fic: Chinese Boxes 4/11

[01cheers]

10. Up, close, and personal

“I can hear you thinking.” They are in bed back at the villa, or rather she is in bed while he is sitting sideways on the bed still wearing the dressing gown. She suspects that he is waiting for her to doze off before he goes into the study to spend the night in front of the computer, and it makes her angry. “You might as well talk out loud.”

He reaches for her hand; a simple gesture, but nonetheless effective in dissipating her anger. She sits up and leans against his side, stroking his back through the smooth silk, feeling the scars. The ones inflicted on skin and flesh aren’t the worst by any measure.

“I want to go back,” he says when she has given up on expecting an answer. It makes her flinch; for a terrifying instant she imagines he means going back to Gotham, casting aside the life he has embarked on here as an interlude between Batman and more Batman. Logic tells her that being legally dead might be an effective obstacle, but it still feels like she is falling from a height when she asks, just above a breath, “Where?”

“To China,” he replies; and her relief, while relative and questionable, is still palpable. “I want to get to both those plants and see what exactly it is that they’re making.”

For once, logic and emotion are sufficiently well aligned to let her speak with conviction resulting from both. “I think it makes more sense to start from here. We can go back to Prato and take a look around the factory, and in the meantime you can keep looking for info in China online.”

“Not sure I agree. Now that Varese is dead, they’ll be expecting someone to come snooping here, but they won’t expect me to go back there.” If he did not call her out on the we, he is still making it clear that he sees China as a solo mission. “Besides, it’s not the shortest route, but it is the more direct one. Going to China will let me see things at the source, and it’ll be easier to follow the chain downstream from there than reconstruct it upstream from Prato.”

She suspects that calling it the suicidal nonsense she believes it to be will gain her little besides a protracted verbal battle. Well, as they say, if you can’t beat them, join them. “Fine. On one condition.”

“No.” The vehemence of his tone is unexpected. He gets up and walks right out of the bedroom, onto the terrace. After a few seconds of quietly fuming, she flips on the light, reaches for her shirt, and walks out after him.

He is standing on the terrace in the dark, the long black dressing gown falling from his shoulders looking exactly like the cape, and with the light now coming from the bedroom falling on his jaw with the rest of his face in darkness, the resemblance to the costume is complete. She is so struck that she literally stumbles back from him. To her, seeing Bruce as Batman is seeing Bruce going to his death; at this rate she’d rather tolerate the Wayne persona than this. He sees her reaction but makes no gesture to comfort her; instead he leans on the railing and looks away, over the lake.

She is not one to give up easily, however. “I can be useful, and I can take care of myself.”

Her reasonable tone seems to work... somewhat. “I know. I’ve been your mark, and I’ve seen you fight. But that’s not the point.”

“What’s so wrong about me going with you?”

“Everything.”

“Can you be a bit more specific?” She injects her voice with all the sarcasm she can muster; she is not some sort of useless, helpless, burdensome creature.

But when he starts answering, she is sorry for her callousness.

“I told you... about Rachel,” he says, quietly and hesitantly. “I told you how much she meant to me. Even when it looked clear that she was choosing Harvey over me, I still wanted to do everything to keep her safe, to have her near. It probably sounds masochistic, but even if she had chosen another, I couldn’t let go, even if it meant we’d only see each other as friends. Of course I still hoped she’d change her mind, but that again is beyond the point. The point is, I didn’t tell you how and why she died. I let her and Harvey get into a fight that should have been mine and mine alone. They had their reasons for wanting to jump into it, but the madman who killed them was looking for me, and was using others to get to me. I should have stopped them, and instead I let them both become his victims.”

She is about to make a riposte about free will and people’s right to pick their own fights, but something else in what he just said jumps out at her. “Harvey as in, Harvey Dent?”

“Yes,” he exhales.

“But Harvey Dent was no one’s victim. I’ve heard the contents of Gordon’s draft resignation speech. He didn’t want it published, but it was... leaked anyway. Harvey Dent killed five people in a deranged spree and died falling off a ledge. How exactly is that your fault?”

