The Villa Triste Read online

  ‘Certo,’ he said again. ‘Of course. It will be my pleasure.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The Mayor sighed. ‘You know,’ he added, as if he had read Pallioti’s mind, ‘I think about them sometimes, the partisans.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pallioti suspected that there was not a man in Italy who did not think about them, Italy’s Holy Children. Not a man who, at some point, in the dead of night, had not lain staring at the ceiling and wondered – would I have done it? Would I have had the courage?

  ‘They were half our age, most of them. If that. Children, really.’ The Mayor’s voice sounded suddenly tired. ‘Between you and me, my friend,’ he said, ‘I suspect we’ve made something of a pig’s ear of the world they fought for. So, chasing up the thug who murders one of them, it does seem, doesn’t it, the least we can do?’

  Enzo Saenz was waiting when Pallioti stepped out of the lift that had whisked him silently down five floors and deposited him in the pristine new garages where his car was waiting. The subterranean depths of the recently renovated police building were every bit as impressive as those above ground. Below the explosion-proof, bulletproof, generally terrorist, mob, and reprisal-proof offices and incident rooms, there was a gas-proof, disease-proof, weapons-of-mass-destruction-proof maze that housed not only official vehicles, but labs and armouries, firing ranges and files and God knows what. Pallioti suspected that one day he would send someone down here and have to mount a missing persons operation to get them back. It would not, however, be Enzo Saenz. Enzo could find his way home from hell itself.

  Today, he was wearing one of his collection of leather jackets and sporting a rough-cheeked twenty-four-hour beard. Combined with his ponytail and Roman nose, it made him look more than a little medieval. Not that that was inappropriate. Pallioti always saw in Enzo the Medici enforcer – the silent and trusted young man who slipped into the alley and did the deed.

  It took them ten minutes to reach the building where Giovanni Trantemento had made his home. There was no question which one it was. Already, an ambulance, a police van, and two marked patrol cars were pulled up outside. A uniformed policewoman was placing bollards in the street. A wet young man who could only be the Mayor’s reporter was mooching about on the pavement. In the bus station opposite, a crowd had gathered. They peered through the scratched Plexiglass wall, watching the police like fish looking out of a tank.

  Enzo, who had shooed Pallioti’s driver away and taken the wheel himself, pulled inside the bollards and stopped. Ducking from the rain, which if anything was coming down harder now than before, he and Pallioti opened the doors and made a dash for the building. The ambulance crew was coming downstairs as they entered the hallway. They carried a folded stretcher and oxygen canisters. One looked up and caught Pallioti’s eye. He shook his head.

  ‘Fourth floor. All yours,’ he said without breaking stride.

  A second uniformed policeman was stringing evidence tape across the front grille of a tiny elevator tucked under the stairwell. As Enzo crossed to have a word with him, Pallioti turned towards the stairs. Their stone treads and dark polished banisters vanished upwards and out of sight. Like Jacob’s Ladder, he thought, without being really sure why. Taking a deep breath, he began to climb.

  The front hall of the huge chilly building was so cavernous and so badly lit that it was not until Pallioti reached the first landing and looked down that he even noticed the woman. She was wearing a flowered headscarf. As she looked up at him, her face was a pale, round moon. The light was too poor to see if she blinked. Pallioti nodded. Then he kept climbing, his shoes tapping time against the endless thrum of the rain on the windows.

  ‘Six apartments, one bottom, one top, and two on the two floors in between. I’ve had them tape off the whole place. A second car is coming to take statements.’

  Enzo caught up with him on the second level.

  ‘Do we know who found him?’

  ‘Woman downstairs. Marta Buonifaccio. Sort of self-appointed concierge. She brought an envelope up for him, saw the blood under the door, opened it, saw him, went back down and called us.’

  Pallioti stopped.

  ‘Elevator?’ he asked.

  Enzo shook his head. ‘Regards it as an instrument of the devil. Always uses the stairs.’

  ‘And the door, Trantemento’s apartment door?’

