The Villa Triste (11 page)

The epiphany was cut short by the Mayor’s voice.

‘It’s only just happened,’ he was saying. ‘Some hack called the press office for a comment. And they actually had the wit to call me. Thank God.’

Pallioti frowned; he had no idea what the Mayor was talking about.

‘What’s only just happened?’

‘Giovanni Trantemento. Mean anything to you?’

Pallioti shook his head, relieved. It wasn’t just him. The Mayor wasn’t making any sense either. Again, nothing new. These conversations could be like doing a crossword puzzle. The theme only became clear at the end.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Giovanni who?’

‘Trantemento. He was a hero of the resistance. A partisan. Heroic role in the liberation, all that. Decorated in Rome, by the President. You remember?’

Pallioti did, in general, if not specifically. A year and a half ago a line of old men in dark overcoats and berets, rheumy eyes watering, had finally stepped forward to receive the medals they’d earned more than half a lifetime earlier. A dinner at the Quirinale had followed. And many speeches about the Heroes of Italy, the young who gave and gave, and the memory of those who died – whether from Fascist bullets or Nazi bullets – so we can all sit here today and insult each other at liberty.

‘Someone’s killed him,’ the Mayor was saying.

‘What?’

‘I know. I know. It’s appalling. An old man. Eighty-seven. In his own apartment. What kind of animal does that?’

A human one, Pallioti thought acidly.

‘So you will, won’t you?’ the Mayor went on. ‘Keep an eye on this? Make sure it doesn’t get ballsed up. It’s the sort of thing,’ he added ominously, ‘that could look bad. For the city.’

‘Ah.’

‘I know how busy you are,’ the Mayor added. ‘But as a personal favour?’

‘A personal favour?’ Pallioti cleared his throat. He thought he had detected a hint of pleading in the Mayor’s voice. ‘I am, as you know,’ he murmured, ‘very busy with this fraud case. Very complex. Of course,’ he added, ‘I would like to do everything I can. But if I were to, I wouldn’t have much – no, really any – disposable time to—’

‘Yes,’ said the Mayor, who was not stupid. ‘All right. All right. Yes, yes, my friend. I understand. Completely. There are plenty of other people to trot out. Many, I’m sure, who we can find to talk about policing. None, of course, as eloquent as you might be – however.’

‘However—’ Pallioti echoed.

Looking out of the window, he smiled. For a moment, in the grey watery light thrown back by the rain, his face looked distinctly fox-like.

He had not lied. He was in the middle of coordinating the winding up and preparing for trial of a substantial fraud. Not that it would make any difference to Giovanni Trantemento. He would give the day-to-day running of the case to Enzo Saenz, and keep an eye on it from a distance. Nothing more would be necessary. The fraud was genuinely complex. This, on the other hand – an old man murdered in his apartment – while certainly distasteful, possibly inflammatory, and definitely the sort of thing the press loved (
Hero Survives Nazi Bullets Only to be Slaughtered in Own Home!
) was not complex. In fact, Pallioti made a mental bet with himself that it was a burglary gone wrong. Making sure the whole mess was cleaned up quickly and correctly would not only curry favour with the Mayor and prevent a dent to the city’s image, it was also the right thing to do. It was the least he could do, in fact, for those old boys who, despite the rather tedious hours of TV coverage, had, sixty years ago, fought with a courage he himself found inconceivable.

‘
Certo
,’ he said again. ‘Of course. It will be my pleasure.’

‘Thank you.’ The Mayor sighed. ‘You know,’ he added, as if he had read Pallioti’s mind, ‘I think about them sometimes, the partisans.’

‘Yes.’

Pallioti suspected that there was not a man in Italy who did not think about them, Italy’s Holy Children. Not a man who, at some point, in the dead of night, had not lain staring at the ceiling and wondered – would I have done it? Would I have had the courage?

‘They were half our age, most of them. If that. Children, really.’ The Mayor’s voice sounded suddenly tired. ‘Between you and me, my friend,’ he said, ‘I suspect we’ve made something of a pig’s ear of the world they fought for. So, chasing up the thug who murders one of them, it does seem, doesn’t it, the least we can do?’

