The Villa Triste

by Lucretia Grindle

  So far, the great effort had not turned up a silver bullet. But doing it did make him feel better. And, as Guillermo had pointed out, he could afford to look on the bright side. At least there wasn’t anyone else for Piero Balestro to kill. If he was going to do in Little Lamb, he’d have done it years ago. The only time-sensitive issue now was getting enough evidence on the old bastard to charge him before he dropped dead.

  With that happy thought, Pallioti picked up the glass Bernardo had brought him and remembered to spare a moment for the good things in life, not least of which was the fact that Lupo was open on Sunday.

  The foul weather guaranteed that the restaurant was quiet, the few occupied tables taken by regulars, old diehards, many of them alone. Usually sated, if not stuffed, after his family meals, Pallioti rarely came in on Sundays. Now, tucked into his dark corner, lulled by the soft hum of conversation and the wine, he paid little attention to the rest of the room. Bernardo removed the offending menu. A hot consommé was followed by veal chops and mushrooms, and a small plate of spinach. A pear with hard white slices of pecorino appeared. Pallioti had no idea what the wine was, and didn’t care. He was content to sip it and let the events of the weekend slip away, show themselves out like bothersome guests.

  ‘Dottore?’

  Pallioti looked up.

  ‘This comes with compliments.’

  Bernardo was holding a glass in one hand and a very expensive bottle of grappa in the other. Feeling suddenly uneasy, expecting to see the Mayor or the magistrate and wondering if he’d have to apologize to them, Pallioti looked around.

  ‘From the Signora,’ Bernardo said, setting the glass on the table.

  Pallioti glanced beyond him.

  Signora Grandolo was sitting alone, in the opposite corner. She raised a hand. It was a slight, graceful motion. Beauty knows no age. Pallioti did not know who had said it, but he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was true. Getting to his feet, he crossed the room.

  ‘I did not mean to disturb you.’ She smiled up at him. ‘It was such a foul night. I couldn’t bear the house alone. All those windows rattling.’ She gestured to the chair opposite. ‘Will you join me? Or are you too busy, keeping our world intact?’

  ‘As long as I will not disturb you, Signora.’

  ‘Never, my friend.’

  Bernardo, who had been watching them, retrieved Pallioti’s glass and hurried across with the grappa bottle. At a nod, he poured for Signora Grandolo as well. Pallioti sat down opposite her.

  She smiled.

  ‘To the good fight,’ she said, raising her glass. ‘And to comrades. Fallen and living.’

  ‘To comrades.’ Pallioti joined her, tasting the faintly sweet, sharp grappa on the back of his tongue.

  She was wearing grey tonight, a soft colour. Smoke. A discreet pair of earrings, considerable diamonds, sparkled in the candlelight. As she reached up to adjust one, Pallioti noticed again that, in contrast, her wedding and engagement rings were simple. Seeing his eyes drawn to them, she smiled.

  ‘Cosimo gave me some exceptionally beautiful things over the years,’ she said. ‘But nothing more valuable than this.’ She twisted the plain gold band. ‘Neither of my daughters wear one. They say they don’t “need rings to prove their love”. I don’t know whether to admire them, or think they’re frivolous. What is your opinion?’

  ‘Is that what it is, a ring – proof?’

  ‘No.’ Signora Grandolo shook her head. ‘It’s just a ring. And some memories.’

  She raised her hand to the light, letting the candle catch the dull gleam of the gold and the deep shine in the small cluster of stones that was her engagement ring.

  ‘But,’ she added, ‘they’re a testament too, I think. And a souvenir. A vow. A kind of promise that has nothing to do with proof. Would you agree?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Pallioti said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She regarded the rings, then looked at him. ‘My daughters have great faith in the rightness of things,’ she said. ‘In the inevitability of the correct conclusion, without the assistance of things like vows and remembering. It’s a belief in natural justice, I suppose. I’m glad they have it. But I’m not sure I share it. Perhaps that has something to do with the war.’

  ‘Where did you spend it?’

