The Deliverance of Evil (7 page)
“Was Manfredi alone?”
“Yes, he was wearing his helmet, as usual. He got off very quickly. He probably didn’t want to miss the start of the game. He went right into Building A.”
I wasn’t satisfied, but there was little else I could ask. I turned to Father Paul.
“We met downstairs on Sunday about five thirty. I was coming up to see the cardinal, you were in a hurry—you were going to San Valente.”
He looked at the cardinal and received a small nod. Permission to speak. “I went straight to San Valente. There was another volunteer there, Antonio. He drove the children to the parish youth club in our bus. They were there until eight.”
“And what did you do for those two hours?”
“I cooked. At eight, when Antonio returned with the children, everything was ready. We ate in front of television.”
“And after the game?”
“Antonio and I put the children to bed. Then we also went to sleep.”
“Did you know Elisa Sordi, Father Paul?”
There was a shade of apprehension in those blue eyes that darted to Cardinal Alessandrini for a moment and then turned back to me.
“Of course.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
I felt Alessandrini’s eyes on me, but I kept my gaze on Paul. Beneath those freckles something was stirring. He ran a nervous hand through his red curls.
“Every so often Elisa brought some papers here. Two, maybe three times.”
“What did you talk about?”
It appeared to be painful for him to remember.
“About my vocation,” he replied in a whisper.
I had to keep myself from laughing. Valerio Bona went to Mass with Elisa. Father Paul talked about his vocation with her. Manfredi escorted her courteously to a nearby café. Then someone dragged her under a bridge, violently murdered her, mutilated her body, and tossed it in the river like a piece of garbage. Perhaps after making the sign of the cross.
“Was Elisa planning to become a nun?” I spat out sarcastically.
Paul answered seriously.
“Perhaps. She asked many questions about the religious life.”
I turned to Alessandrini.
“Do you know anything about this, Your Eminence?”
“I never exchanged more than a few words with the young woman when she delivered some documents. We spoke only about work.”
The cardinal was deep in thought. It must have been a disturbing thought, because his usually affable features had hardened in a stern expression.
I turned to Paul. “Did you ever visit her in her office on the third floor?”
Now the flush and embarrassment were clear. “On Saturday she called me on the intercom.”
“You mean the day before she disappeared?”
“Yes, about five o’clock. She asked if I would take some books up to the cardinal. We spoke for a few minutes.”
“And what did you speak about?”
“About her work, that she was there on a Sunday, but that was okay. She said something strange: that she wanted me to hear her confession. I told her I wasn’t a priest yet.”
“And then she left?”
He hesitated, then continued. “I waved good-bye from the terrace. She was standing by the fountain with Gina. They both saw me and waved.”
There was the motive for this little confession. There was a witness, the concierge, who would be coming back from India and perhaps would remember that they had exchanged good-byes.
“Then another thing happened,” added Father Paul, looking worried.
My instinct told me what that was, before he could say it. “She waved good-bye to someone on the terrace of Building A?” I asked.
I could read the stunned look on Paul’s face, and for the first time a mixture of respect and fear on the face of Cardinal Alessandrini.
“You knew already?” murmured Paul, confused.
“I don’t know anything, except that I’m more convinced than ever that evil lurked in this little earthly paradise.”
Father Paul nodded. “The boy with the binoculars is strange. He—”
Alessandrini decided it was time to put an end to this conversation.
“This isn’t paradise, Captain Balistreri, but neither is it hell. You won’t find any evil here. However, I will take what action I can, as I promised, so that the count will be obliged to cooperate with the police. As for Father Paul and myself, I think we have told you everything we know.”
I had one more question for Paul, but I couldn’t ask it then.
Did you see Elisa Sordi the Sunday she died?
. . . .
I left as July’s unrelenting sun was finally setting on the horizon. I looked up at the third-floor window, the office where Elisa Sordi used to work. The flower that had sat on the windowsill since before her death was now drooping and shriveled. I caught the usual reflection from Building A’s penthouse. From there Manfredi could keep an eye on everything and everyone. He could see without being seen, the ideal condition for him. He could see Elisa Sordi’s window. And in that moment, he could see me. I couldn’t resist the temptation. I lit a cigarette and, blowing smoke through my nose, waved good-bye to him.
I walked across the magnificent grounds, enjoying my cigarette and the singing of the birds. I was in Rome, but it felt like the countryside. I glanced at the swimming pool. A woman in a bathing suit was lying on the grass, tanning in the sun’s last rays. I’d already caught a glimpse of her while she was getting in the car with the count the previous Sunday. She could have been my age, although her physique was that of a twenty-year-old, lean and slender. I saw her face sideways on, extremely delicate features and tiny crows’ feet in the corners of her eyes. She turned to look at me, her eyes a greenish-blue.
