“Convenient again.”
“Cèrto.”
Pallioti took his glasses off, picked up his pen, and tapped it on the edge of his blotter.
“They probably called it Operation Lazarus,” he said. “Or something like that. It’s expensive,” he added a second later. “That kind of magic trick. But I gather that in this case, enough of the right people thought it necessary. Have the fingerprints come back?”
Enzo shook his head. They had dusted all the makeup samples and sent a team to the apartment. Pallioti shrugged.
“They will. The only thing that might be interesting is if anyone else was there.”
“They weren’t.”
“No,” Pallioti said. “I don’t think so, either.”
He stood up and walked to the window. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves. With bare forearms and without his cuff links, he looked strangely naked. The thin gold face of the watch his sister had given to him glinted on his wrist. Pallioti complained frequently that it was finicky and Swiss and hard to read, but Enzo had never seen him without it.
“Angela Vari’s mother was an American. She worked here, in repatriation, for the Red Cross, after the war. Fell in love, got married, stayed. It was enough, apparently, to convince the Americans to take Angela—the fact that her mother was a citizen. And they owed us some favors.”
Pallioti spoke without turning around, still staring down at the piazza.
“Angela spoke fluent English. Her father kept it going at home after her mother died and she studied it in school. So that made it easier.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Our friend at the consulate was right. After she was cremated in December 1980, she was enrolled in the US Federal Witness Protection Program. She arrived in the United States in January, 1981. So, voilà!”
He turned around.
“Her accent is brushed up, a few years are peeled off her age, and Angela Vari becomes Anna Vanetti. They gave her an Italian family background, got her a place in a college in Boston, and, well—” Pallioti spread his elegant hands. “Really, she never looked back. I suppose you could say, death became her. Arguably better than her previous life.” He smiled at his own little joke.
“Anna Vanetti was an excellent student,” he went on. “She got a scholarship to graduate school, worked for a consultancy in small business development, and eventually started her own company. AV Design. Which became AVC design when she married Dr. Kenneth Carson in June 2001. First marriage for her, second for him. No natural children, one stepdaughter, Kristin. Like all protected witnesses, Anna has an emergency number. She’s never called it, not once in thirty years. In fact,” he added, leaning against the window ledge and crossing his ankles, “I’m almost surprised she’s still on their radar. But that’s one of the strengths of their program.” He regarded his shoes for a moment. “It’s one of the reasons the Americans are so successful with this. The rules are draconian, but once you agree to go into the Witness Protection Program, they agree to protect you. Forever. In Anna Vanetti’s case it hasn’t been necessary. She never put a foot wrong.” He looked at Enzo. “Until now. Or not,” he added. “As the case may be.”
“You haven’t told me why,” Enzo said. “Why they went to all that trouble, all that expense. To make Angela Vari disappear. Why was she so important?”
Pallioti smiled one of his non-smiles.
“She was a high-value witness,” he said. “It was 1980.”
Enzo felt the unpleasant prickling again, as if someone was rubbing sandpaper down his arm, and realized he knew the answer. He wondered if he’d known it the second Pallioti had told him who Antonio Tomaselli was. Wondered if that was who he had really been asking Giulia about last night—not Tomaselli at all, but the woman he had faced, touched, stood so close to that he had seen the flecks in her eyes and smelled, under sweat, the faint woody scent of her perfume.
You won’t recognize them, his mother had said. And she had been right.
“That was the thing that was so difficult about the Red Brigades.” Pallioti pushed himself off the window ledge and returned to his chair. “You have to understand this, because it’s important. And because we didn’t, at the time. You see, the BR weren’t like the other left-wing groups. They weren’t a personality cult like the Baader-Meinhofs, or some bunch of tatty students living in squats and occasionally killing people. They were disciplined. And their security was very, very good. Excellent. They were extremely professional.” He shook his head. “If we’d really understood that, if we’d really known—”
Pallioti took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d been junior, only beginning his career in the police. Even so the weight was personal. Enzo could see it. And hear the unspoken words that hung in room. If we had really understood that, if we’d really known how good they were, taken them more seriously, Aldo Moro might still be alive.
