The Villa Triste (16 page)

Antonio Valacci nodded.

‘That’s what he said. He was hysterical, I tell you. “First Mama and now you – you’ve, both of you, ruined my life!” Those were the words. You should have seen my mother’s face. I thought she was going to have a heart attack. Honestly. She turned grey. I took the phone out of her hand and hung up on him.’

Antonio shook his head.

‘It wasn’t funny, really,’ he said. He looked at Pallioti and smiled. ‘So, you see,’ he added, ‘the least dear Uncle Gio could do was give her the damn medal. To this day, she thinks he just had a change of heart.’

‘Didn’t he?’

Antonio shrugged. He looked up at the buildings behind them as if he expected to see his mother at the window.

‘Not exactly. I telephoned him the next day. From my office.’ He smiled, looking somewhat sheepish. ‘You may not believe this, Ispettore,’ he said. ‘But I do love my mother, very much. So, I told dear Uncle Gio exactly what I thought of him.’

‘And?’

Antonio sighed.

‘Let’s just say that by the end of the conversation – look,’ he added, ‘I’m not particularly proud of this – I don’t generally go around threatening old men – but, well, I may have suggested that some of his transactions, his sales, and his clients might be looked into a little more carefully than they had been in the past if he didn’t, as they so quaintly say in America, Straighten Up and Fly Right.’

Pallioti could not help smiling. He was beginning to like Antonio Valacci.

‘Straighten Up and Fly Right?’

‘I had an American girlfriend, what can I say? Anyway,’ Antonio added, ‘Uncle Gio called my mother the next afternoon and apologized. I came home from work that evening and she told me she’d gone to Mass and confession for the first time in ten years and prayed her head off for her dear, darling brother, and lo and behold, a “miracle” had happened. Imagine.’

‘Imagine.’

‘And, of course, he accepted the medal.’

‘And gave it to her.’

Antonio nodded.

‘And gave it to her.’ They began to walk again. ‘But,’ he added, ‘I don’t think it was just that, honestly – my shaming him, heavy-handing him – whatever you want to call it.’

‘No?’ Pallioti asked.

‘No.’ Antonio Valacci shook his head. Then he stopped again and looked at Pallioti. ‘When I saw him at the dinner, it was almost as if—’

He stopped talking, his eyes focused back in the past. Pallioti waited. Antonio Valacci gave himself a small shake. ‘I know it sounds strange,’ he said, ‘but before I threatened him – I doubt, incidentally, that I’d have been able to do any of that, get his sales looked into, but it sounded good – before I did that, he was angry. But more angry the way people are when they’re afraid. Like an animal that’s cornered. They fight and scratch because they’re terrified. But at the dinner, at the Quirinale – perhaps it was just time – but it was as if he’d changed.’

‘How?’ Pallioti asked quietly. ‘How did your uncle change?’

Antonio Valacci thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘People are so strange. As I’m sure you know. And perhaps I’m wrong, but I got the feeling he’d stopped fighting. That he wasn’t angry any more. He was just tired. Like someone who’s given up.’ Antonio shrugged. ‘Perhaps he had a presentiment, you know, that it was all almost over. Now I do sound idiotic,’ he added. ‘Next I’ll be telling you he had an aura. A blue haze around his head or something. Although it is a little spooky. Given what happened.’

Pallioti said nothing. Spooky was not the word he would have used. They began to walk again.

‘I’m parked at Chiesa Nuova.’

Antonio Valacci nodded.

‘I’m going that way.’

They came to the end of the narrow street. Antonio stopped, dug in his pocket, and pulled out a slim gold cigarette case.

‘Is that why he was killed?’ he asked. ‘Do you think? Because of that stuff, the erotica?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pallioti said. ‘Possibly. At this point, anything is possible.’

‘So, no leads.’

If it was a question, Pallioti didn’t answer it. Instead, he watched as Antonio examined his cigarette, raised it to his lips, then said, ‘The name I gave you. On the card. She isn’t my secretary.’

‘Ah.’

‘I didn’t give her name to your friends from Rome, either. Just you. She’s Carlo Perocci’s wife. We’re having an affair. You know who he is?’

