A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Read Free Page A

before it departed and see who else did the same. It was the stuff of movies, but sometimes Hollywood did not lie. These methods were not, however, the best for spotting a tail. If you were hunted with more than the mildest determination, you would have more than one follower, and when you “burned” the first by doubling back, a second would take over, and perhaps a third, a fourth, and a fifth, if the pursuers valued you enough. You could not double back forever. And even if you had only one follower, you marked yourself as having something to hide, a fact that might have been unknown to your pursuers, who maybe had been only a little suspicious of you. What you wanted was to convince them of your unexceptionality. To convince them took methods less crude. Walking was good and in Milan was easy since the city was as flat as Nature allowed and the streets had grown organically, Europeanly. A man could stroll, say, from the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo’s The Last Supper was sheltered, across town to the castle of the Sforzas, or in the other direction to the Navigli, the canal district, without laboring for breath and choosing from any number of smallish streets that would make spotting a follower easy.
    So Massimo walked. The afternoon was cold, but there was no rain and even a bit of sun, an aberration for hibernal Milan. He enjoyed the fading light for a time, then, having seen no one of note on the street, he turned into a bookstore. He browsed, pulled a book off the shelf, and became to all appearances absorbed in it, but the door was never beyond his peripheral vision, and he noted everyone who entered. He watched to see whether any eyes flitted over him or worked too studiously to avoid him, but none did. Everyone gave the bland, aging man the small due he deserved. He left, walked some more, and entered a clothier’s, where he examined a shirt. Then it was a grocery, then an electronics superstore, then a sexy shop, as Italians call their stores for erotic assistance. Massimo enjoyed sexy shops, professionally speaking. They made people, even spies, uncomfortable, and a discomfited spy was one who made mistakes. At one or two stores he bought a bauble or two, which added a degree of realism to his errands. Amateurs never bought anything; they were too agitated. Now and then he caught a tram or a bus and rode it a few stops.
    Long after day had turned to dark, he reached Piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini and his mistress had been hung from the canopy of a gas station after their encounter with Partisan bullets. Massimo descended into the Metro and boarded the red line. Five stops later he alighted and emerged at Piazza del Duomo, where Milan consents to be wantonly glorious. The Duomo is one of the largest houses of Christendom, yet its edifice is like a bride’s mantilla—unimaginably intricate but not burdensomely so, and productive of the feeling, even in Massimo, that it is good to be alive. He skirted the cathedral and across from its north transept passed through the glass doors of La Rinascente, a department store of the prospering middle class that could have been uprooted and dropped at Fifty-ninth and Lexington without the shoppers of Bloomingdale’s ever noticing the difference. He rode up successive escalators past perfumes and stockings and cravats and tureens to the seventh floor, where he got off, bypassed the aisles of haute foodstuffs, and entered the modernist café and solarium, which might better have been called a nimbarium at that time of year. He took a table an olive’s throw from the brilliantly lit rooftop of the Duomo and ordered a beer. The café was filled with its usual polyglot mix of tourists and shoppers whose conversations—German here, Japanese there—made it a good place for foreigners to meet without drawing attention. He tried to guess who among the patrons might be his contact. This was just for sport since his contact would recognize him. He sent a