Last Voyage of the Valentina

by Santa Montefiore

  “That’s not Valentina,” he began, then suddenly felt his heart wrenched from his chest. Falco simply stared back.

  Thomas looked again into the car. He had been wrong. It was Valentina, but not the Valentina he knew.

  “My favorite stone is a diamond. I would like to wear a necklace of the finest diamonds just to sparkle for a night, to know what it feels like to be a lady.”

  It was then that he opened the car door and fell onto her body, weeping in despair and disbelief, grieving for the woman he knew and for himself, so cruelly betrayed. He clung to her, still warm and soft and smelling strongly of a perfume he didn’t recognize. How could Valentina dress like this? What was she doing in this car with this strange man? The night before her wedding? Nothing made sense. He shook her, as if he could wake her. Wasn’t his love enough?

  He felt rough hands as they pulled him off her and dragged him away. Suddenly the car was surrounded by men in blue uniforms and hats. Police cars had drawn up, their sirens wailing. The press had arrived from Naples too and there were cameras, flashbulbs, raised voices. In the midst of all this chaos it started to rain, and detectives hurried to cover the crime scene before the deluge destroyed the evidence.

  Thomas was cast aside like an extra in a movie. He watched in confusion as the police hovered about the dead man. No one seemed to take any notice of Valentina. Then he saw a couple of men gesticulate crudely at her before erupting into raucous laughter. He realized that while he was dwelling in a Hell of fire and pain, everyone else around him was celebrating. There were smiles, pats on backs, jokes. A fat detective in a long coat rubbed his hands together before lighting a cigarette beneath his hat, as if to say, Right, all done here, case solved.

  Thomas staggered over to him. “Do something!” he yelled, his eyes bulging with fury.

  “And you are?” the detective replied, studying him with narrow, intelligent eyes.

  “Valentina is my fiancée!” he stammered.

  “Was your fiancée. That woman’s not in a position to marry anybody.” Thomas’s mouth opened and closed like a drowning man’s, but nothing came out. “You’re a stranger here, aren’t you, signore?” he continued. “The woman is of no importance to us.”

  “Why not? She’s been murdered, for God’s sake!”

  The detective shrugged. “She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “Pretty girl. Che peccato!”

  As the rain fell, dripping down his hair and into his eyes, Thomas stumbled over to Falco and grabbed the collar of his shirt.

  “You know who did this!” he hissed.

  Falco’s big shoulders began to shudder. The iron backbone that held him up began to melt and he hunched forward, hugging himself. Thomas was stunned to see such a powerfully built man cry and felt a surprising sense of relief as he too began to sob like a child. They clung to each other in the rain.

  “I tried to tell her not to go!” Falco howled. “She did not listen.”

  Thomas was unable to speak. Desolation had winded him. The woman he was set to marry had all the time loved another and for that she had paid with her life. He withdrew from Falco’s embrace and vomited onto the ground. Someone had cut through Valentina’s soft, delicate throat with a knife. The brutality of the killing, in cold blood, left him crazed with anguish. Whoever had robbed Valentina of her future had stolen his too.

  He tried to picture her gentle face but could only see the mask that lay slumped in the front of the Alfa Romeo. The mask of the stranger who had lived a parallel life about which he knew nothing. As he stood bent over the wet ground, the fog began to clear:

  “War reduces men to animals and turns women into shameful creatures…I don’t want her to make the mistakes that I have made in my life…You don’t know me, Tommy.”

  She was desperate to be taken away from Incantellaria. Was that all he was to her? A ticket to a new life where she could start afresh and leave her sordid, shameful ways behind her?

  He felt a hand on his back and turned to see Lattarullo standing beside him in the rain. “I never knew her, did I?” he said, looking at the carabiniere in desolation.

  Lattarullo shrugged. “You are not alone, Signor Arbuckle. None of us did.”

  “Why do they behave as if she doesn’t matter?” The police still buzzed around the dead man like wasps about a honeypot.

  “You don’t recognize him, do you?”

