by Grace Brophy
The room had grown quite warm. She hoped Umberto couldn’t hear the water gurgling in the pipes. It was just the sort of thing that would attract his attention. He might even come up to check on her. She lifted her glass to drink and saw that it was empty. She poured the last of the bottle into her glass and slowly counted the pills, one by one, as she swallowed. She thought of a tradition they had in Spain of eating twelve grapes to welcome in the New Year. But this was hardly like that!
Her missal, the one Anna had given to her on her wedding day, lay on the night table. She searched through its pages until she found the funeral prayer that the priest had intoned that morning. She read it aloud: O God, Whose attribute it is always to have mercy and to spare, we humbly present our prayers to Thee for the soul of Thy servant Amelia which Thou has this day called out of this world, beseeching Thee not to deliver it into the hands of the enemy. . . .
23
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Artemisia stood at the attic window looking out at the distant outline of Spello—Hispellum, in Roman times, when the town had served as a retirement home for pensioned-off legionaries. “Retired Roman soldiers!— That’s a good one,” her nanny, Marie, had said thirty years earlier looking out the same small window. “Tourist crap! Roman soldiers didn’t live long enough to retire. Imagine it, tomato gardens in the day, Roman orgies at night, and for the meat course, feeding their holier-than-thou neighbors to the lions.”
The attic room in which Artemisia was now standing had been Marie’s bedroom. Here, late at night, lying in the creaky iron bed with its straw-filled mattress and mended flannel sheets, Artemisa had learned to love Marie and hate her mother. They would lie together like two stacked teaspoons, Marie hugging Artemisia around the middle to keep her from falling out of the narrow single bed, and Marie would talk about Sicily, and witchcraft. Everyone in Sicily believed in black magic but only special people like her grandmother practiced it. Casting spells was her grandmother’s trade. “The only way to keep others from beating you down,” Marie said. “Make them afraid of you!”
Artemisia had never thought about it when she was a child (it had seemed perfectly natural at the time), but the maidservant who dusted her father’s law library, ironed his socks, scrubbed pots and pans, and toilets—maliciously at times, using the pots and pans brush—who said Si, contessa, twenty, maybe thirty, times in a day with a sweet smile, was the same woman who spat on the rough bleached floorboards of her attic room at night. “English putana,” Marie had recited like a mantra when Artemisia’s mother had once made her re-iron a white linen tablecloth, twelve feet long and five feet wide. “Look,” her mother had said, pointing to a slight yellowing on the edge, “it’s scorched. Wash it again please, Marie, and re-iron it.”
Marie said other things, too—delicious, terrible things. One hot summer’s evening, after she had returned from a beach outing to the Adriatic, she’d found Artemisia in her room, lying on top of the counterpane, kicking her heels and sobbing in a white rage. The countess had gone to open a country fair at Costa di Trex and had taken Camillo with her. Artemisia had been left at home—punished for striking her brother. That same night Marie told Artemisia that the countess had come to Italy because she couldn’t get a man in England. “Bloodless old sow,” she had called her, “dried up, like the parched earth of Puglia, eyes the watery blue of the dirty Adriatic.” Marie had a fixation about the dirty Adriatic.
When Marie was homesick, she would talk to Artemisia of the Sicilian indigo sea that raged below her grandmother’s house in Cefalù. Whitecaps and seabirds riding high on the pristine blue-violet waters, huge crashes of white flecked foam smashing against the rocky coastline, spraying the promontory above with the damp bouquet of brine and crushed sea shells. Marie said the Adriatic, which belonged to the mainland, was a warm cesspool of slime, devoid of strength or beauty. She worshipped strength and beauty. The men of Cefalù were dark and wiry, the strength of panthers in their limbs, and the small-boned women were dark beauties, with wild hair frizzed by the sea air and coal black eyes, descendants of the original Sicanians and Greeks. The others were imposters, Normans who had come to Cefalù nine hundred years earlier to steal and had forgotten their way home.
Artemisia was jealous of her brother, who had silky yellow hair and blue eyes. Camillo was her mother’s favorite. But Marie mocked Camillo’s pale hair and pale eyes. “Mommy’s little fairy,” she had called him in the guttural language of Sicily, which only she and Artemisia could understand.
