The Villa Triste (26 page)
The night before, as he had walked away from the cafe after meeting Eleanor Sachs, Pallioti had been of two minds. He very much doubted that she was a murderer. But his instincts still told him, with some certainty, that she had been lying.
He could call Enzo, who would run a background check on her, and pull her in and question her, and generally make her life miserable. He could do nothing, and see what she did next. Or he could carve a route between the two – run a background check and then wait.
He found himself inclined towards the last of these, partly, he realized, because he liked the game. Liars interested him, especially when they had gone to the lengths Eleanor Sachs had. He had no idea what it was she was really after, but he would find out eventually – if only because she would tell him. Liars always told, in the end. If you had enough patience. Because at heart, they were showoffs.
He had pondered the paradox of that – that half the thrill of any con was showing how you did it, thereby destroying what you’d built – as he’d made his way to Saffy’s gallery, moving through the night streets of the city like Jonah through the belly of the whale.
He was still considering, even as he arrived and had a glass of champagne stuck into his hand, how they might verify the connection between Roberto Roblino and Giovanni Trantemento. Eleanor Sachs’s game, whatever it was, was probably irrelevant. But the connection between the two old men, if it existed, was not. He’d sipped the wine, and had been on the verge of accepting the dreary reality that either he, or more likely Guillermo, would have to spend some considerable time on the phone and/or in a library and online in order to see if they could back up a single thing the good Dr Sachs had said, when a potential solution had presented itself in the unlikely guise of Maria Grandolo.
‘Alessandro!’
Despite the fact that it was November, Maria was wearing a wisp of a dress. She might have the brains of a peahen, but they were definitely housed in the body of something, well, just short of a goddess. Her legs, which were perfect, went on for approximately half a mile. Her stomach was flat. Her hair shimmered and her face was a perfect oval. But what really interested Pallioti about her – in fact, the only thing that interested him about her – was that, while he was as bewitched as any man for about three minutes, that was it. By minute four, the idea of actually having sex with her was invariably replaced by an almost panicky desire to flee.
Maria had clasped him by the shoulders – she was stronger than she looked – and kissed him rather too enthusiastically on either cheek.
‘Alessandro!’ she’d exclaimed again, demonstrating that she did, in fact, know his name.
‘Hello, Maria, you’re looking well.’
‘We have been on holiday! One last one before the horrible winter. Beautiful! We took over the hotel. You should have come! Such fun. The spa. I tried to get Seraphina, but you know what she’s like. Work! Work! Work! Just like you, Alessandro.’ She paused and took a breath. ‘But at least you’re here tonight,’ she added. ‘Seraphina didn’t tell me. If I’d known I’d have invited you. We’re going for dinner afterwards.’ Maria had named one of the glitzier restaurants in the city. ‘Let me see if they can add another place!’
She had whipped out her mobile as Pallioti began to protest. Then, quite suddenly, he had remembered the organization Saffy had mentioned – something run by Maria’s family that dealt with the partisans – and stopped in mid sentence. He could, of course, have used his not-inconsiderable clout to contact whatever the group was and ask for help. But that would have made it official. Which would have meant potentially public. Which was not only un-Florentine, but an anathema to the notoriously private Grandolos.
Maria had looked slightly startled when, instead of protesting, he’d smiled, put his hand on her elbow, and said, ‘How delightful. I’d love to join you.’
Later, he’d told himself it was a small price to pay, and if nothing else, would give him a chance to make up for Sunday by spending an evening with Saffy and Leo, both of whom had spent the next hour glancing at him as if he had gone off his head.
As he expected, the dinner had been loud, the restaurant pretentious, and the food ordinary. But the experience hadn’t killed him, and he had got what he wanted. Maria, flattered that he deigned to speak to her at all, had been more than helpful. The eagerness with which she’d made a call even before the first round of champagne had been poured, had made him feel a heel. But it had borne fruit. As soon as he arrived at the office the next morning, Guillermo handed him a slip with an address on it and informed him that he had an appointment with a researcher at Remember The Fallen.
Now he was standing outside a suite of offices in an expensive and anonymous building not far from Piazza D’Azeglio. If he had been expecting genteel eccentricity, elderly ladies in cardigans or little old men in fusty tweed suits juggling manila files, it looked as if he was going to be disappointed. The young woman who greeted him was crisp and professional. She smiled brightly and extended a well-manicured hand.
‘Ispettore,’ she said. ‘We have been expecting you.’
The room he was ushered into had several sofas, low tables with magazines, and what was obviously her desk. On it sat neat stacks of papers, a potted orchid, and a large computer. There wasn’t a manila file in sight. It could have been the outer office of an upmarket psychiatrist, a lawyer, or an estate planner.
‘I am Graziella Lombardi,’ she added, as she crossed the thick blue carpet towards a closed door. ‘The administrator. I would be happy to help you, of course. But our Director has insisted that she would like to meet you herself.’
She rapped on the door – which, like the rest of the room, was painted a pale golden colour, its mouldings picked out in pale blue – pushed it open, and said, ‘He is here, Signora.’
Pallioti heard a murmured voice. There was the sound of someone getting up from a chair, then the door swung open and the Director of Remember The Fallen stepped into the room.
