Epilogue

Monday, February 15th

PALLIOTI ALLOWED VALENTINE’S DAY, that most gruesome and unlikely celebration of lovers, to pass before he returned to Bologna. It only seemed fair.

Although, he had to admit, he was finding fairness a stretch these days. It didn’t interest him much, or at least as much as he suspected it should. This, for instance, was essentially an ambush. Or perhaps, he thought, as he got out of the car and crunched across the expensive gravel, it wasn’t. He found it hard to believe that a woman as intelligent as Barbara Barelli would be surprised to see him.

Antonio Tomaselli had held her against her will. He had threatened her with a gun, tied her up, and locked her in an upstairs room. That much was true. But it was also true that she had gone to the farm of her own free will, and that when Antonio opened the door and let her in, she had stepped over the threshold announcing not only that she knew Kristin Carson was there, but that she refused to leave without her. A fight had ensued. Tomaselli had won.

Pallioti did not know, when it came to it, if Antonio would have killed Barbara, or Kristin. He probably didn’t want to. But then again, he probably hadn’t really wanted to kill Aldo Moro, either. It was hard to know exactly what was in people’s hearts. Or what they would do when they could not get what they wanted—whether it was political recognition, thirteen comrades freed from jail, or one last chance with the woman they loved. Pallioti was sure Antonio Tomaselli had wanted that. The past returned and Angela Vari with it.

Like all attempts to unwind time, and every love story ever written, it was, he thought, that simple. And that complicated.

This time the bells ran through their full chime before anyone opened the door. When she did, Hedwige Aarlheissen was barefoot and, somewhat disconcertingly, wearing purple fuzzy leggings and a very long and equally fuzzy purple sweater. Pallioti thought she looked like a large moldy grape. As she waved him in, he heard Barbara call from the family room.

“Is it the wine order?”

“Sadly not.”

Barbara looked up at the sound of his voice. She was stretched on the couch, a book in her hand. Giorgio Bassani. Very fitting. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Pallioti wondered if she was merely suffering from a fit of nostalgia, or if the text held a deeper and more immediate resonance for her. He smiled.

“Dottoressa.”

Barbara nodded and said nothing, her eyes following him as he came in, turning down the coffee Hedwige offered. The truth was, he would have loved an espresso. But this wasn’t that kind of visit.

“I was wondering,” he said to Barbara, “if we might have a talk?”

She dropped her eyes, as if she was hoping he would go away, or had come for something else. When she looked up and saw him still standing there, she put the book down and nodded. Barbara Barelli swung her legs off the sofa slowly. She was barefoot. A thin gold chain glittered around her left ankle.

“I think,” she said, “it would be better if we went into my office.”

Pallioti felt Hedwige’s eyes on his back as he followed Barbara across the entryway and into the locked room.

Barbara Barelli closed the door. Then she looked around her office as if it was unfamiliar to her—the big desk, the wall-mounted screen, the rows of cabinets and shelves. The blind over the window was half lowered. She didn’t raise it. Instead she gestured Pallioti to what was obviously the client chair.

“Please,” she said, and sat down behind her desk.

Pallioti let a few seconds of silence beat between them while she gathered herself.

“How did you know?” she asked finally, folding her hands on the blotter.

“The magazine article.”

She nodded.

“The publication,” he said, remembering the files he had picked apart over the weekend. “The American one, what is it called—”

“Runner’s World. April 2006.” Barbara swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “You see, I went to college, in the United States, on a track scholarship. So I still get the American edition. You know, to keep up.”

Pallioti nodded.

“It was—” Barbara cleared her throat. “There was an article. Because New York was coming up, the marathon, and one of the contenders had been operated on by a Dr. Kenneth Carson. He does miracles, apparently. On a routine basis. So they did a profile on him. And there she was.”

Pallioti folded his hands and leaned back in his chair.

“There she was,” he said.

