A Deadly Paradise (4 page)

“Surely you know the rules,” she said, rounding on him. “No one is permitted in the autopsy room without express permission from the medical examiner, and then only if properly clothed. I’ve finally gotten a go-ahead from Rome to shut this one down. It’s so loaded with infectious matter, it could start the next bubonic plague.”

If she hadn’t laughed when she saw the panic register on his face, Cenni might have gone screaming out the front door searching frantically for a vat of antiseptic. “Sorry,” he responded sheepishly. He knew the rules of the autopsy room as well as anyone, but like most of his fellow officers he rarely observed them, mainly because Batori had never enforced them. In his own defense, he added, “I’ve been in there before dressed in street clothes. With
Dottor
Batori. He was okay with it.”

“That idiot! He should have contracted an infectious disease twenty years ago. Tuberculosis, rabies, plague, anthrax, hepatitis, smallpox, herpes, Creutzfeldt-Jakob—mad cow to you—every disease agent known to man is probably lurking in the corners of that autopsy room. We haven’t actually met, have we?” she asked, interrupting her diatribe against Batori to pull off her right glove. “I’m the medical examiner, Dottoressa Falchi,” she said in a conciliatory tone, extending her hand.

Cenni hesitated before taking it, and she laughed. “I donned this space outfit to meet with you. I’m clean.” They were standing side by side, and she didn’t quite reach his shoulder. Not quite a midget, he reflected, but certainly not more than five feet tall.

She closed the door and then removed her respirator and cap.

Cenni finally saw her face. A vast improvement over Batori! A small delicate nose, deep-set black eyes, and a sensuous mouth that owed nothing to the current rage for silicone injections. A small voice in the back of his head scolded him for being a chauvinist, but he ignored it and gave the petite medical examiner his most winning smile. Better than an improvement, he decided. Her last name was Italian but her physiognomy suggested that she was part something else. Maybe the better part, he thought disloyally, admiring her delicate bones.

“You’re putting me on, I hope, about all those diseases,” Cenni asked, not quite sure.

She laughed again. “Well maybe about mad cow. We haven’t yet had a recorded case of it in Umbria. But to answer your question seriously, the Angel of Death, or Malak al-Maut as my mother calls him, would flee from this place. It stinks of formaldehyde. The attendant who let you in, Claudio, has allergic dermatitis from its overuse. The smell hangs in the air; and for what, I ask you? We rarely embalm bodies in Italy, yet Batori ordered it by the keg. Probably from a brother-in-law,” she added sarcastically. “And don’t get me started on Claudio. He breaks every rule in the book. The day I came here to perform the autopsy on the German, I found him in the autopsy room drinking coffee and eating a sandwich. My God, think of it! Eating in the autopsy room! But enough. If you want to review Baudler’s postmortem in the autopsy room, you need to be properly outfitted. Or . . .” and she smiled charmingly, “if you’d rather, we can do it outside in the sunshine and get the stink of this place out of our nostrils. And have a smoke.”

I like her, Cenni thought. She’s not as young as she looks, which is about twenty. From her position as head of forensic pathology in Perugia, he knew she had to be at least thirty, probably older. Yet she still has passion, still believes the system can work for her if she yells loud enough. Her reference to Malak al-Maut, the Angel of Death in Islam, could account for that other part of her and also perhaps for her passion. No full-blooded Italian working in a government job still believed in the possibilities of change.

Cenni had some ten minutes to think about how he would begin his discussion of the German’s postmortem, and its delicate nature, with this good-looking woman. He wasn’t even sure if it was because she was good-looking or because she was a woman that he was so uncomfortable, although he knew that either one probably meant he was a chauvinist. He’d ask Elena about it the next time he saw her.

Cenni and his twin brother had moved forward professionally in the old Italy, a male-dominated world, he as a senior police officer and Renato as a bishop in the Catholic Church, but the old Italy was rapidly disappearing. Women had crowded into all the professions except the church, and the church had lost its relevance. The birth rate in Italy was the lowest in Western Europe, and women no longer accepted their priests’ admonition that their job was to stay at home and breed. Abortion, especially among married women, was now considered a sacred right. Cenni recognized that his comfort level in working with a female pathologist was of no consequence; he had no recourse but to adapt.