Before Pallioti could answer, Antonio said, ‘Junior Culture Minister. He’s an ass. It’s been going on for a long time. Anna and me, I mean. Well, and him being an ass, too. If he knew, he’d kill her. We’d run off to the ends of the earth together, but I can’t leave my mother. Yet.’ He shrugged. ‘So there we are.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Antonio smiled. ‘So am I. So’s Anna. It’s a mess. We’ve known each other for years. That number I gave you? It’s her mobile. We were together almost all day. Certainly all morning. We have an apartment, in Trastevere. People saw us. It’s not just my lover vouching for me.’

‘Thank you for telling me.’

Antonio waved his hand through the stream of smoke.

‘It’s the least I can do, cooperate with the police. I mean, I’m just the Culture Ministry, but we’re more or less on the same side. Besides,’ he added, ‘you’ll want to clear it up, since I have a motive.’

Pallioti raised his eyebrows.

Antonio Valacci dropped his cigarette into the gutter, shook his head, and ground it out under his heel.

‘I wasn’t born yesterday, Ispettore,’ he said. ‘I’m sure people have killed for less than that apartment. I’m also sure I’m not one of them.’

He held out his hand. Pallioti shook it.

‘Safe journey home.’ Antonio Valacci smiled. ‘Chiesa Nuova’s straight ahead. Down that alley, then on the left.’

The plane rose from the runway, swung out over the ancient port of Ostia, and turned north. Below, the silver sheet of the sea glittered in the setting sun. Then it turned pink, and orange, and was lost in cloud as they climbed over the coast.

A drink, vodka straight up on the rocks, and a foil envelope of ‘nibbles’ sat untouched on the tray table in front of Pallioti. He poked the ice cubes with his green plastic stirrer, then put it down and sipped the cold slimy liquid. Vodka was a bad habit he had picked up some years ago – he could not remember exactly when – a defence against all the times, on planes and overseas, when grappa was out of reach. As a substitute it was a poor one, but it had the comfort of familiarity. He felt the taste evaporate on the back of his tongue, considered the supposition that, in a perfect world, Alitalia would provide plump green olives instead of vacuum-packed stale almonds, and looked at the small red book he held in his hand.

Strictly speaking, he should have signed for it, or at least told Enzo he was taking it. He would remember to mention it. Not that anyone would care. It was a souvenir, evidence of nothing except the past. Eventually it would be handed over to the Valaccis, along with the rest of Giovanni Trantemento’s belongings.

He had recognized it at once, from the moment he’d held up the bag. The cover was the wrong colour, but otherwise the little book had been as familiar as the face of a long-forgotten friend in a crowd. There was only one shop in the city that sold these, an ancient dark little hole of a stationer’s in an alley not far from Via Purgatorio that had no name.

The little books, all with the lily stamped on the front, came in a variety of colours. They were sold in soft cloth bags, often in pairs. Appointments, accounts, liaisons, and dreams – all the crucial, forgotten minutiae of lives had been carefully recorded between covers just like these by generations of Florentine women. Pallioti’s mother had kept hers in the secret drawer of her desk.

Her book was always dark blue, her favourite colour. As a child, he had often released the secret latch and pulled it out. Sometimes, instead of studying the small cramped pages, he’d simply sat there, his feet barely touching the floor, holding it against his cheek because the cover was as soft as her skin and the pages smelt of her perfume.

The memory came back so suddenly, it made him blink.

The cover of this book was battered, the red faded, the gilding on the lily almost gone altogether. The spine was intact – the hand-stitching had assured that, but the flyleaf was water-marked, the inscription on it barely visible. Pallioti turned on his reading light and held the speckled page up in the beam. There was an address – no number, but a street off Via Senese that he recognized, and a date – 1 November 1943. Then the inscription,
To Caterina Maria Cammaccio, the Most Beautiful Bride in Florence ~ From Her Sister, Isabella
.

