The Last Enemy (16 page)
Authors: Grace Brophy
He was standing once again in the Casati mausoleum looking down at Rita Minelli’s body, the shiny white legs with the coarse dark hairs on the upper thighs in stark contrast to the elegantly clothed upper body, her pants and stockings bunched up together at her ankles. The grandmother of a friend of his had worn her stockings in just such a way, rolled down around her ankles. He remembered his friend’s mortification whenever she’d come shuffling out of her room at the back of the house, an old woman without elegance or shame, too lazy to roll up her stockings. A cold hard anger had been growing within him all day at the Casati family for their complete disregard of Rita, first in life and then in death, and at the smug righteousness even Amelia Casati exuded that Rita had been nothing more than a nuisance, a family inconvenience. In her last moment of life, the murderer (and Cenni was sure that the rape had been staged) had robbed Rita Minelli of grace and dignity. His last thought as he drifted off to sleep was sure to give him fitful dreams: For Rita Minelli, he would seek perfect justice.
1
HE WOKE AT 6:00 on Easter Sunday, the same time he awoke every morning, to the insistent buzzing of his clock radio and to an even more insistent dream of Sophie Orlic. He pushed down the snooze alarm and rolled over, dragging the pillow with him. Just another moment, he thought, and she’d have said
yes.
He lay there for another five minutes, eyes shut, pillow wrapped tightly around his head, trying to recapture that final instant of bliss, but the woman of his dreams, all sweet enchantment, had vanished, replaced by the watchful staring eyes of his prime suspect.
The best part of the day is early morning, but not when you’re chasing a Sagrantino hangover. Cenni got out of bed gingerly, afraid to wake the sleeping giant, and padded from bedroom to sitting room to bathroom, eyes averted from the early morning light that streamed into all the corners of the sitting room, illuminating the kitty litter that Rachel distributed into all the corners of his life. Maria Sotto, his cleaning lady of ten years and a former ally against his mother (who would rearrange his furniture any time she managed to get the key), had changed sides after the arrival of Rachel, claiming that the apartment now resembled a beach house in Sardinia. She hated cats, as did his mother, but for different reasons. Maria was allergic to cat dander and sniffed and sneezed her way through the apartment twice a week, but for an extra five euros she suffered the inconvenience. His mother was allergic to independence of any sort; cats, in particular, offended her sense of importance and control. Her current lapdog, a Pekinese named Cara Mia, had first gone to obedience school before joining his mother’s household. Cenni smiled. Rachel might not fetch tennis balls on demand, but she sure as hell could take Cara Mia if push came to shove.
He put the coffee on to boil, kissed Rachel, who just happened to be sitting on the kitchen table, and reflected on the coming day. Piero, together with Sergeant Antolini, would walk the streets of Assisi (an impossible job on Easter Sunday, he was sure to hear later from Piero) to determine if any of the growing number of suspects had been seen going to or coming from the cemetery. As a bonus, perhaps the sergeant would take Piero’s mind off his manifold sufferings; this week it was postnasal drip. And Elena! In a moment of guilt he’d given her the day off. Piero was dogged, but Elena had flair. He needed them both on the case full-time. Half-holiday was a reasonable compromise, he decided; he’d give her a call, bring her in at noon. Dealing with Togni was the biggest problem of his day, but he’d already decided how to handle that Artful Dodger. His day had begun; the hangover could wait.
A man of fixed habit, Cenni emerged from his apartment building most mornings at five minutes after 7:00, into the Piazza IV November, the medieval heart of Perugia. On good days, he would take his time as he strolled south-ward toward Piazza Italia, often stopping at the Fontana Maggiore (the sublime work of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano) to view the allegory that extolled the virtues of punishment, a large lion thrashing a cub. Keeps me honest, he’d told Piero when the inspector had asked why he liked it so much. But on this particular Sunday he found himself too distracted to give the great fountain or the little lion more than a cursory glance.
At Piazza Italia, he began his steep descent into the bowels of the medieval city, emerging finally into daylight and the urban sprawl that surrounds Perugia. And then, by way of another series of subterranean escalators and stairways, he entered the largest underground car park in Umbria. A few years back, a prominently placed bureaucrat (with a brother-in-law in the building trade), had decided to move police headquarters from Perugia Centro to the suburbs, a few hundred yards from the football stadium. Cenni had threatened to quit, maybe get a transfer, join the caribinieri. “I like the uniforms— women love the red stripe,” he’d told the questore. He was kidding, of course, although not about the red stripe, but Carlo had taken him seriously. He now received a handsome stipend to pay his garage fees, large enough to lease a doublewide space in the only section of the gigantic car park that guaranteed twenty-four hour security.
