‘He was quiet. Even as a boy. He was always so quiet, so modest.’
Ensconced in a large armchair in the sitting room of her Rome apartment, Maria Valacci, Giovanni Trantemento’s seventy-seven-year-old sister and only sibling, buried her face in her handkerchief and began to weep loudly. Standing behind her, her son rolled his eyes before patting her, none too gently, on the shoulder.
‘Mama,’ he said, ‘please.’
Tall and thin, with a strangely skull-like head, Antonio Valacci bent over his mother and whispered, quite loudly, ‘For God’s sake, Mama, pull yourself together. This man is a policeman!’
Leaning back in the uncomfortable chair he had been shown to, Pallioti watched as Maria Valacci somewhat reluctantly followed her son’s advice. He wondered if they knew exactly how dear Uncle Gio had amassed his not-inconsiderable nest egg. The size of his bank accounts – there were several – had surprised everyone. What he had amassed was not a fortune, quite. But when added to the cold cash found in the safe, it was damn close. And as his will stated, most of it, including his extremely desirable apartment in Florence, would revert to these two people. Pallioti wondered if they were aware of that fact.
‘He was my older brother,’ she said. ‘My only living relative.’
Antonio Valacci sighed as he folded himself onto the sofa beside his mother’s armchair.
‘E che sono? ’ he muttered. ‘Il figlio di nessuno? ’
‘Don’t be so silly.’ His mother glared at him. ‘Of course you’re not no one. You know what I mean!’
‘Yes, Mama.’ Antonio nodded. ‘I certainly do. My mother is proud,’ he said, turning to Pallioti, ‘exceptionally proud, of the role her brother played in the war. In fact,’ he added, ‘she never tires of talking about it. It’s one of her favourite subjects. Which is all the more amazing since dear Uncle Gio, who we saw all of once a decade, never mentioned it at all.’
This caused Maria Valacci to wail, ‘He was a modest man!’ again. She produced another handkerchief from somewhere in the depths of the chair. ‘A patriot,’ she said. ‘One of the heroes of Italy. Without men like him,’ she announced, turning to her son, ‘people like you wouldn’t be free to walk the streets.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’
Antonio leaned back and closed his eyes. Pallioti thought he saw him counting to ten. A clock whirred in the corner of the room and began to chime the half-hour.
Although the day was bright the windows were half shuttered, filling the long room with light the colour of pond water. Pallioti wondered if it was always like this, or if the gloom had been specially induced out of respect for Uncle Gio.
The apartment itself was in a building in the warren of streets between Piazza Navona and the Vittorio Emmanuel. The address was distinguished, but even the police driver had had difficulty finding it. Eventually Pallioti had got out and walked, leaving the young officer and his Mercedes at Chiesa Nuova. In the end, the building hadn’t been more than twenty steps away, as everything in Rome seemed to be once you actually knew where it was. He had been buzzed in and climbed the three flights of marble stairs, his footsteps ringing loud as cymbals. The fact that there had been only one other front door on the far side of the Valaccis’ landing led him to suspect that their apartment took up at least half the floor. For Rome, that was large. But perhaps, Pallioti thought, not large enough to comfortably house a fifty-year-old man and his ageing mother?
From somewhere beyond the sitting room another clock, then another, joined the chorus of whirring and chiming. Antonio opened his eyes and managed a wan smile.
‘An enthusiasm of my father’s,’ he said. ‘He was a shipping agent – frozen foods, mostly. And rice. Did you know that Italy is a major exporter of rice?’
Antonio Valacci got to his feet, straightening his tie and pulling down the cuffs of his pinstriped shirt.
‘I suppose you did,’ he said. ‘It’s the sort of thing policemen know.’ He glanced at Pallioti, and added, ‘At least your kind of policeman. Anyway,’ he shrugged, ‘it was lucrative, but it bored Papa. What he really loved was clocks. He liked to collect them and disembowel them, in his spare time. He called them “his children”.’ Antonio smiled thinly. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that makes them my brothers and sisters. My mother’s only other living relatives. May I offer you an espresso, Dottore?’ he asked. ‘I’m feeling in need of one.’
