Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Get out of my car.”

“Not yet.”

“Falco, damn you, get out of my car right now or I’ll have you thrown out.” Two spots of livid color appeared high on Chairman Grassi’s cheeks.

They were seated in the rear of the chairman’s sleek black motorcar, a long unmistakable Lancia Dilambda that cruised the streets of Bellina every Sunday morning to inspect progress in the town and assess the behavior of the inhabitants, like a shark patrolling its waters. A muscular uniformed chauffeur sat up front in the driving seat, suitably separated from his passengers in the elegant sedanca de ville by a glass partition. Nonetheless, Roberto kept his voice low. He had waited on the street corner in the chill wind that whistled up Via San Michele, and as soon as the chairman’s car slowed at the crossroads on its usual route, he had stepped into the road, pulled open the rear door, and swung himself onto the seat before Grassi could voice his objection. They faced each other from opposite ends of the long leather seat.

Roberto placed a photograph face down on the expanse of cream leather between them.

“What the hell is this? Grassi demanded. “What are you playing at?”

“It’s not a game, Chairman.”

Grassi snatched up the photograph. He was a man used to dealing with surprises. Each day he handled unpleasantness and he was skilled at maintaining his composure, his eyes revealing nothing. But his jaw dropped open. He scowled at the picture.

“Where did you get this?”

“I took it myself. That’s what you pay me for.”

“It’s Marchini.”

“Right first time.”

Roberto saw the moment when the Fascist Party’s chairman let his anger trickle away as realization of what the photograph meant hit him. Grassi started to chuckle, a thick unpleasant sound that rose to a roar of laughter. He reached over and slapped Roberto heavily on the knee.

“Bene, bene,” he said boisterously, “you’ve done well, Falco.” But the deep grooves on each side of his mouth hardened and the laughter was cut off short. “This isn’t enough,” he growled. “This proves nothing.”

Roberto’s smile didn’t even attempt to reach his eyes. “There are more.”

Grassi nodded to himself, satisfied. “Alberto Marchini will regret this day, the perverted bastard.” He flicked the photograph into Roberto’s lap with disgust.

Signor Marchini was Chairman Grassi’s chief assistant in the Party headquarters and was extremely efficient at his job, industrious and painstaking. He was a slender man in his forties, tall and elegant, who wore finely styled suits and possessed a soft pink complexion that belied the sharpness of his mind. He had come up through the ranks with Grassi from the early Milan days, but the trouble with having an assistant who had been with you so many years was that he knew you too well. He’d seen your mistakes. Your weaknesses. He knew where the black corners were buried in your heart. You were at his mercy and someone like Grassi would writhe in the cold hours of the night at that thought.

Roberto was relying on it.

“Where did you take the picture?”

“On one of his trips to Party headquarters in Rome.”

The photograph showed Alberto Marchini wearing a brassiere on his naked chest. Not any old brassiere, nothing so banal. This one was a striptease brassiere of shimmering gold with holes cut out. His nipples peeked through, painted some dark color that didn’t show up in the black-and-white photograph, but which Roberto recalled all too well had been a shocking deep Chinese carmine. It had looked obscene. The man’s paper-white skin. The tawdry brassiere. His nipples glistening and coated in thick layers of red lipstick.

“Who are they?” Grassi jabbed a finger at the two young women with bottle-blond hair and flesh spilling out of their tight clothes, one on each side of him, holding him up on his feet.

“They were just cheap bar girls who worked the club. They had no idea who he was.”

“Bene!”

The photograph was taken in a narrow dark street at the back of a nightclub in one of Rome’s seedier districts. Roberto had needed to use a flash, but Marchini was too drunk to notice and the girls didn’t care. His button fly hung open in the picture. It wouldn’t have mattered much, not really, if it had been anyone other than Marchini. But he, of all men, had set himself above what he vigorously condemned as degeneracy. He was an avid churchgoer, a self-proclaimed moral man with a wife and six offspring, whom he held up as moral examples for the rest of the town. Daily he cursed the depravity and debauchery of the modern Italian male and urged them onto the path of sobriety and piety. His face was blurred, as if it had somehow melted in the heat of his own debauchery.

Roberto felt sorry for Marchini. Truly sorry. But nowhere near as sorry as he was feeling for Isabella right now.

“There are more,” he said again. “More revealing ones.”

“Show me.”

The church bells started to peal at that moment and if Roberto had believed in such things, he might have taken it as warning. But he didn’t. So he shook his head as the car purred past the hospital where the wounded from the rally field fought for life, and he gave the chairman a level stare.

“No,” he said.

“Don’t be a fool. Give them to me.”

But even as he held out a hand for them, Roberto could see understanding dawn in the distrustful eyes. The chairman slumped back against the cream leather with a snort of annoyance.

“What is it you want, Falco?”

“Isabella Berotti out of the police cell.”

“What?”

“You ordered Colonnello Sepe to arrest her.”

“What the police do is their affair, not mine.”

Roberto leaned closer and could see the tiny muscle at the side of Grassi’s eyes jump and twitch.

“Release Signora Berotti and the rest of the photographs will be yours. You’ll be able to make Alberto Marchini jump to your tune for as long as you like.”

Chairman Grassi stared out of the window, thinking hard, his teeth clamped together. After a full minute’s silence he turned his head.

“So, Falco, you have become one of us. You are like Marchini. Feet of clay. No room for you on the moral heights anymore.” He gave Roberto a slow insinuating smile. “You use what you have to in order to get what you want.” He laughed softly. “As dirty as the rest of us now.”

“I’ve learned from an expert.” Roberto nodded at Grassi.

Abruptly the chairman sat up and straightened his camel overcoat and brown felt fedora, patting a hand on his bulky chest as though to reassure himself of who he was.

“That girl is a bloody nuisance to me, Falco.”

Roberto held out his hand, hovering over the cream leather in invitation. “The photographs will be in your hands the moment she is released.”

“To hell with you.”

“Agreed?”

“Yes. Agreed.” He shook Roberto’s hand and it was all Roberto could do to stop himself from slapping the soft clinging flesh away.

“We use what we have to,” Roberto said quietly.

The chairman laughed loudly, goading him, but Roberto banged on the glass partition.

“Stop here,” he ordered.

The car drifted to a halt outside the elegantly curved station building and Roberto opened the door, but instead of climbing out he swung around to Grassi.

“Leave Signora Berotti out of this. She knows nothing about the man you are hunting. Don’t be a fool; don’t waste your time on her.”

The chairman dragged a hand slowly down his face, as though trying to rearrange whatever thoughts were in his head.

“Mussolini wants heads on a platter,” he snapped. “He’s demanding bodies hanging in the streets. And if I don’t bring him the traitor who plotted this assassination attempt, he will make sure that mine will be one of those bodies.”

Roberto slapped the photograph face down on the seat between them. “If you live by lies, Grassi, you die by lies. You should know that by now.”

He stepped out of the car.

“Falco!”

He slammed the door.

The window rolled down. “She’s involved, Falco. You know it and I know it. We’ll be watching her.” He uttered a deep humorless chuckle. “Perhaps that pretty head of hers on a platter will satisfy Mussolini’s thirst for blood.”

As Roberto strode away, the chairman’s voice chased after him. “Don’t forget the photographs, Falco.”

As dirty as the rest of us now.