by Mark Mills
I was cleaning his room. It was on the sideboard.
Then you're forgiven.
I think I'll bake it.
Excuse me?
The fish, Signora.
DINNER WAS A TRYING AFFAIR.
It didn't help that the meal was billed as being in his honor. He had always struggled with that kind of thing. Some children glowed with self-importance at their birthday parties; others blushed, even when they managed to blow all the candles out.
It didn't help that he was seated directly opposite Maurizio down one end of the table. It didn't help that Harry and Antonella had returned from Florence the worse side of two cocktails each, giggling like love-struck teenagers. And it didn't help that he now knew for certain that someone—someone at the table, or the someone serving them—had been going through his papers in the study.
He knew, because he had laid a trap, stacking his notebooks in an apparently careless (yet very particular) fashion, laying his ballpoint pen on a pile of loose papers so that its tip pointed directly to the upper left-hand corner of the top sheet. Simple yet effective. The idea of lacing the bait with something had only occurred to him at the last moment. He had slipped a sheet among the papers.
On it was written in big bold capitals: i know you're looking through my things.
Whoever it was had done a good job of covering their tracks. Not good enough, though. The notebooks were too neatly stacked, the pen slightly out of alignment. Fortunately, Antonella was beyond suspicion. He had set the trap after her departure for Florence with Harry, and it had been sprung before their return.
The ruse with the sheet of paper served him less well than he thought it might. In fact, about the only thing he learned was that it's impossible to second-guess someone who knows you're trying to second-guess them. He saw signs of guilt wherever he turned.
Maurizio and Chiara had moved into the house above the farmyard earlier in the day. They wanted to be around to help with the final preparations for the party, just two days off now. In an uncharacteristic display of selflessness—brought on, no doubt, by the brace of gin fizzes—Harry offered to vacate his room so that they could sleep in the villa.
Signora Docci sweetly acknowledged his noble gesture, while pointing out the obvious: that a lack of bedrooms was rarely a pressing concern at Villa Docci. No, it was a question of principle. "It's their farmhouse, and they hardly ever use it. It's good for them to use it.
"My mother's right. It's good for us to use it," said Maurizio tightly.
"It'll be one of their last opportunities."
Everyone looked to Signora Docci. She savored the moment before continuing.
"I plan to be living there myself next month."
"Mamma . . . ?" frowned Maurizio.
"That's right, I'm moving out of the villa. And you and Chiara are moving in, I hope."
"Are you sure?"
"Of course I'm sure. Next month." She lowered her eyes modestly and said in Italian, "I'm sorry if it's taken longer than you thought."
Adam despised what he saw in Maurizio's face: the spark of deep satisfaction behind the eyes, the struggle not to smile. He would soon be master of Villa Docci. The long years of waiting were over. Finally, there was a concrete, tangible purpose to his crime.
Maurizio must have sensed Adam studying him, because he shot a quick glance across the table and the look vanished from his face. It was the same sudden composure he had brought to bear in the memorial garden, when Adam had sprung on him the subject of fratricide in Dante's Inferno.
The mask was not allowed to slip again for the remainder of the meal. Even when it came time for Adam to detail his discoveries for Maurizio and Chiara's benefit, Maurizio's expression never faltered. He was not shaken by all the talk of murder and intrigue. Quite the reverse. He embraced it, heaping praise on Adam for his achievements and firing off questions to keep the discussion alive.
Adam was beginning to doubt the picture of the man he had painted for himself when he witnessed the one other wobble in Maurizio's performance. It occurred toward the end of the evening, just before Antonella left.
Signora Docci mooted the theory that Federico's murder of Flora and her lover, enshrined in the garden, had acted as some kind of curse on the family, coloring the fortunes of the villa's occupants, consigning the Doccis to centuries of ill luck, violence and tragedy.
Her words cast a momentary pall over Maurizio's features, a sadness tinged with a telling self-pity. "That's very interesting," he said.
