Vita Nuova

by Magdalen Nabb

  ‘Yes. I went to the club last night—I should have told you, but it was unofficial and I thought I’d better not involve you in it, since your face is known here. . . .’

  The other man waited, still puzzled. Not being paid off, so what, then? To be so serene and cheerful. Perhaps he was mistaken and the lie had no sinister implications. He could just have been busy, thought he ought to say he’d checked the place out—after all, the prosecutor himself had called him. He could simply be lazy, though it seemed unlikely . . . so lively and energetic, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the sort of colleague Teresa would think attractive. Hmph—well, there was no getting away from the fact that he’d lied. Could have misunderstood what he actually said or meant. Best just to ask him, maybe. Lorenzini would have done it. Looked him in the eyes, jabbed four fingers an inch from his nose and shouted ‘Aow! What sort of story was that?’ Tuscans . . . they were a race apart, that was a fact.

  ‘Involve me in what? Are you all right? You look exhausted—you’re sure you don’t want that coffee?’

  ‘No, no. . . .’

  ‘Suit yourself. So? What did you not want to involve me in?’

  ‘It’s just . . . I took a look round The Emperor—not official, as I said—not in uniform.’

  ‘You went as a client, you mean? Undercover? Good heavens—I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you don’t look a likely customer. What did you think of the place? Pretty much as I described it to you, eh?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Making a fortune, I reckon.’

  ‘Behind the scenes, perhaps. Not by charging fifteen euros entrance, including a drink.’

  ‘No, well, it’ll be more the private parties, stag nights and so on. Then there’s a bit of privée stuff upstairs, lap dancing, nothing more than that.’

  ‘Sixty euros for ten minutes.’

  ‘Did you . . . well! Hope you enjoyed it. Must give it a try myself sometime.’

  Up to now he was only amused. The thing was to uncover it all bit by bit, and watch for a change in his face. Of course, in these situations there was more than one way of paying people off. Someone who wouldn’t want to dirty their hands with money might not be above a regular freebie.

  ‘Then there’s the hotel . . . the one that’s not a hotel, if you follow me. Now that’s more like serious money.’

  ‘You went there, too? You did have a night out. No wonder you’re looking tired.’

  But he was still amused, not alarmed at all. Even so. . . .

  ‘Yes. What I’m thinking is that while what goes on at The Emperor can pass for being above-board, that hotel can’t.’

  ‘I agree with you, but—I don’t know if you’ve understood how it works—if we went in there, we’d find nothing but a private house, belonging to Paoletti’s wife, and maybe the odd house guest.’

  ‘And the girls in the attic?’

  ‘Staff. Servants. And all with regular papers.’

  ‘Yes . . . you know it belongs to his wife, then.’

  ‘Of course. I told you, I’ve checked the place out— though not as . . . intimately, let’s say, as you did. I’m impressed. Incidentally, I can’t find out that he’s treading on anybody else’s toes in any way that might have caused the daughter’s murder. He keeps himself to himself. Word of that would get around. He’s not importing girls for any of the other clubs, I can assure you of that.’

  ‘And can you assure me that his own girls are not slave sex labour? And that their passports are not locked in Paoletti’s safe?’

  There. That was where the smile faded.

  ‘Can you? Isn’t that what explains his profits?’

  ‘I have no evidence for it . . . I just checked their papers. They had regular work permits for domestic labour, so . . . I’m not saying it’s impossible.’

  ‘But it’s all above-board.’

  ‘Listen, Guarnaccia—’

  ‘No. No, no . . . I’ve heard what happens to those girls when they arrive.’

  ‘Guarnaccia, you have to listen to me. Don’t insist. You’re investigating a murder. What’s going on here has nothing to do with that murder, nothing at all to do with it—’

  ‘You can’t know that for sure. You can know he’s not annoying his business rivals, whether Italian or Russian. I’m not disbelieving you about that. But there could be something else, something personal. This was a very personal murder. The prosecutor on this case is not a man I’ve ever had a lot of time for, but even he recognizes that.’