“It’s entirely my fault,” he insists. “Harvey painted a huge target on himself when the Joker demanded that the Batman reveal himself and he gave himself up as the Batman. He didn’t even give me a chance. If it hadn’t happened, he and Rachel wouldn’t have been taken hostage and strapped to time bombs. And I could have, I should have saved him afterwards... after she died. I saw him in hospital very briefly but I should have found a way to stay with him through the worst of it, should have let him spend his anger on me instead of others. He was a good man, a brave, honest man, and even if he didn’t deserve the glory they covered him in after he died, he doesn’t deserve to be remembered as a villain.” He is still looking away from her so she cannot see his face; but he sounds broken, years of guilt, only fractionally justified, coming to the surface. “I can’t keep letting people get killed when they take up my fights.”

“This one’s my fight too,” she argues. “I suggested the trip to China, I was there with you on the plane, and right there when you were talking to them. You wouldn’t have gone there if it hadn’t been for me.” And you wouldn’t have been so anxious to keep trouble to a minimum.

“No, I was the one who suggested China, and you didn’t tell me to mention Varese.”

“If I’d known of him, I would have. In fact I would have done so myself. I was the one who suggested Mongolia, anyway, and neither of us is responsible for its visa regime.”

“You couldn’t have mentioned him, you don’t speak Chinese.”

“The principle still stands.”

It is a stalemate; they have descended from sweeping statements into petty details, but she likes it better this way. The more she can corner him with technicalities, the more difficult it is for him to go back to self-flagellation on a global scale.

And he may be foolish in many ways, but he has enough experience in tactical situations to know that he has to concede defeat here. Not that it makes him happy.

“You aren’t letting go of this,” he says, turning away from the lake and looking sideways at her. It isn’t a question; she tries to hide her triumph.

“You’re not the only stubborn one.”

“That’s libel. I’m not stubborn. I’m prepared to offer you a compromise.”

“Go on.”

“I agree to keep looking at this mess from the Italian end and not go to China until it becomes absolutely necessary. If you agree to stay out of it.”

She has multiple issues with this proposal, starting with the until and the absolutely necessary part and including the stay out of it part; but it’s a start, and it is best to cement her advantage now and try to build on it later.

“All right,” she snaps, perhaps a touch exaggerated, and turns to leave... but when he gets hold of her arm and pulls her to him, she does not resist.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers against her temple. “I didn’t want to drag you into this mess.”

“So long as my being dragged into the mess means increased chances of you making it out of it alive, I really don’t mind,” she counters with a touch of wry amusement.

“We were supposed to go to Venice this weekend, and instead we’ll be dealing with this.”

“We can always go later,” she argues. “Venice isn’t going anywhere.”

“You never know.” She can feel him smirking, his lips soft against her skin. “They say it’s sinking.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m betting on us making it there sometime in the next hundred years. It won’t have sunk in that time.”

11. Lifting the lid

“So… which one came first, the villa or the boat?” she asks once she has taken in the sight of the Falcon at the pier of the tiny Portofino harbour. It is a valid question; Bruce’s yacht is basically the Carona villa rendered seaworthy… or conversely, the villa is the Falcon landlocked. Sleek, gleaming white, spacious decks and metal railings and wraparound windows that can’t really be called illuminators even at a stretch. Bruce is amused by her benign teasing; he was probably expecting more pointed barbs about his taste for the high life that he never before had time to enjoy, but she likes the thing too much to be disapproving.

“The villa,” he admits, “but I probably had this boat in mind when explaining the design I wanted.” Fair enough.

Earlier in the day they flew in his Cessna from Lugano, landing in the early afternoon at Pisa Galileo airport, a dozen miles north-northeast of Livorno and about sixty miles west of Florence. The hour-and-a-half flight allowed them to cut an hour off travel time, but Bruce’s main reason for taking the plane was that by then, he had already driven into and out of Italy twice in the space of a few days, and spent five days driving it around Tuscany; with the Sesto technically not road-legal in Italy, driving it into the country a third time in a week was probably tempting fate and the Italian traffic police.

