by Martin Rua
In the box were business cards, pens, sheets of paper, a small notebook and a watch. All things that belonged to Bruno.
“These are images of the killer. We took them from the CCTV video,” said Oscar, handing me an envelope. It also contained a photo of the German actor whose face had been used as a model for the mask worn by the killer.
“Incredible,” I murmured, “I would never have doubted that this man was the killer.”
“Yes, but believe me – our investigation was very thorough. The man was definitely in Berlin when Bruno was murdered.”
I nodded, and went back to look at the photos. Suddenly, something popped into my memory.
“Oscar, can I see the film it was taken from?”
“Sure,” said Oscar. He opened a video file on his PC and beckoned me to his desk to watch it. In the film, the man entered the store, approached Bruno and offered him his hand. I felt a shiver as I saw my friend quickly pull his hand away. A moment later the two men were sitting down talking quietly, then, after a few minutes, the man got up and handed something to Bruno.
“What’s he giving him?” I asked, pointing at the screen.
“We asked ourselves the same question,” said Viola, “it looks like a piece of paper, perhaps a business card. See? Bruno looks at it and simply puts it on the desk, then says goodbye to the man without offering him his hand. As you can see, the two of them laugh about something. Pretty chilling, if you consider what had happened a few moments before.”
In subsequent images, the man left the shop and you could see Bruno placing the card in a little book that was on the desk.
“That’s his personal diary – he always carried it with him.”
“Yes, that’s what you told us last time,” said Viola. “In fact, it was the last thing you told us. Then you asked us if you could get back to your wife and you disappeared off the face of the earth. We studied all the films of that day and we saw Bruno put the diary in his bag before leaving. But—”
“But—?” I pressed her.
“We didn’t find it at his house. Not even in the safe,” said Oscar.
I raised an eyebrow. “Which safe?”
Oscar looked confused. “The one hidden behind the bookcase in the study – the only one we found.”
I nodded, then I got up and put on my coat. “There’s another one. One whose existence only he and I knew of. Let’s go.”
*
Bruno lived in a villa in the country between Via Posillipo and Marechiaro, a place of breath-taking beauty with incredible views of the Bay of Naples. He loved the peace and quiet of the house, where his jazz trio could practice without disturbing anyone. Safety was never a problem: a burglar would have had to deal with hi-tech security systems. The home of an antiques dealer needs to be as secure as a bank vault. Evidently, however, he hadn’t expected anyone like the man who killed him, who seemed to have such incredible resources at his disposal.
Bruno lived alone. He was shy, and very refined, and his manner was almost effeminate. He liked women, but had very refined tastes.
“A woman must resonate along with the chords of my piano, to the notes of a piece arranged by Teddy Wilson. Only in this way can she arouse my interest,” he would say. I would shake my head and remark that perhaps, at the end of the day, it wasn’t actually so hard to find a woman like that.
“In short, old boy, the world is full of special women,” I would reply.
Ever the pessimist, however, he was convinced that the perfect woman for him didn’t exist and so he merely pursed his thin lips, put on a record and said, “Until you bring me an authentic one, I’ll continue to limit myself to whores. I don’t ask anything from them, except that they be beautiful and know how to do their job. And the morning after, they can, in the nicest possible way, go to the devil.”
But they were just stupid words – a way of giving some strength to his conviction. The talk of a sophisticated, snobby man who loved nothing more than provoking others.
Now, in the whirlwind of events that had turned my life upside down, facing the fact that he was dead left a huge hole inside me. In the blink of an eye, I had lost a valuable employee and a friend.
In any case, I tried to concentrate so as to provide as much information as possible to Oscar in the time that I was dedicating to my policeman friend.
*
At Bruno’s house there were seals to prevent the crime scene being contaminated. Even Bruno’s only living relative, his sister Maria, had not yet been allowed to enter.
We slipped on sterile coveralls and bootees and went inside.
“We didn’t find any signs of forced entry or theft,” said Oscar, heading towards the living room, “no sign of a struggle or anything. Everything seemed in order and apparently you too confirmed that nothing had been stolen.”
“This appears to suggest that Bruno was killed in order to send a message and not because he had something precious that his murderer wanted.”
“Exactly. And in the days immediately following the discovery of the corpse, we turned the house upside down. We didn’t find anything that could be attributed to the killer – not a footprint along the driveway that leads from the gate to the villa, not a hair. Nothing. It was as though he was made out of thin air. Believe me, with the tools we have nowadays, we can normally guess what a man’s body temperature is. But this time, there was nothing. The suspect was so obviously there, right before our eyes but at the same time invisible. The only important thing was the bloodstain on the carpet where he opened fire on Bruno’s face and where we found the body, and the shell that I showed you. That’s all.”
We crossed the living room and headed towards the kitchen.
“Obviously it was my idea to hide the second safe in here,” I said, making way for Oscar and Viola. “He thought it was vulgar, but as far as I’m concerned, my kitchen is my sanctuary. In the end I was proved right.”
“What an incredible gourmet you are.”
