The Villa Triste (51 page)
Pallioti looked around the room. At the soft pools of light and hollows of shadow. At the dense carpets and the polished furniture. He wondered whether, if he listened, he could hear the echoes of conversations that had taken place here, the running of children’s feet, the whispers of discontent, the old jokes and repeated refrains that made up a family. There was no television. Probably, it was upstairs, in a study or a library, where it could not disturb the perfect symmetry of this house. She had been watching, he thought, perhaps with her sick husband beside her, or perhaps alone, probably considering turning it off – possibly only half paying attention. Until the woman in the blue dress squawked out another question, and shoved the microphone into Massimo’s face.
The silence in the room deepened and thickened until Pallioti thought he could hear the snow falling outside, drifting against the walls, fingering its way into the slats of the shutters. In the fire, a flame cracked and guttered. He reached out and fingered the edge of the paper that lay on the table. The black characters of Guillermo’s neat, even hand flickered in the firelight, as though they might come alive and jump off the page.
‘I may have found your son,’ he said. ‘Or your nephew. But probably I haven’t. Probably,’ he said, smiling sadly, ‘I just wanted to help someone.’
Pallioti got to his feet, feeling old, as if time had defeated him. He picked up his coat.
‘He lived in Cleveland, Ohio. In the United States. And then in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He died a year ago of lung cancer. His parents were Italian, Victor and Catherine. Their last name was Faber. Shortened from Fabbionocci. I don’t know if that means anything to you. But if it does, he had a daughter. Her name is Eleanor Sachs. She taught at Exeter University, in England. She’s going back to America.’ Pallioti nodded at the paper on the table. ‘It’s all written down there.’
He finished buttoning his coat. Then he looked into Signora Grandolo’s face, knowing that this was the last time he would see her. He realized that he would have liked to have touched her again, to have felt the warm firmness of her hand, and smelled just once more the exotic sharp note of her perfume.
He reached into his pocket. His fingers curled around the worn cover of the little red book. Giving it up was like giving up a lover.
He leaned over and gently placed it on the table.
‘I believe,’ Pallioti said, ‘that this is yours.’
It was only a few days later that Pallioti heard that Marta Buoni-faccio had returned to her apartment in the palazzo where Giovanni Trantemento had been killed. He was busy at the time, and his first instinct was to forget about her. He had already started the process of checking Signora Grandolo’s whereabouts. Not that it mattered. He knew he would find that she had been in Apulia, staying with her family in the hotel Maria had been so enthusiastic about. Possibly he would find that she had had reason to be in the countryside south of Siena from time to time as well, and that no one had seen her on the afternoon Roberto Roblino died, or the morning when Piero Balestro was killed. He would look, but he would not see her car on the security tapes from the garage near Giovanni Trante-mento’s apartment, or on Balestro’s cameras. Nor would he find a licence for a Sauer 38H, or a purchase receipt for a box of ammunition, or any record of her buying men’s gloves.
And in the end, he would not apply for a warrant. Because there was no point. The winking eye of a security camera could not capture her any more than he could. She had come and gone leaving no evidence, nothing at all. Except one black crumbling piece of Bakelite. That was it. The rest was nothing but a story. And Signora Grandolo was just an old lady.
Like salt, the case left a dry taste in his mouth.
So, his first instinct was to forget about Marta Buonifaccio. To put the past behind him and, in the dreaded parlance of the day, ‘move on’. But he had agreed to have dinner with Enzo, to talk over the constraints of the budget, and the prioritization of cases for the new year, and the palazzo was only a minor detour, a few blocks from the new restaurant where he had had Guillermo book a table. For some reason he could not quite put his finger on, he no longer gravitated to Lupo.
It was 6.30 when they arrived at Giovanni Trantemento’s building. The street lamps glowed a sulphurous yellow, throwing shadows upwards onto the rusticated surface of the facade. If anything the canyon between the palazzos seemed steeper, the doorways darker. Enzo, having usurped Pallioti’s driver yet again, scanned the entrances of the alleys as if any number of hazards might be lurking in them. Then he pulled up in front of the door.
‘Shall I come with you?’
Pallioti shook his head and opened the car door.
‘I’ll be five minutes,’ he said. ‘Well, perhaps ten.’
He could not envision that his conversation with Marta would be anything but short and to the point. Looking back on it, he realized he should have known better.
