The Villa Triste (24 page)

I looked at Mama, but she would not meet my eyes. She bowed her head and played with the stem of her glass.

‘Papa?’ I asked.

My father’s face looks so tired these days. Sometimes only his eyes seem as they used to, wide and blue behind his glasses.

‘They need our help, Cati.’ He reached out and covered my hand with his. ‘We must be glad to give it.’

But I did not want to be glad. I thought of the trains, of hands waving through slats, of the people who have been dumped in the hospital’s doorway after they have been visited by the Banda Carita.

Enrico turned to me. ‘Cati,’ he said, ‘it’s our duty.’

It was those words, it was when he said that – ‘our duty’, that I snapped.

I leapt out of my chair. I told him I did my duty every day – that down here in the city we ate, drank and slept ‘our duty’, and that he was selfish, and that while he was playing at soldiers in the mountains, we were stuck here – ducks in a shooting gallery – Mama and Papa and me. I asked him if he was stupid – if he understood? That it was us who would be arrested, us who would be dragged off to the Villa Triste. That when the Germans traced his radio, we would be the ones lying in a heap in the snow. I screamed at my brother that he was as bad as Mussolini, as Mario Carita, as the SS, or the Allied bombers – putting us in this much danger.

Papa had to grab me to stop me from hitting him.

But, of course, it made no difference.

That’s what I had seen in Rico’s face. And in Mama’s. That’s what I had felt in Papa’s touch, heard in the clap of his hands.

Salute!

Before I even walked into the kitchen, the decision was made. When we raised our glasses, we were drinking to the newest member of our family. Her name is JULIET.

Chapter Twelve

By Tuesday evening, Pallioti had all but given up using the front doors of the police building. The press office had managed, in the forty-eight hours since Roberto Roblino’s body had been found, to avoid confirming that his death was in any way linked to Giovanni Trantemento’s. But Pallioti realized, along with everyone else – including, apparently most of the press – that they could not keep up the front indefinitely. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, someone would get hold of something concrete. Then he would have to give another press conference, and answer more questions, most of which would almost certainly contain the magic words ‘serial’ and ‘killer’. Nothing, after all, sold newspapers better. He was just hoping he could delay the inevitable until Enzo came up with a reasonable line of enquiry – something that would make them sound as if they had some clue as to what on earth was going on. Or better yet, an arrest.

As he came out of the cafeteria service door, Pallioti spoke briefly to the guard on duty. Then he stood in the back alley, buttoning his coat. It had been a long day. He had spent most of it catching up with everything he had missed during the trip to Brindisi. The fraud case was as thorny as it had always been, but he was faintly optimistic that, as far as Roberto Roblino was concerned, they were in fact making progress.

Enzo’s team was happily picking apart what little there was in The file from Brindisi. Pallioti himself had made several calls to Rome and thought that he might, finally, have found the right person to light a fire under whatever poor unfortunate it was who was responsible for the consular archives in Madrid. Enzo had met again with the reporter who had written the neo-Nazi piece. Cesare D’Aletto had dispatched the original letter to their own forensics people. It was true that a second search had revealed nothing similar in Giovanni Trantemento’s papers, or tucked away inside one of his books, or anywhere else in his apartment. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t received a letter like Roblino’s, which had, after all, been sent over a year ago. Hate mail was the sort of thing people threw out. Everyone who knew Trantemento – a relatively short list – was being questioned again to see if anything jogged their memory. In the meantime, partisan groups were being contacted to see if they knew of any other similar missives, and the letter had been circulated on the police databases. It had to be only a matter of time before they got a break. The spelling alone suggested Roblino’s letter hadn’t been written by a criminal mastermind. Which, oddly, was the one thing about it that bothered Pallioti. Enzo disagreed, pointing out that even morons could wear gloves and get lucky enough not to leave evidence behind. The gun had probably been kept as a souvenir.

Pallioti sniffed the air. It was warmer than it had been. A fog had rolled down from the mountains. Dusk was falling so fast he thought he could actually see it, dropping like a curtain of gauze across the roofs of the city.

He had been considering simply going to Lupo then crawling home to bed, when he remembered Saffy’s show. He had indeed missed the opening, but a message on his phone had informed him that tonight she had a special late viewing. He glanced at his watch. If he was quick about it, he could still catch the florist and arrive with a conciliatory bouquet in hand.

