The Lost Girls of Rome (25 page)

‘I’ll bet Giorgia Noni is one of them. What does she do, does she talk to you? Or does she look at you without saying anything, making you feel ashamed?’

Zini flung the glass of lemonade down on the ground. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘I know you rigged the investigation.’

Zini shook his head. ‘It was the last case I worked on. I had to hurry, I didn’t have much time left. Her brother Federico deserved a result.’

‘Is that why you sent an innocent man to prison?’

Zini looked straight at Marcus, as if he could see him. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Costa isn’t innocent. He had previous convictions for stalking and molesting women. We found hardcore pornography in his apartment, illegal stuff downloaded from the internet. The theme was always the same: violence against women.’

‘Fantasies aren’t enough to condemn a man.’

‘He was preparing to act. You know how his arrest came about? He was on the list of suspects in the Figaro case, we had our eye on him. One evening we saw him stalking a woman outside a supermarket, he had a gym bag with him. We didn’t have any proof, but we had to decide quickly. We could let him make his move, taking the risk that he’d harm the woman, or else stop him immediately. I chose the second option. And I was right.’

‘Did he have scissors in the bag?’

‘No, only a change of clothes,’ Zini admitted. ‘But they were identical to the ones he was already wearing. And you know why?

‘To change in case he got blood on his clothes. Perfectly logical.’

‘And besides, he confessed. That’s enough for me.’

‘None of the victims of his attacks provided a description that could identify him. They simply stated
after the fact
that it was him. Women who are subjected to violence are often so upset that when the police show them a suspect, they immediately say it’s him. They’re not lying, they want to believe it, in fact they’re convinced of it. They couldn’t live with themselves, knowing that the monster who harmed them is still at large. The fear that it’ll happen again is stronger than any feeling of justice. So one guilty party is as good as another.’

‘Federico Noni recognised Costa from his voice.’

‘Really?’ Marcus said angrily. ‘Was he in his right mind when he fingered him? Think of all the traumas he’d suffered in his life.’

Pietro Zini did not know how to reply. The old mettle was still there, but something had snapped in his heart. The man who once had been capable of striking terror in a criminal with his eyes now seemed incredibly fragile. And it wasn’t merely because of his blindness. In fact, his blindness had made him wiser. Marcus was
convinced he knew more and, as was so often the case, all he needed to do was to let him talk.

‘After they told me I was going blind, I made sure never to miss a sunset. Sometimes I would go up on to the terrace of the Janiculum and stay there until the light had completely faded. There are things we take for granted and forget to look at. The stars, for example. I remember when I was a child I used to lie in the grass and imagine all those distant worlds. Before I went blind, I started doing it again, but it wasn’t the same. My eyes had seen too many terrible things. One of the last things I saw was the body of Giorgia Noni.’ He held out his hand to summon his cats to him. ‘It’s hard to accept that someone could have put us in this world just to see us suffer. They say that if God is good then He can’t be omnipotent, and vice versa. A good God wouldn’t let His children suffer, which means He must be powerless to prevent it. If on the other hand He’s foreseen everything, then He isn’t as good as He’d have us believe.’

‘I wish I could tell you there’s some greater design that we can’t understand, that it’s beyond the comprehension of any one of us. But the truth is, I don’t know the answer.’

‘At least you’re honest. I appreciate that.’ Zini got to his feet. ‘Come, let me show you something.’

He took his stick and went into the study. Marcus followed him. The room was extremely neat and tidy, a sign that Zini was perfectly self-sufficient. The ex-policeman went to the record player and started the Dvořák LP again. As he did so, Marcus noticed a rope, some six feet long, lying in a corner of the room. He wondered how many times Zini had been tempted to use it.

‘My mistake was to give up my weapons licence,’ Zini said, as if he had guessed his visitor’s thoughts. Then he went and sat down at a desk with a computer on it: not a normal computer but a Braille display. ‘You won’t like what you’re going to hear.’

Marcus tried to imagine what it could be.

