The Innocent (14 page)

—Don’t say anything to him. Promise me.

With the next flash came the thought of Esposito, the one thought he really must keep out if he wanted any sleep at all. His first name was Lorenzo. His mother, on the phone, had called him Enzo. She was a widow but she sounded young, cheerful. Women got on all right without men around, getting in their way. But he couldn’t get along without Teresa …

He’d lied about his mother being ill. That was going to go against him. There might or might not be evidence of him in her flat but DNA would prove if the child was his. There were the photographs and there were witnesses. That restaurant was packed last night, full of Japanese fashion people here for the menswear show. The owner had recognised Esposito from the photographs right away. Tomorrow he was going to have to go back to Peruzzi, Lapo, all of them.

It was only natural that they’d all thought he was accusing Peruzzi to protect Esposito. We all protect our own, as Lapo said. Up to that point they’d been so helpful, so discreet, avoiding mentioning Esposito, trusting him. Lapo saying nothing more than:—What a nasty mess, especially for you … but I know you’ll do your duty.—Peruzzi, distressed as he was, swearing he wouldn’t talk to journalists. They’d been trying to help him and he hadn’t understood. He’d spent a long time closeted with Lorenzini, going over first, the timetable of events, as well as could be managed without a precise time of death, then the information he had failed to pick up on in the little square. Stuff that had been meaningless at the time.

Peruzzi saying:

—How can you be sure … but of course you’d know. And then:

—I could have sworn she was in love … She was in love … the baby would have kept her.

—I could have done a lot for them. We had plans. Did he tell you?

Well, no, he didn’t tell me because … He bundled himself back into the damp, creasy sheets but they were intolerable and he got up again. Because he didn’t feel he could confide in me. Because I don’t understand anything and my own wife is keeping me away from my son because I’d only upset him. If she’d been able to keep me away from Esposito we might not be in this mess. No. That was rubbish because, by that time the Japanese girl was dead. Before then, Esposito had been doing well.

Lorenzini had talked to the men, not telling them why, asking them if they knew anything about Esposito’s girlfriend, especially Di Nuccio who was from Naples and had been the one to say Esposito must be in love. But all he knew was that Esposito used to go out fairly often, all spruced up, and then he stopped. He’d just assumed. Of course he hadn’t confided in any of them. He was an NCO and a newly made one at that, hardly likely to get pally with the men. Lorenzini himself was his immediate superior. Esposito was living in barracks, far from home and old friends. There was nobody. There should have been the marshal. The young man was under his care and if he had felt unable to confide in him, that was the marshal’s failure.

‘I’ll make you some camomile tea.’ The light went on.

‘What?’

‘Salva, you’ve been trailing around the room in the dark for the last half-hour and the sheets on your side look like a battleground. Make the bed and I’ll bring us some camomile. D’you want a bit of honey in it?’

‘Yes, and …’

‘And what?’

‘Are there any biscuits?’

In the morning it was still pouring down. The marshal had himself driven the short distance to the little square. The rain-sodden flags hung limp and dirtied. There were few people about. If he was going to have to spend his morning apologising for himself, he’d start with Santini, the restorer, and work his way up. By the time he got to Peruzzi he’d be better informed, better prepared. There was a spotlight glowing in Santini’s window, illuminating a painted kitchen cupboard and a well bucket full of fresh flowers, but nobody appeared when the marshal went in and the bell rang.

‘Anybody there?’

The first room was as dark as the day. A dozen large decorated bowls stood on a long table and there was a small desk which the marshal looked at as he waited. It must have been very old because there was a worn patch in the middle at the front and a burned-in depression on the right hand edge. Somebody had spent a good many hours with his feet up, smoking a cigar. A man at peace with himself and the world.

The marshal sighed and called out again, ‘Anybody there?’

He knew there must be because he could hear violin music and work going on, sandpapering, he thought, somewhere behind.

‘Come back later. I’m busy!’

The marshal edged his way down a corridor stacked with picture frames and half blocked by a marble sink leaning against the wall. ‘Santini!’

The young restorer appeared at the end of the corridor in a rectangle of light. His old clothes were spattered with paint and varnish, his long curly hair tied back with a rag.

