Galileo's Room (Noir Florentine Book 1)

by Strozzi, Amadeus

  They settled in Borgo when she was three years old. Throughout her life, and with varying intensity of feeling, Marta had always seen the Montefalcone family and villa as an extension of her life. As small children, at the little local daycare, she and Samu, who was the same age, had played under the pines, wedding games, house. At age six, it was well known that he was officially her fiancé if anybody asked, and he never denied it. Then came Walter and Nora’s divorce, an event predicted by every other woman in Borgo as inevitable. They shrugged and said, “They all go home eventually, these foreign women.”

  Marta’s other life, her solitary life, began that summer, when she was eight years old. She was convinced that the events and mood of that terrible season tempered her to be good at her job. It was the year Samuele disappeared and left her alone. She listened to the Borgo gossip, trying to understand his absence, but nobody really understood, or if they did, they weren’t saying. She had a partial picture, but it wasn’t enough to shed a light, and she suspected that the mystery of it had egged her on to become a cop. They told her that Sam had been sent to boarding school, a military boarding school somewhere in Canada, but that was all.

  She wrote letters to him on flimsy blue paper, saved up money to buy stamps, but had to leave the address space empty. Nobody was forthcoming as to his exact whereabouts, though she had asked everyone, demanded to know. She marched with her letters up to the villa and asked to see Walter. She wasn’t afraid of him. He was nice, not like her male relatives in San Valentino. She handed the letters over, one a month, sometimes more, and he promised to post them. In those five years, not a single reply ever arrived.

  When Samu did finally come home in 1985, he was unrecognizable. He knocked on her door, asked for her, sauntered into her kitchen and started talking about the neighbourhood, how everything felt so foreign, and then he moved onto the topic of rock groups. His Italian had an American inflection. Eventually, the five years did drop away, and by the time they were sitting down to dinner, she saw a new Samuele, a much more interesting Samuele. He had manners. He opened doors for her, said please and thank-you, was thoughtful and kind. Unheard of in any of the local boys.

  When he let her know that he would be choosing Liceo Classico, Marta chose the same secondary school, but she had to scramble to keep up. Her family had been expecting her to go to the vocational school, to study hotel management. She studied four times harder than everyone else and managed to squeak through. But she was happy. They all travelled as a pack in the first year. No one had paired off. She and Samu were always together, in the cafeteria, on the bus to and from school, quizzing each other in Greek and Latin up in the villa’s vast rooms.

  Marta began to lose Sam as the weather grew warmer. Something was eating at him and he wouldn’t talk about it. He became silent and morose. She learned through the Borgo grapevine that he was seeing a psychologist way over in Sesto Fiorentino where nobody knew him.

  By summer he was gone again, whisked away by his family’s wealth to the seaside, to visit his mother abroad, to pastimes that she could only imagine. It was torture when he was away but she made a pledge to herself that no matter what happened, she would always be there for him, no matter how far he strayed – and he was straying well beyond her reach. But she also knew she had to live her own life.

  After graduation, she went to America, to those San Valentino relatives who had emigrated to towns outside of New York and Boston. She worked hard on her English, did some courses, had a couple of unexciting flings. It was her American cousins who opened her eyes to the possibilities of joining the police, in particular, international anti-organized crime work.

  Thinking about it now, as she applied her eyeliner in front of the mirror, a dark wave swept through her, a cynicism that she was just becoming acquainted with, and she fought it off. She had thought she looked good but when she examined her skinny frame and dark lank hair through his eyes, she was suddenly inadequate.

  Samuele Montefalcone always made her feel that she was something special, at first, and then a little later, that she had somehow fallen short, but in ways she couldn’t fathom. And she was never sure these days whether the intimate tone he used with her was a promise of something more or just his noblesse oblige trying to get some favour out of her.

  Samuele would never be able to understand what it was like to be on the other side, one of the villagers from Borgo, one of the populace living downwind of the villa and all its dirty laundry. He would never know what it was like to have to swallow his feelings constantly.

  Even so, the promise of more still smouldered at the centre of her brain. She knew him, knew his body. It was knowledge gained in a careless moment, on a spring night heavy with wisteria and cut grass, glittering with fireflies. She had just come back from CEPOL training in France, and he had returned from a climb in the Himalayas where he’d almost slipped to his death. She had impressed him, enchanted him, managed to draw him in through a mix of anecdotes, pheromones, dinner, and sheer will power.

  After that, she learned to be careful what she wished for. Wanting more and getting it was the start of her “breakdown”. It was her mother’s idea to call a truce with the southern relatives, who in turn suggested that Marta go down and stay with some who had moved to Matera. It would work out fine. They were understanding people. Marta’s mother was simply happy to have her out of gossip’s line of fire. Marta was already in her late twenties, too old to be crying in public, too smart to be overtly parading the brainlessness of a sixteen-year old around the neighbourhood.

  She vowed to herself that she would never become Samu’s jailer, though she could have tried. She boarded the train alone in September, and remembered feeling, just outside of Rome, that the greyish-green and iron-brown plains were soaked with centuries of blood. It went through her like a shiver, a vision of her dire future, and then it was gone.