Without waiting for Pallioti to answer, Antonio Valacci picked up a small silver bell from a side table and rang it. The sound should have been lost in the chiming of the clocks, but apparently wasn’t, because a small Asian woman in a uniform popped out of a doorway at the end of the room even before he put it down. Pallioti wondered if she had deliberately been idling in order to eavesdrop, or if she was always required to hover just out of sight. She was illegal, probably. In a perfect world he ought to check. But he wouldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of policeman.
‘I wonder if you could tell me,’ he asked, leaning towards Antonio’s mother, ‘how often, Signora Valacci, did you see your brother, in the last few years?’
Maria Valacci’s skin was pale and finely wrinkled. A vein twitched at the corner of her eye. ‘Not often enough,’ she said.
As she spoke she glanced towards the fireplace. From above it, a portrait of a dark-suited man whom Pallioti assumed was Antonio’s clock-loving father stared down at them.
‘Not often enough. During my whole life,’ Maria Valacci said again. ‘I never saw Giovanni often enough.’
She paused. Pallioti braced himself for another flood of tears. But they didn’t come. Instead, Maria Valacci narrowed her eyes, staring into the middle distance as if she was trying to pick something – some moment, or word, or gesture – out of the past. Failing, she shook her head. Then she said, ‘Tonio is right. Giovanni did not care for us.’
‘Mama—’
‘No. It’s true.’
Maria Valacci reached out and touched her son. For a second, her thin, almost talon-like fingers rested on the back of his hand with unexpected tenderness. Then she drew back, twisting the large sapphire ring that sat on her left hand and shaking her head.
‘Perhaps we did not care for him, either,’ she said. ‘As much as we should have. If the truth be told.’
She glanced at Pallioti and smiled. It was nothing more than a flicker, an echo of the young woman she must once have been.
‘The dead are difficult, don’t you find, Ispettore?’ she asked suddenly. ‘They tend to be so much more present than the living. Perhaps because they can be everywhere at once.’ Her pale-blue eyes dulled for a moment, then she gave herself a little shake. ‘In any case,’ she continued, ‘my late husband did not care for Giovanni, on the few occasions that he met him. And to be very honest, I didn’t know him. I didn’t see my brother, after the war, for almost twenty years. I thought he was dead. So we might as well have been strangers, really. We were. I suppose,’ she added, looking down at her hands, ‘I thought I would correct that, one day, in the way you do. But I never did. I was ten years younger than Gio.’
She stopped speaking, her eyes searching into the past again. Pallioti waited.
‘My father,’ Maria Valacci continued. ‘I loved him. He used to carry me on his shoulders, pretend he was a horse.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘He was killed in the war, in Russia, Papa. Left to die on the retreat when our German friends decided they could not, after all, spare the resources to help evacuate their beloved brothers-in-arms. Mama, my mother – she never forgave him for that. Never got over it. It made her ill. She’d been a believer, you see.’ The old woman looked at Pallioti and nodded. ‘A loyal follower of Il Duce,’ she said. ‘An advocate of the Pact of Steel. So, the shame – you see, she couldn’t cope with it. She believed my father was a coward, that somehow it had to have been his fault. Being left behind. Dying. Leaving her. She couldn’t hate Mussolini, or the Nazis – so she hated Papa. And eventually, she did the same to Giovanni. Hated him for what he did.’
Pallioti leaned forward.
‘For what he did?’
Maria Valacci nodded.
‘Joining the partisans. My mother never forgave him for that. Even though he took such good care of her. He loved her, you see,’ she added. ‘The way children will. You kick a dog and it keeps coming back. She died in a sanatorium, Mama. In Switzerland, near Zurich. In 1947.’
Her voice stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Silence seeped into the long room, rocking on a backwash of memory. It was broken by the creak of a door and the quick tap-tap of the maid’s shoes as she crossed the polished chestnut floor bearing a tray that held three tiny porcelain cups and saucers.
The coffee was bitter and strong and seemed to inject a pulse of normality into the proceedings. Which, Pallioti suspected, was why Antonio had suggested it. He wondered how much time, exactly, Maria Valacci’s son spent trying to fish his mother out of the whirlpool of the past.
‘Forgive me,’ Pallioti said, replacing the little cup and saucer on the tray, ‘but I am afraid I have to ask you. Last Wednesday, November first, can you tell me where you were?’
