The light changes and changes again before Angela finally crosses the street and stops at the memorial to the five bodyguards. She is a little surprised that she can recite their names. Oreste Leonardi, Domenico Ricci, Giulio Rivera, Raffaele Iozzino, Francesco Zizzi. The tide of flowers has receded, but the cross she saw on TV is still there. And the beret, the medals with their faded ribbons pinned to its brim. A few remaining bouquets are piled on the pavement, some newer than others. Rain beads their cellophane wrapping. The flashing neon sign from the bar across the street catches the drops and makes them glitter. Red. Pink. Green. Red. Pink. Green.
Angela doesn’t know how long she sits in the bus stop. Later, when they ask her—because they ask her every tiny thing, even the most embarrassing, even the most intimate, things—she can’t tell them. Just as she can’t tell them what time, exactly, it is when she gets up and walks down the street. It is certainly after dark, certainly after the time when Antonio will be back in the little apartment, will be turning on the television and wondering where she is and what has become of her. Or perhaps he already knows, and the apartment is empty, and after he kissed her and held her face in his hands and told her he loved her, he never planned on coming back there again. She doesn’t know. Any more than she knows if he stood at the bus stop in a stolen airline uniform, or if he pulled a trigger, and if so, which one. Which bullet he fired. All of them? Any of them? None of them? It doesn’t matter. Any more than it matters that she believed him when he promised her Aldo Moro wouldn’t die, told her they weren’t killers.
The rain has eased. It falls now in showers, bursting and splatting as the wind picks up. Angela reaches inside her collar. She feels for the clasp her father’s fingers could not manage and undoes the gold chain. The locket is soft. She slides the ring over it, feeling the sharp edges of the stone, then reclasps the necklace and tucks it away.
The tiny emerald winks in the light of a passing car.
“I couldn’t stop it,” the woman with the blue eyes had said. “I couldn’t save him.” And Angela had replied from far away, “No one could have stopped it. No one could have saved him.”
But that was a lie.
It isn’t just bullets that kill people. It’s silence.
All it would have taken was a phone call. An anonymous note. Via Montalcini. Two words for a man’s life.
Angela leans forward and drops the ring into the gutter. For a second, the gold glints. Then it is sucked in to the thin, dark torrent that runs down the storm drain, and is lost.
* * *
The officer on desk duty looks up as the door swings open. It’s been a long bad day in a string of what now seem to be endless long bad days, and he hopes, he really hopes, that this woman isn’t another nutcase who has come down here to tell him she’s had a dream and knows where the kidnappers’ prison is, or that Aldo Moro is sending her secret messages spelled out in the hairs in her curlers, or that she’s always thought that jerk Guido her sister married was strange and there’s something they should know. It’s happened in police stations all over the city, but especially here, so close to Via Fani. Then, with something that feels like a punch, he remembers that it probably won’t happen much anymore. And if anything, that’s worse.
She’s very young, this one, and soaked to the skin, and looks confused, standing there clutching her bag.
“Can I help you?” he asks, and she looks at him as though she’s surprised he’s here.
“Signorina?” he asks again, and begins to wonder if something really bad has happened to her. Or if this is one for the trash bin—not that they’re mutually exclusive.
“Signorina?”
She steps to the desk, still clutching the bag, and places her free hand, her left one, flat on the wooden surface and studies her fingers, which are bare—no rings—and look cold and white. When she finally looks up, the expression in her eyes is enough to make him reach down and feel for the butt of his gun.
“Can I help you?” he asks again.
And he’s about to push the button under the counter, thinking To hell with her, I’d better help myself, when she nods, and says, “I killed Aldo Moro.”
Part V
Ferrara, 2010
Tuesday, February 9
ANNA WOKE WITH A start. Her head was on a pillow, her hands underneath it. There was the garish green stripe of a quilt, a piece of blue carpet. For a moment, she didn’t understand. Then she remembered, and sat up.
