by Grace Brophy
JANUARY 3, 2002—With my uncle (and now my aunt) I’m always at fault! In August I found a woman sobbing on the steps of the family mausoleum. She said in broken Italian that her employer was blackmailing her, that the woman wouldn’t return her passport. Of course, I informed the police. What decent person wouldn’t? Umberto and Amelia took the blackmailer’s side. To be expected! She’s one of their darlings; she was Nonna’s caregiver in her last days and my uncle dotes on her. Whenever she comes in to help with the cleaning he manages to be underfoot.
Yesterday she followed me home, although she claimed afterward that she was walking in the same direction and that I started the conversation. What conversation! She spat at me, called me a busybody, butting in where I was not wanted—something like that, anyway. If that had been all, as I explained to Amelia when she rebuked me (now who’s the busybody!), I wouldn’t have complained to the police. She threatened me! The woman is mad, I think—and dangerous! I told Amelia that and she scoffed. Don’t be ridiculous, she said.
The policewoman—the one I spoke to in August about the blackmail—wasn’t concerned either. She shrugged it off; said that the Croatian had just received a bill from her lawyer for his services in August—a very large bill, she said accusingly—more than she has. As though this were my fault. Forget about it, she said. Don’t file a complaint or she’ll be deported!
I was reluctant to agree with the sergeant at first. Of course, I don’t want any more grief from Umberto (or Amelia). And God knows, I don’t want the woman deported. But she did threaten me.
Commissario Russo is the only one who showed any proper concern. He’d noticed me talking to the sergeant at the front desk and suggested that we go into his office for some privacy. We don’t need every Albanian in Assisi listening in, he said to the sergeant. He recognized me at once for a Casati. You look like your cousin Artemisia, he said, only petite and prettier. Flattery, but I don’t mind. Artemisia is always putting me down. Calls me la Americana grottesca behind my back, and sometimes even when she knows I’m listening.
At first the commissario disagreed with the sergeant. He urged me to press charges. Threats of this nature must be taken seriously, he said. But when I told him that my uncle wanted me to drop the charges, he changed his mind. You should listen to the count, of course, less trouble for the family. When I didn’t immediately agree, he said he’d keep a watch on the Croatian for a while. I’ll call you tomorrow, perhaps even the day after, just to be sure you’re not bothered. He’s very good looking!
MARCH 1, 2002—I hate Sundays! Ever since John met Matteo, he spends all day Sunday with him. And my family has no use for me, nor I for them, although they’re so enamored of their darling selves, I doubt they’d even know that their opinion of me is reciprocated, in spades. Bugger them! So you see, dearest uncle, I too can speak the Queen’s English.
And, of course, he can’t leave his wife on Sunday, not even for a measly hour of lovemaking although it’s his brother-in-law he’s afraid of. Screws around on his wife Monday through Saturday, but never on Sunday. Mustn’t miss the sacred family dinner! He’s rather boring, not at all what I’d expected, but the sex is good!
I must be mad. I am mad! Every piece of my waking day is consumed by thoughts of sex. Today at early mass I wondered about the man sitting next to me and, later, at the communion rail, I imagined the priest in bed, and the man is a midget, shorter even than me! Oh, Gianni, where are you?
MARCH 2, 2002
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass
I memorized those lines of Rupert Brooke when I was in college. Perhaps I knew, even then, that one day they would belong to me. In June, in that little Spanish restaurant on Eighth Avenue, I was captivated by the color of the Rioja wine. Mahogany velvet, I said as I held my glass to the light. Not at all, Gianni rebutted. The crimson velvet of a Raphael painting! When I insisted on mahogany, Gianni said the gentleman’s way to settle our dispute was for us to visit Raphael’s portrait of Leo X in the Uffizi with a bottle of 904 Reserve and two glasses. We can toast a great Florentine patron of the arts, he said, and get drunk at the same time. Those words still resonate whenever I think of Gianni. Always in my imagination we meet in front of Leo’s portrait. To the women who come and go, we’re just two posturing strangers. We speak in code:
The lighting on the camauro and mozzetta is magnificent; it evokes the crimson-red of a fine wine, Gianni says.
