Turn to Stone

by James W. Ziskin

Giuliana felt no need to keep quiet now. “Gabriele was betrayed by Alberto Bondinelli. My family has always known he was given away by someone close to him.”

  “Maybe it was one of his other comrades,” said Franco. “You can’t assume it was Alberto who betrayed him.”

  “Look at the photo,” she said. “He’s sitting there with a senior official of the OVRA. And there’s Bondinelli, smiling at the camera.”

  “Maybe the girl turned him in,” said Franco.

  “No,” came a voice from the other side of the room. We all turned to see who had spoken. It was Max. “Silvana was in love with Gabriele. Though he used the name Marco Bianchi at that time. It was his nom de guerre.”

  “Who set up the meeting in the café?” I asked.

  Max didn’t hesitate. Didn’t try to evade my question. He answered simply, “Alberto.”

  “I told you,” said Giuliana, practically spitting at Franco. “Bondinelli betrayed my cousin and the other men in his squadra.”

  Chaos reigned in the room, with arguments breaking out along party lines, as it were. Giuliana and, to a lesser degree—or at least with less vitriol—Lucio and Tato, went on the offensive. Franco and Veronica defended Bondinelli, Bernie and I could do no more than watch in horror as the people who had been friends and colleagues only days before, now lobbed insults and threats at each other. The inspector silenced the free-for-all with a booming voice I would not have thought in his power.

  “Everyone will remain calm,” he began. “Alberto Bondinelli is dead. And no one can say with certainty that he betrayed his friend or was a traitor to his partisan comrades.”

  “I can,” said Max. “I was in a prisoner of war camp at the time the meeting took place, but my sister told me later that Alberto had organized the meeting at her request. She was in love with Gabriele and wanted to marry him. But she feared my father would disapprove and, so, she asked Alberto to intervene.”

  “But he was in love with her too,” said Giuliana. “He married her after my cousin was murdered by the Nazis, didn’t he?”

  “He loved her so much that he was willing to sacrifice his own happiness for hers. And, according to Silvana, he loved your cousin, Gabriele, as well.”

  “Lies!”

  Max drew a sigh. “As in Ellie’s story, it was the father who betrayed the lovers. My father.”

  “How do you know this?” asked the inspector.

  “How? He told me himself. He told me his daughter would never marry a Jew. A Communist Jew.”

  The room fell silent for a short spell, until Giuliana spoke. Subdued for the first time since I’d met her, she asked if Bondinelli had known Rodolfo Locanda was an officer in the secret police.

  Max offered a shrug. “I have no idea. It was the secret police after all. But I knew Alberto. If he had wanted to kill your cousin—or any Communist, for that matter—he would have done it himself. As a young man, he was cruel and without pity. He would have butchered this Gabriele without a second thought. So I am certain he did not betray anyone. It was my father. He told me so and swore me to secrecy to protect my sister.”

  Peruzzi stepped to the center of the room and assumed control. “Bene. The police will open an inquiry into this matter and determine if it is indeed Gabriele Levi in the photograph. That’s our job, and it’s the easy part. But you, signorina,” he said addressing me, “you’ve neglected to close the circle. What I want to know is who is P. Sasso?”

  The opportunity to feed hot crow to a man who is trying to humiliate you without cause—other than the fact that you’re wearing a skirt— doesn’t come along every day. So when it does, you have to make the most of it. And I did.

  Reaching into my purse a third time, I produced the letter Bondinelli had written to me. The one Teresa had delivered, rescued, then redelivered. I unfolded it with deliberate care and read it to the inspector.

  Finally, I’d like to divulge a secret. You surely do not realize that you and I have more in common than your father’s work and a passion for medieval literature. In fact, dear Eleonora, you and I share a name. Or at least we once shared a name for a time.

  “What is this riddle?” demanded Peruzzi. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a letter Professor Bondinelli wrote to me before he died. He goes on to say that he would explain everything to me once the symposium was over. Of course he never got the chance.”

  “Then we’ll never know,” said Franco.