They spent about an hour in Livorno upon arrival, first buying a pair of shabby overalls from a worker he spotted leaving the port for the exorbitant price of 500 euro, then renting a motorbike and leaving it in Livorno as the backup getaway option for his intended evening trip, before taking a rental car eighty miles north to Portofino, a millionaire playground of a miniature port surrounded by hills, with the semicircular sweep of its cosy little harbour curving outward to meet the outlying gulf, where the boat was waiting for them at the pier. The other three or four big boat owners, mostly rich Arabs, were so surprised to see someone arrive at the Falcon that had been sitting there vacant for weeks that they even condescended to poking out of their floating palaces to nod their greetings.

The villa resemblance is reinforced once they have taken a tour of the inside, the big open-plan saloon on the main deck offering sweeping views of the outside, the only difference being touches of polished mahogany and decor accents in navy instead of grey or black to pay tribute to its maritime habitat. Selina can easily see how they could spend almost every spring and summer weekend here, cruising from one coastal town to another and just hanging around. But for now, there is no time for fun and relaxation. There may be for her, though she prefers to spend it doing her Italian practice, but Bruce goes to the bridge almost immediately to power up the engines and steer the Falcon out of the harbour, setting the course for the three-hour voyage back to Livorno.

The vicinity of a big cargo port may be a strange place for a pleasure craft to hang around, but Bruce has his reasons for this eccentric choice of cruising waters, even though it gives him the extra headache of finding a spot shallow enough to cast the anchor in, and far enough from commercial sea traffic arriving at and leaving the port: he needs to get inside the warehousing area adjacent to the port, and it is easier to bypass security by sea.

Since they agreed last night that he would start his on-site investigation in Italy, it was obvious that there were two angles of attack: trying to get into the Tessuti Varese premises in Prato, and trying to meet with Gianfranco, the son, again, but this time confronting him with whatever suspicious evidence Bruce and Theo may find by then. Given Gianfranco’s reserved and reluctant manner earlier, all three of them are not sure if Gianfranco is in on the game, or an accomplice; the more facts they have to corner him with, the better, the most significant of which, besides the ownership and financial data they found, being potential evidence of Zhejiang Zili yarn, presumably packaged in Rongbaolin boxes, arriving at Tessuti Varese via Livorno. But to get that evidence, Bruce has to hurry: with the latest Chinese arrival, the COSCO Ningbo, having docked at Livorno two days ago, he has to get into the warehousing area, find the containers in question, and attach trackers to them before they leave port. Unloading a 9,500-container ship takes a few days, but there is no telling where exactly the containers are in the unloading order, and how fast they will move after that. If he fails, it will be a long two-week wait until the next ship arrives.

Once the Falcon is anchored outside Livorno they eat a quick dinner using supplies they brought on board; shortly after that Bruce, with the overalls and carefully applied grime smears on his face making him indistinguishable from an Italian docker, and carrying a toolbox containing the trackers, boards the motor dinghy to take it into the port. It should be dark by the time he reaches Livorno, making it easier for him to slip by and find the containers. Earlier in the day while they were in the middle of their travels, Theo was able to locate ten of these containers on the COSCO Ningbo cargo manifest, and was then able to give Bruce both their allocated portside storage area according to the unloading register and the exact GPS coordinates of that area, so what remains is for Bruce to find that spot and pick a good moment to stick the trackers on while staying undetected himself. The added complication is that the trackers have to be stuck to the top of each container, both to minimise the risk of detection and to maximise the power charge. Considering that these are active GPS devices that emit a regular ping regardless of being queried and have longer range than the mini-tracker in Selina’s pearls, they are equipped with a miniature solar battery - an adhesive square of what looks like black film - that should make sure that the signal will carry for more than a dozen miles and last longer than a couple of days. They briefly toyed with the idea of using passive RFID tags instead of GPS, smaller and power- and placement-independent, but those would only be useful for as long as the containers travelled on the toll highway network, assuming that Theo would manage to hack into the network to locate their signal. The moment the containers got onto the last stretch of smaller regional and provincial roads leading into Prato and from there to the Tessuti Varese site, the RFID tags would fall silent.

