A Deadly Paradise (3 page)

After one o’clock, the place emptied out sufficiently for Alex and Piero to talk. Piero pulled a manila folder from his briefcase and slid it across the table. “Here’s the information you wanted, Alex. Jarvinia Baudler! Not one of my favorites. She stirred up a considerable lot of trouble in Paradiso during the last year. Nasty woman. She was always causing trouble in bars and with the locals. Two denunciations against her next-door neighbor. His family’s lived in Paradiso for hundreds of years, then this lesbian Kraut rents the house next door and bullies the local police into giving the neighbor a warning for letting his cat run free. She’d caught it trying to mount hers. Its name is Princess,” Piero added disparagingly. “She even threatened to kill the neighbor’s cat if it happened again.”

“What’s happened to Princess?” Cenni asked.

“The neighbor has it. I hear he’s promising kittens all around for early summer. Say good-bye to the purity of that line,” Piero replied. He started riffling through the papers in his folder until he found what he wanted. “Here, read this! Her first denunciation was sexual; the second is environmental. She says the cat peed on her dahlias, killing them. Who in Italy grows dahlias, anyway? Hardly surprising that someone cut off—”

Cenni interrupted. “You know! I thought only the medical examiner—”

“Of course I know.” He grimaced. “I have a friend in the carabinieri. Shame having to see that. Must have been quite a shock.”

“Even more of a shame that no one in this country can keep his mouth shut, apparently, not even the carabinieri. The postmortem report was sealed. Does anyone in this country know how to keep a secret?” he asked sarcastically, not realizing that Orlando was standing directly behind him.

“How about the followers of St. Francis? They hid his body in the Basilica and kept its location secret for hundreds of years,” Orlando informed him, handing Cenni his second coffee and Piero another apple tart.

Cenni smiled, partly at Orlando’s reference to Italy’s favorite saint, but mainly at the sight of Piero’s second pastry. “
È vero,
Orlando, Italy’s only secret.”

He waited until Orlando had gone back up the stairs before speaking again. “The CIA would never succeed here, not with every third cousin of every policeman’s wife privy to state secrets.”

“Come on, Alex, we’re not that bad. And you should talk; you’re the one who wanted to meet in a bar to discuss police business.”

“The coffee at the station house isn’t fit for human consumption.” Cenni slid the folder back across the table.

“I have to get back,” Piero said, standing.

Cenni looked up, puzzled. “Sit, Piero! I’ve got thirty minutes before my meeting with the medical examiner.”

Piero sat again, too modest to assert his new status.

“Listen, Alex, keep the folder and talk to Orlando if you want to know more about the German. She dropped in here whenever she was in Assisi, always drunk by the time she left. And now I have to get back. You never know what they’re up to when the boss is away.” It wasn’t Piero’s intention to belittle his officers; he’d just wanted to remind Alex that he had a different job these days. He added, “
È
vero,
Alex, they’re really a great group, except Staccioli.”

“Staccioli! You mean that fat bastard’s still around?” Alex responded. “Don’t tell me he’s sucking up to you these days?”

“Not a chance! Not me! I put him to filing residency applications. Genine’d love that. Remember how she despised him!”

AS ALEX WAS leaving the Bar Sensi, a gust of wind lifted one of the newspapers that had been left abandoned on an outside table and plastered it against his chest. He peeled it off and scanned the front page quickly. A single column and, miraculously, nothing about the manner in which the German had been murdered; but it wouldn’t be long!

Cenni set off for his meeting with the medical examiner still somewhat in the dark regarding the character of Jarvinia Baudler. Piero had blasted her unmercifully, but his only knowledge of her was from the police blotter and a dispute over two cats in heat. Piero’s obvious distaste for Baudler’s nationality was understandable. His grandfather had died at the end of the Second World War, supposedly fighting the Germans. To Piero’s mother, who had successfully indoctrinated her son, the Germans were to blame for everything that had gone wrong in her life.

Italians were an insular lot, and Piero had kept the habits and prejudices of his parents. Cenni also knew that Piero’s distaste for the German had as much to do with Baudler’s sexual habits as her origins. The rest of Europe was moving toward enlightenment with respect to sexuality, but even in the larger cities of Rome and Milan, particularly Rome where St. Peter’s dominated the skyline, his countrymen continued to treat homosexuality as a moral disorder. In small hill towns like Assisi and Par-adiso, it was rare for even the most courageous to live openly with a partner of the same sex.