Enzo Saenz was sitting on the opposite bed, watching her. Something told her he’d been sitting there all night—or all early morning—or all dawn. Whatever you wanted to call it since she’d stopped talking.
“Are you hungry?”
Anna ran her hands through her hair, catching the tangles in the ends, looked at the red chafe marks on her wrists, and nodded.
“I think so. I’m not sure.”
Shards of dreams—of the inside of her father’s ruined shop, of the bicycle with the torturous seat, of the long pale road stretching through nothingness and the crack-crack of bulrushes as the bird rose out of them—glittered around her. She heard her own voice calling for Antonio, then winding through the dark as she sat here on this bed, telling this man she didn’t even know her life. Letting it spill through her like a dam that had finally given way.
She felt dizzy. And must have looked it, because he was off the bed, shoving her head between her knees, the palm of his hand on the back of her neck.
“Breathe,” he said. “Just breathe.”
She did. But not fast enough to stop the tears.
“It’s going to happen again, isn’t it?”
“No. No, it isn’t.” Enzo crouched in front of her, his hands on her shoulders, bracing her the way you might brace a wall or rickety fence that’s about to tip over on top of you. “We can stop it,” he said. “This time we can stop it.”
Anna looked at him.
“Listen to me,” Enzo Saenz said. “You have to tell me the rest. About the phone call. From Antonio. You have to tell me everything about it. Every single thing, even if you don’t think it’s important. He’s only called you once, is that right?”
She nodded. “At the Excelsior. During breakfast. After I left the message on Kristin’s phone.”
“Tell me exactly what he said.”
Anna closed her eyes. She felt the phone in her hand, heard the chink of silver and glasses. The tap of footsteps on the marble floor.
“I’ll kill her, Carina. If you say a word, just one, this time, to anyone. I will kill her. Do you believe me?” he had asked. “Do you think I’m lying?” And she had answered, “No.” No, she didn’t think he was lying. “Good. Then come and find me. Because I love you. I have always loved you, Angela. Ti possiedo, per sempre, Carina. And you owe me. You owe me a life.”
“He wouldn’t let me talk to Kristin.” Anna took a breath. “He said I had to believe him, that she was alive. He said it was just between us, him and me, this time. That I could make it up to him, but that if I said anything to anyone, he’d kill her. He said I should turn my phone on twice a day, at seven and seven, to see if I had a message from him. Then he laughed, and said we were playing hide-and-seek, and it was my turn now. He’d come to find me when he left Padua. Now I had to come and find him.”
She opened her eyes and stared for a moment at nothing. “When I asked him how Kristin was,” she said finally, “when I asked Antonio if she was all right, he said she wanted her teddy bear. That’s all.” Anna Carson looked at Enzo. “That’s all,” she said. “After that, he hung up.”
Enzo Saenz no longer thought she was lying about Rome, about what had happened. He had already called Pallioti and told him as much while she had been asleep. But he did not think she was telling him the truth now. He had seen it before, in the faces of the desperate, the terrified, the cornered. People who had nothing left—except the tic, the hard leftover lump of scar tissue, the something to hold back. One final bargaining chip.
&
nbsp; “All right,” he said. “That’s why you brought the bear. What else?” He studied her face, hoping they could do it this way, and not a worse way. “Antonio said something else. One more thing, didn’t he?”
Anna Carson looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded.
“He said he loved me, and that I owed him a life.”
“And?”
Her eyes slid away. Enzo could feel it, stuck in her throat like a bone. He was not a hard man, but if he had to, he would. He would reach down and jerk it out.
“Anna,” he said, “I can’t help you if you don’t let me.”
She looked back at him.
“He asked me if this time I believed him, because he lied to me, about killing Moro, and I said yes. And then he said that he would never lie to me again. That he was sorry. And he was telling me the truth, and to make sure I paid attention and worked hard. I had a deadline.”
“A deadline?”
She nodded.
“They were always doing that. In their stupid communiqués. They were always setting deadlines. If something didn’t happen by such and such a time, they’d kill Sossi, or they’d kill Moro or—”
“He’ll kill Kristin?”