Bruce comes back close to midnight after a successful mission - he was able to tag five out of ten containers, as they were stacked two high - and as soon as he has changed out of the overalls into the usual all-black, he prepares to leave again, this time to go seventy miles east on the rented motorbike still waiting for him in Livorno. Back in Lugano he did a quick Internet recon on Tessuti Varese using satellite view; the company occupies an industrial site in Castelletto, five miles west-northwest from Prato, with the inside of the roughly diamond-shaped area a quarter mile across looking like a few warehouses and a production facility. But there is no telling how recent the satellite image is, what changes may have taken place in the past weeks, and more importantly, what sort of security the site has; and for obvious reasons, Bruce needs to find that out.

The devices he takes with him this time are a smaller and much more curious kind, filling what looks like two dark-coloured cigarette packets: two swarms of bona fide metal insects, the smallest and most sophisticated of the miniature drones that Wainwright Security produces for government military clients. Seeing Selina’s fascination with the tiny gadgets, he gives her a quick demonstration in the saloon: the first kind, a fake fly, is equipped with a propeller, a microscopic fish-eye camera, and a transmitter for the camera feed and operator commands; it looks a bit large for a regular fly, but in flight, is virtually indistinguishable from a large garbage fly or horse-fly at a distance of a few feet. The second kind, designed to take samples rather than video, is a fake cockroach with micro-suction pads on its feet that can navigate its way using a more primitive camera, travelling on surfaces up to a vertical 90-degree angle and, like its flying counterpart, obeying controls operated via wireless transmitter. He intends to drop them off, boxes and all, as close as practicable to the Tessuti Varese perimeter for later deployment: two of the limitations of these fantastic gadgets are that they have no night vision capability, making immediate internal recon impractical, and can only be effectively controlled over a short range of up to five or six miles, meaning that he cannot operate them later from Livorno or Portofino and will wait until he decides to move in on Tessuti, at which point he will go back there and get close enough to be in range for controlling the drones.

“I should be back in a couple of hours,” he tells her. “Don’t even think of leaving the boat on your own.”

She scowls at the blatantly pointless warning; the Falcon is anchored a good half mile out to sea, and he is going to take the motor dinghy again. But she says nothing and asks nothing about worst case scenario options, just watches the boat leaving, then goes back into the saloon, powers up the huge TV, and stays up watching DVDs of some spy drama, only releasing her breath when she hears the dinghy approaching three hours later, close to 4 am.

“Did you stay up all this time?” Bruce asks suspiciously, seeing her camped out on the saloon couch.

“Doesn’t matter,” she retorts. “How did it go?”

“It went OK, but could have gone better,” he shrugs. To his credit, by then he is sitting next to her, stroking her neck in a way that makes her forget about being angry at being left on the boat. “I dropped off the drone boxes out of camera range, but there was no way to get inside the fence, the way it’s strung with heat sensors like Christmas lights, even if I managed to cut the barbed wire. Nothing sophisticated, but effective by way of sheer quantity. I suppose I’ll wait until we talk to Gianfranco again to see if I have to fly the drones or can get in myself.” Well, at least he is willing to have her along when talking to Gianfranco, not that she cares about him.

They go back to Portofino first thing in the morning and for two days after that, they stay in and around Portofino waiting for the tracker signals to move. In all this time she does not, in fact, leave the boat on her own - their dinner outing à deux on the first evening doesn’t count - except to dive off the aft deck for a swim when they cast anchor outside the harbour. Bt she discovers that there are plenty of ways to have fun on the boat so long as both of them are there; and that mind-blowingly good sex is only one of them. There is the al fresco dinner on the aft deck on the second evening, there is laughing at old pirate films they watch on the big screen in the saloon, there are midnight swims followed by stargazing from the hot tub or the couch on the upper deck… much as she would like the whole Varese matter to be resolved quickly, she also wishes they could have a few days of this life. Her wish is partially granted, but on the third morning of this happy existence all five containers leave the port warehouse and are tracked to Castelletto by mid-day.

