The Villa Triste (14 page)

Pallioti returned his attention to the table. At the far end a col-lucretia lection of plastic bags lay in a heap. On closer inspection, they held what appeared to be very faded leaflets. He lifted one of the bags by the corners, holding it up to the light. It was large and sealed with a zip, the sort of thing one kept frozen food in. A number, 46, had been written on the front of it in what appeared to be black felt-tip pen. A small yellow sticker with a smudged name printed on it was stuck in the top corner. He put the bag down and picked up the next one, which was similar, although this time heat-sealed. The number on the front, again written in black felt pen of some kind, was B742. It was circled.

Pallioti squinted, then fished in his pocket for his reading glasses. With them on, he could read the tiny faded print through the plastic. The document in the bag wasn’t a leaflet, but a faded and folded newspaper of some kind. He flipped it over and saw the headline in dull greying letters,
La Nostra Lotta
, Our Fight. He could just make out the date, February 1944. The other bags were the same. There were at least fifteen, possibly twenty. The quality was uniformly poor and the titles uniformly full of bravado.
Call to Freedom
,
Patria
,
The Green Flame
, and again
Our Fight
.

He recognized them at once. Any Italian schoolchild of his generation would. Slipped into Fascist papers, left on park benches, folded into menus. They were like small ghostly hands reaching out. Touching a shoulder in the jostle of a crowd. Exhorting in a whisper not to lose hope. Not to give up. These were the ‘newspapers’, the underground press, that had been printed and distributed by the partisans during the last years of the war when the Germans had occupied Italy and released the Fascists, allowed them back out into the light of day to have one last hurrah.

Pallioti smoothed the bag in his hand, running his fingers over the dingy plastic, and looked up at the whiteboard and Giovanni Trantemento’s face. On first glance, the old man did not look sentimental. But looks could be deceiving. The truth was, everyone was sentimental. About something. Why should it be any surprise that Giovanni Battiste Trantemento, hero of the liberation, had been proud of what he had done? That he had collected these leaflets, souvenirs, a fragile deteriorating little record of his youth with the partisans.

Pallioti put the bag down, placing it carefully on the table. He was about to turn away when a flash of colour caught his eye. Something red, also in a plastic bag. He reached into the pile and lifted it out.

The top of this bag was open. Shreds of brittle yellowing sellotape clung to its mouth. Inside was a small book, about the size of his hand. He slipped it out, turned it over, and saw, stamped on the faded red leather cover, the ghostly outline of the lily of Florence.

Chapter Four

‘He was quiet. Even as a boy. He was always so quiet, so modest.’

Ensconced in a large armchair in the sitting room of her Rome apartment, Maria Valacci, Giovanni Trantemento’s seventy-seven-year-old sister and only sibling, buried her face in her handkerchief and began to weep loudly. Standing behind her, her son rolled his eyes before patting her, none too gently, on the shoulder.

‘Mama,’ he said, ‘please.’

Tall and thin, with a strangely skull-like head, Antonio Valacci bent over his mother and whispered, quite loudly, ‘For God’s sake, Mama, pull yourself together. This man is a policeman!’

Leaning back in the uncomfortable chair he had been shown to, Pallioti watched as Maria Valacci somewhat reluctantly followed her son’s advice. He wondered if they knew exactly how dear Uncle Gio had amassed his not-inconsiderable nest egg. The size of his bank accounts – there were several – had surprised everyone. What he had amassed was not a fortune, quite. But when added to the cold cash found in the safe, it was damn close. And as his will stated, most of it, including his extremely desirable apartment in Florence, would revert to these two people. Pallioti wondered if they were aware of that fact.

‘He was my older brother,’ she said. ‘My only living relative.’

Antonio Valacci sighed as he folded himself onto the sofa beside his mother’s armchair.

‘
E che sono?
’ he muttered. ‘
Il figlio di nessuno?
’

‘Don’t be so silly.’ His mother glared at him. ‘Of course you’re not no one. You know what I mean!’

