Enzo felt himself struggling. He started to call, then decided not to waste the breath. She was hardly going to stop and he had no idea how many people were really creeping around these godforsaken fields carrying who knew what kind of weapons and grudges. He dug out an extra burst of speed from somewhere, and felt it pay off. Her figure was silhouetted now against the glow of lights trained on the farmhouse. Enzo pushed himself again, forced his feet to turn over faster, his thighs to burn. And thanked God, because she stumbled.
He caught her around the waist and lifted her off her feet. Then he slapped a hand over her mouth. She twisted like a snake, but Enzo held on. A second later she went limp. He lowered her feet to the ground, but didn’t let go.
In front and slightly below them, they could see the farm lit up like some sort of bizarre film set. The men in black—there appeared to be four of them now—had stopped at the tree. Antonio was standing with his back to the wall of the house, far enough away from the front door and windows that he couldn’t be reached. He had Kristin in front of him. She was gagged with what looked like a piece of duct tape. Her hands were cinched behind her back. Antonio had one arm around her neck and held a gun to her temple.
Anna let out a small moan.
“Sssh.” Enzo tightened his hand. They were outside the lights. He had no idea who else was standing in the dark with them.
“Let her go, Signor Tomaselli, and no one gets hurt.”
The call came from a megaphone somewhere beyond the tree. Antonio didn’t move.
“Let Kristin go, and we can talk this out.”
Enzo thought he saw Tomaselli smile at that one. He was sure he saw him shake his head.
“Where is she?” he shouted back.
“Where is who?” the megaphone asked.
“Angela!” Antonio bellowed into the dark. He grabbed Kristin tighter. “Angela,” he screamed. “You promised me!”
Anna thrashed and kicked. Enzo felt his hand fall away from her mouth.
“Antonio!” she screamed. “Antonio! I’m here!”
At the sound of her voice, his head whipped around.
“You can let her go!” Anna shouted. “I’m here!”
As he peered into the dark, searching beyond the wall of lights, Antonio’s arm loosened, and Kristin staggered forward. Released, she stumbled, then fell to her knees on the cobbles. But Antonio didn’t seem to care. He dropped the gun, and turned away from her.
“Angie!” He stepped toward her voice. “Angela! Where are you?”
“I’m here,” Enzo heard her say. She began to walk forward, and in that moment, he saw it.
Antonio had moved away from the farmhouse. He was peering into the darkness as the sniper rose from the barn roof.
Enzo threw himself forward. He caught her by the shoulders and spun her around as the shot went off.
She hears herself scream. Then she hears Enzo Saenz’s voice. And feels his hands, pressing her head, hard, into his shoulder.
“Don’t,” he is saying. “Don’t.” It’s a murmur in her ear, an instruction straight to her heart. “Don’t look. Don’t look.”
He is holding her neck, cradling the back of her head, pushing her into his own body so she cannot see what is in front of them in the dead white circle of light.
“Remember him. Do it,” Enzo Saenz says. “Do it now. For Antonio. Remember him the way you loved him.”
And so she does.
She closes her eyes, screws them tight, and clings to the shoulders of his jacket, her fingers digging into the soft leather, and feels herself flying. Back past the beach at Ostia. Past the sand and the taste of salt, past Marry me, Angela, to the tiny cramped kitchen in Trastevere where sun spills into the scratched sink and they sit across from each other, her bare foot on his. While Enzo Saenz holds her, while he presses his chin to the top of her head, she flies past the campanile at Pomposa where she stands with all the summer world below her and Antonio’s arms around her. She flies past the bedroom under the eaves, and the cleared pane of glass that bears the imprint of his hand. Past the Montagnola, and the Angels’ Gate, and the ghosts of the old men under the street lamp in Via Vittoria, to August. To the prickle of orchard grass and the mingled buzz of bees and laughter and the tight, bursting skin of an apple that Antonio holds in his hand and stretches toward her as he smiles, dappled with light.