Antonio opened his hands in a ‘who me?’ gesture and smiled.
‘Not in Florence,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you’re wondering. I was in my office. I work for the Ministry. Under the general umbrella of Culture. My mother,’ he added, ‘was having her hair done.’ Antonio Valacci was watching Pallioti carefully. ‘She has her hair done at 11 a.m. on Wednesdays,’ he said. ‘On any and all Wednesdays. I can give you the name of her hairdresser. And of my secretary.’
He jumped up and began to weave his way towards a desk in the corner.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Antonio,’ his mother said, her eyes following him. ‘You make us sound as if we’re suspects.’
‘We are.’
Antonio Valacci glanced over his shoulder and smiled. He appeared to be writing something on a piece of card.
‘Everyone’s a suspect,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they, Ispettore?’
Threading his way back across the room, Antonio handed Pallioti an old-fashioned address card that had a telephone number and two names – The Bella Donna Hair Salon, and Anna Perocci – written on the back. The woman’s name sounded familiar, but Pallioti could not put his finger on why. He slipped the card into his jacket.
‘I gave the same information to the pair who came yesterday evening,’ Antonio said, sitting down on the couch again. ‘But perhaps they haven’t passed it along. If the police are anything like the Culture Ministry it takes about a year for one department to talk to the next.’
The police were actually not much like the Culture Ministry, but it was entirely possible that the two fairly junior Roman officers who would have been sent to inform Giovanni Trantemento’s next of kin of his death had not yet got around to filing a report. Not that it mattered much. They were family liaison officers, dispatched for the purpose of bringing comfort, not casting suspicion on the recently bereaved. That was his job.
Having spoken by phone to one of the officers in question, Pallioti knew the Valaccis had not been told any more than the press – simply that Giovanni Trantemento had been shot in the course of what appeared to be a burglary. No mention had been made of single bullets. Or of kneeling. Or salt.
Now he leant forward and said, ‘I know it is unpleasant, but I must ask. Do either of you have any idea, any suspicion at all, as to why someone might have wanted to kill Signor Trantemento?’
The words were so clichéd that he felt mildly ridiculous even mouthing them. But hackneyed as it was, the question was necessary, and in his experience, almost always useful. It was not so much the answer that interested him, as the reaction he got when he asked it. Sometimes outrage. Sometimes gabbled nonsense. This time, he was rewarded with a knowing look, at least from Antonio. Maria Valacci simply shook her head.
‘I thought it was burglary,’ she said.
‘Yes. But there is always the chance that he knew his killer. So, if you have any idea—’
He looked from one to the other of them. Antonio was studying his empty coffee cup with intense interest.
‘I never visited him,’ Maria Valacci said. ‘Not once, in Florence. Or anywhere else, I’m afraid. So I don’t know anyone he knew. Except Antonio and my late husband, of course. I went to Switzerland,’ she added, ‘with my mother. Giovanni took us. He stayed with us for a while, then he vanished. Not surprising, I suppose. Even the most devoted dog can be kicked too hard.’
Pallioti frowned. Maria Valacci looked at him and nodded.
‘It was horrible,’ she said. ‘Our mother, she called Gio names. Said he was a coward, like his father. We weren’t even allowed to mention Papa. It was as if she wanted to wipe him off the face of the earth, pretend he’d never existed. But she couldn’t because she had us. And Gio looked just like him. Perhaps that’s why Mama hated him, because although we couldn’t speak about Papa, or even use his name, Gio still had his face.’
She studied her hands for a moment, twisting the big ring. ‘They said some heart ailment killed her,’ she whispered. ‘But really, it was anger. Hate. Hate turned her heart black.’
She stopped speaking. The clocks ticked like a chorus of crickets.
‘After my mother died,’ Maria Valacci said, ‘I got married. I thought Gio was dead.’ She shrugged. ‘Everyone else was. So I just assumed. And I had a new husband, and—’ She shook her head and looked at Pallioti. ‘Everything was so confused just then. You have no idea. Nothing was the way it had been. It was as if the whole world had been taken and shaken and all the pieces broken and put back in the wrong place.’
Pallioti nodded, waiting for her to go on.
