Property of Blood

by Magdalen Nabb

  ‘Poor Caterina … We make so many mistakes with our children but even with hindsight who can tell what’s right? She needed her father and he was … what he was. He had little enough time for the children and then we divorced. I don’t know yet how it could have gone differently. In my efforts to take the blame on myself I go as far as feeling guilty for marrying Ugo in the first place and so giving my children an unstable father and an unstable life. That’s as foolish as you can get, I think, since then they wouldn’t have existed—not as their present selves, anyway. Besides, for my sins, I was hopelessly in love with him. He dazzled me after all the fresh-faced dull boys at home. Then, when he’d gone, what could I do to make up to Caterina for her father’s absence since it wasn’t my attention she wanted? I resorted to tricks, the way we all do sometimes with our children. Little presents I would say came from him. I wouldn’t do that if I had my time over again, or at least I believe now it was wrong, but my heart bled for her, so still and silent, waiting for him to come back. I didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘It was a relief in more ways than one when he died. She was only ten, Leo fourteen. That was my biggest subterfuge of all, a “will” which gave them a two thirds share in the family estate on reaching their majority. Ugo did actually leave a will but it was all fantasy and I made it a reality by arrangement with our lawyers—the children don’t know, so please don’t ever tell anyone. I did what I did to protect them from the truth about their father. At least, that’s what I told myself then. Now, I suspect my motives. I think I was playing God, reinventing reality. It made me feel good, generous, powerful to give my children such an important inheritance and a caring father. But it was the Brunamonti inheritance really, and Ugo cared nothing for that or his children. Vanity… vanity and presumptuousness had a hand in what I did. Ugo, you see, no longer owned anything. He had only ever given the estate a thought when he wanted to borrow money on it, and he never gave us a thought at all. I had long since paid him off and got control of the estate. I sold off the smaller properties to launch my business and invested a sum of money for each child.

  ‘Leo went through a bad time—perhaps the worst in his young life—just before Ugo died. They met in some bar in town, or avoided meeting, and Ugo was reduced to a pitiful state. It shocked and frightened Leo. Caterina was spared that, thank heaven, but his death was a terrible blow. She didn’t shed a tear, she never does. I feel sure not even this business will have made her cry. It frightens me, what she might be suffering when she’s like that. She was too young to understand about the will, and I gave her the only thing I had of Ugo’s, a leather writing set that had been his father’s. I told her he had particularly wanted her to have it and she has always treasured it. Was I wrong? Was I? Oh, why couldn’t he have cared a little for her, whatever he thought of me? I’ve failed to make it up to her, I’m sure I have—and now I’ve been the cause of so much stress and made them poor again—I’m sorry, just give me a moment… I know I’m not talking sense. I didn’t cause it, did I? Did I cause it? I left the main doors open … Do they blame me? It will pass if you just give me a moment…

  ‘I want to tell you… what did I want to tell you? That morning … Yes, that morning when Woodcutter changed the plasters on my eyes. He let me take the old ones off and with the gauze it didn’t hurt so much. As I was doing it he came close and explained why it was necessary, that after a time, the sweat and the oil from your skin cause them to work loose so that there was a risk of my being able to peer under or over them. He warned me again, for my own good, to tell him if I felt them loosening.

  “‘You lie still and never mess with them. That’s good. Give it here. Be more careful with the square ones over your eyes.”

  “‘I don’t mind lying still. I think about things.”

  “‘What things?”

  “‘Today I thought about my time at university.”

  “‘Lucky for you. I had to leave school at fourteen and see nothing but sheep for years until I started my own business.”

  “‘What sort of business?” He didn’t answer.

  “‘If you have your own business, then why do this? Is it anger because you had no chance to study? Is that why?”

  “‘No, that’s not why! I do this because I’ve no choice. I ran away from home at fifteen and came over here to some relations. I thought I could work as a shepherd boy part-time and still go to school. Be careful with that one, the gauze is out of place …”

  “‘Agh!”

  “‘Give it here.”

  ‘I rubbed at the sticky soreness. “And did you go to school?”

  “‘Did I go to school, like hell. I had to be a feeder for a kidnapping the first year I was over here.”

  “‘But later, when you were older, couldn’t you have got out?”

  “‘You can never get out. They don’t let you. It’s forever. You make me laugh when you tell your pathetic stories about how hard up you’ve been. People like you don’t know what poverty means—” His voice against my face stopped in the middle of a sentence and there was only the sea roaring in my ears. He was no longer touching me and I felt for him. He slapped my hand away. The zip. I smelled someone new but he didn’t come inside. I also felt Woodcutter’s tension. I think the man outside spoke. I was sure this was the boss. I kept as still and quiet as a mouse until I heard the zip again and sensed Woodcutter relax. The boss had gone. This wasn’t the only visit. I learned to read the tension around me when he was there, but it was the only time I knew he had looked at me. I was soon to find out why he had come. Apart from checking on the condition of the goods, which I suppose was his usual reason.

  “‘Open your eyes.” I opened them. Woodcutter’s denim jacket, his square hands screwing up the used plasters, the olive light in the tent.

  “‘You were scared of going blind, weren’t you?”

