Liar Moon (20 page)

“You mean partisans.”

“It’s exactly what I mean.”

“We saw no other footprints.”

Cigarette in his mouth, Bora placed his fingers on the dead man’s lids, and held them closed. “That’s a good piece of information. Now I would like to collect this fellow’s carbine and the ammunition.”

“They are at the police station.”

“Kindly send your corporal to retrieve them. You know, this poor fellow does look like Valenki. All the same, you’re rid of him.”

“Yes, while Lisi’s killer is still at large.”

Bora spoke back with sudden irritation. “It amazes me that you’re so sure, because I’m not. The difference of course is that whoever killed Lisi is not a random murderer.”

Guidi’s own hostility had been stored overnight, and the words fuelled it beyond their import. He tasted anger, and for once liked the taste. “And you, what did you
do
to Clara Lisi last night? She was in hysterics by the time I saw her.”

“How gullible you are. I did nothing to her.”

“But you saw fit to inform her about the abortion of the Zanella girl.”

“I also asked her if she has a lover. You wouldn’t ask such a question, and I think it’s relevant.”

Guidi felt blood go to his head. “Why don’t you just lynch her while you’re at it?”

“On the contrary, I plan to stay clear-minded about her. And about everybody else. The flaw of you Latins is that you confuse firmness with cruelty.”

“Sure, the same firmness that made you cart off a load of innocent people!”

Bora reacted as though he’d been struck. “Don’t you
dare
, Guidi. Don’t you
ever
discuss military operations with me.”

It was all he replied, but Guidi saw a change go through Bora so complete as to make him wonder. He started to add something, and angrily Bora kept him from it. “No. No.” The silence between them was flimsy and unstable, threatening on Bora’s part as it was insecure on Guidi’s, a moment when things could go either way.

Just as quickly, though, Bora regained his aplomb. “Let’s hold to the business at hand. You asked me to come here. I came. Is it Clara Lisi you wanted to discuss – what I
did
to her? Or you wanted to show me what remarkable shots my men are? I will be visiting the Zanella woman tonight. You can come if you want to, or I’ll wrap this thing up on my own and give my recommendations to the Fascists in Verona.”

“What recommendations? You haven’t figured this out any more than I have!”

“No, but I have no bias, and that’s why I will. Did our precious Clara Lisi tell you what I managed to get out of her?”

Guidi spoke through gritted teeth. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

“She was engaged to be married when she met Lisi.”

“So?”

“So I looked into this suitor of hers, and I’ve already found out his first name is Carlo.”

Guidi clammed up. They left the death room together, and because it was sunny, Bora chose not to wear his greatcoat again.

“What about you, Inspector?” Turco enquired.

“I’m not German. Give me my damn coat.”

Outside the small building, the crust of intact snow alongside the cemetery path allowed the slender, graceful shadows of the cypress trees to draw a phantom fence on the white ground.

Bora went to walk in the snow. “I love this,” he said, crushing the bright crust under his boots.

As if there had been no tension between them a moment ago, he was trying to abstract himself, to pretend
the investigation and the people in it were nothing to him. Guidi knew, and would not let Bora get away with it. Keeping to the sunny side of the path, he smugly said, “Well, what have you discovered, other than that the name of Claretta’s ex-boyfriend starts with a ‘C’?”

Bora looked over. “I thought you’d never ask. The fellow was from Vicenza, and as of last report he served on a submarine. The Ministry of the Navy informs me he began his career aboard the mine layer
Pietro Micca
. Presumably he did his duty then. I have already phoned the police in Vicenza to find out more, and was promised an answer by this afternoon. Clara Lisi swooned when I asked her, so I’m still curious to know how this boyfriend took it when Lisi wheeled onto the scene, and whether or not he kept in touch with her.” It seemed the right time to remind Guidi of what Enrica Salviati had told him at the café – the call Claretta received and cried over – but Bora did not. Unaffectedly he walked among the graves, ankle-deep in the snow.

“Aren’t we grasping at straws?” Guidi chose to say. “You assume the boyfriend was jilted, but we don’t know that.”

