The delicious smell of cake wafted through the kitchen doorway. “I’m sorry I upset you.”
“You’re only doing your job. Before Salvatore comes around asking, tell him I don’t know of anyone getting raped in this town. Ever. Now take the scraps for the dog and let me do my work.”
Enzo was still reassuring his mother of his undying filial love when Nico left the restaurant. The wet grayness of the day clung to the old stones of the church and the buildings that led down to the main piazza, matching Nico’s mood. The encounter with Tilde and her family had left him sad. He had no desire to go to the Chianti Expo, to hear the Friends of Chianti’s band play or listen to eight mayors of the Chianti Classico municipalities go on and on about how flawless their wines were. He certainly didn’t want to see Perillo or Daniele. His questions had clearly upset Tilde, his wife’s closest family and a woman he respected and loved. He regretted getting involved with Gerardi’s murder. He would go to the Expo tomorrow when the booths opened, he decided. Tonight, he would taste his own perfectly good wine at home with dinner.
Walking down the hill to his car, he passed Enrico’s shop. Its grate was down, but the shop door was open. Food shops in Italy closed from one to five in the afternoon, sometimes five-thirty.
Nico stopped and looked at his watch. It was three o’clock. “Hey, Enrico, no siesta for you?”
“Doing a little cleanup.”
Enrico’s shop was always spotless. Nico suspected the shopkeeper was taking a break from Luciana’s hugs—and her cat.
“Need anything?” Enrico stepped out of the darkness of the shop and lifted the grate halfway. “You look like you need something.”
An astute man, Signor Enrico. But his need had little to do with food.
“It’s all right. You can’t sell me anything now, and I’m too lazy to come back later.” He had every intention of parking himself in his chair on the balcony and sitting there until the swallows came home.
“You are right. I can’t sell to you now. I’ll sell to you tomorrow when the shop is open and you pay me. I give to you today.”
That was the Italian way, the law only serving as suggestion. Nico was tempted. He slipped under the grate and entered the shop. “Thank you, Enrico. I’ll take fifty grams of finocchiona and a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano.” It would be his dinner. He wasn’t in the mood to cook.
Enrico sliced the salami, cut a chunk of cheese from the Parmigiano wheel, added a thick slice of cooked ham on the house for OneWag and handed Nico the package. “Two olive loaves tomorrow?”
“Two olive loaves tomorrow and today’s bill,” Nico said. “A domani.”
“A domani,” Enrico repeated to Nico’s back.
The afternoon hours went by, Nico sitting on his balcony with OneWag. First, they watched the swallows flutter in short loops over the neat rows of vines and the grove of olive trees under a now bright, sunny sky. Swallows represented loyalty, freedom, hope, he had read somewhere, and finally the three of them came to sleep on his balcony. Their presence gave him a sense of home. Rita would have been “tickled pink,” an expression she’d fallen in love with when she’d first immigrated to the States as a teenager.
As the afternoon glided on, Nico’s sadness wore off, replaced by questions. Why would Tilde have reason to lie about the identity of Gerardi’s great love? Her body language, the complete stillness of her expression told him she knew. Why was she protecting this mystery woman? Didn’t she realize that woman could be the killer? Or did Tilde know the woman was innocent, meaning to protect her from a painful interrogation and town gossip? With OneWag asleep, Nico let the questions swirl in his head unanswered, and after a while, he nodded off too.
What seemed only minutes later, he awoke to the sound of the dog scratching at the front door. “Coming.” Nico stood up stiffly and was surprised to see a dipping red sun leak its pink-orange light down the length of the horizon. He let OneWag out and followed. The vegetable garden needed to be checked after a hard rain. An earthworm wiggled past his foot. He hoped there were many more to aerate the soil. As always, a few snails were gathered by his salad patch. He picked them up and put them in the pail he kept for weeds. Later, he would drop the snails on the grass behind the house—a great distance away for a snail, but he suspected he would find the very same ones in the garden a few days later. He picked a small bunch of string beans and a head of lettuce for tonight’s salad and whistled to OneWag for them to go back inside.
