Daggers and Men's Smiles

by Jill Downie

  Suddenly the tunnel took a sharp turn, and Sydney flung out her hands to each side of her, panicked at the thought that she might have to decide between one passage or another. But there appeared to be only one direction in which to move, and she took it. It led into a wider area where she could no longer feel the sides of the space. Disoriented, she looked up and saw a glimmer of light, a faint sheen of metal. With a cry of triumph she recognized the metallic disc and serrated edge of the gun turret. Time now to be thankful for the low height of the tunnel, because she had to stand on her toes to reach the catch, and use all her strength to unfasten it from the bar that held it closed.

  The cover was heavy. Frantically, she pushed against it, and felt the load abruptly lifted from her. A pair of hands appeared around the rim near the catch and a voice said, “That you, Sydney? Liz here — hang on, I’ve got it.”

  The lid was flung back and rain fell on Sydney’s upturned face. A moment later and she was hauled out, half-winded, on to the wet grass. She heard the cover slam shut behind her.

  “Come on.” Liz Falla was pulling her up, and dragging her away from the tunnel exit.

  “Watch out,” Sydney croaked, her voice coming back to her. “There are trenches everywhere.”

  “I know, we hid in them — see.”

  From the tangle of ferns, ivy, pennywort, and rambling rose peered a number of heads.

  “Backup,” said DC Falla, holding on to Sydney’s arm, hastening them both along.

  “Ed — where’s Ed? He was on the phone and he —”

  “Breaking down the front door, now we know you’re out.”

  “How did you know where I was?”

  “Ms. Vannoni phoned the station when she got your message.”

  “Giulia? How is Giulia?”

  “Don’t know — let’s keep moving.”

  “Giulia!” Sydney broke away and started to run toward the front door of Giulia’s castello, fear and anxiety spurring her on, with Liz Falla at her heels.

  The heavy wooden door was on the ground, a splintered mess. Several police vans, lights spinning, were parked at a distance up the lane. Uniformed policemen wearing bulletproof jackets and carrying guns stood in the entrance. Most were looking inside. Sydney pushed through, and was held by the arms as she got inside the door.

  Giulia and Ed Moretti were kneeling down, crouched over the body of Monty Lord on the ground. At the disturbance in the doorway, they both looked up and Giulia sprang to her feet.

  “Sydney.”

  “You killed him?”

  “No, cara, he killed himself. He threw the dagger at you, but it only damaged Arethusa.” She pointed at the sculpture. Sydney could see a gash on the bronze surface. “We can only be thankful he was crazy enough to stick to daggers.”

  Sydney walked toward the crumpled body of Monty Lord. His agonized face looked up at her, a yellow froth caking his contorted lips.

  “He took poison.” It was Ed Moretti who answered her unspoken question. He pointed to a tiny vial on the floor by the body.

  “He spoke before he died,” Giulia said. “‘Cosa fatta, capo ha.’ A thing once done has an end.”

  “Gil used that in Rastrellamento.”

  “Yes,” said Moretti.

  Running through Moretti’s head was the beautiful voice of Clifford Wesley.

  If there is crime, it is gorgeous crime, all daggers and secret poisons.

  He looked at the tiny vial by Monty Lord’s side, lying on an emerald dragon with a dagger in his ivory throat. It was the kind the beggar on the Corso said was sold as genuine in stores like the one close to the town walls of Grosseto. But Moretti felt certain this one was for real, found by Sylvia and Stefan’s son in an Etruscan cave, on the road to the deserted village of San Jacopo.

  “Rastrellamento will be made?”

  “Oh yes. I shan’t stop it, and I never intended to. There’s a clause covering not only the death of the writer, but the death of the producer. And there is very little left to do.”

  Sydney and Giulia sat together on the black leather sofa, drinking Aperol. Two days after the death of Monty Lord, the door was back up, the window on the upper floor repaired, and there was no sign of the drama of forty-eight hours earlier. Sydney pointed to the sculpture, the mark still visible on her faultless thigh. She noticed for the first time the outline of a dolphin swimming in the translucent depths of the white cube.

