The Villa Triste (42 page)

‘The rest of us get shot at. Find our houses in ruins, burnt, trampled, shat in. Have to beg for our bread. Starve. Dig fucking German mines out of our fields, if we live to get back to them. He goes to a fancy medical school. In America. Doctor Peter Bales.’

‘How did that happen?’

Achilleo Venta stared at his hands, lying half useless in his lap. ‘You want to know more, you’d better ask him.’

Pallioti nodded. ‘I’d like to.’

‘Well, it isn’t difficult!’ The old man’s head snapped up. Anger made his voice tremble. ‘He lives in Siena. Massimo, Massimo,’ he muttered, turning his chair away. ‘Biggest damn house on the damn block. Il Castello. Il Palazzo. Of course.’

Over the bent figure, the hunched shoulders and the faded wool of the blue beret, Pallioti met Eleanor Sachs’s eyes. Her face was a combination of confusion and excitement. They had found Massimo, almost without having to look, but neither of them had any idea what it was, exactly, that had upset Achilleo Venta quite so much. Apparently just the fact of his cousin’s existence. And perhaps that was enough. Perhaps it had always been like that, Pallioti thought, since they were little boys. Blood didn’t take much account of subtleties – of once removed or twice. Cousins might as well be siblings. Love and hate, jealousy, devotion, it was all knotted into a lifetime. Throw in a war, a struggle for survival, and who knew what could happen.

‘Signor Venta,’ he asked gently, ‘was your cousin Piero, Massimo, the leader of your GAP unit?’

Achilleo Venta looked up, his face momentarily blank, as if he was surprised to find Pallioti and Eleanor in the room. Then he shook his head and said, ‘Of course. Massimo was always the leader of everything, wasn’t he?’

‘Did he give you your name?’

‘Little Lamb.’ Achilleo Venta smiled, but his hands moved fretfully in his lap. ‘That’s what my mother called me when I was a baby,’ he said. ‘It made Massimo laugh. He thought it was a big joke.’

‘Not a very funny one.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

Achilleo Venta fingered the remaining mitten that dangled from his jacket sleeve.

‘I hated it,’ he said after a moment. ‘But he always had to be the boss. Or at least, he thought he did. Others thought different, but why would that matter?’

‘Which others?’ Pallioti bent down, trying to see the old man’s face. ‘Lilia?’ he asked.

It had been a guess, but Achilleo Venta nodded. He was watching his hands, the gnarled fingers plucking at a hole in the thumb of the mitten. He found a loose thread and yanked it.

‘Lilia,’ he said. ‘Lilia, and the other one. The boy. Not that they were ever apart.’

‘They were each other,’ Pallioti murmured, his eyes fastened on the old man’s face.

Achilleo Venta nodded. His hands stilled. ‘They were each other.’ He looked up at Pallioti. ‘Massimo couldn’t stand that,’ he said. ‘But he didn’t get everything, not everything he wanted.’

‘Not Lilia?’

Achilleo Venta smiled. His cracked lips stretched over toothless gums. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Lilia. And she was worth ten men.’

‘Were you in the hospital, still, in June?’

The old man nodded. His eyes were fixed somewhere behind Pallioti, and far farther away than that.

‘They took me to Fiesole. To the monastery where they kept the crazy people, and the invalids. The weaklings, like me. They said there was something wrong with my lungs. In June, Massimo came. He took me away, found a doctor. He got me drugs. Then we went back to the city. To shoot rats.’

‘And Lilia?’

The rheumy eyes looked back to Pallioti, fastened on his face.

‘Gone,’ the old man whispered. ‘All gone.’

‘Papa!’

Pallioti felt a rush of cold air and turned around to see a very large person standing in the open doorway. With her padded hunter’s coat, overalls and boots, it was hard to tell if she was a woman or a man. Only the braid of long dark hair hanging over her shoulder gave her away.

‘Signora Venta?’ Pallioti straightened up as she strode into the room.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she said, ignoring his outstretched hand. ‘And what the hell are you doing in my house?’

Pallioti regarded her for a moment, and decided
politesse
was pointless. He pulled his credentials out again.

‘Your father has been kind enough to give us his time.’ Pallioti caught Eleanor’s eye. ‘It was very gracious of him, and we are just going.’

‘Now, wait. Wait a goddamn minute,’ she exclaimed. ‘My father’s an old man, a hero. You can’t just come in here and—’

Agata Venta made a snatch for the proffered credentials but was not fast enough. Her hand was still hanging in mid-air and she was still protesting as Pallioti took Eleanor’s arm and propelled her quickly towards the door. He raised a hand to the old man, and was sure he saw Achilleo Venta smile.

