‘I know that.’ Eleanor Sachs stared at him. ‘I told you that. I mean before, what happened to her? It’s important? Isn’t it?’ Her voice had a whine of insistence.
Pallioti put his cup down. The tone of her voice reminded him of Saffy at thirteen, of how utterly implacable she had been. As if she could read his mind, Eleanor leaned forward.
‘You owe me,’ she said. ‘Without me, you wouldn’t be here.’
She looked at him for a moment, then sipped her coffee.
‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘You’re the police. You’d have got here. Eventually. But you wouldn’t be here now. Not this fast. We had a deal.’ She glared at him. The blush in her cheeks had heightened, making her eyes even brighter. ‘You could at least tell me the truth.’
‘I don’t know what the truth is.’ Pallioti shook his head. ‘To be honest, I doubt we’ll ever know.’
Cosimo Grandolo’s warning to his wife ran in his head like a hamster on a wheel. He said I could do more harm than good, seeing connections where they didn’t exist.
Finally, he looked up and said, ‘Does the name Antenor mean anything to you?’
‘Antenor?’ Eleanor Sachs looked at him as if he had truly gone crazy. ‘What does Antenor have to do with anything? And it’s Antenora, by the way.’
‘So you do know who he was?’
‘I know what they are. They are two different things, a person and a place. Antenor was the person Antenora was named for. The guy who betrayed Troy.’
‘Betrayed Troy?’ Pallioti picked up his cup and put it down again. ‘I thought he was one of the elders.’
Eleanor smirked.
‘He was. That was the point. He was mad because they didn’t do what he said, give Helen back. So he betrayed the city to the Greeks. And, incidentally, founded Padua.’
She sipped her coffee and shook her head.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she added, ‘Antenora is in Dante’s ninth circle of hell. Canto thirty-two. It’s reserved for traitors.’
‘Traitors?’
Eleanor Sachs nodded. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s a particularly horrible place – not that much of the Inferno is a bargain. But Antenora is freezing cold, because Dante considered treason the coldest of human sins. It freezes the heart. And soul. Traitors are moral outcasts. Their lives may go on, but they’re cut off from humanity. Forever.’
She took another sip of her coffee and went on, falling happily into the full flow of a lecture on Dante. But Pallioti wasn’t listening. Instead, he was seeing the photograph Maria Valacci had given him, seeing the long, drawn features of her brother. The hero who had presented her with his medal. Who had told her she ‘deserved it more than he did’. Whose hand had rested so awkwardly on her shoulder, and whose face had been filled with such sadness because he did not belong, for decades had not belonged, to a humanity that deserved rewards. Or, perhaps, in his mind, to humanity at all. No wonder he had put himself into exile, locked himself away at the top of his palazzo, condemned himself to gaze down on the city he could not be part of. How cold, Pallioti wondered, had his grand apartment been? The solitary rooms where he eked out his days alone, surrounded by drawings of the most intimate of human acts.
‘Are you all right?’
Eleanor Sachs reached out and touched his hand.
Pallioti picked up his cup and nodded. She looked at him.
‘Who was Antenor?’ she asked. ‘I mean, in this story?’
‘I don’t know.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Probably no one.’
‘It was Massimo, wasn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘He was a traitor, wasn’t he?’ Her eyes searched his face. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it? It has to do with when he was at Villa Triste, doesn’t it? That’s what he meant, Achilleo Venta, about hell. What did Massimo do?’ she asked.
Pallioti shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
But he had a horrible feeling he did. Gone, Little Lamb had whispered, All gone. Lilia and the boy she would not be parted from. And Caterina, and Enrico, and their parents. All of them whose names Issa had counted out on her fingers and repeated like a litany night after night after night. Enrico is dead. Carlo is dead. Papa is dead.
But how? That was what he didn’t understand.
I called him Jesus Christ, because after three days he came back from the dead.