Bora’s answer was casual, almost easy-going. “We’ll see.” Stopping in front of this or that headstone, like a curious museum-goer, he looked at and read the inscriptions. Leisurely, for Bora’s impatient nature, he observed the wilted flowers in gilded tin vases, the snowy wreaths resembling sugar-dusted buns. “We’ll see.”

“In any case, five years seem like an awfully long time to keep up with a woman who’s no longer interested.”

Bora halted. “On the contrary. It is not a long time.”

At the far end of the cemetery, in a shady remote corner, were the pauper graves. Seeing that Bora was
headed in that direction, Guidi made a point of remaining in the sun.

“What are you looking for, Major?”

“Nothing.”

 

The Vicenza police called at three in the afternoon, while Bora sat in his office, reading a letter newly arrived from his mother.

According to the police, Carlo Gardini’s family had not objected to the breaking of the engagement, all the more since Claretta had no money. “All the same, Major, Gardini didn’t take it well. He went to her house a couple of times and, according to the neighbours, in both instances he made a scene. We also have a 1937 report about a public altercation between the parties. Some slaps flew back and forth, it says here, ‘on account of her incipient use of peroxide for cosmetic purposes’.”

Bora found it difficult to pay attention while his eyes were still on the letter from home, so he laid it face down on his desk.

“Any recent reports of Gardini’s activities?”

“We enquired of his father. The family received occasional news through the military post, but after the navy disaster at Cape Matapan there were no letters, and no official communiqués. He is not listed as a prisoner of war, nor as missing, nor as killed in action. After the confusion of 8 September, who knows. Two months ago an acquaintance told the family she was sure she had seen him in Vicenza, but more likely than not it’s a case of mistaken identity.”

Bora wrote on a blank sheet: “Remember to go higher in the Ministry of the Navy”.

“Very well,” he said. “Thank you. Let me know if there are developments.”

He’d barely put the receiver down when De Rosa called. Without wasting time, “Major,” he asked, “did you happen to read yesterday’s news in the
Arena
?”

“No, I don’t get the paper here at Lago. Why, what should I have read?”

“Vittorio Lisi’s housemaid, the Salviati girl…”

“Well?”

“A tram ran her over the day before yesterday near the station.”

Bora remembered the traffic jam in Verona, the passengers crowding to get off the public car. “Is she dead or alive?”

“Dead. Eyewitnesses reported she slipped while crossing the tracks, either because of the ice or because she took sick. They transported her at once to the hospital, but she was dead on arrival.” De Rosa paused for effect. “Now don’t tell me I don’t keep you posted.”

“Is it possible someone pushed her?”

By De Rosa’s hesitation, Bora wondered if he’d said more than he intended. “I’m reporting all I know, Major. Meanwhile that self-styled first wife, Masi, says she wants to go back home. She says that if you or Guidi have other questions to ask, that you go about it soon. I don’t mind putting my office at your disposal, but need to know when you might be using it.”

Bora folded his mother’s letter, and placed it in his breast pocket.

“I prefer that you bring Olga Masi here,” he said. “Tonight, preferably. Nineteen hundred hours sharp. I’ll make sure the inspector is in attendance.”

His planned trip to see the Zanella woman was out of the question.

 

At seven o’clock, De Rosa punctually delivered Olga Masi, who was still wearing the clothes she had donned at the funeral. She showed no timidity in the German’s presence, other than that she clutched her knitted gloves and handbag to her chest.

All she knew, she told Guidi and Bora, was that Vittorio was dead and she wanted to go home. No one had ever bothered to keep her informed of Vittorio’s doings before, so there was no point now. She had put her mind at rest long ago. “Vittorio was what he was. Handsome, manly, he liked women. There was no changing that. Better to pretend nothing was happening. When he married me” – here Olga Masi turned to Guidi in a fluster – “
g’avevo solo la dota del Friul: tete e cul…
”

Guidi glanced at Bora, whose lack of reaction might mean he had not understood that a poor girl’s dowry is “ass and tits”, or else pretended not to understand.