___________________________________________

Notes to Ch 11

Here is a bunch of links to a few pictures of Falcon 115' motor yachts. I tried to find one that I could imagine being theirs, but none of them has quite the right décor; I just imagine it as a variation on, or mix of, the following. this, also, same boat; this, this, and this.

Implied container ship specs, including capacity and travel times in the previous and a later chapter, and the GPS (satellite positioning) vs. RFID (short-range passive tag) tracking technology are pretty much as I hint. The insect drones may sound like pure sci-fi, but are a lot more real than it seems. I cannot remember where exactly I read about these 3-4 months ago, but the military do have something similar already.

12. Taking the plunge

He may wear Brioni but the Varese family wealth probably does not quite extend to this kind of tonnage, Selina observes as she watches Gianfranco trying not to seem too awestruck upon arrival on board the Falcon. He does his best to act uninterested in and unimpressed by the beautiful boat, but instead of making him appear cool and sophisticated, it only makes him look sulky and vaguely comical. It might, of course, be due to the fact that Bruce is meeting with him on his own territory, having invited him to Portofino earlier in the day using wording that was just polite enough to mitigate the fact that it did not invite any argument.

Sitting in the saloon with Bruce and Selina and absent-mindedly sipping the Montepulciano, he waves away Bruce’s superficially conciliatory apologies for the abrupt summons to ask directly about the reason and the urgency. He has obviously understood by now that Selina is not, or not just, a business colleague and Wainwright Security employee, but has made no comment on that. Interestingly, the change in Gianfranco’s demeanour from their first meeting has an opposite effect on Bruce: he looks so relaxed, it is bordering on pleased.

“I was very saddened by your father’s death,” Bruce answers, the quiet, level tone doing nothing to conceal the inherent reproach. “And I took it upon myself to look very briefly into the situation around Tessuti Varese to see if, perhaps, there was anything that may have driven him to take his own life. Or may have otherwise resulted in his death.” The undercurrent has moved from inherent reproach to inherent menace, casually icy instead of soft and pensive. “And after I’d had that quick look, I came away with a few questions, but also with enough facts to convince me that it wasn’t caused by an allergy.” Gianfranco’s attempt to appear calm looks not far from crumbling.

“What do you mean?” Predictable; and boring. But, she’ll grant him, there aren’t many options.

“One thing I found was that your father had a stake in a Chinese intermediary that, in turn, is the sole owner of a yarn producer.” Clearly, Bruce has decided to start with the remotest, most innocuous charge and ratchet it up. “Which then apparently supplies yarn to Tessuti Varese through another intermediary, as I was able to verify this morning, having tracked their containers from Livorno to Castelletto. Which would be fine, except that from a cost perspective it makes little sense to involve two intermediaries in what would be a textbook case for upstream integration, even allowing for any tax benefit from the current arrangement; so there must have been other reasons why your father or his Chinese partners decided to keep it that way. Another thing I found is that the current majority owners of Tessuti Varese are ultimately owned by a holding company that also owns a pulp mill in central China that is a supplier of cardboard boxes to your father’s Chinese investee and, for reasons I am happy to explain later, looks suspect on a number of fronts. And finally,” Bruce sits back for the killer blow, cool, measured, impassive; an accountant from hell. He must have been a menace in the boardroom. “I have seen proof that your father’s death was not from natural causes.” He does not elaborate on this, the most serious charge, apparently keeping his promise to the scared doctor. “I believe that you, signor Varese, are aware of these facts, and I owe it to your father as a former client of mine to find out what exactly happened and why. Hopefully, with your help.” The unsaid part is loud and clear; if you don’t help, I’ll find out anyway.

“I really don’t know much about this, Mr Wainwright,” Gianfranco ventures, in a frantic last-ditch attempt at plausibility. “I was never involved in my father’s business -“

“Non mi dire delle stronzate, signor Varese,” Bruce cuts him off sharply if still quietly. Selina bites down on a smile; if only Theo could hear his signature line delivered with such chilling flair, he would be proud.

Assuming that the verbal punch was calculated to throw Gianfranco off balance, it succeeds. He instantly turns from fake-confused to visibly pissed off and defensive.

