The Bishop's Bedroom

by Chiara, Piero; Foulston, Jill;

  It’s possible to spend an entire day in the Sanctuary of Santa Caterina, wandering through the various passageways, arcades and cloisters, all of them infused with the atmosphere of other eras. Under an arcade of ogival arches, Orimbelli found a fresco showing skeletons in a country dance.

  “I don’t like this place,” he said. And he hurried toward the osteria, with its four rooms and a small veranda hovering over the water on stilts.

  We sat down in the early morning shade to look at the lake. The islands rose up from afar. Up closer, on the other shore, the cube that was the Albergo Eden showed up white against the green of Pallanza Point. The other milky cube—the Regina Palace and the Grand Hotel of the Borromean Islands of Stresa—looked like huge cetaceans stranded on the shore. Below us, the Tinca strained at its mooring, light as a cork.

  The owner of the osteria came to tell us that she’d make us a risotto with bass for lunch. Orimbelli was easily persuaded to stay, but he wouldn’t take a brief walk with us while we waited for the risotto. He didn’t move from his spot beside the balustrade where he leaned back on the chair, staring into the distance, his arm resting on the gray stone surface. While the women started to walk up the hill, I asked him what he was looking at.

  He replied without turning around. “The summit of Zeda. I’m making triangulations. Because the earth, like life, can be measured in triangles.”

  I proceeded to join the women, but at the third flight of steps on the mule path leading to the edge of the cliff, only Matilde sat on a low wall.

  “Where’s Landina?” I asked.

  She pointed toward the summit, and with a sweeping gesture invited me to sit down beside her. She lowered her head and in a harsh, toneless voice said of my friend, “What a shame for that woman! She’s so sweet and likable.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I thought you were free.”

  “I am—free.”

  We sat very close to each other on the wall. Matilde looked at the ground without replying. After a long silence, she raised her head and looked at me with those eyes of hers, always frightened. A strand of hair had fallen across her forehead. I gently put it back and placed my open hand over her temple: it was burning. I wanted to draw her head toward me, but first I glanced above and below us.

  Orimbelli was climbing up from the flight below.

  I got up and began gathering blackberries from the bushes in front of me.

  Orimbelli appeared at the turn. “The risotto is ready,” he said sullenly. A moment later Landina arrived, and we climbed down together.

  During lunch Matilde put her soft, fleshy calf beside mine under the table, while her brother-in-law ate in silence, his head bowed.

  I had the sensation of being caught in a whirlpool—or in one of those triangulations Orimbelli had been talking about.

  As we sailed toward the top of the lake, Matilde asked me to let her take the helm while Orimbelli rested below deck. She sat beside me in her swimsuit, holding the tiller, and Landina, stretched out on the prow, kept a foot on the spinnaker so the jib would stay tight. Matilde came up close to me, brushing her breast against my arm and pressing against my right leg with one of her round knees. Eventually I put Landina at the helm and I went below deck to rest beside Orimbelli. Tanned as he was, stretched out with his hands crossed over his stomach and his eyes fixed on the deck’s supporting beams, he resembled the mummy of Beato Alberto in every detail.

  Our pace slackened and the hours went by with the quiet sloshing of the waves against the keel of the Tinca, allowing me to nap for almost two hours.

  When we turned around the point of Villa Lavazza, the Gulf of Luino came into view. The inverna began to drop.

  I went out and gazed at the sky, which looked menacing toward the west. “We’ll spend the night in Luino,” I said.

  In Luino I decided to sleep in the hotel myself, but not in Landina’s room, since she had stayed there the night before and the owner recognized her.

  At eight we sat down to eat, but Orimbelli’s mood was so remarkably dark that not one of us made the slightest attempt to initiate a conversation. I tried suggesting that we stay at the Albergo Ancora the next day, in case the bad weather should continue, but no one responded.

  Our supper was about to end in silence when a marshal from the carabinieri entered the hotel. He approached the desk and spoke to the owner’s wife. She pointed to our table.