Chiara threw her husband a curious look and said in Italian, "Since when are you superstitious?"
Since the moment it exonerated him of his own crime, thought Adam; since the moment it allowed him to view himself as a victim of some grander design set in motion by a murderous ancestor. Maurizio had leapt too readily at his mother's wild theory. That had been his mistake, and it shored up Adam's flagging suspicions.
Only as Antonella was leaving did Adam realize he'd paid her hardly any attention. She'd gone to a lot of effort to make the meal a special occasion, buying two magnificent fish, which Maria had cooked to perfection, and he had barely acknowledged the fact. Worst of all, he wouldn't be seeing her again until the party. No one would. Something had come up at work. She hoped to get away early on Friday if at all possible, but she couldn't promise she'd appear much before the first guests arrived. These were about her last words before she disappeared into the night.
Maurizio and Chiara followed suit soon after. Adam noted that they stopped and kissed each other as they made their way across the parterre. When Signora Docci announced that she too was ready for bed, Harry told her to wait a moment, he had something for her. He disappeared inside the villa, promptly returning with his scuffed leather shoulder bag. From it he produced something wrapped in a paint-bespattered piece of cloth. He laid the object carefully, almost reverently, on the table in front of him. It was about a foot long, not too thick—like a slender log.
"I was going to give it to Adam. But it's for you, a thank you. If you don't like it, give it to Adam. And if he doesn't like it. . . well, I'll shoot myself." He let out a nervous laugh.
That's when Adam realized that one of Harry's own creations lay swaddled in the old rag. Maybe he should have guessed sooner, but he'd never seen anything by Harry on this scale. All the other works had been at least three or four times the size, considerably more in the case of the "giant mechanical penis."
This moniker, coined in relative innocence by Adam, had almost brought the two of them to blows right there in the Bath Academy sculpture studio at Corsham during Adam's one and only visit. Welded together from "recovered pieces"—Harry's fancy phrase for scrap metal—the work in question was part building, part machine, and, in Adam's firm opinion, blatantly phallic.
For a horrible moment it occurred to Adam that the thing on the table, the thing about to be unveiled by Harry and handed to Signora Docci, might actually be a maquette for the same sculpture, a preparatory "sketch" in miniature.
It wasn't. It was the first figurative piece by Harry that Adam had ever seen. And it was good. He knew it was good the moment he set eyes on it, because his very first thought was that it had almost been his, and now it never would be, not unless Signora Docci didn't like it. But he could see in her eyes that she did.
It was a creature, almost a man, but not quite. Mounted on a slate base, it had long spindly legs of welded steel that climbed to a thick barrel chest, redolent of an insect's thorax. There was no skin as such, just an irregular mesh of slender steel struts, each no thicker than a matchstick, which reached to the heart of the creature, leaving you in no doubt that it had been built from the inside out. The head consisted of two shapeless steel protrusions. The arms, like the legs, were skeletally thin, and were raised above this stumpy nonhead and crossed at the wrists.
Somehow, the little insect-man was both robust and delicate, noble yet fragile, brave yet cowardly.
"It's made of mild steel. Do you li
ke it?" Harry asked tentatively.
"Am I allowed to like him?" replied Signora Docci. "I want to, but I'm not sure he wants me to."
Harry beamed, happy with her reply. His head crept around to Adam.
"Well done."
"Really?"
"Harry . . . really."
Signora Docci held the sculpture up to the candlelight. "He's so sure of himself but so frightened." She paused. "I see Mussolini at the end, before they strung him up with piano wire in Piazzale Loreto."
"That's good," said Harry.
"Maybe it's the way the arms are crossed above the head, but I see you and me in the Anderson shelter down the end of the garden in Kennington when the bombs were coming down."
"That's good too," said Harry.
"Thank you," said Signora Docci. "I love him and I will live with him for the rest of my life."
