Some Bitter Taste Page 12

  ‘I have to get a few things from the market at Santo Spirito. I’ll not be more than half an hour but, in any case, just ring the bell. She’s in. I’d be so grateful.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He was moving forward, his gaze turned upwards to the first floor. ‘I’ll talk to her.’ He was climbing the stairs. On the landing he heard voices raised behind the closed door. He waited, in no hurry to interrupt. But there was no real need to strain his ears, either. Not so much because the furious voices were so loud but because he understood the cause of their quarrel without bothering himself with the details of the resulting vituperation, which was not usable evidence. The voices approached the door.

  ‘Not a penny more!’

  ‘You’re in no position to dictate terms!’

  ‘Oh, but I am! Oh, indeed I am.’

  ‘We did what you told us to do. Now you pay.’

  ‘For what? For what?’

  ‘It’s not our fault! We did as you told us.’

  ‘Did I tell you I wanted her dead?’

  ‘Maybe not but it suits your book anyway, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Are you a complete fool? Suits my book to have a murder investigation on my doorstep? You should be paying me for the damned mess you’ve made and all for nothing.’

  ‘And all that stuff we moved? What about that?’

  ‘What stuff would that be? And where would it be? Where’s your proof? If you want my advice, take that envelope and disappear before somebody starts looking for you!’

  A third voice now, not so loud nor half so confident: ‘If they do we’ll take you down with us.’

  ‘No, you won’t. And I’m so sure about that I’m quite happy to point my friend the prosecutor in your direction.’

  Had he picked up the phone when he said that? It seemed likely. There was a scuffle, a shout of ‘You arsehole!’ The door opened.

  ‘Good morning,’ the marshal said. T was just about to ring. Do you mind if I come in?’

  A brief flash of fear lit Rinaldi’s eyes but the marshal showed him such a dull and expressionless face that he was back in control in an instant.

  ‘Ah, Marshal. What can I do for you? If you’ll excuse my porters, they were just about to leave.’

  The two enormous men, both as red in the face as when they’d been lifting a crated marble statue, made to move forward, then stopped. The marshal stood still in the doorway, filling it with his presence, fixing them in turn with his big eyes. He waited. Their eyes shifted but they made no further attempt to get past him. They were watching him as though afraid that he would sink his teeth into them at the least provocation. They needn’t have worried. It was Rinaldi he wanted. ‘Don’t leave on my account,’ he said peaceably. ‘On the contrary, I’d rather you stayed—oh, only for a minute. I’m making a few inquiries that concern Signor Rinaldi here and as … collaborators of his, as it were, you might be able to help me at some point. Nothing urgent, you understand. Just leave me your names and addresses.’

  Afterwards, when he told them they were free to go they hovered, disorientated, needing an exit line. A bland, empty stare was all they got. They looked to Rinaldi, who practically pushed them out and shut the door behind them before turning to face the marshal.

  ‘So? What can I do for you?’ All pretence at geniality was gone. Nor did he try the ‘my friend the prosecutor’ line. He was confident still but he was no fool.

  ‘A small favour,’ the marshal answered. ‘I’d like to use your phone.’

  ‘Certainly. There’s one right here. I’ll leave you to speak privately.’

  ‘No, no. Stay where you are.’ The marshal dialled, his eyes on the cigar end stubbed out in a silver ashtray beside the telephone. He gave instructions to Lorenzini, including the licence plate of the three-wheeled truck.

  ‘No, just follow them. There are two men in it, yes. I’ll tell you the rest when you’re on your way.’ He rang off.

  Rinaldi was still keeping control of himself. T don’t know what those two have done but I must point out that they are not my employees so that—’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose we’ll find so much as a receipt for any transportation they’ve ever done for you, but that’s all right. I’ve no doubt they’ll tell us all about it. Besides, as I said, it’s you I’m interested in.’

  ‘I fail to see why.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say,’ admitted the marshal, ‘that I’m not so sure myself. I know what you’ve done but I don’t know why. But, after all, it’s what you’ve done that I’m going to arrest you for, not why you did it.’

  ‘You can’t arrest me.’ Rinaldi was genuinely incredulous. ‘I don’t believe you’ve got a warrant.’

  ‘No,’ admitted the marshal, ‘I haven’t. I’ll have to ask you to let me use your phone again so I can call your friend the prosecutor and ask him for one. He might refuse, I suppose, butjust in case he doesn’t, perhaps you should make a call to your lawyer first. Even then we might have to wait and see what happens with your two porters and I don’t know where they’re going.’ He looked at their addresses, frowning. ‘I suppose it’ll be to this place. Nice bit of country and not too far …’

  ‘This is ridiculous!’