On her eighth birthday, Artemisia’s parents moved her bed-room from the attic to a room on the second floor, to sleep with the adults. She didn’t want to leave her little room and begged to stay in the attic with Marie, who helped her to dress and bathe, and who took her for long walks to the top of La Rocca, where they could almost see Sicily in the distance. At night in her attic room, Artemisia could hear Marie through the open door, moving around, talking to herself, and the hall light, a bare bulb that hung from a looped wire, cast a soft tawny glow into her room until the early morning hours when Marie rose to begin her day’s work. Her room was a square box, with a small iron bedstead, a bureau with three ill-fitting drawers, and hooks on the wall for her dresses, but Artemisia could see into all the corners of the room at night, and if she stood on the bed, she could almost touch the ceiling.
Her new room on the second floor had a twelve-foot-high ceiling, and there was no hall light to cast a friendly glow into the dark spaces surrounding her bed; her mother insisted that she sleep with the door closed. That first night, after her birthday celebration, she lay in the suffocating darkness. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, she prayed out loud. If she chanted the Hail Mary until early morning light, she would ward off the dead who hovered in the vast spaces above her head, vampires who would suck her blood if she slept! She knew about vampires because Marie had seen them in Sicily.
The next morning, when Marie came to dress Artemisia for school, she found her charge huddled by the doorjamb, stiff with cold. “I fell asleep and the vampires came for me,” she told Marie, the tear tracks visible on her soft cheeks. When Marie told the count that Artemisia was afraid of the dark, he said she should have a nightlight but her mother disagreed. She reminded the count that Camillo had also been afraid of the dark and that it had lasted less than a week. She’ll get over it, she told the count, and he concurred.
That afternoon, when Marie picked her up at school, she gave Artemisia a ring with a tiny star ruby in its center. She’d found it in one of the trinket shops on via San Paola. “It cost me a week’s wages, but it’ll protect you from the vampires.” That night, when the count and countess were out to a concert, Marie taught Artemisia how to execute the banishing ritual of the star ruby. It was very like the Sign of the Cross that Artemisia’s grandmother had taught her when she was little more than a baby, only the words were different, “Sicilian words that drive away the evil spirits and bestow strength.” Marie had learned the ritual from her grandmother, who had learned it from her grandmother. It was as old as Sicily itself. Artemisia still executed the ritual that Marie had taught her all those years ago while she recited the banishing words: Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law. Love Is the Law, Love Under Will.
At nineteen, Artemisia had visited Sicily, stopping in Cefalù to visit the Abbey of Thelema, now a shrine to Aleister Crowley, the English-born genius of the occult, who had practiced black magic in the Abbey until banished by the Italian authorities for undisclosed acts that hinted of human sacrifice. Marie had introduced the eight-year-old Artemisia to the occult, but Aleister Crowley, who was still referred to as The Beast fifty years after his death, had made Artemisia a disciple. She had read all the master’s books before she was sixteen.
That same year she had also stopped to visit Marie, who had gone to live only a few hundred yards from the Abbey with a younger sister, in their grandmother’s house. From th
e sister, Artemisia learned that Marie was in prison on the mainland for stabbing and killing her lover in a jealous rage. She also learned that the grandmother had been a disciple of Crowley’s, and it was from him that the grandmother had actually learned the star ruby ritual. Another of Marie’s lies. Two months ago, the sister had written to Artemisia to ask for money, for masses, she said. Marie had died in prison in a fight with another inmate. Mad, malevolent Marie, who had once loved Artemisia.
This was what Artemisia was thinking as she clutched the small ring in her right hand and perused the letter from Marie’s sister once again. Artemisia had tucked the ring away at the bottom of her jewelry case when she had returned from school in England. It was a cheap manmade stone, costing no more than a few hundred lira, hardly a week’s wages as Maria had claimed some thirty years before. But it had served its purpose; it had protected a frightened eight-year-old from vampires and, later, a lonely adolescent from more dangerous fiends, the girls at Artemisia’s English boarding school, who had tormented her because of her heavy accent and coal-black hair. One of them probably still had prong marks in her right breast. Artemisia smiled at the thought. She had stabbed the girl in dining hall with her fork, stopped only by its hilt from piercing an artery. The girl, whose name Artemisia had long forgotten but whose blonde hair and blue eyes she still remembered, had referred to her as “that dark Sicilian.”
