The Villa Triste (18 page)

‘His mother was Jewish,’ Pallioti said. ‘He got her out,’ he added. ‘Giovanni Trantemento. He got his mother out, and his sister, during the Occupation. To Switzerland.’

‘That can’t have been easy.’

‘No. But the partisans were doing it. And others.’

‘I can’t imagine that,’ Saffy said suddenly. ‘Can you? What that must have been like? To be hunted like that?’ She put her wine glass down. ‘Or to risk your life like that – saving other people? People you didn’t even know. I can’t imagine the courage that takes.’

Pallioti smiled. A strand of blonde hair had escaped her ponytail and whispered against her chin. ‘Yes, you can,’ he said.

Bernardo was closing in on them, two tiny glasses hooked through his fingers. His other ham-sized fist gripped a bottle of grappa. He poured two thimblefuls of the bright clear liquid and whisked their plates away.

‘
Salute!
’ Saffy emptied hers in one mouthful, rolling the dense, syrupy liquor on the back of her tongue. ‘You’re busy Sunday, right?’

Pallioti nodded. If it was even remotely possible, he shared Sunday lunch with his sister and brother-in-law and whatever assorted friends Saffy had rounded up. This week, however, even that sacrosanct afternoon had been sacrificed to the fraud case.

‘And I know, no matter what you say, that you won’t make it tomorrow. So, come on.’ Saffy put her glass down. ‘I want to show you something. Then we can go for gelato.’

The Benvoglio Gallery was on the western edge of the Oltrarno, beyond the high-fashion enclave of the Borgo San Jacopo and the boutiques of the Via Santo Spirito. Unlike its trendier counterparts, the area still had a faintly raffish air. On an early winter night with the lamps throwing muzzy haloes into the damp dark, it was still possible to believe that artists worked here.

The huge honey-coloured facade of the Carmine, blank-faced and rough-hewn, loomed behind them as Saffy and Pallioti threaded their way through parked cars and chained Vespas. Its piazza was a parking lot. There was no view from its steps. It had none of the grace of Santo Spirito, or the charm of San Felice, or the serenity of San Miniato. Perhaps, Pallioti thought, that was why it was one of his favourite places in the city. The Carmine made no effort to seduce. He turned and looked back at it. Floodlights threw hard shadows across its front, making it a place of foreboding. A fitting home for the exile from Eden.

Saffy’s gallery had been once been a chapel. Then a warehouse. She had spent a small fortune gutting and lighting the interior.

‘Here.’

After unlocking the door, she took Pallioti by the shoulders and guided him into the centre of the dark space. He heard her step away, and for a second was left suspended in darkness with pictures he could not see floating on the walls around him. Then she switched on the lights.

Directly in front of him was a panorama of cloud – a high, thin, pale-blue scudding, broken only by the black lacings of winter treetops. Next to it was a peeling doorway, its lintel heaped with snow. Three steps led up to it. One dark set of footprints led away. An empty room with a single table and chair was overlooked by a window rimed with ice. A fallow field was striped with dark ploughed lines of earth. The exhibition title,
The Winter Line
, hung from the high ceiling, the words hovering, engraved on glass. Below them floated a print of a sculpted angel. Grey on grey, the fluted wings stood out against the rippled veins of a marble wall. Next to it was a photograph of gateposts. Snow piled at their bases. It mounded over thin fingers of grass and speckled the fields that lay on either side of the white drive that ran away, beginning and ending in a gauze of fog.

15 November 1943

Our neighbours, the Banducci – Signor, Signora, and their two children, boy and girl – are living with us. Temporarily. Please God, let it only be temporarily. I am sorry. I know I should feel pity for them, and I do. But I don’t like them, nonetheless. They have lived in our street for perhaps ten years, but we have always avoided them, as they were known to be Fascists of the more devoted kind. They kept a picture of themselves on the mantel, taken years ago with Mussolini, and talk a great deal about The Glory of Italy, and the redemptive quality of Mass.

Or at least the Signora does. She is obsequious and pushy at the same time, and eyes our possessions – the furniture, and silver – and comments on their quality. Or on what she judges to be the lack of it. She fingers things when she thinks no one is noticing, runs her thumb along the edge of the gilt frames checking for dust, and stares into the flowered Venetian glass in the hall as if she might find something suspicious there. Her husband is much quieter. Mostly, he hovers in the sitting room looking bewildered – which is, I suppose, not surprising. Their house caught fire, in the middle of the night, and burned to the ground. It is a small miracle that they got out at all, and they have lost everything. So as I said, I should feel sorry for them. The Signora talks endlessly about going to Ravenna to live with their cousins, whose villa is much finer than ours. There, they will each have their own room instead of having to share our two guest rooms as they do here. The children chorus this, as if it’s a song they have been taught. The boy wears Enrico’s old trousers from his childhood trunk. The girl, one of my old dresses. Mama caught her stealing yesterday. It was only a stale roll, but bread is increasingly scarce. When Mama took it away from her, saying we all must share, the child hissed like a cat. Later, I found her in Issa’s room.

