Persona Non Grata (Inspector Trotti Book 3)

by Timothy Williams

  “Not much of a joke.”

  There was something sheepish about Pisanelli’s smile. “It was just teasing—like school children.”

  “You were hard on her.”

  “You’re hard with us, Commissario.”

  “You’re a man, Pisanelli. And you’re going to spend all your life in the PS. You’re not going to go off after several years to have a family.”

  “It was Schipisi and Cardano who were hard on her.”

  “You were unkind, Pisanelli.”

  The car entered the courtyard.

  “You left her to get on with the Vardin dossier while you were hanging out in the hospital.”

  “I was helping Merenda.”

  “Merenda? You were flirting with the nurses.”

  “No.” The vehemence with which Pisanelli shook his head took Trotti by surprise. “No, I wasn’t flirting.”

  “ ‘A man who understands women’—that’s what the woman doctor in Ostetrica said about you.”

  Again Pisanelli shook his head—he was holding his suede jacket on his lap—and the long hair at his ears rose with the centrifugal force. “I don’t understand women.”

  “You should. Pisanelli, you’ve been engaged at least three times in the last four years.”

  Spadano parked the car and turned off the engine. “We have arrived, gentlemen.”

  Pisanelli looked at Trotti. “Ornella—it was Ornella who I liked.”

  “Ciuffi?”

  “She was special.”

  “I didn’t know you were on Christian-name terms.”

  “More than just like. It was stronger than that.” Pisanelli sucked his teeth. “I shouldn’t have teased her. And yet, Commissario, at the time I wanted her to notice me. I wanted her to see that I existed. I felt that by creating a bit of distance, by being a bit stand-offish … I thought that perhaps, well, that she would notice. You know what women are like, how they don’t like weak men …”

  “They don’t like phallocrats, either.”

  Pisanelli sounded hurt. “Phallocrat?” he repeated and then fell silent.

  “A woman is a flower, Pisanelli.”

  Pisanelli stared at the jacket on his knees. After a while, he shrugged as if talking to himself.

  “Pisanelli, are you going to get out of this car?”

  “If only Ciuffi were still here.” Pisanelli raised his eyes and gave Trotti another of his smiles. “If only it were possible to tell her that I’m sorry—that I think about her all the time.”

  53: Como

  HE COULD FEEL Spadano’s irritation at having to wait.

  It hurt Trotti to walk. They had bandaged his ribs at the hospital in Monza and now he was grateful to have Pisanelli with him. He walked slowly.

  “And the Questura?”

  “I beg your pardon, Commissario?”

  “What’s the news from the Questura, Pisanelli?”

  “No news.”

  They stepped into an elevator.

  Spadano looked at the two men from the Pubblica Sicurezza. A smile hovered at the corner of his lips.

  “How’s Merenda coming along?”

  “I told you, Commissario—we’re all missing you.”

  “Has Merenda found Ciuffi’s murderer?”

  Pisanelli bit his lip. “The dog went.”

  “The dog?”

  “Gino’s dog. Principessa.”

  “She went?”

  “Merenda said that it was inadmissible.”

  “What was inadmissible?”

  Pisanelli gave an apologetic shrug, “The smell—the smell of Principessa.”

  “Merenda doesn’t work on the third floor. What the hell’s the dog got to do with him?”

  “Schipisi complained.”

  “Gino’s retiring at the end of the year.” The elevator halted and Trotti winced. “For God’s sake.”

  “He said the dog had to go.”

  Trotti clicked his tongue. “And Ciuffi’s murderer?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “How’s Gino taken it?”

  The doors of the lift slid open.

  “Well?”

  “He hasn’t been in for a couple of days.”

  They stepped out of the elevator and went down a corridor. Clean walls, blue-tinted neon lighting and the occasional sound of machinery from behind the glass doors. More like the headquarters of a big newspaper than Carabinieri barracks.

