The Partisan Heart

by Gordon Kerr

‘Mister Keats! How lovely to meet you. I know your newspaper well from my many visits to London. It’s a good paper.’

  ‘Thank you, signor Ronconi. It is kind of you to say that. And very kind of you and your father to see me,’ replied Michael, taking the proffered hand and feeling a strong, firm handshake. He was unnerved, however, by the hard stare that he received from Antonio Ronconi, as if the man were trying to read what was going on in his mind. But he quickly shook off the odd feeling of familiarity he experienced.

  ‘Of course, I get to London very rarely these days. My father hasn’t been well for several years and I spend most of my life behind this damn desk with the telephone glued to my ear. Or, increasingly, stuck in front of this computer. Aren’t computers the curse of modern life, Mister Keats, or do you mind if I call you Michael?’ He sipped from the glass of water that Anna Trabucchi had poured for him before leaving the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

  ‘No, not at all. Michael’s fine. I must say in my line of work, I find computers very useful.’

  ‘Ah, well, each to his own, I suppose,’ Antonio said, sitting down at his desk. ‘Now, tell me, regarding the kidnap of my sister, are you finding anything new? It seems to me that the media is tiring of it already. We have our public relations people working on ideas to keep them interested. I know, it’s ridiculous,’ he sat back in his chair and shook his head. ‘My sister has been kidnapped – she may even be dead, although I think she is most definitely alive – and we have PR people working on ideas to keep the story in the news! Yes, it is ridiculous! We market even our own grief these days, it seems, Michael.’ He spun round in his seat and stared out of the French doors at the lake, shining like a polished mirror in the distance. Then, he seemed to shake himself and drew his hands across his face as if wiping away all the words he had just uttered.

  ‘Anyway, you’re here to talk to my father. I don’t know what his lordship or your editor told you, but I fear that you are not going to be able to spend an awful lot of time with him. Luigi Ronconi has had a tough life, you know. People ask why they don’t know more about him, why he isn’t accessible to the press every minute of the day. What they should remember is where he came from – a small village in the Valtellina, about forty kilometres from here. The people of that village and all the villages around it, had been nowhere. Think of it. For centuries, man, they had been nowhere.’ He fell into the rock idiom like a man falling into a vat of wine – comfortable and secure. ‘In those days, you know, Michael,’ he went on, leaning forward in his chair, folding his large hands in front of him, ‘you didn’t travel far.’ He stood up, facing the doors leading out into the garden and sweeping his hands across the panorama they offered. ‘You were lucky if you could boast of travelling more than twenty kilometres from your home in your entire lifetime. Until the wars, that is. Wars change everything. They change people. But they not only change people; they also change their expectations. The last one certainly changed my father. In 1939, he was a mechanic working in a garage; a couple of years later, he was married with a young child – me; another couple of years later, his wife and son had disappeared, had been taken to Germany, to certain death, it seemed; he, by this time, was killing Germans as if he had been born to it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world; then he was wandering across Italy like a vagabond; and then … well, you can see it all around you; his success.’ Michael was surprised by the emphasis that was placed on the last word. Antonio hissed the word, rather than spoke it.

  In the last two minutes, it seemed to Michael, the man in front of him had experienced a range of emotions. Antonio seemed to be under an inordinate amount of stress; he was a man in extremis, a man at the end of whatever tether he had made for himself.

  ‘But … anyway, you know most of this.’ He walked towards Michael, suddenly emanating bonhomie and warmth, throwing an arm around Michael’s shoulder, guiding him to the door and saying, ‘Come on, let’s go visit the old man. But let me warn you, he recently had a … how do you say it in English … un ictus?’

  ‘A stroke,’ Michael obliged, knowing the Italian for the illness of one of Rosa’s aunts.

  ‘That’s it! A stroke!’ Guiding Michael through the door, towards the stairs. ‘Such a strange way of putting it, but English is such an odd language, don’t you think? Anyway, you never know how he is going to be and his speech … well he was never the world’s greatest talker – the Valtellina is famous for producing men of few words – but, his words often lose themselves somewhere between his brain and his tongue. He gets very frustrated, but there’s nothing to be done. I shouldn’t tell you this – you being a member of the Fourth Estate and all – but I think you are a man of honour, even though you are a journalist! My father will almost certainly suffer another stroke soon. The doctors don’t know how soon or how serious, but it won’t be long, they think.’

