Vita Nuova (19 page)

‘And did she?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose I can’t testify against him even now, can I?’

‘No.’

‘No . . . but there are more ways than one of—I’m getting a bit too drunk for this conversation, but you’ve got to understand: Everything that happens in this house is down to him, and if my daughter’s dead, it’s due to him, hospital or no hospital. I can’t testify, but I can help you, even so. He’s taken one daughter from me. . . .’ She touched a photograph in a silver frame standing behind the whisky bottle. ‘How thin she was, poor thing. It’s hard to believe it now, but I was happy that year—or at least as near to happy as I ever got.’

‘The year of her First Communion. She was happy then, too, maybe. She had that same photograph by her bed.’ He remembered it with a bullet hole, the bullet embedded in the carving of the bedside cabinet. ‘She is very thin. How old is she there?’

‘Ten. And I thought we could play happy families. He just wanted more people he could order about—you’ve got to arrest him. It’s all his fault! I know I’m drunk, but I’m telling you the truth. Whatever happened, it’s his fault.’

He wanted to say Yes. Yes, I believe you. He didn’t dare. He said nothing.

‘Have to go to bed.’

He stood up and held out his arm to help her.

‘No. I don’t need. . . .’ With a sideways movement she sat down heavily on the bed.

‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

‘He’s coming home tomorrow. Come in the afternoon. He’ll be out. I heard him on the phone. . . .’

‘The afternoon, then. It could be . . .’ Could he risk it? He stuck to the script, at least, ‘ . . . that you or your husband will be asked whether there any guns in the house. The prosecutor didn’t want to disturb you by—’

‘Fulvio? If there are any guns! Like he doesn’t know there’s a collection of them. He’s here every other night.
He
used to drag us all to the shooting range with him. Showing off what a brilliant shot he was. And Fulvio was there, too, more often than not. If there are any guns in the house. . . .’

She was reaching for the earplugs by her bed. He could only hope that he could take her word for it, that drunkenness, sleep, hangover, and the earplugs would protect her—and Paoletti’s other prisoners until tomorrow. He left her.

He felt he shouldn’t go home. The game he was playing with the prosecutor had to be kept up. Even so, he couldn’t stand one more minute of this kitchen. He tried his best, walking around the huge room, looking at all the stuff. It was like the kitchen of a big restaurant with every kind of professional-looking equipment. Why would you need that great big bacon slicer? All that expanse of marble, lit by dozens of neon strips? Was it like the books upstairs? Had Paoletti ordered a kitchen wholesale that wouldn’t be put to good use any more than the books would ever be read? Round and round he walked, but it was no use. He couldn’t stay down there. He gave up on it, climbed the stairs and went along the flagged passageway to open the front doors. He walked across the gravel to the cars. He could hear the radio coughing into life and going off.

‘All right?’

‘Quiet as the grave. That’s us! Thank God, I’m starving.’

Another car was nosing in. The next shift.

The marshal’s driver was out of the car, walking up and down.

‘I just needed to stretch my legs.’ He got back in the car and the marshal got in beside him.

‘Are we leaving?’

‘No. I’m just going to keep you company for a while. Everybody inside is asleep.’

‘What’s going to happen next?’

‘Nothing.’

He said that more to reassure himself than anything. He’d left one of the outside lights on over the front doors. He’d have left all them all on, but the rest were on automatic timers and would only go off again. He had the keys in his pocket. Both cars had a view of the big studded doors. The ones at the other end of the flagged passageway that gave onto the gardens were locked and bolted on the inside with great iron bars. The two family cars were parked to the right of the marshal’s, under the trees.

Not to keep people in but to keep people out, she said. Prying people. People like him who wanted to uncover the family secrets. It occurred to him that Paoletti might be aiming to make enough money to sell the club, the hotel, all of it, and distance himself from the source of his wealth. That might explain his carving up of this place. To cut himself off from his past, he needed money, a lot of it. He was on the verge of starting his new life, ready for his role as a restorer of churches, a pillar of the community, a respectable old age. The unread books were on the shelves on one side of the library, but on the other they were still in their boxes. He’d been interrupted. He’d lost control. The stroke. . . .

The marshal opened the car door.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I just want to take a look around. You stay here.’

He wanted to go back to the start. Even in the dark, he wanted to stand by the pool as he had on that morning. It might help him to see everything in the new light of Prosecutor De Vita’s involvement. He turned the corner of the tower and went round to the far side of the swimming pool to stand there. The city lay below him, its palaces illuminated. Long glittering chains showed where the River Arno snaked between the buildings. The moon was bright enough, now all that rain had washed the air. The grass under his feet was springy and wet. He turned and stepped onto the tiled border to keep his feet dry. He looked up at the tower’s silhouette in the moonlight. Had ‘the lodger’ been locked in up there, or had she tried to lock her family out? Didn’t it, in the end, come to the same thing? Whatever family had built this place and shut out the war or the plague, they’d been shut in too, hadn’t they?

