Liar Moon

by Ben Pastor

  “Who was it, Major, do you know? Where did it happen?”

  “We stumbled onto him two hours ago, behind a rubble wall. Two miles to the east of the ditch where you found the first body. Fosso Bandito, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, this other place is nameless on the topographic map, and just marked as a farmhouse. But the house is long gone. Only a watering trough and the rubble wall are left. From what I could judge, it was an old man. The shot was fired point-blank and it all but blew off his head. There were fragments of brain tissue stuck to the wall all around.” Bora waited for Guidi to examine the objects before asking, “Are you sure your lunatic carries an army rifle?”

  Guidi took from his desk drawer the two bullets he’d recovered. “That’s the report we have. But look how smashed these are.”

  Closely Bora studied the shapeless bits of lead, running the fingers of his right hand all over them. “That’s why I asked, Guidi. Whoever it is, he tampered with the bullets by filing the tips or cutting the casing crosswise. The Russian partisans did the same; I recognize messy butchery. It’s not army-rifle butchery.”

  Guidi kept for himself the clever comment that had risen to his lips. He limited himself to saying, “How long had the man been dead, in your opinion?”

  “One hour. Maybe less. There was no rigor mortis yet, not even on the neck muscles. Let’s say he was killed within thirty minutes of six hundred hours. This is all he had in his pockets, and we found the casing a few feet away. Now, Guidi, do me the favour of sending someone to fetch the body. I need my men back.”

  Bora was about to add something else, Guidi could tell. The fact that he kept from doing so meant he wanted to be asked directly, and Guidi let him wait for a moment before satisfying him with a question. “Did you notice anything unusual about the body, or around it?”

  “I suppose you expect I’ll tell you whether he had shoes on.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. He was barefoot. No shoes, no socks. Oh, and there was also a tobacco pouch, but I wasn’t about to pick it up from where it had fallen.” Bora closed his eyes in the sunlight, uneasily stretching his left leg. “He must have been a beggar, a vagrant. Or a very poor farmer. You might recognize him when you see him, Guidi. As far as I’m concerned, all I know is that I don’t want to end up like him. He’d made a little fire of sticks and apparently walked to the wall to take care of a physical need. They killed him in his own excrement.”

  Guidi shrugged. “It isn’t less honourable than any other death, Major.”

  “No, but it’s unaesthetic.” Opening his eyes, Bora smiled unaffectedly. “I believe a dignified death is of the greatest importance.”

  “Maybe.” Guidi walked out to dispatch a couple of men to the place indicated by Bora. When he walked back into his office, Bora was standing at the window, slowly massaging his neck.

  “About the Lisi affair, Guidi, you ought to know there’s another wife to contend with. No, no, don’t ask me now. I’ll tell you in a moment. I have also met with one of the midwives.”

  Claretta’s lonely pink figure rose in Guidi’s mind. “Another wife? Do you mean to tell me that Lisi was also a bigamist?”

  “I’ll tell you everything. One thing at a time. I have been thinking that the letter ‘C’ might not stand for a person’s name. It could indicate, I don’t know, the name of a bank, or a company. It could mean ‘communists’. It could be the Latin cipher for one hundred.”

  “Come, now!” Guidi was so pressed for real news that Bora’s interest in word games seemed inopportune. “I doubt Lisi was proficient in Latin, Major Bora. But I do agree the clue in and of itself is not sufficient to incriminate Claretta.”

  Perhaps because he’d heard him call the widow by her first name, Bora turned to Guidi with a curious stare.

  “The circle of suspects,” Guidi continued, “is only limited by the fact that a car was used to commit murder. Since he certainly did not hail a taxi for the purpose, the assassin must have used a private vehicle, and have a good reason to drive around. Why are you smiling, Major? Have I said something that amuses you?”

  “No. I was trying to imagine the old lecher as he struggled to get away while the car aimed at him. It’s not funny, you’re right. I’m just tired. The strangest things seem humorous when one is tired.”

  “At any rate, we should set a date to visit the crime scene and to interrogate the maid.”