Skirting the the piazza, staying well away from the police building and the few lingering reporters, Pallioti stopped at the kiosk and bought a dozen irises. By now there was a proper fog. Puffs of it billowed between the buildings, making the cobbles glisten and the mouths of the alleys dark and empty. Sound came in ripples. The splishing of the fountain was counterpointed by a general tap of feet as figures drifted, or hurried, by.

As he paid the flower seller, Pallioti thought he heard someone say his name. A coin still in his hand, he looked around. But the only people close by were a pair of carabinieri walking slowly, heads bent, hands behind their backs like priests. Lost in conversation, they passed the kiosk without looking up. Pallioti shrugged, dropped the euros into the old man’s hand, and started towards the alley that led to the river.

‘Ispettore?’

The word seemed to come from nowhere. Pallioti was not even sure he had heard it. His step faltered. He paused by the loggia where a pair of damp backpackers hunched over guidebooks. They did not appear even to notice him.

‘Ispettore Pallioti?’

This time it was louder. He whirled around, almost dropping the bouquet.

The hazy light made a silhouette of a woman’s coat. Not more than a few yards in front of him, the shape seemed to be drifting, rising out of the darkness at the mouth of the alley.

Pallioti felt his breath catch. His heart thumped uncomfortably. From where he stood, he could not make out her face, but he could see that she had dark hair.

‘Ispettore Pallioti?’

Her voice was strange. There was something not quite right about it, a faint flat echo thrown back from the stone walls.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please. I need to speak with you.’

As she stepped towards him, Pallioti felt himself step backwards. Instinctively, his hand went to his pocket, as if the little red book could summon her up. Or make her go away.

‘No!’ she exclaimed, as he began to back towards the open space of the piazza. ‘No, please, don’t!’ Her hand, small and white, almost childish, reached towards him.

‘I’ve left messages.’ She stepped closer, the words coming faster. ‘At your office. I left my number with your secretary—’

Guillermo. There had been two more messages yesterday. What was it he had said? That the woman’s Italian was good, but her accent was American?

The spell shattered like glass.

This was no ghost. No wandering shade who had slipped from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, her voice echoing down the decades out of a distant and war-torn past. If this voice was echoing from anywhere it was from the mid-west of the United States. He knew those flat vowels. He had done an exchange year at the University of Chicago.

This had to be the insistent Doctor Eleanor Sachs.

Pallioti felt his shoulders drop. A small surge of something like relief turned quickly to irritation. He felt stupid, then angry – embarrassed at having behaved like an idiot, thinking he was seeing phantoms. Squaring his shoulders, he summoned up what remained of his dignity.

‘Dottoressa,’ he said, ‘if you wish to speak with someone, you must follow correct procedure.’ Sounding like a petty official, even to himself, he added, ‘There is no point in continuing to harass my secretary. Please, contact the press office.’ And turned on his heel.

‘No!’ she said. ‘No! You don’t understand.’

He spun around. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘But I do.’ Pleased to have genuine cause to be annoyed, he added, ‘Only too well. You are the one who does not understand. I do not give interviews. Now, if you will excuse me—’

‘Wait! Wait! It’s not that. Wait, I’ve been trying—’ She grabbed his arm, her voice rising to a high, shrill note, her small white hand fastening like a claw on the black sleeve of his coat. ‘Please!’

In the piazza, several people had stopped and were looking towards them. The flower seller was hurrying across the damp pavement, rising out of the fog, his bandy legs making him look like a giant wind-up toy.

‘Dottore!’ he called. ‘Dottore, is everything all right?’

‘It’s about Giovanni Trantemento.’ The woman’s voice dropped to a low hiss.

‘What?’

She was small, and dark, her glossy hair cut short, like a boy’s.

‘Just tell me,’ she said quickly, the words not much more than a whisper. ‘Please, just tell me. Was his mouth filled with salt?’

‘So, Dottoressa Sachs’ – Pallioti’s guess had been right, that was exactly who she was – ‘what is it, exactly, that I can do for you?’

In the low light of the cafe he had hustled her into, and robbed of her ephemeral cloak of fog, Doctor Eleanor Sachs looked less ethereal than simply cold.