“Why is it that you’re digging this all up? What’s in it for you, who are you working for? You installed the surveillance, we paid you, what more do you want?” There is something else lurking in his voice behind the veneer of anger; Selina has learned in her relatively brief but spectacular career to be a judge of people’s mental states, and she can sense it now: desperation. But not the bitter desperation of a cornered culprit; more the frantic desperation of a kid scared to death. And apparently Bruce sees it, too.

She expects him to back down and try a different tack now, playing good cop to his own bad cop. But what he says is beyond her assumptions.

“I want justice for your father.” He sits up, his face a few inches closer to Gianfranco’s now; his shoulders are slumped and his voice quiet and lacking the ice shards. “Because no matter who exactly his murderers are, I’m probably the one who got him killed.”

She has heard him imply it before, but watching him say it again does not hurt any less.

Desperate or not, she still half expects Gianfranco to go for his throat after that and half expects him to sag in relief at having another take the blame for his crime; but neither happens. He sits very still, and when he speaks next, it is just as quietly as Bruce just spoke before him.

“Cosa vuoi dire?” he asks again. He has switched from the formal third person to the informal second, either as a sign of contempt or a sign of trust.

Bruce does not seem to care which it is. Instead, he plunges ahead with telling Gianfranco the full story of their landing in Xining, and the fateful mention of Giacomo’s name. When he has finished, the anger is gone from Gianfranco’s face. If anything, he looks close to tears. And even more scared than before. But on balance, it looks like Bruce has called the right bet.

Gianfranco does not speak at once. When he does, his voice is shaky, and he stumbles over his words.

“I... appreciate you telling me this. I know it must be... trying for you, learning about his death after you mentioned his name. I can understand how you were... compelled to do it in a crisis. And as much as I’d like to blame you, as much as it would be easier for me... I can’t. I probably didn’t do enough myself to try and talk him out of all this when it became clear that things were... dangerous... but I also know that the way he was, he wouldn’t have listened until it was too late. The truth of the matter is, my father dug his own grave, and I don’t know who could have stopped him.”

It is Bruce’s turn to say the quiet What do you mean, mirroring the second-person address.

“I’ll tell you,” Gianfranco volunteers, the fear creeping back into his face. “But you have to promise to stop and not try to investigate. If you don’t, they’ll kill me too, they’ll kill us all.”

She didn’t expect to feel sorry for him a few minutes ago, but she does.

“Who?” she asks, joining the conversation for the first time.

“Wu and his men,” Gianfranco explains readily. “They run everything there now, and they’ll kill anyone who goes against them or who tries to expose them, whatever it is they’re doing. My father tried that, and see what it got him. You’re right, he didn’t die of natural causes,” he continues, turning back to Bruce. “He died after a business dinner with Wu and his deputy. The way he’d been opposing them for months before that, I still can’t believe he went there. I told him not to go, Mother told him not to go, and he still did. He said he’d had enough of those bastards stealing his company from him, even if he’d invited them himself at the beginning. And he kept saying that he was going to find them out and go to the police. I think he even told them that. Your mentioning his name in China may have been the last drop that confirmed to them that he was trying to dig up things on them, but it was a matter of days or at best weeks as it was, he was going to try it anyway. You were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. So am I, so was my father.”

For a while, none of them speaks. The confrontation over, the mood that has settled over them is somewhere between mourning and relief. Selina may be selfish, but she confesses inwardly that her feelings run more toward the relief end of things.

“I can promise you that I won’t do anything without talking to you first,” Bruce replies eventually. “But I’d appreciate it if you told us what you know. There may be a way of getting them without endangering ourselves,” he finishes. Most likely thinking about setting the Interpol on their trail from the Chinese end, Selina suspects. Hopefully without the need for him to go there.

