by Jill Downie
“You’re going to tell me.”
“I think you should know — I want you to know — hell, I want someone to know. I’m in no mood for sweet talk or listening to reason. Reason and I parted company a long time ago. Sit down, honey and don’t try to tell me to give myself up and all that shit. Like Bella did.”
“Bella? Oh, dear God, not Bella.”
“Yes. Such a pity, stupid broad. But hey, Syd, anyone who stands in my way!”
At that moment the telephone rang. Sydney started, and in a flash Monty Lord had a dagger in his free hand and against her throat.
“Don’t move.”
Across the room she heard the sound of the machine clicking as it recorded the message, and then she heard Ed Moretti’s voice as it was played back.
“Pick up the phone next time it rings, Mr. Lord. We have to talk.”
“Ed!” She called out his name and Monty Lord lowered the knife from her throat.
“Ed? You’re on first-name terms with the cop?”
“He’s my lover. He’ll be going crazy.” It was worth a try, and she had very little else at her disposal.
“You’re a fast worker, baby — and I thought it might be Giulia! Revenge against that bastardo you married — I can understand that. Perhaps we could do a deal. When the phone goes, answer it.”
It rang again. Moving cautiously, Sydney walked over to the phone and picked it up.
“Ed, it’s me.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Ed, he’s got a knife.”
“Put this on speaker-phone, Sydney, so Mr. Lord can hear me.”
She found the button on the phone, pressed it, and Ed Moretti’s disembodied voice filled the room.
“Mr. Lord, Rastrellamento is almost finished, and I know Ms. Tremaine will not stand in the way of its release when she hears your story. You have done what you set out to do in making it and, in the end, even if you get away from here, you will be caught. Why not give yourself up now?”
“That, of course, is a possibility.” Monty Lord spoke coolly, as though he were giving serious thought to the matter. “Only one problem, Moretti. It’s the logical thing to do, and I have lived without logic all my life. As an ending, it does not appeal to me. It lacks the grand gesture.”
“Then let Ms. Tremaine go. She’s not part of your storyline.”
“Hey, don’t blame me for that.” He sounded angry now. “She wrote herself into the script, and I don’t like bit players directing the action. I must have control — what my parents did not have in their brief lives. I’ve got to hand it to you, you managed to find out in a short time what it took me years to discover. Just how much do you know?”
Sydney Tremaine listened in silence while Ed Moretti explained, as engrossed in the narrative as her captor.
“I know that your mother was Sylvia Vannoni, the eldest daughter of the family, and that your father was a Slovene schoolteacher in the village of San Jacopo, where the Vannonis lived for centuries. That they fell in love, and used Sylvia’s comings and goings to look after a British prisoner of war on their property to carry on their love affair, and that they were betrayed by the priest. That the Vannoni family set the schoolteacher up to be killed by the partisans, who also killed the Briton, who, presumably, happened to be on the scene. That Sylvia gave birth to you in secret, guarded and midwived by the family housekeeper, Luisa Scarpa. And that your mother set fire to the church where she had been betrayed, and killed herself there. That the Vannonis then left the area, to settle in Fiesole and Florence, taking many of the family retainers with them. What I don’t know is how the Vannonis managed to get you out of Italy and into the States, completely hushing up that part of the story.”
“That’s not all you don’t know, Moretti. But that’s pretty good, I grant you. I want to tell you and your current squeeze here something about my father — what little I know about him, anyway. His name was Stefan. I have been unable to find out his last name, because the people who remembered him had known him by his first name only. His last name was difficult, unpronounceable for Tuscans. One thing is certain: he was not a fascist sympathizer, because that was the very reason he left the village, near Parma, to which his family was moved before the outbreak of war to escape working in the offices of the local fascist party. He couldn’t fight because of a limp — a club foot, I think.”
“Your real name, then,” interjected Moretti, “is not Monty Lord.”
“My real name?” Monty Lord gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t know my family name, but I was named Stefano by my mother, after my father, and that was the name I took to the States, when Luisa Scarpa took me there, with some of the other evacuees whose parents died in the bombing.”