  Yet again, faced with the organization of the Carabinieri, Trotti found himself resentful. And jealous.

  An officer saluted.

  “What news, Tenente?”

  “The Embassy on the phone a couple of times.” A grin. “Very German, very efficient.”

  “What did they want?” Spadano asked.

  The man had an intelligent face. “If we were going to press charges against Herr Schuhmaker.”

  “Taking an unregistered firearm out of the country? You can tell our German friends that their Herr Schuhmaker can count on a minimum of two years in an Italian jail.”

  “They want to know why he’s being held incommunicado.”

  “Don’t they have their own terrorists, the Germans?” Spadano gestured towards Trotti. “I’m hoping our friend from the PS can help us.”

  Trotti said, “I don’t know any Germans.”

  Pisanelli ran a nervous hand through the long hair at the side of his head.

  Spadano put the stub of a cigar in his mouth and lit it. “Let’s go and see Herr Schuhmaker.”

  They returned to the elevator. The Carabiniere accompanied them. The smell of his aftershave lotion competed with the acrid smell of Spadano’s Toscani cigar.

  “Incidentally, Trotti, I forgot to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I managed to find him.”

  “Him?”

  “Primula Rosa—the man your mad priest was looking for.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Find in a manner of speaking, that is.” A cloud of cigar smoke.

  “Do you have to smoke that thing in an enclosed space?”

  Spadano shrugged. “Found him a bit too late.”

  “Why?”

  “He died in a road accident about seven years ago.”

  Trotti fell silent.

  The passage of time.

  His mind turned back to the months at the end of the war. Bloodshed—there had been a lot of bloodshed; yet, in those days, things had appeared simple. And that simplicity—like Primula Rosa, with his one good hand—belonged to the past. The end of the civil war, Reconstruction—the hopes and the expectations for the future, for himself, for Italy …

  Trotti glanced at Spadano, and he was overcome with a sense of bitter nostalgia.

  “Primula Rosa won’t be helping your priest.”

  Nobody spoke in the elevator.

  Three floors. They stepped out on to another corridor, this time slightly cooler. They were beneath ground level. No windows and the air was damp.

  “This way please.”

  Although Spadano had lived in the north for most of his life, he had not lost his Palermo accent.

  Trotti and Pisanelli followed, a step behind the small muscular back and the thick neck. Hair that showed no sign of thinning. For a man well into his late fifties, Spadano had aged well.

  Primula Rosa was dead.

  “Here.” Spadano hammered at the grey door, the sound feeble against the thick, riveted steel. A scraping noise of a bolt being pulled back. The door opened outwards and, following Spadano, the two officers from the Pubblica Sicurezza entered into a flood of blinding neon light.

  The man sat on a bench.

  The room smelled of despair. Elsewhere somebody was shouting and banging a utensil against the bars of a cell. The muffled sound came through the brick wall. It was followed by a brisk shout of command.

  Silence and the man raised his head to look at the visitors.

  Trotti had turned pale, staring at the German.

  “
Jesus.”

  A tired face, bags under the eyes. A narrow chin and a bald head that caught the reflected light. Thin lips and dark, hurt eyes.

  “Trotti—Italo Trotti.”

  54: Woman

  “WELL?” THE BARONESSA said sharply.

  They were like an old couple, Trotti thought. Fond of each other, yet continually bickering.

  “For all these years you’ve lied to me.”

  “How could I expect you to understand the truth?”

  “But you lied.” Fra Gianni screwed up his eyes and his voice could not hide that he was hurt.

  “You’re an old fool, Gianni. You have never been in love. You don’t know what love means.”

  Velvet curtains and dark-red wallpaper.

  “A little something to drink, Commissario?” A conspiratorial glance at Trotti. “This awful priest doesn’t like me drinking alcohol. He would have made a terrible husband.” Her repeated jibe about Fra Gianni gave Trotti the impression that she was putting on an act for him. She went to the dark mahogany cabinet and produced a bottle. “Schnapps, perhaps—nothing better to warm an old heart.” She laughed to herself.

