But they weren't here. He was and he could do what he damned well liked.
Afterwards Peroni would try to convince himself it was a considered, reasoned decision, one weighed and balanced, pros and cons, before he made up his mind. But this was, he knew, a lie, a conscious act of self-deception. The proof already lay in his pocket. On the way out, he'd subtly lifted a very full notepad from the desk of one of Vieri's taciturn Milanese minions.
There was one sentence in it about Ion Dinicu and three pages about the eminent psychiatrist Giorgio Spallone and his businesswoman wife Eva. They lived in a fancy street in Parioli. It seemed a good place to start, but only after he'd checked a couple of things on the computer first.
The villa was, like everything in the couple's quiet, rich, suburban cul-de-sac, daintily perfect. A three-story detached home from the early twentieth century, soft orange stone with colorful tiled ribbon decorations over the green shuttered windows. A small orchard of low orange and lemon trees ran between the ornate iron gate and baroque front door with its stained glass and plaster curlicues and gargoyles. In the finely raked gravel drive stood a subtle grey Maserati saloon and next to it a lurid red Ferrari .
He glanced through the window of the low sports car. There were magazines on the passenger seat, titles about women's fashion, a few coarse gossip mags, and, somewhat oddly, a glossy about men's health, with a cover of a muscular bodybuilder type straining at a piece of exercise equipment. There was nothing on the seats or the dash of the Maserati. The car looked clean and tidy. And, like the Ferrari, not much used except as some icon placed behind the iron gates, one advertising the wealth of those to whom these vehicles—so unsuited for the busy, narrow roads of Rome—belonged.
Showy jewelry for the drive, and it wasn't hard to work out which was his and which hers.
Parioli, he thought. The place was such a byword for bourgeois snobbery that the term pariolini to describe its residents had become, for some, an insult in itself. It was a little unfair. But only a little.
He walked up to the door, rang the bell, and showed his ID when a maid in a white uniform answered. She was foreign, of course. Filipino, he guessed. The name "Maria" was embroidered on the uniform. She'd been crying recently and didn't look into his face after she read the ID.
"I know we've been here already. How upsetting this is, Maria," he said. "But I do need to check a couple of small details with Signora Spallone. Please . . ."
She wasn't there, the maid said, still staring at the ground.
"Where is she?"
"Down at the gym."
Peroni was thinking about this when the woman sensed his puzzlement and added quickly, "It's Signora Spallone's job. She and the signore own it. She wanted to break the news to the people there. They all knew him."
"Of course," he said, nodding. "This is such a very small thing. I just need to check some clothing in their bedroom. Giorgio's. One quick look. The boss won't let me off shift until it's done. Can I . . . ?"
She opened the door and he walked in. The place was beautiful, spotless and palatial, walls covered in paintings, old and new, corridors dotted with what looked like imperial-era statues.
"Their bedroom?" he asked.
"They sleep apart," she said quietly and led the way upstairs.
The first bedroom they came across was huge, the size of many working-class apartments. It had its own separate lounge and a bathroom with two sinks, one toothbrush by the nearest.
He opened a wardrobe and saw line upon line of elegant dresses there.
The husband's room was as far away as it was possible to get. Right at the back of the house. He could hear the drone of traffic from the busy main road. It was small and functional and hadn't been decorated in years.
"When did Giorgio move in here?" he asked.
She looked at the bed, all perfectly made for a man who'd never sleep in it again. Then she brushed some stray cotton fibers off the sheets and said, "Two months." Nothing more.
Peroni opened the wardrobes. Plenty of expensive suits and shirts, drawers with underwear and socks. All wool or cotton. Nothing cheap or artificial.
"He was a careful dresser," he said.
She nodded. "The signore took pride in his appearance. He was a gentleman."
"A depressed gentleman?"
Her chin was almost on her chest.
"I am the maid, sir. You ask those questions of the lady."