The conversations he’d had with Anna, and with the US Federal Marshals, in the course of the weekend had yielded startlingly different results. For their part, the marshals insisted—and their statistics agreed—that they had never lost a member of the Witness Protection Program, provided the witness in question obeyed the rules. The cardinal one was no contact. No anonymous postcards, or wordless phone calls. No backward glance. No last look.

If the break with the past was clean, they kept people safe. If, on the other hand, there was the tiniest chink of light, the tiniest tipping of the hat to the past, then all bets were off. So, according to them, since Antonio Tomaselli had clearly known all about Anna Carson, it must have been her fault. She must have done something, however unwitting, to alert him to who and where she was.

But she hadn’t. In the last five days Anna had not wanted to say much of anything to anyone, even Enzo Saenz, but she insisted on that. She had kept her locket, with the picture of her father and mother in it, and she had kept running. But that was all. And in the end, Pallioti thought, it had been enough.

“Go on,” he said.

Barbara shook her head. She passed a hand over her eyes and looked up at him.

“I couldn’t believe it, when I saw it. Her. Or, I don’t know, maybe I could. I never really felt that handful of sand, or whatever it was we buried that day, was Angie. I know it sounds strange, but I never felt her leave. You know?”

Pallioti nodded. He did know. He remembered quite clearly the moment his mother died. He had not been allowed upstairs in to her room, but had been sent out in to the garden and told to play. Standing on the clipped grass, his toy army dutifully arranged at his feet, he had felt suddenly as if a vacuum had been attached to his stomach. As if all of his blood and his heart and organs had been sucked out, leaving him weightless, with nothing holding him to the earth.

“But Antonio.” Barbara shook her head. “Antonio did believe it. And it devastated him. He was angry of course, or disappointed—I don’t know—about what she did. About what he called her betrayal. At least at first. Later I think he almost found it a relief. To stop. Tell the story. Pay his dues. Whatever. I’m not sure he ever knew what he was doing, really, back then, or why, exactly. He kept talking about bread and roses, but when I asked him, he could never tell me what it meant. I think perhaps he wanted to explain that to Angela, or hoped someday he’d have the chance. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “But I do know that he loved her. I don’t even like him. I never did.” Barbara looked down at her hands, still folded on the blotter. “But I will give him that. He loved Angela. I think perhaps she was the only thing he ever did truly love, except for his grandparents, and his brother—and in some warped way he thought the future would be better for them, I don’t know, if Aldo Moro was made to stand trial. That it would be some kind of correction. Justice.”

Pallioti grimaced. There was that word again.

Barbara sighed.

“Yes. Whatever the hell that is,” she agreed. “In any case, when he heard that Angie had been killed, it broke his heart. I saw him first at the funeral. My parents, well, my father, was still living in Ferrara then, so I heard and I went and I felt sorry for him.” She looked up at Pallioti. “I represented him, yes, because in some way, I suppose, I did understand what they’d done, even if I didn’t agree with it. And because someone had to. But I did it mostly because it was something I could do for Angie. I remember, once, right after her father died—” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, I thought she would have wanted me to. Help Antonio. It kept me close to her. I loved her, too, you know.”

Pallioti nodded.

Barbara smiled. “Odd, isn’t it? That Antonio Tomaselli and I should have that in common.” She looked down at her hands. “Anyway,” she went on when she looked up again, “I suppose I wanted to be near him because he was the last living trace of her on this earth. Or so I thought.”

“Until you saw the magazine?”

“Until I saw the magazine.”

“And you showed it to Antonio?”

She nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I showed it to Antonio.”

Barbara Barelli put her face in her hands.

“I don’t know if I wanted to share it with someone,” she said. “Or if I did it for him. Or if I thought I was doing it for her. I honestly don’t know.” She dropped her hands and looked at Pallioti. “I do know I didn’t think anything like this would happen. You have to believe that. I just thought, in his place, I would have wanted, no, I would have needed to know.” She shook her head. “And I thought—”

Thought, what? Pallioti leaned forward. “Dottoressa,” he said. “You are a lawyer. And as such your first duty is to the court. You must have understood, surely, what had happened? That Angela Vari had been made a protected witness? And what that meant?”