  ‘So investigate the girl’s private life!’

  ‘And leave Paoletti’s business alone?’

  The other man stood up, but the marshal wasn’t standing up. He sat where he was, heavy, silent, immobile. The other looked down at him.

  ‘I’m asking you once more. Don’t insist. We’ll be in big trouble, very big trouble, both of us. If you start a witch hunt, our lives will be ruined and everything here will go on as before. We’ll achieve nothing. You know that’s true. And people’s sexual tastes, however weird they might be, are surely their own business.’

  ‘Yes. . . .’ But the children? Did he know about the children? The marshal hoped not, and he wasn’t going to risk telling him, because then Piazza’s career could be ruined for not reporting it. There was another child in this story, after all. A little girl skipping around in her water wings. . . .

  ‘There are reasons why I have to insist—where are you going? We have to talk.’

  ‘No. The less we talk about this, the better. And I’m not going anywhere. There’s something you need to see.’ Piazza took a key from his belt and opened a filing cabinet. He withdrew a large yellow envelope with ‘Urgent’ written in large capitals with a thick black felt-tip and sat down at the desk with it in his hands. His face wasn’t bright and cheery now. He drew a sheet of paper from the envelope, hesitated, then pushed it across to the marshal with the impatient gesture of someone who’d done his best and now washed his hands of the matter.

  The paper had on it a list of names. Nothing else, no addresses, just names. But each of the names was preceded by a title, whether noble or professional. It was to be expected. The marshal recognized two famous family names and an even more famous lawyer. There were two judges, a consultant physician, and a chief of police, local politicians, minor television personalities, a bishop. He stopped reading halfway down and passed the list back. Piazza blocked it with his hand.

  ‘You need to read it all. I can see from your face that you haven’t.’

  ‘No, no . . . what’s the point? It was only to be expected and, even so, I’m going to have to—’

  ‘Guarnaccia, read the third name from the last. Or do I have to read it to you? It’s the prosecutor on your case.

  ‘So. Are you listening to me now?’

  Seven

  The marshal listened. If nothing else, he listened, or was silent anyway, because he didn’t know what to say, where to start, and because everything that had happened up to now meant something different to what it had meant before. He needed to look at all of it again in peace but, for now, scenes were flashing at random in his head. His eyes were fixed on his colleague’s face and he took in the sense of urgency and alarm in his voice, but in his head he was somewhere else. He was standing in the glaring heat of a garden, waiting two hours for the prosecutor to arrive, though the August roads were empty of traffic. Where had he gone first? He was standing outside the door up in the tower with the prosecutor’s hand clapping him on the shoulder as they loaded the body, fat legs and blond hair dangling, into the metal coffin. Of course he hadn’t wanted to take the marshal off this high-profile case to put some clever investigator on it.

  All that stuff about ‘your expertise,’ and all that considerate help. . . . ‘You have your station to run. I’ll go to the hospital. I’ll talk to the mother. . . .’

  ‘Guarnaccia?’

  ‘I’m sorry. . . .’ He realized that his gaze had drifted, that he was staring at the row of
calendars behind his colleague’s head.

  ‘You do realize—’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, I realize . . . I don’t want to cause you trouble. I appreciate your situation.’

  ‘What could I have done? I have a family.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So? How are you going to proceed?’

  ‘I have to report what I found. This . . .’ he touched the sheet of paper. ‘It’s just a list of names. Anybody can write a list of names—where did it come from?’

  ‘Paoletti, I presume. One of his employees must have left it here for me to find.’

  ‘Ah. Well . . . he’s very clever, very plausible. It’s still just a list of names. When was this? How did you come in contact with him?’

  ‘About two years ago, when I first took command here, he came to see me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, except that it was a bit unusual, but he was the one who initiated the contact with a really plausible story about how he always liked to be on good terms with the law because in the nightclub world nasty things could happen, even when, like him, you were trying to run a clean business, and so on and so forth.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘I’m ashamed to say, I did.’