The letters were ghostly. Isabella had chosen to use what must, even at the time, have been pale lilac ink. Caterina Cammaccio herself had opted for more conventional black. Turning the pages, looking at the tiny, cramped writing, he realized with a start that he could not remember what colour ink his mother had used, or – despite the fact that he was ten when she had died and had been reading for years – a single word that she had written. It was simply the fact that she had smoothed the pages with her hands, and left on the marbled paper the shape of her handwriting, marks as definitive as a zebra’s stripe or a leopard’s spots, that had drawn her close to him.

Glancing about to be sure no one was watching, he lifted the little red book to his nose. But there was not so much as a hint of jasmine. The scarred leather and thick ragged pages of Caterina Cammaccio’s book smelt only of dust and shadows.

PART THREE

Chapter Five

Florence, 10 November 1943

I can’t describe the feeling I had, getting back into the ambulance and driving away from Fiesole. An hour earlier, when we had bluffed our way through the checkpoint, watched the barrier rise and driven up the hill with – not three ‘poor boys’ – but two Americans and one British POW in the back, I had felt something beyond relief. A sort of deep gratitude for being alive. The air, the night, as I had breathed it in, tasted like nothing before. Then, watching Issa walk away, start into the mountains, positively glowing with joy because she was doing what she loved most in the world, and because she was in love with Carlo – that left me bereft. Utterly. Standing there watching her go, I felt as if we were an hourglass and life had turned us upside down and was spilling out of me and into her.

So, strangely, as mad as it sounds, Il Corvo telling me his name felt like salvation of a kind. A tiny affirmation. A whisper – the thud of another heartbeat in the dark.

I waited for five days for Issa to come home, and by the time she did, it seemed everything had changed again. No, not changed – tightened. As if a tourniquet has been wrapped around us and little by little is cutting off blood.

The Fascist government has announced that special tribunals will be set up to try party members who have ‘betrayed the faith’, and anyone else deemed ‘in speech or action’ to have betrayed the regime. This could, of course, be anyone. The penalty, if found guilty, for ex-party members is death. For the rest of us, five to thirty years in prison. Papa actually took some pleasure in this, claiming that it means they are truly frightened. As he spoke, Mama’s eyes met mine over the table. I did not need to ask her, I knew. We were both thinking the same thing – that frightened animals are the most vicious. Especially if they believe they have nothing to lose.

This has happened frequently since that night in the kitchen. My mother, who has never been close to me before, who has seemed all my life to hoard her love for Enrico, feels suddenly as if she is part of me, a mirror I look into. In her eyes, the only physical trait we share, I see my own looking back. For the first time, there are threads between us, fine little silks of fear and sympathy. This war has turned my mother and me into spiders weaving the same web. Or, less optimistically, flies trapped in it.

She has taken to cooking. The offerings are frequently burnt, or underdone, or stodgy, or simply raw. But I do not care. Last night, I was very late getting home. The streets were dark, and it was cold. My armband gives me safe passage, but even so, I think I hear footsteps all the time now. Under the whirr of my bicycle wheels, I imagine screams. Occasionally I’ve heard the screech of brakes and running feet. Once, gunshots. Mama had made a crème caramel. I hate to think how much the eggs must have cost. Papa had gone to bed and the rest of the house was dark. She sat across the kitchen table, her eyes following every lift of the spoon, watching me eat as she never had when I was a child. There was barely any sugar in it and the milk was sour, curdled. I scraped the bowl. It was the most delicious thing I have ever tasted.

Food is getting more and more expensive. Thanks to Grand-papa’s money, and the black market, we are all right. The necessities, and even some luxuries, can be had for those who know where to look. But that is bound to get more difficult, because the banks are refusing to cash cheques and limiting withdrawals. And with or without money, some things are getting very scarce. Fuel is hard to come by. The Germans are requisitioning everything. I heard yesterday of a lorry going down the Via Tuornabuoni, emptying out shops, clearing shelves of woollens, gloves, shoes, and boots. Our excavations in the hospital cellars no longer seem as silly as they did two short months ago. I have given up on a new coat. Mama has an old one, and I am using that. When I turn the collar up, it smells of her powder and her soap, as if she has laid her hand on my cheek.