  “I know. The name we share is Stone.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Bernie and Max got it as soon as I’d said it. So obvious, yet hiding in plain sight. P. Sasso was Alberto Bondinelli. I’d assumed it was the name of the unidentified man in the photo, Gabriele Levi. But no. It was his nom de guerre. Bondinelli’s. It was written right there on the back of the photograph he’d kept in his office for twenty years.

  “Non ho capito,” said Franco.

  “The name Sasso. Sasso is Italian for stone. And I believe—no—I’m sure it was Bondinelli’s assumed name while he was with the partisans. To protect themselves from discovery and betrayal, they used nomi di guerra. Bondinelli’s was P. Sasso. I may be wrong, but I would bet that the P stands for Pietro. Peter. Which also means stone. Or rock.”

  After a few moments of chatter revolving around the discovery of Bondinelli’s nom de guerre, Peruzzi invited Max and me to join him in the library. Once we were alone, the inspector bore down on me as if I were a suspect.

  “If, as you say, Leopoldo Migliorini did not rob and kill Alberto Bondinelli, then who did?”

  “No one robbed him,” I said. “And no one killed him. He took care of that himself. It would have been a singular coincidence if he’d been robbed on his way to commit suicide.”

  Both the inspector and Max expressed their doubts about my theory. Peruzzi may have been willing to believe Leopoldo wasn’t his man, but that didn’t mean he bought the idea that Bondinelli had killed himself. And Max insisted his brother-in-law would never have taken his own life.

  “I’ve been told that several times,” I said. “And I ignored the obvious for too long.”

  I proceeded to outline the reasons for my conclusion. “Giuliana visited her uncle—Gabriele’s father—the Sunday before Bondinelli died. There she searched through her cousin’s things in search of something.

  And she found it. A photograph. It was the same picture that she’d surely seen several times hanging on the wall in her professor’s office.”

  “And she hadn’t recognized her own cousin in that photograph?” asked Peruzzi.

  “Not at first. It’s a grainy old picture. And her cousin died when she was a small girl. Three or four years old. But when she stumbled across the very same photo among her cousin’s belongings, she came to believe Bondinelli was the one responsible for Gabriele’s death.”

  “But why?” asked the cop.

  “Because, sitting in her cousin’s bedroom last Sunday, she saw the date on the photograph.”

  “E allora?”

  “Allora, directly above her cousin’s bed hangs the recognition certificate of his service as a partisan. And the date of his death is listed there clearly. April twenty-first, 1944.”

  Peruzzi rubbed his chin. “The same day the photograph was taken.”

  “Right or wrong, Giuliana believes Bondinelli betrayed Gabriele. I’m convinced she confronted Bondinelli with her accusations last Tuesday afternoon. The day he died.”

  “And you think that caused him to kill himself?” asked Max. “Non ci credo. I’ve already told you he didn’t betray that boy. It was my father.”

  “Bondinelli rushed up here to see you, perhaps to hear you assure him of that very fact. But you weren’t in. He returned home and locked himself in his study for an hour. Veronica and the Spanish woman, Teresa, were both there. Then he left in a rush.”

  “That proves nothing,” said the cop.

  “Max, do you know if your brother-in-law spoke Spanish?” I asked. He scoffed. �
�He tried. But he had no talent for languages. He used Italian words mostly. He knew a few expressions perhaps. Nothing more.”

  “Teresa told me the same thing. She saw him that day, as he was leaving the house less than thirty minutes before he ended up dead in the river. She recalled the last thing he said to her.”

  “What was that?” asked the inspector. “‘I’m going to drown myself in the Arno?’”

  “Almost. He told her he was going out. Then he said ‘adiós.’ Bondinelli was a man who didn’t speak Spanish well. An Italian who used

  Italian words when he meant to use Spanish ones. He wasn’t simply telling her goodbye. He wished her farewell. Addio. Final. Permanent. Forever.”

  The two reflected on my linguistic argument, and I sensed I’d dented their resistance. The inspector asked me to continue.