  “Who is — was — Arethusa?”

  “A water nymph. Legend has it that she dived under the sea to escape the attentions of a river god. She emerged again as a freshwater spring in Sicily.”

  “You have your castello back together again, Giulia.” Sydney looked around the glowing cavern of light and colour.

  “I don’t think so, cara. Time to move on. My space has been invaded, violated. It will never seem the same.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. I was happy here, in my castello isola, but I should be rejoining my community in Florence — one cannot run away for ever. And I love my professional life. I have that, after all.”

  “Yes,” said Sydney. “You have that.” She put down her glass and stood up. “I should be leaving now — I’ve got an early morning meeting with Mario. He has made me an assistant producer — a grand title, he tells me, for a dogsbody, but even gophers do something useful.”

  Giulia looked up at her speculatively. “And are you the policeman’s current squeeze?”

  “Ah,” Sydney replied. “One can but hope.”

  October

  The last, dwindling days of late summer were gone, and it was raining when they drove out to Montecatini together.

  “Tell me again, caro Eduardo.”

  “Sophia Maria Catellani is now a widow and she lives with her daughter and her son-in-law, who owns a restaurant and bakery in the town, and her two grandchildren, a boy and a girl.”

  “And she is —?”

  “I think she’s my half-sister. My father’s child by my godmother, Maria Colombo.”

  “You never knew. Do you think your mother knew?”

  “I don’t think so — at least, not in so many words. She was not a fool, she may have guessed and decided to let the past alone. According to her adoption papers, Sophia Maria Colombo was a war orphan. Her true identity was buried to protect the unmarried mother. The birth certificate says ‘father unknown.’”

  “But what makes you think you share the same father?”

  The same gut feeling, he wanted to say, that made me pursue a past drama as the motive for murder. Masculine intuition. Instead, he said, “Here we are. It’s the best restaurant in town, they tell me.”

  The restaurant was in a pretty stucco building with geranium-filled window boxes, green shutters, and small wrought-iron balconies that curved around the upstairs windows. Moretti and Sydney Tremaine were received by the owner, a strongly built man in his early twenties. The place was busy, but he found them a table near the window. The dull light beyond the glass took on a brighter gloss against Sydney’s hair, the cranberry colour of her cashmere sweater.

  They ordered their food and ate without much conversation, small talk not being the lingua franca of their particular country, a landscape across which they moved together in physical harmony. Not words; there were few words. She picked up a grape and put it in his mouth, and Moretti felt his body tremble as the world shimmered and spun around him with the touch of her fingers.

  “So, are you going to ask —.”

  Before Sydney could answer, a middle-aged woman came through from the kitchen, carrying a small child in her arms, and Moretti felt a chill run through him. He was looking at an older, female version of himself, with the dark eyes of his godmother.

  “My God,” Sydney said.

  Moretti watched the woman sit down with a middle-aged couple at a nearby table, handing over her grandson to be admired, watched her laugh and talk with them.

  Moretti thought of another so-called war orphan and his
father and mother. Stefan and Sylvia Vannoni, the father murdered, the baby wrenched from the sepolta viva, raised in a foreign land. Wouldn’t Steve Romano of New York City have been better off not seeking his true identity? Truth, thought Moretti, is not always the best thing, not always the right thing.

  “Well,” said Sydney, “are you going to do anything?”

  Across the room, Sophia Maria held out her arms for the child. A line of Dante’s came to Moretti from The Divine Comedy — one of the few works he had read in Italian. Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa. Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on. He did not remember committing it to memory, and it seemed to him like a sign.

  “What are you going to do?” Sydney asked again.

  “I’m going to take you back to Florence and spend the night with you,” he said.

  He stood up and held out his hand for Sydney.

  “What do you think happened? How did it happen?”