24
AMELIA CASATI DIED in the early evening hours, on the Wednesday following Easter Sunday, and on the same day that Commissario Cenni had struck her name from his list of suspects. The body was found by her husband shortly after 6:00, and the call to Commissario Cenni from Sergeant Antolini came at exactly 6:30. The thirty minutes it took for the commissario to drive from Perugia to Assisi were the most remorseful of his life. In his fifteen years as a policeman he had viewed many suicides, but Amelia Casati was the first to take her own life on his watch. Whatever reasons she may have had for killing herself, Alex knew that he alone was to blame. May God in His forgiveness have mercy on her soul—and on mine, he prayed as he maneuvered his BMW through the crooked, crowded streets of Assisi. From time to time Alex forgot to remember that he was an avowed atheist.
The Casati maid answered the front door after two rings. She was crying and her dark eyes were barely visible behind reddened, swollen lids. After a brief, whispered good evening, further muffled by the handkerchief she was holding to her face, she showed the commissario into the family sitting room where father and daughter were seated together on the chintz-covered couch. Artemisia looked around when he came in, smiled charmingly, and took a long drag on her cigarette. Umberto Casati, unaware of the commissario’s entrance, was staring off into space. His rounded shoulders, no longer rigid with pride, sagged forward toward the warmth of the sitting room fire, and his hair, combed meticulously on Cenni’s previous visits, stood on end, giving him the rumbled, unkempt appearance of an old man who had stopped caring. Umberto Casati had lost his aristocratic bearings.
Cenni took a seat directly across from the couple, in the wing chair that Umberto Casati usually reserved for himself, and out of respect waited for the family to begin. A dazed look was all that the widower could manage. He struggled hopelessly to speak and then, with shaking hands, thrust an envelope at the commissario. It contained a suicide note. Cenni recognized that as soon as he read the salutation, Forgive me, my darling. Four words, six syllables, but they were enough to lessen some of the guilt he had assumed after learning of Amelia Casati’s suicide. He had investigated thirteen suicides in his years as a policeman and had found justification for only one, a man of fifty-five with terminal cancer. The pain was unbearable, he’d told his wife before jumping to his death. He left no suicide letter for his family to weep over in the years to come.
The reprieve Cenni gave himself enabled him to read the letter with some objectivity. Sad, foolish woman, he thought, as he returned the letter to its envelope. Amelia Casati had lived in Italy for more than forty years. She should have known that the circumstances—the niece’s provocation, her own illness, her husband’s influence—would have kept her from prison.
“It’s your wife’s handwriting?” Cenni asked, pocketing the letter.
“Yes, but you can see for yourself. Her checkbook is in the top drawer.” The count pointed to the refectory table. “Amelia . . . my wife always paid the household bills.”
“I’ll take a sample of her handwriting when I leave . . . for our records,” Cenni responded, hoping to hurry it along. He was anxious to curtail his visit and return the family to its mourning. Just at that moment, Lucia returned, carrying a tray of cups and a pot of coffee. Perhaps the sight of the family maid stiffened Umberto Casati’s pride. He straightened up when she entered the room, and when he again addressed Cenni, it was in the supercilious tones of the seventeenth Count Casati. Equilibrium was returning.
“I suppose now you can terminate this intrusive murder investigation, at the very least stop harassing Signora Orlic. My wife was very concerned that you had threatened to arrest Sophie. . . .” He looked sheepish. “I called Sophie, to thank her. I read her Amelia’s letter.”
Artemisia, who’d sat quietly next to her father until then, touched her father’s arm to interrupt. “Oh, but Papa, I’m afraid it’s just the opposite. Mamma’s letter gives the police even more reason to arrest Sophie. Don’t you agree, Dottore?” she asked, flashing Cenni a second charming smile. “Rita caused all that trouble for Sophie last summer, and then again over the New Year. Surely you remember, Papa. It must have been such a temptation when Sophie found Rita lying there, primed and ready, so to speak.” She looked first at Cenni and then at her father with an expectant smile.
“Please don’t say such things, cara. Your mother’s letter exonerates Sophie, you know that! Dottor Cenni will think you . . . us . . . vindictive,” the father responded anxiously. Cenni noticed that he had avoided looking into his daughter’s eyes.
