Page 106 - The Jazzsipper Novel

105

THE JAZZ SIPPER

probably would be talking about taking on the Camorra, the mafia faction that
runs Naples, Italy. Vance started smiling thinking about how Babu would try
to sell him on some of the crazy schemes that he would come up with; he
would have done his due diligence on the scheme up to a point and then
would have relied on Vance to see what he was not seeing. They would argue
back and forth about the risk, the probability of success and the difficulty of
the scheme.

The rest of the port visit in Italy went as well as the first day; Vance and
Francesca consummated their friendship and agreed to stay in touch while
the ship was out to sea. When Vance got back to the ship it was late, the ship
was due to pull out of port at 7:00 am the next morning. That next morning
Vance got up reported to the aft mess hall, his work assignment. He heard
the normal protocol of overhead announcements when the ship is underway.
After their morning muster Vance began to get his mind back on the hustle
and bustle of shipboard life, but he had still not seen Dino and that’s when he
heard the Captain come over the intercom making an overhead
announcement. He said that during our port visit in Naples, four of our
shipmates were left behind and probably would be serving long prison terms
in Italy, on various charges. The serious being robbery, Vance still was not
sure if Dino, was one of the guys that was involved. So he decided to go up
and talk to “The Cat”, but once he got upstairs and spoke with another guy
that was on the Captain Staff, he told Vance the whole story of what had
happened. The guy said that “The Cat”, Dino and two other white guys off the
ship had tried to rob an upscale jewelry store. The guy said to Vance that the
stakes were high; they came up with an idea to mimic a real Yugoslavian,
Serbian jewelry thief gang that was notorious throughout Europe. Whom the