Besides, you could try and shut the plague out, but cancer . . . stroke, too. He kept coming back to it. It had to have started then.

What’s going to happen next? Nothing, or. . . .

He was as sure as the mother in her drunken stupor underground that whatever had happened was Paoletti’s fault, and still it had happened in his absence.

Plague, cancer, stroke, people locked in and people locked out. . . .

No point in breaking his head over it. Once the raids were over, the arrests made, the mother would talk. Despite everything she said, she was vigilant. She was intelligent, too, like her dead daughter.

‘He used to drag us all to the shooting range . . . showing
off . . . and Fulvio. . . .’

So had Silvana really seen a man, as she’d half claimed, but was scared of admitting who? What if she’d seen it all? That ‘confession’ of hers, that she’d been buying shoes instead of being here to help her sister— wasn’t it a bit early in the morning for that sort of shop? Well, that was easy enough to check and, in any case, once they had Paoletti under lock and key, perhaps they’d all find the courage to tell the truth.

‘Come in the afternoon. He’ll be out. I heard him on the
phone.’

She’d certainly have plenty to say.

‘It’s all down to him.’
Yes, but he was never on the scene.

‘Where is Piero?’

Every time he’d spoken to her, she had asked him that.

‘Where is Piero?’

The tower stood empty of its prisoner, looming in the night. The marshal hadn’t liked this place the first time he was here, and he didn’t like it now.

What had happened here had happened in broad daylight. He was going home to sleep, and he would be back before any of them were awake.

As it happened, other things intervened and he wasn’t.

Eleven

'I
’m sorry to hear that, Guarnaccia. I know how much hung on it.’ The captain’s voice on the other end ‘I of the line was very sympathetic.

‘Yes. It doesn’t matter. His wife knows where he’s going this afternoon. She overheard the telephone call we picked up.’

The newly assigned prosecutor had opened a file on The Emperor, and the phone was tapped. Paoletti would be there later in the day to ‘audition’ a new batch of girls. They might find nothing illegal on paper there or at the staffing agency, but domestic workers auditioning as pole dancers would warrant an explanation. So would the hotel. And those two children couldn’t be explained away, even by Paoletti.

‘You should be with us. If it hadn’t been for you—’

‘No, no. You don’t need me. I’ll go back up to Paoletti’s place. Just in case. . . .’

‘In case?’

‘I should go back there. Once I know you’ve got the girls and the children out . . . his wife will tell me everything I need to know. Do you think you’ll get enough evidence on De Vita?’

‘I’m sure of it. That retired marshal you found is a mine of information.’

‘Nesti found him.’

‘Apparently there was a complaint years ago about a blackmail scam involving the hotel. A man starting up an affair with the wife of a well-to-do citizen, taking her to the hotel and then someone sending photographs and threatening to tell the husband. Naturally, the boyfriend claimed he was being blackmailed too. Presumably that developed into the current blackmailing business with De Vita attracting customers by talking up the hotel. And, again, should they ever suspect him, he’d always claim he was being blackmailed too.’

‘And so he would have been, if necessary.’

‘That first woman who came for help claimed that there were at least two others, taken in by this same man, who didn’t dare speak up. She’d found that out for herself. Some years have gone by, but she should be able to identify De Vita.’

‘But not Paoletti. The invisible puppeteer as always.’

‘We’ll get him.’

The marshal, looking at the report lying in front of him, said, ‘I don’t know. . . .’

‘Guarnaccia, I understand that you feel he’s slipped through your fingers; but, in any case, you know he didn’t kill his daughter, that he was in hospital. You’ll get to the bottom of it—besides, something will probably come out regarding the murder once we have these people in custody. The answer might still be outside the family.’

‘Yes. I expect you’re right. But this report means I’m wrong about it all, about him.’

‘You can’t argue with the science, Guarnaccia.’

‘No. No, of course not.’

After he rang off, he read through the report again.

The DNA test showed that Piero Paoletti was the child of Daniela Paoletti and a person unknown, who was no relation to her.

‘Even so. . . .’

His big fingers tapped with a slow rhythm on the paper. He had wanted to be back up at Paoletti’s place early, but the new prosecutor had asked to see him first thing, and once again he had reminded himself that Daniela was dead. The other, living victims must come first. When he arrived back at his office, this report had been on his desk.

Piero. . . .