  “Who is he?” Thomas blinked at him in innocence. “Who the devil is he?”

  “That, my friend, is the devil. Lupo Bianco.”

  Later when Thomas returned to the trattoria like a sleepwalker, he collected together the portraits of Valentina that he had drawn. The first was an illustration of her virtue and mystery, drawn the morning after the festa di Santa Benedetta on the cliffs by the lookout point, more lovely than the dawn but, as he now reflected, just as transient. The second was an illustration of motherhood. He had captured to perfection the tenderness in her expression as she had watched her baby suckling her breast. Her love for their daughter was genuine, unadulterated, pure. Perhaps it had even surprised her in its intensity. He rummaged around for the third, then remembered Valentina had taken it home with her.

  Immacolata’s house was as still and quiet as a tomb. The old widow sat in the shadows, erecting a shrine for her daughter to accompany the two she had already made for her husband and son. Her eyes were fixed on her task with dull resignation. When Thomas approached her, she spoke in a soft voice. “I am called a widow because I lost my husband but what am I now that I have lost two children? There is no word because it is too terrible to articulate.” She crossed herself. “They are together with God.” Thomas wanted to ask her whether she knew about Valentina’s double life but the old woman looked so fragile sitting there in her own private Hell that he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  “I would like to see Valentina’s room,” he said instead.

  Immacolata nodded gravely. “Up the stairs, across the landing to the left.” He left her with her candles and chanting and climbed the staircase to the room Valentina had occupied only the evening before.

  When he entered her small room, the shutters were closed, the curtains drawn, her white nightdress laid out on the bed in preparation for the night. On the dressing table lay her brushes and bottles so recently used. His throat grew tight and he found it difficult to breathe as the room filled with the scent of figs. He sank onto the bed and pulled her nightdress to his face, inhaling her fragrance.

  To find the missing portrait became an obsession. He pulled out every drawer, searched through the clothes in her wardrobe, looked under the bed, beneath the sheets and rug, everywhere. He did not leave a single thing in the room unturned. It was not there.

  24

  Italy 1971

  A lba made her excuses and left Lattarullo, having barely touched her tea. The retired carabiniere watched her go, amazed that she hadn’t known the terrible circumstances of her mother’s death. The violence of it still touched him to this day. He often thought about it. Valentina had been the personification of beauty and grace, in spite of the secret world she had inhabited. It was only a matter of time before a grubby-nosed journalist burrowed about in her business and exposed her in Il Mezzogiorno. Lorenzo added another few verses to the ballad he had composed, about premonition, murder, and the underworld of a woman as lovely as a field of wild violets. He had sung it nightly, his plaintive voice resounding through the town until everyone knew it by heart and Valentina transcended normal memory to live on in legend. Her delicate footprints were stamped all over the town. Little had changed in the years since she had died. Everything reminded him of her and sometimes, in the silver glow of a full moon, he believed he had seen her slipping stealthily around a corner, the white fabric of her dress catching the light and his imagination. Valentina had been like a rainbow that appears solid from a distance but vanishes the moment one gets close. An impossible sylph, an exquisite rainbow—her murder served only to
make her more mysterious.

  Alba ran up the rocks toward Immacolata’s house, her heart pounding. Her father had lied to her, her stepmother had colluded, even Falco and Immacolata had withheld the truth. Did they think her a simpleton? She had a right to know about her mother. She thought of Fitz and Viv; even they, in their wildest dreams, would never have envisaged this.

  Her feet slipped on the rocks and she grazed her knee, drawing blood. She swore loudly but brushed herself off and continued, determined to extract the whole truth from Falco. When she arrived at the house, Beata was under the trees reading to Cosima. The little girl was curled up against her grandmother, sucking her thumb.

  “Where’s Falco?” Alba demanded. Beata looked up from her book. When she saw Alba’s pink face and glassy eyes her own face darkened and she stiffened like an animal sensing danger. Cosima watched her cousin with a serious expression.

