by Donna Leon
‘The Romanian? Was that her name?’ he asked, suspicious that she should know it.
‘Yes,’ Signora Gismondi said. ‘What happened to her?’
He seemed puzzled by her question. What else could happen to a person who got hit by a train? ‘I told you, Signora,’ he said with strained patience. ‘The train hit her. Up there. In Villa Opicina or wherever it was.’ He was not an intelligent man and lacked imagination, so these words meant next to nothing to him. That is, in saying them, he conjured up no image of the steel wheels, the rolling point of contact they made with the metal rails under them, was incapable of summoning up the image of what would happen to something, anything, caught inexorably between those two things.
She placed a hand on the newspapers as if to steady herself. ‘She’s dead?’ she asked, as if the man had not spoken.
‘Of course,’ he answered, impatient at her slowness in understanding things. ‘But so’s that poor old woman.’ His indignation was audible, and the sound of it seeped into Assunta Gismondi’s mind.
‘Of course,’ she said softly. ‘Terrible, terrible.’ She took out some money and set it on the counter, forgot to pick up her paper, and left the shop, vowing never to go there again. Poor old woman. Poor old woman.
She went back to her apartment and, doing something she’d never done and wasn’t even sure could be done, she went on to the Internet and called up the Gazzettino from the day after she had left for London. She regretted her decision to immerse herself in English during the time she had been there: no papers and no news from home, no seeking out of other Italians. It was as though the last three weeks had never taken place. Though, the Gazzettino rapidly informed her, they surely had.
She read only the stories that had to do with Signora Battestini’s murder, and as the days and the editions passed, she followed the tale as it had evolved. The substance was much as the newsagent had said: old woman found dead by her doctor, Romanian servant missing, train stopped at the border, attempt to flee, death. False papers, no woman of that name, family devastated by murder of favourite aunt, quiet funeral of victim.
Assunta Gismondi switched off the computer and stared at the blank screen. When she tired of that, she turned her attention to the books that lined one wall of her studio and read through the names of the authors on the top shelf: Aristotle, Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plutarch, Homer. Then she looked out the window, across the canal at the closed shutters.
She reached to the right of her computer and picked up the phone. She dialled 113 and asked to speak to a policeman.
As she walked through the door of the Questura half an hour later, she chided herself for her foolishness in having assumed that they would have sent someone to talk to her. She was a citizen, doing her civic duty, volunteering information that was of great importance, so of course a bored policeman, who refused to give his name, told her that she was obliged to come down to the Questura to talk to them. As soon as she heard his officious voice, she regretted having given her name when she called: had she not, she would have been tempted to forget the whole thing and let them worry about it. Only she knew they would not worry, knew that the last thing on their minds, assuming that they had minds, would be any desire to change their assumptions and then go to the trouble of working out new ones.
She turned to the right, to a window behind which sat a uniformed officer. ‘I called half an hour ago,’ she began, ‘and said I had to talk to someone about a crime. They told me I had to come in here to do it, so here I am.’ He remained unmoved, so she added, ‘I’d like to speak to someone about the murder that happened a few weeks ago.’
He considered this for a moment, as though this were Dodge City and he had to work out which one she might be referring to. ‘The Battestini woman?’ he finally asked.
‘Yes.’
‘That would be Lieutenant Scarpa,’ the officer said.
‘May I speak to him?’
‘I’ll call and see if he’s here,’ the man said, reaching for his phone. He turned his back to her and spoke softly into the receiver, making Signora Gismondi wonder if he and Lieutenant Scarpa were planning a strategy that would get her to confess to involvement in the murder. After what seemed a long time, he came out of the small cubicle. Pointing towards the back of the building, he said, ‘Down that corridor there, Signora. Turn right and it’s the second door on your left. The lieutenant is expecting you.’ He went back into the cubicle, closing the door behind him.
She started down the corridor, surprised that she should be allowed to walk around in the Questura so freely. Hadn’t they ever heard of the Red Brigades?
She found the door, knocked, and was told to enter. A man of about her own age was seated behind a metal desk in a room hardly bigger than the cubicle downstairs. If he stood, he would be much taller than she. He had dark hair, and eyes that looked as though they would limit their work to seeing the surface of things. There was the uniformed man, his chair, the desk, and two armless chairs placed in front of it.
‘Lieutenant Scarpa?’ she asked.
He looked up at her and nodded, then looked down at the papers on his desk.
She gave her name and her address, then asked, ‘Are you in charge of the investigation of the murder of Signora Battestini?’
‘I was,’ he said, again raising his eyes. He pointed to one of the chairs and said, ‘Please sit down.’
One step brought her to the chair, and she sat, then, realizing that it was placed so that the sun from the small window shone into her face, she got up and moved to the other, angling it away from both his desk and the window before she sat down again.
Signora Gismondi had no direct experience of the police, but she had for six years been married to a very lazy and equally violent man, and she simply put herself back into that time and situation and acted accordingly. ‘You said you were in charge, Lieutenant,’ she said softly. ‘Does that mean the investigation is being handled by someone else?’ If so, she wondered, then why had she been sent to talk to this man?