A pair of dead pheasants lay across the top of the balustrade, their disjointed heads staring limply down into the yard. A broken shotgun had been dropped beside them. Pallioti could not see the dog; presumably it was chained up somewhere. As they emerged it let out a furious volley of barking. They had started down the steps, Eleanor just ahead of him, when a voice called out.

‘Dottore!’

Pallioti turned around.

In his haste to wheel after them, the rug had slipped off Achilleo Venta’s lap, revealing small bent legs encased in green woollen trousers that had seen better days. A red patch of sock showed through a hole in the slippers that were laced onto his feet like a child’s. Under the jaunty tilt of the faded blue beret, the old man’s face was lit up. His milky eyes blinked.

‘Do you know what I called him?’ he asked. ‘Massimo? I was his Little Lamb. But do you know what I called that bastard behind his back?’

Pallioti shook his head.

Agata Venta had come out onto the portico behind her father. She loomed, towering over the back of his chair. Her mouth had opened. She was reaching for him, but something in the old man’s voice stopped her.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Achilleo Venta said. He let out a bark of laughter. ‘That was my joke.’

Grasping the wheels, he rolled towards the top of the steps.

‘Jesus Christ.’ He jerked the brake on the chair. ‘That’s what I called Massimo.’ His bird-like chest rose and fell. His eyes fastened on Pallioti’s. ‘Do you want to know why?’ he asked.

Pallioti nodded. He could feel Eleanor Sachs’s hand, her fingers digging into his elbow.

‘Why?’

‘I called him Jesus Christ’ – the tendons in the old man’s neck strained as he leaned forward – ‘because it was a miracle. Jesus Christ,’ Achilleo Venta whispered. ‘Because he went to hell. Then, after three days, he came back from the dead.’

Chapter Thirty

‘What just happened back there?’

Neither of them had spoken since leaving the farm. Pallioti had reversed and turned quickly, driving down the rutted track, the sound of barking trailing after them like smoke. That had been five minutes ago. Now, Eleanor Sachs was staring out of the window. She ran a hand through her hair and shook her head.

‘He called Massimo Jesus Christ,’ she said, ‘because after three days he came back from the dead. What does that mean? I’m telling you,’ she added, ‘he’s lost it. Is this about Massimo being in the Villa Triste? Was it, what? Three days? Four? Why does it matter anyway? Who’s counting?’

Achilleo Venta, Pallioti thought. Achilleo Venta was counting. He’d been counting for the better part of sixty years.

The old man’s words bounced in his head – jumbled with pictures of a bright-blue mitten, stained woollen trousers, walnut skin creased and folded as a baby bird’s.

They came around a corner. He focused on the ribbon of road. He had turned in the opposite direction coming away from the farm, suddenly sure of where he was.

‘I have to think,’ he said, and abruptly turned left.

Eleanor Sachs clutched at the dashboard as the car swung across the road. They slowed, pulling into the empty apron of a parking lot. She looked around.

‘What is this place?’ she asked.

Pallioti glanced up. Beyond the Renault’s tinted glass, a damp field still littered with traces of last night’s snow stretched to the slope of Monte Siepi. In the middle of it the skeleton of a ruined church rose up, its windows empty, arches naked against the leaden sky. It was every bit as forlorn and magnificent as he remembered. A flight of crows lifted from the broken wall of a cloister, spiralled like black kites and landed again. He killed the engine.

‘San Galgano.’

Eleanor Sachs looked at him. ‘San Galgano?’

Pallioti nodded. ‘Built in the twelfth century, by the same monks who built Siena. Cistercians. They were excellent bookkeepers, among other things. It was abandoned by fifteen hundred. The campanile actually collapsed during Mass.’

‘Oh.’

Eleanor leaned forward, her hands resting on the dashboard. ‘I’ve heard about it,’ she said. ‘I’ve just never seen it before.’

In the grey light of the November day, the building seemed to float, its ruined walls melting into the whitening sky, the eye of its rose window staring, sightless, across centuries.

‘Galgano met St Michael,’ Pallioti said. ‘On the hill, over there. Afterwards, he gave up being a knight and became a hermit. When his family came to try to talk him out of it, he thrust his sword into a stone and offered it up to the archangels.’

He was aware of Eleanor watching him. He turned to her and smiled.

