A Few Drops of Blood

by Jan Merete Weiss

  “There I could be of use, especially after the Allies landed. I spoke French and some English. Paltry but enough, and that’s how I became the liaison with the Americans. We catalogued every monument, mural, church, fresco, statue. Americans and Italians working together: artists, art historians, craftspeople. It’s not like now with all the squabbling and intellectualizing. A great deal was saved. Here in Naples, only the Angevin frescoes in Santa Chiara were beyond repair, and I wept for them.”

  “I’ve only seen them in photographs,” Natalia said. “A great loss.”

  “Enough nostalgia,” said the countess. “Come.”

  The plush, flowery cushions on the garden chairs were surprisingly comfortable. The maid brought out a large platter with dishes of mango and pineapple and a variety of cheeses and placed them on the round, glass-topped table alongside two chilled glasses of pinot grigio and a full carafe.

  “The bread basket, Ida,” the countess reminded.

  “Yes, ma’am.” She set out individual plates and knives.

  Natalia sampled the brie. “Delicious.”

  “How goes the investigation?” the countess said.

  “Well enough, but we haven’t wrapped it up as yet.”

  “No doubt you can’t talk about it. I shouldn’t have asked.” She smiled. “Shameless curiosity.”

  “Not at all. In fact, I’m hoping to clear some up today.”

  The maid appeared with the bread and offered it to Natalia before setting it down.

  “Thank you.” Natalia took a slice and added some brie as she addressed the countess. “I can’t help wondering why Vincente and the Mr. Bagnatti were brought to your garden.”

  “I’ve wondered myself.”

  “I also keep wondering why you omitted mentioning the extent of your friendship with Vincente Lattaruzzo.”

  “I thought I’d explained. I’d confided my humiliation?”

  “Not association?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re originally from Cantalupo.”

  “Yes,” the countess said, absently winding the stem of her wineglass.

  “Vincente Lattaruzzo’s parents were from there as well.”

  “Mmm. I believe that’s right.”

  “Do you know where Ernesto Scavullo is from?” Natalia said.

  “Cantalupo.”

  “Yes … so you knew that, too?”

  “Most certainly. If I didn’t already know, the newspapers remind us at every turn, almost as if Naples were trying to disown him.”

  “Apparently Scavullo’s father—Gianni—was like you, barely in his teens during the war—among the region’s youngest resistance members. He worked closely with your father.”

  “Papa was a farmer with large holdings. Gentry. He and the Scavullos didn’t have much in common except their hatred of the Black Shirts and Mussolini. They conspired against the fascists. Later fought side by side against the Germans as partisans. Young Gianni Scavullo took up arms to kill fascists, which he did with great efficiency. He was a very good strategist and an even better shot.”

  “At twelve?”

  “Twelve … fourteen. Somewhere in there. My father befriended him. When the Allies invaded, father took on the task of helping escaped prisoners of war, hid them. In the forests, on farms, sometimes out in the open, working as field hands. They rescued so many.”

  “Brave men,” Natalia said.

  “That they were. The Germans hung him. My beloved papa. With piano wire.”

  Chapter 11

  Natalia returned to the station and found Dr. Agari waiting.

  “I just spoke with the contessa,” she said, as she followed Natalia into the office. “How did it go?”

  “The contessa is quite an amazing woman,” Natalia answered, “as I’m sure you know.”

  “Quite a story, isn’t it?”

  Natalia nodded. “You knew all of it?”

  “Not all. Not until I was grown. She opened up to you,” Francesca said. “That is unusual. My grandmother was aware, of course,” she went on. “Even though Nella rarely spoke of her father’s arrest and execution or the dreadful man who denounced him to the Germans. Her mother lost her mind. She was institutionalized. An aunt here in Naples took Nella in, and she turned up one day at the school my grandmother attended. Nella wouldn’t speak to anyone. My nonna eventually won her trust, and she befriended me as well. We all remained devoted friends. It was my nonna who introduced Nella to the conte. They married and were happy for forty years.”