Enzo Saenz was waiting when Pallioti stepped out of the lift that had whisked him silently down five floors and deposited him in the pristine new garages where his car was waiting. The subterranean depths of the recently renovated police building were every bit as impressive as those above ground. Below the explosion-proof, bulletproof, generally terrorist, mob, and reprisal-proof offices and incident rooms, there was a gas-proof, disease-proof, weapons-of-mass-destruction-proof maze that housed not only official vehicles, but labs and armouries, firing ranges and files and God knows what. Pallioti suspected that one day he would send someone down here and have to mount a missing persons operation to get them back. It would not, however, be Enzo Saenz. Enzo could find his way home from hell itself.

Today, he was wearing one of his collection of leather jackets and sporting a rough-cheeked twenty-four-hour beard. Combined with his ponytail and Roman nose, it made him look more than a little medieval. Not that that was inappropriate. Pallioti always saw in Enzo the Medici enforcer – the silent and trusted young man who slipped into the alley and did the deed.

It took them ten minutes to reach the building where Giovanni Trantemento had made his home. There was no question which one it was. Already, an ambulance, a police van, and two marked patrol cars were pulled up outside. A uniformed policewoman was placing bollards in the street. A wet young man who could only be the Mayor’s reporter was mooching about on the pavement. In the bus station opposite, a crowd had gathered. They peered through the scratched Plexiglass wall, watching the police like fish looking out of a tank.

Enzo, who had shooed Pallioti’s driver away and taken the wheel himself, pulled inside the bollards and stopped. Ducking from the rain, which if anything was coming down harder now than before, he and Pallioti opened the doors and made a dash for the building. The ambulance crew was coming downstairs as they entered the hallway. They carried a folded stretcher and oxygen canisters. One looked up and caught Pallioti’s eye. He shook his head.

‘Fourth floor. All yours,’ he said without breaking stride.

A second uniformed policeman was stringing evidence tape across the front grille of a tiny elevator tucked under the stairwell. As Enzo crossed to have a word with him, Pallioti turned towards the stairs. Their stone treads and dark polished banisters vanished upwards and out of sight. Like Jacob’s Ladder, he thought, without being really sure why. Taking a deep breath, he began to climb.

The front hall of the huge chilly building was so cavernous and so badly lit that it was not until Pallioti reached the first landing and looked down that he even noticed the woman. She was wearing a flowered headscarf. As she looked up at him, her face was a pale, round moon. The light was too poor to see if she blinked. Pallioti nodded. Then he kept climbing, his shoes tapping time against the endless thrum of the rain on the windows.

‘Six apartments, one bottom, one top, and two on the two floors in between. I’ve had them tape off the whole place. A second car is coming to take statements.’

Enzo caught up with him on the second level.

‘Do we know who found him?’

‘Woman downstairs. Marta Buonifaccio. Sort of self-appointed concierge. She brought an envelope up for him, saw the blood under the door, opened it, saw him, went back down and called us.’

Pallioti stopped.

‘Elevator?’ he asked.

Enzo shook his head. ‘Regards it as an instrument of the devil. Always uses the stairs.’

‘And the door, Trantemento’s apartment door?’

‘Closed but unlocked. She said there was a line of blood. Seeping under the door. She thought he might have hit his head. Opened it to see.’

They began to climb again.

‘The old guy,’ Enzo went on, ‘moved in a few years after she did. That’s what she called him, incidentally – “the old guy”. Says he was getting frail. He’s a stamp and print dealer. High end. According to Marta.’

Was there a low end of stamp and print dealing, Pallioti wondered. He supposed so. There was a low end of everything. High end at least would explain the building. True, it was draughty and dark, but top floors of places like this – top floors of anywhere in the Centro Storico – did not come cheap.