“So this wasn’t some long-haired bunch of left-wing junkies.” Pallioti picked up his pen, stared at it, and put it down again. “They understood keeping cover. They knew how to fit in and how important it was to do it. They weren’t on an ego trip. They looked completely ordinary, even boring, and they behaved completely normally—no fireworks, no showing off—and, yes, some of them did have girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, whatever, who had no idea what the hell they were doing. It’s the perfect cover. Nobody was hanging around boasting in bars. They even published a manual, with instructions, detailed ones, on how to keep their houses, and how to leave for work at eight, and come back at five, how to keep their cars registered, and not throw parties, and be sure to obey traffic rules and stop for red lights. They worked in cells,” he added. “Strictly on a need-to-know basis. It was one of the reasons they were virtually impossible to infiltrate.” Pallioti shrugged. “It’s so simple and so few people actually have the discipline to do it. If you never tell—”
It was one of acknowledged wonders of policing that most people—virtually all of them, in fact—simply had to spill, sooner or later, to someone. Forget forensics and clues and evidence, the human ego needed to talk. Blab. Confess. It was yet another universal truth the Catholic Church had cottoned onto a long time ago. The rare ones who had the discipline not to do it were almost impossible to crack.
“There was one effort, early on,” Pallioti said, “at infiltrating them. It was marginally successful, but only marginally, and it never happened again. They learned the lesson and got even tighter and after that, the security services got nowhere. They could never put anyone inside the Brigate Rosse. That,” he said, looking at Enzo, “was what made Angela Vari so valuable.”
“She was an informant?”
“Not quite. Although some people did think she was a hero. Others thought she was nothing but a duplicitous liar, playing the system when it was most vulnerable.”
“Why?”
“Because she didn’t come forward until after Moro was dead. And—” Pallioti stopped talking and stared out of the window. Light spangled the dark glass. “Well,” Pallioti said finally, “the upside was, that when she did, come forward, she gave them Tomaselli. Without Angela Vari, they wouldn’t have got him. When they did, that led to others. And to the apartment where they’d kept Moro, the People’s Prison. The whole thing. It all unraveled very fast after that.”
Enzo knew what he’d just heard, but he asked the question anyway, if only to hear the words out loud. “You are saying that she knew Antonio Tomaselli, and that she was inside the Moro kidnapping?”
Pallioti nodded.
Enzo gave a low whistle. This really was manna from heaven. No wonder they’d gone all-out to protect her. An informant like that would be, literally, worth her weight in gold. “So I don’t get it,” he asked. “What was the downside?”
Even as he said it, Enzo felt the prickle again and realized it didn’t matter, because he already knew the answer.
Pallioti turned to him. “Angela claimed she wasn’t one of them. She claimed she didn’t know, had no idea,
to begin with anyway, what Tomaselli was doing. What, or who, he was. But—”
He swung back toward the window. The pen beat a sharp little tattoo on the sill then stopped.
“But?”
“But some people just didn’t buy it, because what made Angela Vari so valuable also made her suspect. She was Tomaselli’s girlfriend. More than that.” Pallioti looked back at Enzo. “They were living together,” he said. “They were lovers. They had been for a long time. I gather since they were very young. She was, I suppose you might say, the Juliet to his Romeo.”
Or, Enzo thought, the Lady to his Macbeth. He stood up.
“So has she gone to look for him? Or to join him?”
Pallioti shook his head. “I don’t know. Until we know why Tomaselli’s taken the girl, we won’t know. We’ve isolated Dr. Carson, by the way, MacCready’s babysitting him, and we have a team in the suite and in the hotel in case either Tomaselli or Angela Vari make contact, which one of them will—unless Tomaselli goes directly to the media, in which case—”
Neither of them wanted to think about the “in which case,” about the shit storm that would descend if it hit the news that Red Brigades were not only not dead, but up and running again.