  ‘It was a relief. At once my eyes were searching the tent. Had he brought the newspaper? He was wearing a ski mask, of course, for this job, but I attempted to look into his eyes.

  “‘The newspaper. You promised …”

  ‘He hadn’t brought the whole paper, just the pages with articles about me, the front page and one inside page. There was an old photograph of me on the front page as a model. Another world broken off and floating away from me. Then on the other page … I can’t tell you how it hit me. They’d got hold of a picture of Leo from two years ago. He was looking back over his shoulder towards the camera, his blond hair rather longer than he has it now, and he was wearing a thick patterned sweater. You could only see a tiny bit of the sweater but I remembered it so well—white, patterned in red and green. The background looked deliberately blurred, though perhaps that was just the newspaper reproduction. It was taken on a skiing holiday and I kept it pinned to my notice board in the office. How had they got it? And Caterina! My little girl. A big beautiful picture of her. I couldn’t tell where it had been taken but it was new. You can imagine how I felt when I recognized the collar of one of my coats. It broke my heart to think of her seeking that comfort. At school, when we were dating a boy, we’d wear his sweater. It was like being hugged and you had the smell of the boy on it. I cried then, though even without the plasters I cried deep in my chest from habit, afraid of tears. I cried so much that when, at last, he took the pages back and put them in his pocket I hadn’t read a word. I couldn’t, I was too agitated, shocked into reality by the pictures. My beautiful, beautiful children!

  ‘And to think that I had dedicated a part of my quiet thinking time each day to trying to calculate the stage my kidnapping had reached. I imagined Patrick’s arrival, I thought of the ransom demand—would they phone? I wondered how much they would ask for and longed to discuss this with Woodcutter because I was still convinced their information must be wrong and I was perfectly willing to tell them my real possibilities, which they could then check for themselves. I calculated how long it would take to get the money together, wondered how they arranged these things. I was su
re that, after all this time, I must be near to being released and that kept me determined to eat and try to keep well. But I had no information, and now the newspaper was back in his pocket and I had missed my chance. Yet there was no point in my asking for another chance. I was still crying, almost howling, and could still not have read the article.

  “‘Signora, calm yourself. You must quieten down.” The black masked head moved back from my ear and I tried again to look through the narrow slits into his eyes.

  'I stopped crying obediently.

  “‘Why did you call me signora?”

  'He didn’t answer me.

  “‘It’s because I can see you, isn’t it?” He had also addressed me in the formal third person, the way we would have spoken to each other in the real world. Until then, he had always used the informal tu. I tried to take advantage of this suddenly acquired human dignity.

  “‘Please, allow me to see for a while longer.”

  “‘I intend to. You’re going to write a letter.”

  ‘I remembered other kidnappings vaguely with letters full of polemical or political nonsense sent to all sorts of people—once it was the Archbishop of Florence. Was this what they wanted from me, imagining that I had influential friends?’

  “‘I don’t know anybody important, if that’s—”

  “‘It doesn’t matter. Choose a friend. Someone outside your family whose mail won’t be checked. And someone who won’t go to the cops or it’ll be the worse for you. Here. Write it on here and copy from this one the boss has prepared. His is just notes. You’ve to write it in your own way.”

  ‘It was a ransom demand. A ransom demand! And all this time I had imagined they’d have phoned, that everything would be under way, the money organized, a matter of days to my release.

  “‘You can’t mean you haven’t been in touch with my family before now? Surely it’s more risk for you the longer you wait?”

  'He only laughed. “Write.”

  ‘What else could I do? I wrote. I followed the notes given to me by the boss, and my disappointment, my despair over all the wasted time drove me to say spitefully, “I can see why he wants me to write it in my own words. He can’t spell or put a sentence together, can he?”

  ‘As if this had not crossed his mind before, Woodcutter snatched the notes from me, and I could see that he didn’t know how to answer me, that his own Italian wasn’t up to seeing the mistakes. Satisfied at this little triumph over them, I took the notes back and read to the end.

  “‘Here. Get on with it.” His voice was angry now because of what I had said. He pushed a thick magazine and a sheet of lined paper into my lap and gave me a cheap plastic pen. The light was feeble. There was a sort of window of transparent plastic in the tent but we were under trees and the tent was covered in brushwood anyway. I hoped I would be able to see well enough to write. I soon found that I couldn’t but I wrote, anyway. I was writing blindly, the little light serving only to keep me more or less within the lines. I was excited and nervous at the thought of communicating with my children, with the outside world, and I think this feeling took over from my horrified dismay on discovering that no contact had been made before.

  My dearest Leo and Caterina,

  I am allowed to tell you that the contents of this letter have been decided for me and that only one paragraph at the end can be my own. They’ll read the whole thing, of course, before this letter, goes to you. I am in the hands of professionals and, consequently, if you want to see me again, stick precisely to the rules given you. The first rule is be careful how you deal with state-employed murderers, i.e., police and carabinieri. These squalid cowards are two-faced, double-crossing worms and you must avoid them, otherwise you, my own children, will be guilty of murdering me. You must be even more careful of public prosecutors who have no interest in anything other than their own careers and who don’t care what happens to me or to you.