  “There weren’t any children, I take it.”

  “No. What’s not in the official files is that Nell, in her teens, was arrested by the Italian fascists after her father’s imprisonment and discovered to be with child. She had sought solace in a wartime romance and gotten pregnant. They operated on her, aborted the fetus, and deliberately sterilized her as punishment.”

  “My God.”

  “When she came out of the anesthesia, the doctor, wearing full fascist regalia under his white coat, quoted Mussolini to her. You know, the one about those with empty cradles having no right to empire?”

  “Jesus, how vile.”

  “You think she may have been involved?”

  “She lost her father to the German fascists because of the Lattaruzzos, and now you’re telling me she lost a child to the Italian fascists. I don’t want to think it possible of her to wish for vengeance, but I just don’t know.”

  “Are you adding her to your list of suspects?”

  “I have no choice at the moment.”

  “If you could be discreet about it …”

  “Of course.”

  “Have a good evening, Captain.”

  “You, too, Doctor,” she said, wondering how Francesca would enjoy hers, troubled as she must be about the possibility her Nella was involved in a vicious crime.

  The mops and buckets had been taken in. The door was open. A lone fluorescent bulb lighted the interior of the shop. Across the street, the markets were closed, their medieval arches dark.

  Natalia stepped into the shop.

  “Sera, signora.”

  “Sera,” Natalia said as the proprietor stood and pulled her black sweater around her shoulders. She might have stayed open to catch a stray customer, but more likely she was a widow, children long flown from the nest. She must have been lonely. Hungry for company.

  Natalia had also worked late, filing reports that were less than urgent. If she were honest with herself, she thought, working late was her way to avoid returning to an empty house. Peas in a pod, she thought, as the woman shifted a carton so Natalia could pass through.

  She surveyed the shelves for something to buy, then settled on a container of dish soap and two wine glasses. How could this woman survive on what these purchases brought in? If the place saw a dozen customers in a day, was it a lot? Probably a money laundering operation for one of her children’s illicit businesses. Lucrative for all concerned and socially conscious at the same time, providing Mama a purpose in life beyond visiting her grandchildren and attending daily mass.

  The donna dusted each glass as if Natalia had purchased stemware of fine crystal, rather than clunky glass molded in China. Then she wrapped them in yellowing pages torn from Rivelare.

  Natalia stepped onto her balcony as the sun slipped away, and the swallows started up. Officially the harbingers of spring, in Naples the delicate birds were evident from the first blooms of hibiscus right into the first chilly weeks of December.

  The black shutters of the elegant palazzo on the corner swung open, revealing its high ceilings and cinnamon-colored walls. A woman on the second floor put down her packages and stepped out of her shoes. She disappeared for a moment, then returned cradling a fat, well-tended angora cat. Together they surveyed the rosy dusk.

  Natalia would have imagined the countess with such a pampered creature. Odd that such a cultivated woman, with a perfectly tended garden, would exhibit such devotion to feral cats. Perhaps the de
privations of the war had softened her heart toward homeless and underfed creatures.

  There was just enough light to see the next day’s lessons laid out on the teacher’s desk in the school across the way. Lessons left little room for ambiguity. So unlike her line of work where there were too many possible answers. Was the murder of Vincente Lattaruzzo and Carlo Bagnatti a crime of passion, or was it possibly a well-planned vendetta? She tried to imagine both scenarios as her neighbor took her cat inside and drew the curtains.

  A small tremor rippled through the district. Lights went on, and people emerged on their balconies and in the street. Instantly the scene brought to mind the big quake in 1980, when the floor shook violently and the furniture danced. Nonna had screamed, grabbed her purse and rushed them both out into the dusk and a sea of neighbors, many in their nightclothes.

  They hurried toward Capodimonte as streets cracked open, and buildings and trees fell. Across the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius boiled but failed to explode.