“If Tomaselli has already made contact with Angela, which he probably has”—they both thought of the missing BlackBerry—“then she’s either gone to join him, meaning this was all preplanned, or she’s acting on her own to get Kristin back. Why she’d do that, I have no idea. What I do know,” Pallioti said, “is that, either way, she’s the only lead we have, so you are going to find her. And find her quietly and fast, while we still have a hope in hell of controlling this. I don’t need to tell you that if it goes public, the stakes go up, and everyone loses.”
Enzo did not need to ask if the arrangement was only between the two of them.
“How you do it, and what you think about it,” Pallioti said, “is up to you.” His smile twitched. “Call me a cynic,” he added, “but, personally, I find it hard to believe that out of all the teenagers in America, Antonio Tomaselli happened to pick Angela Vari’s stepdaughter by coincidence.”
Enzo was already on his feet. Pallioti placed his hands on the pile of papers that covered his desk as if he could stop the past leaking back into the present.
“One more thing,” he said. “There were people, back then, who blamed her, Angela, personally, for Moro’s death. Intelligent people, who never trusted her—magistrates, police, even some of the psychiatrists, who were sure she was playing a double hand. Who thought she was that good.”
He held Enzo’s eye for a moment, then began squaring the papers. “So not prosecuting her was controversial,” he said. “But the doubters lost the argument. They needed her. Then the Red Brigades starting killing witnesses, and even the jails weren’t safe, so they made Angela Vari disappear. They had a code name for her,” he added. “They called her the Butcher’s Daughter. I don’t know why. I haven’t had time to read this, but I’m assured it’s all here. Everything. Her past. This,” Pallioti said, sliding the file toward Enzo, “is how you’ll find her.”
Part II
Ferrara, 1965
THE FIRST TIME ANGELA saw Antonio she was seven years old and thought he was a leopard.
“Are you hiding?”
His voice comes out of nowhere, like the Cheshire Cat’s. Angela opens her eyes. He is standing above her, the long grass coming almost to his knees, almost to the bottom of the short trousers all the little boys wear in the summer.
She knows, of course, who he is. Ferrara is a small place, so everyone knows who everyone is. And Antonio is new, which makes him an object of special interest. So Angela knows that he is two years older than she is, and that he has a brother who is two years older than that, and that his family has moved from the country so his father can work in one of the new factories. She knows, too, that they live in one of the buildings that have been put up specially for people like them on the far side of the Darsena, the old port where the Po used to run before it changed its mind and meandered away like a senile relative.
Those buildings are taller than any in the old city, except for the bell tower, and even though they’re not supposed to, Angela and her friends have gone to see them. They’ve stood clutching each other’s sleeves and giggling because they’re forbidden to wander outside their neighborhood, much less outside the city walls, and because the buildings are ugly. Gray and made of dirty-colored concrete and glass, the apartments in them are stacked one above the other like shoe boxes. Each has a tiny balcony where laundry loops from metal railings and flaps in the wind.
Angela blinks at the memory. She can feel spots of sun and shade on her face, and the prickle of grass through the thin material of her summer dress.
“No,” she replies. Although it isn’t true, because of course she’s hiding.
It’s a Sunday, one of the last August afternoons before school starts and autumn brings the first whisper of winter—foggy mornings and sharp nights and early reports of frost in the hills—and they’ve come out to the orchard, a group of children and an assortment of aunts and uncles and fathers and mothers and someone’s grandfather in the back of Signor Pirotti’s truck, to help with the picking. Trestle tables have been set up between the avenues of trees and all the other girls have gone off to pick flowers to make into necklaces, or hold under your chin to see if you like butter.
Angela thinks that’s stupid. Everyone knows it’s just a smudge of yellow and has nothing to do with butter. So she’s rambled off and lain down in the shade. Closed her eyes and listened to the shouts of the boys’ ball game, and the rise and fall of the adults’ voices as they unpack the food. She’s half asleep, drifting on the smell of the fruit trees and the low throb of Signor Pirotti’s bees that live in the hives by the gate, when she hears his voice.