Was this concentrated concern for the child something Paoletti’s drunken wife had transmitted to him?

‘Where is Piero?’

It was almost eleven thirty. Paoletti was expected home at midday. The marshal would have liked to go to the hospital himself, a thing the prosecutor had prevented before. He wanted details as to Paoletti’s health, he wanted his clinical notes. After all, he had discharged himself the other day and arrived home in a taxi. He wasn’t that sick.

But he couldn’t. Not yet, not until after the arrests.

A big operation had been mounted. They would move in on the club, the hotel, and even the staffing agency here in the city at the same moment. There were witnesses: himself, Nesti, Piazza, Piazza’s predecessor, the widower, the blackmailed wife. It couldn’t go wrong. How could it go wrong?

No matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, he couldn’t shake his conviction that Paoletti would escape them.

And what was worse, in a way, was that even with the DNA report staring him the face, he couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that Paoletti wasn’t the child’s father.

He thought of sending Nesti to the hospital but, apart from the fact that he wouldn’t be at his desk yet, Nesti couldn’t obtain the clinical notes. Knowing Nesti, though, he’d get something. He’d have some nurse he could wind round his finger. But what use was that?

Besides, all Nesti’s energies would be concentrated on the big scoop to come later; and he certainly deserved his moment.

Since there was nothing else useful he could do, he called for his driver and got ready to leave. He had no idea of bearding the lion in his den. He was just going to be there.

The lion had arrived before him.

The two carabinieri on duty informed him, ‘He’s been here about twenty minutes.’

‘He arrived in a taxi and kind of nodded to us before he went in, as if we were on his staff. You know what I mean?’

‘Yes. And that’s how you should play it, too. We’re here to protect his family.’

‘Oh, and Marshal, two of the builders were looking for you earlier.’

‘What did they want?’

‘Wouldn’t say. Just said they had to speak to you.’

‘All right.’ He left his driver to move the car to a shady spot and went around the house to the right. There was no sound of any work going on. They would still be on their break. He found them in the old stables. They had set up house and a workshop for themselves in one of the boxes there. Their trowels hung on a length of thick string against the back wall, a stone manger held their bags and belongings, and the remains of their meal stood on an old wooden table they’d recouped from somewhere. They were all sitting on upturned buckets except for Cristiano who, with four buckets and two planks, had constructed a bed rather narrower than himself and was lying neatly disposed on his back, snoring. The men who were awake started to get up, but the marshal signed to them to stay as they were.

‘Who was it wanted to talk to me?’

They all looked at the sleeping Cristiano, but it was the thin young man who’d been so upset over unpaid wages who got up and spoke.

‘Cristiano. . . .’ But he didn’t wake him. It was clear that Cristiano’s afternoon nap was something of a sacred ritual. Nobody was going to wake him. The young workman who was on his feet pulled a bit of paper out of his pocket and offered it to the marshal.

‘What’s this?’ It was just a dusty bit of paper. It was carefully folded, and there were two banknotes inside it.

‘Ah. You’ve been paid.’

‘Thank you.’ The workman tried to indicate his gratitude by nodding and pointing at the money. ‘Thank you.’ He looked down at the sleeping Cristiano and again at the marshal, frowning.

‘No, don’t wake him. Good luck.’ He withdrew from their little world thinking, as he went through the archway and approached the rear façade of the house where eyes had once watched him from behind those low grills, how within the space of a few hours he had uncovered two quite separate hidden worlds in this place. Well, it was also true that without the prosecutor’s determined hijacking of the inquiry, he’d have discovered them on day one, along with a lot of other things. No use crying over spilt milk. He just had to make up for lost time. He walked on until he came to the pool, and decided to go up to the crime scene. Step by step, he had to go back over everything he’d seen and heard. Step by step. A lot of steps. . . . He climbed the steep staircase, his hand on the cool smooth stone of the broad banister. As to where the prosecutor had been before getting himself here on the morning of the murder, the marshal felt pretty sure. He’d gone first to the hospital to confer—or to get his instructions . . . or . . . ?

He paused on the first floor, but only for breath, continuing up to the second-floor landing where he had stood that morning with the prosecutor, watching the carabiniere with the video camera filming the shells circled with chalk marks, the sloppy trail through the drawing room to the bedroom, the body, the white bedspread sprayed with red, broken glass. Running the memory back, then forward again, he paused every now and again to examine a detail. How different the same things looked now—and yet he had no key to some of the images: and they were the ones that, perhaps just because they were unexplained, kept returning. The shattered glass around the body on the rug, for instance. It had been important, of course, because it had explained—once they found the bullet—the extra shell. But that wasn’t what kept coming back. What was in his head was an image he’d put together himself, rather than seen, though it had certainly existed. The body in a white bathrobe, red entrails spilling on the rug, and the ten-year-old Daniela with a bullet hole through her white communion dress.

