The Last Enemy (15 page)

“What did you think of the story she came up with when you asked about her meeting with Minelli in Cascia? It doesn’t make sense,” Piero added, anxious to keep the commissario talking while he finished his second pastry.

“It makes sense to me. She meets her cousin accidentally in the Basilica and they have a coffee together. She votes Communist and prays to Saint Rita, not a contradiction in this country! I’d wager half the people who vote Communist light candles to their favorite saints the night before an election. Finish up, Piero,” Cenni added, standing up. “We’ve kept the American waiting long enough. I can’t give you a butler, but perhaps the boyfriend will do.”

22

Inspector Staccioli, who had been sent to act as dogsbody until Cenni arrived, admitted them to the apartment. He motioned to a man sitting on a chartreuse flowered couch and then returned to his chair by the door and to his newspaper without saying a word. Still sulking, Cenni thought. Williams looked up when they entered the room and gave them a tremulous smile, a wavering mix of anxiety and sorrow, the latter reflected in the pallid skin and bloodshot eyes of someone who’d recently been crying. He was something of a surprise to Cenni, perhaps because he knew Rita Minelli’s age and had expected a man in his forties. He’s no more than thirty, Cenni thought, probably younger. He had the thin, almost translucent, skin of the Irish, sand-colored hair, light blue eyes, and delicate but nondescript features, the kind of face one sits across from in an airport or a doctor’s office for thirty minutes or more, yet can’t remember ten minutes later.

Cenni introduced himself and Piero, and for the second time that day, offered his condolences. From the blank response in Williams’s eyes, he concluded that the man spoke very little Italian. The commissario had learned English as a child from his grandmother and decided to forgo the use of a translator. He began, as he usually did, with preliminary questions, asking the who, what, where, and whys of Williams’s life and, finally, for a description of his friendship with Rita Minelli. The answers surprised him, considering what had been previously said or implied by the Casati family.

Williams told them that he was Canadian, “Not American, as everyone in Assisi insists on calling me. Italians seem to think Canada is the fifty-first state. Some Americans do, too ” he added with a rueful smile. He said he was in Assisi doing research on a group of ecclesiastic maps in the Basilica library. He explained that in the Middle Ages European maps were more ecclesiastic than cartographic, adding that he was writing a book on the influence of the Catholic Church on cartography. He said he had a small fixed income—15,000 Canadian dollars a year—but it was more than adequate for his needs. He had met Rita when he first came to Assisi in December. She was a good friend, and he’d miss her a great deal. “She’d helped me in just about everything,” he added. “She even found me this apartment.”

Cenni looked about him. Two tiny rooms, an open galley kitchen and the slightly larger space they were in, one small curtainless window looking out on a narrow alley, and the only decorative item, a bad reproduction of Saint Francis preaching to the birds. The furniture, typical of what landlords think suitable for tourists, was cheap and barely serviceable. The only upholstered piece in the room was the flowered sofabed on which he and John Williams had been sitting for the last fifteen minutes. It was, Cenni decided, not only the ugliest couch in memory but surely the most uncomfortable. Out of curiosity, he asked Williams what he was paying by the month.

“Five hundred euros,” he replied, “not including electricity.”

No wonder the landlord was so quick to reassure me that
Signor Williams wouldn’t hurt a fly
, Cenni thought. Tenants who open their pockets for picking don’t arrive on one’s doorstep every day, although, in Cenni’s experience, Americans with easy money were the exception to this rule. He supposed he’d now have to add Canadians to the list.

When Cenni broached the subject of sex, Williams blushed a violent red. “Rita was forty-five, I’m twenty-six,” he said, insisting that they’d been good friends only. “Rita may have had other male friends,” he added, turning red on red. “I can’t say for sure. If she did, I don’t know who they were . . . are,” he amended, in confusion.

Asked about his whereabouts on Good Friday, he told Cenni that Rita had visited him for two hours in the afternoon and had left shortly after 4:00.

“Two hours is a long time for an afternoon chat,” Cenni said. “What did you talk about?”

“Just things,” Williams responded, a slight tic pulsing below his left eye. “You know the things friends talk about. We usually went together to Sunday mass at San Stefano’s, but Rita thought maybe for Easter we should go to the Basilica. And she was nervous about the Good Friday dinner with her family. Her uncle is . . . was always picking on her. She was worried that he might be rude to us if we chose the wrong fish for dinner. Things like that,” he finished lamely.

Tics can be as reliable as lie detectors—more reliable, Cenni thought. He’s telling half-truths. They talked about more than just their choice of church on Easter or the correct fish to eat on Good Friday.

Williams concluded his statement by accounting for his time the whole of Friday evening. He’d left his apartment immediately after Rita to attend confession at San Stefano at 4:30—“I was first in line”—and, later, to hear five o’clock mass. When he exited his apartment building, about 4:20, he saw Rita at the top of the street walking toward San Ruffino. “It was the last time that I saw her alive,” he said, and his voice shook. Cenni nodded in awkward sympathy.

After mass, he went to Il Duomo for a pizza—“I’m hypoglycemic,” he offered in explanation, “so I have to eat often. I couldn’t wait until nine or ten at night for my dinner. Rita and I agreed to meet there at six-thirty.”

“When she didn’t show up, why didn’t you notify her family or the police?” Cenni asked.