“Think what you want, but you didn’t find it!” The decor seemed more like a country house than a luxurious seaside villa, with a large, simple marble sink from an eighteenth century Umbrian farmhouse, cupboards from the successive century in the same style and a big table in the centre. One of the walls, the one that separated the kitchen from a small pantry, was made of stone. I walked over and pressed some of the stones in a precise sequence.
“I don’t believe it—” said Oscar in amazement.
As I pressed the third stone, a portion of the wall, nearly two metres high by half a metre wide, opened up and slid across the floor. Behind it was a small room.
“Ingenious, isn’t it?”
“Amazing, more like!”
“The utility room next door is a fake – it serves to create a further diaphragm to protect the wall of the safe, which is made of granite bricks forty centimetres thick and perfectly welded together. You’d have to hack away at it for a week just to scratch it.”
We entered the small room, whose walls were furnished with plain shelves upon which were stacked documents, cash and small valuables such as the rare medieval statues or eighteenth century artefacts that Bruno preferred to keep there. On a small table against the wall opposite the entrance was the famous diary.
“There it is! Why on earth did he put it in here? I know it was precious to him, but not so precious that he had to hide it in the safest place in the house.”
My hands covered by the latex gloves, I picked up the small diary and opened it. Inside were notes on appointments, pieces viewed and the clients who were interested in them. There were also some business cards that had not yet been put in the neat file that he kept at the Églantine. Among them, tucked into the page of the day before his death, was what we were looking for – the business card of his murderer, along with a rather mysterious object.
Oscar took the small rectangle piece of paper. “Let me see. Jürgen Herzog, Antiquitätenhändler, Berlin. There’s also a phone number and an email address. They’re all ob
viously false – he knew that we would find it. We’ll analyse it, though, and maybe we’ll find some fingerprints that aren’t Bruno’s.”
Oscar put the card into a plastic evidence bag and handed it to Viola, then turned his attention to the other object that was in the same page of Bruno’s diary. It was a thin, ancient looking sheet of metal, dotted with rectangular or square holes.
“What do you think it is?” asked Oscar, while I studied the object.
“It’s a Cardan grille, no doubt about it. And it’s probably one of the reasons Bruno was killed.”
“A Cardan grille?” asked Viola, who was standing behind Oscar.
“Yes – a rather antiquated system for encrypting messages in code. The Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardan invented it in the sixteenth century,” he said in response to her curiosity. “You put the grille on a blank sheet of paper and write the message you want to encrypt, entering words or syllables inside the boxes on the grille. Then you join them together in a text that makes sense by connecting other words to the coded message. Obviously, the recipient of message must have the same identical grille to be able to decipher it.”
“It seems simple enough as a cipher,” said Viola.
“Yes. In fact, if it’s not done properly it isn’t very safe, because the secret text jumps right out at you. And if you lose the grille that reveals it, you can say goodbye to the message.”
Meanwhile, as he was speaking, I was looking at the two pages where the grille and the business card had been placed. One of the two had something written on it.
“Look at this, Oscar.”
It seemed that Bruno had tried to leave a message for me before putting the diary in the safe.
Lorenzo code Kiev.
“Does that mean anything to you?” asked Oscar.
I shook my head sadly, reading and re-reading those three apparently random words. “Nothing, but it does look as though Bruno wanted to say something to me.”
On the table, a few centimetres from Bruno’s diary, was an open package, still partially wrapped in plain brown paper. Oscar took it carefully and read the address. “Look here, Lorenzo.”
“’Lorenzo Aragona, via Chiatamone—’ but that’s the address of the Églantine.”
“I’ll bet anything you want that the grille was inside this and Bruno opened it, suspecting something was up.”
I looked at the postmark of the package’s city of origin. “Kiev, Ukraine.”
“Where did you say that the girl who helped you was from?” asked Oscar, tilting his head to one side.
“Russia, but her mother was Ukrainian.”
“Right, the circle’s closed. We need to find her,” snapped Oscar, slipping the grille into another evidence bag.
“You’ll be keeping that as evidence, right?” I asked, pointing to the bag.
“Of course.”
“Can I just make a copy on a piece of paper?”
“Well yes, but why? Have you thought of something?”
“Not yet, but if someone from Kiev took the trouble to send me this, it means that somewhere there’s a message waiting for me to decipher it.”
Oscar nodded. When I’d finished, I returned it to him, sighed, then looked over Viola’s shoulder at the door of the secret chamber. Oscar noticed and read my thoughts.
“All right, I’ll take you home, so you can get ready. I can’t ask any more of you. Although I would like to see the place where you were held captive—”
“I can show you it on the way to my house, it’s only a few hundred metres from there.”
12
The House of Horrors
Events reconstructed by Lorenzo Aragona
Naples, January, 2013
We reached the decrepit mansion which I had left hours before and which was only a few hundred metres from my home.
“According to Anna I was monitored round the clock by cameras and microphones. She gave me the clothes I’m wearing right now, because she said mine were bugged.”