Barbara Barelli nodded. She opened a drawer, pulled out a tissue, wiped her eyes, and nodded again.

“I told him he couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t even whisper. That I was only telling him so he’d know she was all right. I thought Angie would have wanted me to. I thought I was doing it for her.”

Pallioti stared at her. It always amazed, and often terrified, him that highly intelligent people could be so stupid. Especially when it came it love.

“I think—” Barbara ran her hand through her hair. “I didn’t understand at the time—it didn’t even occur to me, but I think it made him even angrier with her. That when he found out she was still alive, had been alive all this time, he felt doubly betrayed. Wanted to punish her—not for Moro, for turning him in—but because she never let him know. That she was still alive—that even if they never saw each other again, he wasn’t alone in the world. That she was out there somewhere. And that loving him hadn’t gotten her killed. He felt so guilty about that. As if he’d killed her himself.”

Barbara looked at him and shook her head.

“I just didn’t understand,” she said. “Not really. I felt sorry for him, but I never tried to know him. He was my client, and I didn’t even talk to him. Not really. Then, of course, when you showed up and told me, I understood at once. How he knew the girl’s name. It was all in the article, even about how the first wife, the girl’s mother, had been killed. It’s why Angie married him, the surgeon, isn’t it?” Pallioti did not have an answer to that, but Barbara Barelli did.

“It is,” she said. “Not because he operated on her knee, but because his little girl had lost her mother. Just like Angie did.” She bit her lip. “I can only imagine how Antonio must have used that.”

Pallioti nodded. A sour feeling twisted in his stomach at the memory of the emails, how the hook that reeled Kristin in had been baited and set with her mother’s death.

“How is Kristin?”

Pallioti was tempted not to answer the question, to snap, “Why should you deserve to know?” then told himself not to be petty.

“Fine,” he said.

And it was true. The young were resilient. With help they would bend and not break. So far Kristin had bent admirably, and she would have plenty of help, mostly from her father, with whom she had reclaimed her relationship. It was hard not to think that was all the easier, all this newfound understanding between father and daughter, because Anna Carson—or Angela Vari, as he suspected she would now prefer to be called, and who had never had much help—was no longer resilient, but in a military hospital outside Prato being treated for advanced shock and exhaustion. Which was apparently the current lingo for a broken heart.

After a brief meeting with her husband, she had chosen to stay in Italy and not return to the United States until she was better. Whatever that meant. Pallioti had watched Kristin and Kenneth Carson board a plane hand in hand on Friday morning. Neither father nor daughter had looked back. Kenneth Carson was not a forgiving or an understanding man. He did not deal in shadows, or understand lies, or the past. And finally her stepmother had made it possible for Kristin to get what she had always wanted, her father’s undivided attention. Pallioti suspected that from now on the Carson family would be composed of two.

Barbara Barelli opened her mouth and closed it again. Both of them knew she had been about to ask about Angela, and both of them knew he would not have told her.

He had been present during Angela’s debriefing over the weekend, and had visited her yesterday with Enzo Saenz, who had taken some long overdue time off. Pallioti was almost as worried about him as he was about Angela. His self-contained world had been pierced. He did not know it yet, but Pallioti understood that Enzo Saenz would never know solitude again, now that he had been introduced to loneliness.

He looked at Barbara Barelli.

“The car,” he said. “I take it you won’t make me waste the time tracing the holding company that owns it?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Antonio asked me to buy the house. That was his price for staying quiet about what I’d told him. And then the car. When he got out. I set up another dummy company—” She waved her hand. “It’s all perfectly legal—”

Perhaps, Pallioti thought, in the strictly practical sense of the word. At least as far as the purchases went. But the court of public opinion would be something else altogether. Not to mention the fact that knowingly compromising a witness would, at the very least, mean Barbara was suspended while she was investigated before being stripped of her right to practice. There might well be additional criminal charges—for lying to the police, not cooperating in an ongoing investigation—depending on who was feeling vindictive.