  They climbed the long, sweeping staircase, past oil paintings from which colour glowed as if they had been illuminated from behind. Heavy gilt frames surrounded each one and they, too, shone. At the top of the stairs, they turned right into a long corridor which was similarly lined with expensive-looking art. Antonio stopped in front of a door and whispered to Michael, ‘Let me just go in first to make sure he’s okay.’

  A moment passed and then he returned, beckoning Michael into the room.

  The 83-year-old Falcone was over by the window of a large, dark room. He sat in a wheelchair, in front of a huge bay window, the curtains of which were drawn closed apart from a three feet gap in the centre of the window. It was in front of this gap that he sat, a shaft of bright sunlight slicing into the room and creating a halo around his head. Motes of dust tumbled lazily in the light above his head and his oiled, still-black hair gleamed.

  ‘Papi. I have Mr Keats, the English journalist here to see you for a moment.’ Antonio took the chair by the handles and pushed it round so that Luigi’s face came into view.

  The handsome, angular features of the twenty-seven year-old Luigi Ronconi could just about be made out, if, indeed, you had known him back then. But his cheeks had become sunken and his eyes had lost the deep colour that had made them seem iridescent and had attracted the opposite sex when he was young. They had become grey and flecked here and there with white. His body, though stooped in the wheelchair, was still large and powerful-looking for a man of his years.

  Michael stepped forward and held out his hand.

  ‘Signor Ronconi. It is an honour to meet you. Thank you very much for seeing me.’

  ‘Ah you can thank his Lordship for that.’ The voice was harsh and deep, the accent was still recognisable as the one which coloured the words of Rosa’s family, the accent of the Valtellina. His speech was slightly slurred, mainly because his mouth was pulled down at one corner, probably, Michael surmised, by the stroke he had suffered. ‘We go back a long way.’

  Antonio beckoned Michael to sit on a leather sofa in the centre of the room and pushed the wheelchair over to it.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind answering a few questions for me, signor Ronconi?’ He gestured to the small tape recorder he had taken from his pocket and was now placing on the coffee table that was in front of both of them.

  ‘That is why you are here, I believe, so, please, ask away.’

  ‘Not too long, though, Papi.’ Antonio interrupted.

  ‘Oh, you fuss too much, my boy. I am feeling fine today.’

  ‘So, signor Ronconi, I am interested in knowing who you think might have kidnapped Teresa. The newspapers have speculated that it might be the mafia, or business rivals or even Eastern European gangsters. Who do you think kidnapped her?’

  ‘I wish I knew, signore. Antonio thinks it is local gangsters. I don’t know.’ He sighed. Speaking was not easy for him and the words came out in staccato bursts at the end of each of which he seemed to gather himself for the next burst. ‘Of course … I have enemies. You don’t get all this,’ his eyes swivelled, taking in the whole room, as he drew
in a deep breath, ‘without making enemies … What is the phrase … You can’t make an omelette … without breaking eggs?’ A slow smile crossed his face. ‘I’ Another deep breath, ‘have made rather a large omelette … don’t you think?’ His eyes twinkled, but then they clouded over again. ‘Ah, Teresa … She is a lovely child, you know. So open … and honest. And with a fighting spirit … just like her mother.’

  ‘Does she work here, for you, signore?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t.’ It was Antonio speaking. He was seated in a chair across from them. ‘She has her own work, her own studies.’

  ‘Ah, what is she studying?’

  ‘She is a … lepidopterist … you know … butterflies,’ said Luigi.

  ‘She is obsessed by them.’ It was Antonio now, interrupting his father. ‘Always has been, since she was tiny.’

  ‘She would chase them around the garden … when she was small. She was like a little butterfly … herself, back then,’ Luigi now, with a wistful look in his eyes as he cast his memory back over the years. ‘This place, you know … is a veritable haven … for butterflies and Teresa … Teresa has learned everything … everything there is to know about them.’

