“Let me see your shoes.”
“What?” Anna was standing behind him.
“Let me see your shoes!”
She looked at him, confused, almost started to laugh, then registered the look on his face, and put her foot out. She wore expensive American running shoes. Enzo didn’t even need to lift them up to know that the tread was completely different from the shoes—or more likely, winter boots—that had made the tracks on the drive. He tried to remember if Anna had been wearing running shoes the night before. She had. She’d dropped almost silently through the hatch in the butcher’s shop, and when she’d kicked him, catching him just once in the shin before he got her on the ground, it hadn’t hurt. The realization that she hadn’t lied about where she’d been yesterday brought a pang of relief. Then something else.
“How big are Kristin’s feet?” he asked. “Are they bigger than yours?”
Still watching him, Anna shook her head.
“No,” she said. “They’re a size, maybe a little more, smaller. Why?” she asked a second later. “Do you think she—?”
“No.”
Enzo was looking at the drive again, at the tire tracks, and the footprints, which were definitely smaller than his own, but larger than Anna Carson’s. He turned around and took her by the shoulder.
“Get in the car,” he said, hustling her down the road. “Go get back in the car. Now.”
* * *
On the way back to Ferrara, Enzo figured he broke just about every speed limit in Reggio, from the back road ones, to the motorway, to the old city street that led to the hotel parking. Anna Carson said nothing the whole way. Once or twice, he glimpsed her, out of the corner of her eye, studying her shoes, trying to understand what he’d seen.
At the hotel Enzo parked abruptly, and was surprised to feel relieved at the sight of another set of Florence plates on another immediately recognizable unmarked police car. Taking Anna by the arm more roughly than he intended to, he pulled her out of the car and trotted up the hotel steps, pushing the sleek glass door into the lobby and causing it to jam because he was too impatient to wait for it to slide open automatically.
Pallioti met Enzo halfway. So it was not until they had nearly run into each other that Enzo realized that he was not alone. That Pallioti, too, had a woman with him—a tall, statuesque blonde wearing jeans and a bright red parka with a fur collar who sat with a coffee tray in front of her, looking as if she had recently been crying.
Enzo had no idea who she was. Right now, he didn’t care. Still hanging onto Anna’s arm, he turned away from her, and said to Pallioti, “I think we’ve found it. A farmhouse out toward Pomposa. We need to check it out, see who owns the property, how it’s registered. There’s no power. If he’s out there, he may have a generator. And there’s a problem.”
Pallioti said nothing. He stood with his head bowed, listening.
“A car drove in,” Enzo went on, dropping his voice to something barely more than a murmur. “Recently. Just one. Something fairly big, probably sometime after noon on Monday when it was warmer—thawed enough to leave tracks. Whoever it was sat and waited by the road before. For some time, by the looks of it, so I doubt it was Tomaselli. I think the driver walked in first, probably looking around. Doing a recce. There were footprints. Either a small man’s or a large woman’s. Then they went back to the car and drove in. Only one set of tracks, so whoever it was is still in there. Meaning either Signor Tomaselli has a friend. Or we have another hostage.”
“Yes,” Pallioti said quietly. “I know.”
* * *
Hedwige Aarlheissen had flung open the front door the moment he pulled into the drive, causing him to wonder if she’d been standing behind it since she’d called and told him Barbara Barelli was missing.
Getting out of his car Pallioti had seen at once that the serene doe-eyed Amazon he’d met less than twenty-four hours earlier had vanished. In her place was a haggard, teary woman who had obviously slept—or, he suspected, not slept—in the clothes she was wearing. Her black trousers were badly creased. Smudges of something, makeup probably, darkened the collar and shoulder of her cream silk shirt. She’d turned and led him into the family room without speaking.
The dinner party had obviously taken place, and been only marginally cleared away. Serving plates with bits of food clinging to them were piled by the sink. Place mats, coasters, and scrunched-up napkins littered five of the places set at the glass dining table. The sixth place, at the head, was untouched, its napkin still rolled in a silver ring. Tears welled in Hedwige’s huge eyes. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Like I told you on the phone,” she said. “She went off yesterday. About a half hour after you left. I thought she’d be back. I didn’t know what else to do. You said to call if—”
Pallioti nodded.