  Even as Pallioti asked the question, he wondered whether it was impolite, whether it sounded as if he were somehow angling to find out about her background, or her age, or any number of other things she would rather not tell him. He thought about Caterina Cammaccio’s warning – that where the war was concerned it was sometimes better not to have an enquiring mind – and of her father who would apparently have found that horrific, and smiled, as if the memory was his own.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  Pallioti shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said, sipping his grappa. ‘Just something I read. About the dangers of enquiring minds.’

  ‘Better, on the whole, to have them than not, surely?’ Signora Grandolo raised her own glass. Then she added, ‘I was here, at the beginning. We moved about. Cosimo was in Rome, then in a POW camp. The bank is Florentine, of course. But his family has a house in Rome. You sit down to lunch and look out on the Palatine Hill. We lived there after we were married, for a few years, before he came back here to run the bank. I could never settle to it. Do you know Rome?’

  ‘I know it. But not well.’

  ‘No, don’t tell me—’ She smiled and sipped her grappa. ‘A city is like a woman, you know her well only after living with her for a lifetime?’

  Pallioti felt himself blush.

  ‘Something like that, I suppose. Although you’ve managed to make it sound faintly ridiculous.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’ She shook her head. ‘I think it’s true. About cities, and people. When you reach my age, a lifetime begins to feel short, to get to know anything. Which still surprises me. Surely, you must find that in your work?’

  ‘Continually.’

  The answer was more heartfelt than he had intended it to be. Pallioti laughed.

  ‘The only thing I have found I can be certain of,’ he said, ‘is that I know very little, and I’m very likely to be wrong.’

  ‘Then how do you ever solve anything?’ She put her glass down, her face suddenly serious. ‘How do you ever solve anything or convict anyone, if you can’t know?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t say you can’t know. It was the amount of knowing I was talking about. It’s a question of persistence, really,’ he added, answering her question. ‘Of putting together a picture. Piece by piece. Until you see it. Until the story makes sense. Until all the pieces fit. With no cheating. No cutting and trimming. Then, you know. Not that it always helps you,’ he added. ‘In fact, a lot of the time it makes no difference at all.’ He shrugged. ‘But it doesn’t matter, because most people simply tell you. If you wait long enough.’

  ‘Confess?’

  She smiled as if she found this hard to believe.

  Pallioti nodded.

  ‘Eventually. They don’t always realize they’re doing it. But they do.’

  ‘So, it’s true then – the lure of the confessional – that policemen are like priests.’

  ‘I suppose so, Signora.’ Pallioti smiled. ‘In more ways than you would think.’

  ‘That sounds rather sinister.’

  Before Pallioti could consider this, Bernardo approached. Both of their glasses were nearly empty. He refilled them and turned back to the room. Tucked into the corner, their table was an island surrounded by flickering light and the warm lapping murmur of voices.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Signora Grandolo asked a moment later, ‘that it’s not so much people telling you things, as you knowing how to hear them? It seems to me,’ she added, picking up her glass, ‘that you policemen, good policemen – and I should think there are only very few of you – are rather more like hunting dogs than priests. I don’t mean the sense of smell. I mean what you hear – the whistle. The rustle in the underg
rowth that the rest of us are deaf to. It’s a gift, I suspect.’ She smiled. ‘Like perfect pitch. Only a very few people have it. And it can’t be taught.’

  Pallioti shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

  In fact, he was absolutely certain that she was right. He had been aware of it since he was a young man – the famous policeman’s instinct – and always a little uncomfortable with it, partly because, like all ‘gifts’, it had little to do with logic and even less to do with being deserving. His career, he knew, to some extent had flourished through no merit of his own.

  Signora Grandolo was watching him.

  ‘You, for instance,’ she said. ‘You heard something, even through decades, didn’t you? That caused you to come looking for those three men the other night?’

  He looked at her, cradling his glass in his palm.

  ‘Did you find them?’ she asked.

  The clear, thick liquid shimmered, clinging to the edges of the crystal.

  ‘Yes.’

  Pallioti could smell the faint trace of her perfume, mingling with the burning scent of the candle.

  ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘I found them.’

  ‘And were they what you expected?’

  ‘I think so.’ He looked at her. ‘Two of them are dead. The third—’ He shook his head. ‘The third, Signora, is the sort of man we fought the war to be rid of.’

  ‘We’ll never get rid of them. Those sort of men.’ She reached out, her fingers touching the back of his hand. ‘That’s something else,’ she said, ‘that Cosimo taught me. That they’re part of us, those kind of men. That the best we can ever do is contain them.’

  Her fingertips were as light as a butterfly’s wing.

  When she smiled and took her hand away the memory of her touch lingered on his skin.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Pallioti swallowed his first espresso of the morning and put the cup down abruptly. It was Monday, the start of a new week and he had slept well, and woken to find that the rain had departed, leaving the air sharp and clear as crystal.

  The barman raised an eyebrow. Pallioti nodded for another as he reached into the pocket where his mobile phone had begun to hop about like a cricket. He spent a few moments talking to Guillermo who, energized by his new fact-finding mission, had arrived at the office an hour earlier than anyone else. Having decided on their priorities for the day, and reiterated once more that it might be best not to share them with Enzo Saenz, or the magistrate, or, God forbid, the Mayor, should he for some reason appear in the office, Pallioti slid the phone closed and tried not to think of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. He was putting it away when his fingers encountered a folded piece of paper. Pulling it out of his pocket, he saw the message left by the London Embassy giving him the personal contact number for Giovanni Trantemento’s pen pal, Lord David Eppsy.

  Pallioti smoothed it on the sleek zinc countertop of the bar, then downed the second espresso, left an overly generous tip, and pushed through the door and onto the street. A moment later he stood, like the rest of the city, on the pavement with his mobile phone clamped to his ear. It was not until he was listening to a burbling and then a ringing that it occurred to him to wonder what time it might be in Sri Lanka.

  By the time David Eppsy answered his phone, Pallioti had stepped into the corner of a small piazza, sheltering from the road and the sound of traffic. He concentrated on a line of wheeled rubbish carts parked against the opposite wall as he apologized for the disturbance of calling and explained who he was. As it turned out, he did not have to ask about the time difference, because Lord Eppsy told him.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ he said, not sounding remotely disturbed. ‘A voice from Florence! The past both literal and temporal! It’s evening here, Inspector. And I can tell you with confidence that ahead of you lies a very good day.’

  Pallioti wondered what he had been drinking. Probably gin.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and added, ‘I am calling concerning a Signor Giovanni Trantemento. I believe you knew him?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes,’ David Eppsy said quickly. ‘Had a message about something. Was why I got back to you. Spot of bother, I gather?’

  Large spot, Pallioti was tempted to say. But he confined himself to simply stating that the man was dead.

  ‘Oh. Oh, dear. Dear me. How very sad. Poor old fellow. I am sorry to hear that.’

  David Eppsy was either doing a very good imitation, or he was genuinely both surprised and unhappy to hear the news. He realized that, other than his sister, David Eppsy was about the only person who had even bothered to pretend to sound distressed on hearing the news that Giovanni Trantemento was dead.

  David Eppsy swallowed. Pallioti thought he could hear the clink of ice cubes.

  ‘He was,’ the Englishman said, ‘well, a gentleman. Dying breed. Rare as the auk. And of course, a connoisseur, in his field. Highly respected. A pleasure to do business with. He’ll be a loss. Damn shame. Too rare, these days,’ David Eppsy said again. ‘A gentleman, of the old school. Too rare. I suppose,’ he asked a second later, ‘that it was a heart attack? Or—’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Apparently the embassy had told David Eppsy nothing in the message they had left asking him to get in touch. Just as well. Being of the old school himself, Pallioti still put some stock in the value of surprise.

  ‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that Signor Trantemento was murdered.’

  ‘Good Lord!’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Good Lord!’ David Eppsy said again. ‘Murdered? How on earth did that happen?’

  ‘I am afraid, in the most common way,’ Pallioti said. ‘With a gun. Someone shot him, in his apartment.’