The entrance hall was unchanged. Stepping into it still felt like diving into dirty water. The light was not only low, it seemed to be actually murky, as if the centuries had collected and blossomed like algae. The lamp cast the same halo of light onto the mail table, where Marta’s presence was immediately evident. There was not a stray envelope or flyer in sight. Those that were present were stacked in neat little piles, their corners perfectly aligned at ninety-degree angles. One of them would be from the taxi firm Pallioti had used as an informant. Taking Cara Fratto’s advice to heart – that flyers would not be wasted on houses where there was no business – he had dropped by the office of First Class Taxis and confirmed that they had, indeed, delivered Marta Buonifaccio to Peretola Airport at four o’clock in the afternoon exactly three days before he made his last visit. This lunchtime they had called to inform him that they had just collected her and delivered her home. She had, apparently, been in Rimini.
At first, it had struck Pallioti as a strange place for an out-of-season visit. Then he had realized that the once-grand seaside resort still had two distinctive draws. Prices – it was ‘once grand’, and thus cheap, especially at the end of November. And a casino.
Marta’s apartment door did not have a bell. He knocked, his knuckles rapping the polished wood. The door opened before he could lift his hand again.
‘Ispettore.’
The greeting, if you could call it that, was issued with something less than enthusiasm.
‘Signora Buonifaccio. Welcome home. Do you mind if I come in for a moment?’
She looked as if she would have liked to have said yes, she did mind, very much, but couldn’t summon the courage to do it. Instead, she simply nodded and stepped back. Entering the tiny sitting room, Pallioti felt like a bully. He told himself not to be stupid, that he was just doing his job. He turned to her and smiled in an attempt to make up for it.
The effect was the complete opposite of what he had intended. Marta Buonifaccio paled visibly. When he added, in what he thought was his kindest voice, ‘I am so sorry to disturb you, but I wondered if I could ask you a few questions?’ her small, solid figure became still.
‘Please,’ she said, when she finally remembered to breathe. ‘Sit. What can I get you, Dottore?’
Pallioti sat, in the same chair he had occupied before, not because he wanted to, but because he hoped it would put her at ease. He didn’t approve of what she’d done. But he didn’t want her to drop dead of fright.
‘Nothing, thank you. Nothing,’ he said again. ‘I just have a couple of questions.’
Marta nodded. She did not sit down, but stood before him playing the Russian doll again, disappearing inside herself, again and again and again, hands folded, eyes dropped to her feet.
Pallioti shifted uncomfortably, almost wishing he had not come, that he was not compelled, like a bitch in heat, to seek out the answer to every question – to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was right.
‘Signora Buonifaccio,’ he said, now wanting to get this over as quickly as possible, ‘I am afraid that you took Signor Trantemento’s wallet, when you found his body.’
She looked at him, expression draining out of her face.
‘I suspect that it was on the desk, beside his keys,’ Pallioti said. ‘Probably where he had placed it the last time he came in, the afternoon before, just after he had cashed a cheque for five hundred euros.’
She neither agreed nor disagreed with him.
‘I don’t think you went through his pockets,’ Pallioti added, trying to make this sound better, as if merely stealing from the dead was somehow more acceptable than fleecing them.
‘I suspect you just saw the wallet and took it. Then, once you had called the police, you realized that you didn’t want to be found with it. So you removed the cash and went outside and threw the wallet into the alley. That’s why you were wearing a headscarf inside, so we wouldn’t see that your hair was wet. And that’s when the letter got wet, too, wasn’t it? The mail had arrived earlier, before it started to rain. But the letter was still in your apron pocket when you went out to get rid of the wallet.’
He looked at her for a moment.
‘I don’t think you meant to steal the letter,’ he said. ‘And you didn’t. You gave it to me, which was entirely proper. But you did that after you had opened it. After you had removed the money orders for three thousand British pounds’ worth of euros. It must have felt thick. The paper for those money orders is quite stiff. And perhaps you knew, or understood, that given the nature of Signor Trantemento’s business, he sometimes received money orders, perhaps even cash, in the mail?’
He looked at her, waiting for at least some acknowledgement. Or even a sign that he had spoken. None was forthcoming. Marta Buonifaccio just stood there, in the middle of her sitting room, facing him like a statue.
Pallioti was beginning to have an unfortunate sense of déjà vu. Signora Grandolo, at least, had been listening to him. He was quite sure of that. He had had the sense, even if she had not replied, that they were in a sort of silent conversation, that the tension in the air could have been plucked like a finely tuned string.
Here, however, the air was dead. If he did not know better, he might have thought that the woman standing in front of him, in her flowered apron and olive-green cardigan, with her cap of curled hair and new felt slippers, was stone deaf.
‘Signora Buonifaccio,’ Pallioti said. ‘Is there anything you would like to tell me?’