“So that was how they got you out of the country.”
“Yes. Easy to hide a baby among other babies. An orphan among other orphans, when the world was in chaos, and there were hundreds and thousands of similar children. I was adopted by an Italian-American family, the Romanos. I spent the first part of my life as Steve Romano, in New York City.”
“But Luisa Scarpa made some sort of confession on her deathbed, and said nothing about the baby being adopted.”
“Ah, so you also found the guy in Grosseto selling fake Etruscan shit, did you?” At this point, Monty Lord got up and started walking around almost as if he had forgotten Sydney’s presence. “I didn’t leave it there. As soon as I heard her called la guardia carceria, I thought she probably had been in on my birth.”
“Monty —” Sydney broke in gently, afraid to draw attention back to herself and find a dagger at her throat. But she wanted Ed Moretti to hear her voice, to know that she was coping. “How did little Steve Romano from New York City find out he was a Vannoni?”
“From my adopted mother.” Monty Lord turned and smiled at Sydney, the knife still in his hand, as though they were exchanging casual chit-chat over cocktails. “See, I always knew I was adopted, a war orphan originally from Italy. But I was blond and light-skinned. I wondered if I might have been the child of rape — an Italian woman by a German soldier — so I asked my mother when I was about sixteen. She saw I was distressed by the idea and told me some more of my story, which she had been asked to keep from me. She said that Luisa Scarpa told her that, out of all the orphan children, I was the one in whom the Marchesa Vannoni was personally interested. I had to be well placed, with a good family — and I was. I have nothing against my adoptive parents. Luisa Scarpa told my American parents that I was the love child of an Italian girl and a British soldier. It took me a while to discover my father was the schoolteacher, and not the British prisoner of war.”
“That was the first story I heard.” It was Ed Moretti’s voice again. “How can you be sure?”
“Only reasonably sure,” Monty Lord replied. He was still walking around the circular space, reliving the years of his search. “But that’s what I found out from Patrizia.”
“Patrizia?” Both Sydney and Moretti said the name in unison. Moretti added, the surprise clear in his disembodied voice, “You’ve been here before, haven’t you? Patrizia’s been dead a long time.”
“Oh yes. I came here a while ago, when I discovered that some of the old servants were still alive and had been taken by the marchesa to Guernsey. They’re all gone now, except Teresa Stecconi, and she knows no more than I now do. I risked discovery a couple of times when I came here a month before we started shooting, scouting my own personal scenarios — I had an earlier try to get at the costumes, and I talked to an old guy I found hanging about the grounds. He yammered on about Patrizia, but he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know before.”
“Dan Mahy. You killed him.”
“Sure, had to. He was out of his tree most of the time, but even he might eventually remember the guy who gave him a small fortune for his SS dagger.”
“A helpless old man who had nothing to do with any of this.”
“Come on now, I did him a favour. Put him out of his m
isery in that shack he called home before the do-gooders had him out of there. Anyway, let me tell you about Patrizia — now, that was exciting, exhilarating, because she heard the sound of my father in my voice. She was almost blind, you see, and sound was everything to her. She said I reminded her of the schoolteacher in her old village, whom all the children loved, even though the Vannonis said he was a fascist. The sound of my voice triggered a whole bunch of stuff and it just poured from her. She said she never believed he was a fascist, because he and Sylvia got on so well, and Sylvia didn’t like the fascists. They worked together, looking after the children, she said. See, Patrizia prepared the meals for la guardia carceria and her charge. She never saw the baby, but she heard him — me — crying. And she heard my mother crying when I was taken from her.”
He held her life in his hands, but at that moment, Sydney wanted to put her arms around him. Monty Lord looked at her and saw the pity in her eyes.
“And now you know why I could not let Gil stop me, and why I cannot let you stop me. This has been a long time in the making and you know what they say about revenge: a dish best eaten cold. And this dish is very, very cold. For years I put the pieces together, and I thought of challenging the Vannoni family, but I knew there was something more I wanted. Only I didn’t know what. Then I read a new novel by the acclaimed British writer, Gilbert Ensor, called Rastrellamento. And hey — I’d even scouted the locations!”