Nico dropped Tilde’s scraps into the dog’s bowl and added Enrico’s ham gift. OneWag skittered over on nails that needed cutting, too hungry to bother with his usual one wag of thanks. Nico poured himself a glass of red wine. He was beginning to sag again. The change from day to night always brought him down. It was when he missed Rita the most. Best to concentrate on dinner. He put a small pot of water on the stove to cook the string beans. As he waited for it to start boiling, he cut up and mixed it with OneWag’s dry food. The dog gave one impatient bark and began wiggling with anticipation.
Washing the lettuce was next. The leaves were a beautiful light green. The color made him think of Stella’s eyes. The same translucent color. Gerardi’s passport photo flashed through his mind. Green eyes. And Elvira had implied . . . Was it possible Stella was Gerardi’s daughter? Stella had been born prematurely.
Nico turned off the stove, his appetite gone. He went out on the balcony with his glass and lit a cigarette. His swallows had flown off again, but he would wait for them to come home. The pieces fit together. Stella could very well be Gerardi’s child, but he wished with all his heart it wasn’t so.
THIRTEEN
At ten o’clock Friday morning, a small crowd was already lining up at the Chianti Expo cashier’s booth. Most of the guests bought their tickets and immediately wandered off to have breakfast at one of the café porticoes. The Expo didn’t open until eleven. Foreign wine buyers and tourists had already shown up for what was considered the most important Chianti Classico showcase in Tuscany. A week later, Panzano would have her own smaller showcase, Vino al Vino, but this one was the oldest and the biggest. Sixty-six producers of Chianti Classico, a wine marked by the Gallo Nero black rooster insignia, were here.
Daniele strutted up and down the four aisles between the booths in his summer uniform: short-sleeved blue shirt, dark-blue trousers with bright-red bands running down the sides. A white bandolier crossed his chest. Last-minute preparations were still being made at many of the booths. Wine bottles wiped clean and displayed according to vintage year and importance, wooden crates stacked neatly, signs with the vineyard logos pinned across the backs of the booths.
After his second go-round, Daniele made his way to the Ferriello Wine booth at the north end of Piazza Matteotti. He was hoping to catch Arben, Aldo’s Albanian assistant, during a break, which didn’t look like it would be anytime soon. Arben and Gianni were still unloading crates from a large handcart parked in front of the bronze statue of Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Greve native who explored North America. Aldo’s wife, Cinzia, was lining up bottles on a shelf below a map designating the Chianti Classico region, while Aldo uncorked some bottles. All four wore Ferriello T-shirts.
“Ehi, Carabiniere, keep us safe, eh?” Cinzia said, with a wink and a smile.
He looked down at his feet. “Yes, Signora.”
“Welcome,” Aldo said. “Cinzia, meet Daniele. He’s Salvatore’s right hand and makes a great sgroppino. Come by when there aren’t too many people and taste some wine.”
Being called Salvatore’s right-hand man made Daniele find the courage to look up. “I can’t afford your wines, I’m afraid,” he said, taking off his hat. Oblique rays of sun were already heating up the piazza. His head needed cooling in more ways than one—Aldo’s wife’s breasts looked like they might tear through the T-shirt.
“For free, Daniele,” Aldo said. “You keep us safe, we thank you. Tell Salvato
re too. He hasn’t been around.”
“I will. Thank you.” The last he’d seen of the maresciallo, he was back in the office calling Substitute Prosecutor Della Langhe to see if any information had come in from California. He was glad he wouldn’t have to listen to the curses that came afterward, information or no information. The man brought out the worst in the maresciallo. “Good luck with sales today.”
“Thanks.” Cinzia flashed her smile.
Feeling his cheeks burn, Daniele put his hat back on and approached the handcart behind the booth. Gianni was lifting the last crate. Daniele had seen him here and in Gravigna, usually with his arm around the same pretty woman. He envied his having a girlfriend.
“You can’t leave that here,” he said to Gianni, hoping Gianni would take the handcart and leave him alone with Arben.
Gianni, his arms around the heavy crate, stopped to look down at him, a full head taller than Daniele. “Like I don’t know that? That uniform has gone to your head.”