  Thousands of people were displaced. Chaos reigned, and once again strengthened the Camorra. The clans rushed into rebuilding and reaped fortunes from the calamity. Their shoddy concrete resurrected whole neighborhoods. Ugly buildings sprouted like mushrooms. Artisans lost their small businesses: toy makers, porcelain craftsmen, tinsmiths. The Camorra thrived in the disaster, quickly taking over legitimate new enterprises. For more than thirty years Naples stagnated, ignored by the central government, the people abandoned. The Camorra offered the only reliable employment for many. By early ’83, there were a dozen gangs; a decade later, more than a hundred.

  So much faded from memory, but that day remained vivid. Her father leaving for work in the dark, as he did faithfully six mornings a week. And the world splitting open and quaking.

  Tonight, as then, Mount Vesuvius sent sparks into the ink-blue sky. Experts regularly contended the volcano could blow anytime, but Neapolitans took the prediction in stride. Fatalists at heart, they believed Vesuvius would do what Vesuvius would do.

  Damn Cervino, she thought. Such an unappetizing man. But he had a point. Divided loyalties were dangerous. Cervino had a right to the large chip on his shoulder, but his righteous anger against the Camorra and identifying her with them made him dangerous to her. She’d have to watch her back.

  He’d never married and lived with his sister, a nurse at the polyclinic. There had never been the slightest whisper of scandal about him—certainly no love affair with a colleague. Moral high ground that Cervino smugly held to. He had come in as a warrant officer. Which meant that, however exceptional his police work, he’d never rise above lieutenant. Unjust certainly, but she wasn’t to blame.

  Being a Carabiniere was an honor, whereas Natalia had taken the exam as a lark. And then she’d received such a high score, she was fast-tracked through the law portion of the officers’ program. Marshal Cervino had been in the ranks for more than two decades when she arrived already a captain.

  She had assumed she’d work five or six years before she married and raised a brood. Presumably with Gino, her cellist boyfriend. But as time went by, she’d gotten involved with her job, and little by little her career accelerated, as she was promoted from the art squad to major crime investigation in ROS.

  As her fiancé’s musical career heated up, his itinerary became international, so he was touring more than he was home. By the time he invited her to live in Milan with him, she’d been promoted to major investigations, and the reality of marriage to a famous absentee musician had grown less appealing.

  He couldn’t compete with the excitement of her job and the quiet privacy she relished after the rigors of dealing with corpses and grieving families and armed felons. Badge and he seemed incompatible.

  With several childbearing years yet ahead, Natalia assumed there would be another relationship in the future and plenty of time to worry about getting pregnant and to figure out with whom. Pino had taken up more than a little of that precious time, a span she no longer could deny. In a year she would be forty.

  Chapter 12

  Natalia took a sip of cappuccino, enjoying the morning quiet she knew wouldn’t last. She needed to catch up on paperwork, to strategize the next step in their investigation. In fifteen minutes she had to go out, but she needed a minute to organize her thoughts, to “center” herself, as Pino always advised.

  A formal message arrived from the colonel. Natalia checked the seams of her stockings, smoothed her grey suit jacket and reported to his office as ordered. She found him waiting, standing at his desk, hands clasped behind his back, insignia glinting. Eyes, too. Her boss was not happy.

  “The contessa a suspect? Really!” He rose from his chair to pace across to the windows.

  “It’s unavoidable, Colonel. The possibility is there that Ernesto Scavullo perpetrated the killings on her behalf, obligated as his family was to avenge her father. The likelihood of her initiating this crime is also present.”

  “A woman as genteel as she, so many years later? I find it hard to believe, I must say.”

  “As do I. She convincingly denies wanting vengeance so many generations later.”

  “Then why?”

  “If she was concerned about what Vincente Lattaruzzo intended to reveal in his memoir, then this would be the moment to call in the long standing debt owed her father.”

  “To discourage the book’s publication by removing its author?”

  “Yes. There’s no indication Ernesto Scavullo knew anything about the family memoir and probably could care less if he did. She did know and cares very much.”

  “And the murder of this Carlo Bagnatti?”