  “Is that your boat, the Tinca, anchored in the port?” he asked.

  “It’s mine,” I replied.

  “Then who is Signor Orimbelli?”

  Orimbelli blanched. “It’s me,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  “Your wife was found dead this morning at Oggebbio. I received a message at noon from the station at Intra.”

  “My wife?”

  “Signora Cleofe Berlusconi Orimbelli,” the marshal confirmed.

  “But how did she die?” Orimbelli asked.

  “The message did not say,” the marshal replied.

  Only then did I notice that Matilde had silently collapsed in her chair. Landina was spraying her with water from the table; she seemed to have fainted.

  “Is it possible to find a taxi?” I asked.

  “There are two outside the Varisene station,” the marshal said.

  I ran to get a taxi and returned to the hotel. Orimbelli, Matilde and Landina got in.

  The journey around the lake, through Valcuvia, Besozzo, Angera, Sesto Calende, Arona, Stresa, Pallanza and Intra took more than two hours in the rain that had begun to fall. Orimbelli never once opened his mouth.

  Domenico was at the gate of Villa Cleofe with a carabiniere, who accompanied us inside. In the drawing room we found the marshal, who took us to the first floor.

  The signora lay heavily on her bed between two candles, as calm as if she were sleeping, and only a little bloated. Lenin and Martina were at her side. She was wearing a dark dress, her hair was combed, and her bare feet were tied together at the toes with a silk scarf. The dead woman seemed a cryptic response to our triangulations. The tranquillity of the lakeside villages, the peace of the azalea- and camellia-covered villas, our own excursions—all this was nothing but a beautiful shroud, concealing death. One had only to draw a curtain, open a wardrobe, switch on the lights in the dark to see the clues, the signals, the stop and go of the real journey.

  “How did it happen?” I asked Lenin.

  “Domenico found her in the dock this morning, drowned in her nightdress.”

  Orimbelli stood beside me looking at his wife. The marshal put a hand on his shoulder and asked him to follow him. The questioning had begun that afternoon in the dining room below. Orimbelli was grilled for almost an hour before it was Matilde’s turn, then mine, then Landina’s. We didn’t have much to say, particularly because no one knew how to respond to the one question they asked concerning a precise fact. They wanted to find out if we’d known about a letter addressed to poor Signora Cleofe and found on her bedside table.

  After midnight the carabinieri went off. Orimbelli, who’d stayed awake by drinking one coffee after another, joined us in the dining room, where the questioning had taken place.

  “Suicide,” he said. “Unfortunately. But I didn’t see it coming. How could I!”

  And he told us that as we were leaving the day before, he’d gone to the gate just before we set off and put through the mailbox a note addressed to his wife, asking for a separation. He’d decided to leave the villa with Matilde, who was naturally in agreement, in order to live freely with her until he could marry her. Evidently Signora Cleofe had not been able to withstand the blow and had thrown herself in the water overnight.

  The marshal had found the letter on the nightstand in the signora’s bedroom. It was handwritten on a piece of paper printed with the initials T.M.O. in red.

  Matilde was shocked. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked her brother-in-law. “I’d never have agreeed to something like that. A letter? Writing
a letter? Wouldn’t it have been better to speak to her openly? And why such haste? Didn’t we agree that we might not say anything this winter? And who told you I’d go along with it? That I wanted to live with you?”

  Orimbelli didn’t reply. He gave the impression of someone admitting to a mistake, but you could see that he wasn’t actually displeased with his haste. He considered it unavoidable, fate, “already implicit in the matter,” as he said before going to his room to sleep.

  XII

  OVER THE FOLLOWING DAYS, the public prosecutor conducted further in-depth investigations, taking up where the carabinieri had left off. It turned out that Domenico had noticed the letter in the box only that afternoon; that the signora, alerted by the gardener, had gone straightaway to fetch it, and that after reading it she had told Lenin and Martina to go ahead and return home to the lodge as she would not be dining that evening.