‘Later,’ he said, ‘three villains tried to steal it. But the stone cried out, and a wolf came and chewed their hands off. You can see them,’ he added. ‘There’s a chapel on the hill. The stone and the sword are still in the floor. The hands are in a glass case.’ He opened his door. ‘I have some calls to make. There’s a cafe, beyond the chapel. Let’s meet in ten minutes for a cup of coffee.’

She nodded without speaking and got out of the car. A minute later, Pallioti stood watching her over the roof of the Renault – a small dark figure, picking its way across a wet snowy field towards a ruin.

‘I don’t believe that’s a human hand,’ Eleanor Sachs said. ‘It looks more like a monkey’s paw to me. And it certainly isn’t eight hundred years old.’

She blew on the top of her coffee. Pallioti smiled.

‘I don’t suppose you believe Petrarch’s cat is Petrarch’s cat, either.’

‘Certainly not.’

She rolled her eyes and reached for a packet of sugar. Apart from the two women behind the counter, they were the only people in the cafe. It was barely noon. Eleanor Sachs emptied the sugar into her coffee and stirred it with a small plastic stick. Then she looked at him.

‘Did you make your phone calls?’

‘Yes.’

‘So,’ she asked, ‘will you tell me who Lilia is?’

‘The GAP unit – the three men were arrested during an attempted assassination, outside the Pergola Theatre, on Valentine’s Day. She was shot, but she got away.’

‘And she was the woman the all-powerful Massimo couldn’t have?’

Pallioti picked up his own cup and regarded her for a moment. The cold had put a blush of pink into her cheeks.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘At least, I think so.’

Eleanor eyed him.

‘Worth ten men. She must have been something.’

‘Yes, I think she was.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘I know that.’ Eleanor Sachs stared at him. ‘I told you that. I mean before, what happened to her? It’s important? Isn’t it?’ Her voice had a whine of insistence.

Pallioti put his cup down. The tone of her voice reminded him of Saffy at thirteen, of how utterly implacable she had been. As if she could read his mind, Eleanor leaned forward.

‘You owe me,’ she said. ‘Without me, you wouldn’t be here.’

She looked at him for a moment, then sipped her coffee.

‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘You’re the police. You’d have got here. Eventually. But you wouldn’t be here now. Not this fast. We had a deal.’ She glared at him. The blush in her cheeks had heightened, making her eyes even brighter. ‘You could at least tell me the truth.’

‘I don’t know what the truth is.’ Pallioti shook his head. ‘To be honest, I doubt we’ll ever know.’

Cosimo Grandolo’s warning to his wife ran in his head like a hamster on a wheel.
He said I could do more harm than good, seeing connections where they didn’t exist
.

Finally, he looked up and said, ‘Does the name Antenor mean anything to you?’

‘Antenor?’ Eleanor Sachs looked at him as if he had truly gone crazy. ‘What does Antenor have to do with anything? And it’s Antenora, by the way.’

‘So you do know who he was?’

‘I know what they are. They are two different things, a person and a place. Antenor was the person Antenora was named for. The guy who betrayed Troy.’

‘Betrayed Troy?’ Pallioti picked up his cup and put it down again. ‘I thought he was one of the elders.’

Eleanor smirked.

‘He was. That was the point. He was mad because they didn’t do what he said, give Helen back. So he betrayed the city to the Greeks. And, incidentally, founded Padua.’

She sipped her coffee and shook her head.

‘For what it’s worth,’ she added, ‘Antenora is in Dante’s ninth circle of hell. Canto thirty-two. It’s reserved for traitors.’

‘Traitors?’

Eleanor Sachs nodded. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s a particularly horrible place – not that much of the Inferno is a bargain. But Antenora is freezing cold, because Dante considered treason the coldest of human sins. It freezes the heart. And soul. Traitors are moral outcasts. Their lives may go on, but they’re cut off from humanity. Forever.’

She took another sip of her coffee and went on, falling happily into the full flow of a lecture on Dante. But Pallioti wasn’t listening. Instead, he was seeing the photograph Maria Valacci had given him, seeing the long, drawn features of her brother. The hero who had presented her with his medal. Who had told her she ‘deserved it more than he did’. Whose hand had rested so awkwardly on her shoulder, and whose face had been filled with such sadness because he did not belong, for decades had not belonged, to a humanity that deserved rewards. Or, perhaps, in his mind, to humanity at all. No wonder he had put himself into exile, locked himself away at the top of his palazzo, condemned himself to gaze down on the city he could not be part of. How cold, Pallioti wondered, had his grand apartment been? The solitary rooms where he eked out his days alone, surrounded by drawings of the most intimate of human acts.