‘Yes, Mama.’ Antonio nodded. ‘I certainly do. My mother is proud,’ he said, turning to Pallioti, ‘exceptionally proud, of the role her brother played in the war. In fact,’ he added, ‘she never tires of talking about it. It’s one of her favourite subjects. Which is all the more amazing since dear Uncle Gio, who we saw all of once a decade, never mentioned it at all.’

This caused Maria Valacci to wail, ‘He was a modest man!’ again. She produced another handkerchief from somewhere in the depths of the chair. ‘A patriot,’ she said. ‘One of the heroes of Italy. Without men like him,’ she announced, turning to her son, ‘people like you wouldn’t be free to walk the streets.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

Antonio leaned back and closed his eyes. Pallioti thought he saw him counting to ten. A clock whirred in the corner of the room and began to chime the half-hour.

Although the day was bright the windows were half shuttered, filling the long room with light the colour of pond water. Pallioti wondered if it was always like this, or if the gloom had been specially induced out of respect for Uncle Gio.

The apartment itself was in a building in the warren of streets between Piazza Navona and the Vittorio Emmanuel. The address was distinguished, but even the police driver had had difficulty finding it. Eventually Pallioti had got out and walked, leaving the young officer and his Mercedes at Chiesa Nuova. In the end, the building hadn’t been more than twenty steps away, as everything in Rome seemed to be once you actually knew where it was. He had been buzzed in and climbed the three flights of marble stairs, his footsteps ringing loud as cymbals. The fact that there had been only one other front door on the far side of the Valaccis’ landing led him to suspect that their apartment took up at least half the floor. For Rome, that was large. But perhaps, Pallioti thought, not large enough to comfortably house a fifty-year-old man and his ageing mother?

From somewhere beyond the sitting room another clock, then another, joined the chorus of whirring and chiming. Antonio opened his eyes and managed a wan smile.

‘An enthusiasm of my father’s,’ he said. ‘He was a shipping agent – frozen foods, mostly. And rice. Did you know that Italy is a major exporter of rice?’

Antonio Valacci got to his feet, straightening his tie and pulling down the cuffs of his pinstriped shirt.

‘I suppose you did,’ he said. ‘It’s the sort of thing policemen know.’ He glanced at Pallioti, and added, ‘At least your kind of policeman. Anyway,’ he shrugged, ‘it was lucrative, but it bored Papa. What he really loved was clocks. He liked to collect them and disembowel them, in his spare time. He called them “his children”.’ Antonio smiled thinly. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that makes them my brothers and sisters. My mother’s only other living relatives. May I offer you an espresso, Dottore?’ he asked. ‘I’m feeling in need of one.’

Without waiting for Pallioti to answer, Antonio Valacci picked up a small silver bell from a side table and rang it. The sound should have been lost in the chiming of the clocks, but apparently wasn’t, because a small Asian woman in a uniform popped out of a doorway at the end of the room even before he put it down. Pallioti wondered if she had deliberately been idling in order to eavesdrop, or if she was always required to hover just out of sight. She was illegal, probably. In a perfect world he ought to check. But he wouldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of policeman.

‘I wonder if you could tell me,’ he asked, leaning towards Antonio’s mother, ‘how often, Signora Valacci, did you see your brother, in the last few years?’

Maria Valacci’s skin was pale and finely wrinkled. A vein twitched at the corner of her eye. ‘Not often enough,’ she said.

As she spoke she glanced towards the fireplace. From above it, a portrait of a dark-suited man whom Pallioti assumed was Antonio’s clock-loving father stared down at them.

‘Not often enough. During my whole life,’ Maria Valacci said again. ‘I never saw Giovanni often enough.’

She paused. Pallioti braced himself for another flood of tears. But they didn’t come. Instead, Maria Valacci narrowed her eyes, staring into the middle distance as if she was trying to pick something – some moment, or word, or gesture – out of the past. Failing, she shook her head. Then she said, ‘Tonio is right. Giovanni did not care for us.’