Before carrying her prize off to bed with her, she told them that they needn't worry about what to wear to the party; something had been sorted out for them. She also told them that she'd be heading down into Florence in the morning with Maria for the final fitting of her dress. They both declined the offer of a lift, though for different reasons.
Adam knew that Maurizio and Chiara also planned to be away in the morning—they were dropping in on some friends who lived to the south. The timing was good. An opportunity for a snoop around the top floor of the villa was shaping up nicely.
"What's the matter?" asked Harry, the moment they found themselves alone together.
"Nothing's the matter." "Come on . . ."
"I wasn't lying, Harry, I love the sculpture."
"That's not what I mean and you know it."
"I'm fine, I'm just tired and a bit drunk."
"It's Mum and Dad, isn't it?"
He felt bad snatching at the line Harry had thrown him, but it would keep his brother happy. And it did. They chatted some more about the situation at home. Meanwhile, Adam's head was on another matter altogether. He was thinking about the morning and how to shake Harry off before visiting the top floor.
The counterintuitive solution came to him as they were making their way upstairs to bed.
"Do you want to have a look around the top floor?" he asked.
What could Harry say? Adam had already told him enough of the story for it to be an intriguing prospect. By the time he'd ladled on some of the more graphic details gleaned from Chiara, Harry was raring to go.
SIGNORA DOCCI AND MARIA LEFT FOR TOWN SOON AFTER breakfast. Harry was all for making a move there and then, but Adam was more cautious. It seemed like an eternity before Maurizio and Chiara's top-of-the-line sedan glided past the front of the villa and down the driveway.
The key was exactly where Antonella had said it would be: in a hidden drawer in the bureau in Signora Docci's bedroom. It was smaller than Adam had imagined it to be, but it worked. It fitted the door at the top of the staircase and, with some judicious force, turned the mechanism.
The first impression was disappointing.
They found themselves in a stark, square hallway with two corridors running off it. This was about all they were able to discern until Harry applied his cigarette lighter to the gloom. They found the light switch and Adam twisted the ceramic knob. Nothing. Hopefully it was just the bulb.
The flickering flame revealed a tall door leading off the hallway toward the rear of the villa. It was locked, although the key was in place. They located the light switch on the other side, but that didn't work, either.
"Shit," said Adam.
"Shit," said Harry, dropping the lighter and plunging them into darkness. "I burnt my bloody hand."
Adam could hear him groping around on the floor for his lighter. "Let's just wait a moment, let our eyes adjust."
Sure enough, out of the darkness three faintly glowing panels emerged: three sets of windows leaking light through their louvered shutters on the far side of the large room.
"We'll have to open one," said Adam. "Give me the lighter."
The fluid was running low, but he made it to one of the windows, picking his way past furniture. He pulled open the center window and forced the shutters apart. They groaned on their rusty hinges, and a desiccated bird's nest floated down to the terrace below.
The sunlight cut a rude swath across the room. The first thing Adam noticed were his footprints in the thick dust coating the floor—evidence of an intrusion, not that there was anything to be done about it now.
Though not as lofty as those downstairs, the room still had a certain grandeur about it. There was an imposing fireplace of white marble, the walls were paneled up to the dado rail, and the ceiling was bedecked with frescoes.
"Jesus," said Harry, "what a mess."
Broken and twisted pieces of furniture lay scattered around the room. There were rococo console tables, upholstered and gilded chairs, a delicate divan with shattered legs and a broken back.
An intricately carved frame was all that remained of the antique mirror above the fireplace. Its broken glass was strewn across the floor in front of the hearth, and in this debris lay the marble ashtray that one of the Germans had evidently hurled at the mirror.
"Paddler," said Harry. He was staring up at the ceiling.