Peroni got the address of the gym, a back street near the Campo dei Fiori in the city center, not far from the Questura. An awkward place to get to from Parioli, twenty-five minutes if the traffic was light. Then she showed him to the door. He couldn't help noticing a pile of unopened letters on a sideboard next to it. A few looked like bills. Several bore the names of banks.
He stood on the threshold for a moment, gazing at the Maserati and the Ferrari.
"Those are not cars for Rome," Peroni said. "Too big, too expensive. Too easily scratched by some stupid little kid who hates anyone who's got the money to buy them. Why anyone . . ."
"They hardly use them," the woman said. "Only when they leave the city. Every morning I wash them down. But when those big ugly things last went anywhere . . ." She shrugged.
"How do they get around, then?"
"I call a driver," she said as if he was being dim.
Peroni didn't approve of exercise. So gyms didn't impress him much. The one the Spallones owned was called the Palestra Cassius and occupied the first floor of a vast palazzo in the Via dei Pellegrini, the old pilgrims' street from the city to the bridge to the Vatican. The name intrigued him until he saw plastered behind reception a black-and-white picture of the man most people knew as Muhammad Ali, not Cassius Clay. There was a debt to history being paid here, but it wasn't a Roman one.
The place smelled of aromatic oils and sweat. There was a blank-looking girl with a ponytail behind a computer, rows and rows of unused exercise machines, and close to the small windows at the back, a boxing ring. A sign leading off to the right said SAUNA.
"Exercise I can do without," Peroni told the kid behind the desk when he walked in. "But sitting around sweating doing nothing . . . that I can manage. Is it good?"
She gave him a leaflet. It boasted of the biggest, most traditional Finnish sauna in Rome. She had her name embroidered on her T-shirt: Letizia. Someone, Spallone's wife, he guessed, liked to tag the things they owned.
"I could break into a good sweat looking at the prices," he said.
"We've got great introductory discounts," she piped up. The girl looked around at the lines of empty machines. "And discounts after that if you ask nicely."
"I always ask nicely. How many people work here? Trainers, fitness people, and the like?"
"Ten, fifteen guys. Plus me. We're good."
"I'm sure you are," Peroni said, showing her the police ID. "But I'd really like to see Signora Spallone now if you don't mind."
The woman was in her office with ten or so of her men. Every one of them was big and fit, under thirty, he guessed. Names embroidered on their shirts. Mostly foreign, from the way they spoke and muttered as he showed his ID. More than half of them blond, Nordic. Like Eva Spallone herself, he now saw.
She ushered them out and gave him a hard stare, the one civilians used when they thought the police were paying them too much attention.
"You're not Italian," he said.
"Is there something wrong with that?"
"Not at all. It's just that I always try to place people. It's a game."
Eva Spallone looked no more than thirty-five. She had short blond hair, the face of an angel, bright blue eyes, and the curvy, almost carved kind of figure Peroni normally saw in the magazines, not real life. She didn't look as if she'd been crying recently.
"Finnish," he said.
"You guess well."
"Not really." He pointed to the books and trinkets behind her desk. "You've got that blue-and-white flag there. The sauna makes a thing about being Finnish and not
many do that. Two and two tend to make four. Usually, anyway."
On the desk stood a picture of her with a man he took to be the living Giorgio Spallone. She was in a wedding dress, he in a suit. The Colosseum was in the background. So many weddings used that location for pictures after the ceremony. From the look of her, he guessed this couldn't have been more than four or five years before.
"I went to your house," he said. "There was a detail to be cleared up. We thought you'd be at home."
Her eyes misted over then. Very quickly, it seemed to him.
"This was Giorgio's business too. It was how we first met."
A tissue came out of a very expensive rose-colored leather handbag, so small it couldn't have contained much else. She wiped her pert nose then rubbed her bright blue eyes with the back of her hands.
"In a sauna?" Peroni asked.
"He loved the silence, the tranquillity. When his mind was troubled, it was the place he went. On his own."
She didn't want to answer that question.