He made a point of finishing whatever it was he was reading and setting it aside before he looked up at her. ‘No.’
She waited for an explanation, and when none was forthcoming, she repeated, ‘Does that mean the investigation is closed?’
He paused a long time before repeating, ‘No.’
Giving no sign of impatience or exasperation, she asked, ‘May I ask what it does mean?’
‘That the investigation is not currently being actively pursued.’
Hearing the tortured vowels the longer sentence revealed in his accent, she adjusted her response to the information that he was a southerner, perhaps Sicilian. Feigning indifference, she asked, ‘To whom is it, then, that I might give information about this matter?’
‘If the case were being investigated, you would give it to me.’ He allowed her to grasp the implications of his statement and returned his attention to the papers on his desk. Had he told her to leave, he could have made it no clearer how little interest he had in whatever she had to tell him.
For a moment, she faltered. It would all lead, what she had to say, to trouble for her and, if they didn’t believe her, possibly to actual risk. It would be so easy to push herself to her feet and leave, abandon the issue and this man with the indifferent eyes.
‘I read in the Gazzettino that she was murdered by the Romanian woman who lived with her,’ she said.
‘That’s correct,’ he said, and then added, ‘She did it.’ His tone, like his words, brooked no opposition.
‘It might be correct that I read it in the Gazzettino, and it might be correct that it was printed there, but it is not correct that the Romanian woman killed her,’ she said, driven by the omniscience of his second remark to launch herself at the truth.
His indifference, however, was unassailable. ‘Have you some evidence for that statement, Signora?’ he asked, not for an instant suggesting that he might be interested in considering it, even if she had.
‘I s
poke to the Romanian woman the morning of the murder,’ she said.
‘I fear the same is probably true of Signora Battestini,’ the lieutenant said, no doubt thinking it a clever thing to say.
‘I also took her to the train station.’
That caught his interest. He put both hands on the front of his desk and leaned towards her, as though he wanted to leap across the desk and squeeze a confession from her. ‘What?’ he demanded.
‘I took her to the train to Zagreb. That is, the one that passes through Villa Opicina. She would have to change in Zagreb for the train to Bucharest.’
‘What are you talking about? Are you saying you helped her?’ He half stood, then lowered himself back into his chair.
She didn’t deign to answer his question and, instead, repeated, ‘I’m saying that I took her to the station and helped her buy a ticket and a seat reservation for the train to Zagreb.’
He said nothing for a long time, studying her face, perhaps considering what he had just heard. He surprised her by saying, ‘You’re Venetian,’ as though it were part of some case he had begun to make against her. Before she could ask what he meant by that, he went on, ‘So have you just recovered from amnesia and come in to tell us all this, after three weeks?’
‘I’ve been out of the country,’ she answered, surprised to hear the guilt in her voice.
He pounced. ‘Without a phone or a newspaper?’
‘In England, taking an intensive language course. I decided not to speak Italian at all,’ she explained, omitting mention of phone conversations with her lover. ‘I got back last night and didn’t find out about it until this morning.’
He changed theme, but the suspiciousness remained in his voice. ‘Did you know her, this Romanian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she tell you what she had done?’
Signora Gismondi willed herself to keep her patience. It was the only weapon she had. ‘She didn’t do anything. I met her in the morning, just outside the apartment. It’s directly across the calle from mine. She was locked out, and the old woman was upstairs.’
‘Upstairs?’
‘At her window. Flori was out in the street, ringing the doorbell, but the old woman wouldn’t let her in.’ Assunta Gismondi raised the first finger of her right hand and waved it slowly back and forth in the air in front of her, imitating the gesture she had seen the Battestini woman make.
Scarpa said, ‘You called her “Flori”. Was she a friend of yours?’
‘No. I used to see her from the window of my apartment. Occasionally we waved to one another or said simple things. She didn’t speak Italian at all well, but we understood one another.’
‘What sort of things did she tell you?’
‘That her name was Flori, that she had three daughters and seven grandchildren. That one of her daughters worked in Germany, but she didn’t know where, in what city.’
‘And the old woman? Did she say anything about the old woman?’
‘She said that she was difficult. But everyone in the neighbourhood knew that.’
‘Did she dislike her?’
Losing her patience for an instant, Signora Gismondi shot back, ‘Everyone who knew her disliked her.’
‘Enough to kill her?’ Scarpa asked greedily.
Signora Gismondi smoothed the fabric of her skirt across her knees, brought her feet together neatly under her, took a breath, and said, ‘Lieutenant, I’m afraid you haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been telling you. I met her on the street in the morning. The old woman was at the window, waving her finger at her and refusing to let her in. I took the woman – Flori – I took her to a café and tried to talk to her, but she was too upset to think clearly. She was in tears for much of the time we were there. She said the woman had locked her out, that her clothing and things were inside. But she had her passport with her. She said she never went anywhere without it.’
‘It was false,’ Scarpa declared.