I began to look for Issa in crowds. I knew, somehow, that she would not come home, not simply walk up to the door and into the house. In my heart, I know that this trip through the mountains, the choices she has made now, will change her forever. I think it’s why I didn’t want to let her go, because I knew that no matter what happened, some part of her – the little Issa I have known all my life – would never come home. It’s Carlo, of course. That heart Isabella has kept locked tight has burst wide open. It’s plain to see for anyone who knows her. But it’s more than that as well. Mama, Papa, and I – we will struggle. Do our best. Try not to be afraid because we want to survive. But Isabella is fighting a different fight. She does not love this war any more than we do, but it has given her her place in the world.

I began to look for her as I cycled to work, to search the faces of crowds, wait for the touch of her hand on my shoulder as I stood in the street. Which was, in fact, more or less how it happened.

It was early morning on the fifth day. The light was still pearly on the river, and I was standing on the bridge with my bicycle, waiting to cross. Then, as the traffic passed, I looked up and saw her, standing on the opposite pavement. It had grown cold. The first dusting of early snow had come the night before. She was wearing a dress and an overcoat I did not recognize, and had a scarf wound around her neck. She looked at me and smiled. The mountains were in her eyes, bright and glittering. I crossed the street and she fell into step beside me, hands dug in her pockets, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

‘How long have you been back?’

It took me a moment or two to ask. I had expected that she would be changed, but still I couldn’t quite take it in. I kept glancing at her, trying to understand how she could be so completely different and at once the same. There was a purpose in her step, and a stillness about her, and an alertness, too, that was completely new. I realized that all my life I had thought of Isabella as frivolous – as prettier, younger, somehow less consequential than me. It was something of a shock to understand that I would never feel that way again.

‘A day.’

‘Was it all right?’

‘All parcels delivered.’ She smiled. ‘Your cigarettes were much appreciated.’

I had slipped the packet into her rucksack. At the mention of them I thought of Dieter, and started to look back, as if I might find him looming up behind us.

Issa grabbed my arm.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever look back and don’t walk faster. If you want to see who’s behind you, stop and look in a shop window.’

She let go of my arm and glanced at me, her blue eyes so dark they looked nearly black.

‘They won’t be wearing a uniform,’ she muttered. ‘Remember that. They’re Italians. They don’t look any different from us.’

I nodded, numbly. I had heard, of course, of OVRA, the Fascist secret police. We all had. But never before had it occurred to me that they might have any interest in me.

‘Then how—’

‘Faces,’ Issa said. ‘Look for faces. On the street. In cafes. At the hospital. Anywhere. People you see too often.’

‘Is that why you’re not coming to the house? Because—’ The urge to look over my shoulder was almost more than I could bear. Issa saw it on my face. She took my arm again.

‘Tell Mama and Papa I’m fine.’

I nodded, unable to contain myself any longer.

‘Where are you staying?’ I blurted out the question. ‘How can I contact you?’

‘Like this. Or I’ll come to the hospital.’

We had come into the Piazza Signoria. People hurried to and fro, scurrying on their way to work. Beyond the fountain, the swastikas snapped in the wind, looking like spiders crawling into the sky.

Issa was watching me. ‘I’m staying at the University,’ she said. ‘Or in the mountains. With Carlo.’

‘Does Enrico know about you and Carlo?’

Again, the question came out before I could help it.

She stopped and laughed.

‘Yes, Cati,’ she said. ‘Enrico knows.’

She might as well have said, ‘the whole world knows’.

‘Is he—’ I asked, ‘I mean, is he all right? Rico?’

Issa looked at me for a moment. Then she laughed again and patted my hand. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he’s fine, he sends you his love,’ and walked on.

I stood for a moment, holding my bicycle, watching her back and the sun glinting off her golden hair. A nervousness was fizzing inside me that I could not quite place, or account for. A pair of soldiers turned as Issa went past, their eyes following her. The sight did nothing to reassure me. I pushed my bicycle forward and caught up with her as we turned into the canyon of narrow streets behind the Bargello.