Anna nodded. Enzo felt himself go cold.
“When, Anna?” he said as softly as he could. “When is the deadline?”
“A week. Antonio said it was a gift, because he loved me, that it was that long. He said he would give me a week. Then he’d kill her.”
While Anna Carson took a shower, Enzo called Pallioti again. Then, after he had brought him up to date and Pallioti had announced he was on his way to Ferrara, Enzo called room service and ordered breakfast. He kept his eye on the bathroom door. There was no window, and he didn’t think she was a suicide risk—she was driven too hard to make up for what she had not done before, to find the girl, or, rather, help them find her the way she had not helped anyone find Aldo Moro—but even so he didn’t trust her. Desperation made people very unpredictable. Anna Carson would use him just as he would now try to use her. If she thought it was working for her, she’d cooperate. If she didn’t, she might do anything. It was going to be a very long day, and what they needed first was food.
Enzo Saenz had been awake, or at least not asleep, all night, propped against the headboard of the second bed, one eye on the woman’s sleeping form. He loosened his ponytail and ran his hands through his hair. His face looked back from the mirror that hung over the trendy metallic set of drawers, and he wondered who he was seeing. Not Giulia with her broad, high bones. Not his grandfather, with his long face and straight patrician nose. Someone he had never known, and would never know. The father whose genes he carried inside him like a secret code he couldn’t read. He crossed to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. Behind the dark shape of the Castello the sky was turning the color of roses. Any moment the bells would begin to ring. It was seven a.m. on Tuesday morning.
“A week” was Thursday. The day after tomorrow.
* * *
Sixty miles to the west, Hedwige Aarlheissen reached across the bed, felt her hand meet empty air, and snapped her eyes open. She had not even undressed, had allowed herself to fall asleep last night after the nightmarish dinner party, convinced that she was only taking a nap and would wake up to either find Barbara beside her or hear her downstairs, banging about, searching for leftovers.
A glance at the undented pillows and a second of listening told her neither was true. Hedwige could feel the emptiness in the house, the undisturbed air. She swung her legs over the side of the bed.
The clock in the hall started to chime, running through its carillon of bells. Most mornings Hedwige didn’t notice it. Most mornings she didn’t drink coffee, either.
Padding downstairs, she caught sight of herself in the glassy reflection of the kitchen window. Her hair was standing on end. She had raccoon eyes from sleeping in her makeup, and something that was probably a combination of drool and lipstick smeared the collar of her white silk shirt.
Priming the Bella Machina, Hedwige made herself a double espresso, then carried the cup, sipping as if it might be hemlock, as she patrolled the house—checked the locks and back entry and office, confirming what she already knew. Not only was Barbara not here now, she had not been here. She had not come and gone in the night, gathering papers and leaving hastily scrawled notes, as she sometimes did in the middle of a case, or when she had to get to some prison or police station at some ungodly hour.
Her patrol completed, Hedwige put the now empty cup down on the kitchen counter. After hosting what had turned out to be a perfectly dreadful dinner party alone, she’d cleaned up. But not very well. Crumbs and bits of food littered the polished stone. A cherry tomato had rolled under the edge of the fruit bowl and squashed itself there. Hedwige regarded it for a moment, as if the pattern of little yellow pips might tell her something. Then she pulled her phone out of her trouser pocket where it had nestled all night like a baby possum.
She’d left the ringer on, and turned up loud, so she knew there were no messages before she even checked. All that was in the log were the four calls she’d made to Barbara. Two yesterday evening before the party, and two afterward, all unanswered. She tapped the speed dial number again. This time Barbara’s number didn’t even ring before her voice cut in, demanding that she be left a message. Hedwige didn’t bother. The phone was turned off. Barbara would see her number and know what she wanted—Where the hell are you? Are you all right? Has that son of bitch laid a finger on you?—when she turned it on again. If she ever turned it on again.
