Death al Dente (17 page)

Cataldo handed us prepared forms in which we confirmed his identity. We signed them and Cataldo clipped the photo graph to them.

“Do you know who he is?” Francesca wanted to know.

“Yes,” he said and pushed a button. A uniformed woman came in and took the forms and the photograph.

“Thank you for coming in,” Cataldo said. Francesca waited for him to answer her question. When he stood up in a movement of dismissal, she said impatiently, “Come on, Carlo, who is he?”

“I’ll know more when I see you again,” he said impassively. Then a flicker passed across his face. “I hope the next time, you will not have such a colorful report to make.”

“We’ll take a bus back,” said Francesca, as we left the Questura. “Have you taken a bus since you’ve been here? They’re fun.”

I told her I hadn’t and thought once more how delightful were her switches of mood and how she liked the simple things as well as the sophisticated ones.

The bus was crowded and we had to stand, jammed against each other. “Let’s go to a nightclub tonight,” she shouted in my ear. “We need to break the monotony!”

She had that pseudowicked glitter in her eyes so I asked blandly, “Are night clubs open this early in the evening?’

We all swayed with the bus as it wove through the traffic and she pressed against me.

“No, but they will be in a few hours.”

T
HE STROBOSCOPIC PURPLE SIGN
outside said “Fica” and I asked Francesca what it meant. She just giggled and we went inside past a uniform that welcomed her by name.

The throb of music set up reverberations in every nerve in my body and Francesca hugged my arm. “This may be more dangerous than the rice fields!” she warned.

The outfit she wore looked dangerous enough. A dazzling cobalt-blue blouse was almost see-through, and the tightest and briefest of black miniskirts had the look of wet leather. Her black pumps had the highest of heels and sheer black stockings showed her shapely legs.

Flashing lights sent exploring beams into the dark recesses of the cavernous place while managing not to reveal anything. Faces gleamed pale for milliseconds and reflections bounced off mirrors and bottles, but the interior remained dim and mysterious. Ethereal effects came when the haze of cigarette smoke drifted into the flickering lights. Neon strips on the walls glowed in luminescent colors.

“I think we’re safe here,” I said. “Nobody will see us.” I had to repeat the statement as the first one was lost in the throbbing beat.

“You’ll soon become used to it,” she said soothingly.

A waiter materialized out of the gloom. He had the advantage of being dressed all in black and only the whites of his eyes gave him away. He showed us to a table, although we had to navigate the final landing operation by fumbling until we our hands encountered chair backs. Francesca ordered a vodka martini and I asked for a scotch and soda.

Francesca was right. My vision did adjust and I could see now that the place was nearly full. Some couples were dancing to the insistent beat, shadowy figures were table-hopping, and in fact, one hopped to our table. He gave Francesca a peck on each cheek, put his drink down on the table, and pulled a chair close. She introduced me. His name was Aldo and he was with a scandal magazine, she told me. He was dismayed. “No, sweetie, we are a sociopolitical journal.”

She put on her hauteur. “The only time you’ve ever been political was when you wrote that piece on the under secretary for trade who was caught in a brothel with three Asian women.”

“We also mentioned his defense,” Aldo protested. “Remember he said he was concluding a commercial deal with Japan?” he asked with a sly grin.

“Commercius interruptus.” Francesca giggled. “Wasn’t that what you called it?”

“It all sells magazines.” Aldo shrugged modestly.

“So whose names are selling the next issue?” demanded Francesca with that marvellous talent she had for merging boldness with naiveté.

“Promise to buy a copy?”

“No,” she said, “but I’ll read it in the hairdresser’s.”

“Anything connected with Pellegrini’s murder gets coverage,” offered Aldo.

“Photographs!” Francesca said scornfully. “The grieving widow … scenes in his cheese factory … his handsome son who is at school in Switzerland … what do they tell? Nothing.”

“Well,” drawled Aldo, “everybody connected in any way will get their fair share of attention in the next couple of weeks. We don’t have much else in the way of juicy scandal—excuse me, sociopolitical comment—just now. Have to fill space.”

“Everybody?” queried Francesca keenly. “Everybody who?”

Aldo drank again and said, “No point in looking around from this table. Can’t see a thing, but I’ll tell you this … a lot of the characters concerned come in here.”