  “Let’s accept for the moment the idea that Bondinelli took his own life,” I said. “How does that illuminate the rest of the evidence that you have? First, it fits your time of death, Inspector. And it makes sense given the fact that Leopoldo Migliorini was far from the Ponte alle Grazie at five thirty last Tuesday evening. What’s missing, of course, is a suicide note.”

  “I’m sure you have a theory on that as well,” said Peruzzi.

  “I do, Inspector. I believe he wrote it in his study just before he left the house. He locked himself in that room for an hour. I asked myself, what does one do in a study? Read books. Pay bills perhaps. Or . . . write letters. I think he wrote his suicide note. Remember, he’d been upset by his conversation with Giuliana at the university. He then rushed up here to Fiesole to see you, Max. His next stop was his house. Then the Arno, not a half hour after telling Teresa ‘adiós.’”

  Peruzzi began to pace the room. Max and I watched him complete three turns before he planted his feet purposefully before us and retrieved his notepad from his vest pocket. He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and aimed his right eye at his book. Then he flipped a few pages and scribbled a note.

  “I will interview Signorina Pincherle about the photograph,” he said as he wrote. “I want to know how it happened to be among her cousin’s belongings if it was taken the day he died. Someone must have delivered it to him. Or mailed it.”

  “I wondered the same thing. And I think the photographer must have sent the photo to everyone at the table.”

  “Or maybe Bondinelli sent it?” asked the cop.

  “Maybe. But if so, it points to his innocence, doesn’t it?”

  “Perché?”

  “Because he’d have had no reason to do so if he’d betrayed Gabriele and sent him to his death. Why bother? Why waste a stamp? But if he’d had nothing to do with his comrade’s discovery and arrest, or if he’d betrayed him inadvertently, he might have sent the photo.”

  A thought occurred to me. I remembered the night Bernie and I had searched Max Locanda’s study. To be perfectly accurate, I did the searching, Bernie did the sweating. And he watched the coast to make sure it stayed clear. But as I was snooping through the old documents on the secretary, I’d discovered a print of the now-infamous photograph in an old studio envelope. I reminded Max of it now.

  “I knew you’d been spying,” he said. “You never lost your mutande in here or anywhere else.”

  Peruzzi choked. I blushed. Max had managed a small measure of revenge for my snooping after all. Or perhaps it was for the Ghismunda and Guiscardo tale I’d told earlier.

  “My point is that the photograph is just over there on top of the secretary,” I said. “It might be in the original envelope. We should take a look.”

  With my guidance, Peruzzi located the envelope and the photograph. He pointed his good eye at it, turned it over and, finding the backside blank, turned it again.

  “This is the same photo,” he said. “But no names or dates on the back.”

  “What’s the envelope say?” I asked.

  “‘Sig.na Silvana Locanda, Villa Bel Soggiorno,’” he read. “The postmark is April twenty-fourth, 1944.”

  “But Gabriele was already dead and Alberto was in jail on that date,” said Max. “My father told me he had him picked up shortly after the meeting in the café.”

  “It must have been mailed by the photographer,” I said.

  “But that is Alberto’s handwriting on the envelope. I’d know it anywhere.”

  “All of this is consistent with the theory that Alberto was either innocent or unaware of his betrayal. I would love to see if Giuliana’s photo was still in its envelope. And if Bondinelli had addressed it himself.”

  Max and I saw Peruzzi to his car. He reluctantly agreed that my photo of Leopoldo Migliorini probably cleared him of the murder of Alberto Bondinelli, but not quite of theft. Not yet, at least.

  “What will you do next, Inspector?” I asked.

  “After I’ve spoken to Signorina Pincherle, we’ll search the Levi residence for more evidence of the April twenty-first meeting. And then I’ll interview this Veronica girl and the Spanish woman. If they know anything about a suicide note, I’ll get them to talk.”

  “They’ll both try to deny its existence. They’re devout Catholics and loyal to Bondinelli. They’ll do anything to hide evidence that points to suicide. Anything that might keep him from a Catholic burial or salvation.”

  Peruzzi stared at me, bemused. “You realize that God knows if Bondinelli killed himself, with or without a suicide note? Those two women can’t hide that.”

