I ARRIVED IN THE DOLOMITES on August 1 and was welcomed by Alberto, his wife, and their two sons. I was put into the quiet and spacious guest room with a view of the mountain peaks.
Thus began my long summer idyll. I slept a great deal. I went on bicycle rides up and down the slopes. I played tennis with my nephews, went shopping with my sister-in-law, and chatted about everything with Alberto and his friends and neighbors.
Even the two house martins with shiny black heads that had made a nest under the portico guttering aroused my interest. One day, while they were off fluttering around, I climbed a ladder and saw the two eggs in the nest. At the end of the first week in August two chicks were born, and the father disappeared. My sister-in-law told me that at sea level baby birds were born in June, but that at a height of 4,500 feet the eggs hatched in August, and from that moment it was up to the mother alone to look after the chicks for about twenty days. Sitting in the sun, I watched the mother coming back with worms in her beak, welcomed by the chicks’ insistent twittering. I found myself in an emotional state counting the days leading up to the first flight for the two house martins and, for me, the first autumn rain.
I gave no thought to work, to crimes, deaths, and perpetrators. Inevitably, from time to time, I thought about Linda and Angelo, losing myself in imaginary conversations with them, as if nothing had changed. Then I rapidly fled from those thoughts and retreated into nature and rest.
In the late afternoon I would sit out in the large garden, facing the green mountain slopes, looking down at the dots that were houses in the valley below. Every day I hoped for the rain that never came. I waited for sunset, feeling the days growing shorter and coolness overtaking the heat. Then, when dusk fell and the windows of the houses began to light up, I went into the house with the others.
The last Saturday in August a small house martin took flight from the nest and landed not far from me, where the lawn ended and the rock overhang began. As I was wondering how to help it, the little bird looked up at the nest where the mother and the other baby bird were watching it. Then it took flight, singing happily, toward the valley.
That evening Alberto told me that Angelo had called. He was coming by the next day. He came for lunch in his old beaten-up vehicle with presents for the boys and my sister-in-law. He looked different. He was surer of himself and at the same time more subdued.
We ate together out in the sunshine in the garden, talking of this and that: the vacation that was coming to an end, the school term that was about to start, and poker tournaments. After lunch, Alberto announced that he had to take his wife and the boys to an end-of-summer festival in another village. It was his excuse to leave us alone. Before leaving, Alberto took us both by the arm.
“When Angelo gets back from Australia, let’s start our regular poker games with Graziano again.” I was touched that my brother was trying so hard. Then they left for the festival.
The silence in the large garden was broken only by a desperate cry. The second house martin fledgling, much smaller than the one that had already flown away, was on the ground right below the nest. Its mother was hopping around it, concerned. The little bird had an injured wing; it must have fallen during its first attempt to fly.
We watched it, not sure what to do. We decided to let the mother take care of it and went to sit on the lawn. We looked out over the green valley and smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey. Years earlier, we would have talked about women, poker, and Paola Rossi. Now we smoked in silence, contemplating the mountains and the valley below. The twittering of the house martins was the only sound.
Two old friends with their memories, many of them good and a few very bad.
I came out with the question more to break the silence than anything else. “Do you know where she is?”
“She phoned me in mid-August; she was about to leave for Africa. She’s organized a foundation in Manfredi’s memory. She wants to build another new hospital there.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’d always known that Linda Nardi belonged to a different world.
“She’s convinced that if she hadn’t rejected Manfredi, he wouldn’t have killed those other women,” Angelo explained.
“But Manfredi wasn’t the one who got Elisa pregnant, and Linda knew that,” I said.
Angelo nodded. “Linda knows that Manfredi attacked Elisa, but she also knows that he didn’t kill her.”
I didn’t ask how Linda could be certain. After all, I already knew the answer.
“You risked your lives, Angelo. A moment’s hesitation and Manfredi would have shot you both.”
He turned to look at me. “There are moments when I have no hesitation, Michele. You should know that by now.”
All of a sudden, a dark cloud floated in front of the sun and a cold breeze swept across the lawn. Angelo Dioguardi was relaxed, observing the valley from a distance.
“I went by the cemetery before I left,” I said. “There were fresh flowers on the three graves.”
Angelo nodded. “Elisa loved tulips. She told me that a Turkish legend claims tulips are made of the drops of blood shed for the love of a young woman.”
I had that flower before my eyes in 1982 and 2005, but I didn’t want to see it.