“I think, perhaps,” he said. “I had better make us some coffee. Then you can tell me exactly what happened.”
Pallioti was not good with things mechanical at the best of times. He had approached the gigantic Nespresso machine that crouched on the countertop with genuine trepidation. Hedwige had murmured something about changing out of these things and taken herself upstairs, leaving him to peruse the terrifying display of dials and levers. He’d finally pushed and pulled several of them, then found a bottle of grappa in the glass-fronted bar behind the dining table as he listened to the sounds of running water and footsteps overhead. He’d been quite proud of the fact that, by the time she came back down in fresh jeans and sweater, her face as scrubbed as a schoolgirl’s, he’d produced two decent cups of espresso. A hefty shot glass of grappa accompanied hers.
Hedwige had looked at him gratefully, then sunk down on the sofa, cradling her cup. Pallioti sat opposite her in a leather armchair so large and squashy it threatened to swallow him whole.
“Now, Signora Aarlheissen,” he said.
“Hedwige. Please. Signora Aarlheissen is my mother. I haven’t spoken to her in twenty years.” She glanced at Pallioti over the rim of her cup. “She didn’t take well to having a gay daughter.”
Pallioti nodded.
“All right, Hedwige. I would appreciate it if you would simply tell me the truth. Or at least as much of it as you know. It will save us a lot of time, which, just now, is one of the things we don’t have.”
She bowed her head. Blond hair fell over her eyes. Hedwige pushed it away with her free hand, then said, “If she knew, Barbara would kill me.”
Pallioti had wondered if he really needed to point out that Barbara Barelli did not know—at least for now—and that if Hedwige did not tell him, the chances were fair to good that Antonio Tomaselli would kill her. Apparently not, because she looked at him and nodded.
“All right,” she said. “It all began, I don’t know, about five years ago, I suppose.”
Pallioti frowned.
“What began, Signora?”
“This—” She was agitated enough to overlook the “Signora.” “This whatever it is that scumbag has on her.”
The words had taken Pallioti by surprise. He put his cup on the coffee table and leaned forward.
“You are telling me that Antonio Tomaselli has something, on Dottoressa Barelli, his lawyer?”
Hedwige nodded.
“And what makes you think this?” he asked.
“I don’t think it,” she snapped. “I know it.”
“Yes,” he murmured. “Of course. I’m sorry. Please go on.”
“Well, about four years ago, the way she treated him changed. It became almost as if, I don’t know. Almost as if she was afraid of him. Besides, if it hadn’t been true, she’d never have agreed about the farm. Never. Although that was later. About two years—I don’t know—maybe eighteen months ago. And the weird thing is—” Hedwige looked at him and blinked, her eyes welling up again. “She hates him. I mean I knew she never liked him. But Barbara had a thing. Guilt, whatever the fuck. About the Red Brigades. She bought into that crap, about
what they did being society’s fault, whatever the fuck that means. So, yes—she defended him. But she never liked him. And now she hates him. I mean really hates him. I kept saying to her, ‘drop him, then. Find someone else to represent him.’ But she wouldn’t.”
Wouldn’t or couldn’t? Pallioti wondered. And what on earth, he asked himself, could Antonio Tomaselli have on Barbara Barelli? And how—given that while he was in prison she would have been his main conduit to the outside world—had he gotten it?
He’d ask her, if he ever got the chance. But, for now, the other tidbit Hedwige had just dropped interested him more.
“The farm, Hedwige?” he’d asked. “What are you talking about when you say ‘the farm’?”
She’d picked up the grappa glass and downed half of it. Then uncurled herself from the couch. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
Launching himself, with some difficulty, out of the chair, Pallioti had followed her across the entryway to a closed door where she’d pushed a series of numbers on a security pad.
