The Partisan Heart

by Gordon Kerr

  The giant seemed to take an age to lower his huge body onto the chair and when he did, his body spilled over its edges and seemed to swallow it up.

  ‘Now, some details first. Name?’ his pen poised above the form that began all official conversations.

  ‘Mazzini, Ignazio.’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘Address?’

  The giant began to calm down, slumped in his chair, giving the mundane details of his life. Only when d’Annunzio turned the page and asked for the particulars of the crime to which Ignazio wished to confess did he come to life once more, his eyes blazing with anger.

  ‘I hit him! Not the kidnappers. With this bat. I … I can’t stand to see him on television, being treated … being treated like some kind of a hero when it was me who waited in the alley and got him. It was me!’ His voice rose and he sat forward in his chair. ‘I wanted to get both of them when they came down, but there was only him and I didn’t even kill him. I should have struck him again when he was down … but I heard the sirens … I thought they had come for me …’

  ‘Ah, signore, wait, slow down.’ D’Annunzio waved his hand for emphasis. ‘I can only write so fast. Start again, please. Who did you hit with the bat and who has been kidnapped?’ Perhaps he is, after all, a madman, he thought to himself.

  And so, Ignazio slumped against the back of his chair and explained in more measured tones how in a bar one night someone had told him that the relationship between Silvia, his wife, and Alfio Bonfadini, her employer, was something more than the normal employer-employee relationship. It had become well known all over the village that there was little point in trying to buy a ball of wool or a pair of knickers between eleven and twelve every few mornings because the couple who worked in the shop were, as the informant delicately put it, ‘otherwise engaged.’ He had been furious and wanted to go round to Bonfadini’s house immediately, but thought better of it, deciding to wait to take his anger out on them properly. Consequently, next day he had loitered in the alley that ran down the side of the building. He heard the commotion outside the bar, but decided that whatever was going on was none of his business and was about to climb the stairs to Bonfadini’s flat when he heard someone coming down. When he saw Bonfadini running towards him he stepped out of the shadows and swung the baseball bat, hitting him full in the face. He had then heard sirens in the distance and, fearing someone had seen him and reported him to the police, took off over the wall at the back of the building. Later that day, to his horror he had seen Bonfadini claim on the television news that he had been struck by the kidnappers who had been at work in the bar next door as he tried to save the girl they were kidnapping. Bonfadini was a hero now and had been on television a further dozen times. Worse still, there were rumours in the town that he was going to receive a large reward from the father of the kidnapped girl for the ‘valiant efforts’ – that is how they were described in the newspaper – he supposedly made to save her.

  ‘You see, I was driven to it. They were making a fool of me, people were laughing at me. I admit I wanted to kill them both. But now, I just want the truth to be told about that bastardo. I hit him! I smashed his nose! He is no hero!’

  D’Annunzio’s swivel-chair creaked in protest as he sat back in it. He had become increasingly galvanised by Ignazio’s story as it unfolded.

  ‘You understand you are likely to be charged with assault, signor Mazzini?’

  ‘I wish I could be charged with murder! I would give anything not to see that buffone acting the hero on TV again!’

  D’Annunzio put down his pen and reached for the telephone.

  ‘A moment, please signor Mazzini.’ He cleared his throat, as if he were a small-town politician about to give an important speech: ‘Ah, yes, I would like to speak to the Commissario please?’ It came out as a question. Not at all the way he wanted it to sound.

  This could indeed be embarrassing for the hero of Beldoro, he thought, as he waited for the voice at the other end of the line.

  8

  10 November 1999

  Beldoro

  North Italy

  Michael drove down through northern and eastern France and onwards into the more enticing mountainous region that abutted onto Italy. He had been a traveller on this road many times and in many different guises – as a hitch-hiker when he was a teenager, heading south to meet up with whatever fate he could find, selling leather bracelets in sunsoaked markets the length of the Riviera or picking grapes near Béziers; with Rosa, a few years later, in an open-topped car, heading for the silver beaches of the south, wiping with the back of their hands the peach juice running down their chins, lust colouring their every move; later still with Rosa, cooler, better off, much older, it seemed, and more assured, taking several days to get there, good hotels booked en route, silk handkerchiefs with which to soak up the peach juice still glistening on their chins.

