by Grace Brophy
She had started working for the Casati family ten years earlier, immediately after finishing secondary school. The countess paid her eight euros an hour—“Only five euros less than the teachers at the Academy,” she added proudly, “and she also gives me paid time off, which is a lot better than any of my friends who work in stores get,” she added defensively. Cenni imagined that some of her friends gave her a hard time for being in service.
Her workday started at 10:00 and ended at 7:00, with an hour off for lunch, usually 2:30 to 3:30, after she’d finished clearing the family’s luncheon dishes. She did basic cleaning and waited at table Monday to Saturday. She had Sunday off and a halfday on Saturday, when she finished at 2:00. “The countess said she’d pay me for the extra time today,” she added, looking at the desk clock. She then described her daily routine. She changed the bed linens twice a week, on Monday and Friday, and did at least one load of wash every day. She’d normally hang the laundry out to dry on the back line in the kitchen garden, unless it was raining or particularly cold. “The countess prefers the smell of clothes that are dried outdoors,” she explained. “Oh, and I dust every other day,” she concluded, making a face. “Except the library. I dust in there on Tuesday and Saturday.”
Cenni interrupted. “Who lets you into the library to dust?”
“Who do you think? I let myself in, of course!” she responded smartly.
“You know the combination?”
“Everyone in Assisi knows the combination. Maybe even Concetta!” Lucia said, laughing. “It’s written right there on the count’s blotter,” she said pointing to the desk. “Nine, eight, six, three. The ninth of August, 1963. Camillo Casati’s birthday.”
When he asked her to describe Rita Minelli, her description was similar to what she had told Elena, although more circumspect. Lucia managed to look sad when she remembered why they were there, and occasionally glanced over at Piero to gauge his reaction. Cenni decided, at least for the moment, not to probe about the diary—since he would read it for himself. If it appeared later that any pages had been removed or altered, he could question her again. He was more interested in knowing Rita Minelli’s movements on the day of her death and in resolving the discrepancy concerning the book that Minelli had been holding when she’d had words with her cousin.
Lucia stated that she had seen the American twice on Good Friday. The first time—she was upstairs changing the bed linen—she’d seen Rita Minelli go into Signora Artemisia’s room; the second time was at two o’clock. She was just finishing in the dining room and was on her way downstairs to have her own lunch when she saw the American let herself out the front door. It was exactly two o’clock by the hall clock. Lucia added that she’d spent the remainder of the day below stairs, washing and hanging out two loads of laundry. She had finished exactly at 5:00 and left shortly after by the alleyway door. “The countess said I could leave at five to go to confession.”
When she had finished, Cenni said, “You’re an excellent witness, signora . . . signorina,” he amended, noting the distress on her face at the aging title. “Intelligent and precise in all that you’ve told us. I only wish half the people that we interview were as clear.”
She purred in response. Cenni suspected that not many people complimented her intelligence, possibly the reason for the silicone lips.
He said, “I wonder if you can clarify one point for us concerning the discussion Signora Casati had with her cousin yesterday. You told Inspector Ottaviani that the American was holding a book from the count’s library, similar in size and shape to one of those,” he said, pointing to the books that lined the room. “You’re absolutely sure it was from the count’s library and not an ordinary book—one, let’s say, similar to the Signora’s book?” He asked the question with that irritating kind of smile that says We all make mistakes from time to time.
“I just told you that I dust in here twice a week. I’d know if it was a book from here,” she responded.
“I don’t doubt what you’re telling me for a moment. It’s just that the Signora says you don’t know anyth . . . that you’re mistaken. She said it was her book that Rita Minelli was holding.” He waited for Lucia’s reaction. First her throat and then her face became mottled with patches of red, but she didn’t respond immediately. Cenni guessed that she was weighing her relationship with the daughter of the house against the defense of her ego. He decided to help.