He was seated on one of the benches that lined the pedestrian walk to the hospital’s front entrance, waiting for Dottoressa Falchi (or Tahany, as she had asked him to call her) to change out of her space outfit into street clothes. He leafed through the postmortem report again, trying to frame his questions in a way to avoid embarrassing either of them. He realized it was going to be worse than he feared when he saw her approaching. She had been hiding a very trim figure under that surgical gown, and the rubber boots had been replaced with sling-back spike heels, about three inches’ worth, he estimated, as he watched her struggling on the cobblestone walkway.

She plopped down next to him, emitting a large sigh of relief before lighting a cigarette. “I hate that place and I hope to God—yours and mine—that this is the last time I’ll have to work in there. I wonder what
la tedesca
would say if she knew how she was spending her last days above ground. She was quite snotty, I’ve heard. I don’t think she’d be too happy at the way Claudio exhibits her to all comers. You’d think she was Madonna or the Queen of England, for Christ’s sake,” she said, exhaling a long stream of smoke at the end of her speech.

Now how did she do that, Cenni wondered, watching the smoke rise above their heads and disappear into a shaft of sunlight. She must have the lungs of a deep-sea diver. He couldn’t contain himself any longer.

“You know, Tahany, I don’t generally interfere in anyone’s pleasure, so long as it’s not a felony. But inside the mortuary you were so concerned that you might contract an infectious disease and outside, in the fresh air, you’re smoking yourself into an early cancer.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. I’m planning to stop,” she replied, tossing her spent cigarette into the bushes. “In the meantime, care to join me?” she asked, proffering the open pack.

After she had lighted both their cigarettes, she looked straight at him. “Let’s get it out of the way. Her clitoris was hacked off. There, it’s said!
Excised,
I suppose is the word I should use, more genteel. But there was nothing genteel about what was done to Baudler, although, thank God, it was done after she was dead. If the killer were trying to make a statement, it’s not particularly clear from anything at the crime scene exactly what it was. It was a sloppy job, certainly nothing even close to a Sunna circumcision or any of the other forms of female genital mutilation practiced in Africa—where I was born, in case you’ve been wondering. Even those horribly botched jobs performed in secret in Italy and in other parts of Europe are executed better than this one. If I had to call it, I’d say the person who killed the German is mad as a hatter. Not someone you’d want on the loose.”

8

THE NARROW CROOKED house, the smallest and some said the oldest house in town, held upright by the clock tower on one side and the deconsecrated chapel on the other, was at last covered in paint. The pink house, Anita said to herself twice. She liked the sound of it so much, she said it again a third time, and then out loud. She had petitioned the town council for more than a year for permission to paint her house pink. It wasn’t saturated color that they objected to, just the color pink. They counterproposed with yellow, initially a mellow light-toned yellow, and, later, a hard bright gold. When she rejected yellow, they moved on to green, five different shades of green, and then finally to blue. They were persistent in pushing blue: peacock, indigo, azure, gentian, sapphire, aquamarine, and turquoise, so she finally offered a compromise. She suggested lavender. But they objected to lavender even more than they did to pink. Each month for over a year, the council sent around a workman to apply another patch of color to the house. Live with it, they said to her, try it out, they begged, let it speak to you, they suggested, until Anita’s house took on the appearance of a gaudy clown. She rejected all their offerings, firmly. It was her house and she wanted it pink: a glowing, vibrant, rosy pink.

In the days when the fountain across from the house had provided water for the town’s annual flower procession held every June to honor the feast of Corpus Christi, Anita had played inside, in the dungeons where prisoners had been tortured. It was a different time back then, when men routinely inflicted pain on their enemies before killing them, not to extract information, but simply because they liked it. The house wasn’t pink back then, according to the town council; but how could they know that for sure, Anita had argued. And it wasn’t pink when she played there as a child, when her uncle Orazio had lived there; it was the color of pewter, dull peeling pewter.

Marta, Anita’s mother, had grown up in the house, but she’d left it when her parents died, when Anita was three years old. They had gone to live in an apartment on the other side of Paradiso. The house was half her mother’s, and Anita couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t live there, but this was just one of the many subjects that Marta refused to discuss with her daughter. She also refused to talk about Anita’s father, who had left Marta when Anita was still an infant. Orazio, Anita’s uncle, had stayed in the house but Anita always knew that one day it would be hers. It was the only sure thing in her life. Her mother said Anita would never have children, that no man would want her because of her deformity, so the house was her compensation.