Epilogue
Monday, February 15th
PALLIOTI ALLOWED VALENTINE’S DAY, that most gruesome and unlikely celebration of lovers, to pass before he returned to Bologna. It only seemed fair.
Although, he had to admit, he was finding fairness a stretch these days. It didn’t interest him much, or at least as much as he suspected it should. This, for instance, was essentially an ambush. Or perhaps, he thought, as he got out of the car and crunched across the expensive gravel, it wasn’t. He found it hard to believe that a woman as intelligent as Barbara Barelli would be surprised to see him.
Antonio Tomaselli had held her against her will. He had threatened her with a gun, tied her up, and locked her in an upstairs room. That much was true. But it was also true that she had gone to the farm of her own free will, and that when Antonio opened the door and let her in, she had stepped over the threshold announcing not only that she knew Kristin Carson was there, but that she refused to leave without her. A fight had ensued. Tomaselli had won.
Pallioti did not know, when it came to it, if Antonio would have killed Barbara, or Kristin. He probably didn’t want to. But then again, he probably hadn’t really wanted to kill Aldo Moro, either. It was hard to know exactly what was in people’s hearts. Or what they would do when they could not get what they wanted—whether it was political recognition, thirteen comrades freed from jail, or one last chance with the woman they loved. Pallioti was sure Antonio Tomaselli had wanted that. The past returned and Angela Vari with it.
Like all attempts to unwind time, and every love story ever written, it was, he thought, that simple. And that complicated.
This time the bells ran through their full chime before anyone opened the door. When she did, Hedwige Aarlheissen was barefoot and, somewhat disconcertingly, wearing purple fuzzy leggings and a very long and equally fuzzy purple sweater. Pallioti thought she looked like a large moldy grape. As she waved him in, he heard Barbara call from the family room.
“Is it the wine order?”
“Sadly not.”
Barbara looked up at the sound of his voice. She was stretched on the couch, a book in her hand. Giorgio Bassani. Very fitting. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Pallioti wondered if she was merely suffering from a fit of nostalgia, or if the text held a deeper and more immediate resonance for her. He smiled.
“Dottoressa.”
Barbara nodded and said nothing, her eyes following him as he came in, turning down the coffee Hedwige offered. The truth was, he would have loved an espresso. But this wasn’t that kind of visit.
“I was wondering,” he said to Barbara, “if we might have a talk?”
She dropped her eyes, as if she was hoping he would go away, or had come for something else. When she looked up and saw him still standing there, she put the book down and nodded. Barbara Barelli swung her legs off the sofa slowly. She was barefoot. A thin gold chain glittered around her left ankle.
“I think,” she said, “it would be better if we went into my office.”
Pallioti felt Hedwige’s eyes on his back as he followed Barbara across the entryway and into the locked room.
Barbara Barelli closed the door. Then she looked around her office as if it was unfamiliar to her—the big desk, the wall-mounted screen, the rows of cabinets and shelves. The blind over the window was half lowered. She didn’t raise it. Instead she gestured Pallioti to what was obviously the client chair.
“Please,” she said, and sat down behind her desk.
Pallioti let a few seconds of silence beat between them while she gathered herself.
“How did you know?” she asked fina
lly, folding her hands on the blotter.
“The magazine article.”
She nodded.
“The publication,” he said, remembering the files he had picked apart over the weekend. “The American one, what is it called—”
“Runner’s World. April 2006.” Barbara swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “You see, I went to college, in the United States, on a track scholarship. So I still get the American edition. You know, to keep up.”
Pallioti nodded.
“It was—” Barbara cleared her throat. “There was an article. Because New York was coming up, the marathon, and one of the contenders had been operated on by a Dr. Kenneth Carson. He does miracles, apparently. On a routine basis. So they did a profile on him. And there she was.”
Pallioti folded his hands and leaned back in his chair.
“There she was,” he said.
The conversations he’d had with Anna, and with the US Federal Marshals, in the course of the weekend had yielded startlingly different results. For their part, the marshals insisted—and their statistics agreed—that they had never lost a member of the Witness Protection Program, provided the witness in question obeyed the rules. The cardinal one was no contact. No anonymous postcards, or wordless phone calls. No backward glance. No last look.