  ‘Closed but unlocked. She said there was a line of blood. Seeping under the door. She thought he might have hit his head. Opened it to see.’

  They began to climb again.

  ‘The old guy,’ Enzo went on, ‘moved in a few years after she did. That’s what she called him, incidentally – “the old guy”. Says he was getting frail. He’s a stamp and print dealer. High end. According to Marta.’

  Was there a low end of stamp and print dealing, Pallioti wondered. He supposed so. There was a low end of everything. High end at least would explain the building. True, it was draughty and dark, but top floors of places like this – top floors of anywhere in the Centro Storico – did not come cheap.

  They rounded the corner onto the last landing and were met with a white glare. The scene of crime team was already setting up floodlights. Pallioti stopped. He pulled the protectors Enzo handed him over his shoes and slipped on latex gloves. The landing was wide, and unfurnished except for the tapestry. The tall narrow window in the stairwell would have lit it poorly, even on a sunny day. The elevator cage was to the left. The door to the apartment, which was topped with an ornate carved stone lintel, was directly opposite the top of the stairs. It was open. The old man’s body lay just inside.

  The team processing the scene were stepping back and forth over the stream of blood that had snaked its way under the door and was now congealing on the cold floor. The medical examiner crouched by the body. The glare of the lights caught her white paper suit, making her look like a polar bear guarding a kill.

  ‘Come on in. Just step over.’

  She glanced up, waving them into the apartment. Beyond the body, a hallway stretched to the back of the building, where Pallioti could see glass-fronted doors giving onto what looked like a loggia. Enzo went first, hopping over the dead man and padding down the hall on the worn oriental rug. He checked the loggia, stuck his head into one room, and vanished into the next.

  Pallioti followed, stopping in the hall, which was lined with bookshelves roughly to waist height on both sides. Above them, a series of prints and paintings, most in heavy gilt frames, were hung on the old-fashioned flock-wallpapered walls, making the hallway a densely patterned tunnel. The air smelled dusty, as if the glass panel doors at the end had not been opened for some time. The result was an immediate feeling of claustrophobia.

  The medical examiner nodded, looking up at him.

  ‘Single shot to the back of the head,’ she said. ‘I’d say three, four hours ago.’

  ‘So.’ Pallioti looked down at the body. ‘Sometime late this morning, he opened the door, turned around, and whoever it was shot him?’

  The medical examiner’s reply was a surprise.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  She waved a hand at the thin, crumpled figure. He was wearing brown twill trousers, velvet slippers and a cardigan.

  ‘Look at him,’ she said. ‘He’s what? Six foot?’ She leaned forward, her gloved fingers gently probing the back of the skull. ‘I can’t be sure until I get him on the table, but I think the angle of this shot was downward. At best straight on. It means, at the least, you have a very tall killer. Over six feet.’

  ‘Or he bent over for some reason, to pick something up, and they took advantage.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she agreed. ‘Certainly could be. Let me take some pictures and I’ll roll him.’

  While she reached for the camera in her bag, Pallioti stepped back over the old man’s legs and outstretched arm. He examined the apartment door. It did not appear to have been forced in any way. There was not so much as a scratch.

  He stepped over the body again and
went into the hallway, anger rising in him. No matter how many times you warned people, especially old people, they kept on opening their doors. It was what made them such easy targets – and those who took advantage of them so despicable. How hard would this have been? To get into this building, walk up here, knock on the door saying you’re the gas man, or the TV repair guy, or who knew what? Then one shot’s all it takes, and the apartment’s yours. Frankly, he didn’t know why it didn’t happen more often.

  Expecting to find the main room ransacked, he stepped through the door, and stopped. It wasn’t a pretty room. Up here under the heavy chestnut eaves the ceiling was too low to be gracious. But it was big, running almost the length of the apartment down one side of the hall. A line of windows gave onto a view over the roofs that was beautiful even in the rain. Santa Croce rose up, and beyond it, the hills on the far side of the Arno. Nothing looked out of place. In the middle of a dark, heavy dining-room table a family of sculpted silver foxes sat on a silver tray. A silver letter opener lay in plain view next to what looked like an ivory-handled magnifying glass on a desk.