  Her hand was warm against his shoulder. Moretti picked it up and kissed it. The dawn light was just filtering through the curtains of the bedroom. Beyond lay the Uffizi and the Bargello, the candy stripes of Brunelleschi’s Duomo. One day he would come back and explore his father’s country, but for now the world was here, in her green eyes and her long dancer’s limbs and her red hair.

  “It’s possible they really did believe she was a war orphan. My father disappeared, and even his own family didn’t know where he was or what happened to him. So my godmother gave up her child, and gave up on Emidio Moretti, and moved away. He came back after the war, she had moved, and he’d fallen in love with my mother.” Como un fulmine, Eduardo. He could hear his father’s voice.

  “Enough about me. Tell me more about this movie.”

  She sat up, and he could feel the excitement in her body already distancing her from him.

  “It’s about Marie Taglioni — she was one of the great Romantic ballerinas of the nineteenth century, daughter of a Milanese dancing master. She changed the look of ballet — Bournonville created La Sylphide for her. When I went to meet the director and producer, what I had in mind was to be an expert consultant on the dance of the period. What they had in mind was to cast me as Taglioni. I was amazed.”

  “I can’t think why.”

  “I’d lost faith in myself. Some people are not — good — for you. Or maybe I’m not good for some people.”

  “I’m trying to read between the lines.”

  She turned to him. “Ed, my sweet tender Ed, at the risk of sounding trite, I have to find myself before I commit to anyone else again. Remember Giulia’s statue? She is Arethusa, a water nymph who dived into a river to escape a river god and came up again as a freshwater spring in Sicily. God, I’m getting confused here, but what I’m trying to say is —”

  “You don’t want to metamorphose into a freshwater spring in Guernsey.”

  “Something like that.”

  Moretti saw the armless woman bathing her blue-green body in the lake at the Manoir Ste. Madeleine. Sydney’s underwater Ophelia smile was gone. Immobility and immutability were only good for statues, and that was what commitment could do, if it was one-sided. The irony was not lost on him.

  “I understand,” he said. “Something I keep meaning to ask you — the name of your perfume.”

  “Je reviens, Eduardo.”

  Together they laughed at the apposite name, the triteness of the cliché.

  The ATR was bringing them in across the harbour. No clear blue sky this time, but the soft grey light of approaching winter on St. Peter Port below. How could he have thought that Castle Cornet still looked like an eighteenth-century print? The old tower on the engraving was long gone and facing the sea was the great concrete rampart of a German gun emplacement, built on earlier foundations.

  One saw what one wanted to see. Monty Lord had clearly seen a sword in the hand of the angel on the ceiling at San Jacopo. But the hands were no longer there, and it could just as well have been a lyre, or a harp, thought Moretti. Soon they would pass over the military underground hospital, the manor with its hidden bunker. Festung Guernsey. A world buried beneath the rock of the island. War buried many things: crimes, past passions, motivations.

  He thought about his father. Had the discovery of Sophia Maria changed how he felt about him? Theirs had been a relationship both abrasive and tender, his mother often the buffer between them. Now all he remembered, all he felt, was tenderness. After what Emidio Moretti had been through, and survived, how could he pass up the chance to live his life with the woman he called his angel of mercy?

  Como un fulmine, Eduardo.

  * * *

  Liz Falla was waiting for him with the police Mercedes.

  “Congratulations on your promotion, Detective Sergeant Falla. Giorgio Benedetti sends his best.”

  She was giving him one of her looks again. “Thank you. Good holiday, Guv? How was the weather?”

  “The weather was good.”

  The weather kept them going for a while, a bridge between the personal and the professional.

  “The Martello tower on Icart Point is up for sale, Guv.”

  “So, Giulia Vannoni is leaving the island. How about the marchesa?”

  “Well, there was talk she was going to leave when the media were after her, but things have quietened down now. You were right to get away. You’re no longer headlines in the Guernsey Press, and you don’t hear much about the case on BBC Guernsey or Channel Television any more. Are they still on about the Vannoni story in Italy?”

