Persona Non Grata (3 page)

“You can charm her.”

Pisanelli appeared offended. “She’s a married woman.”

“Married?”

Pisanelli nodded. “With two girls. One five years old, the other three.”

“How old is she?”

“Who?”

“How old is this wretched woman?”

“Twenty-three.” Pisanelli defensively flicked the long hair away from his ears. On the top of his head, Pisanelli had gone completely bald.

“Why does my colleague Commissario Merenda think she’s murdered her baby?”

“All the signs of a recent childbirth. She was brought in the day before yesterday—covered with blood. But, despite all the questions from Merenda’s team, she still hasn’t admitted to anything.”

They were standing outside the hospital, the noise of the controller over the scratching radio. Ciuffi was sitting in the car, waiting.

“And so instead of doing as you’re told and staying with Ciuffi, you decide to go off and give Commissario Merenda a hand, Pisanelli?”

“I thought I could be of use.”

“You’re of most use doing what I tell you. If Commissario Merenda feels that he needs you, he will inform me. It’s not for you to decide what you want to do and what you don’t want to do.” Trotti started to move round the back of the car. “And you’re telling me you believe her?”

“Believe her?”

“You don’t believe she’s had a baby?”

A shaft of sunlight caught the pale eyes, making Pisanelli appear innocent and very young, “I don’t know what to believe.”

“The doctors should know when a woman has given birth. They know when …”

“Placenta in the uterus.” Pisanelli shrugged the shoulders of his suede jacket. Trotti wondered whether it was the old jacket that had been cleaned, or whether it was a new and equally scruffy one. “And they’ve put her on a diet for loss of blood, giving her protein and vitamins. As far as the hospital is concerned
there’s no question. Loss of blood, dilated vagina.” He blushed. “Etcetera, etcetera.” He hesitated. “Within the last forty-eight hours.”

“You know a lot about these things?”

“I did a couple of years of medicine at university.”

“And you can’t get her to talk?”

“Nobody seems to be able to.”

“What’s Merenda doing?”

“Commissario Merenda’s been with her now for over thirty-six hours. At her bedside. Trying to get her to say where she’s hidden the baby. That’s why I went … I wanted to help.”

“Merenda doesn’t need help.”

“I want to help the poor child.” Pisanelli gestured towards the city, now bright with sparkling roofs beneath the mid-morning light. “Out there somewhere is a baby—and perhaps it’s still alive. A baby abandoned by its mother.”

“Well?”

“That’s what the doctors believe—and it’s what Commissario Merenda believes.”

Silence as the two men looked at each other.

Trotti released a sigh. “Then you’d better get back to Ostetrica and get the damn woman to talk.”

Pisanelli’s face broke into a wide grin.

“With your boyish charm, you should be able to get her to tell you everything. Get her to talk, Pisanelli. And show Merenda that old Commissario Trotti has still got a few good men with him.”

Pisanelli fumbled as he opened the door for him. Trotti got into the Lancia beside Ciuffi. “Even if you have to seduce the woman, Pisanelli.”

T
HREE O
’
CLOCK IN
the afternoon on the third floor of the Questura.

The small office was stuffy. Beige files gathering dust on the floor.

She sat opposite him and the young eyes looked at Trotti without blinking. The girl was pretty: the new generation, the generation for which so many Italian parents had made sacrifices, the generation born during the heady years of the Italian Miracle.

She was wearing jeans and a tennis shirt. Soft down ran along her arms. She had crossed her legs and was sitting back in the grubby canvas armchair.

Trotti noticed the nervous tapping of her foot.

Antonetta Vardin glanced from Trotti to where Brigadiere Ciuffi was sitting.

“Your father says you have a boyfriend, Netta.”

She shrugged.

“Well?”

“Riccardo and I are friends.”

“You like dancing?”

“It depends who I’m with.”

“With your boyfriend.”

She smiled tautly. “My father can be old-fashioned.” There were freckles on her nose and cheeks.

“But your parents don’t mind your having a boyfriend?”

A shrug.

(The smell was coming from the hall.)

“And they let you go out together?”

“I am allowed out on Saturday night—provided I am back before eleven o’clock.”