He could see the beginning of it: the arrest, the bargain that was made in return for an ‘escape’. The fact that – what? – three, four days later, the safe house near the Pitti Palace, the one used after the weapons drop, had been raided. That would have been a valuable bargaining chip. Too many people knew, Issa said, and she was right. So, yes, he could see the beginning. But he couldn’t see the end. Because no one knew where Radio Juliet was meeting. No one knew about the house off the Via dei Renai. Only those attending had been told, at the very last minute, and all of them were dead. Isabella had seen them. With her own eyes. She had seen where they had dug the trench, and knelt down. Unless Caterina had been right all along, and somehow she had been followed.
Pallioti put his cup down. He could feel the parts of the picture, sliding about as if they were on the inside of a kaleidoscope, but he couldn’t make them come into focus. To do that, he would have to talk to Massimo.
His stomach felt sour, not just because he had slept badly, or because of the amount of coffee he had drunk, but because of what he was about to do. The treachery he had already begun to commit.
‘Eleanor—’
She looked at him and saw what he was about to say in his face.
‘No,’ Eleanor Sachs said.
She jumped to her feet, almost knocking her chair over. ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to see him, I’m coming with you.’
Pallioti shook his head. ‘You can’t. A car is on its way. This is police business now. Part of an investigation into a murder, probably two. I can’t possibly—’ ‘And this morning it wasn’t? You sure could “possibly” when you needed me! You promised!’
The women behind the counter had stopped talking. There was no sound at all in the cafe except the low murmur of a radio somewhere in a back room and the anguished huff of Eleanor Sachs’s breath. Pallioti stood up. He was a good head taller than she was.
‘No. No!’ Her voice rose in a wail of protest. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You cannot leave me behind now. It is not fair!’
‘A police driver is coming to pick you up. I’ll wait here with you until he arrives and return your car this evening.’
He was determined to make sure she was returned to Florence. If he left her with her own car, she would simply follow him. Trail after him like a stray puppy he would be forced to kick.
‘No!’
Looking at the angry hurt on her small upturned face, Pallioti saw the journey she had been on – the loneliness of it, mingled with hope – and felt an unwelcome wave of sympathy. Aware of how dangerous it was, he pushed it back. The effort was about as successful as closing the door on a flood.
‘You can’t,’ Eleanor Sachs said again. ‘You promised me.’
She bowed her head, and dug in the pocket of her jacket. Finding a tissue, she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she crumpled it in her hand, speaking fast without looking at him and so low that the women had to lean over the counter to hear.
‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You just can’t do this to me.’
Painfully aware that he looked like a father bullying his teenage daughter, or worse, an ageing Lothario who, for some demented reason, had brought his child lover to the Abbey of San Galgano to abandon her in a sandwich bar, Pallioti took her shoulder and guided her to the far corner of the room. The women behind the counter did not even pretend not to be listening. The next time he came here there would probably be mouldy ham in his panini and salt in his coffee.
‘Eleanor,’ he said. ‘Please. I’m grateful for your help, and I don’t mean to be unkind, but you must underst
and—’
To his surprise, she nodded. Then she looked up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but her lip was no longer trembling.
‘I have been looking for almost three years,’ she said. ‘I know you probably think it’s crazy, and maybe it is. It’s damaged my career. It’s trashed my marriage. But my father is dead. I never even knew the people who raised him. I don’t know who I am, and I have nowhere else to look. I have turned over all the rocks. I have made an ass of myself chasing you. I’ve done everything I can.’
She paused and took a deep breath. Pallioti could feel the flood gates giving way, the water tumbling in and rising around him.
‘I have never been this close,’ Eleanor Sachs said. ‘I won’t say anything. I swear to God. I’ll do exactly what you tell me.’
She looked at him.
‘But you have to let me come with you. I have to at least see this Massimo, or Piero, or whatever his name is. Please.’ She reached out and took Pallioti’s arm. ‘Because whatever else this man is – he might also be my grandfather.’
Chapter Thirty-One
The house was more than just a house. The block a lot bigger than a block. And neither, strictly speaking, were in Siena. But Achilleo Venta had got the size right. There was no question that Piero Balestro’s estate, some ten miles south of the town, was large.
