It was a fair guess, given the causes she had chosen to defend, that Barbara had enemies. Probably powerful ones who would be all too happy to get a dig at her. And none of that even began to touch on her moral obligation to her client and his safety. To say it had been compromised was something of a sick joke.
He stood up. What he was about to say gave him no pleasure. Barbara Barelli was a gifted lawyer. The causes she fought for had been the right ones.
“Will you write the letter?” he asked. “Or would you like me to?”
She looked at him for a moment, then folded her hands on the blotter again and shook her head.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “This afternoon. I’ll submit myself for judicial investigation, and relinquish my license. Immediately. Regardless of the outcome.”
Pallioti nodded. Then he turned on his heel and started toward the door. He was about to turn the handle when she said, “Dottore?”
He turned around. Barbara Barelli stood up. Her fingertips rested on the blotter. Her dark hair drifted on her shoulders. Looking at her he remembered again how much he had liked, and even admired, her.
“I wondered,” she asked, “of course, I wasn’t there, but—have you seen the autopsy report?”
Pallioti smiled. There was no humor in it at all.
“The real one?”
She nodded.
A piece had come out in the papers, barely more than a paragraph telling yet another pathetic story about the end of the Red Brigades. Detailing how, after his release from prison, Antonio Tomaselli had been unable to adjust. Had struggled first to find a job and then to build a life, and had finally given up on both when he retreated to an isolated farmhouse outside Ferrara where he had died in an accident involving a gun. Pallioti looked at his watch.
“It should be on my desk,” he said, “when I get back to the office.”
“Will you tell me what it says? Just for the record?”
His mouth twitched in an unpleasant smile.
“Just for the record.”
Pallioti let himself out of the office. Hedwige Aarlheissen was in the kitchen. She leaned against a counter, watching him, then turned away as he left.
* * *
Once again the fat man had been as good as his word. It was strange, Pallioti thought, but there really was a code of honor among thieves. Or perhaps it was something less admirable even than that. And more dangerous. An irreducible part of the arrogance that led to the crime in the first place. He had read once that the spy Kim Philby had kept a framed photograph of a mountain in Russia on the wall of his office the entire time he worked for British Intelligence. The idea made him smile. It was well known that people never really looked at photographs.
He had, though. Last night. He had spent until the early hours of the morning studying the pictures of Angela Vari’s funeral. They had worried him from the beginning. It was some time before he finally understood what he was seeing.
Now he tipped them out and spread them across his desk. As everyone knew, the early hours of the morning were notoriously unreliable. He wanted to be certain, in the cold light of day.
It was not just the number of photos, it was the angles they had been taken from. Far too many. He had realized at once that there had been more than one police photographer in the cemetery. Now he understood why. They were not merely keeping a record. They were setting up evidence. He couldn’t spot the shooter crouched behind a crypt. Or shooters—there would surely have been more than one. Or the shoulder holsters worn by the prison guards, whom he now doubted were prison guards at all, but he understood why they had stayed so well back, why they’d taken Antonio Tomaselli’s chains off, hadn’t even handcuffed him. Not out of respect, but because they’d hoped he would run.
But no one had taken the bait and come to try and set him free. Mara was dead, and the others were locked up, or too smart, or simply didn’t care enough anymore. During the war it had been a point of pride among the Partisans that they rescued their own, never handed them over to the enemy. But as Barbara said, Antonio had never quite been one of them, had never quite belonged. To anyone. Except Angela Vari.
Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t do something very stupid. Take the opportunity of her funeral, for instance, to bolt. Make a dash, conveniently relieved of all restraints, through the crypts and monuments, and vanish into the city he knew so well.
If he had, he would have been dead within seconds. And the whole thing would have been caught on film. All asses amply covered. Notorious Terrorist Attempts to Flee. Tragic Shooting Assures Safety of Population.
They must have been crushed when he was too busy grieving, and too many civilians appeared, to carry out plan B—because there was always a plan B. He wondered what it would it have been. Merely knocking him to the ground and shooting him in the head? The priest probably wasn’t even really a priest, or, if he was, he was one of ours with bulletproof armor under his vestments. They must have been furious, after going to all that trouble. After all, Angela had no family, how could they have guessed that the Pirottis and the Ravellis would notice that she was dead and insist on paying their respects. Or that Barbara Barelli would be visiting her father? Pallioti wondered if they would have shot her, too, if she got in the way. What did they call it these days? Collateral damage.
Barbara Barelli was right. He hadn’t believed it, not really, deep down inside. Then he’d studied the pictures. Pallioti felt a physical wave of disgust so powerful he nearly staggered. He pushed the photos aside and turned to the envelope, the fat man’s second little billet-doux he had received this morning.
He didn’t know if this was a second autopsy report. He suspected not. Antonio was not Mara. He wasn’t a founder of the BR, or a beautiful young woman who had become a media star when she busted her husband out of jail. And he did not have a wife or lover to be outraged, to organize vigils and light candles and call for vengeance for his assassination. He was just a two-bit conspirator, probably a killer. A dried-up terrorist reduced to manipulating teenagers. So Pallioti doubted they’d bothered. No one cared about Antonio Tomaselli. He wasn’t worth a fake autopsy report. In fact Pallioti found himself half surprised they’d bothered with an autopsy at all. But they had. That was another puzzling thing about pictures. How often killers took them of their victims. He thought of all the film footage, all the photographs from the concentration camps.