“Strictly speaking, smoking isn’t permitted on the grounds,” she said politely. It was a warning more than anything else. I looked instinctively toward Building A’s terrace, but it was hidden by the trees.
I should have said that I had lit it on purpose to provoke that overbearing husband of hers and her nosy young son. In that way we could have spoken. Instead, I did something very unlike me, meaning I did the diplomatic thing. I mumbled a few words of apology, stubbed the cigarette out on the ground and then picked up the stub and put it in my pocket. I cursed myself; the count was making me feel uncomfortable in a way I never had. I’d met men who were just as powerful and dangerous, but the difference was that I appreciated some things about Count Tommaso dei Banchi di Aglieno. Or at least I would have appreciated those things at one time, in my bad years: uncompromising belief in an idea, whatever the cost. There were other things I detested in him, such as fidelity to a king who had rejected Fascism and favored a medieval aristocratic system that left power over land and people in the hands of a few.
Whatever it was, I’d had a bellyful of that unease and wanted to get away from there as soon as possible. I crossed the city in my Duetto with the top down in the first cool of sunset. Thanks to a special permit I was allowed to enter the historic center, which was closed to traffic. I parked nonchalantly next to a squad car below the Spanish Steps, showing my badge to the men in uniform. I bought a large cone of pistachio and chocolate ice cream and leaned against the Duetto looking around, shamelessly eyeing up the beautiful female tourists. And between the fountain and the steps there were plenty of them, some already looking curiously at the red Spider and the dark suntanned young man not giving a shit about the cops while peacefully enjoying his ice cream. A platinum blonde, suntanned and elegant in high heels, was coming out of Via Condotti with a Gucci shoulder bag and wearing a short Valentino dress. She was about ten years older than I was.
It took me only a moment to see the moped coming and the two kids without helmets. The one behind stretched out his arm to grab hold of the bag and wrench it from the blonde in one swift move. In an instant and with a loud slap, my pistachio and chocolate cone was plastered over the eyes of the one in front. The moped wobbled off course, hit the edge of the fountain, and overturned, taking the two kids with it as it fell.
The patrolmen ran over. I again showed my badge and recovered the lady’s Gucci bag, leaving my colleagues to deal with the two little would-be thieves.
“They’re juveniles, Captain. We’ll take their names and let them go if they don’t have records,” one of the officers said.
I shot a glance at the two kids. They were from the suburbs for sure. One was wearing an earring; the other had a Che Guevara tattoo on his muscular biceps. “No. Lock them up. A night in jail will be good for them.”
The woman was waiting for me off to the side. She held her shoes in one hand.
“Broken heel,” she explained with a smile.
She was as tall as I was, even without her shoes. Then I noticed the wedding band and diamond ring on her left hand.
“You can’t walk around barefoot. Let me give you a ride,” I offered, pointing to my car. She smiled.
“I haven’t ridden in one of those in ages, but I remember it was fun.”
The patrolmen were watching me, and I could imagine what they were saying to each other.
“Where do you live?”
“In London, with my husband and two children,” she replied.
“Well, I can hardly take you all the way there. Where are you staying in Rome?”
She pointed to the Spanish Steps leading up to Santa Trinità dei Monti.
“I’m at the Hotel Hassler up there. But if you’re not in a hurry, I’d love a tour. This car is bound to make me feel like a kid again, and I see you can drive through the zones forbidden to common mortals.”
In the Duetto with the top down, we crossed the city. The golden domes of Rome’s many churches were lit by the setting sun. I drove slowly into the pedestrian area. Mine was the only vehicle. All around us were Romans and tourists heading out on a Saturday night. She asked me to show her Piazza Navona and do a loop around the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and I obliged her, to the surprise of the tourists.
“This is the car from
The Graduate
, isn’t it?” she asked me, while we were driving up toward Santa Trinità dei Monti.
“Yeah, the one Dustin Hoffman drives.”
“It suits you. You’re as good-looking as he is, but taller.”
It was dark by the time we got to her hotel.
“Thanks for rescuing my bag. And thanks for the tour,” she said, turning toward me.
I couldn’t tell whether she was teasing me or being serious.
“And I’m sorry about your gelato,” she continued. “If it weren’t impossible to park here in front I’d ask you to come in with me—the gelato at this hotel is exceptional.”
I put the top up and left the car directly under a sign that said no parking. all vehicles will be towed. On the windshield I left my own sign, one that clearly said, police. on duty.