“I can understand why you’d want revenge.” Sydney’s voice was puzzled; in spite of her fear the story had caught her attention. “But I don’t understand why, after all this time, the Vannonis are so paranoid about keeping the story quiet, with everyone sworn to secrecy. Why move, give up their ancestral home? Why such a conspiracy of silence?”
“Good question, honey. I think I finally found the answer — quite by chance — after I hired Mario for the movie. I was in Siena, doing some research on the fascists and partisans in the area with some of his family contacts —”
“I knew about his father,” interjected Moretti.
“You dug deep, didn’t you, Inspector? Well, one elderly ex-partisan said to me, ‘Vannonis? Sons of bitches, the lot of them. Blamed us for their own killings.’”
“Their own killings?” Monty Lord’s audience again spoke in sync.
“Local partisans swore they’d never laid a finger on either man, and that the story about my father being a fascist sympathizer was fabricated by the Vannonis themselves, to discredit him after his death.”
“So,” said Moretti, “you are saying the marchese or the marchesa, or one or both of their sons, killed your father. And, in all probability, then had to kill the British prisoner of war because he saw them.”
“Right on the money, Detective. The Vannonis are murderers.”
“And thieves.”
Another disembodied voice. For a moment, both jailer and captive were thrown. Monty Lord spun around, holding out the dagger, staring into the air as though expecting a phantom to materialize. But Sydney, turning in shock toward one of the silk wall hangings, knew where the voice was coming from and who it was. Giulia was standing there.
September 22nd
"Vacca! How did you get in?”
Instead of going for Giulia, Monty Lord grabbed Sydney and held the knife against her throat. She wanted to cry out, but she couldn’t breathe. Monty Lord spun round, holding Sydney across his body. She could now see Giulia. She looked tough, dressed in her motorcycle leathers, but she didn’t appear to be carrying any kind of weapon. Then she saw that Giulia was laughing, actually laughing.
“This is my place, Signor Lord. I know every nook and cranny. There are some alcoves in the Martello wall.”
“How the hell did you get past me?”
“I was already here, and I’d picked up Sydney’s message on my machine — I screen all my calls. I heard you break the window upstairs, Monty, and then come down the stairs. Before I could do anything, Sydney was letting herself in the door, so I hid. You set me up as a suspect, didn’t you?”
“Sure, it was convenient you rode a motorbike and took your runs near the hotel. And Bella does — did — your voice very well. Created some confusion with the local constabulary. But don’t tell me you’re going to do something heroic for this baby — she’s got the hots for the cool-cat copper.”
“So she told me.” Giulia smiled at Sydney, shrugged her shoulders and turned back to Monty Lord. “Hey, Stefano, don’t you want to hear the rest of the story? Why they didn’t want your mother to marry anyone, let alone your father, a penniless schoolteacher?”
“Of course I want to know. Don’t play games with me.” Monty Lord brought the knife up to Sydney’s throat again, and she couldn’t repress a cry of fear. Ed Moretti must have heard, because he called out, “Tell him, Ms. Vannoni — do what he says, for God’s sake.”
“I will.” Giulia looked at Sydney and smiled again. Her eyes darted toward the bronze sculpture on her white translucent cube. “But first you have to let Sydney go. Put her over by the statue — looks a bit like her, doesn’t it? — where you can watch her, and I’ll tell you.”
Sydney felt Monty Lord’s arms relax around her body. He pushed her toward the statue, and her legs almost buckled under her as she went over to it. She rested her body against the cube, thinking desperately about the door in the black wall. All Monty Lord’s attention was now on Giulia Vannoni, but she remembered another of the skills he had boasted about to her and to Gil at one of their drunken dinners: his brief sojourn in a travelling circus performing a knife-throwing act. She prayed Giulia also knew the story, but it was unlikely.
“Why?” Curiosity and eagerness filled his voice.
“The oldest, most sordid, reason in the world, Monty. Money, money, money. Soldi, soldi, soldi.”