  ‘There’s a safe in the bedroom,’ Enzo said, coming in behind him. ‘Not touched, as far as I can tell.’ Pallioti spun around. ‘But there’s no sign of a wallet, or any cash, either. Some coins on the dresser, but no notes. And there’s something else. Come and take a look.’

  Enzo nodded towards the bedroom. Pallioti followed him across the hall.

  This room was also large. The floor was covered in another dark-patterned Turkish rug. In here, the windows – which would face the building across the alley, or more probably, its roof – were covered by heavy, and on first glance rather moth-eaten, velvet curtains. The double bed faced a wardrobe with carved doors and a mirrored front. The walls above the padded headboard were lined with rows of expensively framed prints. Pallioti stepped forward.

  ‘Porn,’ Enzo said. ‘Politely known as erotica. Probably valuable. Maybe very. I’d say, eighteenth century. It looks to be some kind of set. Maybe two. I didn’t study them.’

  ‘Boys?’

  Enzo nodded. ‘Every one.’

  Pallioti turned away from the dark etched figures, the grinning faces and flying shirt tails. He had never found pornography titillating, no matter what its date. He sighed. Sexual proclivities were people’s own, what consenting adults did together the most private and inviolate of private lives. But he knew as a policeman how often and easily the word ‘consent’ could be twisted to suit one party and not the other. He didn’t know what he had hoped to find here, but it wasn’t this. A decorated partisan porn dealer. The story was not going to read well.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s—’ But before Pallioti could finish the sentence, or the thought, the medical examiner swore from the hall.

  By the time the two men got there, she was sitting back on her heels, the body rolled over, face up, beside her.

  ‘Dottoressa?’ Enzo reached her first.

  The medical examiner looked up, shaking her head.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  As Pallioti came up behind them he looked down and saw the old man’s face. His cheeks, obviously lean and probably usually sunken, were puffed out, making him look like a cartoon child at a birthday party, mouth stuffed with cake. The man’s eyes stared in panic through lopsided glasses. One lens was cracked. His lips were caked with something white that had spilled down his chin and onto the scrawny skin of his neck.

  ‘It looks like someone packed his mouth with—’ The medical examiner shook her head again. ‘I don’t know. Heroin? Cocaine?’

  Enzo knelt down and touched the old man’s chin. He sniffed his finger, then, before Pallioti or the doctor could stop him, dabbed at it with the tip of his tongue.

  ‘Not coke.’

  Looking up at them, he licked again, the pink tip of his tongue darting.

  ‘Salt,’ Enzo Saenz said. ‘Whoever killed him packed his mouth with salt.’

  Chapter Two

  Marta Buonifaccio felt something like dread as she watched the man in the dark overcoat come towards her.

  He was neither tall nor short, this policeman. Nor was he ugly. Or handsome – not like the young one. Yai. Marta did not want to think of the trouble he must cause. Or how much fun it might be to be in that kind of trouble. That would be a pleasant thrill. Which this wasn’t. Because unless she was careful, this man walking towards her would cause trouble too, but of a much more serious kind. It was the quiet ones, she thought, always the quiet ones. Then she told herself that she had not done anything wrong. It was just men in well-tailored dark clothes. That was all. The ones who talked softly had always frightened her most.

  ‘Signora Buonifaccio, thank you for taking the time to talk to me.’

  As a gesture, it was gracious. Both of them knew she didn’t have any choice.

  ‘I’ll try not to keep you too long at the moment,’ Pallioti added. ‘I realize this must have been a terrible shock for you. I will need you to give a complete statement to someone later.’

  The woman nodded without lifting her eyes. The scarf she had tied over her head hid her hair, making her look curiously ageless. That, combined with a solid body that showed no signs of the frailty she had ascribed to her housemate upstairs, made it difficult for Pallioti to age her. She might be an old fifty, or a young eighty. What was apparent about her was that she was scared. Contrary to the received wisdom, Pallioti invariably found that frightened people did not fidget. They became very still. This woman was attempting to turn herself to stone.

