The Faces of Angels (64 page)

‘Both of his past landladies,' Pallioti is saying, ‘have told us he was very interested in photography. The most recent even let him set up a dark room in the basement. Unfortunately, we've had to tear her wall down. Marcello did some repair work for her, and made a cache for his souvenirs at the same time. Incidentally, he told her not long ago he needed to photograph buildings because he was thinking of becoming an architect.'

I close my eyes and nod. I have an awful feeling I know which building he was photographing.

‘He also had an impressive collection of photos of all the women. Before and after they were killed,' Pallioti adds. ‘We found them under his bed.' Neither of us comment on how similar this was to my manila envelope. How Marcello and I were mirroring each other, closing ourselves in our rooms at night and communing with the same dead faces.

Pallioti gets up and goes to the window, leans on the sill with his back to me.

‘I am afraid,' he says, ‘that the fact he knew you were back in the city was our fault. After the accident he kept in touch with a couple of friends from the academy. He was apparently particularly interested in the newspaper reports of your attack and your husband's murder. He followed it closely. So when your name came up on one of our lists when you re-entered the country, naturally his friend noticed it and mentioned it to him. Marcello was working odd jobs at the time, and the vacancy at the grocery store was a particular stroke of luck. But I'm sure he would have found another way to get close to you if the signora hadn't needed help with her tomatoes. We found a soutane among his clothes,' Pallioti adds. ‘We think that after he realized Signora Raguzza received communion at home he sometimes came into the building dressed as a priest.'

The perfect disguise. Like pigeons and showgirls, Billy said, they all look alike. That's how he knew her name too. All he had to do was go through her drawers to find her driver's licence, or her library card. Anthea. He would have done that after he got in with my keys. That would have been easy too. He could have slipped his hand into my bag a hundred times. Or, knowing me, it's entirely possible I did even better and left them on the counter of the grocery store one day when I was in a hurry. Something Pallioti said is bugging me, though.

‘He collected clippings on me? Did he do that for all of us?'

‘To some extent. But I would have to say you were his favourite. The attack on you, and your husband's murder, apparently fascinated him. He had virtually everything that was written on it.'

‘Why?'

Pallioti stubs out his cigarette and looks at me. ‘Because,' he says, ‘he didn't do it. Marcello was hit by a car on his scooter on the seventeenth of May. On the twenty-fifth, the day you were attacked in the Boboli, he was flat on his back with his leg in traction in the recovery ward of the hospital. He'd been operated on for the second time only the day before, and there is absolutely no possibility that he left his bed. He couldn't even walk for two months.'

I stare at him. ‘So,' I say finally. ‘Karel Indrizzio. After all.'

He nods. ‘Karel Indrizzio after all.'

The silence in the room is thick, heavier than the smoke hanging in a pall above our heads. I feel as if my blood has slowed down, as if it's turned to sludge and no longer moves inside my body. Pallioti is watching me.

‘Ty?' I ask. But it's an unfair question. Pallioti can't give me an answer for why he died. It wasn't for God or Grace. It was for nothing more than a wallet. A blue handbag. My husband died because some creep read about murders in the newspaper and saw an easy way to get some euros. And of course Marcello was fascinated by it. Because he was the only one who recognized the attack on us for what it was: a copy of his own work. The exact reverse of what we thought.

‘But the mask,' I say. ‘I assumed—'

Pallioti takes his glasses off, rubs his hand across his eyes.

‘So did I, signora,' he says. ‘That was my mistake. I saw what wasn't there.' He looks up at me and smiles. ‘For all we know,' Ispettore Pallioti says, ‘Karel Indrizzio went to Venice and bought himself a souvenir that fell out of his pocket. On the other hand,' he adds, ‘a lot of people use the gardens. So perhaps it was there all along.'

Pallioti walks me down to the lobby of the Questura for the last time. He's quiet, solicitous, as if he's genuinely sorry that he can't wrap up what happened to Ty and me in a neat little bow and hand it over like a present. When he shakes my hand, there's a sadness in his still, pale eyes.

‘I know this will sound strange, signora,' he says. ‘But it has been a pleasure, making your reacquaintance.'

‘For me too,' I say. And I realize with a shock that this is actually true. For a start, I'll miss having someone to sneak cigarettes with.

I watch the straight back of his suit move steadily up the marble staircase, then I push my way out through the revolving doors. The usual late-afternoon crowd is milling in the streets, and as I join them I realize that today is probably the first day since I arrived in Florence two months ago when no one at all is watching me. Walking home towards Pierangelo's, I feel more alone than I have in weeks.

T
HAT WAS ALMOST
a month ago. Now it is late May, and Pierangelo and I are in our third week in the country. Summer is coming. Poppies wash the chalky humps of the Crete Senese and at night the first fireflies pulse and flicker at the edge of the woods.

The house Piero's mother left him sits high on the slope of a line of hills, small mountains really, that look down over a river valley where ducks land in the marshes, their calls echoing back and forth in the evening light. Once it was a fortified farm, part a huge estate, a
fattoria
, that owned as many as thirty or forty farms, and processed the oil and wheat and olives in central stores. Now most of the barns are empty shells, crumbling yellow ruins, or second homes, oases at the end of white dirt roads with bright blue patches of swimming pools and livid squares of sprinkled lawn.