‘After we were married,’ she said a moment later, ‘my husband and I came here, to Rome. His family is from here. And, well, I tried to find Gio. I made some calls. Wrote to the Red Cross and the CLN. The Committee of National Liberation. They were supposed to know what had happened to all the partisans. Finally, I was told he was dead. I’d thought so anyway, so why should I guess it wasn’t true?’ She looked at Pallioti, her face pleading, as if she were asking for his forgiveness. ‘It happened,’ she said. ‘To a lot of people. No one knew who was dead or who was alive or who was anywhere.’
‘How did you find him again?’
Maria Valacci shrugged.
‘I didn’t. He found us. He came here, one day. Out of the blue. Antonio was just a little boy. It was in the afternoon.’ Her eyes narrowed again as she drifted backwards. ‘It was a long time ago. And as I said, Gio and my husband – they didn’t get on.’ Her thin shoulders jumped under the sweater. ‘We came from Pisa,’ she added. ‘Gio and I were both born there.’
Pallioti frowned. He realized that in the back of his mind he had somehow assumed that Giovanni Trantemento had been a native Florentine. It was the apartment, of course. Properties like that in buildings like the one Maria Valacci’s brother had lived in were usually passed through generations as carefully as family jewels – which, in fact, they were.
Maria Valacci’s hands ran across her lap, plucking at the pleats of her black trousers. For a moment Pallioti thought she wasn’t going to go on. Then she said, ‘I didn’t have a reason to go to Florence, after that. And Giovanni – well, he was busy.’ She looked up at Pallioti and nodded. ‘He travelled a lot. Yes, a lot,’ she repeated, as if she liked the sound of this, as if it explained everything – all the years that had slipped away unattended, and left her here, surrounded by clocks and overstuffed sofas and uncomfortable chairs. ‘Building his business,’ she said. ‘He was very successful, you know. An antiques dealer.’
Pallioti glanced at Antonio. Sunk into the couch, he had given up the coffee cup and was now studying the tips of his fingers. His nails were blunt and close clipped.
‘Did he mention any friends at all? Business acquaintances? Someone he came to see when he was here in Rome?’
Even as Pallioti asked it, he realized that this was pointless. Nothing suggested the earlier answer might have changed. In fact, it all pointed to the contrary. Maria Valacci and her brother might as well have been strangers.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I – as I said, we weren’t close.’
Pallioti nodded, and decided to change tack.
‘Do you by any chance have a picture?’ he asked. ‘A recent photograph of Signor Trantemento that we might be able to borrow?’
Antonio looked up. He glanced at his mother as if he were wondering whether or not she was going to lie.
‘Not more recent than the ceremony,’ Maria Valacci said finally. ‘That’s the last time we saw him. On the day of the celebration, when he got his medal. The ceremony, and everything – it was on TV. Then we were invited to the dinner. At the Quirinale.’
She got up from her chair, her thin body unfolding like a spindly ladder. Her son began to get to his feet. He reached a hand towards her, but she waved him away.
‘I’m not dead yet,’ she muttered.
Pallioti, who had been about to rise and offer her his arm, sank back onto the lumpen brocade of his own chair.
‘He was frightfully angry with me,’ Maria Valacci added. ‘He rang up and shouted.’
The small black velvet slippers she wore made a soft hissing sound as she shuffled towards the grand piano that sat in front of one of the windows. The top was down, and laden with picture frames.
‘Because you came to the Quirinale?’ Pallioti asked. For Giovanni Trantemento to deny his only relative seemed churlish, no matter how distant they might have been.
‘No, no.’ Maria Valacci seemed to be having some trouble seeing in the dim light. She was peering at the forest of frames. Finally she found the one she wanted, reached in and plucked it out.
‘No, no,’ she said again. ‘When I nominated him, for the decoration.’
‘Nominated him?’
‘Yes. I heard about it, you see.’ She turned back towards the two men, executing the turn with the care of a dancer. ‘Well, actually,’ she added, ‘Tonio did, heard about it, and told me – that they were going to do something special for the partisans, on the six-lucretia tieth anniversary. So I, I nominated Giovanni. I put his name forward.’
She moved slowly back across the room and stopped in front of Pallioti, holding the frame, its face pressed against her black cashmere sweater as if she was afraid he might try to snatch it from her.