‘But first let me tell you that Federico Noni has already suffered enough. Years ago he lost the use of his legs. Becoming blind at my age is a blow you can learn to accept, but losing the use of your legs
when you’re a young athlete! Then his sister was brutally murdered,

practically in front of his eyes. Can you even imagine something like

that? Think how powerless he must have felt, think of the guilt he

must still feel, even though he didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘What does this have to do with what you’re going to tell me?’ ‘Federico has a right to justice. Whatever that justice is.’ Pietro Zini fell silent, waiting for Marcus to demonstrate that he

had understood. ‘You can live with a handicap,’ Marcus said. ‘You

can’t live with doubt.’

That was enough for Zini, who began tapping at the keyboard.

Technology was a great boon to blind people. It allowed Zini to

carry on activities like surfing the internet, chatting, or else sending

and receiving emails.

‘I had an email a few days ago,’ he said. ‘Let me play you this …’ On Zini’s computer there was a program that read his email

messages for him. He activated it and sat back in his chair, waiting.

A synthesised voice first recited an anonymous Yahoo address. The

message had no subject. Then came the text.

‘He-is-not-like-you … Look-in-Vil-la-Glo-ri-Park.’

Zini pressed a key to stop the voice. Marcus was stunned: the

person responsible for the enigmatic message had to be the

unknown guide who had led him here. Why had he written to a

blind ex-policeman?

‘“He is not like you.” What does that mean?’

‘Frankly, I’m more interested in the second part: “Look in Villa

Glori Park.”’

Zini got up from his chair, came to him and grabbed him by the

arm. He almost seemed to be begging him. ‘Of course I can’t go.

But you know what you have to do now. Go and see what’s in that

park.’

2.14 p.m.

In the months since David’s death, solitude had been like a shell. It was not a state, it was a place. The place where Sandra could
continue talking to him, without feeling that she was going mad. She had shut herself up in an invisible bubble of sadness, and let things bounce off it. Nothing and nobody could touch her if she remained there. Paradoxically, her grief protected her.

Until the pistol shots meant for her that morning in the chapel of St Raymond of Penyafort.

She had been afraid to die. At that moment, the bubble had burst. She wanted to live. And that was the reason why she felt guilty towards David. For five months, life had been suspended. Though time had passed, she had stood still. But now she wondered how loyal a wife had to be to her husband. Was she wrong to want to live when he was dead? Could it be considered a kind of betrayal? It was stupid, she knew. But for the first time, she had moved away from David.

‘Very interesting.’

Schalber’s voice broke the spell of her thoughts. They were in Sandra’s hotel room and he was sitting on the bed, holding the photo graphs David had taken with the Leica. He had looked at them over and over again.

‘Are you sure there are only four? No others?’

Sandra feared that he had guessed her little deception: she had decided not to show him the photograph of the priest with the scar on his temple. But Schalber was still a policeman, and she knew how policemen thought. They never allowed themselves the benefit of the doubt.

‘Even though you may think it’s a good thing, what the penitenzieri are doing is illegal. There are no limits or rules to their activities.’ That was what he had said when he had told her about them. Which meant that, as far as he was concerned, that priest was a criminal. Nothing would make him change his mind.

In the academy, she had been taught that everybody was guilty until proven innocent, not the other way round. Plus, you should never believe anybody. For example, during an interrogation a good police officer should question every word. She remembered once giving the third degree to a hiker who had discovered a woman’s body in a ditch. It was obvious that the man had nothing
to do with the death, he had simply raised the alarm. But she had bombarded him with pointless questions and made him repeat his answers, pretending she had not understood, all with the intention of making him contradict himself. The poor man had submitted to this relentless onslaught, innocently thinking that it could help to throw light on the woman’s death, unaware that if he had shown the slightest uncertainty he would have ended up in real trouble.

I know what you’re thinking, Schalber. And I won’t let you. At least until I know I can trust you completely.

‘Just four photographs,’ Sandra confirmed.

Schalber looked at her for several moments, either weighing up her reply or hoping she would betray herself. She managed to sustain his gaze. He looked away and started examining the photographs again. She thought she had passed the test, but she was wrong.

