Some Bitter Taste (23 page)
‘I think Enkeleda might be one of them. She probably knows how to feed hens and rabbits, though. She’s not a child, really, but the brain injury’s left her with a mental age of about five.’
‘I think she’ll do all right with other children around. It’s a lovely place, high up in the hills so it’s cooler there. The only trouble is that, though it’s healthy, it’s a bit isolated and these are children who are already afraid of the outside world. It’s good for them to have a variety of visitors, to learn a bit about life in the safety of their refuge. I go up there as often as I can. I suggest you and I pay them a visit one day, have lunch with the children. Wear your uniform and talk to them a bit about your job. Introduce Enkeleda to them.’
‘Introduce her?’
‘That’s right. I’ll have a word with the hospital social worker about it and we’ll take her with us. Make sure she understands in a few simple words that if she learns to walk she can go and live there. She’ll learn all the faster for it, you’ll see. I’ll give them a ring and we’ll organise it as soon as possible. In the meantime, take a break from the Hirsch case until you hear from me that there’s some development. I think I’ll ring our friend Rinaldi up for a cheery, even apologetic chat. It occurs to me that I might remember now where we met at dinner.’
‘You do?’
‘No, I don’t. I’m sure we never met at all, but if I choose a suitably illustrious name, titled, of course, he’ll be quite happy.’
‘Yes.’
‘A little baroque curlicue. I’m learning from you.’
‘Me?’
‘Not as impressive as your off-the-cuff one about D’Ancona’s name.’
‘I’d have done better to ask Sara Hirsch his name, along with a few other things. I’d better go.’
‘Take that break, Guarnaccia.’
He took a break. That is, he did nothing useful as far as the Hirsch case was concerned, which, in his opinion, was what he’d been doing all along. Not much of a break. He did come to the surface of life sufficiently to have a row with Teresa about Giovanni.
‘Salva, you can’t force children to do what they don’t want to do.’
‘Did I say anything about forcing him? I’m just saying we could have discussed it, that’s all I’m saying!’
‘Discussed it?
Discussedit?
I’ve been trying to get you to discuss it for the last month but I might as well have talked to the wall. I’ve been telling you about it day after day but the spoken word means nothing to you. You haven’t heard a thing I said, have you? Well, have you?’
‘Of course I have …’ Out of the fog some sentences emerged, sentences he’d responded to with a grunt or a hug, according to mood. That night … that dreadful night after the motorway … he’d been so desperately grateful to her for talking to him long and quiedy about the boys, soothing him until he fell asleep. Those floppy little limbs, a poor dead rabbit … but the prosecutor—
‘Salva, for God’s sake! You’re not even listening to me now! If you can’t be bothered to take an interest, then all right, but don’t start giving orders when the war’s over.’
‘War? Orders?’
‘You spend all day ordering those poor lads around and then you come home and start—’
‘Poor lads? What do you mean “poor lads"?’
‘Living in a barracks away from their families. And some of them not much older than Giovanni. I don’t suppose you ever listen to them any more than you listen to your own children.’
‘They’re not in the army to be listened to!’
‘Just as well. Do you want coffee?’
‘Yes, but what do you mean “the war’s over"?’
‘I mean he’s already made his choice. He’s signed up for the Technical Institute.’
‘But that means …’ He knew by now he was on thin ice and prudence prevailed. ‘He’d already decided at the end of the school year, before we went on holiday.’ Said in a way that he hoped might sound somewhere between a question and a statement—in case she’d told him at the time. She had. He submitted to the ensuing tirade.
He was upset. He had left school at fourteen himself and he’d been looking forward to having his sons at the high school. The last he’d heard, or so he’d imagined, was that Giovanni was to go to the School of Science. The thought had given him enormous satisfaction.
‘He said he was sure.’
‘Well, he’s changed his mind. At his age—’
‘No, he hasn’t changed his mind. Toto’s changed his mind for him, preparing the way for himself! It’s all the fault of that blasted computer!’
‘You’re the one who wants Giovanni to join the carabinieri.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘These days they need modern skills, Salva. I bet you’re the only person in your station who can’t use the computer.’