It was a fair guess, given the causes she had chosen to defend, that Barbara had enemies. Probably powerful ones who would be all too happy to get a dig at her. And none of that even began to touch on her moral obligation to her client and his safety. To say it had been compromised was something of a sick joke.

He stood up. What he was about to say gave him no pleasure. Barbara Barelli was a gifted lawyer. The causes she fought for had been the right ones.

“Will you write the letter?” he asked. “Or would you like me to?”

She looked at him for a moment, then folded her hands on the blotter again and shook her head.

“I’ll do it,” she said. “This afternoon. I’ll submit myself for judicial investigation, and relinquish my license. Immediately. Regardless of the outcome.”

Pallioti nodded. Then he turned on his heel and started toward the door. He was about to turn the handle when she said, “Dottore?”

He turned around. Barbara Barelli stood up. Her fingertips rested on the blotter. Her dark hair drifted on her shoulders. Looking at her he remembered again how much he had liked, and even admired, her.

“I wondered,” she asked, “of course, I wasn’t there, but—have you seen the autopsy report?”

Pallioti smiled. There was no humor in it at all.

“The real one?”

She nodded.

A piece had come out in the papers, barely more than a paragraph telling yet another pathetic story about the end of the Red Brigades. Detailing how, after his release from prison, Antonio Tomaselli had been unable to adjust. Had struggled first to find a job and then to build a life, and had finally given up on both when he retreated to an isolated farmhouse outside Ferrara where he had died in an accident involving a gun. Pallioti looked at his watch.

“It should be on my desk,” he said, “when I get back to the office.”

“Will you tell me what it says? Just for the record?”

His mouth twitched in an unpleasant smile.

“Just for the record.”

Pallioti let himself out of the office. Hedwige Aarlheissen was in the kitchen. She leaned against a counter, watching him, then turned away as he left.

*  *  *

Once again the fat man had been as good as his word. It was strange, Pallioti thought, but there really was a code of honor among thieves. Or perhaps it was something less admirable even than that. And more dangerous. An irreducible part of the arrogance that led to the crime in the first place. He had read once that the spy Kim Philby had kept a framed photograph of a mountain in Russia on the wall of his office the entire time he worked for British Intelligence. The idea made him smile. It was well known that people never really looked at photographs.

He had, though. Last night. He had spent until the early hours of the morning studying the pictures of Angela Vari’s funeral. They had worried him from the beginning. It was some time before he finally understood what he was seeing.

Now he tipped them out and spread them across his desk. As everyone knew, the early hours of the morning were notoriously unreliable. He wanted to be certain, in the cold light of day.

It was not just the number of photos, it was the angles they had been taken from. Far too many. He had realized at once that there had been more than one police photographer in the cemetery. Now he understood why. They were not merely keeping a record. They were setting up evidence. He couldn’t spot the shooter crouched behind a crypt. Or shooters—there would surely have been more than one. Or the shoulder holsters worn by the prison guards, whom he now doubted were prison guards at all, but he understood why they had stayed so well back, why they’d taken Antonio Tomaselli’s chains off, hadn’t even handcuffed him. Not out of respect, but because they’d hoped he would run.

But no one had taken the bait and come to try and set him free. Mara was dead, and the others were locked up, or too smart, or simply didn’t care enough anymore. During the war it had been a point of pride among the Partisans that they rescued their own, never handed them over to the enemy. But as Barbara said, Antonio had never quite been one of them, had never quite belonged. To anyone. Except Angela Vari.

Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t do something very stupid. Take the opportunity of her funeral, for instance, to bolt. Make a dash, conveniently relieved of all restraints, through the crypts and monuments, and vanish into the city he knew so well.

If he had, he would have been dead within seconds. And the whole thing would have been caught on film. All asses amply covered. Notorious Terrorist Attempts to Flee. Tragic Shooting Assures Safety of Population.

