by Grace Brophy
Elena observed the commissario pacing up and down in front of the window. He’s furious at Rome, she reflected. It’s more than just the count’s influence with the current government; it’s the whole kit and caboodle. The pecking order could as easily be reversed, and then the count would be pacing the floor. An ancient game and a well-practiced one. Most of her fellow officers learned quickly, adjusting on a dime to each new administration and each new set of unwritten rules. Fifteen years on the force. He should be used to it by now, Elena thought, but with some sympathy.
Saturday was a case in point. She had succumbed to the power of the aristocracy, just like that stronzo Staccioli. So much for abolishing titles, when they still tell us what to do, and we do it! She should have insisted on securing Minelli’s room but instead had permitted herself to be overruled by the count, and by Staccioli, who’d pulled rank. That might have been excused if she hadn’t joined the others in the kitchen for coffee. The memory of the commissario reminding her of what she was always reminding everyone else was humiliating. Well, maybe her news would make up for it.
She cleared her throat to attract his attention.
Cenni looked up, puzzled. He’d forgotten in his anger that Piero and Elena were still in the room.
“Do you want my report, capo?” Elena asked, clearing her throat again as though something were stuck. And then, because he looked so troubled, she smiled, hoping he’d smile back.
Cenni struggled to clear the image from his head of the count roasting on a spit. “Sorry Elena, I was thinking of something else. Nice job that, reading Minelli’s diaries. Do the follow-up today; locate the demon priest, as you call him, and the big-time Hollywood director. And pay a visit to Turo, the bookbinder. Find out if any diary pages are missing. And both of you revisit every shop in Assisi that sells religious articles. I want to know where Minelli purchased that statue, and when. Assisi’s full of that junk, so check everywhere, even the grocery stores. The maid says she wasn’t carrying a package when she left the house. Williams doesn’t remember a package either.” He finished giving orders and saw the relief so expressively written on Elena’s face. She can barely contain herself, he realized. Probably struck gold yesterday.
“Okay, Elena, you’re on, but before you report on yesterday’s activities, tell Piero what you found in the American’s diaries,” he said mischievously.
“He already knows; he knew before you did,” Elena responded, grinning. “Screw the diaries. What I learned yesterday is a lot more interesting!” Without waiting for his nod, she began.
2
NEITHER THE COMMISSARIO nor Piero had been particularly excited about her news. The junior officers had gone across the street for a coffee at the end of their meeting, and Piero was completely unimpressed. “Big deal, the count was at home on Friday. He told us that. Only now you’ve handed him an airtight alibi, and we still don’t know who murdered his niece.”
Piero was right; she had given her news more importance than it deserved, Elena concluded. Well, the commissario ought to be grateful anyhow. One less suspect to worry about. And it was still possible that the count was involved. Maybe he used an accomplice to do the dirty work: the wife, the daughter, even the granddaughter. With all that money as a motive, the whole family could be in it together. An animating thought! Send them all away for ten years. Actually, though (she mentally backtracked), the wife and granddaughter weren’t so bad; at least they’d been civil . . . but the daughter. Piero had that one right. A bitch on wheels. When Elena and the senior forensic officer tried to take Artemisia’s prints on Saturday, she’d given them the deep freeze, refusing to cooperate. And later, she deliberately messed up the first set of prints and laughed.
Elena had stumbled upon the count’s alibi purely by chance. Piero and Sergeant Antolini were the ones sent out to verify the family’s whereabouts at the time of the murder by talking to busboys, waiters, neighbors, and shop assistants. But the woman who provided the count with an alibi turned out to be an Irish journalist. It was the journalist who made the approach, in the Bar Sensi, where Elena had stopped for a coffee late Sunday afternoon on the off chance that she’d find Piero there, wolfing down one of his ubiquitous apple tarts.