Arben elbowed Gianni. “He’s just doing his job.” He extended a hand toward Daniele. “Arben Kazim.” He was a short man with a torso rippled with muscle, full dark hair and eyebrows, a strong nose and chin.
Daniele happily shook his hand and introduced himself. “Daniele Donato.”
“I’ll take the cart back to the van.” Arben started pushing it across the wide piazza. He was headed for the parking lot across the main street, Daniele guessed. His patrol territory was technically within the piazza, but he needed to ask Arben a question. He scanned the area. Vince and the other men were walking the aisles, eyes peeled for trouble. Five minutes was all he needed.
Daniele hurried to catch up with Arben. “I need to ask you a question about Roberto Gerardi.”
“I don’t have anything good to say about the man.” Arben’s Italian was fluent; his accent was detectable only on the vowels. He had lived in Italy twenty-four years, one of the eight hundred thousand Albanians who had reached the eastern coast by sea.
“Being around him so much, two years, I thought—” Daniele stopped to catch his breath. Arben was walking so fast.
“Yes, two years.”
“Maybe you knew something about the woman he was in love with.”
“I know where he fucked her.”
Daniele clasped his bandolier to control his excitement at the lead. “Where?”
Arben didn’t answer until they reached the covered parking lot, opened the back of the van, hauled the cart inside, locked the door and lit a Toscano cigar.
Daniele stepped away. The smell was vile. “A Toscano isn’t really Tuscan,” Daniele said, repeating what the maresciallo had once told him. “The tobacco is from Kentucky.”
“Where’s that?”
“America.”
Arben smiled. He had incredibly white teeth for a smoker, Daniele thought.
“Marlboro Man country.”
“Where did Gerardi take the woman?”
“Oh, he took her all right. And from the floor creaking and both their moaning and groaning, she knew how to give back. It was upstairs in the abandoned farmhouse Aldo owns, the one where the American lives now. We used to store our old barrels on the ground floor, where the farmer who’d been there before had kept his animals. One day Aldo told me to grab one of the barrels. That’s when I heard them.”
“Did you ever go upstairs when they weren’t there?” He would have wanted to. Maybe.
“Only once. It was clean up there, just a big bed with fancy sheets and a cashmere blanket. A table, two broken chairs. I guess they weren’t interested in sitting.”
“No personal belongings besides the bedding?”
“Towels in the bathroom, nothing more. I didn’t search the place, I just wanted a look. I’ll tell you, that blanket was just asking to be swiped. That would have shaken up that thieving turd, but then I figured he couldn’t afford a blanket like that. I’d be stealing from her, whoever she was. Maybe she could afford ten cashmere blankets, but I don’t steal from women. I give.” He winked at Daniele and took a long drag of his Toscano.
“You never saw her?”
“No. Sorry.”
“After Gerardi left town, did you go back to the house?”
“I confess I did. Maybe whoever she was was going to entertain other men in there. I was going to leave my phone number, but the place had been totally cleared out. I did find an earring stuck between the floorboards. A curled silver snake with green stones for eyes.”
Daniele’s heart skipped. Gerardi had shown Cinzia Ferri the snake earrings he was going to give to his lover. “Did you keep it?”
“Dreaming of a snake can have many different, powerful meanings in Islam, mostly bad. I keep it under my pillow to keep me from dreaming snakes.”
Daniele’s heart was drumming so fast now it hurt. “Fantastic! The maresciallo will need to take it.”
“Only if he gives it back at night.”
“Yes, yes, he’ll understand about the dreams.”
“No, he’ll think all Muslims are stupidly superstitious. We’re not! Just me.”
“He won’t think that. Italians have countless superstitions.”
Arben threw his Toscano on the concrete floor and stepped on it. “I have to get back. We open in thirty minutes.”
Daniele straightened his bandolier and readjusted his hat in an attempt to calm down. The maresciallo would be proud of his detecting skills. Daniele thanked Arben as he followed him out of the parking lot.
“What made you think I might know something?”