‘I thought it was the least they could do,’ she said. ‘To thank them. All those people who died, throwing stones and firing silly little handguns at Nazi tanks. And he deserved it, Gio. He truly did. He fought so bravely. He saved someone’s life – ran out into the street and helped a woman who had been shot. He was arrested, and beaten, and escaped, finally. But it saved her life, that woman. It was written about,’ she added. ‘In the paper.’ She shook her head. ‘My mother was so horrible about it. Even about that. She would barely talk to him when he came to see us, even when he got her to Switzerland. She never told him he was a hero. I thought someone should.’
For a moment Pallioti thought she was not going to give up the picture after all. Then she handed him the frame.
Turning it over, he saw a tall elderly man, his drawn face haunted as he struggled to smile. He wore a dark suit. Even in a photograph it was obvious that it was expensive, well cut. Probably custom made. A medal winked on his lapel. Antonio stood on one side of him, and on the other side, his sister. Giovanni Battiste’s veined hand rested awkwardly on the shoulder of her pale velvet dress.
Maria Valacci turned around and shuffled back to the piano. She came back and stood in front of Pallioti, holding out a small black presentation case.
‘This is his medal.’
She opened the box. Inside, a gold medallion nestled on a bed of white satin.
‘He gave it to me. Afterwards. That night. He said I deserved it more than he did. I told you.’ She looked at Pallioti and blinked.
‘My brother was like that. Modest. He was a brave, modest man.’
Maria Valacci clicked the box closed, placed it on the table beside her chair, and nodded towards the photograph.
‘You will be careful with it, won’t you?’ she asked. ‘It’s the only photo I have, of us all together.’
‘Very. I will be very careful with it, I promise.’
Pallioti got to his feet and extended his hand. He was surprised when she took it in both of hers.
‘I loved him, you know,’ she said. ‘Even if I didn’t know him. He was my brother. A hero.’
‘I know.’
‘Will you find the person who did this thing?’
Maria Valacci’s fingers were surprisingly strong. Pallioti could feel the bones, barely covered by her dry papery flesh.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will.’
Antonio Valacci, who pointed out that he had already missed half a day of work and really did have to get back to his office, walked Pallioti down to the street.
‘I know what he did, you know.’ Antonio glanced at Pallioti as they stepped out of the building, blinking in the bright autumn light. ‘To make his money, I mean,’ he added. ‘Giovanni. I know he dealt in – whatever you want to call it. Not stamps, anyway. More engravings. Specialized. Boys, wasn’t it?’
Pallioti nodded. ‘Apparently. Eighteenth-century, I gather. Very discerning. Was your mother aware?’
‘Good God, no!’ Antonio laughed. ‘No, no. I think my father might have been,’ he added. ‘That might have explained the coolness. Not that dear Uncle Gio was warm himself. On the contrary, a real cold fish. I found out by mistake.’ He glanced at Pallioti. ‘Amazing what the ministry turns up. I kept quiet, of course.’
They walked in silence for a moment.
‘It was a strange comment,’ Pallioti said finally.
Antonio glanced at him. ‘Which one?’
‘About the medal. Your uncle telling your mother she deserved it more than he did. What do you think he meant?’
‘That she was the real hero?’ Antonio shook his head. ‘That getting shot at by Nazis was easier than putting up with their mother? Who knows? That he wouldn’t have got the wretched thing if it wasn’t for her nominating him for it?’ He shrugged. ‘It was nice of him anyway, to give it to her. Unexpectedly gracious. It means a lot to her. Particularly after he was such a bastard. To start with, anyway. Although I suppose that was my fault.’
Pallioti stopped. ‘What do you mean?’
Standing opposite him in the sunlit street, Antonio Valacci shrugged.
‘Well, I was the one who told my mother about the sixtieth anniversary celebrations. That they were planning on giving medals to the partisans. The ones who were still alive.’ He paused for a moment, then he said, ‘You have to understand, Ispettore, she doesn’t have much in her life, my mother. My grandmother, forgive me for saying it, was a rabid Fascist bitch. You know, the kind who thought Mussolini brought “honour” to Italy because he made the trains run on time and liked smart uniforms. I doubt my father’s parents were much better, from what I heard of them. God knows he wasn’t exactly a bargain. And of course, they never knew what Mama was, or I doubt they would have been so kind to her.’