  “I’m glad that’s how you see it,” Bora said. He took a road map of the Verona province out of a leather case at his belt. “I’m ready.”

  Guidi was taken aback. He’d hoped to visit Claretta again, and Bora’s zeal came at the wrong time. “I didn’t mean this morning,” he said. “There’s no hurry, is there?”

  “There is. Life is nothing but hurry.”

  Under Bora’s stern supervision Guidi donned coat, scarf and gloves, instructed Turco to apologize to his mother and to carry on for the day, and followed the German outside.

  The army vehicle had already been refuelled. Bora told Guidi, “Come, let’s take mine for a change,” and dismissed the driver. “Not mine, actually. The BMW is being repaired.” Despite his mutilation, he promptly started the engine. “Well, which way?” He turned to Guidi, who was unfolding the map.

  Guidi told him. And when Bora steered the wheel to leave the kerbside, he saw why his watch had stopped. Half-hidden by the cuff of the army shirt, the watch’s face had been shot clean off its metal band. Bora burst out laughing. “Didn’t I tell you that the strangest things become humorous after a while?”

  The state highway traversed a stretch of land rich in deeply curving brooks and linked chains of low hills. Now and then, tall, svelte belfries signalled distant villages, with bells in their arched top windows like pupils in hooded eyes. At the edge of the fields, much-pruned trees stood guard like wounded bodies, ready to bud again in the spring from their mutilated branches.

  Bora looked away from the trees. Alongside the road, a silvery late grass, bowing in the wind, lent metallic splendour to the gravelly shoulders. “I’m telling you what I was able to find out yesterday,” he told Guidi. “The first Lisi woman, née Olga Masi, is fifty-six years old. She says she didn’t even know he’d married again. Three days ago a clipping with news of his death came to her by post, with no return address. It was the first time she’d heard about him in ten years. I told you she’s illiterate, so she brought the clipping to the city hall to have it read. Then she caught the train and travelled to Verona, where she managed to find out where the funeral was being held. Since the clipping mentioned Lisi’s present wife, she brought along her wedding picture as proof of her claim.”

  Guidi was growing used to Bora’s fast driving but still clutched the dashboard at the next curve. “She’s after money, then.”

  “On the contrary. She expected they’d give her a hard time and try to prevent her from attending, as in fact did happen. All she wanted was to prove her identity and see the dead man. I drove her to the cemetery in order to speak to her at length.”

  “Did the anonymous envelope originate in Verona?”

  “Yes. I have it in my right pocket. Take it out. It was sent the day after Lisi’s death. You see it’s a clipping from the evening edition, since Lisi died in the early afternoon.” Bora cut across a double curve careless of an oncoming truck, merrily shaving past it. “Now, who would know that Lisi had already been married, if even the second wife was unaware of it?”

  The address on the envelope was typewritten. Guidi kept his eyes on the clipping, so as not to look at the road they were devouring. “Well, Major. Likely someone who had known Lisi for years, perhaps a political associate. He might have thought that after his death there was no need to keep the secret, and that informing the Masi woman was just Christian charity.”

  “Maybe.” Bora overtook a truck on a brief stretch of straight road, and barely missed a tractor parked on the verge. “But maybe his intentions were not so charita
ble.”

  Guidi began to wonder if it was out of weariness, or whether unsafe driving was one of Bora’s German habits. “Why would a ‘friend’ wait until Lisi’s death to acquaint the first wife with all the details?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re thinking of blackmail, are you not? Sure, that someone was blackmailing Lisi on account of his bigamy. But what is there to be gained from a posthumous scandal?”

  Bora glanced over. “You assume it was Lisi who was blackmailed. What if it was his second wife? Inability or unwillingness to keep paying after Lisi’s death might have precipitated the revelation. One thing is certain, by now Lisi’s will is a legal nightmare.”

  “Yet Claretta told us he’d never been married before.”

  “If you can trust her.” Expertly Bora switched gears, and slightly slowed down. “The private road is half a mile ahead, right? It’s a good thing I convinced De Rosa to give me the keys to the gate and the front door.”