  In Matera, she accepted the hospitality of these cousins on her mother’s father’s side. Agnese and Isidoro were a couple in their late forties, well-to-do, with a huge three-story house in the Sassi, and a garden full of olive trees and prickly pears. Their house was undergoing an expensive and sumptuous restoration. They showed her the cellar and explained that in order to empty the many underground passageways that had been filled up with gravel, they had already carted away twenty truckloads. The passageways went down and down and down with no end, and she felt that she was looking into a kind of dark and infinite escape route, leading everywhere and nowhere. She felt like one of its fugitives and longed to find that one particular passageway that would return her to herself.

  On the first day in Matera, they sat in a blue and white ceramic kitchen, had maritozzi and coffee, and talked, or rather they talked and she listened. At first, her sense of disbelief at what they were saying made it difficult to take in their words. She didn’t like what they were offering, but a part of her didn’t dislike it either. A deeply ambitious part of her recognized it as the only possible choice. They were very clear on how not being able to have children of their own had affected them, and how very grateful they would be.

  Day after day, she walked up and down along the jagged narrow cobbled streets of white rocky walls and houses dug into the cliffs like caves, houses made of tufa, a flesh-coloured rock so soft you could gouge it out with your fingernails and leave marks. At night she dreamt the houses were dead souls and their spirits lived on the top floors. When she went up to the attics to talk to them, the spirits moaned and told her that what she was doing was wrong.

  Her time came on a Sunday as she walked toward the main piazza, toward the sound of people amassing, unlike anything she had ever heard before, a crescendoing roar, like standing at the centre of a human beehive. The whole town was out, strolling, showing off. There in front of a baroque church, her waters broke and soaked her new tan suede shoes.

  It was a painful few hours that ended in namelessness. Though everything in the newborn creature suggested a Montefalcone, it was enough f
or her to bury that fact in her list of things to know and then forget. When she turned it over to Agnese and Isidoro, it was still nameless.

  Not a lot had been said at the time, but now, ten years on, she felt like a puppet. They had agreed that she would always be its mother, simply, that they would take care of it. And over the years, she had gone down to Matera to visit. Her feelings had transformed. The creature had turned into a boy, a little personality so surprising that she never could have imagined anything so wonderful being a part of her.

  Now that Marta wanted her boy back – they had named him Tommaso, Tommi – the mask had slipped. She could now see who Agnese and Isidoro really were. Had they always known it would come to this? That her feelings would grow beyond reason and that she would have to do what was asked of her?

  She walked up the hill to the villa in the steamy morning wondering at the horrible circularity of things. It was a conversation she thought she might have one day with Samu but had never found a right time. Now was certainly not the right time. It would have to wait.

  When she reached the front of the villa, Donatella had the main door open, was hovering there, the faithful gatekeeper. Her face betrayed nothing when she said “Master bedroom. Tell them I don’t appreciate them dragging their dirt all over the place.”

  Marta wanted to remind her that housekeeping was just a job. Once upon a time, all the kids in Borgo around Marta’s age had been good friends, a gang of kids carousing through the great villa, Samu’s honorary brothers and sisters. She remembered one game where they’d taken the cushions off the couches in one of those mammoth sitting rooms and used them as sleds to ride across the polished floors. White cushions.

  Donatella, that poor old slave, had almost had an epileptic fit. She still thought she was one of the family. One of these days she was going to find out how it worked. She’d get too old to run around picking up after Samu, cleaning up his messes, and she’d get her walking papers. Some people took longer to grow up and realize where they were. Others never did.

  Marta knew where to go, and climbed the big staircase up to the next floor and the abandoned master bedroom. She went across the room and into the bathroom.

  When Marta came in, Samuele tried to stand up. He was in such bad shape that he sank back to the floor again, then lunged over the toilet bowl. She watched as six foot four inches of taut muscle, burning blue eyes and long tangled hair shrank as he emptied himself to a balled-up, bloodshot, retching fist of an animal, almost the same shade as that venomous green bathroom.

  O, how the mighty have fallen, she thought, then recognized her pettiness and scolded herself. Her heart was not so bruised that she couldn’t afford a little pity for him. She leaned in and turned to catch a glimpse of herself, get a quick look at her new earrings, tiny eighteen carat gold pistols. A gift to herself. Because these days, if she didn’t think about doing nice things for Marta La Stella, who else was going to? Her efforts to look good for him were wasted today. All Samu’s charm was swirling down the toilet. The moment belonged to her and her alone. It helped her somehow to know that he was just like everybody else. She snapped a mental pic for the occasion.

  Her boys were in the other room, photographing, tagging, bagging, boxing and sealing off the crime scene. When Samuele had finally brought up the last of the nothing he had in his stomach, she said, “So your little friend...”

  He winced.

  She added, “This is off the record.”

  “Emmie,” he croaked.

  “You remembered her name. That’s very good. A donnaiolo who remembers the names of his conquests. Emmie. Tell me about Emmie.”

  “I had nothing to do with it. And she wasn’t one of my conquests, just for the record.”