“My Vittorio…” Olga Masi sighed. “Whenever he took off, I’d wait for him to come back. I knew he went after somebody else as soon as I turned my head. He was like a blast of wind at the street corner: here, then gone. This
Signora
Clara you speak of was really stupid if she didn’t understand how it was with Vittorio. I want nothing from the will. I have said it already to the lawyer the major sent to me.” Here Guidi looked at Bora, who leaned against the window sill and did not acknowledge the glance. “I never asked Vittorio for money when I needed it. Now that my folks are dead and I have a small piece of land, I don’t need anything
else. I have no children, no grandchildren. What do I need money in the bank for?”

Guidi’s attention shifted to De Rosa, whose martial face and occasional crimping of the moustache betrayed an effort to keep from smiling at the good news.

“The only thing I want,” Olga added, “is to take back Vittorio to Roveredo, where I married him. And maybe the money to get him a cemetery plot big enough for the two of us and our little girl. I have already spoken with the priest, who said it’s all right even if Vittorio had been a socialist and we never did get married in church. As long as we tell the bishop, he said.”

“I don’t know about that,” De Rosa interjected. “After all, Vittorio Lisi belongs to the Party, and the Party should decide. There’s already a granite monument in the works.”

“
Idiotisch.
” The German word came contemptuously from Bora, and both Guidi and De Rosa looked his way. “Keep the money, but at least let her have the body. Haven’t you already got all you could from Lisi?”

De Rosa grumbled. At the edge of her chair, Olga Masi adjusted the drooping black velvet toque that kept slipping over her eyes. “For once in my life I get to keep Vittorio all to myself. There’s satisfaction in it, gentlemen.”

After the meeting, Bora and Guidi remained alone in the office. Bora walked to his desk, and sat down. He’d grown stiffer of gait, and Guidi had noticed how his handshake tonight had been overly warm and dry. But Bora revealed nothing about himself. He flipped on a desk lamp, asking, “Did you bring the book I requested?”

“I’ll fetch it from the car.”

When Guidi returned with the legal tome, Bora had brought a chair to the side of the desk, and was resting his booted left leg on it. Spread on the desk were a few black-and-white snapshots he’d got De Rosa to take for him of property Lisi had acquired in Verona. “He had good taste,” Bora said without sharing the pictures with Guidi. “A flat near Porta Borsari, a pied-à-terre facing Palazzo Bevilacqua, a fancy flat on Corso Porta Nuova. If only his taste in women had run so high.”

Guidi dropped the book on the desk. “I suppose you have a good reason for wanting this.”

“Yes.” Bora looked up. “In five minutes or less, explain to me the legislative aspects of bigamy in Italy.”

Guidi did not answer at once, though the question had come with characteristic hurry, a sign Bora was up to something. He opened the book under the desk lamp, searched for the right page and read out loud from it.

“The act of bigamy is regulated by Article 359 of the Zanardelli Code, and is now considered a crime against the institution of matrimony. Earlier they considered it adultery,” he explained. “Since 1929 a religious marriage is legally binding in the eyes of the civil authority, as by Article 34 of the Concordat between Church and State. A church marriage is recognized as binding by the civil authority, as long as it is transcribed in the State register in observance to the letter and spirit of the law.”

“What about a marriage that was not celebrated in church?”

Guidi turned the page, peering through the crowded script. “Among the causes for annulment in case of a previous marriage contract they st ‘lack of free consent’ on the part of the unaware spouse.”

Bora nodded. “That is, if the spouse does
not
know about the pre-existent contract. What if she knows?”

“If she knows, Major, the annulment is possible only if said spouse denounces it within one month from the beginning of cohabitation, or from the moment he or she discovers the existence of the previous tie. As far as the agent of deception – Vittorio Lisi, in this case – his action is considered as aggravating, according to Paragraph One, Chapter 555, of the Rocco Penal Code.”

“Yes, but since Lisi is dead, the aggravating nature of the crime is nothing to him. Who decides about the validity of the first marriage?”

“Usually a penal judge. But the penal judge can defer resolution of the issue to a civil judge, as by Optional Preposition, Article 3 of the Rocco Penal Code.”

Bora lowered his leg from the chair with difficulty. “So, any way you look at it, Clara Lisi’s marriage is invalid.”