  This time he approached the journey in a business-like fashion. He noted only perfunctorily the mountains beginning to rise on the horizon as he headed towards the French Alps. He listened to Puccini and Bruce Springsteen on the car stereo and stared straight ahead at the road that glistened in an endless, shiny black strip into the distance.

  By seven in the evening he had crossed the French-Italian frontier – cold-looking soldiers waving a long, slow-moving snake of cars through with hardly a glance at passports and faces within – and his eyes had begun to ache with the strain of the drive. He stopped at a town about thirty kilometres into Italy, a town that existed solely for that purpose. Consequently, he had a choice of any number of inexpensive hotels, picking one that seemed very modest from the outside and did not betray that particular notion inside. Still, it was clean and a place to lay his head. He ate pasta and drank a small carafe of red wine at a restaurant in the middle of the town’s one street before calling it a day around ten.

  Next morning dawned crisp and sunny and he was speeding along the motorway to Turin long before the other travellers had even breakfasted. He breezed past Turin but got hopelessly lost a few hours later on the motorway that skirted the northern edges of Milan, finding himself in a spaghettilike tangle of roadworks and missed signs. Eventually, he extricated himself from it and had soon joined the motorway to Lecco and Como, a road with which he was very familiar from his visits with Rosa to this part of the world. It led, if you stuck to the direction of Chiavenna and Sondrio, around the eastern side of Lake Como. Michael took the wrong junction, however, and found himself on the road along the western side of the lake. Never mind, he could take the ferry to his destination, Beldoro, from the small lake-side town of Menaggio.

  A few wispy clouds punctuated the blue sky, but, in the distance, over the mountains which enclosed the lake, the clouds were gathering and starting to look angry. The petrol gauge on the BMW was registering about a third of a tank as he pulled into a tiny one pump petrol station to fill up and check the map. Beldoro would be a good base for his investigations. It was there that the kidnapping had taken place in the bar next to the shop belonging to that character, Bonfadini, who had become a hero. Luigi Ronconi, father of the kidnapped girl also lived close by, in what could only be described as a palace overlooking the lake and the small town.

  He arrived at the ferry at 3.20 p.m. to discover there was not another crossing until 3.55. The afternoon was getting chilly as the wintry sun began to slip down towards the mountains, whose jagged peaks were topped with snow, and he decided to give himself some energy for the last part of his long journey by drinking an espresso at the large hotel that overlooked the ferry. He left his car second in the ferry queue and walked the short distance to the hotel. Its frontage was grand, but the bar was surprisingly small. A television set was switched on with the volume turned up very loudly. A large, masculine-looking woman stood behind the bar and at a table in the corner sat another woman and a baby. She was talking to a man he took to be the hotel chef, judging from his white top and checked trousers, and both were making cooing noises at the
baby in between remarks. He sat down at the only other table, which was right in front of the television and was soon taking his first grateful sip of the bitter black coffee and reading the headlines of the Gazzeta dello Sport, which lay on the table in front of him. But the loud voices booming out of the television almost immediately wrestled his attention away from the latest problems facing the overpaid stars of Inter Milan.

  The programme on the TV was coming to an end, the credits rushing underneath the main action as the host brought it all to a close, giving way to adverts, loud and brash, selling pasta, washing powder and cars. These were followed by an insistent theme introducing a local news bulletin: a dapper middle-aged man with unnatural, bronze-coloured hair staring at the camera and announcing the main story of the day – the exposure of Alfio Bonfadini, the hero of Beldoro, as a liar.