And Gianfranco does tell them what he knows - it sounds like he tells them all he knows, from the moment his father started looking for cash to top up the dwindling working capital when the banks weren’t forthcoming and for a minority partner to hopefully help bring new business, or cheaper suppliers, or both, to a sluggish, old-fashioned company that he was too attached to to either drastically reorganise or sell off. He tells them about the first dealings with Wu, seemingly reasonable and businesslike and surprisingly ready with the money; about Wu’s offer to invest 25% in Tessuti Varese in exchange for Varese’s equivalent stake in Qindgao Jinglian, much smaller in monetary terms due to its mostly-empty balance sheet - Wu’s stated reason was to procure beneficial tax treatment for Zhenjiang Zili, the wholly-owned subsidiary yarn producer, thanks to the foreign investment, but Bruce suspects that Wu’s real reason must have been to make Varese the fall guy if anything went wrong. He finally tells them how Wu then brought in the Chinese fronts as the new majority owners after briefly convincing Varese that they were purely financial investors... and how, after his stake went down from 100% to less than a quarter in the space of a year, Giacomo Varese found himself a trespasser in his own company.

“I have no idea what it is they’re doing, and I honestly don’t know anything about the yarn or the boxes,” Gianfranco goes on, “but Father said that within a month of getting majority, they fired all the old staff and locked access to the production facilities so that no one except them could go there, and put guards around the place. They called them the new workers, but Father said that these workers carried guns, and there were only a couple of them who actually knew anything about weaving and were seen around the weaving machines. And our production dropped to less than a quarter of the old rate but apparently they still got huge profits off the books, mostly from exports. They’d give us a cut, but it kept getting smaller over time, and they kept telling Father to sell the rest of his stake. I tried to talk to him and tell him that it was probably the only option, that we’d be better off out of there, we could always set up another business, but he was too angry at them for what he called ruining his company. The only time he listened and talked to them about selling, they offered him a quarter of the value of our stake, and there was no more talking to him after that, he just kept saying that he was going to the police to nab these robbers.”

“I’m sorry,” Selina says; she means it.

“I want to get these fuckers,” Bruce says, and she is sure he means it, too.

Instead of arguing or pleading, Gianfranco just asks why.

“Your father may have been reckless, but I mentioned his name in China, and I’m not letting go of that.” She is not sure if by now it is the reason or a pretext. “I can try and do so in a way that won’t get you involved, but I admit that it would be easiest if we worked together.”

To her surprise, Gianfranco does not argue; it is as if making the disclosure has helped him find a modicum of courage - or more likely, has reminded him again of the extent of the injustice. “But what can we do? I don’t have any position in the company, and we can’t even get into the site, it’s become a fortress.”

“What we can do,” Bruce counters calmly, “is walk into their fortress, and ambush them right in it. You said that your father still held a minority stake when he was killed; is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And they want to buy it out. They may think that you’ll be so scared now as to hand it to them, or that you’ll be so scared now as to stay out of it and not say a word even if you still hold it, which is just as good for their purposes. What we can do is make it look like you don’t care about the company, or about what happened to your father,” he suggests, and Selina is reminded of Gianfranco’s attitude in their first meeting seemingly being just that, “and just want to get some money out of selling your stake before leaving them to it. It will give us a reason to contact them and hopefully get into the company site, as I don’t think they’ll want to discuss this in a public place or at their homes and you can say the same, and it’ll make you look mercenary enough not to be a threat while tempting them the prospect of full control. I’ve mentioned that I speak Chinese, and if the Xining people talked to Wu he’ll know it anyway, so I can go with you to translate. You have nothing to lose,” he sums up, “in practice you’ve as good as lost it anyway, and this way we can bring them to justice. Besides,” he adds, “I don’t just install alarms, I have some... hands-on security experience as well, so it may not be such a lost cause after all.”

Gianfranco looks up at that last admission. “You don’t seem like you’re Mafia,” he ventures.

“Never was,” Bruce assures him. “But I’ve fought against the Mafia, not here, in the States. Not unsuccessfully, I may add.” She is amused at the newly respectful look in Gianfranco’s face.

And now, she figures, is her chance. She may face an uphill battle trying to convince him on his own and in a more analytical state of mind, but now, with Gianfranco looking like he needs all the support he can get and with Bruce inspired by his own plan, is as good an opportunity as any.