Dieter Reimann had been of even less help in defining Baudler’s character than Piero. He and Baudler had worked together in the Rome embassy for twenty-five years, and although Reimann had not said so directly, Cenni inferred from the security officer’s reluctance to discuss his colleague that he and Jarvinia had been friends. Reimann might have sympathized with her refusal to retire in dignified silence, perhaps because his own retirement was imminent. Orlando had offered a bartender’s view of the German: friendly and funny when she wasn’t drunk, obnoxious when she was; and, drunk or sober, a lousy tipper.

He reflected on what else he’d learned from Orlando. Jarvinia Baudler’s status as Germany’s cultural attaché to Italy was no secret to Orlando or to anyone else with whom she’d come into contact. The only secret—hers— was that during the year she’d lived in Paradiso, she’d no longer been employed at the embassy and had no diplomatic status.

According to Orlando, Baudler had been a drunk and she’d grown worse in the last few months. She always parked illegally in the plaza, and if the police complained, she’d demand they call the embassy. The police never checked on her claim of immunity—couldn’t be bothered, according to Orlando. A few weeks before her murder, she’d thrown a drink into the face of the woman that she’d come in with, a tall good-looking black woman, more than forty years her junior. Orlando had attributed the worsening of the German’s temper to this woman.

“A real looker, in her late twenties, I’d say, and very sexy. Copper color. On the few occasions they were in here together, the men standing at the bar couldn’t stop drooling. She and the German were rumored to be lovers, which made her even more interesting to some of them.” Orlando’s description of the mysterious girlfriend had been slanted toward the sensual: tall, curvy, good legs, almond eyes, shoulder-length hair, great tits. “She had the German eating out of her hand,” he said. “South African, I’d say from the accent. Not that she talked much; she let the German do the talking. A few of the regulars spoke of making a move on her if she ever came in alone.”

“You too, Orlando?” Cenni had asked.

“Leave the young to the young, is what I say. I’ve worked too many years for this.” He patted his paunch. “I prefer to share it with someone who knows what it’s worth.”

In one respect at least, Cenni had quibbled with Orlando’s assessment of what was behind Baudler’s increasingly bad temper.

“You realize, of course, that people in love normally improve in temperament.”

“Not this one, dottore. On the last day Baudler was in here, she’d been hanging around the bar for nearly two hours waiting for the girlfriend, and drinking heavily. Trust me, dottore
,
she was a dog in heat without a bitch. She needed to bite someone.”

7

ALL DAY LONG, Cenni had been happy. The sun was out, and tomorrow he would return to Perugia. It was an idyllic spring day, and he was putting off the inevitable demise of his happiness, taking the roundabout way to the mortuary. Fifteen years in homicide, and Cenni was not yet resigned to viewing murder victims cut open from chin to groin and plundered of their organs, which, all things considered, was inexplicable. He had entered a profession whose singular reason for being was that someone should die. His mother threw it up to him constantly: it would have been kinder to her if he’d become an undertaker. She was guided in all things by her social set, a group of moneyed matrons in competition with one another, and his profession embarrassed her. But his brother and grandmother, whose opinions he respected, had also voiced their surprise when he had chosen the police after graduating first in his law class.

Although uncomfortable with the mumbo-jumbo of psychiatry, he hadn’t entirely disagreed with his friend Sandro, a Freudian, who had suggested a few years back that Cenni was at odds with the laws of nature, that he studied death as an enemy to be conquered. There was a kernel of truth there, but only a kernel. What Cenni looked to defeat was death before its time. He abhorred murder, which deprived its victims of their four score years and ten. For many of his colleagues—those still tied to the Church—death was a glorious beginning and God a benevolent accountant. When they arrived at the pearly gates (none of them ever considered an alternative destination), God would review his ledger: twenty points in the right column if they had loved their wives; ten points in the left if they’d kept a mistress; five points for every occasion they dined at their mother-in-law’s; one point in the left for calling her
that old bag.
But for Cenni, dust-to-dust was not a biblical subtlety; it meant exactly that: final, inexorable oblivion.