I had gone upstairs and noticed the door ajar. When I went to close it, I saw her – the Banducci girl – sitting at Issa’s dressing table.

She turned, her face caught in the light from the hallway, and I gave a little cry. I thought she was bleeding, that she had cut or bitten herself. Then I saw Issa’s red lipstick in her hand. The girl smiled, and her crimson mouth was blurred and huge, like a clown’s.

I was so startled by the sight that I jumped forward and grabbed her. As she stumbled off the bench, her arm caught a bottle of Issa’s perfume and knocked it to the floor. Now the rug reeks of gardenia. It seeps under the door and drifts into the hall, hovering, as if Isabella is standing there herself.

The girl cried and I apologized to her. I took her down to the kitchen and washed her face and made her sweet tea, with extra sugar. I even gave her a biscuit. But she still eyed me as if she thought that at any moment I might eat her. Sitting across from her, looking at her, this frightened little girl, I longed for Emmelina. Yesterday, on the way to work, I cycled past her building. But the shutters were all closed. I suppose they really have gone to Monte Sole.

Poor Emmelina. And the poor Banducci. This is a sign of how mad we are all becoming – like weasels packed in a cage. I know I’m being unfair. Everyone is tired, and cold, and frightened. This morning, the girl, who seems to have recovered, kept asking me about the hospital and what I do. I’m sure she meant nothing. She’s only a child. But even so, on my way in to start my shift, I stopped three times. I looked in shop windows. I changed direction. I went into San Felice, sat, waited, and came out. I could feel my feet freezing. And my hands. But I saw no faces that looked familiar. No one I recognized at all.

I decided to stay at the hospital after that. I had a cot moved into my cupboard of an office, and told the Head Sister I was happy to sleep there in case I was needed. Which I am, because our staff are vanishing. Two nurses have disappeared in the last ten days. I don’t know if they have been arrested, but it’s certainly possible. We hear from Rome that the Jewish neighbourhood has been attacked and hundreds sent away on trains, and here everyone is being arrested – for nothing. Anything. Yesterday, I saw two people, a couple, dragged out of a cafe by the Banda Carita and thrown into a van. Everyone looks the other way. No one dares say anything. The arrested are taken to the house on the Via Bolognese that everyone calls the Villa Triste. Sometimes family members stand outside. They weep and cry until they are chased away. We know that people are tortured there. And we hear of worse . . .

Chapter Seven

Pallioti sighed. He had just finished relaying to Enzo, over an espresso and in some detail, the not-very-productive results of his visit to Rome the day before. They had agreed, of course, that the family would be looked into. Alibis would be given a hard knock to see if they cracked. But neither of them seriously believed that either Maria or Antonio Valacci had sneaked up to Florence and wielded the gun, or paid someone else to do it for them. It was possible, of course. Anything was possible. But without saying so, both of them had the nagging suspicion that, as a solution, it would be too easy. Out of character, so to speak. Because so far, nothing about Giovanni Trantemento’s death was turning out to be easy.

Enzo glanced at him. They had eschewed the police building’s shiny new cafeteria in favour of a dark hole of a bar a few blocks away – partly because it was more private, and partly because, like little boys, they enjoyed escaping because they could. Pallioti, who had been drumming his fingers on the edge of the table while he spoke, forced himself to stop.

Enzo’s update had hardly been more encouraging than his own. The investigating team had more or less come to a dead end on the gay escort theory, pursuing it as far as it went and coming up with nothing even remotely promising. They were still digging into Giovanni Trantemento’s business associates. The English lord was apparently on holiday in Sri Lanka or India, or somewhere else where the British went to wear white linen. The embassy in London was tracking him down. In the meantime, along with the Valacci family, all the other beneficiaries of the will would be given a thorough going-over. But, barring any startling revelations, none of them seemed so eager for the money that they’d been reduced to either taking out a contract on the old man or buying a gun themselves. Never mind the salt. The truth was, seventy-two hours after Giovanni Trantemento had been murdered, they essentially had no leads. No clue as to who had killed him, or why.

Pallioti had had the pleasure of beginning the morning by informing the Mayor of this fact. After that, his mood had been further soured by a call from the press office, which had confirmed what Saffy had told him the night before. Goings-on in Rome were presently both slow and dull. The football clubs had not hired or fired anyone of note and the Prime Minister was out of the country. As a result, the papers had begun to run with the Trantemento story. In addition to speculation about neo-Nazis, one had carried an editorial on The State’s Failure to Protect Citizens in Their Homes, and another on the dire consequences for Societies Whose Police Forces Failed to Care for the Elderly. As a result, a press conference was now inevitable. It was scheduled for this evening, in time to go live on the news. Pallioti was the designated sacrificial goat. It was one of the less welcome perks of the job. And just now, doubly odious, because he had absolutely nothing to say.