The vanilla gelato came with strawberries and whipped cream, and champagne was delivered as she was taking a shower. She stepped out of the bathroom in her robe, and I opened the bottle.
“You won’t believe it, Michele, but this is the first time I’ve strayed in seven years of marriage. I’m a little nervous.”
“Let me take care of it. Just sit back and relax.”
She laughed as I slipped the robe off of her and lowered her naked body onto the bed. She laughed as I tied her wrists together with the belt from the robe. She laughed while I placed the sleep mask thoughtfully provided by the hotel over her eyes. She laughed some more as I spread the vanilla gelato, the whipped cream, and the strawberries on the most sensitive parts of her body.
Then I began to eat my dessert.
I
DIDN’T GO BACK TO
see Teodori. I didn’t even phone him. After my ice cream treat, I dozed off between the hotel’s elegant sheets and slept like a baby.
I left early in the morning. The elegant lady was going off to Florence where she was to meet her husband, who was arriving from London. I had the impression she’d perhaps enjoyed things too much and gave her a wrong number so I wouldn’t have her in my hair again, then went back to my apartment in Garbatella where I went back to sleep.
The telephone woke me toward midday. I thought it would be Teodori and answered rudely in a sleepy voice. I’d taken a day off and didn’t want anyone being a pain in the ass.
“Michele, you sound awful. Rough night?”
It was my brother, Alberto. I’d completely forgotten about his invitation for lunch and an afternoon of cards. His girlfriend was back home in Germany visiting her parents, and he didn’t have one of his usual working weekends. He’d invited Angelo and me for lunch, and then a colleague of his was to join us for some poker.
My exemplary brother was excellent at everything, even cooking. A cum laude degree in engineering, a job as an executive for a multinational, good contacts in all the political parties, with the exception of the extreme far right, a beautiful apartment with a terrace, and a girlfriend who would be the perfect mother to his future children. I should have hated him, but I admired him instead. Not only had he gotten me out of trouble, but he’d never made a big deal out of it, and because his manner wasn’t my father’s utilitarian moderation, which was the acceptable side of arrogance. No, Alberto was a moderate in his soul; he believed compromise was the source of well-being and happiness for everyone.
Angelo was already there when I arrived; he and Alberto enjoyed cooking together, and their styles complemented each other. Alberto was a sophisticated chef, Angelo a down-to-earth cook. My job was to set the table, clear the table, and put the dishes in the dishwasher.
We ate pasta salad and Caprese salad and sipped white wine. It was extremely hot, but the terrace had a little pergola roof.
“You look tired. Aren’t you sleeping well?”
There was no irony in my brother’s question. As usual, he was simply worried about me.
“It’s so hot and noisy at night. Thank God it’s Sunday and everybody’s at the beach. Last Sunday everyone stayed in town to see the game.”
“Italy’s win was so good for the country, though. Sales taxes alone were far above average.”
“A country whose citizens pay taxes on the basis of soccer results isn’t exactly a great civilization.”
Such a country deserves a police captain who drives around pedestrian zones in his Duetto to pick up female tourists.
We talked politics so that we could talk about ourselves without making personal judgments, because we are the way we see the world. And the way I saw it was still quite brutal. On the one hand there were the honest and innocent, usually the impoverished. On the other there were the criminals and cheats, including the many in suit and tie who sat on boards of directors, in government, in public administration, and in the Vatican.
In my younger years I had dreamed that this system would explode and drag the wheeler-dealers who infested Italy into the mud, shamed and ruined. But the only ruin was mine. I cooperated with the secret intelligence service as soon as I realized that my neo-fascist friends had become murderers, manipulated by special interests and attacking entire groups of innocent and defenseless people. They had dishonored our ideals. But the intelligence service was linked to those same special interests, as I came to understand during the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in 1978. At that point, serving the state in an official capacity became the only way for me to avoid spiraling out of control.
“I’ll never let myself be caught up in that dirt, Alberto. I think I’ll relax for another couple of years and then go back to Africa and hunt lions and take idiot tourists on vacations.”
Alberto shook his head, somewhere between amusement and concern.
“Italy was a poor country ruined by the war. Now it’s risen up again. These politicians, Catholics and Communists, industrialists and the Church, also did a few good things, don’t you think?” my brother said.
“They’re the ones who advised Mussolini to go to war and then abandoned him. They were all over industry and in the Vatican. Then, suddenly, at the end of the war they all were anti-Fascists.”
“That’s just not true. It was Mussolini who declared war and decreed the racial laws. Anti-Fascists were persecuted and killed by Fascists, just like the Italian military killed members of the Libyan resistance.”
Only Alberto could risk making a comment like that in front of me and not suffer any consequences.