If the break with the past was clean, they kept people safe. If, on the other hand, there was the tiniest chink of light, the tiniest tipping of the hat to the past, then all bets were off. So, according to them, since Antonio Tomaselli had clearly known all about Anna Carson, it must have been her fault. She must have done something, however unwitting, to alert him to who and where she was.
But she hadn’t. In the last five days Anna had not wanted to say much of anything to anyone, even Enzo Saenz, but she insisted on that. She had kept her locket, with the picture of her father and mother in it, and she had kept running. But that was all. And in the end, Pallioti thought, it had been enough.
“Go on,” he said.
Barbara shook her head. She passed a hand over her eyes and looked up at him.
“I couldn’t believe it, when I saw it. Her. Or, I don’t know, maybe I could. I never really felt that handful of sand, or whatever it was we buried that day, was Angie. I know it sounds strange, but I never felt her leave. You know?”
Pallioti nodded. He did know. He remembered quite clearly the moment his mother died. He had not been allowed upstairs in to her room, but had been sent out in to the garden and told to play. Standing on the clipped grass, his toy army dutifully arranged at his feet, he had felt suddenly as if a vacuum had been attached to his stomach. As if all of his blood and his heart and organs had been sucked out, leaving him weightless, with nothing holding him to the earth.
“But Antonio.” Barbara shook her head. “Antonio did believe it. And it devastated him. He was angry of course, or disappointed—I don’t know—about what she did. About what he called her betrayal. At least at first. Later I think he almost found it a relief. To stop. Tell the story. Pay his dues. Whatever. I’m not sure he ever knew what he was doing, really, back then, or why, exactly. He kept talking about bread and roses, but when I asked him, he could never tell me what it meant. I think perhaps he wanted to explain that to Angela, or hoped someday he’d have the chance. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “But I do know that he loved her. I don’t even like him. I never did.” Barbara looked down at her hands, still folded on the blotter. “But I will give him that. He loved Angela. I think perhaps she was the only thing he ever did truly love, except for his grandparents, and his brother—and in some warped way he thought the future would be better for them, I don’t know, if Aldo Moro was made to stand trial. That it would be some kind of correction. Justice.”
Pallioti grimaced. There was that word again.
Barbara sighed.
“Yes. Whatever the hell that is,” she agreed. “In any case, when he heard that Angie had been killed, it broke his heart. I saw him first at the funeral. My parents, well, my father, was still living in Ferrara then, so I heard and I went and I felt sorry for him.” She looked up at Pallioti. “I represented him, yes, because in some way, I suppose, I did understand what they’d done, even if I didn’t agree with it. And because someone had to. But I did it mostly because it was something I could do for Angie. I remember, once, right after her father died—” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, I thought she would have wanted me to. Help Antonio. It kept me close to her. I loved her, too, you know.”
Pallioti nodded.
Barbara smiled. “Odd, isn’t it? That Antonio Tomaselli and I should have that in common.” She looked down at her hands. “Anyway,” she went on when she looked up again, “I suppose I wanted to be near him because he was the last living trace of her on this earth. Or so I thought.”
“Until you saw the magazine?”
“Until I saw the magazine.”
“And you showed it to Antonio?”
She nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I showed it to Antonio.”
Barbara Barelli put her face in her hands.
“I don’t know if I wanted to share it with someone,” she said. “Or if I did it for him. Or if I thought I was doing it for her. I honestly don’t know.” She dropped her hands and looked at Pallioti. “I do know I didn’t think anything like this would happen. You have to believe that. I just thought, in his place, I would have wanted, no, I would have needed to know.” She shook her head. “And I thought—”
Thought, what? Pallioti leaned forward. “Dottoressa,” he said. “You are a lawyer. And as such your first duty is to the court. You must have understood, surely, what had happened? That Angela Vari had been made a protected witness? And what that meant?”