Francesca leaned forward eagerly. “Who, for instance?”

“Clara Rinaldo, for one.”

The wife of Pellegrini’s lawyer! “Who with?” Francesca wanted to know.

“I can’t say, but I doubt they are discussing cooking methods.”

“Chefs?” gasped Francesca.

“My lips are sealed.” Aldo grinned. “Read the paper.”

“I will, but tell me now.”

“Okay,” said Aldo, “I’ll tell you about Giacomo Ferrero. He’s losing one of his three stars.”

“That’s not what I meant. Anyway, it’s not news,” Francesca said disparagingly. “I heard that last week. What we want to know is, who is taking it away from him?”

“Oh, the committee I suppose—”

“Committee my
asino
—oh, pardon me,” she said, turning in my direction.

“That’s all right, I was absent at that week’s Italian lesson.”

She smiled and turned back to the journalist. “Aldo, don’t be obtuse! You know perfectly well decisions aren’t made by committees. They might be in some countries but not Italy. Now, come on, who was it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“I never speak ill of the dead.”

“Aldo, you always speak ill of the dead. They are the only ones who can’t defend themselves.” Then the import of his answer caused her eyes to widen—at least, as far as I could see in the near darkness. “You mean Silvio Pellegrini?”

Aldo grinned and sipped at the drink in his hand. He said nothing. Francesca looked at me. Her big luminous eyes shone as if to say “How about that?”

“Are you reporting that story?” I asked him.

“Not unless some aspect much more lurid emerges,” he said, still grinning.

“Aldo, you know something more lurid!” Francesca hurled the accusation at him like a spear.

He put on a straight face. “Now what makes you think—”

“Don’t try to fool me, I know you!”

He leaned forward. “And you can know me better if you play your cards right.”

She ignored that. “Tell us. What is it?”

“You’re not a stringer for
Foro di Vista,
are you?”

“That’s another scandal magazine,” Francesca said for my benefit. “No, I promise you won’t see it anywhere else—well, not through us anyway.”

Aldo took another drink, perhaps trying to decide. Then he emptied his glass and motioned to our left. “Take a look inside the last booth.” He slapped his glass on the table, gave us a catlike grin, and disappeared into the void.

I was peering in the direction he had indicated and Francesca said, “There’s a row of curtained booths along that wall. For couples that want privacy.”

“How do we get a look inside?”

“Not a voyeur, are you?”

“This is a serious investigation,” I told her severely.

“I know. I ruined a skirt, a blouse, pantyhose, a pair of shoes, my nails, and a new hairdo already. It’s very serious.”

“Put them on my bill. Now, that last booth, how do we—”

“Give me a ten-thousand lire note.”

I reached for my wallet. “Better make it twenty,” she said.

She took it and pushed her chair back. “Come on.”

I followed her and she watched the waiters, picking one she obviously knew. She whispered in his ear, at least a whisper to compete with the music. He took the bill, crinkled it to assess its value in the darkness, and nodded, saying something to her. She took my hand and we moved close to the last booth.

Black curtains enclosed it and a square board was above it. The waiter rapped three times on the board, and after a moment a voice within uttered something we could not hear.

The waiter motioned to Francesca, telling her to be ready. The waiter twitched aside the curtain and poked his head in, being deliberately careless in leaving one side open wider than the other. Francesca peered into one side of the booth, waving frantically to me to look in the other side.

It was over very quickly. Francesca said a word of thanks to the waiter and we returned to our table. “Did you see your side?” she hissed anxiously.

“Yes,” I told her.

“Well?” She banged her fist on the back of my wrist. “Who was it?”

“Giacomo Ferrero.”

Her mouth opened in astonishment, showing her white teeth.

“Did you see?” I asked.

“Yes.” She looked away deliberately.

I banged a fist on her wrist just as she pulled it away, laughing.

“Well, come on! Who was it?”

“What makes you think there was anyone else in there?” she asked innocently.

“In that kind of booth? Tell me or I’ll—”

“Please! No violence! It was Elena Pellegrini.”

There was a moment of silence. It was silence between us at least. The music had found a new and more penetrating beat. I ordered another round of drinks. “We need these,” I told Francesca, “as shock absorbers.”