“A tulip on Elisa’s windowsill. A tulip on Manfredi’s chest of drawers. A tulip on Margherita’s desk. All of them faded, Angelo, except for the fresh one you placed on her grave.”
Angelo Dioguardi gave me an apologetic smile, the same childlike smile he’d flashed that first day at Paola’s between feigned bouts of retching in her bathroom. It seemed a lifetime ago, but the man was the same. The same man who always apologized for his highly successful bluffs in poker. Now he was apologizing for the bluff he’d used to risk life itself, winning and losing at the same time.
“Margherita’s a little bit like her,” Angelo said. “She’s full of life, trusting, naive. The evening we met she even told me she loved tulips. For a while, I deluded myself into thinking I could go back to living again. Then Elisa’s mother threw herself off the balcony and I was reminded of who I really am.”
Who are you, Angelo Dioguardi? You crossed the line only once in your life for a beautiful young woman. And then you found out she was pregnant. Michele Balistreri would have resolved everything with a quick and brutal good-bye. But you tried to make it go away by lying to your girlfriend and her uncle, the cardinal. Then there was the abortion, Elisa’s tears and remorse. She was about to confide in Father Paul. And for a moment, one single moment out of an entire lifetime, you gave in to desperation and rage.
It was cooling off. The sky was filling with dark clouds and thunder rumbled. There were flashes of lightning in the distance.
Angelo Dioguardi had reacted by facing up to life, trying to be kind and perform good deeds. But that wasn’t enough. When Linda Nardi asked him for help with Manfredi, he told her the truth and agreed to kill Manfredi as a last act of atonement.
Angelo wanted to tell me what I already knew and had never wanted to hear.
“When I went up to Alessandrini, he was furious. He knew that Paul had had lunch with Elisa, and he ordered me to fire her. I was terrified, afraid that Elisa would tell Paul about the abortion, as they were talking to each other a lot in those days. Then Alessandrini and I called you from the terrace, and while you were coming over I told the cardinal I had to go to the bathroom.”
“I know, Angelo. I called the cardinal yesterday. He remembered that you’d gone to the bathroom.”
Angelo went on with his pointless explanation.
“I didn’t go to the bathroom, I went down to see Elisa. I wanted to talk to her, calm her down, comfort her. Thirty seconds later I was on her floor. The office door was locked, which was odd. Now we know Manfredi locked it. I opened the door with my keys. Elisa was on the ground. Her face was swollen, and she was half-naked and bleeding from a cut on her breast. On the table, I saw a letter she was writing to Father Paul, telling him about her affair with me and the abortion. I put it in my pocket, and then I did it.”
To Valerio she appeared to be dead. Manfredi swore he’d left her no more than injured. One of the two was lying, or they were both mistaken.
So Corvu had pronounced at the end of his detailed analysis of the alibis. But rather they had both spoken the truth. Manfredi had left her alive, and a few minutes later Valerio had found her dead.
“You were coming up, Michele. I had half a minute, a chance that wouldn’t come again.”
I should have understood right away, when I saw you on that landing and saw how upset you were that night. I should have understood when I saw that faded flower on Margherita’s desk. You did everything you could to tell me, in your own way.
Angelo gave a last apologetic smile.
“There was a cushion she used to sit on. I used that. Thirty seconds later I was upstairs, waiting for you.”
You can throw your whole life away in a moment of madness. A cushion pressed against the face of a young woman who was almost dead already. A boat in the middle of the African sea, and a boy wearing a wetsuit.
I knew he had thought about Elisa every day for all those years and that the suffering of her parents had tortured him every night. Unlike me, he had tried to make up for it. But I also knew his hands had held that cushion over her face.
The first drops of rain began to fall. I glanced at the mother that was jumping and twittering around the injured bird. The thunder exploded very near, almost shaking the mountainside, and the twittering suddenly stopped. The little house martin was lifeless by now. The mother looked at me uncertainly.
Any one of you could have found yourself in my place.
Manfredi dei Banchi di Aglieno had written those words—the evil man we had all been pursuing and then caught in a trap and, in the end, crushed. It had started like this, in a moment of madness.
It started to pour. We remained there in silence, while the pale light of day grew faint. The rain bathed our heads, faces, and bodies and soaked into our shoes. Then, one by one, the windows at the bottom of the valley began to twinkle in the dusk.
The mother looked one last time at the little lifeless bird. Then it hovered in the air and soared away alone, not happy, but it was singing.