  “He’s in the lemon grove,” she said and watched as Alba hurried down the path and disappeared into the trees.

  “Is Alba angry?” Cosima asked.

  Beata kissed her temple. “I think she is, carina. Don’t worry, she’ll smile again, I promise.”

  Alba ran through the lemon grove until she found Falco. When he saw her, he let go of his wheelbarrow and braced himself. He had feared this from the moment she had arrived. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that my mother was murdered?” she shouted, putting her hands on her hips. “When were you going to tell me? Or weren’t you intending to tell me at all, like my father?”

  “Your father only wants to protect you, Alba,” he said brusquely, setting off through the orchard toward the cliffs. Alba followed.

  “So, who murdered her?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Good. I have as long as you need to tell it.”

  “Let us go and sit somewhere peaceful.”

  “I want the truth, Falco. I have a right to know.”

  Falco put his hands in his pockets. “You do have a right to know. But it’s not pleasant. You will see. It’s not simply that your mother never lived to marry your father. That her life was so brutally taken from her. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Come, let us sit here.” He sat down beneath the tree where Valentina’s body lay buried. Alba sat beside him, cross-legged, and raised her eyes to him expectantly.

  “So, why was she murdered?” she asked. Her tone of voice was flippant, as if she were discussing a character in a novel rather than a real person, still less her mother. The cracks where Falco’s heart had never mended opened again and stung.

  “She was killed with a knife to her throat.” He drew a line with his finger across his own neck and watched the color in Alba’s cheeks turn to gray. “She had been in Naples with her lover, the infamous Mafia boss, Lupo Bianco.”

  “Lupo Bianco? Who’s he?” Alba interrupted. “I can’t believe she took a lover the night before she was to marry my father.”

  “She had been Lupo Bianco’s mistress for some time.”

  “So, who was he?”

  “Probably the most powerful man in the south. I knew Lupo myself as a boy. We fished together. He enjoyed watching suffering, even then. First fish, later people. He cared little for life. He was wanted by the police for terrible crimes. Slippery as an eel, no one could ever pin anything on him. He profited greatly from the war. Made millions through extortion, racketeering, even murder. He hid it all in secret bank accounts that have never been found. Whoever killed him did the police a favor, though it ignited a terrible feud between Lupo’s successor, Antonio Il Morocco, and the Camorra of Naples. A feud over tuna prices which still rumbles on today.”

  “Did my father know?”

  “He found out the morning of her death.”

  “Poor Daddy!” she sighed. “I never realized.”

  “She lay dead in Lupo Bianco’s car, dripping with furs and diamonds. It was a terrible shock for him. But it didn’t surprise me. I understood Valentina better than anyone. She wasn’t a bad person; she was weak, that’s all. She was beautiful and she loved beautiful things. She loved attention; she loved intrigue and adventure. She wanted to leave Incantellaria. She was too intelligent for a small place like this. She was like a bird whose wingspan was never allowed to spread to its full capacity. She was diminished here. She could have shone in Rome or Milan or Paris, even America. She was far too exceptional to be understood by these simple folk. Above all, though, she loved love. She was lonely. She was like an empty honeypot, always relying on others to fill her up. But she was a survivor and as cunning as a fox. Remember, it was wartime.” He shook his head, his thick, curly hair falling over his eyes. “Perhaps I should have tried harder to stop her, but I had my own battles to fight.”

  “Didn’t she love my father at all?” she asked in a small voice.

  Falco touched her arm tenderly. “I think it was only after he left that she realized she loved him. Then she discovered she was pregnant and you, Alba, were her greatest joy.” Alba lowered her gaze and fixed it on the grass in front of her. “She made sure that she ate healthily, as healthily as one could in the wartime. Thanks to her connections with Lupo Bianco and others she obtained food on the black market and an American supplied her with the medication she needed.”

  “Did she continue her affair while she was carrying me?”

  He said nothing. She bit the skin around her thumbnail pensively.