Elena had taken her coffee to the back to avoid talking to any of the press who were hanging around the bar. She’d first noticed the woman when she became aware that the woman was noticing her. A snappy-looking redhead in her late thirties, she was sitting on a barstool in the front, talking on and off to Orlando, and drinking white wine as though it were water. Whenever she had anything to say to Orlando, she’d lean across the bar in a conspiratorial manner. At one point, Orlando nodded toward Elena. That was when the woman downed her wine in a single draught, dropped a few coins on the bar, and got up to leave. But instead of walking out the front door, she came down the stairs and plunked herself onto a chair opposite Elena, without so much as a by-your-leave, and began asking questions. Pushy, Elena thought at the time, but it turned out okay in the end. Better than okay!
“Parla Inglese?” the journalist began. As soon as Elena nodded yes, the woman bombarded her with questions concerning Giorgio Zangarelli. “Is Zangarelli a suspect? What’s the connection between the American’s murder and the Albanian problem? What’s the count’s involvement with Zangarelli?”
“Whoa!” Elena had finally interrupted, not understanding a thing the woman was talking about. She knew Zangarelli’s name all right. Anyone who’d worked with Fulvio Russo in Perugia knew about his rich—ridiculously rich—brother-in-law. Il Lupino never stopped talking about him, and neither did the Umbrian press, particularly after Zangarelli and Russo were caught trying to buy land that the government had seized. That’s when Russo got sent down to Assisi. It turned out that the woman was investigating another of Zangarelli’s dubious ventures, ferrying illegal workers in from Albania to work in his fish-packing factories in the south of Italy and the north of Ireland. The journalist had nothing to add concerning Rita Minelli’s murder. She was strictly interested in Zangarelli. “Something smells here,” she’d said, laughing at her own pun. On Good Friday, a few minutes after 4:30, she’d followed him to the Casati home and watched as the count greeted Zangarelli at the front door. She’d waited until the count let him out again, shortly after 6:00.
“Did you really hang out there, in front of the house, for an hour and a half?” Elena had asked, wondering how she could be so sure that Zangarelli had been inside the whole time.
“Sure, in that little hole-in-the wall café across the street. What else is there to do in this burg but drink coffee or go to church! Doesn’t much matter where you drink it, although the coffee in the Bar Sensi is better than most. I had a perfect view of the house from the café. I even saw the maid leave by the side alley a few minutes after Zangarelli went in.”
Cenni’s mind worked in strange ways. That was a conclusion Elena had come to some time ago. He’d shrugged off her news that the count was involved with Zangarelli, and possibly with the Camorra. “Who isn’t?” he’d asked sarcastically. But he’d really perked up when he heard about the maid leaving the house shortly after 4:30 and made Elena repeat it twice. Did he think Lucia was involved in Minelli murder?
3
“Voi siete americano! Sono qui per la vostra sicurezza!” the fat policeman said slowly and very loudly three times before miming the words—pointing first to John, then to the front door, as he turned an imaginary key, then staging a garroting with himself as dummy. Williams ascertained from the dumb show that he was being held in custody for his own safety. In reply, he stammered out, “Sono Canada, non sono American!” in pidgin Italian, also three times, but the man didn’t seem to understand. Finally, the policeman dialed Commissario Cenni and handed the telephone to Williams. The commissario was very understanding, returning an “of course” to each of Williams’s objections, but he wouldn’t budge. “Sorry, Signor Williams, it’s for your own safety. I know you’re Canadian; you know you’re Ca
nadian; but it’s what other people think that worries me. We’ve had one murder and I don’t want any more, of Americans or pseudo-Americans.”
The commissario was lying! They were holding him in custody because he was their prime suspect! He should call the Canadian embassy to complain that the Italian police had imprisoned him in his own apartment. But if he did that, the commissario might get angry with him, perhaps deport him! Bad things happened to him whenever he made people angry. He’d learned that before he’d reached his fifth birthday. He had wound the little knob on the top of his father’s wristwatch as he’d seen his father do every morning, and for his help, his father had beaten him black and blue.