  “Where did you learn to use a rifle?”

  “Let us drink something and then we can talk like civilized people.” She gestured Trotti to one of the deep armchairs. “Nowadays, people are always in such a hurry.”

  “What rifle?” Fra Gianni remained standing, a solitary old man caught in the yellow light of the doorway. His eyes watched the Baronessa attentively.

  The woman poured two glasses and held one out to Trotti. “I like to tease Gianni—you do understand?”

  Trotti refused the proffered glass. “Why do you want to murder me?”

  She looked at him with her head tilted. The smile was almost coquettish. She sat down. “Murder you, Commissario?”

  “At Borgo Genovese—nobody saw you, because nobody imagined that the little old lady in the Fiat 600 was carrying a gun. And when they heard the detonation, they just thought it was a car backfiring.”

  “Why should I want to murder you?”

  “Why, indeed?”

  “Murderers are hopeful—they think that, by killing people, they are going to make things better.” She turned away to gesture towards the photographs on the piano. “My life is behind me. I have lived long enough.”

  “Then you had nothing to be afraid of.”

  She nodded.

  “You killed a girl … a woman who had all her life before her.”

  The Baronessa von Neumann had a bright smile. “Really?”

  “Why did you want me out of the way? What harm could I do to you?”

  “Not you, Piero Trotti—nor anybody else.”

  “It would never have occurred to me it was you who’d murdered all those old partisans.”

  She laughed.

  “And even if I had found out that you were the mother to my brother’s child, what would I have done?”

  She raised her glass. “To your health.”

  “If anything, I would have tried to help you—because that’s what you needed.”

  “I need nothing,” she said and drank.

  “You had loved Italo Trotti.”

  “I will always love Italo.” The smile vanished. She looked down at her glass and for a few moments there was silence. Then the Baronessa raised her eyes. “I always tried to do what was best.”

  “Like killing people?”

  “For Italo’s sake, I always tried to do what was best.”

  “You wanted to kill me.”

  “You cannot understand. You didn’t know Italo as I knew him.” Her voice had lost its brittle edge. It was almost dreamy and she sat staring into her half-empty glass. “The people in the village could be so spiteful. They always accused me of being pro-German—of being anti-Italian. But I was a better patriot than your partisans ever were.” She raised her chin towards Fra Gianni.

  The priest remained by the door, silent like a stubborn child refusing to sit down.

  “When I married Pauli, I thought I was doing my patriotic duty. Duty towards our two countries, duty towards the Duce, towards the Axis. Towards the marriage of Italy and Germany.”

  “You loved the Baron von Neumann?”

  “He never did anything to harm me.” The smile softened her face. “Pauli was a good man.”

  Outside the house, the sound of the river joined that of the wind. The cold smell of the hills.

  “I spent the first year of marriage in Germany, and it wasn’t until 1943 and the bombing of Hamburg that I returned to Santa Maria.”

  “You told me that you were in Germany at the end of the war. You now admit you were in Santa Maria?”

  A bland smile. “I was happy with Pauli—very happy. A good man—and after so many years of poverty, with Pauli there was no longer the nagging problem of where the next meal was coming from.” She nodded. “We are a good people, we, the Italians. We are good and we have generous hearts. But, in our memory, there is always the fear of hunger. And here in the hills, we have never been rich. You know that, Piero Trotti. You’re of humble, hard-working stock.”

  Trotti did not reply.

  “When war broke out and there was the possibility of selling food on the black market, people were willing to do anything to make a bit of money.” She gestured towards the priest. “About these things, Gianni is so naive. He likes to see everything in black and white. For him the Fascists were all bad and the partisans were all good. He doesn’t understand that our politics were determined by self-interest—and hunger. But then he doesn’t know about the hunger and the poverty of living in these hills. He is from Piemonte.”

