The Faces of Angels (63 page)

I think about this for a second, about the doubt that must have seeped in like damp, peeling back what he thought he knew.

‘And then there was Ginevra,' I say. ‘And the similarities were too great. The way the body was arranged. The bag. So it was either a copy, or Indrizzio didn't kill the first two women.'

Pallioti nods. I feel somehow betrayed by this. I had always assumed his belief that Karel Indrizzio committed the first two murders was total. He never expressed any doubt. But, I remind myself, he wouldn't, to me, would he? Just because he sat by my hospital bed, it doesn't mean our relationship was equal. The idea comes as something of a shock. Then I wonder if that's fair. The police aren't in the equality business any more than priests are, they just like you to believe that while they're trying to get you to tell them things.

I have thought this over, and I know I first saw Lorenzo Beretti on the day we went to the Boboli. The first official day of summer, when the clocks went forward. Billy with her basket. The Japanese girls in Mantua. Ginevra Montelleone was definitely dead by then.

‘And if it was a copycat?' I ask finally.

He shrugs and pulls an ashtray towards him. It's big and glass. The light from the window beside us bounces through its prisms. ‘A copycat could have been as dangerous for you. Your case was in the papers. He might have wanted to really copy Indrizzio, finish what the master left incomplete.'

I think of Billy arguing with me about going to Ginevra's vigil, making the very point Pallioti has just made. Except that already it was too late. Already, Marcello had appeared out of the dark to see me safely home.

‘I think I'll have that cigarette after all,' I say, and Pallioti smiles and pushes the pack and lighter across the desk towards me.

As the heavy silver lighter flares, I look at Pallioti. Were you really just protecting me? I wonder. Or did you think that if you watched me, you might see someone else watching me too?

In which case, my coming back would have been a gift. What's the saying? The best way to catch a wolf is to stake a goat? They probably couldn't believe how lucky they got. Anger rises up in me, then dips again. Why should I blame them? In their place, wouldn't I have done the same thing? And it did work, in the end. Sort of. I know now that they had Marcello on a ‘watch list', that they were suspicious of him, but didn't want to risk bringing him in, in case he led them to Sophie.

We smoke in silence for a moment as I turn this over in my head, realizing I wasn't what I thought I was. That instead of reaching for my dreams here in Florence, being free at last, I was just a decoy: a bright shiny lure flitting through the city, watched in the hope that I might attract something dark.

Pallioti slides the ashtray towards me. Today his face and eyes are made even paler by the severe cut of his suit. He could be a priest himself, I think. A Grand Inquisitor, sitting up here in his office, arranging people in the city below him like pieces on a board, looking down on good and evil. What was it he said to me the day after Billy died?
We live in the picture, but we rarely see it.
Does Pallioti see it, I wonder. Or is that left to God alone? To the bored Jesus looking down on us from his perch at San Miniato?

I could ask him, but it occurs to me I don't even know if Pallioti believes in God. In fact, I don't know anything about him at all. Except that he smokes too much. Finally he stubs his cigarette out, puts a folder on his desk and opens it.

‘Marcello Marelli,' he says. ‘Aged twenty-five. Born, Mantua.'

‘The picture.'

‘
Si, certo.
' He nods. Then he does something I've never seen him do before. Ispettore Pallioti reaches into his jacket pocket, and slips on glasses. Maybe they're new. Maybe he's just gotten them, and age is catching up with him the way it catches up with the rest of us mere mortals. He glances at me over the rims.

‘The picture,' he says. ‘Yes, Marcello would almost certainly have seen it on school trips. The state schools are big on Italy's heritage. I'm sure he went to the ducal palace more than once, and they'd hardly have left out Mantegna.' He sighs and looks back at the papers in front of him.

‘Marcello was put into care, made a ward of the state and sent to a state school when he was twelve. His mother was a single parent, a drug addict. Marcello's stepfather abused him, which was why he was removed. His own father is unknown. His mother died of an overdose when he was fifteen. From an early age, Marcello sought solace, possibly sanctuary, in the church. Babinellio thinks he also liked the structure, found it reassuring.' Pallioti glances up at me. ‘He was an altar boy,' he says.