He was twelve when his father, the son of dour Presbyterian Scots, had sent him away to a Catholic charity school run by the Irish Christian Brothers. “You’ll be among your own kind,” his father had declared in front of his Irish Catholic mother, who had immigrated to Canada from the north of Ireland when she was eighteen. “They’ll know what to do with an incorrigible!”
Incorrigible was the word his father always used when he referred to his youngest son. At the age of seven, when John had visited his oldest sister’s house, he had looked it up. One who cannot be corrected or reformed, the dictionary said. It was a safe word. It branded the son but not the father. Any family could have an incorrigible: an unruly, disobedient, willful son. You read about them all the time in the Bible, and in the Newfoundland papers, boys who stole and lied, who left home and were never heard of again. But a gay son was a different matter altogether. The Presbyters of the church might look at the youngest son and question the manliness of the older brothers, or, God forbid, that of the father. John was the last of six children. The two eldest were boys, then three girls, and finally John, born ten years after the youngest girl. His father was delighted. Another son to help on the farm. His mother was forty years old and worn out.
John never saw his mother again after he was shipped off to school. She died of breast cancer a year later, but he had thought of her every day since. In his memories she always looked as she had that last morning at home. They were to leave early, just after sunrise, and his mother shook him awake at 4:00, whispering to him to get up and come into the kitchen. His father was still asleep in the other room. “Will you have a boiled egg?” she had asked. He hated eggs in the morning; they upset his stomach, but it was the one thing that she could offer that wouldn’t smell up the kitchen and wake his father.
They’d sat together at the worn pine table, at the end where his oldest brother had carved his initials, while he ate his egg and drank his strong boiled tea with extra milk, just the way he liked it. His mother had farmed with his father for thirty-two years, run a tractor, cut down trees, milked cows, raised chickens and six children, kept a spotless house, and she still had gentle manners and a soft loveliness that even his father couldn’t beat out of her. She had protected her youngest child from his father’s belt as best she could, often taking the blows for him.
She held her tea mug cradled in her long, tapered leathery fingers, the nails cut straight across like a farmer’s, and John had thought that her hands were beautiful. “It’s best this way, John,” she sighed, her lilting brogue more pronounced than usual, her eyes rimmed with unshed tears. “He had a brother like you who drowned himself when he was seventeen! He can’t seem to help himself, John. You’ll be happier at school.” She took his right hand in hers and turned it over, palm upward, and placed a medal in it. “Our Lady of Knock. It belonged to your grandmother,” she said proudly. “Your father doesn’t know I kept it. Our Lady will watch over you, my poor, wee John.” When he drove away with his father in the pickup truck at 6:00, she stood dry-eyed at the front door. They didn’t wave to one another. It was easier that way, but John secretly fingered the gold medal all the way to the railway station.
The fat policeman sat in the corner by the door and read his newspaper. Occasionally, he would laugh to himself and look up for a moment as though hoping to share the joke, and then he’d look away, a scowl on his face. He reminded John of Brother Jerome. Jerome had been a tremendous size, larger even than the fat policeman, with black wavy hair and swarthy pockmarked skin. Some of the boys had called Jerome “black Irish” behind his back, and once one of the boys had said it to his face. Jerome had been in a good mood that morning, and the cheeky boy was the hurling captain—he favored the athletic boys. Jerome had laughed heartily and slapped the boy with an open hand on his back. “Good one, lad, but don’t try it on too often.” They had just undressed for their showers, and the print of Jerome’s hand glistened through the steaming waters like a huge red birthmark.
Brother Jerome had transferred to St. Andrew’s from another college two years after John had arrived at the school. From the moment Jerome had learned that John was a Scots Campbell, not an Irish one, and had been baptized into the Church of Scotland, he’d had it in for him, although John admitted to himself years later that he might have helped his animosity along. John had always been a great student of history, and in one of Jerome’s classes, he had challenged the lay brother’s assertion that the Scots had turned Protestant because of Henry the Eighth’s lust for Anne Boleyn.