During the war, the partisans controlled these valleys, and in the piazza of every tiny village there is a plaque that bears witness to the names of the dead, lists the shopkeepers, old men, school teachers and wives, pulled out and shot in retribution for every German soldier who met a bullet or a roadside bomb. The killings of Italian civilians for German soldiers usually ran at a rate of about ten to one, but sometimes they soared to twenty, and the bodies were ordered to be left where they fell, rotting under the Tuscan sun.

It's a land of ghosts and barren soil, grey stone, vines, and the gnarled roots of scrub oak and olive. Starlings nest in our deserted barns. Sitting on the terrace, if you are still enough, you can hear the flutter of wings.

The house itself is rectangular, tall and long, the bedrooms, kitchen and dining room on the lower floor and the rooms we live in above, two long interconnected spaces giving on to a loggia, an eyrie that looks out over the river and what is left of the farm buildings, which seem to be disintegrating before our eyes, crumbling back into the soil they rose from. Roofs have fallen in. Wild roses have taken hold along the walls. They claw up to the windows and gutters, their flowers pale scented speckles in the moonlight.

More than once I have watched Pierangelo from the loggia, seen him, when he thought I was asleep or reading, wandering the dirt drive, probing the doorways and the shadowed places, looking, I think, for the ghost of his mother, for some trace of the woman who gave him up as a baby, and whom he never knew. She lived her last years here, and these buildings, this land, is her legacy, all he has, and will ever have, of her. Pierangelo loves it. He calls it a waking dream. But when I first came here, I had nightmares.

I saw Karel Indrizzio standing in the broken doorways of the storage sheds at the bottom of the hill. I smelled acacia in the roses. And in the rustling that moves through the trees when it rains, I heard Marcello, felt his whisper close to my cheek:
Flesh shall pay for the sins of the flesh.

I've begun to paint again, and we've decided to move the wedding forward. It was Pierangelo's idea. He says Marcello frightened him, made him realize happiness is fragile. Then he laughs and says that maybe it's just his age. Piero turns fifty in a little over a month, and he says the best present I can give him is to marry him. So we'll dispense with the party and relatives, with the white dress and Sicily or Sardinia or Capri. Instead, we'll go to the town hall and, afterwards, we'll come back here, to Monte Lupo.

Most days, Pierangelo commutes to the city and the paper, and I could go with him if I wanted—stay in the apartment, go shopping—but now it is summer, I would rather stay here. I walk, every day, and I like to imagine the paths and deer tracks that cut deep into the forest above the house being used by the partisans, thin young men in worn clothes who slip through the trees. I don't glimpse their ghosts, but I do see deer occasionally, and once even a little black boar. He darts into the path ahead of me and stands with his nose twitching. When he sees me, his tiny eyes squint, his tail goes straight up, and he skittles into the bushes. I start early, as soon as Pierangelo leaves, picking my way along the ridge, watching the line of the river in the valley, and one morning I find the stables. I have heard about them from the woman who comes to clean, picked up whispers in the shop and the local bar. This is where the partisans met.

The buildings stand at the edge of the woodland, above a scrubby field, and I know at once what they are because there's a stone horse's head above the archway where a rusted gate hangs on one hinge.

The walls are the colour of honey. Saplings have grown through the paving stones. Vines and weeds flower and fall. And in the centre there is a huge chestnut tree whose branches spread in a canopy that reaches almost to the roofs. A stone bench, green and furry with moss, circles its trunk, and beside it there's a well. The whispers say traitors' courts were held here, justice meted out, and that collaborators were hanged from these branches. I throw a pebble down into the darkness, hear a whoosh, and then, eventually, a tiny splash.

Six loose boxes, square and dark as monks' cells, ring the yard, and I imagine horses' heads peering over them, their great warm chests pressing against the now rotten wooden doors. Lavender struggles out of a planter, and when I push the door to a store room, I hear the growl of doves. White ghosts flap out of the shadows and spiral to the peaked roof where they preen and strut.

The place feels as if it has been sleeping here for centuries, and the next day I come back with my paints and sketchbook. I have no idea if the stories are true, if bodies hung from the thick branches or if there are bones in the well, and as my brush moves across the paper, I am no longer sure it matters. Whether the ghosts are visible or invisible, all I know is what I see: that the tree still blossoms, that its branches still throw dappled shade, and that no matter what passed here before, or will come after, the stones are beautiful.

 

All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.

THE FACES OF ANGELS

A Felony & Mayhem “Foreign” mystery

PUBLISHING HISTORY
First U.K. print edition (Macmillan): 2006
Felony & Mayhem print edition: 2011
Felony & Mayhem electronic edition: 2012

Copyright © 2006 by Lucretia Grindle

All rights reserved

E-book ISBN: 978-1-934609-97-2

 

You are reading a book in the Felony & Mayhem “Foreign” category. These books may be offered in translation or may originally have been written in English, but they will always feature an intricately observed, richly atmospheric setting in a part of the world that is neither England nor the U.S.A. If you enjoy this book, you may well like other “Foreign” titles from Felony & Mayhem Press. Please check our website for more “Foreign” titles becoming available as ebooks.