‘You told me before that you met one of them last night. I wonder how you managed to recognise him if you had never seen him before.’

Sandra realised she had made a mistake. She blamed herself for supplying him with that information while they were in the Interpol guest apartment, but it had come out spontaneously.

‘I went to San Luigi dei Francesi to see the Caravaggio painting David had photographed part of.’

‘You already told me that.’

‘I saw a man standing in front of it. I didn’t know who he was. He was the one who recognised me. He immediately moved away and I followed him. I pointed my gun at him, until he told me that he was a priest.’

‘You mean he knew who you were?’

‘I don’t know how, but he gave me the impression he knew me. So yes, I think he did know.’

Schalber nodded. ‘I see.’

Sandra was sure he hadn’t swallowed her lies. But for the moment he had preferred to let it go. In any case, it was all right: this way he would be forced to include her in the investigation. She tried to
change the subject. ‘What about the dark photograph, what do you think it means?’

He had been distracted for a moment, but he immediately recovered. ‘I don’t know. For the moment, it doesn’t mean anything.’

Sandra got up from the bed. ‘All right, so what do we do now?’

Schalber gave her back the photographs. ‘Figaro,’ he said. ‘They caught him. But if the penitenzieri are interested in the case, there must be a reason.’

‘What do you plan to do?’

‘The attacker became a killer: his last victim died.’

‘You want to begin with her?’

‘With her brother: he was there when she was killed.’

‘The doctors were convinced I’d walk again soon.’

Federico Noni kept his hands flat on his thighs, and his eyes bowed. He had not shaved for a while and his hair was long. Beneath his green T-shirt, the muscles of the athlete he had once been could still be glimpsed. But his legs were thin and motionless in the track-suit trousers. His feet were raised up on the foot rests of the wheelchair. He was wearing a pair of Nikes with clean soles.

Looking at him, Sandra catalogued these details. Those Nikes encapsulated his whole tragedy. They looked new, but he may well have had them for years.

She and Schalber had presented themselves at the door of the little villa in the Nuovo Salario area a few minutes earlier. They had rung the bell several times before the door was opened. Federico Noni lived like a recluse and did not want to see anyone. To persuade him, Schalber had had Sandra give him an Italian police badge and had shown it to Noni through the video entry phone. He had passed himself off as an inspector. However reluctantly, she, too, had lied. She hated Schalber’s methods, his arrogance, the way he used other people for his own ends.

The house was untidy. There was a musty odour and the blinds had not been raised in ages. The furniture was positioned in such a way as to create routes for the wheelchair. You could see the tracks of the wheels on the floor.

Sandra and Schalber were sitting on a sofa, with Federico facing them. Behind him were the stairs that led to the upper floor, where Giorgia Noni had been killed. But her brother, obviously, never went up there. There was a camp bed for him in the living room.

‘The operation was a success. I’d been assured that with a bit of physiotherapy I’d recover. It wouldn’t be easy, but I could do it. I was used to physical effort, it didn’t scare me. And yet …’

Federico was trying to respond to a blunt question from Schalber on the cause of his paraplegia. The Interpol agent had deliberately started with the most uncomfortable subject. Sandra knew that technique, it was the one some of her colleagues used when they questioned crime victims. Compassion often made them clam up, whereas if you wanted to get useful answers you had to be cold and unsympathetic.

‘When you had your accident, were you speeding on the motorbike?’

‘Not at all. It was a stupid fall. I remember that at first, despite the fractures, I could still move my legs. After a few hours I couldn’t feel them any more.’

On a cabinet was a photograph of Federico Noni standing in his motorcycle gear next to a bright red Ducati. He was holding a wraparound helmet and smiling at the camera. A handsome, happy, fresh-faced young man. Quite a heartbreaker, Sandra suspected.

‘You were an athlete. What was your speciality?’

‘Long jump.’

‘Were you good?’

Federico merely pointed at the display case filled with trophies. ‘Judge for yourselves.’