Chalky hills planted with what appeared to be wheat and topped by picturesque groves of cypress rolled out on either side of them in a landscape sent from central casting. The drive they were following had to wind through several hundred acres. At a best guess. The phone calls Pallioti had made had merely netted the man’s current address. The exact specifics on the property – and anything else Guillermo could dig up on Piero Balestro, and/or Doctor Peter Bales, – would be waiting for him when he got back to the office.
He had made one last call before they left San Galgano, cancelling the car he had ordered to come and fetch Eleanor Sachs. The driver, who had already been cruising happily down the motorway, was probably not best pleased. Well, they would have that in common, Pallioti thought, because the truth was, he wasn’t best pleased either. He hoped that allowing Eleanor to accompany him was not a decision he was going to come to regret. But he already knew – one way or another – that it probably was. He felt a flood of sympathy for everyone in the world who had children. This was what it must be like, he thought – forever allowing yourself to be backed into a corner against your better judgement.
Piero Balestro’s home, when they finally reached it, sat on a knoll at the end of the drive. A mellow confection of stone and tile, it looked old on first glance, but on second glance, wasn’t. A very shiny silver Alfa and some boxy red thing called a Jeep Wagoneer stood on the parking circle. Through the graceful line of cypresses that spread from the side portico, they could see the green slope of a lawn, and below it a paddock, backed by a line of stables.
Pallioti glanced at Eleanor.
‘I know,’ she said, as she opened the door. ‘I remember. Not a word.’
The pale gravel crunched pleasingly underfoot. Four potted bay trees were lined up on either side of the wide front doors. An appropriately weathered pair of stone lions lay at the top of the steps, paws crossed, mouths open in a silent roar. The only discordant note was a security camera. Its round eye peered down from under the eaves of the house. Pallioti made a point of looking straight at it. He had noticed a similar one mounted on the electronic gates that had stood open at the head of the drive. Either Piero Balestro had become careless, which Pallioti somehow doubted, or he was expecting them.
Probably the only reason Agata Venta hadn’t chased them down the drive with a pitchfork was because she had been too busy – first grilling her father, then alerting Dear, and obviously Very Rich, Cousin Piero.
Pallioti had never laid eyes on the man known as Massimo, had no proof that he had ever done anything wrong, and already he loathed him. He glanced around. At the perfectly manicured beds that edged the curve of the drive. At the newly painted shutters with their shiny brass fittings. At the blue glimpse of a swimming pool cover beyond a stand of camellia bushes. All traces of last night’s snow had melted away. The sun was making a half-hearted attempt to break through the white sheet of cloud. It might yet be a nice afternoon. But this place smelled rotten. Underneath the shiny new veneer, it smelled as if something was dead.
For a second, Pallioti wished Enzo was not in Brindisi, but here, and that he had put his own long-held scruples aside and decided to carry a weapon. He was on the verge of taking Eleanor Sachs by the arm, marching her down the steps and back to the car, when the front door swung open.
The woman who faced them was even smaller than Eleanor. Her hair was so black it shone in the overhead lights from the hallway beyond. Her uniform, pale blue, looked as if it had been expertly tailored for a doll. The apron was newly starched, the cuffs and collar a pristine white.
‘The Doctor is at the stables,’ she said, looking at Pallioti and ignoring Eleanor. ‘He said you should go down. Meet him there.’
Pallioti, who had reached automatically for his credentials as the door opened, slid them back into the inner pocket of his overcoat. He wouldn’t be needing them. Massimo knew exactly who he was, and why he was here.
A paved path led around the opposite side of the house from the swimming pool and down a set of steps set into the lawn. Pallioti and Eleanor followed it. As they grew close, they saw that the stables were brick, a long low block fronted by a deep overhang. A weather-vane, a galloping horse with its mane and tail flying, sat on the centre pitch of the roof. Eleanor opened her mouth, caught Pallioti’s eye and closed it again. The steps led to the edge of the front paddock where three horses grazed lazily, their tails flicking, glossy bodies covered in red rugs.
Pallioti and Eleanor had barely passed the last gatepost when a man stepped out of the door in the centre of the stable block. He wore old-fashioned riding breeches, overly shined boots and a green loden hat with a feather in it.