There weren’t many pictures in the envelope. He’d seen hundreds of death reports with more. But they were enough. The ones taken from the front were ugly. But not as bad as the ones taken from the back. Pallioti gave a slight shudder. The ammo used in sniper rifles made one hell of a mess. Which was why snipers liked them. If you lined up a good shot, you didn’t want to have to take it twice.
As the accompanying notes confirmed, Antonio Tomaselli had been hit squarely in the back of the head. Pallioti wasn’t too surprised to read that he’d been hit again just below the left shoulder, probably as he went down. Just for good measure. Just to show off. See if you can rupture the heart while you’re at it. Not that it was necessary. The first shot had been a beauty—more or less blowing off the top of his skull.
There were a few scene photos, too, showing the diameter of the spatter marks, which were impressive. Antonio’s head had all but exploded. From the looks of the body, he had been lifted off his feet, thrown forward, and had landed face down on the rutted cobbles, his hands outstretched. The gun, the one he’d dropped on hearing Angela Vari’s voice, had been so far behind him it wasn’t even in the photograph. No second weapon had been found on his body or in the house.
Pallioti had expected to feel sick. He had expected to need a drink, or fly into a rage. Had thought perhaps he would pick things up and hurl them against the wall, indulge in what his mother had called throwing his toys about. But he didn’t. He didn’t even feel the compulsion to call Rome and shriek down the phone at the fat man, who, either before or after he told him again that petulance didn’t suit
him, would doubtless remind him that they were all fighting the War on Terror.
Instead he walked to the window and stared down at the familiar view of the piazza, realizing that he ought to be tired. Or at least a little surprised. Barbara Barelli’s words came back to him.
You couldn’t survive if you really thought that the state—that your beloved polizìa even—might go around eliminating those they find inconvenient. Or just plain don’t like. That they might do a little correcting when they think the courts have gotten it wrong.
He looked at the flags—the lily of Florence, the Italian tricolor that flew in front of the fancy new police building—and thought, we lie about what we love. To ourselves and to others. But mostly to ourselves. We lie about it because we are selfish and cowardly and human. And because, sometimes, when we were forced to see what we love for what it really is, we have to give it up.
He walked back to his desk, sat down, and unscrewed his favorite pen.
Fifteen minutes later, when he had finished writing, Pallioti made a copy of the single page on the machine in his closet. He put the original in an envelope and placed it in the center of his desk. Then he gathered up Antonio’s autopsy report and the photographs the fat man had sent him, and slipped them, together with the copy, into a large manila envelope that he addressed to Barbara Barelli.
* * *
In the outer office Guillermo was bent over his computer. He glanced at his watch, then reached, without looking up, and pushed the intercom button to Pallioti’s office.
“Just to remind you,” he said, “you have a meeting at three with—”
“Cancel it.”
Pallioti’s voice was not much more than a murmur, but the tone caused Guillermo to stop typing. He was about to ask if he’d heard correctly when the line went dead. Guillermo looked at the closed door. He leaned back in his chair and felt his mouth go dry. A moment later the door opened and Pallioti came out carrying a large envelope and wearing his overcoat. Guillermo, without being quite sure why, got to his feet and stood as he left the office.
The day had turned windy and bitterly cold. Pallioti pulled on his gloves as he came down the steps.
I am resigning my position because I will not serve a state that kills people.
I am resigning my position because of my severe moral reservations.
I am resigning my position because we’ve become a murderous, lying, self-righteous shipload of shits I wouldn’t trust a gerbil with and I’m sick of it.
Of the wording he’d toyed with, he preferred the last. Although, even in his present state of mind, he realized he couldn’t say it. And to be fair, it wasn’t entirely accurate. There were many policemen who were neither self-righteous nor liars, and who did their jobs as well as they could, more often than not with bravery and distinction.
A skin of ice slicked the cobbles in the piazza. The fountain hissed and spat, flinging its silver drops about like a child having a tantrum. A few carriages were pulled up near the taxi stand, the horses swaddled in blankets. Behind the glass, the restaurant was full. No one was standing under the loggia or sitting on its steps. Above him the flags snapped and clicked, keeping time as he crossed toward the flower seller’s kiosk.
The buckets weren’t out. It was too cold, they’d tip over in the wind. Inside the little pavilion, the air was warm and heavy with scent. The flower seller jumped up from his stool when he saw Pallioti. They had been friends for a long time.
“Dottore.” He clapped his hands together. “What can I get you? The usual for the signora?”
The signora was not Pallioti’s wife, he didn’t have such a thing, but his sister. He was in the habit of taking Saffy flowers when he had dinner with her once a week, or went to Sunday lunch, or to a show or opening at her gallery. She was fond of tulips in the spring, and generally of roses. He shook his head.
“Something else,” he said. “Today. Something special. White, probably. And that will get through the night. I’m going to a funeral tomorrow.”