“Bar’s never, officially, given me the passcode to her office.” Hedwige glanced over her shoulder. “But for a really smart woman, she can be remarkably dumb. It’s the date plus the distance of the first international race she ever won.”
“Dotoressa Barelli?”
Hedwige nodded as she stepped inside and turned on the lights.
“Sprinter. Bar represented her country for three years, right after she came back from college in the States.” She shrugged. “No reason why you’d know. She messed up at the Olympic trials, then quit when she started practicing law. But she was good,” Hedwige added. “Almost very good.”
Pallioti had the idea that “almost very good” would probably not have been anywhere near good enough for Barbara Barelli. And in some ways, worse than bad.
The room Hedwige showed him into was lined with bookcases and cabinets. A large desk sat in the center of it. A screen filled half the opposite wall.
“Video conferencing.” Hedwige waved at the screen. “Without it Bar would have to traipse up and down the country and God knows where.” She’d dropped to a squat and began fiddling with the combination lock on the front of one of the cabinets. “She didn’t take a briefcase or anything like that yesterday. Just her handbag and her coat. That’s why I was so sure she’d be back. I mean she does have to go quickly sometimes. She keeps an overnight bag packed—if someone’s arrested or something. I just hope the damn papers are still here,” she added.
Watching her, Pallioti wondered exactly how much time she spent breaking into her partner’s world, and if Barbara knew about it and tolerated it, or was simply clueless when it came to what was obviously one of her lover’s favorite pastimes. He would have used Hedwige as a safecracker any day. Her fingers moved with such dexterity, her head cocked so acutely, listening to the inner clicks of the combination lock, that she seemed almost as good as Enzo Saenz.
At the thought of Enzo he pulled his phone out and glanced at it, but there was no message. Pallioti didn’t know whether to be reassured by that or not. He slipped it back into his pocket. When he looked up, Hedwige had the door open and was rifling through a series of manila files.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “It’s still here. I was afraid she might have taken it with her.”
She lifted a file out, crossed to the desk, which was as barren as Pallioti’s own, and spread the contents in front of him. They appeared, on first glance, to be the deeds, sales, and purchase papers of a property. Pallioti glanced at Hedwige.
“Two years ago,” she said, nodding. “When it started to look as though he really might get out, he called Bar and asked her to come and see him.” She waved at the empty screen on the wall. “Usually she’d just talk to him through that, save her the drive. But he insisted she actually go to him. So she did.” Hedwige shrugged. “I told you, she’d changed. At least as far as Antonio was concerned. Before she would have put her foot down, told him he could talk to her here. Not anymore. He says ‘jump’ and she says ‘how high?’ There’s no one else on this earth she does that for. Including me. That’s how I know,” she added. “I told you. He has something on her. I can’t think of any other reason.”
“Did he call her, or did she call him? Yesterday, after I left?”
Hedwige shrugged.
“How the hell should I know? She locked herself in here. Then she just left. She barely even spoke to me.”
“But you think she’s gone to find him?”
Hedwige looked at him as if he was stupid.
“Don’t you?”
Pallioti nodded. He did. Whatever she might have felt or not felt about the Red Brigades, Barbara Barelli had been extremely upset when she’d heard about Kristin Carson. Now he was very much afraid she had gone off to be an Avenging Angel.
“Anyway,” Hedwige said. “About two years ago she came back after that visit. Upset.”
“Upset, as in angry?”
Hedwige had thought about that for a moment.
“Yes,” she’d said. “But not really. I mean, underneath, it was almost more as if she was—depressed. Resigned. As you can imagine, Barbara’s not passive, but—in any case,” she went on. “It was a couple of months later when I finally wheedled it out of her. Antonio had asked her to buy a house for him.”
Pallioti raised his eyebrows. He knew that many lawyers were deeply committed to their clients—but there were requests, and then there were requests.
“And this is it?” He turned and looked more closely at the papers, at the plan and photographs attached.
Hedwige nodded.
