Chapter 52
OVER DINNER, THE TALK TURNED to the kidnapping of Mario Sossi.
Sossi was a prosecutor in Genoa who had gone after a left-wing terrorist group called Gruppo XXII Ottobre.
He’d put several of its highest-ranking members behind bars, which had earned him lots of accolades and a ton of press coverage but had also put a giant target on his back.
The month prior, he’d been bundled into a waiting car by members of another left-wing terrorist group called the Red Brigades, or Brigate Rosse.
As I’ve mentioned, kidnappings were not a new phenomenon in Italy, but they were a relatively new tactic for the Red Brigades, who had gotten their start sabotaging factory equipment, robbing banks, and—in a few cases—kneecapping industrialists, all in the name of protecting the working class.
Two years before Sossi was kidnapped, the group had kidnapped a SIT-Siemens factory foreman whom they’d held for twenty minutes—just long enough to photograph him holding a placard that read FASCISTA—before releasing him unharmed.
The story had garnered the Red Brigades a lot of attention, and since then there’d been other kidnappings, all of which had followed the same basic format.
With Mario Sossi’s kidnapping, the concern was that the Red Brigades were no longer sticking to their own script. For one thing, they’d already held Sossi for three weeks. For another, they were demanding the release of eight prisoners—all members of Gruppo XXII Ottobre—in exchange for his life.
“This business with Sossi has gone on long enough,” said Roberta Stearns as she dipped a piece of bread into a pot of cheese fondue. “Why not just make a deal?”
“The Italians are not going to negotiate,” said Angela from the other end of the table. “They think it makes them look weak. Not to mention it sets a bad precedent.”
“Hasn’t that precedent already been set?” asked a guy who I believed was heading up Electronics. “Look at the Fiumicino attack.”
“What about it?” Angela asked.
“They sure as hell negotiated then.”
“That wasn’t the Italians,” said Jenkins.
Angela nodded emphatically. “Anyone who walked off that plane alive can thank Kuwait for brokering the deal.”
“Time to call the emir, I guess,” said Joe good-naturedly, and everyone laughed except Angela. “Can someone pass me the gherkins?”
I was sitting between Paul and Daniel Bornemann, so as the conversation splintered, I found myself talking to Daniel for the first time all evening. He had placed a piece of beef on a skewer, and as he dipped it into a pot of hot oil, he gave me a helpless expression. “I never know how to do this.”
“Do you like your meat rare?” I asked.
“I’m not an animal,” he said with a sly smile, which made me laugh.
Daniel Bornemann was cute. Tall and lanky, with a long nose and thick eyebrows that made you think he was really concentrating when, in actuality, he was the least attentive person I’d ever met.
Like a magpie, attracted to shiny objects but unable to carry them all back to his nest. Daniel might ask you about your haircut or a scar on your neck or the fact that you walked with a limp, but he wouldn’t wait for the answer, so he never learned anything new.
The rapid-fire questions were fun at first, but when I realized it was impossible to go deep on anything, I grew a little bored and spent the rest of dinner wondering how in the world he had ended up with someone as serious and self-important as his wife.