They wove their way between cars stuck in gridlock on the main street. “You were competitors, from what Signor Aldo told us. That means you watched Gerardi, hoping to catch him in a mistake. You caught him stealing, so I asked myself what else you might have observed.”
Arben slapped him on his back. “Good thinking.”
Daniele wiped his cheeks with his hands as if getting rid of sweat. It was a new ploy he’d discovered to hide his exaggerated blushing. “Did you tell Signor Aldo what you heard in the farmhouse?”
“I don’t interfere with anyone’s fucking. It’s a right given to man and woman by Allah.”
They shook hands when they reached the piazza. There was now a long line at the two ticket booths. Ten euros for a wineglass embossed with the Chianti Expo logo, a red cloth holder and six tasting pours of wine.
It was almost lunchtime when Nico parked the 500 a good distance from Greve. With the Expo in full swing, he was lucky to find a spot just off the main road. He welcomed the walk, despite the hot sun and OneWag pulling back against his unfamiliar and unwelcome leash. He replayed the morning in his head, what had been said and not.
Anxious to get to the café in case Gogol had shown up early in order to avoid him, Nico had skipped his morning run. When he walked in with OneWag, Nico said hello to Jimmy and Sandro. They waved back. He looked around. A few students with bulging backpacks were already there, stuffing themselves with ciambelle and cornetti. No Gogol, but Nelli was sitting by the open French door, reading the paper, a cappuccino raised to her lips. His first lucky break. Nelli was Gogol’s friend.
Nelli looked up as OneWag ran to her. She’d conquered his heart by stooping down and rubbing his ears whenever they met. The dog leapt onto her lap and licked her chin. Nelli smiled as Nico approached. He admired how easily smiles came to her. And there was nothing fake about them.
“I’m glad you came in early,” Nelli said. “I can give you this in person.” She handed over something wrapped in the paper. “OneWag will never forgive me”—she kissed the top of the dog’s head—“but I think it’s best for him.”
Nico sat down next to her and opened the package. A red harness collar with a tag engraved with Nico’s name and phone number and a matching leash. “I hope you don’t mind, they’re old. My dog was about the sam
e size as yours.”
“How nice of you. Thank you, but don’t you want to get another dog?”
“No. Too painful.” As soon as the words were out, she apologized, putting a hand on Nico’s arm. “She was just a dog. I know her death doesn’t compare to—”
“Please, don’t apologize.” Nico clasped her hand. “Pain is pain, for the loss of any loved one.”
“Thank you.” She looked up at Nico with her welcoming face and warm smile.
Nico felt a rush of emotion that, seconds later, made him uncomfortable. He took back his hand. “How did you get my phone number?”
“I had to convince Tilde I only needed it for the dog tag.” Despite being aware of Nico’s discomfort, Nelli kept her smile as her rejected hand kneaded OneWag’s ear. She resented Tilde’s assumption that she was out to snare Nico. He was a nice man with good looks and kindness to spare, but she wasn’t looking for a relationship. Friendship would be nice, though. “She’s very protective of you.” She’d almost said “possessive.”
“Tilde has been very good to me. She, Enzo and Stella are the only family I have left.”
Nelli changed the subject, asking, “Is Salvatore any closer to finding out who killed Robi? I know you two are friends.”
“Even if I knew I couldn’t tell you, but I’m glad you brought it up. How well do you know Gogol?”
“Pretty well. Why?”
“Is he crazy?” He’d denied the possibility to Perillo, but maybe he was wrong. “Does he ever make things up?”
“I’m not a doctor, but we’ve been friends since I was a little girl. He would come by the house and give me Divine Comedy lessons I wasn’t the least bit interested in. Georgio, that’s his real name, lost his mother when he was maybe nine or ten. Father unknown. The old townspeople say he was pretty normal until she died. I think he just couldn’t accept a reality that included his mother’s death, and so he made up his own. His mother became Beatrice, Dante’s great love, who also died young. By spouting Dante, he keeps his mother alive. The coat he refuses to take off? That’s his mamma hugging him.” Nelli put OneWag on the floor and sat back in her chair. “Now you’re going to think I’m the crazy one.”
Murder in Chianti Page 20