‘I thought we could play happy families.’

Had it started when the poor little girl was only ten? So thin, and he remembered such dark shadows under her eyes in the photograph.

And Paoletti in the hospital—another image he’d created but never seen. Another white image, a white hospital bed. Appropriate, anyway. Paoletti, the whited sepulchre.

What about the prosecutor? De Vita, for all his habitual arrogance, hadn’t really been so sure of himself that day. Even if he had been to the hospital first, there was a lot of stuff he couldn’t have known, unexpected stuff like Signora Donati across the road, his own presence rather than an emergency response car.

‘What are the family members saying?’

That, too, an unknown quantity. What might the childish, hysterically weeping Silvana not have come out with?

‘You think she’s telling the truth?’
His answer now, with hindsight, would be No.

‘And the mother?’

He believed her, all right; who wouldn’t? Which was why he’d been kept away from her.

He’d shown no interest in the doctor’s findings. Other things on his mind. He’d tossed the idea of a robbery into the mix. Perhaps he wasn’t such a Machiavelli, after all. Hiding plenty, yes, but otherwise groping in the dark. The captain was an intelligent man, and he’d warned against assuming that De Vita knew anything about the murder itself when he was only trying to deflect attention from his own crimes.

‘Hmph.’ The marshal opened the window and shutters behind the sofa. ‘A bit more light. . . . And besides, am I supposed to think this murder happened on his watch by coincidence? No, no. . . .’

He remembered quite clearly the moment when, after gazing for a long time at the technicians working in this room, his thoughts still elsewhere, the prosecutor had decided that this slow and rather dimwitted marshal might be just what would suit him. Clapping him on the back and flashing those brilliant teeth at him. . . .

‘The blank incomprehension of the man!’

‘You can’t argue with the science, Guarnaccia.’

The marshal was unmoved. He remained convinced that the child was Paoletti’s and that Paoletti, one way or another, was responsible for Daniela’s death.

In the afternoon, the marshal and his driver watched from his car as Silvana left in the Mini to fetch Piero home from summer school. She returned with the child after forty minutes. Very soon afterwards they heard splashing and the child’s shouts from the pool. The marshal got out and walked around the house to the right to take a look at the scene from a distance. Paoletti was there in a deck chair in swimming trunks. The newspaper he was reading covered his belly. A pad was wrapped around one of his arms, measuring his blood pressure over twenty-four hours of activity. The little boy was splashing with his legs as Silvana pulled him along by his arms. Frida was serving drinks in tall glasses. She wore a bathing suit, too, so she must be allowed to swim in the pool, which surprised the marshal. Or was that how he got away with so much, doling out just enough little favours here and there to keep his victims psychologically as well as physically enslaved?

He was standing near the low curved grills along the base of the building. He saw her clearly this time, and she knew it. She was watching what he was watching. She couldn’t have had a good view but, no doubt, she was listening too. She retreated, and so did he. Back at the car, the young carabiniere asked again, ‘What’s happening?’

It reminded him of the boys when they were small and bored by long car journeys.

Dad, when will we be there?

At least the two carabinieri in the squad car had each other to chat to.

He made an effort and told the lad about The Emperor and his visit there with Nesti.

‘
How
much?’

‘Sixty euros.’

‘For ten minutes?’

‘Ten minutes of nothing much. With an oven timer to tell you when.’

‘I’ve never been to a night club.’

‘No, well, you haven’t missed much.’

‘Is he dangerous, Paoletti?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he kill his daughter?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you don’t think anything will happen? Here, I mean?’

‘Nothing will happen until the raid at seven.’

‘No . . . but you’re staying here anyway, right?’

‘That’s right.’

What was it he used to say to his boys? Whoever is the first to see the sea. . . .

And he’d invent some prize or other—or, more likely, that would have been left to Teresa.

‘Go over to the squad car and check whether anything’s come in over the radio.’

The carabiniere went across and leaned towards the passenger-side window. He talked to the others for a while and then, just as he was straightening up, he spun round on the gravel and ran towards the tower. The other two got out of the car and ran after him. The marshal, following, heard splashes and a woman screaming and screaming.

When they turned the corner of the tower, Frida was climbing out of the pool with Piero limp in her arms; Silvana was in the water screaming. At a distance, the marshal saw the thin young builder running towards the pool with big Cristiano behind him. They stopped when they saw all the uniforms. But the one thing that made the marshal’s heart sink was an empty deck chair. Paoletti was gone.