They rounded the corner onto the last landing and were met with a white glare. The scene of crime team was already setting up floodlights. Pallioti stopped. He pulled the protectors Enzo handed him over his shoes and slipped on latex gloves. The landing was wide, and unfurnished except for the tapestry. The tall narrow window in the stairwell would have lit it poorly, even on a sunny day. The elevator cage was to the left. The door to the apartment, which was topped with an ornate carved stone lintel, was directly opposite the top of the stairs. It was open. The old man’s body lay just inside.

The team processing the scene were stepping back and forth over the stream of blood that had snaked its way under the door and was now congealing on the cold floor. The medical examiner crouched by the body. The glare of the lights caught her white paper suit, making her look like a polar bear guarding a kill.

‘Come on in. Just step over.’

She glanced up, waving them into the apartment. Beyond the body, a hallway stretched to the back of the building, where Pallioti could see glass-fronted doors giving onto what looked like a loggia. Enzo went first, hopping over the dead man and padding down the hall on the worn oriental rug. He checked the loggia, stuck his head into one room, and vanished into the next.

Pallioti followed, stopping in the hall, which was lined with bookshelves roughly to waist height on both sides. Above them, a series of prints and paintings, most in heavy gilt frames, were hung on the old-fashioned flock-wallpapered walls, making the hallway a densely patterned tunnel. The air smelled dusty, as if the glass panel doors at the end had not been opened for some time. The result was an immediate feeling of claustrophobia.

The medical examiner nodded, looking up at him.

‘Single shot to the back of the head,’ she said. ‘I’d say three, four hours ago.’

‘So.’ Pallioti looked down at the body. ‘Sometime late this morning, he opened the door, turned around, and whoever it was shot him?’

The medical examiner’s reply was a surprise.

‘I don’t think so.’

She waved a hand at the thin, crumpled figure. He was wearing brown twill trousers, velvet slippers and a cardigan.

‘Look at him,’ she said. ‘He’s what? Six foot?’ She leaned forward, her gloved fingers gently probing the back of the skull. ‘I can’t be sure until I get him on the table, but I think the angle of this shot was downward. At best straight on. It means, at the least, you have a very tall killer. Over six feet.’

‘Or he bent over for some reason, to pick something up, and they took advantage.’

‘Maybe,’ she agreed. ‘Certainly could be. Let me take some pictures and I’ll roll him.’

While she reached for the camera in her bag, Pallioti stepped back over the old man’s legs and outstretched arm. He examined the apartment door. It did not appear to have been forced in any way. There was not so much as a scratch.

He stepped over the body again and went into the hallway, anger rising in him. No matter how many times you warned people, especially old people, they kept on opening their doors. It was what made them such easy targets – and those who took advantage of them so despicable. How hard would this have been? To get into this building, walk up here, knock on the door saying you’re the gas man, or the TV repair guy, or who knew what? Then one shot’s all it takes, and the apartment’s yours. Frankly, he didn’t know why it didn’t happen more often.

Expecting to find the main room ransacked, he stepped through the door, and stopped. It wasn’t a pretty room. Up here under the heavy chestnut eaves the ceiling was too low to be gracious. But it was big, running almost the length of the apartment down one side of the hall. A line of windows gave onto a view over the roofs that was beautiful even in the rain. Santa Croce rose up, and beyond it, the hills on the far side of the Arno. Nothing looked out of place. In the middle of a dark, heavy dining-room table a family of sculpted silver foxes sat on a silver tray. A silver letter opener lay in plain view next to what looked like an ivory-handled magnifying glass on a desk.

‘There’s a safe in the bedroom,’ Enzo said, coming in behind him. ‘Not touched, as far as I can tell.’ Pallioti spun around. ‘But there’s no sign of a wallet, or any cash, either. Some coins on the dresser, but no notes. And there’s something else. Come and take a look.’

Enzo nodded towards the bedroom. Pallioti followed him across the hall.

This room was also large. The floor was covered in another dark-patterned Turkish rug. In here, the windows – which would face the building across the alley, or more probably, its roof – were covered by heavy, and on first glance rather moth-eaten, velvet curtains. The double bed faced a wardrobe with carved doors and a mirrored front. The walls above the padded headboard were lined with rows of expensively framed prints. Pallioti stepped forward.