Watching her, it occurred to Pallioti that, having successfully cornered him and commanded his attention, Eleanor Sachs now found herself, as the Americans were fond of saying, ‘in over her head’. Feeling no particular desire to rescue her, he leaned back in his chair, deciding to let her stew in her own discomfort. If he hadn’t been so annoyed – he didn’t like being stalked and ambushed any more than the next person – he might have been tempted to smile.

The table he had chosen was at the very back of the room, in a dark corner suited to trysts and arguments and people who did not want to be seen together. Having explained to the flower seller that everything was a mistake, brought on by the fog, that he was perfectly fine and had merely not recognized an old friend, he had hustled the woman who was now sitting opposite him out of the piazza as fast as he possibly could – not because he had any particular desire to have a drink with her, but because until a few minutes ago he had been under the happy illusion that the police had kept to themselves the more intimate facts of Giovanni Trantemento’s death.

He cocked his head slightly, watching her. There were only a limited number of ways she could have discovered the information, and in the next half-hour he intended to find out which one she had used. If it was the most dramatic, that she’d murdered the old man herself – well, he wasn’t worried about being overpowered and they were around the corner from the holding cells. If, on the other hand, it was the far more likely eventuality that someone on the inside of Enzo’s or Cesare D’Aletto’s investigation had told her – then he would, without delay, have their tongue cut out. He might even wield the knife himself.

He realized that the waiter was bearing down on them. Rapidly, he produced a twenty-euro note – he was in no mood to cede any high ground by letting her buy him a drink. After she’d told the boy what she would like, he muttered that he’d have a glass of red wine.

Eleanor Sachs glanced up. Something like a smile flitted across her face, as if she knew that what he really wanted was a double grappa.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘that’s very gracious. I thought you’d like to see these.’

She opened her wallet and slid two cards across the table. One was an American driver’s licence from the state of Ohio. The other was some kind of security card issued by an Exeter University in England. Both had a picture that looked at least enough like the woman sitting opposite him. Both said she was thirty-five years old and that her name was Eleanor Angela Sachs. He nodded and slid them back to her.

‘I repeat the question,’ he said. ‘What is it, exactly, Dottoressa Sachs, that I can do for you?’

The waiter returned. Eleanor Sachs poured some wine into her glass from the small carafe that had been placed in front of her. Her hand wasn’t shaking, but it wasn’t entirely steady, either.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that it’s actually what I may be able to do for you.’

‘And what would that be?’ he asked, obligingly taking the bait.

‘Well—’ She paused and tucked the cards back into her wallet. Then she said, ‘I can tell you about Roberto Roblino, for a start.’

Pallioti’s hand paused for a fraction of a second too long as he reached for his glass. Score one for Doctor Sachs.

‘I assume you know who he is?’ Eleanor Sachs asked. ‘Roberto Roblino?’

Pallioti sipped his wine. Eleanor Sachs was watching him. Her eyes were disconcertingly large, and ever so slightly tilted, like a cat’s.

‘I’m not a journalist,’ she said suddenly. ‘That’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it? That’s why you wouldn’t return my calls.’ She laughed, an odd little barking sound. ‘I don’t blame you,’ she added. ‘I read that piece in the
New York Times
. It was horrible. Honestly.’ She drew her finger across her chest in an X. ‘I wouldn’t write that kind of crap. I’m a university professor, not a hack.’

‘A university professor?’

Pallioti really didn’t care what she did. All he really wanted to know, and preferably sooner rather than later, was how much she knew and who she’d got her information from. It seemed, however, that he was destined for at least an abbreviated tour of her biography, because Eleanor Sachs nodded enthusiastically, as if being a university professor somehow explained everything.

‘At Exeter University,’ she said. ‘In England. My husband and I both teach there. He’s English,’ she added.

‘That’s very nice,’ Pallioti said. ‘But I’m afraid I still don’t understand. Your interest in this case, in Giovanni Trantemento, Dr Sachs, is, precisely, what?’ Remembering some saying about flies and honey, he made an effort to smile. The result was not filled with warmth.

A wary look came over Eleanor Sachs’s face.

‘You see,’ Pallioti continued, ‘regardless of your profession, Signora – or do you prefer Dottoressa?’

‘Signora is fine.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘regardless of your profession, Signora Sachs, you still have not told me what it is you think you know – I presume you think you know something – or how you came to think you know it, or why you are apparently so eager to talk to me that you have harassed my office and all but flung yourself under my car.’