“At first I was worried,” he acknowledged, pausing to run his tongue over his upper lip. “But Rita was really uncomfortable about the dinner with her family. That’s why she’d invited me along, as a bodyguard,” he added with a self-deprecating smile. “I figured she’d decided to skip the dinner and was taking the easy way out by not showing up.”

“Then it wasn’t you who told her family that she was one of the processionists?”

“Little Rita, in the procession! Who told you that?” The image of the diminutive Rita carrying a heavy cross up the steep incline to San Ruffino appeared to amuse him, and for the first time since they’d arrived at the apartment Cenni saw him relax.

“And after the procession, what did you do?”

“I followed the processionists up toward San Ruffino. I had planned to attend the service but the church was too crowded, so I went home. I didn’t go out again that evening. I heard about her death the next morning from my landlord, a little before ten, when I went out for a coffee.”

Cenni threw his head back and laughed, causing the timid Canadian to wince. The grocer had known about the murder before the questore.
“Que Paese!”
What a country, Cenni uttered aloud and laughed again.

When he’d stopped laughing, he asked to see Williams’s
soggiorno
.

“I didn’t know I needed one,” Williams stammered and pointed to the passport that was displayed prominently on the plastic coffee table. Cenni picked it up and began flipping through its pages.

“I thought your name was John Williams?” Cenni said impatiently. “It says here John Williams Campbell.”

“My mother’s maiden name was Williams. I never got along with my father and I decided to stop using his name when he died. That was five years ago.” Again the tic!

Cenni thanked him for his help, told him not to leave Assisi without permission, and to secure his last request, pocketed Williams’s passport. At the door, he turned unexpectedly, “Signor Williams, were you aware that Rita Minelli was pregnant?”

“No . . . I don’t . . . didn’t . . .” he replied, stumbling over his words.

Cenni had known the Canadian’s answer even before he’d asked the question. He’d just wanted to see if the tic would return. It had!

So, Batori was right. Rita Minelli was pregnant. Now to find the father, he said to himself.

The Canadian boyfriend, as he was now known to the police, waited five minutes after they’d left before getting up from the couch, waiting to be sure that the fat policeman wasn’t coming back.

He’d hidden his nerves rather well, he thought, although he’d been afraid that his legs would collapse under him if he stood to say goodbye. He hadn’t offered to shake hands either, afraid his hand might tremble. He was pleased that he’d thought about the passport in advance and had had it ready for them, but not so pleased that they had taken it away with them. All in all, though, he thought he had performed rather well. He deserved a coffee, perhaps at the Bar Sensi. Matteo was in at 5:00.

23

The questore, Carlo Togni, who was often reasonable about the demands he made on those who worked for him, and more so with Cenni, his senior commissario, whom he regarded as something of a prodigy, was the source of Cenni’s frustrations. They got on reasonably well so long as they kept their discussions focused on policing and away from politics. Togni had great ambitions, and in Italy the single most effective way to achieve great ambitions is through relationships, so he spent the better part of his days cultivating relationships and left the legwork to his subordinates. But in the murder investigation of Rita Minelli, Togni was afraid that the relationships might be getting away from him.

In his first call to Cenni, shortly before 11:00 in the morning, when he was still concerned that the American’s murder might have some connection to terrorism, he’d offered his favorite commissario whatever assistance he would need to find the murderer at once. In the second call, at 2:00 in the afternoon, after Cenni had convinced him that Minelli’s murder had nothing to do with the
Brigate Rosse
, Al Qaeda, ETA, or the IRA, the questore had suggested that perhaps Cenni should tread lightly with the count. “Remember, he’s a friend of the PM.” The third call, at 4:00, was a gentle but firm reminder that the Casatis “are the victims here.” The last call, which came sometime after 8:00, to his office, and which Cenni surmised was in response to pressure from higher up, was an ungentle demand that the commissario meet him at 10:00 the following morning. “I want to know more about this Croatian woman,” he’d said. And in case Cenni hadn’t got the message, he added, “You know who I mean, the woman who found the body, the same woman who’d threatened the victim.”

The day that his twin brother lost an election in secondary school to the very unpopular son of the school’s principal, Cenni had learned that justice in any society is subordinate to the vicissitudes of politics. He had applied that lesson when he’d first joined the Polizia di Stato by putting aside his personal sense of justice and adopting Cicero’s less perfect but more workable one, “Justice consists in doing injury to no man.” Umberto Casati had important friends, and Cenni lacked the power to indict any member of the Casati family for Rita Minelli’s murder if a decision had already been made higher up that
they’re the victims here
. But before he’d agree to arrest someone whom he thought to be innocent, he’d resign. It needn’t come to that, though; it never had before. He had his own ways of applying political pressure to the questore. He poured the last of the Sagrantino into his mug and remembering the Irish toast that Piero had taught him, raised his glass in salute.
“Slainte!”
he said, to no one in particular.

After Rachel had jumped from the bed, Cenni turned on his side, closed his eyes once more, and tried to sleep. But the thought of the old woman in Gubbio had evoked other memories. The thugs who had murdered the old woman had done more than just steal her money. They had robbed her of dignity at the moment of her dying. With a piece of coal from her fireplace, they had drawn a handlebar mustache on her upper lip and large clown freckles on her cheeks. He felt the same hot anger now as he had then: an irrational anger perhaps, but it had kept him going day and night for three weeks until he’d found her killers.