by Gordon Kerr
Angela stared at a hole in the roof, through which she could see dark, rain-bearing clouds passing up above. These were alien clouds, however; not the clouds of her homeland, the clouds that hung as if on strings above the mountain peaks of the Valtellina. She knew she would never see them again. She would never see Luigi again. She would never again burst through the bushes into that clearing above the village and see Sandro rolling a cigarette between his slim fingers, a smile spreading across his handsome face like the sun across the valley floor in the morning.
She fell asleep once more, hearing the crackle of rain on the roof but dreaming that it was the sound of rain on the overhanging rock that sheltered two lovers entwined in each other’s arms on the side of a mountain.
10
13 November 1999
Talimona
North Italy
Michael was surprised to find a number of police cars parked in front of Ignazio’s house. Carabinieri in their dark uniforms and men in plain clothes were busy around the house and a further group was milling about over in the small vineyard that hugged the side of the cliff to the right of the property.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked a policeman through the window of his car.
‘And you are, signore?’ the policeman answered the question with another and quite aggressively. Without waiting for a response from Michael, he followed with a curt, ‘Please get out of the car.’
‘My name is Michael Keats; I’m a journalist, from the London Evening Post.’ He closed the car door. ‘I’m writing about the Ronconi kidnapping for my paper and interviewed Ignazio Mazzini, the owner of this farm, a few days ago. I’ve come to ask him a few more questions. Where is he?’ he added more forcefully, looking around at all the activity. ‘What exactly is going on?’
‘I am afraid, signor Keats, that there’s been an accident. Please come with me. My boss will want to speak to you.’
The policeman led Michael up the steep incline towards the vineyard.
The explosion of growth that had made the branches of the vines heavy with dusty grapes had been months ago and the vines now resembled gnarled, brown sticks that had been stuck into the earth as if they were part of some kind of modernist artistic installation. It was a small but tidy vineyard of perhaps a few hundred vines and had been planted on a sloping south-facing plateau that clung to the side of the mountain. Still, it had furnished Ignazio and his antecedents with enough wine for their own consumption for many generations.
Michael was led over to the edge of the cliff where a man in a dark suit, a detective, no doubt, was in discussion with a colleague. In the distance, several hundred feet below where Michael stood, a hydrofoil tore a silver strip out of the surface of the lake, separating the water between Menaggio and Verdanno.
The policeman who had brought Michael up interrupted the conversation, nodding towards Michael as he spoke to him.
‘It’s a steep climb, eh, signore?’ said the second policeman, turning to face Michael, putting one hand on his hip and wiping the sweat off his forehead with the other.
‘Indeed it is,’ replied Michael.
‘I am Ispettore Coloni. My colleague tells me you are English, signore? A long way from home, eh? What brings you here?’
Michael repeated the explanation he had given a few minutes ago and asked once more what was going on.
‘Ah, you are a journalist, signore. Well, you will certainly have this story before anyone else, I think. I am very sorry to have to inform you that it will not be possible for you to ask signor Ignazio Mazzini any more questions. You see, signor Keats, his body was found down there on the Beldoro road earlier this morning.’ He gestured in the direction of the road some three hundred feet below. ‘It would appear that he fell, or possibly jumped – who knows? – from where we are standing, to his death. A truck driver found him in the middle of the road. His skull was fractured and his neck was broken. Regrettably, there was nothing that could be done for him. So, if you spoke to him recently, you may well have been one of the last people to see Ignazio Mazzini alive, signor Keats.’ Michael’s surname sounded odd in Coloni’s mouth, as if he were chewing something that was too large to swallow. He came up to stand beside Michael at the side of the cliff and looked down, shaking his head.
‘What would drive a man to do such a thing? Eh? If, indeed, he did jump, that is. Such a man would have to be pretty desperate, don’t you think?’
‘Desperate indeed. I’m not the greatest judge of human nature, Ispettore, but I would never have described Ignazio Mazzini as a desperate man, and certainly not as a man who would throw himself off the side of a mountain. Not from my discussion with him. He was an unhappy man, I will admit, but he was consumed with a desire to revenge himself on that shopkeeper who had been having an affair with his wife. That’s the kind of anger that gives a man a reason to live, not to die.’
‘Ah, you may well be right, signore, and don’t worry, we shall certainly be talking to Bonfadini, the shopkeeper. But, nevertheless, I think I agree with you – it somehow doesn’t feel right – a man who has lived the life that he has lived, throwing himself off a cliff, committing suicide. He would have seen that as an act of the purest self-indulgence. These people up here in the mountains, you know–’ he swept a hand around the circle of jagged-topped mountains that bordered the lake, ‘they live like animals. Survival is all. It always has been. Up here they don’t understand the kind of angst and stress that drives those poor bastards in Milano and Roma to take their own lives because a share price has dropped a couple of points. Sure, they have their problems, but …’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I, too, must admit that I find it hard to accept that he would have killed himself, but …’ he shrugged his shoulders and stared off into the distance, ‘that is for the judge to decide. Anyway, we are jumping to conclusions. It may all have been a terrible accident. Perhaps he was stepping back to admire his work in the vineyard and suddenly found his foot reaching out into space. Oh, I know, it seems unlikely, but in my line of work we do have to consider every possibility. In fact, nothing can be ruled out until we are certain the evidence is overwhelmingly against it happening. However, signor Keats, I apologise. I am wasting your time and mine with my idle speculation. We shall, of course, require a statement from you. Oh, and we will also need to know where you were yesterday and early this morning. Purely routine, you understand. Why not go down to Beldoro now and we can get it out of the way? Please, would you be kind enough to wait while I find an officer to accompany you to the police station?’ He bustled off towards a group of policemen who were examining the earth with great attention.
