The Villa Triste (17 page)

I didn’t see any light behind the shutters when I put my key in the lock, but Mama was waiting for me. She rose up from the sofa where she had been sitting in the dark. There was no crème caramel this time, just soup and some rather stale bread. She sat across the kitchen table again, saying nothing. Watching me eat.

Now I am writing this in my room. It is cold and I am tired, but I can’t sleep. I have had a little conversation with Lodo. It’s stupid, but I opened the wardrobe, and ran my hand down my wedding dress and asked him if he thought it was beautiful, and what he thinks of all of this. I closed my eyes, and saw him smile. Then I opened my window and pushed the shutters back. There is no moon tonight, and it took my eyes a moment to sort out the dark from the dark, but finally I found them on the horizon – the outline of the mountains Issa is moving through like a phantom. I stood there for as long as I could, looking – as if somehow I might see her beneath the pinpricks of the stars.

Chapter Six

‘Ssandro!’

Pallioti looked up at the sound of his sister’s voice. He closed the file that had lain open in front of him. His driver had handed it to him as soon as he settled himself in his car at the airport. The contents had not made cheerful reading.

The forensics report on Giovanni Trantemento’s apartment had yielded essentially nothing – no unidentifiable finger- or footprints and only a small amount of debris that might have come from anyone’s shoes. The report on the bullet that had been so carefully dug out of his skull was equally unhelpful. It was a .22 calibre, about three years old and common as dirt. In fact, a note in the margin from Enzo informed him, it was virtually the commonest ammunition in the world. It had been around for decades, could be used in rifles or handguns, and was favoured by hunters and shooting clubs due to the fact that it was cheap, versatile, and relatively quiet. In other words, it was a perfect choice.

Pallioti wished he thought that was a coincidence, but he didn’t. However unpalatable, it was increasingly clear that someone had wanted Giovanni Trantemento dead. And had put quite a lot of careful thought into achieving it.

The only bright spot, so to speak, in this increasingly unpleasant scenario, was that the markings on the bullet were strange. Distinctive enough that Enzo had highlighted them, along with the execution-style single shot and the salt, in the profile that had gone out that evening on the Europe-wide databases. As rays of sunshine went, it was a weak one. But it did mean that if they could find the weapon, they could almost certainly match it. To be honest, Pallioti wasn’t optimistic. So far, even taking the wallet into account – which he was less and less inclined to do – Giovanni Trante-mento’s killer had done an impressively professional job. Pallioti doubted he’d have made a mistake as silly as dropping the weapon in the river or stashing it in a rubbish bin.

For the next few hours, however, he vowed to forget about it.

He slipped the file into his briefcase, and watched his sister make her way to his habitual spot in the restaurant’s back corner. What he saw was a thirty-six-year-old woman who might, from a distance, have been a teenager. Seraphina was slight and blonde, and in other words, looked nothing at all like him. Occasionally, he still found it something of a shock to remember that they were related.

Saffy – as only Pallioti and her husband were allowed to call her – was fourteen years his junior. Her mother was their father’s second wife – a slight, gamine Frenchwoman called Mimi whom Pallioti senior had met in Paris and married almost three years to the day after Pallioti’s mother died. Pallioti had never warmed to his stepmother, something he now regretted, because it had not been her fault. An awkward, withdrawn teenager, he had been both infuriated and embarrassed by his father’s behaviour in marrying again, and had taken his wrath out on Mimi, rebuffing her repeated advances with not much more than a grunt. When Saffy was born, he had pretended not to care. He had withdrawn to school, and seen as little of her as possible for the next eleven years. By the time his father and Mimi died in a car accident, Pallioti had not seen any of them for the better part of five years. At twenty-six, he was already a rising star in the police, a young man rather too pleased with himself who had done everything he could to forget that he even had a half-sister.

He had been stationed in Genoa when he heard. It had not been his father’s fault. A young idiot had overtaken at twice the speed limit on a blind corner. All concerned had been killed outright.

The drive to France had taken Pallioti all night. Morning had found him outside a convent school near Montpellier, trying to understand how he should tell a twelve-year-old girl he barely knew that her parents were dead and that a remote, rather arrogant young man who had spent most of his life studiously ignoring her was the only relative she had left in the world.

When the moment came, she had simply stared at him. But there was something in the gravity of her face, something in the way she had blinked her grey eyes, refusing to cry, merely accepting what he was telling her, that pierced him. Made him feel humble, and idiotic, and deeply ashamed of himself.