‘Tell me again,’ he said, ‘about the Chess Club.’

Enzo shrugged.

Giovanni Trantemento had left the Alexandria Chess Club what was turning out to be an increasingly substantial sum. The club was apparently run by one Sergio Pavlakoff, the son of the Russian emigré who had started it just after the war, and admittedly it didn’t sound like a likely front for money laundering, murder, or any other nefarious activities. But, let’s face it, Pallioti thought, they were clutching at straws.

‘It’s off the Poggio Imperiale,’ Enzo said. ‘In the original villa. You know those places?’

Pallioti did. Most of the villas on the hill were enormous and had been built in the mid nineteenth century – not, in his opinion, a happy time for architecture. Those that remained in private hands had decayed quietly, tended by their increasingly desperate owners who increasingly resorted, with some inventiveness, to turning them into things like dentist’s offices. And chess clubs.

‘It’s just been refurbished,’ Enzo said. ‘But I don’t think there’s likely to be anything there. Donations were given by the members, and Trantemento was generous. I saw a receipt. Signor Pavlakoff keeps immaculate books. Beyond that,’ he added, ‘he’s either a very good liar or he genuinely had no idea that he’d come in for a windfall.’

‘What about friends? Other connections there?’

Enzo smiled. ‘I asked, and he looked at me as if I was mad. Or had just dropped my pants.’

Pallioti raised his eyebrows.

‘I didn’t understand, apparently,’ Enzo said. ‘The members don’t go there to socialize. They go to play chess. Quite a lot of them are well known, tournament players. Trantemento went regularly, two evenings a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. He arrived at seven, usually played two games and was absolutely punctual. I gather all of them are. “Set your clocks by them,” was the expression used.’

‘And he’d been doing this for how long?’

‘Forty-one years.’

‘Good Lord.’

Enzo nodded.

‘And after all that time’ – Pallioti was finding this hard to believe – ‘Signor – Pavlov, or whatever his name is—’

‘Pavlakoff.’

‘He had no opinion about Trantemento?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ Enzo shook his head. ‘He had no opinion about whether or not he’d made any friends – and yes, I have the membership lists and we’re going through them. Signor Pavlakoff didn’t have an opinion on his social skills one way or the other. He had quite definite opinions, however, when it came to Antenor’s chess skills.’

Pallioti frowned. ‘Antenor?’ he asked, wondering if he had missed something crucial here. ‘Who the hell’s Antenor?’

‘Antenor,’ said Enzo, suppressing a smile, ‘was Giovanni Trante-mento’s alias.’

‘His alias?’

Enzo nodded. ‘His tournament name. Apparently they all have names they play under. Or rather, should I say, they play under their ‘true’ names.’

Of course, Pallioti thought, attempting not to roll his eyes. What fun would a club be without secret names?

‘Audacity,’ Enzo said. ‘Plato, Hadrian, Augustus. I think Socrates was mentioned. And Vulcan. Hammer of the Gods. Given that they’re all male and the average age is about seventy-five, it’s rather sweet, really.’

Philosophers, Emperors, Virtues and Gods. And why not, Pallioti thought. Perfectly ordinary old men sat down at a little table, moved pieces around a board, and for a few hours became daring, invincible, and wise.

‘Unfortunately,’ Enzo added, ‘while Signor Pavlakoff was undoubtedly grateful for Giovanni Trantemento’s cheque for lighting fixtures – and I suspect was genuinely upset to hear the old boy was dead – he was quite ruthless when it came to Antenor.’

Pallioti sat up. ‘Ruthless, how?’

Enzo shook his head, as much to tell Pallioti not to get excited as anything else. ‘Ruthless, in that he didn’t think he played very well.’

‘Even after forty-one years?’

Enzo laughed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘That was my reaction. But he set me straight. Chess isn’t something you can learn.’ He raised his fingers in quotes. ‘It is a gift.’

‘And Antenor didn’t have it?’

‘Apparently not. He was proficient, and I believe the other word was “methodical”. Possibly “conscientious”. But inspiration was never mentioned.’

‘Talk about damned by faint praise.’

‘Yes,’ Enzo said. He glanced at his watch, the look on his face suggesting that he ought to be getting back. ‘That’s what I thought, too. Don’t worry,’ he added, as they got to their feet. ‘I don’t think Signor Pavlakoff shares his thoughts with the regular clientele. I got the impression that if he did, he probably wouldn’t have any members left.’

No, Pallioti thought, probably not. But people usually knew anyway. Or at least had the ghost of a suspicion. And often a good deal more than that. Self-delusion wasn’t anywhere near as widespread as common wisdom liked to believe.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he asked quickly. ‘Anything on the neo-Nazis?’ He had called Enzo as soon as he had left Saffy’s gallery, only to find that, unlike him, Enzo had read the newspapers.