“What’s your name?” Antonio asks.
His eyes are dark as wet stones. He looks at her like she’s something he’s found—a forked stick for slingshots, or a squished garter snake. Leopard light falls through the leaves and into his black hair.
“Angela,” Angela says, and he nods.
“You’re the butcher’s daughter.”
Since it really isn’t a question, Angela doesn’t answer. Although she does wonder what he’s heard, because it’s strange to have only a father and have your mother be dead. It hangs around you like a smell, and there is always the suspicion you might pass it on, like the flu, and make other mothers die. Angela knows some of her friends whisper. They say her mother touched her going out of the world as she came into it and left a thumbprint in some private place. She’s heard there are bets. About lifting up her dress.
But Antonio doesn’t ask to look, or lean down and grab at her hem. Instead he says, “The butcher’s daughter,” again, as if he likes the sound of it. Then he whips his hand from behind his back and gives her an apple.
It’s not a big one. In fact, it’s tiny and there’s something wrong with it because it’s fallen off the tree too soon and has little black spots on it, and Angela knows if she bites it, it will feel like chalk on her teeth. But she keeps it anyway. It rides home in her pocket, jumping against her thigh, and when she gets to her bedroom, she puts it on the windowsill.
At night the apple changes. It catches the light from the street lamp and the dark spots vanish and it seems to grow. To swell until, from where she lies in bed, Angela thinks it looks not like an apple at all but like something from one of the fairy stories her father sometimes reads her. Rocking on the edge of dreams, she half expects its skin to split and release a tiny winged person. Or a jewel. Or at the very least, a wish.
When, after three weeks, the apple begins to grow soft and wizen and look like the face of the old man who sells newspapers in the kiosk by the cathedral, Angela refuses to throw it away. It spawns a halo of fruit flies, and still she won’t get rid of it. Her father indulges her. But not Nonna Franchi, who is not really her grandmother a
t all, but the old lady who comes to clean the apartment, to sweep the floors and bang the rugs and polish the heavy brown furniture with beeswax and linseed oil. Nonna Franchi survived the Nazis. The apple doesn’t have a chance.
So Angela is not surprised when she comes home from school one day and finds the sill empty.
Even so she stands for a moment, looking at the spot where it sat, where the stickiness has been rubbed away, and feels a kind of hollow in her stomach. Then she closes her eyes, and under the sharp tang of the vinegar and lemon juice Nonna Franchi uses to clean the windows, she can smell the memory of August.
The apartment where Angela lives with her father has five rooms and is on the second floor of a house in the Via Vittoria, which is in the ghetto and only a few steps from the Spanish Synagogue that was built for the Jews when Duke Ercole d’Este, who was good and kind, invited them to come to Ferrara after they had been expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who were not good and kind.
Angela knows this because she learns about it in school. Where she also learns how the Nazis ruined the synagogue. How everyone was too afraid of them to say anything to stop them, so they smashed everything inside and put chains across the door. This story makes her worry about the Jews. Sometimes, putting her key in her own door, she looks over her shoulder at the padlock on the synagogue’s door and at its shuttered windows, and thinks that the ghosts of the Jews are locked out and have nowhere to go. Other times she’s sure she sees them. Gathered at the corner, or walking just ahead as she comes down the street, the soles of their shoes shuffling on the cobbles.
One day her teacher—who is new that year, and young and blond and pretty—reads, as part of a lesson, the Sh’ma Yisrael, the most important Jewish prayer. “Hear, Oh Israel. The Lord is Our God. The Lord is One.” She recites standing in front of the class in her blue skirt and white blouse. Then she explains that it is said first thing in the morning and the last thing said at night. And that it is the prayer of beseeching, and of martyrs. And that it is always on the lips of the dying.
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