  “You were born at home, delivered by Mamma and a midwife. From that moment on she saved herself for your father. She had plans, you see. She was going to live in England and raise a family. She was going to be respectable—a lady. Your father had told her about this great house she was going to live in. She was excited. Once you were born, nothing else mattered but you and your father. When he returned they only had eyes for each other and for you. They’d sit under the trees in the garden and watch you sleeping. You were their obsession. He’d draw her and they’d talk. But she told him nothing of her secrets. She didn’t want to spoil it. I tried to convince her to tell him the truth. I was sure that if he really loved her he would only want to take her away from here where she would be safe and looked after.”

  “So why was she murdered?”

  Falco paused a moment and stared out to sea. His face hardened and his eyes suddenly looked dark and haunted. “I fought with her a lot in the last few days. I told her she had to tell him the truth. She wouldn’t listen. Valentina was as stubborn as a mule when she wanted to be. There was a part of her that was strong and determined. She didn’t look like she could swat a fly, but beneath the angelic veneer was a sometimes hard and selfish woman. Then she had this ridiculous idea of coming clean with her lover. As if by telling him of her plans she would somehow redeem herself in God’s eyes. You see, the statue of Christ remained dry.”

  “The famous festa di Santa Benedetta, I know all about it,” she said. “My mother saw it as a bad omen?”

  “She was very superstitious. She believed it augured badly for the wedding and for her future. She went to Naples to tell Lupo Bianco that she was leaving Italy.”

  “Dressed in furs and diamonds?”

  “Let’s just say she dressed for the moment, Alba. She was an actress.” He pursed his lips in bitterness. “I’ve sometimes wondered whether she just wanted to go out on the tiles one last time. Perhaps she loved Lupo Bianco too, in her way. Maybe that final adventure had nothing whatsoever to do with superstition.”

  “Would she have risked everything just for that?” Alba was shocked.

  “Valentina? Absolutely. It was just another role she played, perhaps one she relished most. She would never be that person again. She was going away to be a lady. Maybe the temptation was just too much for her to resist.”

  “So she was murdered because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “That’s what the police said. She was killed because she saw who killed Lupo Bianco. She knew too much. It’s as simple as that.”

  Alba shook her head
in disbelief. “If she hadn’t gone out that night, she’d be alive today.”

  “Now you know the truth, surely you understand why your father kept it all from you? He swore the day she died that he would protect you from the horrors of her past.” He squeezed her hand. “He did the right thing.”

  Alba sat in front of the mirror in Valentina’s small bedroom. She stared at her reflection, the image of her mother. Since learning the truth, she realized that she was exactly like her. Not only physically but in her faults as well. And she had believed her mother to be a paragon of virtue, an angel, and herself unworthy. She had despised her empty, drifting life and her alley cat immorality. The more she had reflected on her mother’s perfections, the more imperfect she had become, knowing she could never match up. Yet, all along, her father must have seen the life she led and thought how like her mother she was. He must have despaired.

  And what of Margo? Alba was filled with shame. Margo knew the truth and had wanted to protect her from the sordid details of her mother’s past. She had only tried to give her a good home and a solid family. Alba sank her head into her hands as she now reflected on the tactlessness of handing Valentina’s portrait to her father, expecting him to sit by the fire and tell her charming stories about a woman whose secret life had held so little charm. She wept as she thought of the hurt she had caused him over the years, picking as she had so often done at the raw wound that Valentina had left in his heart.

  What would Fitz think of her now? She was no better than her mother had been. Fitz deserved someone better, unselfish, not like her, not like her mother. She picked up a pair of scissors and began to hack off her hair.

  She watched entranced as the feathery pieces fell onto the dressing table. A thin scattering at first and then large, thick clumps. She had a lot of hair. Once the length was cut she concentrated on evening it out around her scalp. She didn’t care how she looked. She no longer wanted to be beautiful. She no longer wanted to manipulate, to beguile, to hold men in her thrall. She wanted people to judge her on herself, not on a superficial and undeserved beauty. Like Valentina, she wanted to start again. Unlike Valentina, she had the chance.