“And where do you go with your boyfriend?”

“Riccardo is a friend—that’s all.”

“Where do you go together?” Trotti took another sweet from the packet he had bought at the hospital shop. Barley sugar.

She shrugged. “There’s the Fast Dog Americano in corso Mazzini—we go there for a hamburger. Or sometimes to the gelateria.”

“And when you want to be alone?”

The foot continued to tap silently. “Then we go into the piazza and we sit and chat.”

“Not much privacy in Piazza Vittoria.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“A boy and a girl together … there are things you are tempted to do.”

“Don’t try to get me to say things that aren’t true. Riccardo and I are friends—that’s all. We are young, we have interests in common and we enjoy each other’s company.”

“How old are you, Netta?”

No reply.

Brigadiere Ciuffi repeated the question.

Antonetta stared at the dusty desktop. “Seventeen.”

“And did Riccardo accompany you to Piazza Vittoria last night?”

There was a pause before she shook her head. “I went with my sister and Bettina. Riccardo didn’t want to come—he has some exams that he is working for.”

“You mean he didn’t want to be with your father.”

The girl turned her head, giving a slight shrug, “My father doesn’t like Riccardo very much—Riccardo or any other friend of mine.”

“What exams is he working for?”

“He failed his maturità tecnica in June.”

Trotti glanced out of the window. The sill was a white patchwork of pigeon droppings. “But he has been to your house?”

“You have a very old-fashioned idea about young people today. You are like my father.” She looked up at Trotti and added, “Next January, I shall be able to vote.”

“Riccardo has been to your house?”

She nodded. “I presented him to Papa once—but Papa was not very friendly.”

“Netta, how long have you known Riccardo?”

“My name is Antonetta.”

“How long have you been going out with Riccardo?”

There was a long silence.

Brigadiere Ciuffi said softly, “Please answer the question.”

The young girl shrugged.

Brigadiere Ciuffi smiled encouragingly.

“He is in the class above me at the Istituto Tecnico.”

“How long have you known him?”

“A year—it will be a year in October.”

Trotti asked, “Do you kiss?”

Before the first tint of a blush began to color the pale face, Brigadiere Ciuffi hurriedly interrupted, “What the Commissario wants to know is whether there is something special between Riccardo and you.”

“We are friends.”

“Just friends?” Trotti asked.

Brigadiere Ciuffi glanced at Trotti and frowned. She moved forward and crouched beside the seated girl. Brigadiere Ciuffi was wearing a uniform dress of dark blue serge. It made her look young. The two women could have been sisters.

“These are embarrassing questions, Antonetta—but you must understand that Commissario Trotti has got to find the man who did those things to Laura. Because if we don’t stop him, perhaps he will do the same thing to other innocent girls.”

“Laura is all right now.”

“She will have to stay in the hospital for a few days. You don’t want that happening to other little girls.” Ciuffi placed her hand reassuringly on the girl’s knee. “Please help us.”

A flicker of worry in Antonetta’s eyes. “I don’t see how I can.”

“You must tell the Commissario about Riccardo.”

Trotti opened the new file and took out the computer-printed picture. “Does Riccardo have long hair?”

“What?”

He handed her the picture. “Do you know this man?”

She hesitated before shaking her head. “Riccardo has shorter hair than that. And, anyway, his face is quite different. It is thin.” She pushed the picture away. “Riccardo is handsome.”

“Riccardo has been to your house, hasn’t he?”

“I told you—I presented him to Papa.”

“Has he been to the house when your parents weren’t there?”

She said nothing.

“Well?”

Her face now was very pale. The freckles had lost their color.

“When your parents weren’t there?”

She nodded reluctantly.

“And you kissed?”

Brigadiere Ciuffi cast Trotti a worried glance.

“You kissed, didn’t you?”

Antonetta gave a shrug of admission.

“On the settee. On the same settee where your sister was attacked. That is right, isn’t it, Antonetta?”

“We did nothing wrong.”

“And Riccardo knows that at night that is where you normally sleep. It wasn’t the first time, was it?”

“We did nothing wrong.”

Trotti waited. “It wasn’t the first time.”

Brigadiere Ciuffi looked as tense as the young girl.

