by Ben Pastor
“We’ll find out soon enough. Here’s a photo of him.” Guidi received the snapshot of a heavy-set man, weighed down by inertia but still maintaining traces of enormous physical vigour. His features were insolent without being brutal.
“A self-indulgent mouth, don’t you think?” Bora said the words staring directly at Guidi, though his peripheral vision was no doubt taking in what went on in the section of the room behind Guidi’s back.
“Physiognomy can be deceptive.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know so. Cruelty and immorality are not reflected on one’s face any more than mercy or good mores, Major. All you have is features. If you are blessed with the right ones, you needn’t worry about visual detection.”
“I disagree, but then you’re the expert.”
Guidi played with his spoon in the cup, worried by Bora’s survey of the place and his unwillingness to give a motive for it. At last, following guardedly the object of Bora’s attention, he saw that it rested on a sallow-cheeked young man with a cloth bag on his knees, seated two tables away from them. The young man seemed immersed in a colourful issue of La Domenica del Corriere.
“Anyone suspicious?” Guidi leaned forward to ask.
“No, never mind.”
“It has to be something, Major.”
Bora put an American cigarette – a Chesterfield, it seemed to Guidi – in his mouth. “Just tell me what you found out. Cigarette?”
“No, thank you. Well, I’ve managed to do some checking on Lisi’s bank account. He was in fact exceedingly well off, even for one who’d been grubbing in the political trough for years. I can’t figure out what his additional sources of income were, but they’re undeniable. Real estate, government bonds, investments in the Colonies. No matter what large sums were withdrawn, larger yet deposits were made. No order to them, no apparent connection. Can’t tell where the money came from, or where it went. He might have spent some money on women, but who knows how much.”
“Perhaps enough to keep their mouths shut.” Bora took one more slip of paper from his briefcase. “These are the addresses of two midwives. I’ll follow up on them tomorrow or the day after, as I can. Through the Verona carabinieri, I ferreted out of a subordinate the titbit that abortions were performed on two underage country girls known to Lisi some time ago. An arrest followed in relation to the second case: the girl was more than five months along, and died of peritonitis after the operation. When the carabinieri pressured her, in self-defence the midwife let slip the name of the prospective father, and lost her licence more quickly than she would have otherwise. Lisi’s name remained publicly spotless in the process. This was in 1940, and the woman has just got out of jail.” Bora let some cigarette smoke out of his lips, as if blowing off an insect flying around him. “I had no idea what leads cleaning women will give you for a price.”
The scent of American tobacco wafted temptingly close. Guidi regretted not having accepted a smoke. “So,” he said, “it could have been revenge.”
“Only if the midwife had a car at her disposal to run Lisi down.”
Guidi did not laugh. “We should interrogate the present housemaid. According to my sources, she speaks of Lisi as some sort of a saint. Amiable toward everybody, good-natured, generous. All he lacked was a halo, listening to her. She blames arguments and separation on the wife, whom she heard threatening him.”
“Oh?” To Guidi’s horror, Bora squashed the expensive cigarette in the ashtray, only half-smoked. Relaxing his shoulders a little, he asked, “Did the wife say she was going to run him over with her Alfa Romeo sports car?”
“No, but close. A couple of weeks ago Clara was reportedly overheard yelling at him that she would make sure he wouldn’t be wheeling around much longer. They were arguing about money, but the maid could not eavesdrop closely enough to find out more.”
“It seems she eavesdropped well enough. How’s the wife’s bank account?”
“Good. She’s set up, no reason to complain there. Lisi provided her with an ample settlement when they parted ways four months ago. She got to keep jewels, furs, the silver and the car, although he asked her to return his ‘beloved late mother’s gold brooch’. She was also given the flat we’re about to visit.”
“I wonder if she’s got a lover or two.” Bora glanced at the wristwatch he wore on his right arm. He motioned to the waiter for the bill, paid it and stood up from the chair.
Guidi resented that glibness. “You’re a gossip, Major.”