  ‘I don’t think you need feel ashamed. He once convinced a priest to be a character witness for him after he’d almost beaten a woman to death, and he’s had a lot of practice since then.’

  ‘But I’m not a priest, I’m a carabiniere. Not that I didn’t think it odd, as I said—but he actually came round here, all smiles and so respectable! And he managed to get into the conversation his donations to various charities, all of them run by the church.’

  ‘And he brought this list?’

  ‘No. That was later. I’d been hearing things. I mean, thousands of visitors pass through here every year to take the waters, but the actual resident population’s quite small. Sooner or later, I was bound to hear stuff. I suppose that’s why he got his story in first.’

  ‘So, how did you hear? From one of his clients, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes—not a hotel client. Those people are invisible, as you can imagine. They’re either there with some young girlfriend or somebody else’s wife or else they’re indulging peculiar tastes. They’d hardly be likely to turn up here. No, this was a local man, a widower. A friend took him to the club to shake him out of his depression— nothing more than a bit of lap dancing. Anyway, he got interested in the girl and went back a few times. He seemed to believe she was fond of him.’

  Thinking of poor Cristina, the marshal said, ‘Well, perhaps she was, if he was kind to her, showed a bit of interest in her life.’

  ‘Oh, he showed more than a bit of interest. He didn’t say, but I got the impression he was thinking seriously about whether he could maybe—oh, he had no illusions about himself, didn’t really expect her to stay with him. Anyway, she told him she couldn’t leave, that Paoletti had her passport. She told him about the hotel, and he came to me.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘What could I say? That I’d look into it.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yes. I went to the hotel with two of my men and we took a look round. No warrant or anything, just a routine visit.’

  ‘And you found nothing?’

  ‘What you’d expect. A villa owned by Paoletti’s wife, a housekeeper by the name of Maria Grazia, some immigrant girls who were cleaning staff and so on, all with papers in order.’

  ‘I suppose she didn’t show you the rooms on the second floor.’

  ‘Oh yes, she did. It was obvious she’d been instructed to. We only looked at two of them. What was the point? One was done up like a church, candles and flowers and a confessional, the other was black sheets and handcuffs, that sort of stuff. The woman opened the doors for us to look in and then shrugged. “Eh . . . Signor Paoletti. . . .” As if it were a question of his own personal tastes. She was perfectly composed and, of course, we saw nothing there that was illegal. The next morning one of my carabinieri found this envelope on the doorstep.’

  ‘And the widower? Did he come back?’

  ‘More than once, but what could I tell him? I told him I’d keep an eye on the place, but that it would be difficult to prove a case or even get a warrant with only a prostitute’s word for it. . . .’

  ‘And he accepted that?’

  ‘No. No, he didn’t. He started asking questions at the club. I warned him not to do that! I told him he was putting this girl at risk.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She disappeared.’

  Thinking she was going for a television audition, probably, and the body never found.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you know his name. He’s not a prostitute; he’s a witness. Another thing: this list. It’s just a list. I take it people like this don’t put their signature to anything. How do you know—or prove—that it means anything? That it’s not one of Paoletti’s tricks?’

  Piazza looked down at the big yellow envelope.

  ‘What else is in there?’

  ‘Photographs. Not of all of them, but a lot of them. Very crude and very compromising.’

  ‘Recognizable?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, there are peepholes in the bedrooms, is that it?’

  ‘Something of the sort, I suppose.’

  ‘And all this to keep the law off his back? Or do you think he’s blackmailing them?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘Hmph. Knowing Paoletti, there’ll be a few chosen victims. He’s a good judge of character.’

  ‘Guarnaccia, just drop it. Don’t insist. You’ll ruin your family and mine and probably some of his victims’ families, too. For God’s sake—where are you going?’

  The marshal had stood up.

  ‘I have to go home. . . .’

  At the door, they shook hands.