  A man, by the name of Ignazio Mazzini, had confessed to assaulting Bonfadini because Bonfadini had been having an affair with his wife, who worked in Bonfadini’s shop. Film of a strangely smiling Ignazio being led in handcuffs into the main police station by police officers over whom he towered was followed by a picture of Alfio’s shop. Police were considering, said the announcer, whether to bring charges against Bonfadini.

  ‘That’s a turn-up for the books,’ said the large woman who was polishing glasses behind the bar.

  ‘Oh, Bonfadini was never any kind of a hero. I could have told the police that. He’s a weakling, an idiot. He spends his life selling wool and knickers, remember.’

  ‘Judging by some of those rich bitches in Beldoro, probably woolen knickers sometimes, too!’ The woman behind the bar laughed as she said this and the others, Michael included, joined in. Moments such as this reminded him how good it was that he had learned Italian a number of years back.

  His coffee finished, he wandered back out and leaned on the railing that ran along the side of the lake. The ferry, a small craft capable of carrying about ten cars, was approaching, cutting a line through the faultless surface of the water.

  A turn-up for the books, indeed, and one about which the police will not be at all happy, he thought. He had planned on talking to this Alfio Bonfadini, had thought it might make an interesting sidebar to the kidnapping story, the elevation of this shopkeeper into a national hero. This new twist on the story, however, was even better and he would try to talk to this new man on the scene, Ignazio Mazzini. The first piece he wrote would be about this particular blind alley in which the police now found themselves.

  The ferry arrived, unloaded a couple of cars and with an efficiency rare in any activity carried out in Italy, filled up again with the four who now waited alongside Michael’s car. Within a few minutes he was staring back at the hill that rose above the multi-coloured buildings of Menaggio as the ferry engines throbbed beneath his feet on the way to the next stop before it zigzagged back across the lake to Beldoro.

  Once again, he recalled making exactly this journey a few years ago with Rosa. They had eaten sandwiches at the rails of the ferry with the wind pulling at their hair, but had stayed on and returned to Menaggio where they had left their car. He felt a stab of pain as he remembered that crossing and reminded himself that he would have to get to Milan. He had called into a post office before leaving London and had sent an express letter to the box number that he had discovered at Rogerson & Gilchrist. In the letter, he had enigmatically told the recipient that he had something of great interest to him and suggested that if he wished to find out what it was he should meet him at the bar in Milan’s Stazione Centrale at noon on the 12th of November.

  How beautiful Beldoro had looked when he had last seen it with Rosa – as the ferry approached, he saw that it still was. The hotels that clustered around the lake-front were painted in a variety of shades of ochre, topped by red slate roofs. The tower of the church climbed up above the red roofs in the centre and pine trees clothed the hill that rose behind the town, sheltering it from the worst of the winter weather. Large buildings hid amongst the trees there, but standing proudly out on its own and hiding from nothing and no one was a large orange building, which he recognised from photographs as Palazzo Ronconi.

  He carefully drove his car off the ferry and turned into the road that ran along the lake. Hotels lined the streets, looking closed for the winter as indeed the majority of them were. He had consulted a Michelin guide on the road through France and had selected the appropriately named Hotel del Lago, phoning ahead to ensure that it remained open during the off season. It was across from this establishment that he parked his car, staring up at the hotel’s weather-beaten, orange-coloured frontage.

  He waited an age at the front desk – this was, indeed, the close season for visitors. Eventually, a man appeared, clad in paint-spattered overalls. He apologised for the fact that the hotel was undergoing some refurbishment, which meant that Michael’s room was located at its furthest extremity. It was no more than a cupboard and to get to it he had to clamber over rolled-up carpets and furniture that belonged elsewhere.

  ‘Mi dispiace, signore,’ the paint-spattered man apologised all the way through the seemingly endless corridors. In all honesty, Michael did not care and when he threw open the shutters, none of it mattered anyway. His small room looked out on the lake, the magnificent view taking in Menaggio and the mountains on the far shore, the peaks of which were beginning to dissolve into mist in the early evening light.