"So you two started the business?"
"It was a wedding gift." Another dab of the eye. "He was the kindest man. Everyone here loved him. I had to tell them myself. Lately he'd been so . . . melancholy."
Peroni found he couldn't take his eyes off the wedding photo.
"What detail?" she asked.
"Was your husband a fastidious man?" Peroni asked.
Eva Spallone blinked.
"Fastidious?"
"Was he careful about what he wore? How good his clothes looked? How neat they were?"
"Very much so," she said.
"Thanks." Peroni got up.
"You came all the way for that?"
"I don't need to take up any more of your time, signora. Will you be here long? Just in case my boss thinks of anything else."
"I'm having lunch with a friend. Round the corner. So many people to tell. And you won't let me do anything with poor Giorgio. No funeral arrangements. It's okay. I understand."
He asked himself: Was that what most widows did the day their husband was found floating in the Tiber? Have lunch with someone to tell them how awkward things were?
He wondered. Most people reacted by staying close to the home they shared. A few found that too full of memories. Too painful.
"Here," she said and gave him a business card for the gym with her mobile number on it.
On the way out he stopped by the ring. Two of the hulks were sparring, landing not-so-gentle blows with puffy brown leather gloves.
Peroni watched them, thought about the gloves, and said quietly to himself, "Boxing."
The rest of the hulks stood around watching, commenting in a variety of accents, none of them native Italian. None of them looked to be in mourning. Next to the ring was a glass door marked as the sauna entrance. Peroni wandered over and took a look. He'd no idea what a sauna was like, really, so he opened the door and found himself gasping for breath almost instantly. It was like peering into a hot, damp fog. All billowing steam, so thick he couldn't see his hand in front of his face.
"You wanna try?" asked a hulk, taking him by surprise when he walked up behind.
"Isn't there someone in there already?"
The hulk laughed.
"Who knows? You share a sauna, man. That's what it's about. Togetherness." He squinted at the fog. "But no. I don't think there's anyone there. Thursdays are quiet."
"Spallone used to come here alone, I thought," Peroni told him.
"Yeah well . . ." The hulk shrugged. He looked and sounded East European, Russian maybe. Peroni couldn't quite make out the name stitched on his shirt. "That's more business than choice, I guess. Sauna's a sociable thing." A big elbow nudged Peroni in the ribs. "A place for men to talk. Get things off your chest."
"Maybe I'll try next week," Peroni told him and walked out of the building, back into the bright day. It was just after noon now. Lunchtime. He wondered what Teresa was doing in Venice, how the playacting was going at Fiumicino, what kind of culinary delicacy the ever-picky Falcone had chosen for his solitary meal in Sardinia. All this speculation made Peroni hungry so he bought a panino stuffed with rich, salty porchetta from the market and ate it from his big left fist as he drove out to Ciampino and the Roma camp.
He didn't need any directions for this place. Every cop knew where the Roma lived, dotted around the city in shifting encampments, bulldozed from time to time by the authorities only to reappear a few weeks later, a kilometer or so down the road. Several hundred, even a thousand men, women, and children lived in these places, crammed together in hovels built out of scrap wood and corrugated iron, huddled around makeshift braziers in winter, sweating out in the open in the scorching summer. For years now the Italian government had been trying to push them back into Romania and Hungary. It was like trying to sweep away the tide with a broom.
Peroni pulled through the camp gates and found his car immediately surrounded by scruffy urchin kids, hands out begging for money. He pushed through them and found himself confronted by a tall, surly-looking man with a beard. Grubby clothes, dark, smart eyes. Security around here.
"Police," Peroni said, showing his ID. "I'd like to see Ion Dinicu's father."
"Not here," the man said immediately.
Peroni sighed, looked around. There were eyes glittering in the dark mouths of the makeshift homes, all watching him. He'd dealt with these people many times in the past. It was never easy. They liked living apart from everyone else. They didn't want the police to solve their problems, offer them protection. In their own eyes they were a separate nation, detached from a world which failed to understand them. That didn't mean they were without rules or principles or beliefs. Faith even.