“You can speak freely. What you say here is confidential and won’t be repeated.” And because he was a man of some conscience, he added. “Unless, of course, it becomes absolutely necessary.” To his surprise, she jumped up from her chair and walked over to one of the cabinets. She opened the glass door.
“Here it is!” she said triumphantly, pointing to a manuscript. “On Tuesday when I dusted this shelf it had only nine books. Now it has ten. They may look alike, but I can tell the difference! This one has a small stain on the back cover,” she said, pulling the manuscript from the shelf and pointing to the stain. “What’s more, it’s the exact same book that’s been in the Signora’s room for more than two years. She kept it on the top shelf of her bookcase, shoved to the back. I clean her room daily, and I know what’s there and what’s not there,” she exclaimed, exulting. Ego had trumped job security.
18
CENNI HAD DEVELOPED a curious liking for the maid despite her flaws, or perhaps because of them. She wasn’t that dissimilar to his grandmother, who also loved to gossip. And at least in what she’d told him during the interview, she appeared to be telling the truth. She’ll hold up well before the investigating judge, he decided, if it should come to that. He had asked Piero to make sure that Lucia left the house immediately after her interview; he didn’t want her talking to Artemisia before he did a little research of his own. He had also instructed Piero to inform the count that he needed fifteen minutes alone in the library to accept an important call from the questore. A little quiet reading time courtesy of Signor Casati, he thought, opening the book that Lucia had identified.
He was sure that Umberto Casati would never willingly permit the police to remove or examine the book, and he was equally sure that he’d have great difficulty getting Antonio Priuli, the investigating judge in the Minelli case, to agree to an order for its removal. He was working on instinct. On this one, he’d have to work extralegally—creatively—if he had to explain his action to the questore. He had fifteen minutes to examine the manuscript for whatever it was Artemisia was hiding, and he had no idea what exactly he was looking for.
He moaned to himself when he found that the frontispiece was in Latin. Beyond the occasional inscription on public monuments, he hadn’t translated anything from Latin in more than fifteen years. But as he turned the pages, his luck also turned. The manuscript was a miscellany of documents with different dates and imprimatur, but all the documents appeared to be itemizations of some type and easily understood even by someone whose Latin was rusty. He checked the first and last pages and found that the dates ranged from 1609 to 1614. He turned the pages quickly, aware that the minutes were passing, that the count might come in at any moment. He noticed that some of the leaves were already starting to deteriorate; he could clearly see signs of powder in the folds and he had to turn them carefully.
“Mannaggia! Not another list of household goods,” he grumbled aloud about halfway through the manuscript. It was the tenth inventory of tables and chairs that he had come across, and he was starting to doubt himself. Perhaps his instincts were off or Lucia had lied. “O Dio!” he cried as soon as he turned the page. The words jumped off the page:
Rome 1612 Rapes and Procurements
Index of Paintings Artimitia Gentileschi
“Mi dispiace, little Lucia!” He offered a contrite apology for his early doubts. How fortunate that he’d kept his promise to read Artemisia Casati’s monograph. He knew immediately what he was looking at. He checked the desk clock noting that he had only four of his fifteen minutes left. He’d have to
trust to Piero to keep Umberto Casati out of the library. The inventory contained the names of twelve paintings, but he knew the names of most of them already. He scribbled quickly, smiling.
19
“PAOLA, THAT’S THE tenth cigarette you’ve smoked in the last thirty minutes. You’ll have lung cancer before you reach forty. And the room reeks of cigarette smoke!” These dire words, spoken by Artemisia Casati to her niece Paola just seconds before she lit her own cigarette, had some effect on Paola, although possibly not the one Artemisia had expected. After flipping her lit cigarette over the grate and into the open fire, Paola proceeded to crack her knuckles, a habit that she had recently acquired while living in Rome and one that she found surprisingly relaxing.
“For God’s sake, Paola, you’re acting as though the KGB were in the house and we had something to hide. Why are you so nervous?” Artemisia asked. Paola realized that the question was rhetorical. She’s having trouble dealing with her own nerves, Paola thought, watching the rapid up-and-down movement of her aunt’s crossed leg. She doesn’t want to know about mine.