  Don’t put your trust in a lawyer, either, because in a situation like this they would take money from you, further their careers, and still be at the service of the state-employed murderers, and that can only lead to my death. I have already suffered terrible tortures and am so destroyed by pain and grief that I no longer feel like a human being. I beg you with all the strength that remains to me to do what is necessary to free me. I am chained up like an animal, unable to see or hear and in dreadful pain. By law, the magistrates will freeze our assets but you can get round this with the help of my friends and, in any case, you can never be prosecuted for ignoring it whereas if you don’t get round it I will be tortured every day and then killed. This can only be avoided if you follow the instructions given you to the letter. The price of my life and freedom is 8 (eight) billion lire, and any hesitation, any false move on your part, will mean that the price goes up. The money must be in notes of 50 and 100 thousand lire. They must be used and not chemically treated in any way. The amount to be paid will not be bargained over and you have two months to get it together. If you refuse to pay the whole amount, on the last day of April I will be executed. If you pay up and don’t try and bring the police with you when you do it, everything will go smoothly. If you collaborate with the law it will do you no good and I’ll pay for it with my life. They have so much blood on their hands already that one more death will only serve to satisfy their bloodthirsty instincts. When you have the money ready you must publish a notice for three days running in the Lost and Found column of La Nazione. It must say: LOST in Piazza Santo Spirito, bag containing important personal documents. Reward. Tel (give the number of one of my friends). As soon as they see the announcement you will receive another letter from me telling you how to deliver the money and giving you proof that I am still alive in the form of a Polaroid photograph of me holding that day’s paper with the headlines clearly visible. Once you have paid I will be released within eight days. I will telephone you, telling you where to pick me up once I am freed, so don’t expect any calls until you have paid up. Don’t come to the appointment without the money or attempt to bring anyone with you. Anyone appearing without the money will be executed on the spot. The person delivering the money according to instructions has absolutely nothing to fear. Rich people become rich by treading on the poor and stealing from them. This transaction is intelligent, fair, and justified. Leo—Block payments to all our suppliers. They trust us and know they will be paid when this is over. Ask my dear friend E. for help. She is in a position to help us without any hardship. The rest Patrick will do. He knows who to ask. I have to ask you and Caterina to give up your inheritance temporarily. Patrick will deal with it. You can transfer it from your accounts to his. The Italian law has no influence in the States. You know I will earn it all back for you. We have survived worse in the past and I will deal with everything once I’m free. If necessary, borrow on the house. The bank will be more than willing and your two signatures will be valid without mine as you constitute a majority. The loan will be overtly to Patrick and you will be guaranteeing it so nobody will be breaking the law. Don’t wait until the last minute but do everything as fast as you can because I am suffering too much to survive very long in these conditions. Everyone will be paid back somehow to the last lira.

  I send you all my love and I think of you day and night despite my suffering. Tell Patrick I love him and think of him. My life is in your hands and I trust you. Don’t abandon me.

  Eight

  People often maintain that they can sense when a telephone is ringing in an empty house or when someone is about to answer. This is not subject to proof but Marshal Guarnaccia, who wasn’t the sort to make any such claims, nevertheless sensed that something had changed inside the Brunamonti house between the moment when he rang the bell on that Friday afternoon at his usual hour and his being admitted. He gave the matter very little thought but he did sense a change in the time he was left waiting and the nature of the footfall approaching through the marble vestibule, rapid and loud instead of leisurely and soft.

  The door was o
pened by a woman he had never seen before and who certainly wasn’t a servant. She wore no make-up or jewelry and her clothes had a secondhand look to them but she had an air of confidence and authority which the Marshal responded to, excusing himself for the interruption as he would to the owners of the house and not to an employee.

  The woman ignored his remark and said in a loud confidential whisper, ‘Are you the one from Palazzo Pitti? If you are I want to talk to you—not now. I’m just so worried … Come in, come in …’

  He followed her into the white drawing-room and all the faces there turned to stare at him. Their expressions were anything but welcoming and he was left there, hat in hand, conscious of a silence as thick as the cigarette smoke circling slowly above Patrick Hines’s head and full of the echoes of the intense conversation his arrival had interrupted. Well aware of the fact that silence was going to unnerve these people rather than himself, he examined them in turn. The woman who had let him in had seated herself on the very edge of a big armchair, her feet close together and her back as straight as a ramrod. Her hair was the same grey as her dowdy grey suit, her eyes dark, her expression just about bursting with all the things she wanted to talk to him about, but not now. Patrick Hines and Leonardo Brunamonti were seated together on the white sofa. After taking in the Marshal’s arrival their eyes avoided him. The sister was perched on the arm of the sofa next to Hines, her arm along the sofa’s back, her diamonds glittering. She was looking at the Marshal with that sideways stare of hers over the cascade of fair hair on her shoulder. Her mouth was widened as if in a tight smile. She was not smiling. The only member of the group arranged in an attitude of complete ease and with an expression that betokened absolute control over the situation was the English detective, Charles Bendy, by which the Marshal understood him to be the most put out at his arrival, which was acknowledged with a brief nod.