‘Mama—’

‘No. It’s true.’

Maria Valacci reached out and touched her son. For a second, her thin, almost talon-like fingers rested on the back of his hand with unexpected tenderness. Then she drew back, twisting the large sapphire ring that sat on her left hand and shaking her head.

‘Perhaps we did not care for him, either,’ she said. ‘As much as we should have. If the truth be told.’

She glanced at Pallioti and smiled. It was nothing more than a flicker, an echo of the young woman she must once have been.

‘The dead are difficult, don’t you find, Ispettore?’ she asked suddenly. ‘They tend to be so much more present than the living. Perhaps because they can be everywhere at once.’ Her pale-blue eyes dulled for a moment, then she gave herself a little shake. ‘In any case,’ she continued, ‘my late husband did not care for Giovanni, on the few occasions that he met him. And to be very honest, I didn’t know him. I didn’t see my brother, after the war, for almost twenty years. I thought he was dead. So we might as well have been strangers, really. We were. I suppose,’ she added, looking down at her hands, ‘I thought I would correct that, one day, in the way you do. But I never did. I was ten years younger than Gio.’

She stopped speaking, her eyes searching into the past again. Pallioti waited.

‘My father,’ Maria Valacci continued. ‘I loved him. He used to carry me on his shoulders, pretend he was a horse.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘He was killed in the war, in Russia, Papa. Left to die on the retreat when our German friends decided they could not, after all, spare the resources to help evacuate their beloved brothers-in-arms. Mama, my mother – she never forgave him for that. Never got over it. It made her ill. She’d been a believer, you see.’ The old woman looked at Pallioti and nodded. ‘A loyal follower of
Il Duce
,’ she said. ‘An advocate of the Pact of Steel. So, the shame – you see, she couldn’t cope with it. She believed my father was a coward, that somehow it had to have been his fault. Being left behind. Dying. Leaving her. She couldn’t hate Mussolini, or the Nazis – so she hated Papa. And eventually, she did the same to Giovanni. Hated him for what he did.’

Pallioti leaned forward.

‘For what he did?’

Maria Valacci nodded.

‘Joining the partisans. My mother never forgave him for that. Even though he took such good care of her. He loved her, you see,’ she added. ‘The way children will. You kick a dog and it keeps coming back. She died in a sanatorium, Mama. In Switzerland, near Zurich. In 1947.’

Her voice stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Silence seeped into the long room, rocking on a backwash of memory. It was broken by the creak of a door and the quick tap-tap of the maid’s shoes as she crossed the polished chestnut floor bearing a tray that held three tiny porcelain cups and saucers.

The coffee was bitter and strong and seemed to inject a pulse of normality into the proceedings. Which, Pallioti suspected, was why Antonio had suggested it. He wondered how much time, exactly, Maria Valacci’s son spent trying to fish his mother out of the whirlpool of the past.

‘Forgive me,’ Pallioti said, replacing the little cup and saucer on the tray, ‘but I am afraid I have to ask you. Last Wednesday, November first, can you tell me where you were?’

Antonio opened his hands in a ‘who me?’ gesture and smiled.

‘Not in Florence,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you’re wondering. I was in my office. I work for the Ministry. Under the general umbrella of Culture. My mother,’ he added, ‘was having her hair done.’ Antonio Valacci was watching Pallioti carefully. ‘She has her hair done at 11 a.m. on Wednesdays,’ he said. ‘On any and all Wednesdays. I can give you the name of her hairdresser. And of my secretary.’

He jumped up and began to weave his way towards a desk in the corner.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Antonio,’ his mother said, her eyes following him. ‘You make us sound as if we’re suspects.’

‘We are.’

Antonio Valacci glanced over his shoulder and smiled. He appeared to be writing something on a piece of card.

‘Everyone’s a suspect,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they, Ispettore?’