I am staring out of the window as I listen, remembering the young man who walked beside me in the dark. One of things he said he wanted was to have a family. How we long to re-create our pasts, if only in dreams, where rage and hurt and damage can't get in our way.

‘He did well in school,' Pallioti goes on. ‘He was bright. He got a place at the university here in Florence.'

‘Is that when he joined Opus?'

They recruit among the vulnerable, Pierangelo told me when I asked him. That's why they like universities. Young people away from home, just starting to find their way in the world. Exchange students. The lonely. Idealists who want to do good but don't know how. There's a joke somewhere in there about showing people
The Way
, but I don't think I'd find it funny. I stub my cigarette out, trying not to feel Marcello's hand in mine.

‘Let's just say that Opus Dei is not cooperating,' Pallioti says. ‘Your pictures have helped there, the ones with Signora Kalczeska. We believe they'd come by to check up on him, make sure he was still on the “straight and narrow.” so to speak. But yes, to answer your question. We think he joined Opus quite soon after he arrived here and moved into one of the Opus houses. He was a young man alone, already religious. Not afraid of hard work and attracted to strict rules, and simple solutions. Opus would have been very attractive to him.'

‘Plus he had lousy self-esteem and probably found life terrifying.'

Pallioti nods. ‘The victims of sexual abuse usually blame themselves, especially if they were children. According to Babinellio, Marcello would have carried a great deal of rage and guilt. And fear. And, of course, as a child, he saw the dangers of chaos at first hand.'

‘Up close and personal.'

The image of the little kid Marcello must have been flashes in front of me as Pallioti raises his eyebrows. ‘Nothing,' I shake my head. ‘It's just an American saying.'

‘The medical examiner found a great deal of old scar tissue, on Marcello's back and thighs.'

My stomach turns cold. I remember standing at the bottom of the ladder in the signora's shop—what? A week ago? And coming face to face with the scar on Marcello's back as his sweatshirt rode up. I assumed it was from his accident. I never even thought of the ‘discipline,' of the privilege of mortifying recalcitrant flesh.

Pallioti looks back at the file. ‘University didn't go as well as he hoped. He decided at some point to drop out, and he got a place—'

‘At the Police Academy.'

The glasses focus on me again. ‘How did you know?'

‘He told me.'

Pallioti's office has a large half-moon window. Pigeons growl under the eaves and, as we watch, a pair of swallows zoom by, flying in tight, close formation, dipping and looping.

‘I met him one night,' I say, watching the tiny birds. ‘He walked me home, and we talked about what he wanted to do. He said he had to drop out of the Police Academy because he broke his leg.'

I look back at Pallioti. ‘Oh my God, that's it, isn't it?' I remember Marcello talking about pins. And pain. ‘He said he was in hospital for a long time. That's the gap. Between me and Caterina, when he started again.'

Pallioti nods. ‘We think it's likely that his relationship with Opus declined during that time as well.'

‘Why? Because he wasn't living in the house? Because he couldn't fulfil his duties for them? For God's sake, he was in hospital!' This seems crazy, even for Opus. Then I think of another reason. ‘Do you think they knew what he did?' I ask. ‘To Eleanora and Benedetta? Could they have suspected?'

Opus demands full confession, placing every last thing in your priest's lap. Returning to the status of an innocent. The ‘Childhood Before God' idea. Except adults are not children. Before God or anyone else. No matter what Opus would like. Is it possible that his priest knew what he'd done and told no one? Just pushed him away so the organization wouldn't be tainted?

Pallioti is looking out of the window. ‘As I said,' he repeats. ‘Opus Dei are declining to cooperate.'

‘Can't the cardinal—'

He looks at me, killing the question before I can finish it, and something close to a smile flickers at the corner of his mouth. Of course. That was why the cardinal was so interested in the first place. Opus Dei supports him, he's hardly likely to do anything to alienate them. Like implicating them with a serial killer, for instance. Much less suggest they actually encouraged him, however unwittingly.