“Why? I’m not passing judgement. I’m just doing Colonel Habermehl’s bidding, remember?” Seconds later, Bora, turned elsewhere, was telling him, “Don’t move. Stay seated, Guidi, don’t move.”
Guidi obeyed, but wondered why Bora should leave the table in such haste, and going where. Turning in his chair, he caught sight of the sallow young man walking toward the exit, and of Bora quickly catching up with him. The German held the cloth bag left behind, and now with imperious courtesy was forcing it upon him.
“You forgot this.”
Confusion ensued when the young man attempted to get away and Bora prevented him, shoving him against a table full of fine, empty glasses. The fine glasses flew. Guidi got to his feet to avoid an incident and keep Bora from using his gun. But before he could intervene, out of the blue the plain-clothes man joined in from across the street and, unasked, floored the youth with his fist. Customers and waiters stood around, dumbstruck. “Police. No one move,” Guidi said. Stepping on broken glass he reached for the bag, and looked inside. Two silver watches emerged and came to rest on the closest table, along with a packet of currency and a kilo of coffee at least. “We have enough here for an arrest.”
Within minutes Bora and Guidi were the sole clients in the café, a space of abandoned tables which suddenly seemed much wider. “Thank God black market is all it was, Major.”
“Well, I could hardly wait for the bag to be picked up by an accomplice.”
Guidi felt the grudging looks of the waiters on them. “It was even more imprudent for you to touch it. Why didn’t you just tell me the man was up to something?”
“I only had his suspicious features to go by.” Bora levelled his dispassionate eyes on the policeman. “And you don’t believe in those.”
“What if it’d been explosives instead of black-market goods?”
“I’d have blown myself up, wouldn’t I.”
“There’s no question about that. And then what?”
Bora laughed, with a bland gesture of the right hand summoning the head waiter to pay for the broken glasses. “And then you’d never have convinced Lieutenant Wenzel to lend you the dogs.”
They left the café to the clicking noise of shards being swept from under the tables. Guidi couldn’t imagine why Bora didn’t want to take credit for his courage, or why he seemed amused. He said, “How can you take it so lightly?”
“God knows I don’t mean to laugh. And if I had any sense at all, I wouldn’t be here chasing murderous young widows either.”
2
Clara Lisi, also known as Claretta, had magazines – Eleganze e Novità, Per Voi Signora – strewn all across her parlour. Fashion plates showed a wealth of heart-shaped mouths, cork soles, absurd little hats, padded shoulders; elsewhere in the room, a profusion of cushions, rugs, knick-knacks, fresh flowers. The feminine space reminded Bora of the summers at his godmother’s in Rome (hot afternoons, day trips, reading forbidden books, the first sins against innocence). He stayed serious, but could have smiled. A drooling, cross-eyed Pomeranian quit chewing on a magazine to snarl against him.
Claretta was a high-breasted, slim girl with an “interesting taste in perfumes”, as Bora was amusedly to remark later. Her bleached hair piled up into a nest of ringlets above her forehead, while polished nails and toenails closely matched the pink shades of dressing gown, heeled slippers and wallpaper.
She had been informed of the visit, so liqueur and candies were daintily arranged on a low table by the sofa
, as if the circumstances justified sociability. Guidi, who hadn’t seen a full bottle of Vecchia Romagna in a year, stared at the jolly Bacchus on the label as if it were a sign that cognac production was alive and well somewhere.
When the visitors introduced themselves, she said with a dramatic little wave of her hand, “I hope you gentlemen have come to listen. Please, please. Make yourselves comfortable.”
She sat on one end of the sofa with the dog in her lap, and Guidi sat at the other end. Having precariously balanced his army cap among the knick-knacks on the buffet table, Bora went to take a seat in a more distant armchair. When he looked up, he saw Guidi promptly offer a lit match to Claretta, as she took a cigarette out of a mauve mother-of-pearl case.
She was thanking Guidi with a nod. “You don’t know what I’ve been through.” She sighed, leaning slightly toward him. “The past two weeks have been a nightmare.”