"If Ion isn't identified . . . claimed by someone . . ." Peroni told the man, ". . . then it's up to us to deal with his
funeral. If that's what you want, fine. But bear this in mind. We'll pass the work on to a charity, in all probability. A Catholic one since we're in Rome. If anyone wants an invitation . . ."
The bearded man stood there, silent.
"If Ion's father speaks to me now, just for a few minutes, I will make sure a request goes through for an Orthodox service. Romanian Orthodox, if you like. It can be done. It won't be unless I ask for it."
He waited.
Orthodox and Catholic. It was like football. Same game, different teams. Bitter rivals.
Two minutes later he was in a corrugated shack at the end of the camp, seated at a low plastic table with an elderly bent man who smelled of cheap dark tobacco and wood smoke.
"What do you want?" Ion Dinicu's father asked.
"To find out who killed your son."
"Why?"
Peroni shrugged and said, "It's what I do. Don't you want to know? Don't you want some kind of . . ." He hesitated. The word sounded odd, wrong, in these circumstances. ". . . justice?"
Dinicu's father had the same kind of eyes as the man on the gate. Dark and intense. Blazing now.
"Find me the man who killed my Ion and I'll show you justice," he said. "He was a good boy."
Peroni sighed.
"He was a pickpocket. A petty thief. Petty. But a thief all the same."
"That was then!" the old man cried. "Not now."
"Now he's dead. I want to know why."
The Romanian was silent for a while, then he murmured, "Everyone hates us here."
"Why did Ion come back then? After we deported him?"
"Everyone hates us there too. At least here, there's money. Work."
"Tourists on the bus. Women with purses in the park."
"No!"
"Then what?" Peroni wanted to know.
"When he came back he was a chauffeur. People wanted to go somewhere, they called. He was good. Cheaper than those taxi guys. Reliable. He had his own car."
This was interesting.
"Where's the car?"
"Gone. He went out on a job yesterday. Next thing, you send round some kid in a uniform to tell me he's dead.
What am I supposed to say?"
Peroni folded his arms, stared out of the opening of the shack, watched the kids playing with their grubby toys, the women sitting round darning clothes, hanging up washing. He couldn't shake from his head what he'd seen in the morgue that morning. How many possible explanations were there?
"This is going to seem an odd question," Peroni said. "What kind of socks did your son wear?"
The man blinked and looked at him sideways. "Is this a joke?"
"Not at all. What kind? Short? Long? Medium?"
Ion Dinicu's father rolled up the legs of his cheap black trousers. His socks ran all the way to the knee.
"These socks," he said.
The cop nodded.
"I mean," the man went on, "these socks. We shared. Socks. Shirts. Was cheaper. Easier that way."
"Right," Peroni murmured and found his mind wandering back to the city.
"What happens to my son? You won't let the Catholics have him? Don't do that to him. He don't deserve it."
Peroni said, "Give me some way I can get in touch with you. When his body's released I'll make sure they know he needs an Orthodox service. If you want to come in to the Questura . . ."
The father was shaking his head briskly.
"Then give me some way . . ."
The man reached into his pocket and handed him a card. It read "Deluxe Ciampino Limousine Service" and had two mobile-phone numbers printed beneath a colour photo of the front of an elderly but very shiny Mercedes, a young man standing beside it, smiling.
"The second phone number's mine. First was Ion's," he said.
Peroni said thanks, then walked back to the car.
By the time he was back in the city, looking for somewhere to park near the Campo dei Fiori, most of the smell of tobacco and wood smoke had left him. Peroni squeezed the battered, unmarked police Fiat into a diagonal space that left the front wheels up on the pavement of the Via dei Pellegrino and would, to his regret, force pedestrians into the cobbled street. He hated doing this, but there was work to be done.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 12/01/12 Page 10