  Already in the reports were declarations which indicated that at ten the following morning, when Lenin noticed that the signora was not yet up, she had knocked at the door to her room; that when there was no response, she’d decided to go in but had found the bed empty and not made up; and that she’d then joined Domenico and Martina in the search for the signora before she was found at the bottom of the dock.

  The magistrate, having “verified,” as he later wrote in his summing up, that the “two lovebirds” had stayed at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Pallanza on the night the signora drowned in the dock, ordered painstaking investigations into whether the chief suspect—as Orimbelli had unfortunately become—had not perhaps disappeared from the hotel during the night. Evidently not. The porter and the nightwatchman had noticed neither entry nor exit between eleven at night and eight in the morning. Matilde stated that Orimbelli had been in her room from eleven until half midnight. In the morning, he’d knocked on her door at around eight and stayed in her room waiting while she washed and dressed so they could go down to breakfast together.

  All motorboat owners and drivers from Pallenza were asked whether they’d taken someone to Oggebbio that night. The answer to this, too, was negative.

  Domenico, questioned by the magistrate, added to his first deposition. After we had left, he’d closed the iron gate of the cellar, which led to the dock. He’d hung the key as usual on a nail in the wall. It was becoming clear that in order to enter the villa, the killer would have had to be in possession of the entrance key or the key to the dock. He could have done without the one to the gate and climbed over the fence, but in that case, he couldn’t have got inside without leaving some trace of a break-in.

  Lenin said that when she’d come in with her key that morning, she found the ground floor windows and shutters firmly closed on the inside.

  There were three keys to the entrance: Lenin had one and the other two were still hanging in the kitchen, where the carabinieri found them. It was evident to the investigators that at approximately 5 p.m. on the afternoon of September 21st—that is, after noting the contents of the letter Domenico had seen in the mailbox—Signora Cleofe had left the villa and gone to the village. Cavallini, in fact, had seen her near a mailbox at around 5 p.m. He couldn’t say if she’d posted anything, but it was highly likely, since Signora Cleofe rarely went out, only once or twice a year, and then only in order to post letters personally.

  The matter was put to Domenico, Lenin and Martina. The signora could not have gone out and come back in without being seen by one of them. But not one of them stated that they’d seen her—which seemed strange, although Domenico said he’d been in the greenhouse for almost an hour around 5 p.m. For her part, Lena said that at the time she’d been in the laundry in the cellar, washing clothes with the help of her daughter, Martina. The signora, therefore, could have put her head around the gatehouse and pushed the button to open the gate, which she then left ajar so it would be open ten minutes later when she returned from the village. It was an acceptable explanation. Less explicable was Lena’s late statement, which emerged only in the second or third witness examination. She remembered noticing, when she entered Signora Cleofe’s room on the morning of September 21st, that besides the unmade bed, there was an overturned chair. Both the marshal during the initial investigation, and the magistrate during the one following, had considered the theory that the body had been dragged from the room to the dock. Yet painstaking reconstructions had done nothing to confirm such a journey, which would have rendered credible the idea of a homicide made to look like suicide. But the upturned chair had to mean something. It could mean that someone had entered the room that night without turning on the light and had tripped over it, since it was usually near the bed. Or perhaps there had been a scuffle in the room, even a minor one. If it had been homicide, it was also possible to consider that the chair had been kicked over by the killer not on entering the room but on leaving it, with the victim thrown over his back in a dead faint or some other state of being unable to offer any resistance. But neither could one exclude the possibility that the poor signora had overturned the chair when she left the room, already intent on suicide. And that was the simplest and most plausible explanation.

  Lena had repeated from the first interrogation that upon entering the signora’s room at ten in the morning, she’d found the central light on, but not the lamp on the nightstand. This fact had given rise to new theories, but served to clarify nothing. The central light could in fact be switched on from the bed, using the cord. And it was logical that someone intending to go out of the room would use that in preference to the lamp on the nightstand, which Signora Cleofe normally used only for reading in bed.

