A Deadly Paradise (14 page)

“What did you mean you’ve found my
signorina?
” Cenni asked, afraid to learn how much 120-proof grappa had loosened his tongue.

“The beautiful Chiara, the love of your life, the woman you’ve been seeking for twenty years, the woman with four fingers on her right hand, the woman who was kidnapped by
Le Brigate Rosse,
the woman whose hem you are not worthy to kiss, Signor
Poliziotto.
This is the signorina that I’ve found.” Antonio was piqued, but he was a man of experience and knew that drinking buddies part company after a night’s sleep, and he also felt compassion for the Umbrian, who needed two hands to raise his coffee to his lips and whose complexion was that of a man who’s eaten a bad egg, so he told Cenni what he had come to say.

“The signorina came here to see her mother-in-law, but the old lady is dead and cremated, three days already. Another old lady from Burano owns the house in which Signora Tartare lived. Her sons are there right now stealing from the dead
.
” He twisted his clawed hands in a circular motion that said more clearly than words that the sons of the old lady from Burano were thieves and couldn’t be trusted.

“Her mother-in-law,” Cenni exclaimed. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand, dottore
;
the signorina married the dead woman’s son.”

Cenni’s surprise amused the old man, and he asked rhetorically, “Did you think you’re the only fish in the sea? A beautiful woman has many opportunities for love, although not with Stefano Tartare. Not any more! He
is
also dead. Your beautiful Chiara comes to visit Stefano’s mamma once a year on his birthday, for ten years now, but she never stays more than a day. Stefano was Martina’s only child, and very smart, the smartest boy on Murano, until he left for Bologna and became a
fanatico!
He broke his mamma’s heart,” he added, shaking his head at the perfidy of stupid, ungrateful children.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this last night?” Cenni asked.

The fisherman shrugged his shoulders. “Dottore, you were drunk. Besides, I didn’t know the beautiful Chiara was Martina’s daughter-in-law until I told my wife your story. She reminded me that Martina’s daughter-in-law also has four fingers. Do you want to see the house?” he asked changing the subject.

“And Chiara? Is she at the house?”

The old man looked at Cenni boldly.

“No, dottore
.
She left early this morning at seven o’clock with Luca Loredan. He dropped her off at the
Fer-rovia.
She had an eight o’clock train to catch.”

CENNI UNDERSTOOD IT all now. Reason and memory had returned with a vengeance. Chiara had married a local, whereas he, Alessandro Cenni, was a
straniero
and, worse, a policeman. The old man lied. He knew last night when he was drowning his
paesano
in grappas that Chiara was the old lady’s daughter-in-law. At some time after midnight, Cenni remembered, Antonio had left the bar for ten minutes. Shortly after he returned, Cenni had retired to the toilet, and when he got back, four drinks were lined up waiting for him. “From our friends over there, and me,” Antonio said, pointing to three men sitting next to the slot machine in the corner. In the glaring light of morning, Cenni realized that he didn’t even own his own hangover.

The house of the dead woman was down a narrow cobbled street behind Campo San Bernardo. They arrived in the middle of a firestorm. Some men, but mainly women, were joined at the front door, talking and yelling at the same time. One woman, of a particularly agitated disposition, kept repeating “robbers” while pointing to someone inside the house. A young carabiniere, one of those who’d worked with Cenni yesterday, was outside the house trying to keep the peace. He finally ordered the agitated woman, who’d stopped yelling at the person in the house and was now yelling at him, to go home and feed her children their lunch. He then went inside and slammed the door.

When the women saw Antonio, they moved aside to let him and his friend pass. One of the women said something to the others and they all laughed. It might have been “He’s one of us,” but since they were speaking Veneziano, for all Cenni knew it might also have been “Let’s kill the cop.” Inside was no better. Three women and two men were arguing in Veneziano, and the young officer was shouting over them in Italian trying to be heard. Antonio, who had the makings of a dictator, said two words to the senior woman, and she immediately stopped talking, as did the others. The young officer, still under the impression that Cenni was in Murano looking for terrorists, immediately deferred to him. “Please, commissario, see what you can do here.”