  ‘Before you leave I will show you her room and her study. You have a camera with you, I presume?’ Antonio rose from his seat. ‘I think that is enough, Papi. I don’t want you getting over-tired.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Signor Keats …’ Luigi reached out a shaky hand to Michael. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you … Please give my regards … to his Lordship.’

  Antonio wheeled the chair back to its former position in front of the window and they left the room filled with the laboured sounds of the old man’s breathing. The interview was over too quickly for Michael.

  ‘You were lucky. Papi was very lucid today. There are days when he is less clear about who he is talking to and he wanders a great deal in what he says.’ Antonio was leading Michael to a room towards the rear of the ground floor of the palazzo. He opened it and stood to one side to let Michael go in.

  ‘This, as you can see, is Teresa’s office.’

  The room was like any office – computer, desk and sofa against the far wall.

  ‘But she slept here as well. Next door is her bedroom – she wanted always to be close to her butterflies – and through here …’ He walked towards a door to the left of the room. ‘… through here are …’ He threw open the door with a flourish: ‘the butterflies!’

  Michael walked into a small foyer with another door a few feet inside, allowing an area for viewing what lay beyond. What lay behind it was a large, conservatory-like construction which had been added, it seemed, to the back of the house. Inside were butterflies. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of butterflies, landing on plants and taking off again, bumping up against the glass through which Michael and Antonio were looking, coloured clouds of silently flapping wings.

  ‘It’s marvellous, isn’t it?’ asked Antonio, shaking his head.

  ‘My God, yes. There must be thousands of them.’ answered Michael, his eyes taking in the extent of this butterfly-infested room.

  ‘Actually, around five thousand. This is her laboratory, her study, her workshop. She breeds them and studies them.’

  A woman walked through a door to the left of where they were standing, smiling at Antonio and then walking to the rear of the building.

  ‘She has a number of assistants. They have been wonderful in the last few weeks in keeping the whole place going.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But, I am afraid I must leave for Milan very shortly. If you wish to take some photographs here, please do …’

  ‘I will, but I wonder,’ interrupted Michael, ‘if I might actually take some shots of Teresa’s bedroom. Some real human interest may be just what you need, if as you say, you want the newspapers to take an interest in the story again.’

  ‘Well, it is a bit of a, how do you say it, a tabloid approach, in a way, but … oh what the Hell, why not. It’s through here.’

  Michael had dropped the film into the Beldoro photographic shop as he passed through town on his way back to the hotel. He had then stopped at a bar and relaxed over a beer and a sandwich before making his way back to the hotel to start transcribing the tape and writing his story.

  ‘Signor Keats, there is a letter for you.’

  The receptionist/decorator stood in his paint-spattered overalls, waving a small manila envelope at Michael as he climbed the first flight of stairs.

  ‘A letter?’ Who would be writing to him? No one knew where he was. He was even more puzzled to see that it had a local postmark on it. ‘Grazie.’ He took it and headed off to his room to open it.

  ‘Gentile Signor Keats,’ the letter began. The envelope was old. It was brown, of the kind used for business communications and only half of the glue on the flap had worked, so that it was half-open. The paper inside was a small, lined sheet, yellowing around the edges, as if it had taken years to be delivered. Ignazio Mazzini – for it was from him and Michael had given him his hotel details when he talked to him, in case he recalled anything else – was not the sort of man to have supplies of fresh stationery around the house and there was every chance that this sheet had been sitting in a drawer for decades before he had found a use for it.

  The writing was painstaking. Each letter sat alone, as if it had been chiselled out of the paper. Each was bold and had been pressed deep, even going through the paper on a couple of occasions.

  ‘Please forgive me for taking the liberty of writing to you there is something I have remembered that I didn’t tell you I told it to the policeman who came to see me not long after you left. Rinaldi was his name.’ The punctuation, or almost total lack of it made it necessary to concentrate on what Ignazio was trying to say.