They must have been crushed when he was too busy grieving, and too many civilians appeared, to carry out plan B—because there was always a plan B. He wondered what it would it have been. Merely knocking him to the ground and shooting him in the head? The priest probably wasn’t even really a priest, or,  if he was, he was one of ours with bulletproof armor under his vestments. They must have been furious, after going to all that trouble. After all, Angela had no family, how could they have guessed that the Pirottis and the Ravellis would notice that she was dead and insist on paying their respects. Or that Barbara Barelli would be visiting her father? Pallioti wondered if they would have shot her, too, if she got in the way. What did they call it these days? Collateral damage.

Barbara Barelli was right. He hadn’t believed it, not really, deep down inside. Then he’d studied the pictures. Pallioti felt a physical wave of disgust so powerful he nearly staggered. He pushed the photos aside and turned to the envelope, the fat man’s second little billet-doux he had received this morning.

He didn’t know if this was a second autopsy report. He suspected not. Antonio was not Mara. He wasn’t a founder of the BR, or a beautiful young woman who had become a media star when she busted her husband out of jail. And he did not have a wife or lover to be outraged, to organize vigils and light candles and call for vengeance for his assassination. He was just a two-bit conspirator, probably a killer. A dried-up terrorist reduced to manipulating teenagers. So Pallioti doubted they’d bothered. No one cared about Antonio Tomaselli. He wasn’t worth a fake autopsy report. In fact Pallioti found himself half surprised they’d bothered with an autopsy at all. But they had. That was another puzzling thing about pictures. How often killers took them of their victims. He thought of all the film footage, all the photographs from the concentration camps.

There weren’t many pictures in the envelope. He’d seen hundreds of death reports with more. But they were enough. The ones taken from the front were ugly. But not as bad as the ones taken from the back. Pallioti gave a slight shudder. The ammo used in sniper rifles made one hell of a mess. Which was why snipers liked them. If you lined up a good shot, you didn’t want to have to take it twice.

As the accompanying notes confirmed, Antonio Tomaselli had been hit squarely in the back of the head. Pallioti wasn’t too surprised to read that he’d been hit again just below the left shoulder, probably as he went down. Just for good measure. Just to show off. See if you can rupture the heart while you’re at it. Not that it was necessary. The first shot had been a beauty—more or less blowing off the top of his skull.

There were a few scene photos, too, showing the diameter of the spatter marks, which were impressive. Antonio’s head had all but exploded. From the looks of the body, he had been lifted off his feet, thrown forward, and had landed face down on the rutted cobbles, his hands outstretched. The gun, the one he’d dropped on hearing Angela Vari’s voice, had been so far behind him it wasn’t even in the photograph. No second weapon had been found on his body or in the house.

Pallioti had expected to feel sick. He had expected to need a drink, or fly into a rage. Had thought perhaps he would pick things up and hurl them against the wall, indulge in what his mother had called throwing his toys about. But he didn’t. He didn’t even feel the compulsion to call Rome and shriek down the phone at the fat man, who, either before or after he told him again that petulance didn’t suit him, would doubtless remind him that they were all fighting the War on Terror.

Instead he walked to the window and stared down at the familiar view of the piazza, realizing that he ought to be tired. Or at least a little surprised. Barbara Barelli’s words came back to him.

You couldn’t survive if you really thought that the state—that your beloved polizìa even—might go around eliminating those they find inconvenient. Or just plain don’t like. That they might do a little correcting when they think the courts have gotten it wrong.

He looked at the flags—the lily of Florence, the Italian tricolor that flew in front of the fancy new police building—and thought, we lie about what we love. To ourselves and to others. But mostly to ourselves. We lie about it because we are selfish and cowardly and human. And because, sometimes, when we were forced to see what we love for what it really is, we have to give it up.

He walked back to his desk, sat down, and unscrewed his favorite pen.

Fifteen minutes later, when he had finished writing, Pallioti made a copy of the single page on the machine in his closet. He put the original in an envelope and placed it in the center of his desk. Then he gathered up Antonio’s autopsy report and the photographs the fat man had sent him, and slipped them, together with the copy, into a large manila envelope that he addressed to Barbara Barelli.