Orazio, who hadn’t married, died suddenly in 2000, after eating poisonous mushrooms, and his half-share of the house came to her mother by default. When her mother died two years later, of a fall from the fourth floor balcony of the selfsame house, it had passed to Anita, her only child. In the thirty-five years that Orazio had lived in the house alone, with no woman to tidy up after him, it had deteriorated, and Anita set about restoring it. Perhaps “restoring” isn’t the right word, as she had the modern Italian’s desire for marble floors and elaborate plumbing. Orazio had lived with pitted brick floors and one small bathroom with a handheld shower on the first floor. Her love of expensive materials and American plumbing meant that Anita had to plan wisely. Anita’s mother had left her only child a bequest (a very large bequest, according to the town’s notary), but Anita knew one should never spend foolishly. She would fix the house slowly, and when it was finished, painted inside and out, she would move in. So she rented it for four years, but never to the same tenant for more than a year at a time. When each tenant moved out, Anita would bring in the workmen and they would replace a floor here, add a bathroom there. The house, which had four stories and a cellar, was ten feet in width and twenty feet in length, so it took a good bit of imagination and architectural sleight-of-hand to squeeze three bathrooms, a marble-enhanced kitchen (with dishwasher), two bedrooms, and a room in which to watch TV into the smallest house in town.

Jarvinia Baudler, a German diplomat, had been Anita’s most recent tenant. Anita knew that renting to Italians was fraught with danger. The government gave them rights that Anita didn’t want them to have, so she’d rented her house only to
stranieri,
and when possible to Americans. Americans paid in advance, never disputed their utility bills, replaced all the spent light bulbs when they left, and added considerably to Anita’s stock of household furnishings. When they couldn’t find what they needed in the house, they purchased it, and often left it behind. The cobbled-together set of chipped and cracked dishes that Anita provided had been supplemented by one of her American tenants with a full set of china handpainted with blue periwinkles. When the tenant left, Anita individually wrapped each of the blue periwinkle dishes in newspaper and stored them in the basement.

Jarvinia Baudler was the first German Anita had rented to. She would also be the last. Anita, who was never finagled by anyone out of anything, had been finagled by the German into signing a two-year lease; not just any lease, either, but an official stamped document, prepared by the town’s only notary
,
covered in wax seals, and in the end paid for by Anita. After the lease was recorded in the town hall, Jarvinia refused to compensate her. “Why should I pay?” she asked when Anita presented the bill. “It’s your house.”

“She’s nothing but a criminal,” Anita told Lorenzo, her cousin and confidant, particularly after Jarvinia followed her initial transgression with others equally shameless and costly. “I’m not paying for garbage pickup,” constituted their second skirmish. Jarvinia won that one also, although Anita planned to recoup the twelve euros by padding the water bill. Then came the dispute about the wine glasses. Jarvinia had expected Anita to provide glasses with stems. Anita had been drinking wine for thirty years and didn’t own a single glass with a stem. The last straw, Anita told Lorenzo, was the German’s comments regarding the quality of the cutlery. “Do you really expect me to eat my peas with this?” Jarvinia had asked caustically, holding up a knife that had been a wedding gift to Anita’s mother. Was she implying that Italians ate their peas with a knife? In the past, on the few occasions when tenants had complained, Anita had had her way. Most of them spoke Italian poorly, and after a few shrugs of Anita’s shoulders, or a few blank stares, the complainants would walk away in confusion. And if they didn’t, she would assault them in rapid-fire Italian. Jarvinia Baudler spoke perfect Italian and she never walked away.

The real difficulty began a month after the German moved in, when her women friends arrived, some for short visits and others for lengthy stays. And then one of them, a young black woman, moved in and didn’t leave. All those who gathered in the town’s only café discussed her advent from early morning until late at night, particularly the old-age pensioners, who were the most prolific gossipers. One of them, old Enzo, approached Anita at the bar one day and asked if she’d ever joined in their games. Anita smelled the grappa on his breath and heard the others snickering in the background. She slapped him hard across the face. The other men in the café gasped in excitement, and the two carabinieri who were having a coffee at the bar escaped through the front door. Enzo apologized to Anita the next day when no one else was around.