Here, the shops still had things in them. The Germans apparently had no interest in jars of ground pigment, in hogshair brushes and pallet knives. I had paused at a window, and was studying a display, thinking of my own watercolours that had lain untouched since that afternoon on the terrace, when Issa said, ‘Cati, we need to do it again.’

I looked up. As she promised, I saw her reflection as she stood behind me. Our eyes met in the glass.

‘How many?’

My voice was not more than a whisper.

She raised a hand, holding up fingers. Four.

‘When?’

Her face was impassive. Almost mask-like, familiar and completely alien at the same time. She mouthed a single word.

‘Tonight.’

Again, Il Corvo and I did not speak as we drove out of the city. We went later this time. Thanks to its red crosses, the ambulance can move freely after dark. The streets were almost deserted. More snow had fallen. The pavements looked dusted with sugar, and you could see chinks of light behind shutters. There were only a few cars moving and no people at all. Like some medieval village plagued by goblins and wolves, Florence has taken to hiding behind closed doors after sunset. To turning her face away while the Devil rides abroad.

We passed one Blackshirt patrol. We did not slow down, but in the darkness I felt Il Corvo tense. Neither of us said it, but I think we were both more frightened of being stopped by them than by the Germans.

This time, as we approached, we saw a car coming through the checkpoint in the opposite direction. The soldier on duty leaned into the window, then stood back and gave a smart, snapped salute. As it passed us, large and black and gliding through the night, we made out the caps of officers in the rear seat. They have requisitioned most of the big villas up here on the hill. The houses recently filled with American heiresses and English lords now house the German command. Not so very long before that it was the French. And before that, the Austrians.

We’ve been occupied longer than we realize. It seems everyone comes to Florence to play at being nobility. The soldier turned and waved us forward. It was not until he stepped into the beam of the headlamps that I realized it was Dieter again. Getting out and handing him the papers felt almost like meeting an old friend.

He was pleased to see me. He remembered my name, and although he made me open the doors, he gave the inside of the ambulance only the most cursory flash of his torch beam. Four men tucked onto stretchers.

‘We are moving more of them to Fiesole,’ I explained again in my bad German. ‘Everyone we can manage. We need the beds in the city for more urgent cases.’

Dieter nodded. Then he apologized that he had no more cigarettes to give me.

In the shed, Issa and Carlo were waiting. This time they were alone. There was no sign of Massimo and his tiny acolyte, and we were faster than before and silent, getting the men out and dressed. Already we have become used to doing this. This time, the clothes were not all Enrico’s, although I recognized a sweater and another pair of gloves. Issa had her hair tucked up under a cap, and was wearing men’s woollen trousers and a heavy jumper and jacket. Again, Carlo strapped her rucksack on for her, then she kissed me on the cheek, her lips cold from the night, and led them out of the side door. The men followed her, one by one, like goslings following a goose. Carlo brought up the rear. Just before he slipped through the door, he turned to me and touched my cheek.

‘Don’t worry, Caterina,’ he whispered. He winked, and a smile lit his face. ‘God shows us the way.’

Another time, I might have told Carlo that I do not believe in God. But I appreciated his kindness nonetheless.

Outside, I watched as they moved like phantoms, six figures, black against the white smattering of snow. Long after they had vanished, I could still hear the tramp of their feet on dead leaves. Then their footsteps were lost in a rustle, and there was nothing on the mountainside but the wind.

Il Corvo let me out in an alley near the Porta San Frediano. I have no idea where they are keeping the ambulance and I did not ask. I wanted to say something to him, give some sign that we were friends, or at least in this together, but in the end I couldn’t think of anything, so I ended up nodding mutely. Even though it was dark, I saw him smile. The expression was strange on his face, as if it were something he wasn’t used to.

I had left my bicycle at the hospital, so I walked home. Snow fluttered from the steps of the Carmine and danced in the piazza as if it were the only living thing in the city. Even the bells sounded hollow, a call to prayer rung by ghosts. Tonight there were no footsteps. No sound of gunshots, or screech of brakes. I thought of Boccaccio and the plague. I might have been the only person left alive, nothing moving but me and the wind and the snow.