  “No. No one is that bothered about two possible, and unproven, murders and a suicide back at a time many people would rather forget. Most of the reporting was of the ‘unbalanced American producer kills writer and member of distinguished Italian family’ kind. That’s the very last thing Monty Lord would have wanted, now that the Vannonis have lost their nemesis, the last real chance of disclosure.”

  “It was Bella Alfieri who picked up the daggers wasn’t it?”

  “Wearing a red wig, yes. And Signor Baza was named after the headquarters of the Slovenian resistance at the end of the war. PC Brouard found that on the internet.”

  They passed the bottom of Fountain Street, where the condemned walked down from Beauregard Tower to a terrible death.

  “That business at my place,” said Moretti. “It wasn’t your imagination, Falla. It was Monty Lord, I’m sure, and if Sydney had stayed there, he’d have got to her. She could have held up the completion of Rastrellamento, and that was the last thing he wanted.”

  “She spooked me.” His partner sounded gruff, offhand.

  “Okay, she spooked you.” Liz Falla could hear the smile in his voice. “But I’d hate to see your grandmother’s tall tales cost you the use of your instincts. Remember what you said to me when I was questioning my own?”

  “I remember. I met Dwight Ellis in town yesterday — he was asking after you.”

  Moretti was happy to change the subject. “I’ll drop in to the club tonight. You know Dwight?”

  “I’m partial to salt beef and red peas, that’s how I met him.”

  Moretti could hear Dwight now in his head, playing. “He’s a good musician — you’ll have to come and hear him some time,” he said. “Sydney Tremaine says you sing like Enya with a touch of Marianne Faithfull. Is that possible, I ask myself.”

  Liz Falla turned and grinned at him. “And you’ll have to come to one of our gigs some time,” she said. A stray glint of sunlight caught her hair, streaking it with bronze, and Moretti remembered the cat he’d bought from the guy in Grosseto selling fake Etruscan shit. It was up on the windowsill in his kitchen, awaiting a decision.

  Too much time has passed, he told himself, and a gift now would look somehow calculated, certainly not spontaneous. So he sat silent, listening to Dwight. He and Garth Machin were now playing a riff on “You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me.”

  The music was playing once more in his head, thank God. That was all that mattered. Case clo
sed, bury the past.

  A thing once done has an end.

  More Great Castle Street Mysteries from Dundurn

  Samurai Code

  Don Easton

  978-1554886975

  $11.99

  This intriguing, suspense-packed novel is the fourth Jack Taggart Mystery in the series commencing with Loose Ends, Above Ground, and Angel in the Full Moon. This time the implacable Mountie Jack Taggart goes undercover to follow the trail of a cheap Saturday-night special found at the scene of a murder.

  He traces the gun from the manufacturer to the person it was stolen from and through several criminals until the trail leads him to a suspected heroin importer. Taggart pretends to be an Irish gangster and penetrates the criminal organization, only to discover that the real crime boss is a mysterious figure out of Asia.

  Taggart and his partner are unexpectedly taken aboard a private jet where they find themselves alone and without backup in the lair of one of the largest yakuza organized crime families in Japan. East meets west. The clash of culture explodes into violence when their real identities are discovered.

  Nightshade

  A Sam Montcalm Mystery

  Tom Henighan

  978-1554887149

  $11.99

  Deadly nightshade — the poison plant par excellence — and in historic Quebec City at an important scientific conference concerning the genetic manipulation of trees it means murder!

  Police, RCMP, and a mysterious FBI agent from Washington converge on the scene. But the sharpest eye belongs to Sam Montcalm, a despised “bedroom snooper” from Ottawa whose primary concern is to clear a First Nations activist of the crime. Sam is middle-aged, tough, and sophisticated, yet he’s also a lone wolf who feels displaced nearly everywhere, and his relations with his colleagues, the police — and with women — are always complicated. “You’re a psychic wound without a health card,” a friend comments.

  The story moves to its surprising climax as Montcalm follows the trail of murder back to Canada’s capital and into the Gatineau Hills, his deep sense of cynicism about human nature confirmed as he closes in on the killer and struggles to come to terms with himself.