“She set up a dummy company. She didn’t want her name on it. I don’t think it was expensive, it looks—I mean it’s apparently almost derelict. A farm, abandoned when the family couldn’t make it anymore, and for sale when they couldn’t pay the taxes on the land. I think it’s somewhere outside Ferrara.”
* * *
Now the same photos were spread across the hotel room bed. Hastily shot, and slightly blurry, they showed a solid cube of a house and a long outbuilding fronting a yard shaded by a single tree. Overgrown fields stretched on either side. The photographer seemed to have been standing in the drive, which looked to be little more than a thin broken track. Both Enzo and Anna were quite certain it was the same property they’d seen from the top of the campanile at Pomposa.
When she heard about the tire tracks and the footprints, Hedwige’s eyes welled. Her voice sank to little more than a whisper.
“Do you think he’s killed her?”
She was sitting in the ugly armchair by the window, still wearing the red parka, which Pallioti guessed was Barbara’s. Looking at her, Pallioti saw the girl underneath—a big raw-boned teenager, too good at sports, at odds with her family, and perhaps even with herself. He wondered what meeting Barbara Barelli must have meant for her, and realized he knew the answer.
“No,” he said firmly. “He has no reason to kill her,” although he could think of plenty. “No,” he repeated, and didn’t add, He’s inked that in for the day after tomorrow.
* * *
“Ciao,” Kristin said. “Wait for the tone. Then tell me everything.”
The first time Anna had heard the message, barely a week ago, she’d found it annoying. Its fake coyness. Its little-girl sexuality. Now it made her queasy. She blinked, and saw the wink of an emerald. A flash of gold in dirty water. And heard his voice. “Ti possiedo. Óra, tu sei mia, per sempre.” It was a whisper, so close and tangible that for a second his body was on hers. Weight and heat. And the taste of earth.
After talking it over, they had decided not to wait until seven, decided they couldn’t leave it up to Antonio to contact her. Or not. Looking up from where she sat at the hotel room desk, the phone pressed to her ear, Anna Carson met Enzo Saenz’s eyes. All of them were watching her intently. Enzo, the woman Barbara loved, and the man in the black coat whose name Anna had trouble remembering. She nodded as the beep of Kr
istin’s voice mail sounded, and felt the room waver and fade, become as insubstantial as this ghost of herself she kept coming face to face with.
“Antonio,” she said. “Ho sentito le campane da Pomposa.”
I’ve heard the bells from Pomposa.
After she cut the connection, the room felt somehow more crowded. They had come upstairs because they could hardly discuss Antonio and Barbara Barelli and Kristin standing in the lobby while half of Ferrara passed in and out of the sliding doors and drifted like pilot fish to the bar.
At first the conversation had been confused. Having barely skimmed the background Anna provided all those years ago, Pallioti had gone to see Barbara Barelli thinking she was merely Antonio’s lawyer. That fact alone had been surprise enough for Anna. But on hearing it, she had understood immediately why Barbara had done it—had seen her leaning in the kitchen doorway, watching Nonna Franchi polish the shoes her father would be buried in, learning about the favors you did for the dead, and applying them to her friend Angela Vari. Who fell downstairs and was laid to rest at the chipped foot of the stone angel.
The shock had obviously been similar for Hedwige, who had looked at Anna with barely concealed dislike, as if she was the unwelcome piece of a puzzle that had finally slotted into place.
Anna had wanted to ask her how Barbara was. Had wanted to ask if Hedwige had a photo in her wallet—so she could see the woman, and look for any trace of the girl she’d known. Barbara Barelli, with her long braid and her crooked teeth. And later her braces, and her swearing, and her smile. But she hadn’t dared. She had no right to ask. She’d surrendered that. Shed it like a skin when she walked into the police station off Via Fani. Then shed it again almost a year and half later when, having exhausted Angela Vari, having hollowed her out—mined her life and heart and soul and bartered them for salvation—Anna had discarded her like a husk as she stepped between two federal marshals onto a plane at Ciampino, and watched out the little window as first Rome, and then Italy, grew smaller and smaller.
The Lost Daughter Page 41