Raphael is a magnificent colorist, but he’s an even greater psychologist. Don’t you think the strain on Leo’s face foretells the Medici’s failure to contain the Reformation? I respond.
He smiles at my allusion and I know that he remembers; I had called that night in June my sexual reformation.
So long as you’re Teresa of Ávila, he’d responded, mocking me. I draw the line at fucking Martin Luther, or, God forbid, John Knox!
I had protested his profanity, particularly its use with respect to St. Theresa.
Cara Mia, you’re such a prude for someone who fucks so well, he had replied, before covering my shoulders with kisses.
It didn’t happen that way at all. We didn’t meet in the Uffizi. My train pulled into Santa Maria Novella on Sunday’s schedule—an hour late—too late to stand outside the Uffizi for another two hours waiting for admittance. I had visited the Medici Pope many times before and Gianni had never appeared. Once in June, shortly after I’d arrived in Italy, I stayed so long in the Raphael room that the guard asked me to move on.
It was romantic silliness to moon around the Uffizi late on a winter’s afternoon, and I had a four-hour wait before I could catch my train back to Assisi, so I decided to visit the cloisters of the Convento di Francesco in Fiesole, one of the places Gianni had spoken of with great affection. It was far too beautiful a day to waste sitting on a bus. The air had the moist, heady smell of winter turning to spring. Delicate cirrus clouds whipped across the eggshell-blue sky like the white sails in a regatta, and the afternoon sun beamed down on the tile rooftops and bounced off the Baptistery’s bronze doors. A perfect day to walk. An hour up, an hour to see the cloisters, an hour back, and still time for coffee and a pastry in the station bar. I began the climb with energy and neglected to pace myself. In less than fifty minutes, I was short of breath and it was no longer possible to ignore the northeast wind that blew down from Fiesole. The massive cypress trees that lined the sides of the road and groped for the sky afforded little protection from the wind as it ricocheted through the great branches, seemingly gathering strength as it traveled downhill. As the road curved into an open bend right before Fiesole, a great gust of wind nearly blew me over and I looked about frantically for something to grab on to. I felt someone take hold of my elbow.
Signora, prego, a man said and pulled me along with him.
He didn’t even know it was me!
When I spoke his name, Gianni—the name that wasn’t really his—he could barely speak for the surprise.
Why, little Rita! You’ve grown up quite beautifully.
Cut your hair and bobbed your eyebrows, he said and laughed. He had remembered my jetty eyebrows!
We walked against the wind, breathless, talking under and over each other the whole time until we reached the convent. Gianni was staying with an old friend in Florence, enjoying a day off from his duties, and had decided to visit the cloisters before returning home. He never did say where home was! At the end of our tour, he asked the caretaker to unlock the gates that open into the small wooded park that runs down from the convent to the main square in Fiasole. My guidebook said it was the pleasantest way to return to the Piazza, and we had decided that nothing less than the pleasantest way would do. When the caretaker said it was promising to rain, I scoffed. How could it? Those beautiful scudding clouds that I had admired in Florence. The sun on the rooftops. Impossible on such a perfect day!
We were ten minutes into our descent when the storm broke and the heavens opened. Great co
ld streams of water rained down through the trees and onto our faces and into our collars. It filled our shoes and soaked us to the skin. The rain blackened my eyes and ran down my cheeks in long smears of waterproof mascara. By the time we reached the top of the Piazza, I looked like a drowned rat in my wet mink, and Gianni, who was dressed in mufti—a thin windbreaker and jeans—shivered with cold. We sheltered in the doorway of a small hotel just outside the park’s gates until I suggested that we go inside for a drink. The proprietor did the rest. He offered us a room where we could dry off and promised to send up towels and homemade grappa—to get the chill off, he said. He didn’t seem to notice that we had no baggage. Perhaps he didn’t care.
Cenni finished the diary pages that Elena had marked with paper clips and read the brief note appended to the last page:
The diary ends here—rather abruptly, almost like she dropped her pen in mid-sentence. Plenty here, though, to pin a few ears back: demon priest, married lover, gay boyfriend. All the makings of a Hollywood triangle (and let’s not forget the movie director!!). If the motive was money, plenty here for someone!