  “I might as well tell you now. Officially speaking, you're the main suspect.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Marta, I was the one who called you. She must have been drugged. I must have been drugged. How do you slice into someone’s throat without waking a soul, without waking the person right beside them? Think about it.”

  He did look like he’d been drugged. And she knew he drank, which wouldn’t have helped matters. Drank even more than she did, drank like a foreigner, treating his body like a toxic waste dump.

  Marta La Stella sniffed.

  “We’ve known each other for years, Marta. Do you really think I’m capable of such a thing?”

  “You should try doing my job for a couple of weeks, Samu. I’ve discovered that a combination of heat and desperation will make anybody do anything. I mean anything. You said it yourself. All the downstairs doors were locked.” She shook her head. “It looks really bad for you, Samu. Really, really bad.”

  She was enjoying this more than she wanted to admit.

  “I don't know what happened. Someone was obviously already inside the house.”

  “There are no signs of forced entry.”

  “Plenty of hiding places in the cellar.”

  At the mention of the cellar, Marta stood up straighter. The villa’s cellar had remained in her thoughts her whole life. She knew all about the hiding places, had done ever since the childhood games of hide and seek. As a teenager, she’d overcome her fear of rats and made it her personal mission to know what was down there, unlike the whole irresponsible Montefalcone family. She often dreamed about the cellar at night and it always appeared as the magical thing that it was, a vision, a truth centre. She smiled at the thought of it.

  Sam uncurled himself and stood up straight. “The tenants wander in and out all the time. They seem to have the run of the place. I haven’t been around here in ages. I’ve been out of town...”

  “What about a boyfriend? A jealous boyfriend maybe?”

  “Emmie was here on holiday with her friend. A type of gap year.”

  “Okay. Well then. How about one of your girlfriends? An especially possessive one? Someone who didn't share your definition of a relationship... like the idea of your screwing around on them with some foreign pick-up?”

  Sam opened his mouth, as if about to say something, then closed it immediately. He turned and leaned over the toilet again, bringing up more bile.

  “Tombola,” said La Stella. “You're not leaving. I've got men on the stairs. Soon as the coroner comes, you and I are going back to the station for a little tête-à-tête.”

  “Will you at least let me clean up? You know how contagious the smell of vomit can be. And I want to look my best for you.”

  La Stella smothered a smile. “Yeah, right.” She called out to the rookie in the bedroom, “Fontana?”

  The fresh-faced Fontana stepped into the bathroom doorway, blushing to the extremes of his oversized ears. “Commissaria?”

  “Stay with Count Montefalcone junior here while he changes, will you? His bedroom is two doors down.” She knew there was something else she should have said to Fontana, but she only remembered what it was when Fontana appeared again ten minutes later and said, “He’s gone.”

  The window in the dressing room. Christ. That was what she’d forgotten to tell Fontana. She’d been distracted, already planning the press release, going over the piquant details of Samu’s arrest.

  “Jesus, pivello. Do you have broccoli for brains or what?” You weren’t supposed to lose sight of him.”

  “Shall I go after him?”

  “No, we’ll pick him up. I know where to find him. But in the future, try to stay awake.”

  “Yes, Comissaria.” Every exposed inch of his pale skin was now flaming.

  Marta couldn’t believe that Samuele Montefalcone was guilty of this crime, unless seducing young blondes could be considered criminal. After all, it had been Samu himself who had called the station to say that a girl had been murdered. He'd stayed put, rather than just running. He was so smart in so many ways, but just so stupid in others.

  Chapter Six

  Sam ran fast and low, oblivious to the brambles tearing at his skin and clothes. He’d never considered the possibility that Marta
would treat him as a suspect. Not seriously, not even for a minute. So his distant training, blurred by whatever had been in last night’s wine, had taken a minute to kick in. When it did, back there in the dressing room off his bedroom, he’d pulled on his running clothes, found some twenty euro bills and his spare set of keys and shoved them into his pocket just before climbing out the dressing room window.

  He’d gone down the side of the house with no driveway access, using the wisteria as a foothold. La Stella’s men, a whole carload of them, were waiting for the forensic team to come from town. They were either inside the house or hanging around the main entrance. He had crawled down into the brambles in the overgrown part of the garden and across the east field, practically crawling in a wide circle, across the section of exposed road that was farthest from the villa, over the stone wall, back into the upper fields and into another wide circle around to the little church and Don Paddy’s house.

  He knew Don Paddy’s habits, and where the extra key was kept. The Don, sedated with wine, slept late whenever he could get away with it. Sam used the latch on the wooden gate as a foothold and vaulted over into the courtyard garden. He went around behind the house and took the key from the terra cotta wall vase that hung next to the door.

  Slipping silently into the house and through to the vestry, he pushed back the robes and rummaged until he found one that was all but on its last legs, quietly ragged at the cuffs and hem. He grabbed a dog collar from Don Paddy’s collection and a battered straw hat. From the table by the door, he nicked a pair of sunglasses, then slipped out of the house again and around to the gardening shed. There was an old clunker of a black bike in the corner, no ordinary black bike, as homely as hell but with a glide that could take you for a mile without a single turn of the pedal.