper's mother, she'd come across that name: Marzio De Paoli.

“I started coming to these mountains when I wasn't much more than a boy,” Marzio tells her. “I was an officer cadet in the Guardia di Finanza. The academy has a school up here, and they give air service survival courses here too. I liked this part of the country. I liked it so much I got married here, and I've never stopped coming back, not even after I moved to the Folgore Parachute Brigade, then to the ‘Tuscania' Carabinieri Regiment, and finally to the GIS. Not even after the accident.”

In the course of a mission, while he was roping down from a helicopter, its engine stalled, and the machine abruptly lost altitude.

Now he lives in a wheelchair. Six years have passed already.

Marzio smiles at his wife who's pouring coffee at his side. She asks Barbara how many sugars, and the lawyer responds with alacrity: none. The little white cup is from the good coffee serving set she sees on the sideboard in front of them.

“If I wasn't in the shape I'm in, I'd know what to do,” he says matter-of-factly. “All I'd need would be an okay, one that wouldn't require too much red tape or too many authorizations. Four or five of us, a local contact, and we'd get him back home. Not a doubt in my mind.”

Barbara barely nods. “Why aren't the Carabinieri doing anything? I don't mean a special forces raid, which I'm afraid would be illegal, but why not put pressure on our government? Or maybe on the appropriate department…”

Marzio shakes his head a little. “I don't know whether we're doing anything or not. Maybe we are, but we're just not talking about it openly. The Carabinieri are like that, so it wouldn't be out of character. But one thing's certain: Kasper, as you call him, is not the kind of individual who inspires crusades in his defense. He's an inconvenient individual, a totally anomalous figure as far as the Italian intelligence services are concerned.”

“Anomalous.”

“Absolutely. The less he's talked about, the better. Otherwise too many explanations would be required.”

“Are you telling me he was a CIA agent?”

“Things are never that simple. Sure, he worked for them too. Besides, as you may not know, an entire division of our intelligence structure—the Eighth—is practically in the Americans' hands. They have enormous power—they can call the shots, they can intervene. They can veto. They have special relationships with magistrates, lawyers, politicians, journalists. They have their own list of Italians they can rely on. Important contacts. And they use them.”

Barbara finishes her coffee, puts the cup on the tray, and thanks her hosts. Then, in the tone of someone thinking aloud, she says, “But Kasper worked for the ROS for more than ten years….”

“Indeed he did, and with terrific results,” Marzio says. “But do you think his success endeared him to them? The atmosphere in the Italian intelligence services is not exactly clean mountain air. There's a lot of dust in it, toxic dust. I wouldn't be surprised if many of Kasper's colleagues thought he basically had it coming.”

“But his superiors, what about them?”

“Forget about it. Do you have any idea what the people in our so-called intelligence services are like? Some of them are highly competent, that goes without saying. Some of them. The accomplishments of others, as we know, haven't been exactly edifying. They live comfortably in Rome, doors open to them wherever they go, they spend money without any particular budgetary limits or any obligation to account for it. And they don't have to produce results. They take notes and write reports, and that's all they do. Then they send them to the prime minister, whose position is often precarious or temporary. And do you know how they put those notes together? They do research on the Internet. Like political science students. For some of them, the chief problem is what tie to put on in the morning.”

“From what I've been able to find out, it seems that Kasper liked to dress up too, on certain occasions,” Barbara says, joking.

“Oh, you probably don't know the half of it,” Marzio laughs. “He used to have his suits tailor-made in Singapore. We'd make fun of him and call him a Florentine snob, which he loved to hear, incidentally. But we were well aware that there weren't very many characters like him around. Otherwise, he could never have done what he did in those years.”

“You paint him like a hero,” says Barbara. “But if you read certain press clippings or court documents, Kasper comes across as a radical right-wing loose cannon.”

“Hero? Who said hero?” Marzio asks, disagreeing with her. “You'll never hear me use that word. There are heroes among us, genuine heroes, but they won't be spoken of in the papers or on TV, or even in parliament, unfortunately.” He pauses and picks up the photograph of the four friends in the mountains. His lips tighten in a smile that seems to slice his beard in half crosswise. “Kasper's not a Boy Scout,” he resumes. “He's not the politically correct good boy who's so fashionable these days. And he'll never be a saint. But in these days of globalization and international crime, he ought to be considered a valuable asset worth preserving. He was born to do this work.”

“As an undercover agent.”

“Secret agent, spy, double-oh-seven, agent provocateur, imposter…Call him what you like. Italy has very few men like him, people able to work abroad. And look, the Florentine has done his double-oh-seven number in some very peculiar times and places. Remember what the world was like before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989? Well, by then he'd already been an operative for years. That's all I've got to say about that.”

“You seem to have known him for a long time.”

“For a good while, yes…”

“For how long?”

“Listen, counselor, what do you say we stop here?”

“Please, I'm not a journalist. I'm his lawyer. I want to help him….”

Marzio lets silence fall. It could end right here, this conversation. After all, he's already told her quite a lot. He's even gone too far. But then he adds, “We've known each other since our stay-behind days.”

“Excuse me?”

“Stay-behind. Operation Gladio, if you prefer. We were in it together.”

“Wait a minute…” Barbara stammers. “You're saying—”

“We were part of Gladio. You understood right. In the event of a Soviet invasion, we were the guys who would go to ground in caves and other hiding places and then reemerge behind the first wave of tanks. Our mission would be to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy. We were a select group of soldiers prepared to die for our country when there were still people in Italy who looked on Soviet Communism as a marvelous prospect. These days I hear some of them on television, and they've cleverly done away with their whole past. They're true democrats now. But until the Wall fell, there was a real, a very real possibility that the so-called low-intensity war would turn into an all-out war. We were going to be among the first responders.”

He stops to catch his breath. His wife's hand on his arm reminds him, with her usual gentle determination, that he's not to get too worked up. Marzio nods and smiles at her. But he hasn't finished.

“Ms. Belli, you've come all the way from Rome to speak to me. You've done so because you've discovered that I'm one of the few friends Kasper had in his line of work. Good. It's a pleasure for me to have this discussion with you. But may I tell you something? You shouldn't be looking for his friends. You should be looking for his
enemies.
The ones in Italy who had him put in jail when he was about to receive the gold medal for civil valor and charged him with something that was plainly nonsense….They accused him of attempted robbery and money laundering. Pure madness. But it got him out of their hair. And what was Kasper investigating when they locked him up? Answer me that.”

“You're talking about the Milan train station. The Swiss with the mysterious suitcase…”

“Mysterious, you say?” Marzio laughs. “The man's name was Bischoff, and there wasn't anything mysterious about his suitcase. It was just that Kasper, who was acting on orders from the Italian judiciary, got stopped and arrested by the Guardia di Finanza, while Bischoff went on his way undisturbed. A rather remarkable procedure, don't you think, Ms. Belli?”

“What was Bischoff carrying in that suitcase?”

Marzio puffs out his cheeks, sighs slowly, and says, “Something whose name probably wouldn't mean very much to you.”

“Can you tell me anyway?”

“If you forget it the second after I say it.”

Barbara barely moves her head.

“Supernotes, counselor. But don't ask me anything else.”