  “According to reports, the garden gate was never locked when the master was at home, so virtually anyone could drive in and out at will.”

  “Yes, including Clara Lisi.” Bora said the last words without looking Guidi in the face, suddenly engrossed in the road as if driving carefully had become more interesting to him than what took place inside the car.

  Was he just being hostile toward Claretta? It was more than his looking away. Time and again over the past few days Guidi had noticed and resented Bora’s tendency to withdraw from the matter at hand, a sudden, introverted abstraction with the excuse of looking outside, elsewhere, refusing to continue the conversation.

  Nothing more was said until the private road branched off the highway with a surprisingly sharp curve, which Bora took at excessive speed but managed without losing control. After the first hundred or so yards of blacktopped tarmac, the road turned to dirt. It remained dirt for a mile, becoming gravel at last, where two lines of squat mulberry trees kept watch near the gate.

  The gate was painted parrot-green. Guidi and Bora stared at it, brash and solid between two pillars of yellow bricks, each of these surmounted by a truncated pyramid of grey granite and a flowering pot. The gate’s bars, reinforced by sturdy horizontal belts, ended up in fearfully acute arrow points. A padlocked steel chain bound the lock in a forbidding clasp.

  Bora left the army car. “I’d rather not drive in. There must be enough tyre tracks as it is.”

  He approached the gate. From his seat, Guidi watched him pry padlock and steel chain loose, and then try, one after the other, all the keys De Rosa had supplied. “What is it, Major?” he called. “It doesn’t come open?”

  Bora was disappointedly shaking the gate. “De Rosa must have forgotten the gate key, or else they changed the lock. None of these fits.”

  Guidi joined him. “It’s hardly possible to scale the wall. Look at the broken glass cemented on top.”

  “Speak for yourself, Guidi.” Bora took off his cap and tunic, which he slid past the bars. “I am climbing the gate.”

  Guidi tried to stop him. “All right, all right. Let me do it. Give me the keys, I’ll try to get inside the house and look for another gate key.”

  But Bora had already placed his spur-clad boot on the first horizontal belt, as if he were mounting on horseback. He heaved himself up with his right hand, nimbly straddling the acuminate arrowheads of the top. “When I need help, I’ll ask you for it.”

  Once they were both inside the gate, they saw how the evidence had been disturbed by the arrival of other cars: perhaps the ambulance, perhaps the police. Luckily no snow had fallen here. Guidi pointed out the interrupted, snaking double trail of the wheelchair in the gravel, and a few traces of dried blood. He uncovered a square piece of tarpaulin, held down by four pebbles, protecting the letter Lisi had traced before dying.

  “It’s identical to the photograph at headquarters in Verona,” Bora commented. “It really looks like a ‘C’. I can’t see what else you can make of it.”

  Without touching it, Guidi followed the outline of the letter. “Not even a ‘G’, it’s true. And look, look where the point of impact is, compared to this spot. Lisi must have been thrown ten yards. And there are no traces of braking, none. To gather this kind of speed, the driver must have floored the gas pedal for the last stretch of the road outside the gate.”

  Bora nodded. He realized the foolishness of his climb when he tried to crouch down beside Guidi, and nearly cried out in pain. Swallowing his discomfort, he limped to the edge of the nearest flower bed, where the gravel was scattered. “The gate is sturdy,” he observed, “but far from wide. Either the driver had a good sense of dimension, or he was familiar with the entrance. See here, Guidi? It seems the killer’s car backed up right here before leaving the garden.”

  Eventually they walked to the house. Beyond a rose garden terracing up from the gate, it was a stuccoed country residence pompously marked Villa Clara above the door. From all sides, zigzagging paths led to it among flower beds currently devoid of blooms. The walls, shutters and steps were different shades of pink. The type of wall finish, Guidi thought, that readily absorbs moisture. The kind of house that seems to blush after rain. He halted in front of the main entrance, where juniper bushes clipped to a minimum curved in, bordering straw-covered dirt beds ready for spring planting.

