Medusa - 9 Read Online Free PDF Page B

his new BMW Mini Cooper S – 163 hp at 6000 rpm, 0–100 kph in 7.4 seconds, top speed 220 kph, alloy wheels with run-flat tyres, and the Getrag 6-speed manual box – and drove down the steep twisting street, past the old casino and the construction area for the new one, down into the original town square on the shore of the lake, when the place had been a fishing village. A pair of huge birds were circling on the thermals high above the glassy waters of the lake. Nestore had often observed them from the patio of the villa, but had never been able to identify them. They were obviously raptors of some kind, yet they never seemed to stoop to prey.
    He drove round the tight bends by the old church, then out along the suburban street leading to the elegant Fascist-era boxed arch of black and white stone marking the confines of this tiny Italian enclave in the Ticino; ‘a tiny bubble of Italian air trapped in the thick Swiss ice’, as Nestore thought of it.
    No formalities of any sort at the border, of course. You simply drove across an invisible line and were, equally invisibly, in Switzerland. Politically Italian, financially Swiss, but to all intents and purposes offshore, Campione was a useful anomaly which attracted many sophisticated and wealthy foreign residents such as himself. The principal amenity it had to offer, although not to Italian citizens, was its negligible rate of income tax, the assessment for which was at the discretion of the local authorities, but almost equally important to Nestore was the fact that Lugano was just a short drive or ferryboat ride away across an unsupervised frontier. That made various things so much easier, notably banking.
    There were many fine establishments in Lugano, but he favoured the UBS, partly for the discretion and professionalism of their staff, and partly because it came raccomandata by no less a figure than Roberto Calvi, who before being found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London had paid a seven million dollar backhander to the Socialist party leader Bettino Craxi through that very bank. Nestore reckoned that what had been good enough for the late lamented Dr Calvi would be good enough for him.
    Despite its international flavour, due not least to the casino whose profits provided all the municipal income, thereby abolishing all other rates and taxes, Campione was geographically a dead end, almost forty kilometres from the country of which it was nominally a part. The one way out reflected this, a narrow unimproved country road running between nineteenth- century villas set in huge walled gardens above the lake, then ducking underneath the huge swathe of the autostrada up to the San Bernardino and Gotthard tunnels, before trickling into the insignificant village at the head of the lake.
    He left his Mini Cooper – a personal toy that Andreina didn’t appreciate, but which Irene certainly did – in the Swiss Federal Railways car park and went off to feed the machine at the entrance. The Swiss might be happy to let the residents of Campione pay virtually no taxes whatever, but God forbid you shouldn’t pay for your parking ticket.
    A thickset man with a spectacularly broken nose was sitting on a bench at the end of the mainline station. A huge jaw, ratty eyes set too close together, jug ears, shaven head. Black suit, narrow rectangular shades. Not Swiss, Nestore thought idly, returning to place the ticket on the dashboard of the Mini. He prided himself on being able to spot people’s nationality at a glance, sometimes even their profession.
    He walked across the metre-gauge rails embedded in the roadway to the bar opposite, with its typical lakeside array of lindens, palms and dwarf pines. Here he checked the timetable for the mountain railway and then ordered a large espresso and a glass of kirsch. He was going to need a bit of fortification before his appointment with Alberto. Amazing, he thought. Of all the stupid things he’d done, and there had been plenty,