He loved his car. His grandmother had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday in 1980. It was already eight years old then, a 1972 Alpine BMW with black leather seats and a lustrous silvery pearl finish. The interior still had its original seat covers, worn to a buttery softness, but the exterior paint had been renewed many times since. Every four years, on the car’s anniversary, he took a vacation to Germany and his car went to the BMW factory in Bavaria for a new paint job and any other work that Bruno, his German mechanic, deemed necessary to keep it in its pristine condition. Chiara had once suggested that he loved the car more than he did her. “You don’t let anyone smoke in your car,” she’d said, “but you don’t mind if they smoke around me, and I have asthma.” She’d particularly hated the engine’s death rattle when they were stopped at red lights. Only his grandmother, who had her own issues with cars, had an appreciation of the delicate nature of a finely tuned instrument with a double-mouth Weber carburetor, differential pinion block, and oil radiator. She alone of women seemed to understand that the beauty of a car is how it performs on the open road.
Cenni knocked his shoes against the cement wall facing his car, then cleaned them on a pad that he kept in his trunk before getting behind the wheel. He now spent most of his days (and nights) in the suburban version of the fortified medieval tower, a two-story cement bunker surrounded by one-story concrete barriers. In the case of their particular bunker, its architect (the wife of the aforesaid bureaucrat) had given it a splash of personality: It was painted flamingo pink with pea green window frames.
On a normal day and in normal traffic, it took Cenni fifteen minutes to drive from his parking garage to this deconstructionist version of hell—when a football game was letting in or letting out it took a maddening two hours—but in neither case did the drive offer the pleasures of the open road or an opportunity to test Bruno’s precision tuning. On Cenni’s last birthday, his fortieth, he’d decided that it was time to act his age, to trade up for a more conservative model. The car dealer, one of the many along Ponte San Giovanni, and a strong advocate of automatic gearshifting (“Helps in traffic jams, Dottore”), had looked at him blankly when the subject of Weber carburetors was introduced. Differential pinion blocks and oil radiators never even came up. Cenni drove away somewhat relieved to discover that he and Bruno were joined together unto death.
2
HE SIGNED IN at the front desk, then started up the stairs, two steps at a time. He met no one. Those who pull duty on Easter Sunday always find ways to be with their families. The audacious get friends to sign them in; the timid come into the office, display themselves in the cafeteria, then disappear. He could easily do the same, leave after his conference with the questore, but this new case was a godsend, the perfect excuse not to appear at his mother’s for dinner. Renato would be there. He hadn’t seen his brother since Christmas and had yet to congratulate him on his recent appointment. He was now “His Excellency, the Bishop of Urbino,” as his mother had mentioned three times yesterday, the second-youngest bishop in the Italian church, which generally preferred its bureaucrats seasoned and wrinkled.
They had been born sixty minutes apart, forty years ago, perhaps the only time they were that long apart until their eighteenth birthday. On that day, they had escaped the guests at one of their mother’s drawing-room events: the count of this, the duchess of that, the inevitable principessa, who was invited to all his mother’s parties, where she did her grocery shopping, slipping hors d’oeuvres into her extralarge pockets. The twins had a lot to celebrate that year. They’d both been accepted by the University of Bologna, to the law college. Alex had taken the lead in everything from the time they were children, even to selecting their university. He had planned and Renato had listened. They would get law degrees, fight corruption, perhaps run for public office.
Later that same night they were celebrating in a disco in Torgiano. He was drinking heavily, beer fortified by shots of whiskey from his friends, and was drunk. Renato was being particularly quiet. He had been sitting across from Alex, nursing the same beer for over an hour, but now he was trying to tell Alex something over the thundering music. It was a Bee Gee’s song. Alex thought he’d heard Renato say that he was not going to Bologna, that he was going to Rome, to be a priest. He had laughed out loud, and Renato had responded with an awkward smile. Then Renato said it again. They stared at each other, Renato’s face distorted through a haze of smoke and alcohol. The beerglass that Alex was holding slipped from his hand and shattered into tiny pieces. Slivers of glass and warm beer sprayed them both, the avowed atheist and the future bishop of Urbino. One of the slivers lodged in the fleshy part of Alex’s hand. It was still working its way out.