Oscar pulled out his gun and looked at Viola. “Let’s hope we find her soon, she’s got a lot of explaining to do. Come on, let’s go and have a look at this famous apartment of yours.”
We went through the rusty gate and found ourselves in something like a forest.
Oscar pushed his way through the tangled weeds that surrounded the building. “This place has been abandoned for over fifty years, I’ll bet, and so has the house.”
We entered the building, which was derelict and in ruins, and climbed to the top floor. The railing on the stairwell was rotten and the stairs themselves had completely fallen through in several places.
“What kind of place is this – it’s bloody frightening in here!” said Oscar.
As we arrived at the front door I had walked out of a few hours earlier, I felt myself start to panic.
“Don’t worry, you’re not alone now.”
Where there once had been a bell there was now nothing but old wires, and the door itself was in a sorry state.
Oscar knocked. “Police, open up!”
No reply.
“Police, open up or we’ll break down the door.”
Again no answer.
“All right, we’ll do it the hard way.”
He backed off a few steps and kicked the door open as though it were held shut by a piece of string. “Too easy,” he said entering cautiously, his gun pointed into the cold darkness of the apartment. “Police! Anybody here?”
Once again there was no response, so he advanced a few metres inside, followed by me and Viola. He found a light switch, but it seemed that the whole building had been without electricity for who knows how long.
“Didn’t you notice that there was no electricity this morning?” he asked in a whisper.
I shook my head. “I was in too much of a hurry to get away. And I was hallucinating.”
The two policemen switched on their torches and we proceeded in the direction of the first room; the kitchen. Oscar walked slowly, his gun aimed into the gloom of that cold, dirty place. His caution was almost excessive. I myself was surprised to find that the kitchen looked even more run down than I had noticed that morning. As though the last hallucinatory traces had gone, and things now appeared to me exactly as they were.
“She was here making coffee—” I said, in the throes of utter confusion, “but it all looks different now.”
“You’re sure this is the right apartment?” asked Oscar.
“Of course I am.”
“Ok, stay calm – let’s continue with the inspection.”
We left the kitchen and went down the hall until we reached another room, even shabbier than the kitchen. The floor was completely broken up, there was rubble everywhere, the ceiling and roof were smashed in several places, and there were holes here and there that you could see the sky through. In front of a blackened chimney, with its back turned toward us, was an old sofa that had once been covered in leather, and in the corner was a large cardboard box.
“Viola, check out that box while we continue with the other rooms.”
“It all looks so different from this morning,” I said, unable to comprehend.
“Maybe you were still under the influence of the drugs, as you said yourself,” suggested Oscar.
We went into the bedroom. At least that seemed the same as what I’d seen a few hours earlier. There was a bed – a simple iron frame with a mattress and blankets – a rotten, wooden bedside table, which still bore traces of Victorian decoration, the wardrobe from which I’d taken the clothes and a desk with a smashed leg, which was propped up on some bricks.
“There are some clothes wrapped in cellophane in the wardrobe – that’s where I got the bugged clothes from.”
Oscar walked over and opened the doors, and a large rat, surprised by the intrusion, ran out squealing. Oscar had just enough time to get out of its way. “What the hell!” He returned to look inside the wardrobe, pointing the torch inside, and after a while turned to me. �
�Come here and see for yourself.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Except for the dust, dirt and splinters of rotten wood, there was absolutely nothing in the wardrobe – no trace of clothing, with or without cellophane.
“These bastards are trying to drive me crazy, they’ve taken them away.”
Oscar looked at me with concern for a few seconds, then Viola entered the room and looked around in disgust. “God, this is awful. This place is a dump.”
“Literally—” he said. “Did you find anything of interest in that box?”
“Just some worthless junk – key rings, coins and a pile of toys.”
At her last word, a jolt ran through me.
“Did you say toys?”
“Yes, a lot of really old toys.”
“Of course – the box!” I said, slapping my forehead. All three of us went into the room containing the sofa and the box.
“The toys, my toys—” I said, digging frantically through the contents of the box.
“What does this mean?” asked Oscar, stooping to look.
I turned around, my eyes wild. “Last night I think, or it may have been one of the other days, that woman, the one who was pretending to be my wife, asked me to sort out this box of junk. I did, and I came across my old Spider-Man toy, the one I told you about – one I was really fond of as a kid.”
I took the little blue and red man out of my pocket and stared at him intently.
“The strange thing is that when I touched it, I had some kind of vision, though I can’t clearly remember what it was now. My mind was blurred. Maybe if I concentrate—”
I stared at the doll for a few seconds in the hope that the phenomenon would repeat itself, but nothing happened. I emptied the contents of the box out onto the floor and began to rummage through the junk like a maniac. I was looking for something that would evoke memories. At that moment Oscar’s phone rang.
“Yes, hello, yes, Valenti, what is it? I see, thanks, keep me informed if there are developments. Lorenzo?”
I wasn’t paying attention, I was lost in my attempts to procure that vision again.
“Lorenzo, listen! There’s nothing in here, and anyway, those hallucinations might have been caused by the drug, not the doll.”