‘What she was?’
‘Jewish.’
Pallioti stood for a moment in the sunlight, absorbing what this must have meant, in occupied Italy in 1944.
‘Well, half,’ Antonio added. ‘Genetically. Strictly speaking, according to the tenets of the faith, Jewish though – since her mother was Jewish. I think that’s how it works, doesn’t it? I’m not really sure. Not that I’d guess the Nazis cared. Mother, father, grandparents, great-grandparents. I think Buchenwald welcomed all comers.’
‘Your grandmother was Jewish?’
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’
Pallioti nodded. He was trying to build a picture in his head. He had heard of it before, Jewish families who were among the most ardent Fascists. And, he supposed, if they considered themselves Italian first and foremost, why not? Plenty of other people had done it. At least until 1938.
‘Her family had converted to Catholicism,’ Antonio Valacci said. ‘Years before. They’d abbreviated their name, the whole thing. And of course, my grandmother married my grandfather. They were good party members. But, yes, my grandmother was Jewish. So my mother was, is, half Jewish. I don’t think it mattered much, at first. But after the occupation, certainly by 1944, even in Pisa – well, you can see why Giovanni was desperate to get them to Switzerland.’
Yes, Pallioti thought. He could.
Antonio smiled, but the expression that flashed across his face was more of a grimace.
‘I doubt my father would have married her, to be honest,’ he said, ‘if he’d known. But in Switzerland, my grandmother was just another refugee war widow with a daughter. To this day, my mother more or less denies it.’ He shrugged. ‘She can’t help it, I suppose. She was brought up denying it – at first because I doubt they ever thought about it. Then because her life, literally, depended on it – on not being what she was. Of course, my grandmother probably would have died before admitting it.’ He let out a bark of laughter. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t intend that to be funny. But you see, it does explain a lot.’
Pallioti nodded. ‘They were, where?’ he asked. ‘In Pisa?’
‘Yes. Both of my grandparents’ families came from there. It wasn’t an issue, really, even after 1938 when the restrictions came in. No one paid close attention, and as I said, my grandparents had become Catholics, and were good party members. But the families were known. After 1943, people began to develop long memories.’
‘And your grandfather was dead.’
‘Yes,’ Antonio nodded. ‘I suspect that made my grandmother more vulnerable. She wasn’t a very nice woman. She probably had enemies. Giovanni must have looked at the situation and realized she was sitting on a time bomb.’
‘No wonder your mother thought he was God.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Antonio agreed. ‘He did the impossible. He got them out. And I heard all about it. Any time my father wasn’t around, my mother went on, and on, and on. How handsome her brother was. How brave he was. How he’d dragged that woman to safety. What a hero he’d been. I grew up thinking my Uncle Gio was a cross between Superman and the Pope. Meeting him was a bit of a let-down, I’ll tell you. Still,’ Antonio shrugged, ‘when I heard about the sixtieth – that the government was issuing a new medal, and trying to dig up as many of the partisans as they could find to pin it on, I told her. Talk about good intentions paving the way to hell.’
Pallioti frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘No,’ Antonio Valacci rolled his eyes. ‘Well, it surprised me too,’ he said. ‘You see, when I told my mother, she was all excited. She wanted me to find out who to give Giovanni’s name to, and make sure he got on a list for a medal. So I did. I made some calls. I told the story about the woman, and how brave he was and blah, blah, blah. My mother wrote a letter, nominating him. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t proud of it – you know how old men are. Their glory days and all that. Certainly, it never occurred to me he’d be upset. But then again, I really didn’t know him.’
‘He was upset?’
Antonio laughed.
‘To put it mildly. When Uncle Gio found out – when the Ministry contacted him with the joyous news that he had been put forward for a medal by his loving sister. Well. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. To put it bluntly, he went mental. Rang up and called her names. I happened to be home. I could hear him on the phone, even though I was across the room. He was shouting. Accusing her of ruining his life.’
‘Ruining his life?’
Antonio Valacci nodded.
‘That’s what he said. He was hysterical, I tell you. “First Mama and now you – you’ve, both of you, ruined my life!” Those were the words. You should have seen my mother’s face. I thought she was going to have a heart attack. Honestly. She turned grey. I took the phone out of her hand and hung up on him.’