They started up again and it took Cenni five minutes to get them to agree to speak in Italian and to explain their argument for his and the carabiniere’s benefit. In Italy, after a funeral, with property to be divided, it was, of course, about money. The two men, the robbers from Burano, claimed that the signora had owed their mother three months in back rent and they were taking possession of her furniture. The senior woman, who turned out to be Antonio’s wife, called it a damned lie.

“Martina never missed paying the rent in twenty years. Her daughter-in-law told us—the three of us who nursed Martina at the end—to take what we want. And what we don’t want, to give to the other neighbors.”

Cenni asked if there was a will, and they all turned and looked at him in amazement. Even the carabiniere, from a rural village in Sicily, knew not to ask anything so foolish. Antonio, who’d kept quiet until now, suggested they look in Martina’s tin box.

“She kept all her official papers in that box. The rent receipts must be there somewhere.”

Antonio’s wife found the box under the woman’s bed, and the carabiniere agreed to force it open since none of them could find a key. Cenni and the young officer started looking through the yellowing papers, a lifetime’s collection of official documents, including her son’s birth and baptismal certificates, a certificate of excellence from his high school, and a cache of rent receipts that went back a full year. Signora Tartare’s rent was paid up until the end of June, which gave her another month of occupancy. Cenni showed the two men his identification and the cara-biniere showed them the door, which was followed by a loud shout from the street.

There was nothing left for him to do on Murano. He wasn’t even sure why he had accompanied the old man to Signora Tartare’s house. Perhaps to see the kind of life that Chiara had chosen in preference to marrying him. In a matter of hours, he had gone from being a man obsessed with finding the killers of a woman he’d loved twenty years ago to a man scorched by jealousy. In the tin box, in addition to the signora’s official papers, there was a small packet of letters from Stefano to his mother, a few family pictures, including one of Stefano when he’d graduated from the
liceo classico,
and a postcard from Bari, dated 1989, signed by Stefano and Ceclia. And one other picture. It was a Polaroid of a man and a woman on a beach, standing in front of a gelato stand. It was Chiara as he remembered her, her hair still blonde. She was leaning back against the man and he had his arm around her waist. When he turned it over, he found that someone had scribbled a date, 1989, and the notation: honeymoon, Stefano and Ceclia.

4

HE WAS THE same man, returning to Venice on the same boat that he had boarded less than twenty-four hours earlier. Nothing was broken that you would see on an x-ray; no one had died, other than an old woman in her time. Even with Chiara, nothing had really changed. She had been alive twenty years ago; she was still alive today. He had been twenty-two when he’d put his life on hold, renouncing the profession that he had chosen for himself and embracing a profession that he had always fought against. He had convinced himself that searching for Chiara’s kidnappers was the only way to memorialize her life and give dignity to her death. He had turned forty-two three weeks ago, had no wife, no child, and no one to care if he returned home. He stood at the rail of the
vaporetto
looking out at the rough seas of the lagoon. A storm was predicted for evening; the skies had darkened and a light rain was falling. To the north was sky and water and desolation, to the south lay the dying city of Venice. The Queen of the Adriatic was sinking into the salt flats from which it had begun its ascent more than a thousand years earlier. Nothing lasts, and this was now his dilemma.

His reason for being a policeman had ended. The search for Chiara’s killers was no longer the sole purpose in his life or the altar upon which he could lay his sacrifices. More than once, Renato had accused him of being a religious fanatic, “just a different religion from the rest of us,” he’d said. “Yours is more vengeful and destructive. I have no wife or child, but at least I know why.” If he stopped being a policeman, what would he do: sell chocolates, coach football, become a defense lawyer and use what he knew to thwart prosecutors? The last he could do easily enough. He knew the many games that the police play to ensure convictions.

His current case was an example of the futility of his job. What good was he doing anyone, particularly himself, in seeking Jarvinia Baudler’s killer? From what he’d surmised so far, the German had been a small-time blackmailer, a bully, and an egotist unbounded. Who would care if her killer was found and brought to justice? No one who had cared about her personally; but the German’s murder, particularly its brutality, was viewed as an insult by her government. As Dieter had indicated, his government wanted the murderer found, and now. Rome was very anxious to cooperate with the Germans. The new politics were not so different from the old, and if the Germans needed a sacrificial victim, Rome would be pleased to find them one. Baudler’s last lover had been a black woman, an African, the ideal scapegoat. In his last case involving Rome, Carlo had insisted that he arrest a Croatian, not much caring if she were guilty or innocent. If he quit now, the same would happen to Baudler’s black lover.