Ottaviani.
He agreed with Elena that the diary ended abruptly. Minelli’s last entry was dated March 2, fifteen days before her death. In a few places earlier there were no entries for two or three days, but never a two-week interval. Not another word about what had happened that night and not another word about Gianni. Rather convenient, he thought, that the last words perhaps he didn’t care ended on the last line of the page, flush to the right-hand margin. He carried the diary to the window to examine it in a stronger light. To his inexpert eyes it seemed as though pages had been removed.
ANTONIO TURO was stamped on the inside cover. Turo, a well-known bookbinder in Perugia, would know immediately if any pages had been removed from one of his diaries. He’d send Elena around with it later in the day.
Nothing much in the diary to identify either of the lovers, the married man or the priest, although he had some thoughts about the married man. The priest was another matter altogether and probably easy enough to trace through the church in New York, although he’d be damned if he’d make a $200 contribution to its poor box. He’d put Elena on it, and he’d also have her check with the police in Fiesole. First hotel after exiting the park, Minelli had written. If the hotel proprietor followed Italy’s antiquated registration laws, he’d have their names on file. And if not—which was just as likely—he could at least provide a better physical description of Gianni than violet eyes and a strong, beautiful face.
If Minelli were two months pregnant (and they’d know by the end of the day when Batori delivered the postmortem), then the circle of suspects may have narrowed rather than expanded as Elena suggested. The priest was not the father, not if they hadn’t met since June. And, in Italy, a priest having a casual affair with an unmarried woman of legal age is hardly the stuff of scandal. Gianni—or whatever his name was—might get a reprimand from his bishop if he were indiscreet, but probably not even that. Minelli, with her New World notions of defrocking, took it all too seriously—but perhaps that’s the way Gianni had wanted it.
Book Five
* * *
Disentanglements
* * *
1
PIERO CERTAINLY DIDN’T look Italian with his green eyes, ginger hair, and freckled skin, and with respect to punctuality, he didn’t act it either. Cenni, who was himself a model of timeliness, wondered how, under the law of averages, two Italians who were punctual to a fault could have found themselves together in the same city, let alone the same police unit. At precisely eight o’clock every Monday they began their meeting with a discussion of the previous day’s football scores and, on occasion, as on the Monday after Easter, with idle chitchat about their work. Cenni began, “How did the house-to-house go yesterday, Piero?”
“Some interesting developments, Alex. But, in general, it was a difficult day . . . you know . . . my mother . . . that I had to miss Easter dinner,” he added in response to the confused look on Cenni’s face.
“Murder takes precedence!” Cenni snapped. He was in no mood to hear about Piero’s mother, an irritating woman, or one of the dinners her son had missed. It would do Piero a world of good to miss his dinner.
“Where’s Elena?” Cenni asked, still snapping. “She knows we start at eight. I thought she was already in the building. She can’t blame traffic today.”
It was fifteen minutes past the hour, and Elena never breezed into their meetings until twenty past. Besides, whenever he complained that Elena was late to a meeting, Alex would take the opposite view and remind him that Elena always brought the coffee. Piero unwrapped his apple tart and began to eat. “I hope she gets here soon,” he said, after taking his second bite. “I need a coffee to wash this down.”
Cenni’s mood lightened considerably as he watched the door open slightly and Elena’s hand come sliding round holding a white take-out bag. Coffee at last!
“May I come in?” she asked.
“Basta, Elena! Get in here. Now!”
The meeting had begun.
“You first, Piero,” Cenni said, nodding at the report that the inspector was holding.
“A very long day, Alex!” Piero began lugubriously, giving it one last try. Cenni surveyed the objects on his desk. The ashtray? No, he might want to start smoking again. The coffee. Hardly! Piero’s apple tart? Gone. He decided on the papiermâché paperweight that the questore had given him for Christmas. He missed Piero, who saw it coming and ducked, and hit Elena in the chest.
Elena thought it very funny, but she also wondered aloud if getting hit in the tits constituted sexual harassment.
“What tits?” Cenni responded, before conceding that he owed them both a holiday.
