“Shit!” Stone yelled, and went to get the old phone. He turned it on, hit the messages icon and read, then he handed the phone to Lugano. “She’s all out of battery. Did your guys get a location? She turned on the phone, at least long enough to send that text.”

Lugano made a call. “Nothing,” he said. “Could be the weak battery or a weak signal, or both.” He closed his briefcase. “I’ll see you this time tomorrow.”

39

Leo Casselli sat back in his reclining chair and watched CNN. His lap was full of work papers, and the sound was turned down fairly low, but then he heard his name mentioned. He turned up the volume.

“Let’s go to our Rome correspondent, Jeff Palmer, for more on this very interesting story,” the young female anchor said. The scene cut to a shot of a middle-aged man standing outside the Colosseum.

“Kalie, Leo Casselli, or Leonardo, as he prefers to be called, made headlines in the United States nearly twenty years ago, when a member of the Mafia family he ran in New York ratted him out to a congressional committee. Before the Justice Department could indict him, Casselli vanished and has not been seen in the United States since that time. He has, however, been seen in fashionable hot spots around Italy and France, schmoozing with the glitterati and having his picture taken with scantily clad young women, usually in restaurants. Casselli maintains that he is a retired businessman, but he is rumored to have a finger in the pies of a dozen Italian industries, and his name appears on many building sites around the country.” They cut to a shot of a Casselli Costruzione sign outside some under-construction condos.

“But now, the Italian police department that concentrates on the Mafia—the DIA—has taken a sudden, overt interest in speaking to Signor Casselli, and two multimillionaire businessmen, one an American, the other French, have posted flyers around Rome and Naples, offering a cash reward of five million euros, a new passport, and resettlement to anyone who can produce evidence that will put Casselli in prison, preferably forever.”

Casselli smiled and leaned back in his recliner; he was enjoying this.

“Trouble is,” the reporter continued, “that suddenly, Leo Casselli has vanished from sight, and the police, in spite of an intensive effort, have been unable to locate him. He has not been seen at his two homes, one in Naples and one on the Amalfi Coast, nor has he been dining at any of his favorite restaurants. He was last seen at lunch in a Paris brasserie that he managed to leave, in spite of the fact that it was surrounded by police. And since that time, two of his ostensibly right-hand men have been murdered, some say because Casselli feared their collecting the big reward.