‘Are you all right?’

Eleanor Sachs reached out and touched his hand.

Pallioti picked up his cup and nodded. She looked at him.

‘Who was Antenor?’ she asked. ‘I mean, in this story?’

‘I don’t know.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Probably no one.’

‘It was Massimo, wasn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘He was a traitor, wasn’t he?’ Her eyes searched his face. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it? It has to do with when he was at Villa Triste, doesn’t it? That’s what he meant, Achilleo Venta, about hell. What did Massimo do?’ she asked.

Pallioti shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

But he had a horrible feeling he did.
Gone
, Little Lamb had whispered,
All gone
. Lilia and the boy she would not be parted from. And Caterina, and Enrico, and their parents. All of them whose names Issa had counted out on her fingers and repeated like a litany night after night after night.
Enrico is dead. Carlo is dead. Papa is dead
.

But how? That was what he didn’t understand.

I called him Jesus Christ, because after three days he came back from the dead
.

He could see the beginning of it: the arrest, the bargain that was made in return for an ‘escape’. The fact that – what? – three, four days later, the safe house near the Pitti Palace, the one used after the weapons drop, had been raided. That would have been a valuable bargaining chip.
Too many people knew
, Issa said, and she was right. So, yes, he could see the beginning. But he couldn’t see the end. Because no one knew where Radio Juliet was meeting. No one knew about the house off the Via dei Renai. Only those attending had been told, at the very last minute, and all of them were dead. Isabella had seen them. With her own eyes. She had seen where they had dug the trench, and knelt down. Unless Caterina had been right all along, and somehow she had been followed.

Pallioti put his cup down. He could feel the parts of the picture, sliding about as if they were on the inside of a kaleidoscope, but he couldn’t make them come into focus. To do that, he would have to talk to Massimo.

His stomach felt sour, not just because he had slept badly, or because of the amount of coffee he had drunk, but because of what he was about to do. The treachery he had already begun to commit.

‘Eleanor—’

She looked at him and saw what he was about to say in his face.

‘No,’ Eleanor Sachs said.

She jumped to her feet, almost knocking her chair over. ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to see him, I’m coming with you.’

Pallioti shook his head. ‘You can’t. A car is on its way. This is police business now. Part of an investigation into a murder, probably two. I can’t possibly—’ ‘And this morning it wasn’t? You sure could “possibly” when you needed me! You promised!’

The women behind the counter had stopped talking. There was no sound at all in the cafe except the low murmur of a radio somewhere in a back room and the anguished huff of Eleanor Sachs’s breath. Pallioti stood up. He was a good head taller than she was.

‘No. No!’ Her voice rose in a wail of protest. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You cannot leave me behind now. It is not fair!’

‘A police driver is coming to pick you up. I’ll wait here with you until he arrives and return your car this evening.’

He was determined to make sure she was returned to Florence. If he left her with her own car, she would simply follow him. Trail after him like a stray puppy he would be forced to kick.

‘No!’

Looking at the angry hurt on her small upturned face, Pallioti saw the journey she had been on – the loneliness of it, mingled with hope – and felt an unwelcome wave of sympathy. Aware of how dangerous it was, he pushed it back. The effort was about as successful as closing the door on a flood.

‘You can’t,’ Eleanor Sachs said again. ‘You promised me.’

She bowed her head, and dug in the pocket of her jacket. Finding a tissue, she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she crumpled it in her hand, speaking fast without looking at him and so low that the women had to lean over the counter to hear.

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You just can’t do this to me.’

Painfully aware that he looked like a father bullying his teenage daughter, or worse, an ageing Lothario who, for some demented reason, had brought his child lover to the Abbey of San Galgano to abandon her in a sandwich bar, Pallioti took her shoulder and guided her to the far corner of the room. The women behind the counter did not even pretend not to be listening. The next time he came here there would probably be mouldy ham in his panini and salt in his coffee.

‘Eleanor,’ he said. ‘Please. I’m grateful for your help, and I don’t mean to be unkind, but you must understand—’

To his surprise, she nodded. Then she looked up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but her lip was no longer trembling.

‘I have been looking for almost three years,’ she said. ‘I know you probably think it’s crazy, and maybe it is. It’s damaged my career. It’s trashed my marriage. But my father is dead. I never even knew the people who raised him. I don’t know who I am, and I have nowhere else to look. I have turned over all the rocks. I have made an ass of myself chasing you. I’ve done everything I can.’

She paused and took a deep breath. Pallioti could feel the flood gates giving way, the water tumbling in and rising around him.