It was a twenty-minute walk from the plaza to the hospital. He was humming to himself when he arrived at his destination. Two officers of the municipal police whom he passed along the way had greeted him enthusiastically, and tomorrow he’d be back in Perugia where he knew everyone and everyone knew him. But his joy in the day was extinguished as soon as he rang the bell for entrance to the mortuary. He was meeting the medical examiner there for the sole purpose of viewing the body of Jarvinia Baudler in her final degradation—a naked shell of decaying flesh: kidneys, liver, heart, and lungs thrown into a plastic bag on the steel autopsy table, her genitalia pitilessly exposed. In lowered voices they would discuss the preliminary postmortem findings: the manner of death (homicide), the number of broken bones (ten), the weapon (a log with a jagged edge), the length of the attack (approximately five minutes), the cause of death (acute myocardial infarction). At some point, they would stop talking, perhaps look away to avoid each other’s eyes, or speak of some other aspect of the case, and then, finally, in hushed tones one or the other of them would speak the unspeakable, the reason for the sealed report: the excision of Jarvinia Baudler’s clitoris with a pair of rusted pruning shears.

THE ELDERLY ATTENDANT greeted Cenni at the front door cheerfully. “Dottore
,
we thought you were gone for good, and here you are back again.” Cenni wondered if he knew the man. Surely he should remember him. The attendant had no lashes and the tissue around both his eyes was red and weeping. It appeared to be diseased. Not someone he would easily forget. He nodded in response to the old man’s greeting, but instinctively kept some distance between them as they walked down the windowless narrow hallway. The stagnant air, reeking with noxious smells, he remembered very well: Lysol, formaldehyde, and sodium hydrochloride, overlaid with a sickening flowery scent. The hospital’s subbasement had originally been designed as a storage area for medical records, but an ambitious city official had had it converted into a mortuary. It lacked an adequate filtering system, and the Department of Forensic Pathology had been trying for years to shut it down, but the same city official, or maybe another, had managed to keep it open for the ten or fewer autopsies performed there every year. Probably to keep the old man employed, Cenni surmised. Someone’s cousin or in-law. It was an Italian phenomenon, keeping one’s family working in unnecessary jobs, and only fools wasted their time railing against it.

The door to the main autopsy room was open, and the old man walked directly over to the steel table in the center of the room, swept his hand over the plastic bag and its occupant as though he were introducing a distinguished personage, and pulled down the zipper. He turned to Cenni, who had stopped short at the doorway, and indicated with a hand gesture and a broad smile that Cenni should take a look.

The senior medical examiner, the replacement for Marcello Batori, who had finally retired kicking and screaming in protest, had agreed to meet Cenni at the hospital at three o’clock, and he was annoyed that she had not yet arrived. He would have preferred to view the body with the pathologist, but he was also reluctant to hurt the old man’s feelings, so he stepped forward, ignoring the sign above the door that read DANGER! NO ENTRY EXCEPT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. Cenni had read the preliminary report carefully, yet he was still surprised at the extent of the bruises that covered Jarvinia Baudler’s upper torso. The preliminary postmortem, which Batori’s replacement had completed in record time (and that in itself was a record), stated that she had been pummeled repeatedly with the jagged end of a piece of firewood, perhaps as many as ten times, and that both arms and shoulders had been broken in multiple places.

“Looks quite peaceful, don’t she, dottore, if you don’t go below the neck. Her hair is especially beautiful; I just combed it.”

“Please step away from the body now!” came a new voice. Cenni, who had been deep in thought wondering if the old man were all there, jumped when he heard himself spoken to so rudely. The voice that had accosted him was loud and high-pitched, a woman for sure. When he turned to give her a piece of his mind, he thought she was a midget. The woman standing in the doorway was fully rigged out in protective clothing, head to toe: rubber boots and gloves, surgical gown and apron, high-tech respirator, and an ugly green cap hiding her hair.

“Commissario, you must leave the room immediately. There’s a risk of contagion.” Cenni jumped a second time, this time away from the body. When he got to the doorway, the woman had already turned and begun to walk away. Cenni followed her down the hallway until she entered a door to the right and motioned him inside.