Giulia Vannoni moved slowly toward the black leather sofa that was between Monty and Sydney. “I’m going to sit down — okay?” she said and did so. Monty Lord watched her.
“What’s all this about money?” he asked.
“Sylvia was a girl, but she was the eldest child. She was therefore entitled by Vannoni tradition to a sizeable dowry and, above all, land. A nasty habit grew up in comparatively recent years of cheating the eldest daughter out of her inheritance by ensuring she didn’t marry, therefore keeping the money and property intact for the sons. This wasn’t so hard in the days when you could virtually lock up your daughter and make sure she didn’t meet marriageable men. It was also not too difficult to do when the looks in the family went to the males. Of course, if Sylvia had met someone wealthy, things might have turned out differently. No one objected to an amalgamation of fortunes — that is why Donatella married Paolo, and how Toni married Anna. But a penniless schoolteacher!”
“Ah.” Monty Lord’s sigh was full of pain. “I could never understand why they wouldn’t let her marry him — a woman beyond her first youth, beyond any chance of the kind of marriage that would enhance the family’s fortune or position.” He fixed his intense pale eyes on Giulia.
“When did you become Monty Lord, and why?” Giulia asked.
“After I started my quest, because there was always the chance someone in the family would know who Steve Romano really was. Monty Lord doesn’t sound Italian, but it is. No one remembers my Slovene father’s last name, but Patrizia remembered the Italian village near Parma where he came from: Montealloro.”
Monty Lord’s attention now moved from Giulia to the telephone on the table near the sofa. He called out, “Detective Inspector Moretti, are you still listening?”
“I am.” Moretti’s voice hung in the air, incorporeal but comforting to Sydney’s ears.
“You’ve been to San Jacopo, haven’t you?” Monty Lord did not wait for a response, but continued. “There is an angel on the ceiling in the room where I camped on more than one occasion. Once I had found it, I used to make a pilgrimage there, every year, to light a candle for Sylvia and Stefan in the church. That angel on the ceiling holds a sw
ord in her hands. I thought of her as an avenging angel. I thought of myself as an avenging angel.”
“Bring them to justice.” It was Moretti again. “Would that not be the ultimate revenge?”
Monty Lord laughed derisively. “Come on now, Moretti. Who are you kidding? You know as well as I do I’ve got about as much chance as a water drop in hell of proving any murder from that time.” Suddenly, he was weeping, his free hand running over his shaved head and his face, the dagger held down by his side.
“Have you ever heard of the sepolti vivi? It’s what they call cloistered nuns, buried alive of their own free will and choosing. During the war that’s what they called the Jews, opponents of the government, all those who were hidden away in sealed-off rooms with no access to the world. Cloistered and imprisoned even before she met my father, even before her pregnancy and his murder, that was my mother. A sepolta viva all her life.”
He rubbed his hand over his eyes and Giulia screamed.
“Run, Sydney, run — now!”
This time the adrenalin pumped strength into her legs and she ran, darting around the side of the cube. Behind her Sydney heard another scream, a scream of rage from Monty Lord, a clattering, tinny noise, and the sound of bodies crashing to the floor.
The door behind the sculpture opened smoothly and closed with a heavy thud. On the other side the air was damp and fetid; it was also pitch-black. Sydney could hear the sound of her breathing, like bellows in the dark silence. She stumbled forward, hands stretched out, feeling for the sides of the tunnel. Please God, may there be only one passage to the exit, she prayed. She started moving forward, feeling pebbles and debris shifting beneath her feet. At one point, her head scraped against the top of the tunnel hard enough to make her wince with pain. She crouched and stumbled on, terrified at the thought of someone coming after her in the darkness.
“Oh Giulia, Giulia,” she said out loud. She heard what sounded like panting behind her, but realized it was the sound of her own breath echoing around the hollow space. Over and over in her head rattled the words of Monty Lord. Sepolta viva, sepolta viva. Buried alive — would that be her fate? Death by fear or suffocation in darkness instead of a dagger in the light.