Piero began his report. “Sergeant Antolini and I visited every shop that sells that religious stuff, particularly the ones at the top of Assisi like you suggested. Not a single shopkeeper remembered selling that statue to Minelli. We also visited every restaurant and bar in lower Assisi with not a single identification of anyone connected to the victim. If we’re to believe them, everyone in Assisi was either at confession, preparing for confession, or saying their prayers after confession. Our last stop of the day was at a little bar at the top of Assisi, the one right before Porta Perlici.” He stopped and looked first at Elena and then at the Commissario to make sure that he had their undivided attention. “Paola Casati was in there on Good Friday—with a man! And not just any man—the son of the Minister of the Interior,” he announced dramatically. He flipped open his notebook and began to read the bar owner’s statement:
The two of them came in close on to five. I’d just started cleaning the coffee machine and told them so. No more coffee, I said. I’d promised my wife I’d take her to the procession later in the evening, and I wanted to go to confession first. The boy, he’s one of those punks, blond streak in his hair, earrings, one in his lip of all places! He got aggressive, said I’d lose my license if I didn’t serve them coffee. I didn’t like him, and what’s more I recognized him from a picture in L’Unita. Son of that minister in the government, you know, Montoni! L’Unita claims he’s involved with terrorists; you know the ones I mean. They blew up that McDonald’s in Rome, where they killed that cleaning lady. L’Unita says the government’s protecting Montoni because of his family. The girl—I’d recognize her anywhere—Luciana Stefanak’s grand-daughter. Poor woman died of a broken heart five years ago. Terrible what those people did to her!
I’ve voted Socialist all my life, Inspector. Always with the people, if you know what I mean, but I don’t hold with that muck. Blowing up working people in hamburger joints. Even I eat hamburgers! It’s hardly the way to get rid of the fascisti, now is it? Too much money these kids have nowadays. Playing around with what they don’t understand, is what I said to my wife.
Then with an added flourish, Piero told them about the bar owner’s wife. She’d been cleaning some glass shelves near where the cou
ple was seated and overhead bits and pieces of their conversation. Paola Casati was upset, almost in tears, and said very little. Montoni spoke in undertones, but every now and then he’d raise his voice in anger. Piero quoted what the wife overheard: “Stuff it, Paola . . . not a single thing your cousin can do! Can’t prove a thing, but why couldn’t you keep your trap shut? Or if you had to blab, why involve me?”
Piero stopped reading to interject, “It was Sergeant Antolini who interviewed the wife. ‘Are you absolutely sure he said cousin?’ she asked the wife. Get this, Alex, and I’m quoting exactly: ‘Si, certo, I’m sure he said cousin, but the girl, she used a name, she said Rita.’ ”
Cenni interrupted. “The woman may have read about the murder in the papers. Maybe, unconsciously, she substituted the name Rita.”
“Sergeant Antolini thought of that too,” Piero responded smugly. “She’s pretty smart, you know.” He flipped the page of his notebook and read, “Question: Do you remember seeing the American’s name in the newspapers. Perhaps you heard it on TV? Or from your husband?”
Cenni prompted, “And her answer?”
Piero read again from the notebook. “My husband, he told me about that dreadful murder. Said the dead woman was an American, but he didn’t say her name, leastwise I don’t remember him saying it. And I don’t read the newspapers or watch the news on TV either. All that violence makes me nervous. I know the name Rita when I hear it; she’s my favorite saint. The girl said Rita.”
Piero’s news was hot, and it made the commissario hot under the collar. The report from Rome on Paola Casati, delivered yesterday and in record time, had been totally innocuous. Just a few easily ascertainable facts: where she lived and worked in Rome. Not a word about any political activities. If what Piero had discovered yesterday was verified by other sources, Paola Casati may have done far more than just vote Communist in local elections; she may have acted on her beliefs. If she and the boyfriend were involved in the McDonald’s bombing and she’d told this to Rita, possibly on the day that they’d met in Cascia, then Paola Casati had a motive for murder, particularly if Minelli were threatening to talk. And from what he knew of Rita Minelli, the chances of that were high. Passages in her diary suggested that she viewed herself as a self-appointed vigilante. And if Paola Casati had implicated Montoni to Rita, as it seemed she had, then he also had a motive for murder.