‘Eleanora Darnelli was a nun,' Pallioti says, reading my mind. ‘Of course, her death attracted the cardinal's attention. When Benedetta Lucchese was killed, he became even more concerned.'

I bet he did.

‘
Serviam.
' Pallioti repeats the last word Marcello ever said. ‘Latin for “I serve.” It's also Opus Dei's motto. Babinellio thinks that, to some degree, Marcello may have been doing this to impress Opus. As they pushed him away, he would only have become more frantic. They had been a home to him. Losing his place in it would have been terrifying, given his past, so he would have tried harder and harder to prove himself. Apparently a main tenet of the organization is that its members attempt to bring others to God.'

‘Fishing.'

‘I'm sorry?' The eyebrows go up again.

‘They call it “fishing.” I think it's one of the requirements for membership, or at least for good standing. You net other souls for God.' The expression on his face actually makes me laugh. ‘Subtlety isn't really one of their strong points,' I add. ‘Secrecy, on the other hand…'

Now it's Pallioti who smiles. It transforms his face with a quick flash of light, and for the first time I wonder how old he is.

‘Along with fishing, we believe one of his duties was repairs, replacing the odd roof tile, carpentry, generally care-taking,' he says. ‘Opus Dei owns a number of older villas around the city and they take a lot of maintenance. Marcello was good with his hands.'

‘So that's how he knew about the House of the Birds?'

‘We think so. Opus has been trying to acquire it for some time. At one point they had a survey done, and even volunteered to do some work on it, in an attempt to soften opposition from the owner.'

I was a gardener for a while,
he told me,
but that isn't a career.
Not like returning the lost to God. And he would have seen them as lost too, each one of them. Eleanora, a nun leaving the church because of what he would have seen as lust, betraying Christ for sins of the flesh. Benedetta, unmarried, living with a lover and, worse, working actively to get her sister out of Opus Dei. Caterina was a prostitute; that would have been bad enough, and not knowing her, or Rosa, perhaps he saw himself in her son. Ginevra was an ardent defender of women's right to control their own bodies—commit murder, in Marcello's eyes. And Sophie. It wasn't Signora Raguzza's companion who left the grocery bag outside her open door. It was Marcello, who spoke perfectly good English, and who wouldn't have had to stand there long to hear Sophie planning to kidnap children. As for Billy. Well, Billy was Billy. I think of her in her crimson dress, literally the Scarlet Woman. It was the day after I went to Siena that she first mentioned him, said she thought he was cute, and told him so. I remember thinking at the time that a fling with her might be the highlight of his life. Now I cringe at the thought, and remember the expression on his face when she spilled her coins across the floor of the shop and let loose a truly creative catalogue of obscenities. I had thought it was embarrassment, but probably it was rage. Which leaves me. Before he died, Marcello said he never hurt me. Maybe he meant that after I was nice to him he changed his mind.

‘He knew all the women,' Pallioti says. He pulls out another cigarette and lights it. ‘Or rather,' he adds, ‘he knew of them. Opus sent volunteers up to do some maintenance work at Eleanora's convent. Gossip got around. Isabella can't remember, but he may have actually known her, certainly he would have known of her once she left. I gather sheep who leave the fold are publicly shunned. And her sister, who got her out, would be regarded as, at best, lost. At worst, dangerous. Caterina went to the same church he did after he got out of the hospital.'

‘And the church did work at the clinic where she was in the methadone programme.'

Pallioti looks up. The picture, I think. The face I thought I recognized as I was leaving. ‘If you check,' I say, ‘I think you'll find him in a group photo in the conference room.'

He nods and makes a note. ‘Ginevra, of course,' he continues, ‘was something of a public figure, especially after she threw eggs at the cardinal.'

I understand all this. What I can't understand, though, is how Marcello would have known, two years ago, about Pierangelo and me. The affair would certainly have qualified me for his attentions, and my best guess is that he came across Ty, perhaps in connection with Rinaldo, then somehow made his discovery. Perhaps he saw Piero and me together on the street, or in a bar, anywhere, and recognized me. Florence is a small town that way.