The thought bloomed like a sick black flower in Hedwige’s head before she could even begin to stop it. Its smell, fetid and sweet, filled her nostrils and made her stomach heave. She dropped the phone and gripped the edge of the counter, hanging on until her eyes watered. Then she gave in. Hedwige Aarlheissen did not cry. Despite appearances to the contrary, she was the tough one. The strong one. The one hard as nails. So the sound that came from her throat was unfamiliar. It took her a moment to even understand what it was.
* * *
After hearing from Enzo, Pallioti had been tempted to grab the first car he could find in the police garage and fling himself onto the motorway. Then he’d realized he’d probably be more effective if he got his ducks in a row first. The primary duck was James MacCready, to whom would now fall the unenviable job of convincing Dr. Kenneth Carson, yet again, that the very best thing he could do was stay put and shut up. Give them just another few hours. Another day.
Enzo believed Anna Carson. She had been very young and very much in love, trapped between needing to believe in Antonio, who was all she had left in the world, and betraying him. In the end, perhaps inevitably, she had done both. Aldo Moro had died anyway. And Antonio Tomaselli had spent half his life in jail. He had thought about it for years, and now he was having his revenge. On Thursday, the day after tomorrow, if he hadn’t already, he’d kill Anna Carson’s stepdaughter. And, Pallioti suspected, if he could manage to lure her to him, probably Anna, as well. And then, almost certainly, himself. If he couldn’t get his Angela back even for a few precious minutes to punish her by killing her—well, then he’d very likely just settle for the next best thing. Killing himself and Kristin and making all that her fault, too.
Unless they found him first.
What was it Barbara Barelli had said? Love drives us all to the biggest screwups? Something like that. Pallioti allowed himself a single roll of the eyes. Jesus, he thought. What an unholy mess.
Pallioti liked James MacCready, not least because he didn’t have to waste breath explaining to him exactly how delicate this was. They had brought Anna Carson, like some renegade spy, in from the cold, and now nothing must be done, by Kenneth Carson or anyone else, to break the nebulous bond Enzo Saenz had somehow established with her. Neither he nor Pallioti had a clue where Antonio Tomaselli was, but he was fairly certain, from what Enzo had told him, that Angela Vari did. Even if Anna Carson
didn’t realize it.
It felt to Pallioti like that silly party game in which a whisper is passed from ear to ear, only now it was traveling through decades—Antonio to Angela, Angela to Anna, Anna to Enzo—and they had to play it fast. If they could keep the meaning intact, the prize was not a bottle of wine, or a kiss, or a piece of cake, but Kristin Carson’s life. And probably Anna’s and Antonio’s as well.
He wanted to be in Ferrara by lunchtime. When he finally stepped out of the elevator into the police garage, Pallioti saw the car Guillermo had ordered waiting for him already running, as if the officer on duty expected him to leap in and fly up the ramp like something out of The French Connection. The young man scurried to take the overnight bag Pallioti kept packed in his office. He placed it carefully on the backseat, then jumped to open the door, standing so straight Pallioti felt he ought to salute. He thanked him instead, slid into the driver’s seat, and had just finished adjusting the mirrors when his phone rang.
* * *
Anna Carson leaned against the cold glass of Enzo Saenz’s passenger window and watched the countryside she had ridden through at such cost yesterday fly by. The same way she had watched it all those years ago from Antonio’s Fiat. The same way she had watched the sodden green of Torrita give way to the outskirts of Rome from Monica Ghirri’s car. All of them in other lifetimes, shuffled and falling back out of order like a badly played card trick.
“This may be a stupid idea.”
She said it without looking at him.
“It’s not.”
They had talked more over breakfast. Anna wasn’t certain how she felt about the fact that he’d called his boss, the long-faced man in the black suit who looked like a well-dressed member of the Inquisition, but she supposed it was inevitable. It was only in the movies that the Daring Guy and Spunky Gal went solo and caught the dastardly villain all on their own. In real life you reported in, and did as you were told. Which they were, more or less.
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