‘Oh, it’s you …’

He turned back to the cupboard door he was working on, sandpapering away dark-green paint from its edges to show brown wood. He acknowledged the marshal’s presence beside him by reaching to turn off the radio.

‘What can I do for you?’ The tone suggested that, whatever it was, he wasn’t going to do it.

The marshal followed the rhythmic movement of his hand a while, thinking. Then he laid his cards on the table. ‘Listen, Santini, I didn’t know.’

‘Eh?’

‘About Esposito.’

‘Oh … that was his name, was it …’

‘Do you believe me or not?’

Santini put down the sandpaper on a cluttered workbench and took up a rag that smelled of turps. He began rubbing in silence.

‘So?’ The marshal stood his ground, insisting.

After a long wait, Santini at last threw down the rag and looked him in the face. ‘Yes. I believe you. You’re probably the only southerner on the face of the earth I would believe and I don’t know why I do but … If you want to know, none of us knew anything either, until she’d gone. He didn’t hang out around here and Akiko was very close about her private life. But then Peruzzi got so agitated and started talking. There’d been a row that had really upset her and Peruzzi blamed him.’

‘What was the row about. Do you know?’

He took up the rag and went back to his rubbing. ‘All I know is what Peruzzi told me. Your man wanted to marry her and she wouldn’t, not even when she was pregnant.’

‘Did you know her well?’

‘She was one of us, a real craftsman. That’s all.’ He took a soft dry cloth and rubbed with gentle strokes so different from his harsh voice.

‘It’s just that everybody who’s talked about her said she was so precise, organised, determined, too. What I mean is, these days, if a woman doesn’t want children …’ Santini snorted. ‘What people think they want and what they really need don’t necessarily coincide, do they? That’s when ‘accidentally on purpose’ kicks in. Natural forces care nothing for our half-baked ideas of how our lives should go. Life is what happens to us while we’re making other plans, right?’ He rubbed harder, then bundled the cloth up and threw it down on the bench.

‘You sound as if you learned that lesson the hard way.’

‘Is there another way to learn it?’

The smell of turps was very strong. The marshal took a step back, waiting in silence.

Santini dribbled thin, pale-green paint down the door, disturbed its meandering progress with the soaked rag, stood back to look. ‘Your next question is “Are you married yourself ?” No, I’m not. And no, I’m not gay. I have the occasional fling but … look around you. I rent two small rooms on the first floor and they don’t look all that different from this one. This is how I live, who I am. What sort of woman would marry me?’

The marshal thought, a woman like Akiko. He didn’t say it. He couldn’t afford to put his foot in it again. Best put that one on the back burner until he’d done the rounds, heard everybody.

Santini worked on in concentrated silence for some time. Then he looked at the marshal, ironic, almost smiling. ‘You’re thinking Akiko. I wish … No, that won’t take you anywhere, but thanks for the compliment. I could never have moved her in that way. Your man must have had something special.’

‘Did you meet him?’

‘No. Never saw him until he showed up that day in uniform and then it was only a glimpse. Good-looking. But that’s not what counts, is it? There are some men who can impregnate a woman just by looking at her. D’you know what I mean? Perhaps he’s one of them. What do you think? You should know.’

He should know, but he didn’t. Behind Santini, a metal door stood open on a gloomy little courtyard, no more than a well in the building, where stone and marble sinks leaned against the dirty walls and old paint tins and buckets were clustered in the middle. The rain came on heavier, clattering, splashing and drumming on everything in its way. It was growing darker.

Swish and clack, swish and clack, the printing press drowned out the noise of the rain. The fruity smell of ink filled the little front room where a young assistant was packing wedding invitations into white boxes.

‘He’s gone to the bank. He reckons it’s less crowded than Fridays but he’ll be hours, even so.’

‘He doesn’t send you? It can’t be much fun, at his age, standing for hours in a queue.’

‘No chance of him sending me. Nobody touches his money. Besides, it’s a gossip shop. And he’s usually had a coffee and a grappa when he gets back.’ His glance strayed to the open newspaper on a stool at his side, open at the football page. While the cat’s away … he would no doubt go back to it when the marshal left.