  “He was widely hated, needless to say. His rumormongering may well have displeased and damaged someone enough that it called forth terrible retribution. Or he and Lattaruzzo may have been caught by a betrayed lover and murdered out of jealousy. Or … he was simply in the wrong place at the moment they pounced on Lattaruzzo.”

  “Hated that much?”

  “Angelina is researching his pieces, working up a list. It’s going to be a long one.”

  “What about this Fabretti fellow?” Colonel Donati asked.

  “Pietro Fabretti paid for his friend’s funeral. He loved Bagnatti, I’m fairly sure. But they hadn’t been involved for many years. There’s no motive that I can see.”

  “How are Director Garducci and Stefano Grappi behaving?”

  “Stefano stays close to home, nursing his grief. His shock at learning of his lover’s death seemed genuine, like his present depression, though both could be contrived. He turns out to be the beneficiary of Bagnatti’s will after Lattaruzzo’s passing, whom he succeeds as the inheritor of the columnist’s sizeable estate.”

  “Large enough to inspire this debauched murder?”

  “No, but perhaps a satisfying topping to Vincente’s betrayal of him with Garducci and Bagnatti and whoever else.”

  “That’s quite the twist.”

  “A surprise, for sure. Though Stefano Grappi denies any knowledge of his inclusion in Bagnatti’s will, as if he were some kind of relative by extension.”

  “You’re sure the document is genuine?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Garducci?”

  “Director Garducci has buried himself in work. He has a volatile, violent temperament, and he may have been jilted by Vincente.”

  “In favor of Bagnatti?”

  “Possibly. Or Stefano Grappi. I haven’t gotten the impression Vincente Lattaruzzo was much into monogamy.”

  “And Boss Scavullo?”

  “Ernesto Scavullo took his mother to Sunday Mass at the Duomo. Drove her in his Lamborghini. He went on to a sports pub and met up with some cronies to watch Napoli defeat Frankfurt. The next day he lunched with his favorite Bengalese girlfriend at the Café San Felice. Outdoor table, full view from the street.”

  “Not a care in the world, eh? The modern day don.”

  “Ernesto Scavullo has five thousand friends on Facebook.”

&n
bsp; “Jesu! Another Camorra hero.” Colonel Fabio drew himself up. “All right, Captain. That will be all.”

  Natalia needed air, a walk in the light away from the unrelenting pressure of the station and her job and her boss’s visible pain at hearing conjectures about the countess. She wasn’t so happy about her suspicions herself.

  On the corner of Via Librai and Via del Duomo, the flower vendor arranged a voluminous bouquet of girasole and greens. The sunflowers’ black velvet centers, surrounded by voluminous gold petals, seemed a reversal of the day’s sun, its golden brilliance piercing in places a dark blanket of black storm clouds and matching her mood well.

  Natalia walked. A young woman balanced two cake boxes filled with roses and baby’s breath as she and Natalia stood side by side waiting to cross the busy street. Natalia took in her creamy neck and a blue rose tattooed there. It took her a moment to realize she knew the serious young woman with black hair. She had provided information in the Steiner case the previous year. And she’d fallen hard for Pino.

  Besides the change in hair length and color, the skinny girl had filled out. And her young face was now free of piercings

  “Tina?” The girl turned. “Captain Monte,” Natalia said.

  “Oh. Yeah.” She shifted the boxes.

  The light changed, and they joined the throng crossing the street.

  “You left your job at the café?”

  “Business was slow,” Tina looked past Natalia.

  Mama must have stepped in, Natalia thought. It figured. Mama was a Gracci, as Natalia had discovered when she ran a background check on the girl. Among other business ventures, the Graccis used florist bouquets to deliver drugs to special customers—socialites, businessmen, even government officials. Mostly they employed underage children for the task, but Tina’s cover was nearly as good: a lovely young woman transporting flowers. Who would imagine that below the fragrant creamy petals and delicate baby’s breath, several ounces of powder lay nestled in tiny satin bags? All the more perfect since Tina was pregnant.

  “Everything okay?” Natalia asked.

  “I got these deliveries.”