Antonio shook his head.
‘It wasn’t funny, really,’ he said. He looked at Pallioti and smiled. ‘So, you see,’ he added, ‘the least dear Uncle Gio could do was give her the damn medal. To this day, she thinks he just had a change of heart.’
‘Didn’t he?’
Antonio shrugged. He looked up at the buildings behind them as if he expected to see his mother at the window.
‘Not exactly. I telephoned him the next day. From my office.’ He smiled, looking somewhat sheepish. ‘You may not believe this, Ispettore,’ he said. ‘But I do love my mother, very much. So, I told dear Uncle Gio exactly what I thought of him.’
‘And?’
Antonio sighed.
‘Let’s just say that by the end of the conversation – look,’ he added, ‘I’m not particularly proud of this – I don’t generally go around threatening old men – but, well, I may have suggested that some of his transactions, his sales, and his clients might be looked into a little more carefully than they had been in the past if he didn’t, as they so quaintly say in America, Straighten Up and Fly Right.’
Pallioti could not help smiling. He was beginning to like Antonio Valacci.
‘Straighten Up and Fly Right?’
‘I had an American girlfriend, what can I say? Anyway,’ Antonio added, ‘Uncle Gio called my mother the next afternoon and apologized. I came home from work that evening and she told me she’d gone to Mass and confession for the first time in ten years and prayed her head off for her dear, darling brother, and lo and behold, a “miracle” had happened. Imagine.’
‘Imagine.’
‘And, of course, he accepted the medal.’
‘And gave it to her.’
Antonio nodded.
‘And gave it to her.’ They began to walk again. ‘But,’ he added, ‘I don’t think it was just that, honestly – my shaming him, heavy-handing him – whatever you want to call it.’
‘No?’ Pallioti asked.
‘No.’ Antonio Valacci shook his head. Then he stopped again and looked at Pallioti. ‘When I saw him at the dinner, it was almost as if—’
He stopped talking, his eyes focused back in the past. Pallioti waited. Antonio Valacci gave himself a small shake. ‘I know it sounds strange,’ he said, ‘but before I threatened him – I doubt, incidentally, that I’d have been able to do any of that, get his sales looked into, but it sounded good – before I did that, he was angry. But more angry the way people are when they’re afraid. Like an animal that’s cornered. They fight and scratch because they’re terrified. But at the dinner, at the Quirinale – perhaps it was just time – but it was as if he’d changed.’
‘How?’ Pallioti asked quietly. ‘How did your uncle change?’
Antonio Valacci thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘People are so strange. As I’m sure you know. And perhaps I’m wrong, but I got the feeling he’d stopped fighting. That he wasn’t angry any more. He was just tired. Like someone who’s given up.’ Antonio shrugged. ‘Perhaps he had a presentiment, you know, that it was all almost over. Now I do sound idiotic,’ he added. ‘Next I’ll be telling you he had an aura. A blue haze around his head or something. Although it is a little spooky. Given what happened.’
Pallioti said nothing. Spooky was not the word he would have used. They began to walk again.
‘I’m parked at Chiesa Nuova.’
Antonio Valacci nodded.
‘I’m going that way.’
They came to the end of the narrow street. Antonio stopped, dug in his pocket, and pulled out a slim gold cigarette case.
‘Is that why he was killed?’ he asked. ‘Do you think? Because of that stuff, the erotica?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pallioti said. ‘Possibly. At this point, anything is possible.’
‘So, no leads.’
If it was a question, Pallioti didn’t answer it. Instead, he watched as Antonio examined his cigarette, raised it to his lips, then said, ‘The name I gave you. On the card. She isn’t my secretary.’
‘Ah.’
‘I didn’t give her name to your friends from Rome, either. Just you. She’s Carlo Perocci’s wife. We’re having an affair. You know who he is?’
Before Pallioti could answer, Antonio said, ‘Junior Culture Minister. He’s an ass. It’s been going on for a long time. Anna and me, I mean. Well, and him being an ass, too. If he knew, he’d kill her. We’d run off to the ends of the earth together, but I can’t leave my mother. Yet.’ He shrugged. ‘So there we are.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Antonio smiled. ‘So am I. So’s Anna. It’s a mess. We’ve known each other for years. That number I gave you? It’s her mobile. We were together almost all day. Certainly all morning. We have an apartment, in Trastevere. People saw us. It’s not just my lover vouching for me.’