She was wearing a sweater of pale pink, lipstick that matched it, and a single strand of pearls. Her white hair framed her face in loose abundant curls. Pallioti had no idea how old she was, and understood at once that it didn’t matter. The woman who was extending her hand to him put paid to any idea that youth and beauty were connected.
‘Ispettore Pallioti,’ she said, her face lighting into a smile, ‘what a pleasure it is to meet you. Your sister is a dear friend of my great-niece, Maria.’
Pallioti extended his own hand nervously. He had not intended for Maria to summon up her great-aunt in person. A researcher would have done, would have been more than enough. Now he found himself pressing an utterly trivial issue on Cosimo Grandolo’s widow herself.
‘Please, please.’ Signora Grandolo was gesturing towards the open door of what was apparently her office. ‘Do come in,’ she said. ‘And tell me how I can help you?’
‘My husband started this organization, quite soon after the war. Did you ever meet him?’
Signora Grandolo had settled herself behind her desk, which was wide and highly polished. The fog of the night before had cleared and a bright, sharp sun fell through the tall windows of the office, burnishing the glass-fronted bookcases that lined the walls and the great ship of a desk to a deep chestnut brown.
‘No.’ Cosimo Grandolo had died only a few months earlier. ‘I’m very sorry,’ Pallioti said, ‘that I never had the pleasure. It was a terrible loss, for the city. And, I am sure, for you.’
Signora Grandolo smiled, acknowledging the compliment.
‘There was a great need, you see,’ she said. ‘After the war. So many of them, the partisans, were so young when they were killed, and quite a few had families. Parents, grandparents, who would have been depending on them, had they lived. And in many cases, of course, small children.’
She spread her hands, her wedding band catching the sun.
‘Cosimo realized that they needed help. The country, the new government, was in its infancy. Germany bled us dry.’ She glanced at him. ‘Not many people understand that – how much they looted. I’m not talking about paintings and fur coats. I mean our machinery – they stripped it out of the factories and took it, you know. Also our gold reserves. Literally, our coin. After that, and after more than twenty years of Fascism, when we finally had our freedom my husband felt the least we could do was try to help the families of the people who made it possible.’
Pallioti nodded. He knew, everyone knew, he supposed, about the devastation at the end of the war. But the truth was, he had never considered what had happened to the families who had been robbed of the generation that would have been expected to care for them – those in their twenties and thirties who would have taken on the role of provider.
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. Do you know, I had never really thought about it.’
Signora Grandolo regarded him for a moment. Then she smiled.
‘Very few people have,’ she said. ‘The practicalities, I mean. After the parades were over. And those that did are mostly dead.’ She shrugged. ‘At your age, why should you have thought of it? You have other things to worry about. And the state has always taken care of you. But back then, there were so many other things to deal with. And in the meantime, where would children’s clothes come from? Who would buy their books? Who was going to make sure the Nannas and the Nonnos who had been bombed out, who all those young people had died fighting for, that they had a place to live? It’s not just countries and factories and bridges that wars destroy.’ She looked towards the window. ‘It’s families.’
A shaft of sunlight caught her hair and turned it white-silver. Beneath her fragile skin, the bones of her cheeks and the straight line of her nose were hard and clean.
‘The scale of the problem was larger than anyone anticipated,’ she continued. ‘Do you have any idea,’ she asked, looking back at him, ‘how many members of partisan brigades, organizations, groups – whatever you want to call them – there were by the summer of 1945?’
Pallioti shook his head. ‘None. I am embarrassed to say.’
‘Don’t be. I’m sorry to lecture. I shouldn’t.’ She smiled. ‘It’s a privilege of age. The best estimate is two hundred thousand. Of those, some fifty-five thousand were women. Approximately thirty-five thousand of them fought in armed engagements.‘
‘I had no idea.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, Italy was quite different, in that respect. Our women didn’t just run messages and clip telephone lines. They fought shoulder to shoulder. And died. Just like their men. My husband spent the war interned. He was in the army, arrested and shipped to Germany within hours of the armistice. He never quite recovered from the guilt of not having taken part. Not fighting for his country. He tried his whole life to make up for it.’
The story was not unfamiliar.
‘I think,’ Pallioti said, ‘that a lot of people felt that way. Especially men.’
Signora Grandolo smiled. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I think that is probably a male cross. Not uniquely. But I have always believed that women are better at giving up regret. In any case,’ she added, ‘Cosimo just wanted to do what he could to help. Hence’ – she spread her hands and gestured to the office – ‘Remember The Fallen. And now, of course, it would run perfectly well without me. It’s just a hobby for an old woman with too much time on her hands, to come in here and meddle. More interesting than needlepoint, or playing bridge.’ She laughed. ‘And safer than meddling in my daughters’ lives. Do you have children, Ispettore?’
Pallioti shook his head.
‘Just the police.’ Signora Grandolo smiled.
And Seraphina, he started to say. Then he realized she was teasing him.
‘Now,’ she said quickly, before he could become embarrassed, ‘I think you did not come here to discuss any of this – the ruthlessness of women and the superior sensibilities of men.’
‘No.’ As agreeable as that might be, she was right.
Signora Grandolo appraised him for a moment. Then she said, ‘So, tell me. What can I do? Maria said you needed a favour?’