Her grandparents had left the room a few minutes ago. Her grandmother had gone to her room to make arrangements for Rita’s funeral and her grandfather had gone to check on the police. He’s in one of his snitty moods, Paola thought. She’d been on the wrong end of his moods often enough lately to feel almost sorry for the police, although she dearly wished they’d go away. Her turn was next, as soon as the commissario finished his telephone call, and she still hadn’t decided on her tactics. How much did they know? How much should she conceal? They were the police, after all. From what Giulio had told her, they seemed to know everything. Giulio was sure the police had planted an informer in their group. Paola sank back into the soft cushions, reached for another cigarette, and ruminated on the mess that she was in.
She had spent the first seventeen years of her life honoring her parents and the last three imitating them. They had been killed in 1984, before she was two, when a homemade bomb they were wiring detonated accidentally. She had no memories of them beyond the ones that had been superimposed by others and a few pictures. Her only photograph of them taken together was on the day they were married in the summer of 1982. In the picture, her father, Camillo, who was a good head taller than her mother, is smiling down at his bride. Her mother is looking directly into the camera with great seriousness. Paola often wondered if her mother knew, even then, how things would end. They had exchanged vows in a small park in Perugia with a few of their friends bearing witness. She had been born two months later. They weren’t wed under the laws of Italy or Rome, so Paola knew that made her a bastard.
Paola had been left in Assisi with her maternal grandmother on the day they blew themselves up. When the bomb detonated, it also blew a hole in the kitchen floor, killing an old woman who lived in the apartment below. If Paola had been in the kitchen that day, in her highchair as she usually was, she too would have died. She often thought about the significance of that. For the next three years, she lived with her maternal grandmother, Luciana Stefanak, until her paternal grandparents adopted her after a long custody fight. Luciana, who cleaned the houses of the rich, lived in a small cold water flat consisting of two rooms and a toilet. In the winter she heated the apartment with a portable gas stove.
Paola had read the transcript of the custody trial when she was sixteen. A young lawyer from Todi, paid by some of Camillo Casati’s leftist friends, had represented her grandmother. He had done his best, but the count had retained the finest lawyer in Perugia. The custody trial had been described by some of the papers as the powerful against the weak, the rich against the poor, but in the end, the final decision of the court had turned on her grandmother’s antiquated plumbing and the gas stove, which was viewed as dangerous. In King David fashion, the court permitted the count and the countess to adopt Paola, but it also ruled that she must spend every Sunday with her maternal grandmother. Paola wondered why the court thought the gas stove was safe on Sundays. So shortly after her fifth birthday, Paola Stefanak, who had taken her nightly bath for three years in a tub that sat in her grandmother’s kitchen, became Paola Casati, adopted daughter of the Count and Countess Casati, with an en suite bedroom and bathroom and a maid to pick up after her.
In the beginning, she missed her grandmother terribly and began to wet her bed. But she also started school that year, and she enjoyed the games they played at recess and her friendships with the other children. She loved to draw pictures of cats and dogs; her new parents, who had two cats and a dog, gave her sketchpads and pencils and a place for her to hang her drawings. She stopped wetting her bed shortly afterward. She saw Luciana—she still called her nonna—every week as the court had ordered. The countess—she was now mamma—took her to Luciana’s every Sunday at 9:00 in the morning and picked her up at 7:00 in the evening. In the end, Paola never adjusted well to the notion of either Luciana or the countess as her mother. It was all too confusing to a five-year-old.
When she was seven, she made her First Holy Communion at the Basilica and discovered the frescos in the lower church, which covered every wall and most of the ceilings. She loved them all, but she particularly loved the one of St. Francis preaching to the birds. She identified with one of the small brown birds—the one in the back behind the tree, which over the centuries had faded into the deteriorating paint and was almost invisible. You really had to care about that bird to find it, she thought.