  ‘Could you tell me,’ he asked gently, ‘exactly what happened, this morning?’

  The question was left deliberately vague. It was always interesting to see where people chose to begin.

  ‘It started to rain,’ Marta said. ‘At about eleven o’clock.’ She glanced up at him. ‘You could hear it. Like drums. I came to watch. I’ve always liked it better,’ she added. ‘Winter.’

  Pallioti smiled. A tiny spark of complicity lit between them. Marta looked down again, and went on.

  ‘There isn’t much to tell,’ she said. ‘I watched for a while. Then I came back in. Up there’ – she gestured with her head towards the stairs – ‘the second floor, left, they were cooking. So it was lunchtime. I don’t eat lunch,’ she added. ‘But I was going in, my television show is on, and there were some of those things, you know, menus and things, on the floor. So I picked them up.’

  ‘Who were they from?’

  ‘From the Chinese place down the street,’ Marta said, ‘the one they closed two years ago because of the dead rat.’ Found in the toilets, if Pallioti remembered the headlines correctly. It had caused quite a row. ‘And a taxi company. You can look, if you want,’ she added. ‘I put them in the dustbin. Which is when I saw the letter, addressed to Signor Trantemento.’

  ‘It was in the dustbin?’

  She nodded. ‘Over there, beside the table. It happens sometimes. People collect their mail, and throw things out they don’t want. Well, they used to just drop them on the floor, which is why I got the waste-paper basket. Sometimes they get mixed up and throw out things they don’t mean to.’

  ‘Did Signor Trantemento do that often?’

  ‘No. Not often. But he was getting old, you know? So I decided to take it up to him.’

  ‘And the mail? How is it delivered? Does the postman have a key?’

  Marta looked at him as if he were daft. How many keys would a postman have to carry if that were the case?

  ‘It comes into the basket, through the front door,’ she said, ‘and I put it in the mailboxes.’

  ‘So, you have a pass key. To the boxes?’

  She nodded. ‘Everyone used to collect their own. But it got all confused. So, I don’t know, ten years ago, I volunteered. I don’t mind.’ Marta shrugged and shook her head. ‘There isn’t much more to tell you. I went upstairs. I saw the blood, coming from under the door. I tried the door and it was unlocked, so I o
pened it. And there he was, just inside.’

  ‘Did you touch him? Feel for a pulse?’

  She hesitated for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘I put my fingers on his neck. He was dead. I came back downstairs, and I called you people. Then I waited.’

  ‘Down here?’

  ‘Right here. Where I’m standing.’

  ‘And did anyone come or go before the first policeman arrived?’

  ‘No. No one. It was only about fifteen minutes. The ambulance and the police, they arrived together.’

  Pallioti nodded. ‘Do you have a mobile phone?’

  That actually caused her to smile. A small pucker twisted her lips upward.

  ‘So you came all the way back downstairs to call the police?’ Pallioti asked. ‘Or did you use Signor Trantemento’s telephone?’

  Again, she hesitated. Then she said, ‘I came back downstairs. I – I don’t know why. I’d never been in his apartment, I suppose. I didn’t know where the phone was, and—’ She shrugged.

  And he was dead, Pallioti thought, so there was no real rush, was there?

  ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘The elevator. You didn’t use that? Even when you knew he was dead and you needed to call the police?’

  She shook her head emphatically.

  ‘And can you tell me, by any chance, if you noticed where it was?’

  She looked at the grille with the crime scene tape strung across it as if Pallioti had just suggested that the elevator itself might have dashed outside and into the building next door. Then she said, ‘Oh. I see. No. No, I don’t know what floor it was on. I don’t pay any attention to it,’ she added, as if the elevator were a badly behaved child.

  Pallioti reached into his pocket for a card.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘I won’t trouble you further now, but if you think of anything you’d like to tell me—’

  She took the card gingerly and dropped it into her apron pocket. He was about to turn away when he heard Enzo call his name.