The frescoes were eighteenth century from the look of them: overblown and slightly suffocating, with lots of ballooning flesh and ruddy-cheeked cherubs on show. The centerpiece was a depiction of Diana and her hunting party, but it looked more like the aftermath of a bloody skirmish. Diana had been shot between the eyes. She also sported two bullet holes instead of nipples. One of her attendants had been blasted in the groin and the cherubs had been picked off like hapless birds.
"Fucking philistines," murmured Harry.
Adam lingered when Harry wandered through to the adjacent rooms. The gramophone player on the table against the wall suggested that this was the scene of Emilio's murder.
According to Chiara, Emilio had fired into the gramophone to kill the music and attract the attention of the two Germans busy lobbing another piece of furniture out of the window. This detail of her account certainly appeared to be correct. There was a bullet hole in the gramophone's wooden casing. It was deep, but not so deep that the bullet had passed clean through. Which meant it should still be there, embedded in the wood. Only, it wasn't. Someone had removed it with the aid of a knife or some other such implement. The mouth of the hole was scored with nicks and notches where someone had gouged it free.
"Look at this," called Harry from the room next door.
He had thrown the shutters wide open. Adam peered outside. The workmen hammering together a low wooden dais at the center of the parterre were fully engrossed in their work, but he still drew the shutters back a touch.
"Hey," complained Harry.
"You can still see."
The room had obviously served as some sort of dormitory. There were four canvas cots still with their bedding, counterpanes folded down, pillows puffed up. They had made their beds, even knowing they'd be gone by nightfall.
"Nothing's been touched," said Harry.
This wasn't quite true. There were a couple of wooden filing cabinets in the corner. Their contents had been searched, the papers hastily replaced on the shelves. A few stray files lay shrouded in dust on the floor, like flatfish waiting for prey.
The next room was a corner room, and clearly the Germans' operations center. There were metal desks and cabinets, and a letterboard with cross-garterings was attached to the wall. A couple of typewriters had not made the last truck out, and judging from the ashes heaped in the grate, a large amount of paperwork had ended up as smoke. Harry seemed more than happy to poke around, so Adam slipped away.
He returned to the scene of the shooting and tried to picture the events unfolding around him: Emilio and Maurizio coming through the door, the two Germans busy at the window, their backs turned, oblivious to the fact that they had company because of the music blaring from the gramophone player. He saw Emilio taking in the de
struction around him—the broken mirror, the bullet holes in the ceiling frescoes—before leveling his gun at the gramophone and firing.
It was easy to imagine an argument ensuing, as Chiara had described. What else had she said? That Emilio was standing near the fireplace when he was shot.
Adam wandered over. He examined the marble surround and the walls on both sides for evidence of a stray shot, but found nothing. That's when he noticed that the rug in front of the hearth was not centered. It had been dragged a few feet to one side. He crouched down and folded back the edge of the rug.
The stain was large and irregular. Emilio had bled a lot.
The pool of blood was still fresh when it had been covered up, judging from the mirror impression on the underside of the rug. This wasn't what attracted Adam's attention, though—it was the bullet hole in the boards near the middle of the stain, easy to miss if it hadn't been for the slanting light.
He leaned closer, running his finger around the rim of the depression. As with the gramophone player, there were score marks in the wood where the bullet had been removed. This must have occurred sometime after the event, or fresh blood would have seeped into the notches, whereas clean new wood showed through them.
The bullet might have vanished, but the grim truth remained: Emilio had not been fired on by the German from across the room; he had been executed at close range when already on the floor.
Hearing Harry returning, Adam folded back the rug and got to his feet.
The rest of the day passed in a mist of distraction. Harry made a phone call, then announced he was heading into town. It was his last chance to see the Swedish Finn. Her boyfriend would be back at the weekend, and Harry planned to leave for Venice on Sunday.
"A day to recover from the party, then I'm out of your hair. Tell me you'll miss me."
"I'll miss you."
"That was almost convincing."
"It's true."
"Then this might be the time to talk about you advancing me a small loan for the rest of my trip."
"As soon as I've figured out what my own plans are."