“I understand, Signora.”
“How can you?” Claretta turned anxiously from Guidi to Bora, and back. “I believe neither of you can possibly understand. Carabinieri and police have been badgering me so, and that hideous peasant woman—”
“Your husband’s maid?” Bora coolly intervened.
“Who else? Naturally you know why she has an interest in accusing me.”
“No, why?” Guidi asked.
“No,” Bora only said.
After a long, disconcerted look at the German, Claretta faced Guidi again. She hesitated. “You must have heard how Vittorio behaved with women.” Her mouth quivered, but even under a lot of lipstick it was a fresh and charming mouth.
Guidi nodded in sympathy. “We heard.”
“This maid, this horrible Enrica – she was just the last of a series, Inspector. If it wasn’t one woman, it was another. Life with him was impossible. I cannot imagine having wanted to marry him once.” Her eyes darted to the safety of her clasped hands, where the cigarette trembled between her fingers.
“So, what was the source of your husband’s wealth, outside of his political office?” Bora asked. The question sank like a rock rudely thrown in water, splashing those around it. Guidi was provoked by his lack of sympathy, and – in spite of it – by the way his unfriendly good looks seemed to affect Claretta.
“Why, Major,” she said. “I have no idea. Vittorio never discussed business with me.”
“Yet you had been his secretary.”
With some bitterness Claretta spoke up. “Facility with numbers is hardly what Vittorio sought in a secretary. It was only because I wouldn’t give him what he usually got so freely that he married me.”
“Had he been married before?” Bora asked.
“No.”
“And you?”
“I? I was a child!”
“According to my information, you were of age.”
Guidi gave a reproaching look at Bora, who paid no attention to him. Then, “Signora,” he coaxed her, “everything would be much easier, if we knew how your car was damaged.”
“I told the police!” Claretta’s tone rose defensively. “How many times must I repeat it? Only a few days before Vittorio died, I ran into a bicycle parked between two cement posts. It happened as I was driving out of my parking space after shopping here in Verona. Vittorio and I had had a terrible row, and I was always so ragged after arguing with him.” She unsteadily put out the cigarette in a pink onyx ashtray. “Vittorio was still paying the bills and always made a big fuss about little things. I know, I realize I should have tried to find out to whom the bicycle belonged, since I had demolished it. But Vittorio would have flown into a rage, the bicycle owner was nowhere to be seen, so I just drove on.” A quivering smile curled Claretta’s lips when she looked at Guidi. “Had I been more honest that day, I wouldn’t find myself in such trouble now.”
From the other end of the parlour, there came the click of Bora’s lighter.
“You forget the initial in the garden’s gravel,” he said in his unaccented Italian. “It may be coincidental, but we haven’t been able to find any other associate of your husband’s whose name begins with ‘C’.”
The young woman, Bora could tell by the way her eyes focused on it, had just noticed that his gloved left hand was artificial. “It shows how little you know about Vittorio,” she replied. “There was much more to his life than appears in his records.”
“I thought you said you knew nothing of his affairs.” Having lit his cigarette, Bora deftly dropped the lighter into the rigid palm of his left hand, and then slipped it into his pocket. “But I’m sure it’s as you say.”
Claretta put the Pomeranian down on the magenta flowers of the deep-piled carpet. The gesture of relinquishing the little dog had no pretence, no intended effect. She was weak, and afraid. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I understand how things are. Vittorio was powerful and had many friends, and I’m just a poor ex-secretary. I know I’m expendable when it comes down to it. But I did not kill him, though God knows how many times the thought crossed my mind. Especially when he’d grope for somebody new under my very eyes, so shamelessly, so without a care…” Her voice broke down, and she turned away from the men. For a few moments she sobbed, tight-lipped, with her eyes averted. When Guidi offered her his starched handkerchief, she held it against her lips and then dabbed her eyes with it, still weeping, careful not to smear mascara on her cheeks.