Finally, he had been able to think of nothing to say except, ‘What do you want to do?’

To which Saffy had replied, ‘I want to go home.’

He had stared at her.

‘I want you to take me home,’ she had said.

‘I can’t take you home,’ he’d muttered. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’ Saffy had asked.

And although he was sure there were thousands of them, in that moment he hadn’t been able to think of a single reason.

Now, Saffy knew him better than anyone else in the world. If anyone had asked, Pallioti would have been happy to tell them that, if he had done anything to help Seraphina become the woman she was, she had more than repaid the favour by, if not eradicating, at least checking, his worst instincts. If he was a decent human being, if he was even slightly more thoughtful than the arrogant young man he had been, it was Saffy’s doing. When she had married Leonardo Benvoglio – an older and successful businessman not much younger than himself – he had taken the groom aside and told him, without any particular malice, that if he ever did any-lucretia thing to hurt Seraphina, Pallioti himself would kill him. Promptly and probably painfully.

Leonardo, to give him credit, had taken it in the spirit it was intended. No threat. Just a statement of fact.

‘So—’ They had settled in at the table, attended by Bernardo, the owner of the restaurant where Saffy sometimes joked that her brother had a ‘meal plan’. ‘I’m sorry I look like this.’

She looked down at the polo-neck sweater, jeans and boots that had been revealed when Bernardo had taken her coat. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her small hands were nicked and flecked with paint. Only the rather large diamond ring on her left hand and the earrings that matched it suggested that she might not be your average Florentine housewife, whoever that was.

‘Is the show finished?’

Saffy nodded as Bernardo poured her a glass of wine.

Seraphina Benvoglio was a well-known photographer. Her still lifes and landscapes sold for considerable sums. Several had recently been acquired by smaller but significant European museums. She had her own gallery in Borgo San Frediano. Increasingly, her shows were covered by the national press.

‘You are coming?’

She looked up from the menu. Pallioti had seen every show she had ever hung, from the first one in a grim student collective somewhere on the outskirts of Modena, to the considerably more ritzy biannual affairs she hosted now. The opening of her latest show was the next night.

‘If I can.’ He made a face. ‘And if I can’t,’ he added quickly, ‘I’ll get there before the week is out. I promise.’

She smiled and shrugged.

‘As long as you turn up at some point. It’s unlucky if you don’t. Tommaso will be disappointed,’ she added.

Tommaso was Saffy and Leonardo’s son, and not only Pallioti’s nephew, but also his godson. At five, he was increasingly a connoisseur of Spiderman and Batman – both of whom he seemed to think were closely related to his uncle. Pallioti supposed he ought to be grateful the little boy hadn’t become enamoured of Shrek.

‘I wish I had a superhero cape,’ he muttered. So much for forgetting about the contents of the file.

Glancing at him, Saffy put her menu aside. There was no point in ordering at Lupo in any case. Regardless of what they said, Bernardo simply brought what he thought they ought to be eating. He claimed to know what Pallioti would like from the look on his face. This culinary mood-reading was a little obscure at the best of times, and probably had more to do with surpluses in the kitchen than Pallioti’s smiles and scowls. But it hardly mattered. The results were uniformly pleasing. Tonight they began with a plate of plump grilled wood mushrooms dusted with delicate curls of pale, hard cheese.

‘It’s not this old man, is it?’

Spearing a mushroom, Saffy looked up. She was the only person, other than Enzo and the Mayor, with whom he ever discussed cases. Even the medical examiner and the magistrates rarely got more than he decided they needed to know. Pallioti didn’t like gossip. And speculation made him nervous.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is.’ He stabbed a mushroom harder than was strictly necessary. ‘How do you know about it?’

Saffy eyed him over the top of her glasses. They were round and made her look like a baby owl.

‘I read the newspapers.’

He groaned. He had turned down a newspaper on the plane, both this morning and coming back.

‘What are they saying?’

She shrugged. ‘That this – what was his name? Trantimenni?’

‘Trantemento.’

‘Trantemento. That he was a partisan hero, a harmless old man, shot in his apartment in the middle of the morning in what was probably a burglary, or’ – she glanced at him – ‘probably not, since you were at the scene. Oh,’ she added, popping the cheese curl into her mouth and licking her lips, ‘and one of the papers said something about neo-Nazis.’

‘Neo-Nazis?’