As he waited, Michael gingerly approached the edge of the cliff. He had never been very good with heights and the drop was sheer, without even an outcrop to break a fall. Down below, the asphalt strip of the road stretched like a shoelace in the direction of Beldoro one way and towards Milan the other.
Had Ignazio Mazzini really taken his own life? Had he taken a break from his pruning and stepped to the edge to admire the view, the view to which he had awakened every morning? Had he, breathing in the enormity of it all and realising the smallness of his own existence, limited by the land he worked and the peninsula on which he lived, stepped closer to the edge and leaning over, seen the nothingness below, the yawning empty space? Had he felt a desire for that space as he had never felt a desire for anything before? Had he looked back behind him and seen the crumbling walls of his own home, sensed the empty rooms within it, the shifting of a dirty dish in a sink, the scratching of a rat beneath the floorboards, the silence of a spider at the centre of its web?
Had he then taken a step into that space he desired more than anything, a step into that mirror of himself, a smile creasing the weathered lines around his eyes?
Michael closed his eyes, standing at the edge of the cliff, and said a silent prayer for a small life that had perhaps finally given up the unequal struggle. He then took one final look at the beautiful view that had been Ignazi
o Mazzini’s last and turned away.
‘It was his Lordship’s doing. Sometimes he has his uses, you know.’ Harry Jones’s guttural, smoke-damaged laugh gurgled down the telephone line from London.
Michael had returned to his hotel room after giving his account of his conversation with Ignazio to a policeman in the little police station in Beldoro. As he left he had been asked not to stray too far from the area just in case they needed some more information from him. ‘Purely routine’, of course, but he had no doubt that there were suspicions about him. It made him realise that it was now even more impossible for him to say anything about Claudio Scatti’s body rotting away in that chalet high above the valley.
On returning to the hotel, the receptionist/decorator gave him a fax from Bruno in Milan saying that, not knowing where Michael was staying, Harry had called his newspaper and asked for Michael to be told that he wanted to speak to him. And so Michael was seated by the window of his room, watching dark clouds threaten the mountain tops, laughing with Harry on the phone, happy to hear his Welsh accent. He was even more delighted to hear that the Post’s aristocratic owner had used his connections to arrange an interview with Luigi Ronconi. It would be the first interview with the old man since the kidnapping and it was to be with an English paper.
‘He bloody hates the Italian press, apparently, even though he’s owned most of it over the years. So, he is perfectly happy to well and truly piss them off by giving the story to a foreign paper,’ Harry gleefully added, before giving Michael details of who to contact to arrange the interview.
‘Before I go – I hope you don’t mind me asking – how is everything else, Michael? Have you found anything out? About Rosa, I mean.’
‘I’m no further forward, to be honest, Harry. I’m not really sure what to do next.’
‘How about coming back and getting on with your life, boyo? I’ve got a job here as Deputy News Editor that has your name on it, should you want it.’
‘Give me some more time. I’m not quite ready, but if I haven’t found out any more soon, I’m going to pack it in and get back to reality. I promise.’
‘Good lad. Now must dash. Mustn’t keep his Lordship waiting. You take care now, and let me know what happens with Ronconi. He’s supposed to be a difficult old bugger from what I hear.’
‘Bye, Harry. I’ll let you know.’
Michael put the phone down. He had not told Harry about Claudio Scatti, had not voiced his suspicions. It was hard to know why not. He still had not got it right in his head and wanted to be sure of it before sharing it with anyone. He was like that.
He ran a bath, wondering idly if he was, indeed, as he had said to Harry, ready to get back to reality. What was reality, anyway? Anything that was real had evaporated, had fallen between his fingers like sand as soon as he had discovered that Rosa had been dishonest with him. Even if he did return to reality, it would have to be a different version and perhaps that meant that he, too, would have to become a different version of himself.
It had turned unseasonably warm and even quite muggy as the morning had lengthened towards eleven, the time of Michael’s appointment at the Palazzo Ronconi, and he had been happy to walk the couple of miles from Beldoro to the gates of the palazzo. However, he thought longingly of his car’s air conditioning as he walked slowly up the steep driveway with sweat dampening his hair. The gate had swung open electronically for him after he had spoken his name into the grill on the gate-post and now the full glory of the palazzo began to appear in front of him from amidst the trees that screened it from curious eyes on the road that ran past it or from the town below.