  “We know from what the maid told police that she fell asleep after lunch in the pantry at the back of the house. After she heard the crash, it took her ‘some time’ to reach this door. As we know, driver and car had already vanished. Surely if she’d caught a glimpse of Claretta she’d have promptly accused her.”

  In pain though he was, Bora struggled to keep from smiling.

  Guidi saw it, and grew impatient. “I must really seem ridiculous to you today, Major. It’s the second time you’ve laughed at me.”

  “I’m not laughing, but I think you like the widow.”

  “While you despise her. Is that it?”

  Bora leaned against the door frame with his shoulder. “I don’t despise her. I’m indifferent to her. And as long as your feelings do not interfere with your good judgement, you can like the widow all you want.”

  “As if it were your privilege to permit it, Major!”

  “Maybe not. But at least I do not grow sentimental when it comes to murder.”

  “Unless, of course, you have something to gain from accusing Clara Lisi.” Guidi didn’t know why he said the words, but that Bora should then openly laugh provoked him beyond politeness. “You said yourself that the will is a nightmare and will probably be impugned. The Verona Fascists might find it very useful if Clara Lisi is thrown in jail.”

  Bora stopped smiling. “The Verona Fascists? And what have I to share with them? Why would they come all the way to Lago to seek the help of a German officer? Dirty dealings are best done without adding outside witnesses.”

  “Or with the help of favourable witnesses.”

  “You carry a Fascist Party card. I don’t.”

  “I’m sure you carry your own card, Major.”

  “Not at all. I’m a soldier, and don’t dabble in politics. For a police inspector you presume a great deal.”

  Just then the lock of the front door clicked under Guidi’s pressure. He entered first, flipped the light on and let Bora in. It rankled with him that he was reluctant to argue, when Bora seemed to have no trouble speaking his mind. Within moments he overheard Bora’s cool comment from the next room, “Holy Christ. What a tasteless place. A regular circus. I wonder where they keep the elephants.”

  On the second floor, Claretta’s quarters were easily recognizable by the profusion of vases, shawls and knick-knacks. Misticum brand lipstick jars marked Persia and Capri lined the dresser. The Lenci doll sitting on her bed was as large as a four-year-old child, dressed in a rose-patterned voile frock and with a straw hat on her head. Stuck behind the bevelled edges of the dresser mirror, postcards from vacation spots formed a garland of sea and mountain views. B
ora looked at Guidi in the rose-hued warmth of the bedroom. “I feel like I’m inside a uterus. Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Hm. Did you notice the single bed? They slept in separate rooms.”

  “What else would you expect, Major? It’s logical that a paralysed man should have a room on the first floor.”

  “Especially if the maid’s room is there too, yes.”

  When they inspected the parlour, an overwhelming crowd of souvenirs confronted them: silver, pewter, ceramics, gondolas of gilded celluloid and paperweights full of water, with Saint Peter’s and the Colosseum inside. Women’s magazines and movie magazines were everywhere, scattered on every available horizontal surface. Paper flowers, wax flowers, feather flowers and silk flowers filled a series of crystal pitchers. Soccer trophies Lisi had won in his youth lined the fireplace mantel, watching over a solitary book on architecture.

  After this, Lisi’s room at the end of the hallway seemed Spartan. It was a simple study with a bed. At once Bora became absorbed in a fine Piranesi print, but then Guidi called his attention to a colour photograph of Lisi shaking hands with Il Duce. Mussolini looked pasty, and Lisi – holding a pennant that read SEMPRE OVUNQUE – had a mouthful of gold teeth. Bora stared at the photo, too, for a good long time, with an indefinable expression on his face.

  It was in Lisi’s room that it became apparent to Guidi the Verona authorities had chosen to limit the extent of their search. Save for the removal of a few papers already in the dossier, the premises were virtually untouched. The calendar had not been detached from the wall, even though initials were scribbled all through the pages alongside certain dates. A stack of banknotes still lay in the right-hand drawer of Lisi’s mahogany desk, where powerful painkillers and a shot glass kept company with a ream of Pelikan carbon paper. Silver fountain pens – the expected gift from underlings – formed a thick bundle, bound by an elastic band.