When she was fourteen, Francesca Munzi moved to Assisi from Florence. Her father was the new director of the Assisi Hospital, and Francesca joined their class in the middle of the year. She was tall, had silky blonde hair, green eyes, and breasts, and was immediately popular, especially with the boys. Paola, who was timid and a daydreamer, had spent her free afternoons until then drawing, visiting the Basilica, or doing her homework, but with the arrival of Francesca all that changed. Francesca chose Paola, along with three other girls, to be her best friend.
After classes let out, Francesca would lead the four of them around Assisi—by their noses, Artemisia said caustically. Some times they would drag soap along the windows of the local merchants on Corso Mazzini; other times they would steal doormats and throw them into the closest dumpster. Another of their games, and the one Francesca enjoyed the most, was for the five of them to swoop down on an elderly woman and scare her into dropping her packages. One afternoon, when they were walking down Via Metastasio toward Porta San Giacomo, Francesca spotted a gray-haired woman with a mop and bucket walking in front of them. Paola recognized her immediately. It was her grandmother Luciana.
Andiamo! Francesca cried, grabbing Paola’s arm and pulling her along.
Paola wanted to run the other way but she couldn’t. The momentum of Francesca and the others carried her with them. She was too ashamed to stop Francesca, to confess that the old lady with the mop and the bucket was her grandmother. Francesca and the others ran off laughing after Luciana had dropped her bucket and its contents had rolled on to the street, but Paola stayed for just a moment, to look back. That insubstantial moment in time, a millisecond in her life, when granddaughter and grandmother looked at each other without acknowledgment, almost without recognition, before Paola turned and ran off with the others, was, as she would realize years later, the most substantial moment of her life. It would change her forever.
“Paola, stop daydreaming! They’re ready for you.” Paola looked up to see her aunt standing over her. “Stop worrying, the commissario’s not an ogre,” Artemisia added, half-smiling. “Remember, you’re a Casati!”
20
ARTEMESIA LISTENED INTENTLY at the open grate, catching odd snatches of meaning in the swirling wisps of sound wafting upward from the floor below until, finally, she heard the loud bang of the front door. He had left the house. She peered through the slats in the shutter and watched the commissario and the other policeman, the fat one, walk in the direction of the Piazza del Comune. The interview with Paola had been brief. Why, w
as she no longer a suspect? Her niece often played the fool around men. Perhaps she had done so with Cenni. No matter, though. He was no ordinary policeman, to be taken in by that act.
She had made inquiries about Cenni months ago, after the Gentileschi exhibit. Brilliant, a mutual acquaintance had said, first in his law class. Joined the Polizia di Stato for personal reasons: his fidanzata had been kidnapped by the Brigate Rosse. Fulvio Russo had offered a different view. Fanatic about social causes, probably votes Communist, thinks he’s God gift! Artemisia knew where that was coming from! The Cenni family was distinguished, and rich by all accounts; Fulvio’s father worked on the Fiat assembly line.
Fulvio’s jealousy soared even further! Cenni’s money came from selling chocolates . . . cocoa . . . coca . . . he had sneered. Artemisia had smiled back, remembering the gossip about Giorgio Zangarelli, Fulvio’s brother-in-law—new money, distinguished member of the Camorra—and discounted most of the jibes. But whatever Cenni’s background, his family was not noble. That was Artemisia’s rationalization for not minding when he’d missed her reception. No extant titles in his family! On the other hand, there was money there. Others had said the same, not just Fulvio. Chocolate bars to the stars!
Artemesia had heard other rumors. Cenni was assigned to a special task force on terrorism, an assignment straight from the prime minister. It made no sense that someone of his stature would investigate the murder of someone of absolutely no importance, someone like Rita. Unless he had requested the assignment? Men like Cenni could do what they wanted. Fulvio had complained that Cenni always got the plum assignments. And the questions that he had asked, with that ridiculous redheaded policeman taking notes, they made no sense. Why should he want to know about her book on Gentileschi?