Threading his way back across the room, Antonio handed Pallioti an old-fashioned address card that had a telephone number and two names –
The Bella Donna Hair Salon
, and
Anna Perocci
– written on the back. The woman’s name sounded familiar, but Pallioti could not put his finger on why. He slipped the card into his jacket.

‘I gave the same information to the pair who came yesterday evening,’ Antonio said, sitting down on the couch again. ‘But perhaps they haven’t passed it along. If the police are anything like the Culture Ministry it takes about a year for one department to talk to the next.’

The police were actually not much like the Culture Ministry, but it was entirely possible that the two fairly junior Roman officers who would have been sent to inform Giovanni Trantemento’s next of kin of his death had not yet got around to filing a report. Not that it mattered much. They were family liaison officers, dispatched for the purpose of bringing comfort, not casting suspicion on the recently bereaved. That was his job.

Having spoken by phone to one of the officers in question, Pallioti knew the Valaccis had not been told any more than the press – simply that Giovanni Trantemento had been shot in the course of what appeared to be a burglary. No mention had been made of single bullets. Or of kneeling. Or salt.

Now he leant forward and said, ‘I know it is unpleasant, but I must ask. Do either of you have any idea, any suspicion at all, as to why someone might have wanted to kill Signor Trantemento?’

The words were so clichéd that he felt mildly ridiculous even mouthing them. But hackneyed as it was, the question was necessary, and in his experience, almost always useful. It was not so much the answer that interested him, as the reaction he got when he asked it. Sometimes outrage. Sometimes gabbled nonsense. This time, he was rewarded with a knowing look, at least from Antonio. Maria Valacci simply shook her head.

‘I thought it was burglary,’ she said.

‘Yes. But there is always the chance that he knew his killer. So, if you have any idea—’

He looked from one to the other of them. Antonio was studying his empty coffee cup with intense interest.

‘I never visited him,’ Maria Valacci said. ‘Not once, in Florence. Or anywhere else, I’m afraid. So I don’t know anyone he knew. Except Antonio and my late husband, of course. I went to Switzerland,’ she added, ‘with my mother. Giovanni took us. He stayed with us for a while, then he vanished. Not surprising, I suppose. Even the most devoted dog can be kicked too hard.’

Pallioti frowned. Maria Valacci looked at him and nodded.

‘It was horrible,’ she said. ‘Our mother, she called Gio names. Said he was a coward, like his father. We weren’t even allowed to mention Papa. It was as if she wanted to wipe him off the face of the earth, pretend he’d never existed. But she couldn’t because she had us. And Gio looked just like him. Perhaps that’s why Mama hated him, because although we couldn’t speak about Papa, or even use his name, Gio still had his face.’

She studied her hands for a moment, twisting the big ring. ‘They said some heart ailment killed her,’ she whispered. ‘But really, it was anger. Hate. Hate turned her heart black.’

She stopped speaking. The clocks ticked like a chorus of crickets.

‘After my mother died,’ Maria Valacci said, ‘I got married. I thought Gio was dead.’ She shrugged. ‘Everyone else was. So I just assumed. And I had a new husband, and—’ She shook her head and looked at Pallioti. ‘Everything was so confused just then. You have no idea. Nothing was the way it had been. It was as if the whole world had been taken and shaken and all the pieces broken and put back in the wrong place.’

Pallioti nodded, waiting for her to go on.

‘After we were married,’ she said a moment later, ‘my husband and I came here, to Rome. His family is from here. And, well, I tried to find Gio. I made some calls. Wrote to the Red Cross and the CLN. The Committee of National Liberation. They were supposed to know what had happened to all the partisans. Finally, I was told he was dead. I’d thought so anyway, so why should I guess it wasn’t true?’ She looked at Pallioti, her face pleading, as if she were asking for his forgiveness. ‘It happened,’ she said. ‘To a lot of people. No one knew who was dead or who was alive or who was anywhere.’