My high school history teacher in Libya was a skinny guy with a beard who wore a parka, jeans, and gym shoes. A young left-wing teacher who had accepted that poverty-stricken position in Tripoli in order to have a permanent job. He never missed an opportunity to tell us what he thought of our colonialist grandfathers and fathers. One day, an hour before recess, he was talking about Italo Balbo, Marshal Graziani, and the criminal clique that deported and massacred the Libyan resistance. I knew this to be true, but this guy had no right to talk about it and link our colonialist families with actions like those.
Together with two kids who thought as I did, I went up to him in the courtyard during break.
“My grandfather came to Libya in 1911. He organized the olive-oil industry. He and other Italian colonists built roads where there had been only sand, made the water drinkable, and set up the vocational schools for young Arabs. Is he a criminal?”
The teacher was smoking, and that also irritated me, given that it was forbidden for the students. He gave us an icy look.
“We’ll discuss it in class, Balistreri.”
I was beside myself. The advice my father and my brother Alberto gave me frequently,
Always count to ten
, vanished. It was as if I’d finally discovered who I was and was fed up with having to hide it. As I gave the teacher a shove and he fell to the courtyard cobbles, I knew that my life had reached a turning point. I’d read somewhere that very few of our adolescent actions have a determining effect on our adult lives. Well, that was one of the few.
While the teacher was shouting and all our classmates watched us with their mouths open, the three of us grabbed hold of him. I would have preferred to do it on my own, but it would have been impossible. I took his legs and the other two an arm each. We carried him to the goldfish pond like that and chucked him into it, along with our fears and school careers.
I smiled at my brother again. He knew what I was thinking.
“Thank you for reminding me. But this decadent and corrupt democracy will hand the country over to the Communist party or, worse still, into the hands of the Red Brigades.” I was fully convinced of this, while Alberto was very relaxed about it.
“It’ll never happen, Michele. You underestimate the Catholics’ pragmatism and you overestimate Communism. It doesn’t make sense anymore—it’s over.”
Naturally, as ever, he was right and I was wrong. It was a debate that had been going on all our lives, with variants cropping up according to the circumstances. It was a kind of mantra on our disagreements.
Angelo listened with interest, but in silence, to these discussions of ours, but never offered an opinion. It was one of his ways of getting to know us. While Alberto went to make the coffee, I was left alone with him. We sat there with a last glass of wine and a cigarette watching the slow Sunday traffic crawling alongside the Tiber five hundred feet below.
“Whoever did it knew her,” I said, without looking at him.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Michele, not as a friend. As a witness and even as a suspect, no problem. But only with Superintendent Teodori in an official capacity.”
Angelo was sad, and sadness was so out of place in him I was put off from continuing.
“Just one thing, Angelo. Did you see or hear Elisa on Sunday morning?”
“I’ve already told you. I was with Paola the whole time until I came to pick you up at five. I called Elisa from Paola’s at about two thirty. She reassured me that Gina would deliver the papers to the Cardinal at five o’clock. There was no need for me to come by. I never heard from her again. Maybe Teodori hasn’t told you, but he’s already questioned Paola about my whereabouts, and about yours, too, Michele.”
So these were the investigations Teodori felt he was allowed to conduct. Valerio Bona, Angelo Dioguardi, and even Captain Michele Balistreri. The nobodies, leaving the untouchable ones in peace. Well, now it was time to shift gears.
I left Alberto’s in the late afternoon, and it was evening by the time I arrived at the Villa Alba clinic. A nice quiet place, green and discreet. Visiting hours were long over. The reception area was deserted, except for one old nurse. I quickly showed her my police badge so she wouldn’t be able to remember my name.
“I’m here to see Claudia Teodori,” I said firmly.
“Visiting hours are over,” she said stiffly, but not unkindly.
“I understand, and I wouldn’t normally ask you to make an exception, but we’re seeking confirmation of the toxicology report, and need it now.”
“But we sent it right after the accident, when she was admitted.”
“The copy you sent wasn’t legible. The prosecutor’s office wants me to take a look at the original.”
“Why is it so urgent?” asked the nurse, perplexed.
“There’s a meeting going on right now. The prosecutor wants to determine whether it was involuntary or premeditated. And the toxicology report is crucial to that.”
“Premeditated? She was driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Do you think she hit the tree to kill her friend on purpose?”
In the end I got a look at the clinical file. When she arrived there with some abrasions, Claudia Teodori was out of her mind on amphetamines. Driving in that state was equivalent to firing both barrels of a loaded shotgun in the middle of a crowd. So much for premeditation. Unless the girl knew she’d taken them, which was all still to be proven.