  After careful examination, the only theory that seemed plausible was that of suicide. Signora Cleofe, in a state of shock after reading and absorbing her husband’s letter, had made her fatal decision: she’d gone down to the cellar in the night, taken the key to the dock off the hook, opened the iron door and thrown herself in the water. The door had in fact been found open, with the key in the lock on the inside.

  It was possible to formulate one other hypothesis: if the alleged killer had had a key to the dock, it would have been simple—after entering the grounds—to go down to the shore, get into the dock from the lake, wade waist-high in the water, open the iron door and gain access to the villa’s premises through the cellar.

  There were two keys to the dock: one, which Domenico had used to lock up, and another that we kept in the boat, in a box underneath the wheelhouse.

  The key theory wasn’t neglected by the diligent magistrate. During my interrogation, he asked me whether I’d noticed the key missing from the box it was usually kept in, either temporarily or permanently. The question prompted me to remember the key, which should still have been in the box on the boat. The boat had remained at port in Luino, and the magistrate sent me there to get the key. It was in its place, among the tangled lines.

  If it had only occurred to me to look in the box after passing the man on the bicycle that night in Pallanza! If I hadn’t found it there, I’d have been certain that Orimbelli was the culprit and the next day, the reason for his nocturnal journey would have been perfectly clear to me.

  But it hadn’t occurred to me, and it would have been improper now to introduce into my deposition the hazy picture of the Pallanza shoreline that obsessed me: a man pedals toward Intra on a bicycle, its headlamp slicing through the night. It would have been unfair to identify, with hindsight, something that was more shadow than man.

  The result of the investigation, the report from the carabinieri and the interrogation of everyone in the house plus ten other people, permitted the magistrate to archive the file under the heading: DOCUMENTS RELATING TO THE DEATH BY SUICIDE OF CLEOFE ORIMBELLI, NÉE BERLUSCONI. The postmortem examination had concluded “death by drowning” and ruled out any sign of violence on the body of Signora Cleofe; but it didn’t fail to observe that she could have been stunned by a blow to the head inflicted by a heavy, blunt object—a bag of sand, for example—and then taken to the dock and thrown in t
he water.

  Unfortunately, the suicide theory was never corraborated by a letter, not even a few lines written by Signora Cleofe. Those who voluntarily forsake their lives usually leave a message, a farewell, a phrase that serves as some explanation for their decision.

  But proof of homicide, which in this case would have been more than premeditated, was lacking. So to the public prosecutor, it seemed only sensible to archive the file.

  Orimbelli and Matilde made me swear not to leave them alone in this situation. To tell the truth, I’d never thought of leaving. I was keen to follow the investigation, because I hoped everything would be cleared up and Orimbelli would be seen to have had nothing to do with the death of his wife, even if the explanation was that he’d returned to the villa on the night in which Signora Cleofe had died, perhaps regretting having left the letter for her in the box and intending to get it back—or, if it was too late, to be frank with his wife about the reasons for his decision. I’d then have been free of any doubt. But none of it added up. As far as the investigation was concerned, suicide was the only possible explanation, and it seemed so self-evident that the law had to be satisfied with it.

  Couldn’t I, too, be content with it? I asked myself continually, reexamining, minute by minute, the time passed in the company of Orimbelli and the two women from the morning of the 21st of September until the evening of the 22nd.

  In the muddle of the reconstruction and various theories, I came to believe that if Orimbelli had really killed his wife, he would have done it in order not to lose Matilde. He couldn’t have been unaware that an understanding was developing between his lover and me. Maybe he’d been forced to consider the crime for fear that the love he’d temporarily managed to trick us out of would develop between us. In fact, now that his wife was dead, it would be possible for him to marry Matilde. Ah, the triangulation he’d spoken about while sitting on the parapet of Santa Caterina! He’d said it all: it was necessary to understand, and to act.