Unmoved in his armchair, Bora suffered the Pomeranian to salivate greedily on his well-greased riding boots. Even before finishing his cigarette, he stretched over to smother it in the pink ashtray. “I am certain you have already told the police, Signora Lisi, but where were you at the time your husband was killed?”
Claretta sobbed into Guidi’s handkerchief, but Bora pressed on.
“What I really mean is, were you alone or do you have witnesses for your alibi?”
“Major,” Guidi cut in, “give her time to catch her breath. Can’t you see how upset she is?”
Bora gave a discreet kick to the dog, which pulled back from him with a show of teeth. “You ask her, then.”
By the time they left Claretta’s flat, Guidi had quietly worked up an anger toward Bora, whose energetic limp reached the street ahead of him. Bora made things worse by light-heartedly observing, “No love lost there, eh?”
It was the last straw as far as Guidi was concerned. “It seems to me you were just plain rude.”
“Rude? I’m never rude. Straightforward, maybe. She’s a murder suspect; why on earth should I be engaging toward her? She means nothing to me, and her tears leave me cold.”
“All the same, Major, you could have achieved the same end by being less straightforward.”
Bora stopped at the kerb, where driver and BMW waited. He’d removed his right glove to shake hands with Claretta, and now he put it back on, helping himself with his teeth. It was done unaffectedly, but Guidi did not believe that ease, and did not feel sympathy for the self-command behind it.
Bora said, “Frankly I don’t think there’s much else to find out about this story, but I’ll go along with Colonel Habermehl’s wishes. I’ll give the Fascists a few days of brain work.” He turned sharply to face Guidi. “Let’s pay a visit to De Rosa at his headquarters before we drive back. Is there petrol in your car?”
“About half a tank. Why?”
“Take this coupon and fill her up. I want to ride with you and chat on the way to De Rosa’s. What is it?” He smiled at Guidi’s puzzlement. “It’s just that there’s less chance of getting a grenade in your lap if the licence plate isn’t German. Or do you trust your compatriots more than I do?”
Centurion De Rosa didn’t know what to make of Guidi when Bora introduced him. That he was displeased by the interference showed only through an occasional convulsion of his upper lip, where the moustache humped and stretched.
“Inspector Guidi is a loyal, card-carrying Party member,” Bora mollified him.
With unconcealed contempt, De Rosa ran his eyes down Guidi’s civilian garb. “Well, I assume y
ou know what you’re doing, Major Bora. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to hear additional recollections of Vittorio Lisi.”
De Rosa walked back to his desk. Behind it, an Italian flag from which the royal crest had been cut out hung on the wall. As the good republican Fascist, he’d replaced the insignia with a patch of white silk. “What more is there to say, Major? Lisi was an excellent man. He had a good mind.”
Bora glanced at Guidi, who didn’t look back. “A ‘good mind’. I don’t know what it means in this context, De Rosa.”
“An acute mind. A very acute mind, Major. And he was a happy, jovial man. He loved humour and puns and good-natured practical jokes.” Intentionally leaving Guidi out of the exchange, De Rosa turned with his tough little body to Bora, who towered in front of him. As if he were reporting to a direct superior, he said, “Lisi found Verona a sleepy place, for instance. So he nicknamed it ‘Veronal City’. What a sense of humour, eh?” And because Bora gave no sign of appreciating the pun, “I’ll tell you another one,” De Rosa continued. “This is the joke that all who call themselves Fascists without being ready to suffer for the ideal ought to keep in mind: Vittorio Lisi said that such people only put up a hypocritical face of political faith, and called them face-ists.”
“I’m astonished by such fine humour,” Bora said.
“And that’s not all, Major! Lisi also had an extraordinary memory. Numbers just stuck to him. Every speech he gave was unrehearsed. He could meet you once in a crowded room and perfectly recall your name six months later.”
Guidi had done all the silent listening he was going to do. “What about women?” he asked.
As if the inspector had suddenly materialized in the office, De Rosa tossed an over-the-shoulder annoyed glance at him. “Well, what about women?”