  “I may not be a Catholic, Inspector, but I am well aware of the basic tenets of the Christian faith and the power of its God. Still, I believe their devotion is so strong—especially Teresa’s—that they will do anything to protect his everlasting soul.”

  EPILOGUE

  I arrived back at Idlewild three weeks later. My dearest friend in the world, Ron “Fadge” Fiorello, owner of the ice cream shop across the street from my apartment, was there to meet me in his beaten-up Nash Ambassador. The driver’s side door was still dented shut, as it had been for nearly two years. But the heap ran well enough, and there was plenty of room in the trunk for my bag and souvenirs.

  We discussed the tragic events of my first week in Italy as he motored up the Taconic Parkway. And I told him I had a special gift for him. Two gifts, actually. A pair of 45s for the jukebox at his store.

  “You’ll be the first in New Holland to have these songs by the Beatles,” I said.

  A true music fan and incorrigible collector, he seemed to recall having read something about them somewhere, but couldn’t say if he’d ever heard their music.

  “Your teenaged customers will love them.”

  “At a nickel a pop, I can retire to the racetrack,” he said and drove on. The three weeks that followed my time at Bel Soggiorno had passed without incident, if one didn’t count the handsome man I’d met in Portofino after my stay in Florence. And I didn’t mention him to Fadge. He was more than a little sweet on me, and I knew he wouldn’t have understood.

  But before I’d taken off for the balance of my tour of Italy, which included the Riviera, Milan, Venice, and Rome, I spent several days more in Florence with Bernie. After whirlwind tours of the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, and every church in town, I met with Inspector Peruzzi. He filled me in on the developments of the investigation.

  “We released Leopoldo Migliorini this morning,” he told me as we sat at his desk in the questura on Via Zara, not far from Piazza della Libertà. “And my men did an admirable job of tracking down the old woman he claimed gave him the wallet. It turns out she’s well known for begging from the tourists on the Oltrarno.”

  “You’re not going to tell me she robbed Bondinelli, are you?”

  He didn’t laugh. “No. But I will tell you that she met the professor moments before he threw himself into the river. She approached him on the Lungarno near the Ponte alle Grazie to ask for money and noticed he was praying. She asked him what was wrong, and he waved her off. Then he called her back and handed her his wallet. He told her to keep it.
He didn’t need it.”

  “Did she see him go into the river?”

  “No. She hurried off before he could change his mind. She told us there was five thousand lire inside. She’s been thanking the saints for him ever since.”

  “I suppose that tells us a lot about his conversion,” I said. “He truly did change.”

  Peruzzi nodded, perhaps not as sentimental as I was when it came to reformed fascists. Then he told me about the search of the Levi residence on Borgo Pinti. Old Alfredo Levi regaled the investigating officers with tales of his son’s heroism, pointing out with glee the certificate hanging on the wall of Gabriele’s bedroom to anyone who stood still for two seconds.

  “Did you find any other evidence of the April twenty-first meeting?” I asked.

  “There were a few love letters from Silvana Locanda. Nothing else. The photograph Signorina Pincherle took from her cousin’s room was not in an envelope. It must have been lost years ago.”

  “That’s a shame. It would have been nice to see who had addressed it.”

  “We know who addressed it,” he said and produced a folded sheet of paper for me to examine.

  The letter was dated—September 24, 1963—and written in a precise hand in blue ink. It was Alberto Bondinelli’s suicide note, addressed to his daughter. “A mia figlia Mariangela.”

  I scanned the letter, reading it quickly once, then going back over it a second time. It consisted mostly of a long, rhetorical treatise on the responsibilities of a Christian, a comrade, and a traitor. With brilliant, if cold, logic, he explained to his child that a man is responsible for his actions, in the eyes of men and of God. He wrote that his love for Jesus had saved him from eternal damnation once, and he trusted that God would understand his last act on earth for the justice it represented and the sentence his crime demanded. For make no mistake, Alberto Bondinelli did not view his death as a suicide. He wrote in clear, unambiguous terms that he was merely carrying out the execution that he deserved for having betrayed his comrade and friend, Gabriele Levi, also known as Marco Bianchi.