  ‘I’ll do my best. . . .’ There was no need to say what about. They both knew he didn’t mean his best to solve the case, just his best to save Piazza’s skin.

  And his own?

  Back at the station, Lorenzini said, ‘Your wife phoned—twice. Are you all right? What’s going on?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. Damn . . . did she say something about going to see a flat?’

  ‘The one you told me about, that you’re thinking of buying? No. She just wanted to know where you were.’

  ‘Hmph. Who’s the woman in the waiting room?’

  ‘Signora Nuti.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I thought I recognized her. Don’t tell me they still haven’t unblocked that street drain?’

  ‘Not a sign of them, despite the lawyer’s letter—and there are storms forecast. You know how her cellar flooded last time, and she lives alone, poor soul. I can deal with her as soon as I’ve—’

  ‘No. No, send her in to me.’

  That was what he needed, to be back for a moment in his own world with his own people, with their small problems. He could hear his heart beating, feel every nerve end tingling at the thought of what he had to do.

  ‘Oh, Marshal, I’m really sorry to be bothering you, but. . . .’

  ‘No, no, Signora. Sit down.’

  ‘I don’t know what else to do—I mean, it’s been six months. . . .’

  ‘They’re a disgrace. You’ve been too patient.’ Easy to criticise. Teresa had called twice, and what had he done about that flat? Nothing. He’d been too busy with this case which, likely enough, would ruin their lives. Instead of worrying about getting onto the housing ladder, they could soon be worrying about his being transferred to the back of beyond. And Teresa? And the children’s schools? Giovanni was enrolled at the technical school. . . .

  ‘My nephew came and helped me last time—I can’t be carrying buckets of water, what with my age and my arthritis—but I can’t keep asking. . . .’

  ‘No. And why should you have to?’

/>   Whose advice could he ask without dragging them into it? Anybody he told would immediately be in the same boat. Damned if they didn’t act, damned if they did.

  ‘We’ll both be ruined and things will go on here just as before.’ Piazza was right.

  And those children? The little girl crying on the bed?

  No, no. . . .

  ‘My nephew says I should go ahead and sue, that there are so many complaints like this coming in, they don’t even look at yours unless you sue. But the expense. . . .’

  ‘They’ll have to meet the costs, that’s not the problem. It’s the time it will take, and you still in this mess.’

  He had to sort the mess out before Teresa came home. She was so settled here. The children had their friends, their plans. . . . The paper! The second edition of The Nazione would be out!

  ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry, I won’t keep you waiting more than a minute, Signora.’

  ‘If you want me to come back another time. . . .’

  ‘No. I won’t be a minute.’

  She was his only link to reality, the familiar reality he could cope with, beyond which was a menacing, silent darkness. And it wouldn’t be silent for long. He looked in at the duty-room door.

  ‘I need a copy of the second edition of The Nazione.

  ’ A young carabiniere was already on his feet. ‘I’m going for the post, Marshal. I can get it on my way back—’

  ‘No. Get it now and bring it to me right away.’

  He went back to Signora Nuti. He wanted to keep her talking so as not to hear the silence in his head. In the end, she was the one to say she had to go and do her shopping.

  ‘I’ll do what you suggested—what was the number again?’

  ‘Seven hundred. Don’t worry, your lawyer will know the emergency order I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter if you forget the number. Wait, I’ll write it down for you . . . here you are. And tell your lawyer he can call me if I can help. We’ve been round there and seen exactly what the situation is. Something in writing from us might help.’

  He walked through the waiting room with her and saw her out, delaying the moment when he was left alone with his fears, his too-loud heartbeat. What was terrible was that, no matter how hard he tried, he knew he could never be like Piazza. Whether it was the children or the other girls or what. . . . The thing was out of his control and rolling forward under its own momentum. He couldn’t stop it. How could anybody be expected to do this job properly? Why had he ever joined up? Why, oh, why had he gone with Nesti? Why wasn’t Teresa here—