‘Well, I’m not. Lorenzini’s fifteen years younger than me and he can’t, either.’ Lorenzini would have been surprised to hear this but Teresa didn’t know any different and he clung to his traditional ally. ‘Besides, Toto will have enough trouble getting through his national service, never mind joining up professionally, so he hasn’t any excuse for not going to a good school just so he can type theft reports into a computer.’
‘The Technical Institute is a good school and Toto wants to design software. I told you.’
‘What does that mean—don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear any more about it!’
His heart was pounding. He could hear it in his head. Teresa got up from the kitchen table where they were having their coffee.
‘Where are you going?’
She came round to him and drew his head close. ‘Whatever’s the matter with you, Salva? Why are you so upset?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, trying to swallow down the pounding that made it hard to breathe. T don’t know what’s wrong with me and I don’t know how you put up with me. I’m useless. I should have helped you with this weeks ago, not now. It’s too late now. I’m too slow. My mother always said I was and she was right.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why not? You always do.’
‘Well, then. There’s no call for you to be saying it, is there?’ She held his head and looked down into his big, mournful eyes. ‘What is it, Salva? It’s not just the schools. You’re really upset about something else, aren’t you?’
‘Just about being slow. What else is going to blow up in my face because I wasn’t listening …’
As long as she kept hold of him and he could feel the vibrations of her voice it was all right. But the rest of the time he felt the cold fat toad still squatting in his stomach and he couldn’t dislodge that feeling of apprehension.
Still, days passed and nothing happened. He listened with dogged attention to all the usual people with all the usual problems. Some of them were quite taken aback by the interest their lost passports, stolen mopeds, broken car windows provoked.
‘You’re not thinking it’s connected with some bigger crime or something, are you?’
‘No, no …’
With August came the first big exodus from the city. The evening news showed mile-long queues for the ferries to Elba, Sardinia, Sicily. The local news announced the death from a stroke of Sir Christopher Wrothesly.
‘Sir Christopher had been ill for some time,’ the announcer intoned.
Poor sad man. Still, it was one thing less to worry about. After all, if there should be a big robbery up there now, Sir Christopher wouldn’t suffer from it.
The temperature in the city was 102 degrees. At the airport, the hottest place of all, it was 105.
More warnings were issued about going out during the middle of the day. The pollution alerts that had been flashing almost daily on the avenues went dark as the resident population deserted the city. Storms exploded in the north and south of the country but Florence lay in an unbroken breathless torpor, broiling the tourists so that they got tireder and hotter and more forgetful of their cameras and handbags. The marshal’s office filled daily.
At last, after a few false alarms, the first August storm broke, plunging the city into afternoon darkness and washing it clean. Terra cotta roof tiles were soaked, white and green marble was refreshed, gilding glittered in the pink evening sunlight.
As usual, the weather continued unbroken along the coastline. The news showed beaches with people packed side by side, radios loud against a background of squealing children and the yells of soft drink vendors. A reporter asked a lithe young woman lying between other bodies, well oiled and browning nicely, ‘People are starting to take their holidays in June or September these days, what do you think?’
‘You’re joking! And stay in the city in August? I’d die of the heat!’
‘It’s pretty hot here.’
‘If I get too hot I jump in the sea.’
A shot of the sea with bodies packed as tightly as on the beach.
It was the morning after that report, which made the marshal and his wife grateful not to be at the seaside, that he received a phone call at seven-thirty just as he was sitting down in his cool office.
‘Guarnaccia? Is that you?’
‘Speaking. Who …’
‘I don’t know whether you’ll remember me. Brogio, Antonio. We were at NCO school together.’
‘I don’t think…’
‘It’s all the same. Long time ago and I wasn’t in the army above ten years. I left when my father died. Took over his undertaker’s business.’
‘Ah! Brogio, yes. I’ve got you placed now. It must be … I don’t know how many years.’
‘Too many to think about, don’t dwell on it. Listen, this is a business call, I didn’t ring you up to waste time chatting.’