Nothing had been stolen from either Roblino or Balestro. It was the anomaly that had driven him here. Now he wished that it hadn’t.
The news came on the television. The talking head of a news-reader, who might have been the blue-dress lady, yammered silently.
‘Anything at all you would like to say?’ Pallioti asked.
This time, at least, she shook her head. Then she looked down at her feet again.
Pallioti began to feel ridiculous. Finally, he pulled the cuffs of his shirt, aligned his cufflinks – little ovals of shiny black onyx set in a thin gold rim – and got to his feet. With the two of them standing in it, the little space felt like a cell. In his black suit and black overcoat, Pallioti towered over her. Marta Buonifaccio did not look up.
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ he said, finally. ‘I’ll let myself out.’
‘Holy Mother of God! What is it with me and old women?’
Enzo raised his eyebrows as Pallioti slid into the passenger seat of the car.
‘She wouldn’t speak to me,’ Pallioti said. ‘Not a word. She let me in, all right. She didn’t really want to, but she did – invited me to sit. Then stood there and didn’t say a word.’
‘She didn’t deny taking the wallet? Or the money?’
‘No. She didn’t say anything. Nothing.’
Pallioti raised his hands and dropped them on his knees.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was so sure I was right. But who knows? Who knows? Perhaps Giovanni Trantemento was burgled and robbed and just happened to be gobbling a pound of salt for lunch! It doesn’t matter now, anyway,’ he muttered, aware that he was sounding like a sulky teenager. ‘I just would have liked to have known,’ he added. ‘I wasn’t going to throw the lonely old woman in jail.’
Enzo, who had listed to this outburst without saying anything, looked at him.
‘What’s her history?’
‘Her history?’
‘Yes. Do you know?’
Pallioti threw his hands in the air. In fact he did know. Marta Buonifaccio had turned up, like everyone else, in the trawl Guillermo had made at the end of the investigation.
‘I mean, during the war?’ Enzo said.
‘She was – I don’t see what this has to do with anything – she was a chambermaid, at the Excelsior. She was, I don’t know, booted out, fired. Accused of stealing. That’s what made me so sure of this.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘She – she went to join her aunt. On a farm.’ Pallioti stopped talking suddenly, aware of what he was about to say. ‘On the Monte Sole massif,’ he added. ‘They were killed, all of them. Everyone but her. In the massacre.’
‘September 1944.’
Pallioti nodded, wondering when, exactly, he had become such an insensitive clod. He’d never even asked the poor woman about her family.
‘Afterwards,’ he said, ‘she got back to Florence. Somehow. She got married. Had a life.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I still don’t see what that has to do with any of this?’
Enzo shrugged.
‘Neither do I, exactly.’ He opened his door.
‘Where are you going?’ Pallioti asked.
‘Five minutes.’ Enzo ducked his head in and smiled. ‘The engine’s running. Turn the heat on if you get cold.’
He slammed the door, turned down the collar of his leather jacket, then caught the door of the palazzo as a couple stepped out. They looked at him, slightly alarmed. Whatever he said reassured them. A moment later they smiled broadly and nodded, starting down the street arm in arm.
Pallioti drummed his fingers on the dashboard. He decided to count backwards from a hundred, betting himself that Enzo would reappear before he got to fifty. At thirty-two, he gave up, and played with the radio until he got a re-broadcast of
Turandot
made some years ago at La Scala.
He had just about decided that in fact he had been wrong all along, and that Marta Buonifaccio had killed everyone, including Enzo; and was wondering how long he ought to wait before he called for back-up, when the palazzo door swung open and Enzo Saenz reappeared. The street light caught his profile, making him hawkish and sinister. He slipped into the front seat of the car, quick and quiet as an eel.
‘The five hundred euros from the wallet,’ he said, ‘she took that. And the money orders. She cashed it down the street, no problem. There’s a
tabaccaio
guy who does it under the table. She was going to throw the wallet out of the window, on her way down the stairs. But she wasn’t tall enough to reach and the windows don’t open anyway. She didn’t want to go back into Trantemento’s apartment, have to step over the body and all, and she was worried about fingerprints. So she took it out and threw it in the alley. Then she called the police. She thought he’d been burgled, so she didn’t think it would matter. She’s sorry,’ Enzo said. ‘She didn’t mean to cause any trouble. And she had a couple of big wins in Rimini so she’s going to write to Maria Valacci, apologize and pay her the money back. I said we’d leave it there.’
Pallioti looked at him slack jawed.
‘How on earth—’ he asked. ‘Why wouldn’t she talk to me?’
‘Because she’s terrified of you.’