*  *  *

In the outer office Guillermo was bent over his computer. He glanced at his watch, then reached, without looking up, and pushed the intercom button to Pallioti’s office.

“Just to remind you,” he said, “you have a meeting at three with—”

“Cancel it.”

Pallioti’s voice was not much more than a murmur, but the tone caused Guillermo to stop typing. He was about to ask if he’d heard correctly when the line went dead. Guillermo looked at the closed door. He leaned back in his chair and felt his mouth go dry. A moment later the door opened and Pallioti came out carrying a large envelope and wearing his overcoat. Guillermo, without being quite sure why, got to his feet and stood as he left the office.

The day had turned windy and bitterly cold. Pallioti pulled on his gloves as he came down the steps.

I am resigning my position because I will not serve a state that kills people.

I am resigning my position because of my severe moral reservations.

I am resigning my position because we’ve become a murderous, lying, self-righteous shipload of shits I wouldn’t trust a gerbil with and I’m sick of it.

Of the wording he’d toyed with, he preferred the last. Although, even in his present state of mind, he realized he couldn’t say it. And to be fair, it wasn’t entirely accurate. There were many policemen who were neither self-righteous nor liars, and who did their jobs as well as they could, more often than not with bravery and distinction.

A skin of ice slicked the cobbles in the piazza. The fountain hissed and spat, flinging its silver drops about like a child having a tantrum. A few carriages were pulled up near the taxi stand, the horses swaddled in blankets. Behind the glass, the restaurant was full. No one was standing under the loggia or sitting on its steps. Above him the flags snapped and clicked, keeping time as he crossed toward the flower seller’s kiosk.

The buckets weren’t out. It was too cold, they’d tip over in the wind. Inside the little pavilion, the air was warm and heavy with scent. The flower seller jumped up from his stool when he saw Pallioti. They had been friends for a long time.

“Dottore.” He clapped his hands together. “What can I get you? The usual for the signora?”

The signora was not Pallioti’s wife, he didn’t have such a thing, but his sister. He was in the habit of taking Saffy flowers when he had dinner with her once a week, or went to Sunday lunch, or to a show or opening at her gallery. She was fond of tulips in the spring, and generally of roses. He shook his head.

“Something else,” he said. “Today. Something special. White, probably. And that will get through the night. I’m going to a funeral tomorrow.”

The flower seller made a face.

“My condolences, dottore,” he said. “Not family, I hope?”

Pallioti shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Not family.”

They were burying Antonio Tomaselli in Ferrara, not far from where they had once buried Angela Vari. He didn’t know who would be there. Antonio’s father, a cripple, had died while he was in prison. His mother, from what Pallioti understood, was blind and frail and had for many years, ever since the death of Aldo Moro, whom she had considered a saint, claimed she no longer had a son. He doubted the fat man would show up, and wondered if he’d have the nerve to punch him if he did. Probably not, on both counts. In the end, he thought, it would just be Angela Vari and Enzo and himself, a strange little trio, not one of them believing in God as they stood beside the open grave with a priest and a few DIGOS agents reciting the prayers for the dead.

He watched as the flower seller prepared the bouquet, his chapped red hands quick and delicate as he chose blossoms and trimmed their stems, then crimped and wrapped and tied them with a suitably somber bow, and thought of how, in the end, he had taken a page from Brigate Rosse. A prayer from what Angela Vari had called their “Book of Hours.” Keep it simple. Clean and fast. It was good advice. Finally he’d just paraphrased Barbara Barelli.

I am resigning because when we become Judge and Executioner, there is no difference between Them and Us.

Pallioti handed the flower seller a significant number of euro notes and told him to keep the change. Then he lifted the bouquet, cradling it in his arms as he walked across the piazza. He stopped at the mailbox beside the loggia just long enough to slide the manila envelope into it before he turned down the alley that led toward the river and home.