‘I spoke to the reporter.’ Enzo shrugged into his leather jacket. ‘He’s thinking about it,’ he said. ‘He wants to talk to his source.’

‘Do you think his “source” actually knows anything – or was this just the idea of the month for the editorial page?’

Pallioti tried to keep the cynicism out of his voice, and failed.

Enzo shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He’s not a bad guy. He’s helped me before.’

One of the legacies of Enzo’s past work with the Angels, as the city’s undercover division was informally known, was his extensive network of contacts across the city. Many of them
sub rosa
. Glancing at him, at today’s rather ratty jacket and distinctly worn running shoes, Pallioti suspected that he might be on his way now to meet someone under a bridge, or in a corner of one of the less salubrious parks. It was one of their unspoken agreements that he never asked. And Enzo never told.

‘I’m going to give him a couple more hours to think it over before I start making his life really hellish.’ The smile that flicked across Enzo’s face was distinctly wolfish. ‘If I get anything in time for tonight,’ he added, ‘I’ll tell you.’

Pallioti nodded, wishing that made him feel better. ‘Who was he anyway?’ he asked suddenly as they started towards the door.

‘Who was who? The reporter?’

‘No. Antenor.’

‘Oh. Him.’ Enzo stood aside as a man reading a newspaper pushed through the glass-panelled door and wove through the tables to the bar without so much as looking up. ‘I had to ask the same thing,’ he said. ‘Even Signor Pavlakoff admitted that he had to go look it up.’

‘And?’

‘And Antenor was an elder of Troy. An advisor to King Priam. He may also have founded Padua.’

‘Padua?’

Enzo nodded. ‘After the war, presumably,’ he added as they stepped out onto the street. ‘Which I gather wouldn’t have happened, if Antenor had had his way.’

‘Oh?’

The day was bright with a distinct chill under the sunshine.

Enzo pulled his ponytail out from the collar of his jacket.

‘Antenor,’ he said, ‘apparently advised the Trojans to return Helen. He didn’t think she was worth it. According to Signor Pavlakoff, he took one look at the armies outside the city, and told the Trojans to give her back post haste, or they’d be destroyed.’

27 November 1943

It was three days before I went home. The Banducci were still there, but much subdued. Even the children. Signor Banducci was, if anything, more nervous than before. They were still intent on going to Ravenna, but the trains are difficult. Driving is not possible, as very few people still have a car – at least one with wheels on it – and there is very little petrol. Beyond that, it is dangerous. Anything on the roads risks being strafed by the Allies on the off-chance that it might be German. Still, Mama knew someone who knew someone. She believed she had secured travel passes for them to go the next day, by train.

She told me all this as I was eating at the kitchen table. (I had quite deliberately managed to come home too late to share supper.) After I was finished, I went upstairs to change out of my uniform and found my bedroom door locked. When I went back down to ask Mama for the key, she dug it out of her pocket, and without saying anything, held her hand open to show me she had the keys to Issa’s and Rico’s rooms as well. The girl was watching this little pantomime, looking around the edge of the kitchen door. She backed away as I came through the dining room, moving into the corner by the sideboard, but not before I noticed that the clip she had in her hair was the one I left in my dressing table drawer.

I was too tired to care. I didn’t look back as I heard her following me up the stairs. The hallway still smelled of gardenia. It was very cold. There is almost no fuel. I sensed the child standing behind me as I opened my door. When I went in, she moved closer, then stopped just outside and stood staring at me, my hair clip hanging in her limp curls, one of my old dresses too tight around her belly, the frill sticking out below her sweater. I stared back at her. Then I closed the door and locked it. I didn’t hear her walk away. A moment later, when I took my uniform off and opened my wardrobe, I saw that all the tiny satin buttons had been pulled off the back of my wedding dress. They lay, scattered across the floor, white as teeth.

I stood there, staring at them, those little flecks, and suddenly – as one understands all at once when one is very tired – I understood. I had never thought about it much before, none of us had. But now I realize that it does not matter if the Banducci go to Mass. Or if Signor Banducci was a party member, or even if they were photographed with Mussolini. The Fascists may have cared a great deal about such things, but the Germans do not. The Banducci villa did not burn by accident. It burned because they are Jewish.

I was so ashamed at my own stupidity that at first I put Lodovico’s picture into my night table drawer because I couldn’t bear to have him look at me. Then I heard his voice whispering in the dark, telling me that he understood, that everyone makes mistakes – everyone is afraid and cold and stupid sometimes – and that he loves me and that I am precious. So I took it out again, and curled up, and clasped my pillow, and and closed my eyes. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I will give her all my hair clips. Tomorrow I will make this right.