But his mother had been right, school was better than home. Some of the older boys were bullies, but if you kept out of their way, you could manage. He liked to learn, and he was first in his class every year. Even after the arrival of Brother Jerome, school was better than home. And then came a rash of robberies in the dormitories. One of the boys lost a wristwatch and another a ring. Jerome was their dormitory monitor and he searched all the lockers. In John’s he found the medal. “This is Our Lady of Knock, something a devout Catholic wears around his neck,” Jerome said with clenched teeth, “not something a dirty Scot hides in his locker, not unless it’s stolen.” And then he put it into his mouth and bit down hard. “Gold,” he announced to the dormitory at large. Until that moment, John had always accepted Jerome’s insults, banking his anger, but when Jerome put his mother’s medal into his foul mouth, anger filled him up so fast he couldn’t push it down. “Don’t call me a dirty Scot, you filthy bugger!” he’d cried, his normally pallid skin flushed a blood red.
Jerome slammed him down onto his bed, then grabbed him by the shoulders and swung him round, pushing his face into the mattress and his knees to the floor. “Drop your pants, you little queer,” he raged. “We’ll find out who’s the bugger around here. Thieving, murdering Protestants,” he exploded, slashing out at John’s bare buttocks with his belt buckle, twenty-four strokes in all. John could hear someone crying in the background. It was little Matty, his upper bunkmate, he realized. “I’ve read your file,” Jerome bellowed. “Stole from your own Da! Even his own people, the dirty Protestants, don’t want his kind around,” Jerome announced to the other boys who’d been made to look on.
The next day the medal was returned to him, by gentle Brother Luke, with greatest sorrow. “We know it’s yours, John; it’s listed with the possessions you brought with you when you first came to us. Brother Jerome neglected to read that part of your file. But not to worry, John. Brother Jerome is being transferred to another school.” When John saw the medal in Brother Luke’s outstretched hand, he tried to mouth “my mother,” but he couldn’t form the words. He was choked with tears. Luke cradled John in his arms, wiping away his tears. “Poor, wee John,” he’d said ever so softly, stroking his head. A year later, they were lovers.
John graduated from St. Andrew’s at seventeen with highest honors and went on to McGill, on full scholarship. When the investigation into abuses at the Irish colleges first surfaced, he was in his third year at McGill. Many of the accusations of physical abuse were lodged against Brother Jerome, who had been transferred from college to college, until he finally left the order. Some of Jerome’s former students had provided John’s name to the prosecuting attorney. John agreed to testify, but he never told about Luke; they had been friends as well as lovers. It was because of
Luke that he converted to Catholicism. It wasn’t until later that he’d learned of the other boys. “Luke’s boys,” the newspapers called them. Apart from the money that John received every year in compensation for Jerome’s beating, that was the only part of the scandal that affected him. He wept when he learned of the other boys. Luke had told John that he was special.
After Luke, he had remained celibate for five years. When it happened again, he was the seducer. He was teaching geography at a small religious college in Maine and met a boy very much like his younger self at St. Andrew’s—lonely, diffident, different—only this boy was older, eighteen on the day that they made love. To celebrate the boy’s birthday, his roommates had dragged him out of his dormitory room and forced him on a woman at one of the strip joints just outside the town. “Prove your manhood,” they had demanded. Jeff had walked away from the woman and from them, returning to the university on foot, a good five-mile walk, crying the whole way. John recognized Jeff as the two of them entered the elevator in their dormitory building. Jeff was a clever student, one of his best. He invited him to his room for a drink. He told Rita the whole unlovely story on New Year’s Eve, the only person he ever disclosed it to.
“Jeff hanged himself by tying a belt to the hook on his windowsill. After placing the noose around his neck, he let himself out the window by holding onto the ledge. He must have known that when he dropped down from the ledge it would be impossible to climb back up. His room faced the chapel, and he was seen dangling against the building by some students as they walked to early service. It was too late to do anything, of course. He had been dead for hours.