‘I don’t see what difference that makes,’ Signora Gismondi shot back. ‘It would have got her out of Italy and back to Romania.’ Rashness and anger made her add, ‘It certainly proved sufficient to get her in.’ Hearing her own anger, she paused, imposed calm at least upon her voice, and said, ‘That’s all she wanted to do, go home to her family.’
‘You seem to have managed very well without her speaking any Italian, Signora,’ Scarpa said.
Signora Gismondi bit back her response and said, ‘There was very little for her to say: “basta”, “vado”, “treno”, “famiglia”, “Bucaresti”, “Signora cattiva”.’ As soon as she heard herself say it, she regretted that last.
‘So you say you took her to the train?’
‘I don’t only say it, Lieutenant. I declare it. It is true. I took her to the station and helped her buy a ticket and a seat reservation.’
‘And this woman with a false passport who you say was locked out of the house, she just happened to be walking around with enough money on her to pay for a ticket to Bucaresti?’ he asked, in a crass imitation of her own pronunciation of the word.
‘I bought her ticket,’ Signora Gismondi declared.
‘What?’ Scarpa asked, as though she’d confessed to madness.
‘I bought her ticket. And I gave her some money.’
‘How much?’ Scarpa said.
‘I don’t know. Six or seven hundred Euros.’
‘You’re asking me to believe you don’t even know how much you gave her?’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘How is it the truth? You saw her there and you just snapped your fingers in the air and seven hundred Euros floated into your hand, and you thought how nice it would be to give them to the Romanian woman, seeing as she was locked out of the house and had nowhere to go?’
Signora Gismondi’s voice was steel. ‘I was on my way back from the bank, where I had just cashed a cheque sent to me by a client. I had the money in my purse, and when she told me she wanted to go back to Bucharest, I asked her if she’d been paid.’ She looked across at Scarpa, as if to ask him to understand. She saw no evidence that he was capable, but she went on nevertheless. ‘She said she didn’t care about that; she just wanted to get home.’ She paused, suddenly embarrassed to confess to such weakness to this man. ‘So I gave her some money.’ His look changed and she saw his contempt for her weakness, her gullibility. ‘She’d been there for months, and the woman locked her out without giving her what she owed her or letting her come back in to get her things.’ It came to her to ask him what he expected her to do in a situation like that, but she thought better of it and said, ‘I couldn’t let her work for months and get no money.’ She chose to say no more.
‘Then what?’ he asked.
‘I asked her what she was going to do, and as I told you, she said all she wanted to do was go home. She had calmed down by then and stopped crying, so I said I’d go to the station with her and find out about the trains. She said she thought there was a train for Zagreb around noon.’ It seemed simple enough to her, all of this. ‘So that’s what we did, went to the station.’
‘And her train ticket, you claim you paid for that, too?’ he asked, intent on plumbing the full depths of her gullibility.
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I went home. I had to leave for London.’
‘When?’
She paused to consider this. ‘The flight was at one-thirty. The taxi came to get me at noon.’
‘And you were at the train station until what time, Signora?’
‘I don’t know, ten, ten-thirty.’
‘And what time are you saying all of this began? When did you say you met this woman?’
‘I’m not sure, nine-thirty, perhaps.’
‘You were leaving the country for three weeks, you had a taxi coming, and yet you still had time to take this woman you say you barely knew to the station and buy her a ticket?’
She ignored his deliberate provocation. S
he wanted to explain how she always hated the final hours before leaving, how she hated walking around her apartment, checking and rechecking that the gas was off, the windows and shutters closed, the phone cable disconnected from the computer, but she did not want to tell any of this to him. All she said was, ‘There was time.’
‘Do you have any proof of this?’ he asked.
‘Proof?’
‘That you were there?’
‘Where?’
‘London.’
She was tempted to demand what difference that would make but, recalling her husband and the way any sort of resistance had driven him to violence, said only, ‘Yes.’
‘And you left her there?’ he demanded, abandoning London.
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘In the station, by the ticket windows.’
‘How long did it take you?’
‘What? To buy her a ticket?’
‘No. To walk home.’
‘Eleven minutes.’
He raised his eyebrows at this and pushed himself back in his chair. ‘Eleven minutes, Signora? That seems very exact. Have you been planning this?’
‘This what?’
‘This story.’
Before answering, she took two deep breaths. ‘Lieutenant, it is exact, not because it is a story, but because it takes eleven minutes. I’ve lived in that house for almost five years, and I go back and forth to the station at least twice a week.’ She felt the anger mounting in her voice, tried to control it, and lost. ‘If you are capable of simple arithmetic, that is more than five hundred times, back and forth. So if I say it takes eleven minutes, that’s how many minutes it takes.’
Ignoring her anger entirely, he asked, ‘So that’s how long it would take her?’
‘Take who?’
‘The Romanian woman.’
She started to tell him that the Romanian woman had a name, Flori, but she stopped herself and said only, ‘That’s how long it would take anyone, Lieutenant.’
‘And what time was it that you began to walk these eleven minutes, Signora?’
‘I’ve told you. Ten-thirty, perhaps a bit after that.’
‘And the train to Zagreb leaves at 11:45,’ he said with the certainty of one who has checked the timetable.