Or, at least, its full lack of glory. He was almost disappointed by the simplicity of the building, a simplicity that belied the term ‘palazzo’. It was very large, however, a square, ochre-coloured building with a red tile roof. It was not, in fact, very old, Michael had read this morning. It had been built by an Italian-A merican millionaire philanthropist in the fifties to house a college in which young, affluent Americans could study Italian culture. Luigi Ronconi had acquired the building in the seventies when he had decided to return to the area of his youth after spending many years with Rome as his home as well as the centre of his business activities.
Luigi Ronconi was an enigmatic figure, if ever there was one. A man who, if he could be bothered, could count his fortune in hundreds of billions of lire, a fortune earned from his many industrial plants around Italy and the world; a man who had, many times since the war, been rumoured to be one of the power-brokers in Italian politics, moving politicians around like pieces on a chess board to create coalition governments; a man who, at one time, had controlled, through his network of companies, huge swathes of the Italian media and, consequently, influenced the opinions and thoughts of his fellow countrymen.
And yet, this was a man about whom not much was really known, as Michael had discovered from the fax that he had been sent by the Post this morning. Three pages to sum up one of the most influential European lives of the second half of the twentieth century.
He was born in the tiny Valtellina village of Dulcino in 1916; he became a car mechanic before the war; he distinguished himself in the partisan movement towards the war’s end; then little is known until 1950, when he appeared from nowhere to buy a small factory near Naples. The rest is history, really. Ronconi cashed in on the economic boom of the mid to late fifties, supplying engine parts to the major car companies from a network of factories across the country. He became an industrial puppet-master, a genius at making money and now he had one of the largest private fortunes in all of Italy and was, in fact, one of the richest men in Europe. Yet, he had never been interviewed on television and few photographs of him existed. Those that did were from the sixties when, for a few short years, he could be spied hobnobbing with the beautiful people of Europe. This was mainly because in the early nineteen-sixties, he fell in love with and married a Swedish model – Agnetha Dorland. The marriage, however, had not lasted longer than the time it had taken to have a child – Teresa, the victim thirty-five years later, of the Beldoro kidnapping.
Michael had read how peerless Ronconi’s record in the war had been. As ‘Il Falcone’, he had been a ruthless scourge of the German garrison in the Valtellina, charismatic and inspirational leader of what turned out to be a doomed group in countless operations, but his wife and young child had been taken by the Germans as a reprisal and he had left the valley and had spent the next few years fighting with other partisans before disappearing from view, presumably seeking the fortune that eventually was to be his.
While he had been earning his fortune, he was also investigating the fate of his son, Antonio, and, indeed, Antonio was miraculously found, living with a German family just a couple of years after the war. He returned to live with his father and grow up to learn the family business. It was Antonio Ronconi – half-brother to Teresa and twice as old as her – that Michael had to meet with first.
The door was opened as he approached and he was welcomed by a young woman, dressed for business in a blue, two-piece Chanel suit. She spoke to him in English.
‘Good morning, Mister Keats.’ Her accent had an American inflection to it, as if she had been left behind by the college that used to occupy this building. ‘How nice to meet you.’ She reached out her hand. ‘I am Anna Trabucchi? Signor Antonio’s personal assistant?’ She spoke in questions, betraying her American education. ‘Signor Antonio apologises. He is just completing an important telephone call and will be down directly? May I get you something, a coffee or perhaps some water …?’ As she said this, she was ushering him into an office that was located to the right of the main door. As he entered it he took stock of the luxurious decor of the entrance hall. Lush, floral wallpaper that looked almost too heavy to stay on the walls; large gilt-framed oil paintings depicting classical scenes; a long, sweeping, red carpeted staircase leading to the upper floor; a sparkling chandelier with tears of crystal dripping from it. The road that Luigi Ronconi h
ad taken to this from a small village in the Valtellina represented something of a miracle.
‘Water would be great, thank you. It’s warm out there,’ replied Michael, taking in the room he had entered – booklined walls, a seriously hefty and inordinately tidy desk in front of the large French windows, which opened onto a beautiful vista down through the trees to the ever-present lake, gleaming in the midday sun.
She was not for small talk, this woman. ‘I’ll have someone bring it?’ she said, bustling out of the room in search of someone to bring his water.
A few minutes later she returned, accompanied by a woman carrying a tray on which were three decanters of different flavoured juice, a bottle each of sparkling and still water and a couple of glasses. The woman placed it on the table under the bustling direction of Anna Trabucchi, who then proceeded to pour a glass for Michael. He had just taken a long, refreshing draught of the ice-cold water, when the figure of a large man appeared in the doorway.
Antonio Ronconi was, as the magazines were always at pains to point out, a handsome man. He was tall, powerfully built and his hair was very dark and surprisingly long for a man of his age – around fifty-eight years old. His skin gave off a healthy, tanned glow. Sun-lamp or the beach, Michael would have been hard-pressed to say. He wore tiny, round sunglasses, tight-fitting black jeans and a leather jacket.
‘Anna, I never want to talk to that idiot again. He knows nothing. See to it that he never gets through to me.’ His words were in rapid Italian and he seemed to be angry in a very controlled way. Michael sensed a capacity for fury in this man, however, from just those few words. But when he turned to face him, his anger was immediately replaced by a disarming charm as he changed to speaking English. He held out his hand, speaking very fluently.