Barbara Barelli nodded. She opened a drawer, pulled out a tissue, wiped her eyes, and nodded again.
“I told him he couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t even whisper. That I was only telling him so he’d know she was all right. I thought Angie would have wanted me to. I thought I was doing it for her.”
Pallioti stared at her. It always amazed, and often terrified, him that highly intelligent people could be so stupid. Especially when it came it love.
“I think—” Barbara ran her hand through her hair. “I didn’t understand at the time—it didn’t even occur to me, but I think it made him even angrier with her. That when he found out she was still alive, had been alive all this time, he felt doubly betrayed. Wanted to punish her—not for Moro, for turning him in—but because she never let him know. That she was still alive—that even if they never saw each other again, he wasn’t alone in the world. That she was out there somewhere. And that loving him hadn’t gotten her killed. He felt so guilty about that. As if he’d killed her himself.”
Barbara looked at him and shook her head.
“I just didn’t understand,” she said. “Not really. I felt sorry for him, but I never tried to know him. He was my client, and I didn’t even talk to him. Not really. Then, of course, when you showed up and told me, I understood at once. How he knew the girl’s name. It was all in the article, even about how the first wife, the girl’s mother, had been killed. It’s why Angie married him, the surgeon, isn’t it?” Pallioti did not have an answer to that, but Barbara Barelli did.
“It is,” she said. “Not because he operated on her knee, but because his little girl had lost her mother. Just like Angie did.” She bit her lip. “I can only imagine how Antonio must have used that.”
Pallioti nodded. A sour feeling twisted in his stomach at the memory of the emails, how the hook that reeled Kristin in had been baited and set with her mother’s death.
“How is Kristin?”
Pallioti was tempted not to answer the question, to snap, “Why should you deserve to know?” then told himself not to be petty.
“Fine,” he said.
And it was true. The young were resilient. With help they would bend and not break. So far Kristin had bent admirably, and she would have pl
enty of help, mostly from her father, with whom she had reclaimed her relationship. It was hard not to think that was all the easier, all this newfound understanding between father and daughter, because Anna Carson—or Angela Vari, as he suspected she would now prefer to be called, and who had never had much help—was no longer resilient, but in a military hospital outside Prato being treated for advanced shock and exhaustion. Which was apparently the current lingo for a broken heart.
After a brief meeting with her husband, she had chosen to stay in Italy and not return to the United States until she was better. Whatever that meant. Pallioti had watched Kristin and Kenneth Carson board a plane hand in hand on Friday morning. Neither father nor daughter had looked back. Kenneth Carson was not a forgiving or an understanding man. He did not deal in shadows, or understand lies, or the past. And finally her stepmother had made it possible for Kristin to get what she had always wanted, her father’s undivided attention. Pallioti suspected that from now on the Carson family would be composed of two.
Barbara Barelli opened her mouth and closed it again. Both of them knew she had been about to ask about Angela, and both of them knew he would not have told her.
He had been present during Angela’s debriefing over the weekend, and had visited her yesterday with Enzo Saenz, who had taken some long overdue time off. Pallioti was almost as worried about him as he was about Angela. His self-contained world had been pierced. He did not know it yet, but Pallioti understood that Enzo Saenz would never know solitude again, now that he had been introduced to loneliness.
He looked at Barbara Barelli.
“The car,” he said. “I take it you won’t make me waste the time tracing the holding company that owns it?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Antonio asked me to buy the house. That was his price for staying quiet about what I’d told him. And then the car. When he got out. I set up another dummy company—” She waved her hand. “It’s all perfectly legal—”
Perhaps, Pallioti thought, in the strictly practical sense of the word. At least as far as the purchases went. But the court of public opinion would be something else altogether. Not to mention the fact that knowingly compromising a witness would, at the very least, mean Barbara was suspended while she was investigated before being stripped of her right to practice. There might well be additional criminal charges—for lying to the police, not cooperating in an ongoing investigation—depending on who was feeling vindictive.
The Lost Daughter Page 43