‘Dottore, Dottore! Such a pleasure.’ Piero Balestro virtually threw his arms open. ‘Welcome,’ he cried. The gesture strained his tweed jacket, making the buttons look as if they would pop across his chest. ‘This is an honour. I have heard so much about you.’
Pallioti wondered if that was actually true, and, if so, what the good doctor had heard. And from whom. He extended his hand.
‘Doctor Bales. Or do you use Balestro now?’
‘Ah, so you know about that, do you? My “Americanization”? But of course you do. Of course you are our all-powerful police.’
Piero Balestro smiled as if this was a great joke. Almost as funny as his knowing who Pallioti was before he introduced himself.
‘Balestro, Bales. Legally, my name is Peter Bales. Use whichever you prefer, Dottore. And this is?’ He dropped Pallioti’s hand abruptly and turned to Eleanor.
‘Professor Eleanor Sachs,’ Pallioti said. ‘She’s been helping us with our enquiries.’
‘Delighted. Delighted!’
Piero Balestro’s voice was as loud and as full of bonhomie in person as it had been on the video tape. Pallioti wondered if it bothered the horses as much as it bothered him. Apparently not. The three in the paddock hadn’t so much as looked up. A couple of others who had their heads stuck over their doors seemed to be asleep.
‘Horses,’ Balestro boomed, following Pallioti’s gaze. ‘Lawrence of Arabia said, “Somewhere in the pastures of the human soul, there are horses galloping.” Do you like horses, Dottore?’
‘No,’ Pallioti said abruptly.
It wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. But he was in no mood for a long-winded tour of Piero Balestro’s equine empire.
‘I don’t want to take up much more of your time than I have to,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re a very busy man. But we would appreciate it if we could have a few words with you. Concerning an old friend.’
‘An old friend?’
Piero Balestro smiled. He looked a
t Pallioti, his pale-blue eyes cold and sharp as ice in the broad genial features of his face.
‘And who would that be?’ he asked. ‘Surely not my dear cousin Achilleo?’
‘No,’ Pallioti said. ‘Not Achilleo. Another friend. Giovanni Tran-temento.’
‘Giovanni Trantemento?’ Piero Balestro did a reasonable imitation of looking confused.
‘Perhaps you knew him by another name,’ Pallioti said. ‘Giovanni Rossi. Il Corvo.’
‘Ah!’ He let out a guffaw. ‘Il Corvo. Il Corvo, of course. My brother-in-arms! How is the old fellow?’
‘Dead.’
Pallioti waited a moment, then he added, ‘He was shot in the back of the head at the door of his apartment. About three weeks ago. The same thing happened to someone else you know. Roberto Roblino. Or perhaps you knew him as Beppe? Giancarlo Menucci.’
‘Good heavens! Really? Both of them dead?’ Piero Balestro did not look especially surprised.
Pallioti smiled. ‘I was hoping,’ he said, ‘that you might be of some assistance.’
‘Well, of course.’ Piero Balestro spread his hands, embracing the world. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything I can do to help the police.’
Above them, the weathervane clicked and rattled. The stillness of the day had broken. For the first time since the night before, the wind had risen. It had a cold northern tang. The horses stopped eating and pricked their ears. A handful of straw skittered down the concrete apron of the stable.
‘I wonder,’ Pallioti said, ‘if there is somewhere where we might sit down?’
The interior of the house looked as if it had been bought whole from a catalogue the week before. The only discordant note was a rather mangy ageing spaniel curled in a basket beside the sitting room’s unlit fireplace. It opened one eye as they came in, then closed it again and began to snore.
Sinking down onto a chintz sofa so soft it was difficult to remain upright, Pallioti realized he’d mistaken the show at the stables. It was not meant to be Prussian Cavalry Officer, but English Country Gentleman. The picture was made complete by the appearance of the maid, who brought in tea in a china teapot. She placed the tray carefully on the table in front of Piero Balestro, and gave a small curtsey. As she left the room, Balestro winked at Pallioti.
The Villa Triste Page 40