‘Thank you for telling me.’
Antonio waved his hand through the stream of smoke.
‘It’s the least I can do, cooperate with the police. I mean, I’m just the Culture Ministry, but we’re more or less on the same side. Besides,’ he added, ‘you’ll want to clear it up, since I have a motive.’
Pallioti raised his eyebrows.
Antonio Valacci dropped his cigarette into the gutter, shook his head, and ground it out under his heel.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday, Ispettore,’ he said. ‘I’m sure people have killed for less than that apartment. I’m also sure I’m not one of them.’
He held out his hand. Pallioti shook it.
‘Safe journey home.’ Antonio Valacci smiled. ‘Chiesa Nuova’s straight ahead. Down that alley, then on the left.’
The plane rose from the runway, swung out over the ancient port of Ostia, and turned north. Below, the silver sheet of the sea glittered in the setting sun. Then it turned pink, and orange, and was lost in cloud as they climbed over the coast.
A drink, vodka straight up on the rocks, and a foil envelope of ‘nibbles’ sat untouched on the tray table in front of Pallioti. He poked the ice cubes with his green plastic stirrer, then put it down and sipped the cold slimy liquid. Vodka was a bad habit he had picked up some years ago – he could not remember exactly when – a defence against all the times, on planes and overseas, when grappa was out of reach. As a substitute it was a poor one, but it had the comfort of familiarity. He felt the taste evaporate on the back of his tongue, considered the supposition that, in a perfect world, Alitalia would provide plump green olives instead of vacuum-packed stale almonds, and looked at the small red book he held in his hand.
Strictly speaking, he should have signed for it, or at least told Enzo he was taking it. He would remember to mention it. Not that anyone would care. It was a souvenir, evidence of nothing except the past. Eventually it would be handed over to the Valaccis, along with the rest of Giovanni Trantemento’s belongings.
He had recognized it at once, from the moment he’d held up the bag. The cover was the wrong colour, but otherwise the little book had been as familiar as the face of a long-forgotten friend in a crowd. There was only one shop in the city that sold these, an ancient dark little hole of a stationer’s in an alley not far from Via Purgatorio that had no name.
The little books, all with the lily stamped on the front, came in a variety of colours. They were sold in soft cloth bags, often in pairs. Appointments, accounts, liaisons, and dreams – all the crucial, forgotten minutiae of lives had been carefully recorded between covers just like these by generations of Florentine women. Pallioti’s mother had kept hers in the secret drawer of her desk.
Her book was always dark blue, her favourite colour. As a child, he had often released the secret latch and pulled it out. Sometimes, instead of studying the small cramped pages, he’d simply sat there, his feet barely touching the floor, holding it against his cheek because the cover was as soft as her skin and the pages smelt of her perfume.
The memory came back so suddenly, it made him blink.
The cover of this book was battered, the red faded, the gilding on the lily almost gone altogether. The spine was intact – the hand-stitching had assured that, but the flyleaf was water-marked, the inscription on it barely visible. Pallioti turned on his reading light and held the speckled page up in the beam. There was an address – no number, but a street off Via Senese that he recognized, and a date – 1 November 1943. Then the inscription, To Caterina Maria Cammaccio, the Most Beautiful Bride in Florence ~ From Her Sister, Isabella.
The letters were ghostly. Isabella had chosen to use what must, even at the time, have been pale lilac ink. Caterina Cammaccio herself had opted for more conventional black. Turning the pages, looking at the tiny, cramped writing, he realized with a start that he could not remember what colour ink his mother had used, or – despite the fact that he was ten when she had died and had been reading for years – a single word that she had written. It was simply the fact that she had smoothed the pages with her hands, and left on the marbled paper the shape of her handwriting, marks as definitive as a zebra’s stripe or a leopard’s spots, that had drawn her close to him.
Glancing about to be sure no one was watching, he lifted the little red book to his nose. But there was not so much as a hint of jasmine. The scarred leather and thick ragged pages of Caterina Cammaccio’s book smelt only of dust and shadows.