‘Business? No, listen—’
‘No, no, no, no, no! Nothing like that.’ Undertakers were known for paying bribes to policemen and emergency ward staff for directing business their way. ‘No, it’s your advice I want. I mean, it’s a bit of a funny business. Hardly the sort of thing you can ring 112 for so I thought, since we knew each other, you could tell me who I should call. The thing is, I’ve got a body here I can’t bury.’
‘Why ever not? The prosecutor told me—’
‘Somebody else might have done it and thought nothing of it, but after ten years as a carabiniere nobody can pull the wool over my eyes, know what I mean?’
‘I … no.’
‘There should have been an autopsy done.’
The marshal knew that the prosecutor had released Sara Hirsch’s body for burial the day before and for one senseless moment his stomach tightened as it flashed on him that he had never read the second part of that autopsy—hadn’t the prosecutor said there was no need? In any case—
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. Yes. I’m still here.’ He got a grip on himself. ‘There was an autopsy done. I have a copy of it here in the file. Besides, you can see for yourself—’
‘I can see a left arm broken at the shoulder and four broken fingers on the left hand is what I can see.’
‘An arm … ? No, no, I don’t think … If you want, I can read you—’
‘I know my business, Guarnaccia, and I can read a corpse with or without an autopsy. I’ve got this left arm, right? And what I’ve also got is a wound to the back of the head. And before you tell me that could have happened when the body hit the ground at the moment of death—’
‘Yes. That’s right. I saw the body and I remember a head wound …’ The marshal had grabbed the file and was trying to extract the autopsy reports from it with the receiver jammed under his chin. A broken arm? Maybe in the second one … ‘The attack was pretty brutal and the reconstruction …’ Damn! There were pages and pages … ‘An arm twisted behind the back isn’t unlikely … If you’ll just give me a minute.’
‘As many minutes as you like but I’d say you’ve got your wires crossed somewhere. I’m not saying he didn’t die of a stroke like the death certificate says. Even I can see from his face that he has had a stroke. All I’m saying is I can’t bury this chap until there’s an autopsy done because, whatever he died of, I’d say he had a bit of help and if you’ve got a file open on the business you’d better get round here.’
There. It had happened.
I
t was raining in the garden. The afternoon storm was over and the sky had lightened but it was still shrouded in mist and weeping softly on the wet earth and leaves. The marshal stood behind the French windows of the small sitting room and looked out, watching the rain, waiting for it to stop. Once or twice he thought it had but when he stepped outside and left the shelter of the porch he realised that he was wrong. Looking up, he could see only a misty haze, but the fine drops were touching his face and dampening the dark shoulders of his uniform, making them darker. The marshal, catlike, didn’t care for rain. A man obliged to be out all day in uniform never does like rain. No umbrellas, no taking your jacket off and borrowing something until it dries. He gets wet, he stays wet.
So the marshal waited, looking out, and every so often he went as far as the path to check again. He was anxious to get to the lily pond. A few birds were beginning to sing but in the garden it was still raining.
The visit to the Medico-Legal Institute that morning in stifling heat seemed like days ago. Sir Christopher’s body had been delivered there the day before. His own physician, contacted by the prosecutor, had been immovable.
‘Certainly the contusion on the head was pointed out to me. Sir Christopher suffered a number of very minor strokes and, some months ago, a rather more serious one which paralysed his right side and impaired his speech. I suggested a clinic but the idea distressed him. He could hardly be forced. He had a young man, a medical student I was told, who was in constant attendance. Sir Christopher was confined to a wheelchair of late and the only autonomous movement of which he was capable was that of transferral. In other words, getting himself from his bed to the wheelchair, from wheelchair to armchair and so on. For anything more complicated or potentially dangerous—the bathroom, for instance—he required assistance. I understand he attempted something of the sort alone and fell, hitting his head. The wound had been dressed and I removed the dressing to examine it. I found a very superficial excoriation, irrelevant as far as the cause of death was concerned—by all means, ask me anything you wish.’
But the questions led nowhere.
‘No, I did not examine the left arm and hand since I had no reason to do so.