The flower seller made a face.
“My condolences, dottore,” he said. “Not family, I hope?”
Pallioti shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Not family.”
They were burying Antonio Tomaselli in Ferrara, not far from where they had once buried Angela Vari. He didn’t know who would be there. Antonio’s father, a cripple, had died while he was in prison. His mother, from what Pallioti understood, was blind and frail and had for many years, ever since the death of Aldo Moro, whom she had considered a saint, claimed she no longer had a son. He doubted the fat man would show up, and wondered if he’d have the nerve to punch him if he did. Probably not, on both counts. In the end, he thought, it would just be Angela Vari and Enzo and himself, a strange little trio, not one of them believing in God as they stood beside the open grave with a priest and a few DIGOS agents reciting the prayers for the dead.
He watched as the flower seller prepared the bouquet, his chapped red hands quick and delicate as he chose blossoms and trimmed their stems, then crimped and wrapped and tied them with a suitably somber bow, and thought of how, in the end, he had taken a page from Brigate Rosse. A prayer from what Angela Vari had called their “Book of Hours.” Keep it simple. Clean and fast. It was good advice. Finally he’d just paraphrased Barbara Barelli.
I am resigning because when we become Judge and Executioner, there is no difference between Them and Us.
Pallioti handed the flower seller a significant number of euro notes and told him to keep the change. Then he lifted the bouquet, cradling it in his arms as he walked across the piazza. He stopped at the mailbox beside the loggia just long enough to slide the manila envelope into it before he turned down the alley that led toward the river and home.
A Note from the Author
The Lost Daughter is the second novel I’ve written in a planned trilogy dealing with key moments in Italian politics in the twentieth century. In fact, the last three novels I’ve written, The Faces of Angels, Villa Triste, and The Lost Daughter, have all been set in Italy, though I myself had barely set foot in the country before I’d turned forty. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up pretty much half and half between the USA and the UK, where we moved for my father’s work the first time before I was six months old and later owned a house for thirty-five years. My first encounter with Italy was a two-week vacation of the pretty standard broke-university-student type when I was in my early twenties; the second was a slightly more upmarket vacation in Florence and Venice with my mother that lasted only a week.
So it’s not unreasonable to wonder, Why Italy? rather than England? Or America? Or for that matter, France? I’ve asked the question of myself, not least because the what and where any writer chooses to write about is both defining and revealing—to ourselves as much as anyone else. One of the weird alchemies of writing is that we don’t always know what we’re doing until we’ve done it. And sometimes not even then.
To begin to explain, I need to give a little bit of a background. In 2000, my British husband and I bought a group of derelict seventeenth-century barns on the northern edge of Dartmoor in the west of England and embarked on what would become a decade-long building and renovation project. That is how we came to be living in the west of England when the Twin Towers fell on the morning of September 11, 2001.
We spent that day, like most of the rest of the world, glued to the television and on the phone, anxiously tracking down family and friends. It wasn’t until dinner that we slowed down enough to ask each other “what this all meant” and, I suspect like many people around the world, “what would happen next.”
Over a glass of wine, my husband and I found ourselves asking each other what we would choose to do if the world were going to fly to pieces. I never went to continental Europe as a kid, despite the fact that I had spent every summer and school holiday in England. So it was I who said, “I want to go to the Uffizi. If World War III is going the break out, let’s go to F
lorence.” And so we did.
What I remember from that trip is the cold, blowing down from the Apennines, flecking the Arno into whitecaps, and the way the streets, narrow enough to be shadowed at the best of times, turned dark by five, and how the shops spilled light out onto the glassy cobbles. I remember a few warm days, but mostly rain, running down the grim, rusticated faces of the buildings with their gigantic torch rings and doors so huge smaller doors had to be set into them, as if this were a city once inhabited by giants. I remember the crowds on the Ponte Vecchio just before dark, braving the winds to feed the fish who come there at sunset, carrying in the shadows of their fish memory the centuries before when the bridge was the province of butchers who at sunset drew their shutters and threw their spoiling offal and carcasses and hooves into the sludgy water. I remember facing the Primavera and thinking it one of the most sinister paintings I had ever seen, stained as it is with Botticelli’s madness that seeps like mold up through the beauty. And I vividly remember standing in a darkened room staring at Bronzino’s Lucrezia Tuornabuoni—first because she had the same name as me, and also because Bronzino gave me the eerie feeling that I had never really seen portraits before.
How do we first begin to love a person, or a place, or an idea? I don’t know, but I think that it has far less to do with beauty or even appearance than we are led to believe. Because, I should confess now, I do not find Florence—or even most of Italy—particularly beautiful. Of course there are certain views, vistas, buildings, Tuscan valleys, and cliffs falling into azure seas that are undeniably lovely. The food is good, but, like everywhere else, can sometimes be awful or just mundane. The wine is nice, but for me, France takes that biscuit every time. None of that is what I found beguiling on that trip, or have found beguiling ever since. To me, Italy is compelling simply because it is one of the most intellectually rich, vibrant, and contradictory countries in the world—and from that first visit I knew both that I wanted to try to understand something of it, and that I probably never would.
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