It took her only a split second to grasp the meaning of the English words and I continued. “A widow’s grief lasts longer in England.”

“In Italy too,” she said. “In opera at least.”

“Whereas here in real life … we had better tell the captain, hadn’t we? Or maybe he doesn’t listen to gossip?”

“He probably knows already,” she said, indifferent.

“How?” I asked in surprise.

“He stations one of his people here whenever he has an important case. This is an ideal place to pick up rumors.”

“Do you know who it is?” Automatically, I looked around in the gloom.

“He uses someone different each time. Sometimes it’s a customer, sometimes a waiter. Sometimes it’s a man, sometimes a woman, and other times … half and half.” She gave me an amused smile. Gossip and scandal are part of the Italian way of life.”

“Yes, Italians love intrigue, don’t they?”

“We learned it from the masters: Machiavelli, Cellini, Cagliostro, Casanova …”

I shook my head. “A police force making use of gossip! Extraordinary!”

“When is it gossip and when is it an important clue?” Francesca asked.

The drinks arrived. She drank and then said, “Many Italian men have mistresses. No Italian woman does. Most of these mistresses are the wives of other men.”

“Go on,” I urged. “I have the feeling you’re leading up to a point.”

“Well, don’t you see? The funny thing is that it’s only recently that men have been getting uneasy about this. It’s taken them all this time to work out that the situation is mathematically impossible.”

I thought about it. “You’re right,” I said, and she gave me a superior smile.

“Still,” I added, “we’d better tell Cataldo.”

She sipped and nodded pensively. “Pellegrini’s wife and Giacomo Ferrero together … that does suggest a motive doesn’t it?”

“The eternal triangle? Yes, it does. I wonder too if it fits in with Brother Angelo’s statement about ‘Pellegrini and the three chefs’?”

“I don’t trust that Brother Angelo,” Francesca said and there was that look of steely determination on her face. “I don’t care if he is a monk.”

“I’m sure he isn’t. The bishop would have tossed him out by now. Threatening people with a knife and almost pushing them off parapets cannot in any way be part of routine monastic training.”

“You take things like that personally, don’t you?” she chuckled. Then her expression changed. She was staring past me, towards the door. “It can’t be!”

Entering the Fica was a daunting experience, as I had found out already. It was like stumbling into a dark cave with no idea if the next step would find ground under it. Now that our vision had adjusted, it was amusing to watch others come in, fumbling for a chair or a table, staggering as if sightless.

The couple coming in now were just as cautious and uncertain. They came close to our table, obviously not seeing us. We could see them, though, which was the reason for Francesca’s astonishment.

They were Ottavio Battista, the enfant terrible of Italian gastronomy, and Vanessa Mantegna, the wife of Bernardo, chef-owner of the San Pietro and the wizard of plant and flower cookery.

I
T WAS THREE O’CLOCK
when we left, and in the taxi we dissected the night’s findings, pondering over the unexpected couplings taking place—and being observed—in the nightclub.

“The demure Vanessa, seemingly devoted wife and partner of Bernardo, plant and flower chef, seen in the Fica with the demon king of the kitchen, Ottavio!” I said. “Does that have any significance as far as the puzzle of the three chefs is concerned? I can’t see how. It’s just a marital infidelity and nothing more, isn’t it? A sort of romantic culinary triangle?”

“Maybe,” Francesca said, musing.

“Now the words of Brother Angelo—”

“I don’t believe a word he says.” She was blunt and uncompromising.

“I know you don’t, but some things he said might have been true. ‘I can tell you about Pellegrini and the three chefs.’ That’s what he said.”

“But he didn’t tell you.”

“True—his life was in danger.”

“Are you sure of that?” she asked darkly.

“Clearly, you have taken a dislike to this cleric you have never met.”

“He tried to kill you.”

“Yes but—”

“And he’s no more a cleric than he is pope.”

“It seems likely—”

She sighed in deep exasperation. “There you are then.” Her tone changed. “Now Giacomo Ferrero and Elena Pellegrini, that’s different.”

“A different bowl of minestrone altogether,” I agreed. “Another of the three chefs and the grieving widow of a man who may have been murdered …”