  Naturally, in this state of disrepair, the hotel had closed its restaurant for the winter – it was only open for breakfast – which meant that, after showering in a bathroom so small that he could hardly turn round in it, Michael walked the streets to find somewhere to eat, settling finally on a busy, steamy-windowed bar full of noisy card-playing workmen that was able to cook him a steak that he could wash down with his customary half carafe of red wine. Such was his relief at having stopped travelling and at being anonymous amongst all these people living out their existences in this town on the banks of Lake Como that he ordered a second small carafe, knowing he would regret it in the morning. He drank it, watching them talk, argue and laugh at each other, an outsider looking in on the life of a town and happy to be so.

  At eleven o’clock he got up and staggered through the deserted narrow streets of Beldoro, his footsteps echoing in the darkness. As he entered the hotel, he looked back across the lake, which stretched like a black sheet towards the lights of Menaggio. A light flashed in the distance, probably on the ferry landing stage. Above it, lives were being played out, lives from which he felt for the moment divorced. Somehow, he had to get back into that world, he thought, stopping for a moment in the doorway.

  When he went down to breakfast at around eight-thirty next morning, he discovered he was not alone in the hotel, after all. There were four others – three elderly Germans, a man and two women, obviously on holiday and dressed for walking in stout boots and thick clothes. There was also another man, an Italian, it seemed to Michael, probably here on business. A travelling salesman of some kind, he thought, from the practised manner in which he dealt with the complexities of the self-service breakfast bar.

  He rapidly lost interest, however, as he drank his coffee and planned his day. He never slept well when he drank a lot, and having wakened early this morning, around six-thirty, he had watched the television news and was surprised to learn that Ignazio Mazzini had been released from custody late the previous night. Alfio Bonfadini, it seemed, was unable to stand the embarrassment of going to court with this case and had decided not to press charges. The police, therefore, had had no choice but to let Mazzini go free. The newsreader noted, however, that the police had not yet decided whether to charge Bonfadini in relation to the lies he had told about the kidnapping.

  Perhaps, thought Michael, it was time to talk to these two men, Alfio Bonfadini and Ignazio Mazzini.

  The Bonfadini shop was just off a medium-sized square with a church dominating one side of it and shops occupying the other three, which served as the centre of town. Michael ma
de his way there around eleven, as the streets began to fill with the increased bustle of late morning.

  The shop itself was dowdy, its one window filled with lacklustre displays of wool and faded knitting patterns on one side and industrial sized women’s under-garments on the other. Bonfadini’s customers were evidently of the matronly sort.

  The lights of the shop, however, were off and the sign on the door had been turned around to the side that announced that it was closed.

  Next door, as Michael already knew from press reports about the kidnapping, was the bar in which it had actually taken place. It was long and small, with a chrome-surfaced bar running down one side. Michael entered and ordered a caffè macchiato from the barman, who was absently cleaning glasses and staring out through the doorway as if expecting someone extraordinary to walk in at any moment.

  ‘So, he’s closed, next door?’ asked Michael, lifting the small cup to his lips.

  ‘Cosa?’ The barman had been far away.

  ‘The wool and knickers shop. Is it closed?

  A smile played across the dark features of the barman.

  ‘Si, signore, chiuso. He is closed, but the widow that works for him is most definitely open for business.’ He laughed, creases appearing around his eyes.

  ‘You mean …?’ Michael also smiled.

  The barman leaned forward, his elbows resting on the bar, as if he were sharing a great secret.

  ‘It’s well-known, signore. Every day, when the widow is in, from eleven until twelve, Alfio Bonfadini likes to enjoy a little, how shall we say, siesta. He is very good to his employees because he allows them to share his hour off.’ He leaned forward even further and began to speak very quietly, even though there was only one other customer – an elderly man, reading a newspaper at the other end of the bar. ‘The Mazzini woman wasn’t the first, you know, although she was certainly the youngest.’ He then stood up straight again, picked up his tea towel and began to dry another glass.