“And if you need any expertise from the other side of the law,” she cuts in smoothly, ignoring Bruce’s alarmed look, “I am a professional thief. Was, until a few months ago. Cat burglar, actually. A good one; you can ask him. And if there’s any snooping around needed, I can do it while looking so stupid that they’ll never know what hit them until it’s over. And if there are any safes that need cracking, it’s as good as done.”

She can see Bruce preparing to shoot her down, and readies her killer weapon. “Besides, when we had our emergency landing in Xining, Brandon had to tell the Chinese that I was your fiancée having an affair with him to get me off the hook, didn’t you, caro? It will make a perfectly plausible cover story.”

The effect, if anything, is more devastating than she expected. Bruce just stares at her, dumbfounded by her stealthy offensive, his face a perfect illustration of an et tu, Brutus moment.

Gianfranco, however, is probably too encouraged by this discovery of a new and accomplished ally to realise the lapse of judgement he is about to commit. “I’ve never been so happy to discover I had a new fiancée,” he beams. “I’m glad Chiara is still in Bali or else she’d be giving me -“

The look Bruce gives him in the next instant makes Selina wonder if Gianfranco is facing a swim in the harbour... or worse. In fact, she is glad that he has apparently managed to keep control of his bowels. “I mean... as a business partner,” he bleats.

Bruce subjects him to the stare for two more long seconds before seemingly relenting.

“Just to make things clear,” Bruce answers in a deceptively soft voice, “Céline here is my fiancée, and she only gets involved to the extent that is necessary.” She does her best not to show how much she is savouring this. Apart from her strategic victory, being called his fidanzata, even as a deterrent to others, even if he will never actually propose and she does not expect him to, is quite flattering.

“The story will be that I insisted on being part of the talks because my family lent you money and I want to make sure that we get it back, and that I’m your pretend fiancée so Brandon and I can’t do anything... risky to avoid being found out, but we still carry on when you aren’t watching,” she cuts in before tempers get too frayed.

“And the reality is that she is my real fiancée so you can’t do anything risky either if you want to keep your balls,” Bruce remarks, seemingly as an idle comment.

“Yes, of course,” Gianfranco nods hurriedly.

“I’d bet there will be safes there that we may want to look into,” she interjects to stop Gianfranco from ruining it with his fear of Bruce.

“I can figure out ways of opening a safe,” Bruce mutters, still noticeably put out.

“Using what?” she presses.

“Explosives,” he admits reluctantly, and she feels perfectly justified in making a face.

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” she replies, unable to resist the taunt. She figures she’ll make it up to him... later.

***

“Insomma, ragazzi,” Bruce calls out to them from the bar where he is looking for a whisky bottle; given the alliance they’ve forged and the planning they’ve had to do, it probably isn’t surprising that Gianfranco ended up staying for dinner; and to Selina’s relief, he has managed to avoid tempting Bruce into chucking him overboard up to this point, “we have a day to get ready and just under two days before we meet in Prato.” Before they sat down to dinner, Gianfranco called Wu to suggest a meeting to discuss the buyout, and to their relief, was given an appointment at Tessuti Varese on the afternoon of the day after next. “You meet Cèline at 1 pm at Santa Maria Novella, off the train from Milan. I meet you both at your house, and we go from there to Castelletto. In the meantime we go back to Lugano tomorrow, get Céline her Italian ID, get the fabric and the translation device, and you find a trustworthy girl with an industrial sewing machine and bring her to your villa by the time we’re there. Tutto chiaro?”

“Yes, yes, it’s all clear,” Gianfranco responds. “Perhaps you could get me another one of those translation gadgets..?” he starts, but seeing Bruce’s sour look, thinks better of it.

“With all due respect,” Bruce starts, pouring himself a tumbler, “Céline is a professional thief who knows her way around this kind of situation, and she’ll manage to keep a poker face no matter what. I am not going to jeopardise our advantage by the risk of your eyebrows twitching when you hear something you aren’t supposed to know the meaning of. You’re getting the Kevlar, that should be good enough.” Gianfranco purses his lips but decides not to press the point.

“The important thing to remember,” Bruce concludes, “is to avoid any business dinners with Wu, or else we’ll all end up with a severe peanut allergy.”

(end of Ch 12) - continued in part 5