“But Papa, Mamma didn’t kill Rita. Didn’t the commissario tell you that?” she asked slyly, looking at Cenni sideways through a ring of smoke. “She was suffocated, Papa. The police found a fragment of the cloth used to smother her caught in her left earring. And despite how it looked, she wasn’t really raped . . . so her murderer must have been a woman!”
The count looked daggers at his daughter.
“Well, that’s what Fulvio says, anyway,” she added.
HIS SESSION WITH father and daughter had given Cenni quite a bit to think about on the return trip to Perugia. He had expected Umberto Casati to tear into him for not informing the family that Rita had died by asphyxiation, at the very least to insist that Cenni remove himself from the investigation. He had also expected the father to support the daughter’s demand that the police arrest Sophie Orlic. Instead, he had retreated into a brown study after hearing Artemisia’s startling accusation. Afterward, as Cenni was leaving to return to Perugia, Umberto Casati had asked him quietly, out of hearing of Artemisia, if he agreed with Fulvio’s assessment that the murderer was a woman. He also asked, seemingly as an after-thought, if Sophie were still a suspect.
The commissario had been direct and evasive at the same time. “Signora Orlic is a suspect, certainly, but there’s still investigative work to be done and tests to come back from Rome. We still don’t know who impregnated your niece.”
Umberto Casati had jumped on Cenni’s last words. “Of course, the lover. The obvious suspect. No doubt he faked my niece’s rape to make it appear as though a vagrant had killed her.” The relief in his voice was palpable.
Umberto Casati was surprisingly supportive of Sophie, too supportive. He was hardly an egalitarian, yet for a servant who cleaned his house, and a straniera, he had shown true concern. Cenni reminded himself that Sophie and Umberto Casati had a history together that preceded her recent services as cleaning woman and flower lady. Sophie had lived in close intimacy with the Casati family for two years as caregiver to the grandmother. A stunningly be
autiful woman in the role of Florence Nightingale! No way around it, Cenni concluded: Umberto Casati was in love with Sophie.
25
THURSDAY DAWNED WARM and sunny, a beautiful spring day, until another early-morning call put quit to that pleasure. “We’re meeting at the questura with Fulvio Russo at nine. Be there!” Togni had ordered before hanging up. With no one else to complain to, Alex bent Rachel’s ear, figuratively and literally, scratching behind her right ear vigorously, as he exploded. Rachel wondered if cazzo were a new endearment, not that it mattered as she preferred ear scratching to all else.
At the questura, Cenni held his anger, just barely, until Fulvio Russo was out of the room, but the instant the door slammed, he let loose. “Screw Rome and its threats. We’re the police, for Christ’s sake, sworn to serve the law, not knuckle under to a bunch of ass-kissers in Rome. If you want Sophie Orlic in jail, Carlo, you arrest her, but if you do, you’ll have my resignation and a media frenzy to boot. I have good friends at L’Unita, and I’ll use them. God damn it, Carlo, we’re supposed to be on the same side.”
Cenni no longer had any doubts about Fulvio’s guilt. The little shit had finally revealed himself, delivering a series of threats that, so far as Cenni was concerned, were not credible. He doubted that Fulvio had come to Perugia on Umberto Casati’s behalf as he claimed, or that Umberto Casati was talking to Rome threatening legal action against the Perugia Questura, or against him. Men in Casati’s position rarely displayed their antagonisms publicly for the world to feast on, and they didn’t send the second rate to deliver their threats. The final giveaway that Fulvio was acting on his own was when he cautioned that his visit was confidential, that the count preferred to keep his concerns unofficial, for now. If Umberto Casati were planning revenge against Cenni for his wife’s suicide, he’d find another way—one far more deadly than public exposure.
One nasty fact kept intruding on Cenni’s conviction: Artemisia’s seemingly offhanded remark that Fulvio had told her about the fringe caught in Rita’s earring—the left earring. It had him tossing and turning most of the night. Batori had a genetic inability to keep his mouth shut, and he probably did tell Fulvio about the fringe, but Cenni was the only one who knew where it was found. He had searched his memory and was sure he hadn’t mentioned the left earring to anyone, and definitely not to Batori. Fulvio could only have known it was the left earring if he had placed it there purposely, and why do that? The fringe was from his own scarf! Cenni had some thoughts on the matter, but first things first!