The nearly twenty years that he’d invested in police work did have meaning, profound meaning for those like Sophie Orlic, whom he had saved from prison. It was not the convictions that counted so much, but the men and women who were out in the world today, free because of his efforts. He’d wait to make a decision about his future until after he’d found Jarvinia Baudler’s killer. And for that reason alone, he had come to Venice.

BEFORE LEAVING PERUGIA, he had done his homework on both Marcella Molin and Palazzo Molin, the family palace built by Grazia Molin in 1680 along the Canale di Cannaregio with money from her fabulously rich Spanish father. The Molin family, one of the oldest in Venice, had lost all its money by 1680, when the half-witted twenty-year-old heir to the title married Grazia, the thirty-year-old daughter of Don Miguel Peraza. The guidebook that Cenni consulted described Palazzo Molin as the last great palazzo built in the Byzantine–style architecture that had been popular three hundred years earlier. The Spaniard’s daughter, who had purchased her way into the Venetian nobility, had set out to impress Venice by overwhelming it. According to the guidebook, the result was an excessively florid imitation of earlier Renaissance palaces, redeemed only by the addition of frescoes executed some fifty years later on the first
piano nobile.
Sightless and already in her eighties, Grazia, the Spanish upstart, hired Giambattista Tiepolo to decorate the ceilings of the four public rooms with allegorical interpretations of the four continents. Some critics believe that the Molin frescoes predate the frescoes created by Tiepolo for the Würzburger Residenz in Germany.

Information on Marcella Molin, the last direct descendant of Grazia, was easily obtained. She was one of the wealthiest women in Italy. From all accounts, she had built a second and even greater family fortune after the war, some said by profiting from the miseries of postwar Italy. It was rumored that she’d purchased land and buildings from many of Venice’s oldest families, initially by making generous loans and then later foreclosing on the properties when the owners couldn’t pay the escalating interest rates, the existence of which were in the fine print. Some of the people she destroyed had been close friends of her father. Her vineyards and rice plantations were the most profitable in Italy, and she was also reputed to be the largest slum landlord in the Veneto, owning buildings that were falling down but still providing her with a healthy income. All the migrant workers in Venice were said to live in one of her many apartments, as many as ten to a single room, and it was said that she paid off the police and the judiciary to protect her investments.

Her father, Count Molin, now something of a hero in Venice, had died during the war; his body was found lodged between the pilings that support the
Fondamente
Nove vaporetto
stop. No autopsy was performed. Some said he had committed suicide, citing as a reason his wife’s madness and his daughter’s sexual deviance. But this rumor didn’t start until more than five years after his death. The only real clue was information from the family that he’d been picked up by a police launch on the evening before his body was found, and that two Germans in uniform had accompanied the plainclothes police who had taken him away. It was also after his death that the rumor began that the count had been a member of
La Resistenza.
An investigation had been proposed at the end of the war, but the daughter, who was now head of the family, objected. She and her mother wanted to forget the horrors of the war and her father’s death, she’d said when approached by the authorities.

THE SOFT RAIN had turned into a downpour by the time the
vaporetto
docked at Ponte delle Guglie. Cenni had no umbrella, so when he arrived at Palazzo Molin, less than a five-minute walk from the ferry stop, he was soaked through. Perhaps it was the misery of the day that affected his first view of the palazzo, but when he peered through the iron gates that shut out the world, he imagined that the original Grazia would be horrified to see the outside of the home that she’d built to impress Venice. The extravagant splendors of plaster and stuccowork described in the guidebook, written fifty years earlier, were gone. The peeling façade would have been appropriate for a gothic B movie, something to scare little children. Marcella Molin could easily afford to repair her ancestral home, yet she’d let it lapse into dissolution. Cenni wondered why.