  ‘When I stood waiting for il porco, Bonfadini, and my whore of a wife, I overheard voices from the front of the bar a voice said, ‘Mi dispiace, la mia farfalla.’ I hope this can be of use to you the policeman was very interested. Distinti saluti.’

  The signature that followed was laboured, like the handwriting of a ten-year-old. Still, Ignazio had had little occasion to pick up a pen in his lifetime, Michael surmised. ‘I am sorry, my butterfly’? Why did someone say that? Michael was puzzled.

  ‘Rinaldi?’ answered the voice at the other end of the telephone. ‘I’m sorry, there is no one of that name here. Are you sure you have the correct name, signore?’

  ‘Thank you, I must have made a mistake,’ replied Michael, replacing the receiver.

  He had spent the last hour phoning every police station in the area and even a few outside the area, trying to locate the policeman who had visited Ignazio Mazzini a short time after he had. Every time he had received the same response. No one of that name worked out of that police station. The conclusion had to be that there was, in fact, no policeman of that name.

  Michael stood up and went to the window, instinctively peering out from behind the curtain down into the street in front of the hotel, as if he expected to see this phony policeman staring back up at him. The street was, of course, empty. It was lunch time, the sacred hour in Italy.

  Michael let the curtain fall from his hands and walked over to the tiny table on which his laptop sat. He felt uneasy. Had he been followed to Ignazio’s farm? It would not, of course, take a genius to work out that Ignazio might have some important information. But had they thought that he had found out something that no one else had and that was why he had been talking to the late farmer?

  There were a number of possibilities. The main one that occupied Michael’s thoughts as he stared at the screen was that this Rinaldi had, in fact, killed Ignazio. Of course, he may have killed himself, but it seemed very unlikely. And surely there was no way that he could have fallen? He had worked that land all of his life. It would have been as familiar as a sitting-room carpet to his feet.

  But, why would Rinaldi have killed him? What did Ignazio know that was so critical? Could it be something to do with his recollection of the
words he had heard on the day of the kidnapping as he waited for the shopkeeper’s footsteps?

  Michael reached over to the bed and picked up the yellow-edged letter that he had left there. He peered at it, running his finger across the badly punctuated words. ‘Mi dispiace, la mia farfalla.’ – ‘I’m sorry, my butterfly?’ An ironic reference to Teresa Ronconi’s studies, no doubt. Those words were the only thing about which the police had no knowledge, because Ignazio had not repeated these words to them. Could those four words be the reason that he had been killed?

  Again, he stood up, feeling nervous, and made his way to the window. The street was now beginning to fill up again as the lunch hiatus came to an end. Mopeds were spluttering into life in the distance and cars were revving up. Voices filled the silence that had previously enveloped the town.

  He, too, now possessed this information.

  They may have thought that Ignazio had already shared it with him during his interview. No matter, though. He knew it now. And, more importantly, he presumed they knew that he knew it.

  He pulled the curtains closed and returned to the seat at the table. He stared, unseeing, at his laptop which gazed bluely back at him, the cursor winking at him from just to the right of the last letter he had typed.

  Still nervous, he waited until the sun had sunk behind the high peaks and light began to seep out of the town before leaving the hotel to collect his photographs.

  He had also arranged for a courier to collect the photos from the hotel in an hour and take them down to Bruno in Milan, from where they could be transmitted electronically to London. There was no internet here at the hotel and anyway he wanted to ensure that the quality was good. He had already e-mailed several thousand words to Harry. He was back in business and happy to be so.

  He walked briskly to and from the photography shop, keeping to the centre of the narrow streets, cheered by the fact that the mild weather had encouraged people out to look in the windows of the shops or just to stroll. He had ducked into a small grocery store and bought a bag of crisps and a six-pack of beer and was just opening one of the bottles back in his room when Rosa’s face jumped into his mind, unbidden. Her dark eyebrows were raised in a quizzical way and the downward pout of her lips seemed to give her a critical look, as if there were something of which she did not approve. It was precisely at that moment that he remembered the envelope of her contact sheets that he had stuffed into the side pocket of his bag the morning he had left for Italy.