  ‘Good Lord. How horrible.’

  ‘Yes.’

  You don’t know the half of it, Pallioti thought. He had a sudden vision of the terror on Giovanni Trantemento’s face, of his broken glasses, his open mouth. Of Enzo, reaching down, dabbing his finger and pronouncing, ‘salt’. He shoved it aside.

  ‘The reason I am contacting you,’ Pallioti went on, ‘and I am sorry to take up your time, is that we found a letter from you to Signor Trantemento. It arrived the day he was killed. 1st November.’

  ‘Ah.’ There was a pause. ‘Ah, yes,’ David Eppsy said. ‘Yes, of course.’

  Pallioti had not really expected him to deny it, but he was glad, all the same, that he hadn’t.

  ‘I had just written to him, about our little – arrangement.’

  For the first time a note of coyness crept into the Englishman’s voice, a slight furtive edge. Pallioti ignored it.

  ‘The letter,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me, exactly, what was in the envelope?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Well, the note, of course. I assume you have that.’

  ‘Yes. And what else?’

  ‘Ummm.’

  David Eppsy lowered his voice. Pallioti could hear him walking. There was the crunch of what might have been gravel, the creak of a wooden floor.

  ‘The note, yes,’ Pallioti prompted. ‘And?’

  David Eppsy cleared his throat.

  ‘A money order,’ he said. ‘For three thousand pounds. Whatever that is in euros.’

  ‘I see. A money order?’

  ‘Well, two, actually. Bit more discreet, that way. They were issued—’ David Eppsy laughed, and for the first time Pallioti felt sorry for him. ‘Issued by Western Union,’ he said. ‘Rather good, actually.’ His voice was suddenly overly jovial. ‘Like book tokens. Saves you writing a cheque.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pallioti said. ‘Exactly. Will you have a record of the numbers?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Of course.’

  David Eppsy sounded so pleased at the idea of being helpful that Pallioti wondered if he were a younger son.

  ‘Of course,’ he added. ‘At least I should think so. Somewhere at home.’ His voice fell again. ‘Do you need them now?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I suppose it’s possible. And I do want to help. I could arrange f
or someone – but it would be rather, well—’

  ‘I don’t need them now,’ Pallioti said. ‘I may not need them at all.’

  ‘Well, if you do—’ The relief in the man’s voice was palpable. ‘And if there’s anything else I can do. Anything at all. Poor old fellow.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pallioti agreed. ‘Poor old fellow. Forgive me,’ he added, ‘for interrupting your holiday. You have been most helpful.’

  ‘Inspector!’ David Eppsy broke in just as he was about to finish the call. ‘Inspector,’ he said. ‘I wonder if – well, has there been a funeral yet?’

  ‘No. No,’ Pallioti said. ‘We’ll be releasing the body shortly. To his sister and nephew.’

  ‘Well, when there is, a funeral, if you know – would it be possible for someone to contact me? I’d be grateful.’ He gave a little laugh. It didn’t sound very jolly. ‘One likes to send flowers,’ David Eppsy said. ‘Gesture of respect, and all that.’

  ‘I’ll be certain to let you know. I’ll call you myself.’

  ‘’Preciate it. Damn shame.’

  Half a world away David Eppsy was still muttering when Pallioti closed his phone. He stood for a moment, watching a pair of pigeons as they squabbled over an orange peel beside one of the rubbish bins. They puffed their feathers, cooed and strutted, then lost interest and flew away. Pallioti opened his phone again. He made one brief call before he turned and walked quickly towards the river.

  It was barely 9 a.m.; people were still scurrying to work. A bus turned into the street, somehow avoiding taking the corner with it, and lumbered up the pavement. The door to Giovanni Trante-mento’s building burst open just as it pulled away. A woman dashed out. She ran a few steps towards the bus stop, then stopped and swore. Pallioti caught the huge front door before it closed. As he slipped inside, he saw the woman step into the street. Shaking her head and buttoning her coat, she mounted the opposite pavement and started the now inevitable walk to work.