‘Attacking ageing partisans. The Reich will never die.’

Pallioti put his knife and fork down.

‘Are they?’ he asked. ‘Attacking ageing partisans?’

He had to admit, it was an angle he hadn’t even considered. It sounded too mad. But then again, the terms ‘neo-Nazi’ and ‘rational’ hardly went hand in hand.

‘I don’t know!’ Saffy said, laughing. ‘You’re the policeman. You tell me. It sounds crazy.’ Pallioti sighed.

‘Which paper?’ he asked.

She told him. He made a mental note to get hold of the editor, or the reporter, or someone, and see if this was just hot air or something of more unfortunate substance.

‘Actually,’ she added a moment later, ‘Maria mentioned it, too.’

‘Maria?’

There were a lot of Marias in Florence, but the one Saffy was talking about, Maria Grandolo, was a particular bugbear of Pallioti’s. The spoilt offspring of a wealthy banking family, she was one of the very few of Saffy’s friends whom he neither liked nor approved of. Which was unfortunate, at least for Maria, because according to Saffy, Maria had once had a major crush on her older brother. She seemed to have recovered from it, but one could never be sure. His sister looked at him and laughed.

‘Her cousins,’ she said, ‘started some sort of foundation, after the war, helping the partisans. Maria was just saying how awful it was. That this poor old fellow was killed.’ Saffy winked. ‘She seemed reassured knowing you were handling the case.’

Pallioti resisted the impulse to groan.

‘They’re responsible for those memorial plaques you see all over the place,’ Saffy added. ‘Her family. That’s how it came up.’

Pallioti had no idea about the Grandolos and memorial plaques, but he wasn’t surprised. The Grandolo family had, over the course of several centuries, done a great deal for the city of Florence. Most of it with the utmost discretion. With the unfortunate exception of Maria, they were private almost to the point of neurotic. His picture had almost never been in the papers, and his name was not plastered across the front of buildings, but Cosimo Grandolo, the head of the bank, who had recently died, had nonetheless been a philanthropist of note. Clinics, hospital wings, and education programmes had all been quietly underwritten. So Pallioti was not shocked to hear that the Grandolos had reached out to those who had sacrificed so much for their city and their country. It only confirmed his suspicion that Maria, whom he considered at best a nitwit, was some sort of genetic throwback – an equalizer, designed to ensure humanity didn’t evolve too fast.

‘She’s not that bad,’ Saffy said, laughing at him again. ‘Maria’s fun. And she has a good heart.’

Deciding prudence – or at least silence – was the better part of something or other, Pallioti merely smiled and reached for his wine.

Bernardo swept down on them with the next course. A platter of chicken livers sautéed and tossed in sage. Pallioti and Seraphina ate in silence, moving methodically from the chicken livers to the bowl of tiny golden roast potatoes that accompanied them, and back again. The sage reminded Pallioti of childhood winters. Tasting it, smoky and soft, he could see the pale grey-green leaves tinted with frost as they tumbled out of the pots that had lined the gravelled path to the garden of the house where his parents had lived, and where his mother had died.

He finished the plate reluctantly, knowing he did not need more and wanting it anyway.

‘So, was it?’ Saffy asked.

As she spoke, she took her glasses off, tucked them into her bag, and swirled the deep, almost purple, wine in the globe of her glass.

Pallioti did not need to ask what she was talking about. They had learned, over the years, to read each other’s minds with remarkable efficiency.

‘No,’ he said, pushing his empty plate away and picking up his own glass. ‘I thought it was at first, just a burglary. One more old person who assumes everyone at the door is a friend.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s what it looked like, on first glance. By which I mean, that’s what I expected. Some thug posing as the gas man barging his way into an apartment to steal the stereo. Or the BlackBerry. Or whatever it is people steal these days.’

‘The silver,’ Saffy said. ‘They still steal the silver.’

‘Well, not in this case. In fact, I don’t think they stole anything.’

‘No?’

‘No. There are’ – Pallioti glanced at her – ‘circumstances.’

Saffy smiled. ‘Are you going to tell me what they are?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not just at the moment.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘That bad?’

‘Pretty grim. And, strange,’ he said slowly. Then he added, ‘That’s where I was today, in Rome. To see the family. Among other things.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

She knew how much he hated this. How much any policeman hated having to pick through the lives of victims in front of the people who, whether they had loved them or not, were desperately trying to keep some vaguely familiar picture of their husband or wife or child intact.