‘I suppose you know about Peruzzi’s Japanese girl?’ The marshal, too, shot a glance at the paper but there would be nothing in there until after tomorrow morning’s news conference.

‘Everybody’s talking about it and about …’ He tailed off, shooting a glance at the gold flame on the soaked hat the marshal was holding.

‘About her carabiniere boyfriend?’

‘They say Peruzzi hasn’t heard from him for ages and that—’

‘That what? That maybe he killed her, is that what they’re saying?’

‘No! Nobody … that you’re keeping him away. You know … to avoid a scandal. That’s all. I didn’t mean …’ He was blushing and he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple prominent in his thin neck. He was very young, still had a trace of acne.

‘That’s all right. It’s only natural they should talk about it.’ The last thing he wanted was to frighten the lad. He needed all the friends he could get in the square now. Remembering the oldest gardener’s complaint, he was glad that he wasn’t wearing his black glasses. He hated the rain like a cat hates the rain but at least, in this weather, he could see without the streaming tears that sunshine provoked.

‘Anyway, you can tell him when he comes back that we’re not keeping this a secret, we just didn’t know about it until now and, you’ll see, it’ll be in the paper the day after tomorrow. So if he knows anything he should get in touch with me. All right?’ The young man’s face showed that it wasn’t all right, that the dead weight of anxiety that was hurting the marshal’s chest was communicating itself. The young man stared at him, uncertain how to answer. Say something casual …

‘Well, I’ll let you get back to your football. Pleased they’re back in the first division?’

‘If they stay there this time.’

‘They’ll stay there. It just needed Della Valle’s money. That’s what counts these days …’ That was the best he could do but he could hear the false note in his own voice.

Swish and clack and out through the frosted-glass door into the rain. Adjusting his hat and turning up the collar of his black rainproof, he splashed through a puddle in the uneven paving to the huge open doors of the packing warehouse, knowing it was likely to be the same story there. Nevertheless, he called out and waited among mummified statues and bundled chandeliers in the high room until an old man appeared to tell him that the packer, too, had gone to the bank. He explained his errand and left. The printer and the packer were much of an age and were, no doubt, in the bar having a grappa by now. Santini, the restorer, was another generation. Lapo fell somewhere in between but it wasn’t difficult to guess where he would attach himself.

It was his plump daughter, stacking plates in the half-lit back room, who told him. ‘Dad’s gone to the bank. If you want to come back later, it’s stuffed pork roll today …’

In the warm light of the kitchen behind her mother was bent over the open oven door, basting the pork. Granny was parked in the corner behind her where she spent all her days since a tiny stroke had frightened her. She was peeling potatoes in the lap of her apron and dropping them in a bucket at her feet. Even at this early hour, the smell of the roast scented with rosemary provoked a sharp twinge of hunger.

‘No, no … Just ask him to call me this afternoon, and tell him …’

Pausing on the doorstep, looking out at the dark rain splattering on to bare plastic tables, he had to admit to himself that he was relieved to have had this opportunity of ‘throwing his hat in first’. Now, when he did talk to them, the air should have cleared.

As for being prepared for Peruzzi, how do you prepare yourself for a minefield? You tread carefully, that’s all. What did it matter anyway, now? To think that, only the other day, he’d been sitting here in the sunshine with a glass of wine in front of him and nothing more on his mind than a regular murder case involving a foreigner. No political or powerful connections, no distressed parents, no press harassment, no pressure from the prosecutor’s office, his only problem a bad-tempered shoemaker.

Hunching his shoulders against the heavy rods of rain, he made for the workshop. Thunder cracked above his bowed head, preparing him for Peruzzi’s flashing anger.

Akiko’s death had hit Peruzzi hard. His sharp gaze seemed without direction, as if he were wandering in a maze. The marshal himself had been obliged to wander through a maze to get to him because he wasn’t in the workshop. Surely, after all the grand talk about his son’s seeing to everything, he hadn’t gone to the bank with the others? Just for the chat and the visit to the bar? No, Issino had told him.

—In shop. Signora goes for coffee. This way please.