“He had been to your house before, hadn’t he? Not during the day—but at night, when your parents were asleep. That is why the front door was left on the latch, wasn’t it?” Trotti laughed, aware of the unkindness in his voice. “Only last night, it wasn’t you who was warm and curled up and waiting for him. It wasn’t your body …”

“No.”

“Not you—but the body of your little sister.”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you, Signorina. You’re not quite the innocent little girl you pretend …”

“You don’t understand, Commissario …”

“I think I am going to require a medical examination from you, Signorina Vardin.”

Then she broke down.

“No,” she shouted, “no, no, no.” She started to cry and her crying shook her young body with hysterical sobs that seemed to echo through the Questura.

B
ENEATH THE SILENCE
, Trotti could feel Ciuffi’s anger.

“You are angry, Brigadiere.”

They drove across the Ponte Imperiale.

Ciuffi did not reply.

“It’s because of Pisanelli?”

She turned and there was a smoldering light in her eyes. “Pisanelli and everything else.”

“Everything else?”

“You told Pisanelli to stay with me—and, when he goes off, you say nothing. Just a silly little mistake, an oversight, but it doesn’t matter because you are men, because there is a tacit agreement between you. But when I—the first female police officer in the Questura—when I fail to find out what’s happened to the child, you attack me. At the hospital, in front of everybody. Because I’m not a policeman, am I? It’s my job to run and get the coffee—or buy you your damn rhubarb sweets.”

“I never attacked you, Signorina.”

“It’s because I’m a woman, isn’t it? You think that all women are stupid and that we can’t—”

“Signorina Ciuffi, you don’t seem to realize—”

“I realize only too well, Signor Commissario. You are insensitive.” She snorted. “Like all men.”

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

“I don’t like the way you treated Netta.”

“I’ve got a job to do.”

“A seventeen-year-old girl and you treat her like a whore. I thought you were a good man—a kind man. Don’t you have a daughter of your own?”

“My daughter is in Bologna.”

“You can be very cruel at times,” Ciuffi said. “As if it weren’t already enough for Netta to know that her sister is lying in bed, her body covered with wounds that were perhaps meant for her.”

“So you think that Netta Vardin knew the attacker?” He gave Ciuffi a sideways glance.

A dismissive shrug. “It makes no difference. The fact is a man entered the house during the night and with his knife—”

Trotti corrected her, “With an instrument that was perhaps a knife.”

“A man attacked Laura on the dining-room settee. It didn’t have to be Laura—it could well have been Netta. She realizes that and she feels guilty. Anybody would feel guilty—it’s only normal: her sister taking the suffering that was meant for her. But that doesn’t seem to bother you, does it, Commissario? Other people’s feelings and …”

“I have a city to think about.”

“A city is made of people—and people have feelings.”

“The only thing I’m interested in is catching the man who did those things to a little girl.”

A laugh. “The only thing you’re interested in?”

“I have to stop him before he thinks he can do it to any other woman sleeping in her bed.” He turned and looked out of the window. The river was now behind them and the buildings grew more scattered as they reached the open countryside. It was hot and a thin haze hung over the fields. The car gathered speed.

Ciuffi fell silent, but Trotti could feel her hostility. She kept her eyes on the road.

A few minutes later Trotti spoke. “You’ve been in the PS for three years, Brigadiere Ciuffi, and you still think that you can act according to your emotions?” He lightly touched her forearm.

“Emotions are important.”

“Not when you have a city to protect.”

At Gravellino they turned left and, glancing at his companion, Trotti saw she had pressed her lips together.

The mixture of determination and innocence touched him. “Emotions,” Trotti muttered under his breath.

They drove through the village and soon found themselves in the new residential area that had grown up in the last few years: houses for the professional people who had moved out of the city, houses with white walls and sloping roofs of tiles. A couple of villas were of two stories but most were low buildings that imitated the style of the farmhouses they had usurped. Gardens hidden by high privet hedges and cypresses that demarcated well-kept barriers between neighbors.

The air still retained the smell of the countryside—a bittersweet mixture of grass, dung and fertilizer. Above the haze, the afternoon sky was a deep, saturated blue. Swallows wheeled overhead to a secret choreography.