  “I have lived here for more than forty years, Baronessa.”

  “And still you don’t understand, Gianni.”

  “Understand what?”

  She took a quick gulp of schnapps and smiled as the liquid descended her throat.

  “What don’t I understand?” The priest’s voice was aggrieved, like that of a little boy’s.

  She turned to Trotti. “Gianni is a good man. Not very intelligent, but good, with a kind heart. Unfortunately, like so many Italians, he doesn’t like to face up to the truth.” She spoke as if the priest were still in his presbytery. “Or rather, Gianni prefers to create his own truth. He has got it into his head that all the partisans were good and everybody else was wicked.” She turned to look at him, her head to one side and talking like a schoolmistress. “Goodness isn’t something that you’re born with. Goodness comes with the freedom from drudgery, with the freedom from back-breaking toil. Goodness comes from knowing that you can spare the time to help your friends.”

  The priest said, “We are all born with goodness in our hearts. And evil.”

  “The hills are a hard taskmaster. You know that, Piero Trotti. The hills have made us a tough and determined lot. The incessant labor. A land that would yield nothing without a struggle.”

  Trotti held up his hand. “You loved my brother?”

  “Of course I loved him. I was a pretty girl in those days, and I could pick and choose. But Italo wasn’t like the other men.” She stopped and looked at Trotti carefully. “You have eyes a bit like his, Piero. So sad—and yet so warm. Intelligent, brown eyes. And when I saw those eyes again—when Italo returned from Russia, it was as if he had never been away … as if I had never been married.” She smiled to herself.

  “You had an affair with him?”

  “How else, Piero Trotti, do you think I got pregnant?”

  “You were a married woman in 1944.”

  “You are all the same.”

  “You had been married to the baron for three years.”

  “You men can’t understand—because you can’t love. You don’t know what love is—true, disinterested love.” She shook her head. “I loved Pauli—very much indeed. Perhaps, at first, I was impressed by the uniform—Pauli was so splendid in his uniform. And perhaps the idea that a simple peasant girl from the hills could
become a German Baronessa.” A snort of humorless laughter. “A Baronessa with bare feet. I was flattered—flattered by all the attention, and by the possibilities.”

  There were the photographs of Pauli again, looking down from the piano. Pauli in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Pauli smoking a pipe and swinging a golf club. Pauli—his hair now thinner—and a little boy on a windswept beach of the North Sea.

  “I loved Pauli very much.”

  “And my brother? You loved him, too?”

  “With Italo it was different, quite different. I loved Pauli, of course. I loved him and I gave him two daughters of his own. He was a good man and I respected him. But Italo was different.”

  “In what way was my brother different?”

  “You ask such stupid questions.”

  A flash of anger. “I loved my older brother.”

  “Of course you did, Piero Trotti. Everyone loved him.” Again she glanced at the photographs and there was disappointment on her face. “I had always loved him—before the war, before he ever left to go into the army.” She closed her eyes. “It must have been 1937—no, 1936—when they sent him to Africa. That’s right, he was just eighteen.” A smile of nostalgia. “We all loved Italo—so young, so good. He was ten years younger than me and for six marvelous months …”

  “In 1936?”

  “You were still at school, Piero Trotti. You think I don’t remember you? An ugly little child you were even then—Italo and I used to joke about you. Thin as a rake—and your long, sharp nose. With your darned trousers and wooden shoes that were two sizes too big for you, you were not a very attractive child.”

  “You flatter me.”

  “You could never have been like Italo. You have always been a stubborn and opinionated person, Piero. The complete opposite of Italo. Even as a child, you behaved like a self-righteous priest.” She laughed. “No wonder you became a policeman.”

  “You loved my brother—and yet you wanted to murder me. Because you were afraid that I would find out about the past.”

  “The past?” She laughed. “You cannot change the past, Piero, not you or anyone else.”