Cenni’s office was on the top floor, a few doors down from the questore’s, a distinct disadvantage since Carlo Togni loved to talk, and he particularly loved talking to his senior commissario, whom he regarded as his protégé when things were going well and his nemesis when they were not. Either way, he too frequently interrupted Cenni during working hours for one of his general gossips. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether one was for or against crime, Togni also had a small office in the city center, in the Palazzo dei Priori, where he spent most days cultivating relationships, doing lunch with his political brethren. His decision to visit the suburbs on Easter Sunday did not augur well for Cenni’s day.
Two reports had come in during the night. Both were in folders on his desk. From the handwritten labels, he could see that one report was from Croatia and the other from Rome. He was particularly surprised by the early report from Rome, which normally treated Perugia the way the questore treated Assisi, as a backwater town worthy of no special favors and getting none. He assumed that the murder of an American, the niece of a friend of the PM, had sparked the prompt response. What had been bothering him since yesterday evening, though, was the identity of the person who had provided the questore with information on Sophie Orlic. The previous night, Carlo had known that Orlic didn’t have an alibi for Friday evening. Only three people other than himself had direct access to that information: Elena, Piero, and Fulvio Russo. Italian pragmatism at work, Cenni concluded. Carlo and Fulvio are sworn enemies, but when their interests collide, they help each other out.
The report on Paola Casati contained nothing of interest, just one short piece of paper listing her address in Rome and the information that she was a student of art restoration, currently working at the Borghese Gallery. No police record, not even a parking ticket. The folder containing the Orlic report was thicker than he’d expected. He thumbed through it quickly and found it contained two documents. The originals of both were in Slavic but English translations were included—a tribute to the power of the uni-lingual Americans, he thought with a sigh.
“
Buongiorno
Alex, may I interrupt?”
Cenni looked up in surprise. The questore was standing directly over him. It was barely 9:00 and their appointment was not until 10:00. The ear-to-ear smile that Carlo displayed, dazzling in its perfection of symmetry and whiteness, was always good for a few laughs among his subordinates. The latest rumor was that Togni and the PM shared the same dentist, a man known for capping every tooth in his patients’ heads, whether they needed it or not, and even more celebrated for squeezing in a few extra teeth for the cameras. The questore’s smile held no comfort for Cenni. He knew from past experience that the greater the display of porcelain, the more onerous the meeting would prove. Ah well, he thought warily, returning Carlo’s smile with fewer teeth but with equal insincerity, this is going to be more difficult than I’d thought.
He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Carlo please! I’m still reviewing some of the reports on our cast of suspects, six so far and growing. I’d hoped to finish before our meeting at ten. Can you wait until I finish?”
“Oh Alex! Surely not six!” Togni added, dusting the seat with his handkerchief before sitting. “I understand this Croatian— the woman who found the body—had a number of runins with the American, actually threatened her in the street,
and in Assisi of all places
,” he tacked on with emphasis. “City of peace and all that,” he added, in case Cenni had missed his point. “Unless she has an unbreakable alibi—and I understand that she hasn’t—she seems to be the likely suspect.” His smile grew by two additional molars waiting for a response. A long silence ensued, broken only by the buzzing of two flies copulating on the windowsill.
The questore, the first to yield, as usual, spoke. “For Christ’s sake. Alex, can’t you swat those things? They’re damn annoying!” And when Cenni didn’t respond, “You know the PM’s anxious for us to make a quick arrest. He wants as little yellow journalism as possible surrounding this case.” He paused, confounded for the moment; perhaps he’d noticed the small dints on either side of Cenni’s mouth, a signal to those who knew him well that the commissario was amused, or perhaps he was struck by the incongruity of his own words. “Well, the Leftist press, anyway. They’re always out for the PM’s blood, if you know what I mean. An early arrest and conviction would do a lot to keep the press quiet. What say you, Alex?” he asked, his tone now pleading. “Do we have enough evidence to arrest this woman?”
“She doesn’t have an alibi for what we believe is the time of death,” Cenni responded. “But neither do any of the other suspects. We’re still waiting for the postmortem report. If what we’ve learned so far turns out to be fact, the uncle has the strongest motive for murder—money! Minelli left the bulk of her estate to him, if she didn’t change her will. We’ll talk to her lawyer in New York tomorrow. And from something the wife said, the family can use the money. What’s more, if the rape were faked by a woman, as we discussed last night, the Casati women—all three of them—have as strong a motive as Orlic.”