  The marshal stared at him. Rinaldi was doing his best to be aggressive but he looked a bit green at the gills. ‘I wonder if you shouldn’t sit down. Even better, make that call to your lawyer and we’ll both sit down. What with one thing and another this might well take a bit of time.’

  It took most of the day. Rinaldi was removed to Borgo Ognissanti Headquarters, leaving the marshal free to catch up with his own men, who were following the porters’ truck in an unmarked car. By the time he reached them they were parked on a country road near the point where a stony track led down into a valley on the right.

  ‘It’s a dead end,’ said Lorenzini, indicating the sign nailed to a tree, ‘and I don’t think they’ve gone much farther than the bend down there where this vineyard ends. We heard them stop from here. There’s a backup car on the way.’

  ‘We might need a full-scale search—unless we’re lucky’ The marshal sent the young carabiniere who had driven Lorenzini to a villa on the opposite side of the road. ‘Ask if there’s a tip, or a place where people do dump stuff illegally. It could save us some time further on.’ He asked Lorenzini, ‘You’ve told your backup to arrive quiedy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ There was a time to arrive with lights spinning and sirens wailing and gravel spraying in all directions. There was also a time not to. Once the backup car was in place, next to his own, blocking the entrance to the lane, the marshal got into the unmarked car with Lorenzini and drove quiedy down to the bottom of the vineyard. It was beginning to rain. On either side of them the big vine leaves bounced as the drops hit them. By the time they rounded the curve and drew up in front of a farmhouse it had stopped again. When they got out they could smell the rain, and the dust had set-tied in the lane. Thunder was grumbling nearby.

  They stood looking at one of the few farmhouses in the area not to have been renovated by city people so as to look like fake farmhouses complete with mini iron lampposts and imitation terra cotta tiles. This one hadn’t changed in centuries. It was built of stone and had a central tower with a dovecote. Under the archway fronting the house hung plaits of garlic, bunches of drying herbs, and orange corncobs for the hens, who were picking around in the shade below. An old woman looked up from scooping hen food out of an oil drum. She wore a thin flowered frock fastened at her breast with a big safety pin and flimsy plastic shoes. As they walked towards her, a dog shot out from their right, barking, to pull up short with a yelp of frustration as it reached the limit of its chain and leapt back.

  ‘What’s to do?’ The old woman looked up but she didn’t straighten up. She was permanendy bent double.

  ‘We’re looking for’—the marshal read the porters’ names from his notebook—'Giusti, Gianfranco and Falaschi, Piero.’

  She indicated the fr
ont door with a twist of her head. ‘They’re inside.’

  She showed neither surprise nor curiosity, which told its own story.

  They went inside. The marshal removed his sunglasses and peered into the dim room. There was no one there. They heard the noisy little truck start up out back and rattle away.

  ‘Good,’ murmured the marshal. ‘A little look round, I think.’ He turned back to call to the old woman, ‘Signora? Do you mind if we take a quick look around? We won’t touch anything.’

  She shrugged and scattered the last of the hen food before picking up a basket and going off to collect her eggs.

  They looked at the big kitchen.

  Lorenzini said, ‘I reckon they were sitting here trying to decide what to do rather than trying to hide anything.’

  ‘Yes.’ The room was clean and spartan. On the big marble-topped table stood a straw-covered wine flask and two kitchen glasses with a drop of red still in them. Two facing chairs had been pushed back. Such houses have usually only one entrance but the marshal soon found a room containing feed sacks and fertilizer that had an exit to an outside staircase. At the bottom was a jumble of sheds on the lower ground behind the house. They went down to look. One of the sheds was empty and presumably housed the truck which had just left. In another stood a battered tractor, a moped, and various farm implements. The next was dark and smelly and filled with rabbits crammed into cages.

  ‘Are we looking for anything special?’ asked Lorenzini.

  ‘No … yes. Not the safe but whatever they opened it with. I don’t know these two characters. Perhaps you should …’ He fished out his notebook and passed it over.

  Lorenzini, accustomed to interpreting the marshal’s thought processes without the aid of the spoken word, took it and went off. ‘I’ll not be a minute.’

  The marshal continued to look, not touching. Lorenzini would run a check on their previous convictions from the car. By the time he came back, the marshal had found an oxy-acetylene cutter and a protective mask in a three-legged kitchen cupboard with no doors. He had touched something, twitching back an old flowered sheet that had covered it. Lorenzini returned to confirm his suspicions.

  ‘Grand theft auto, three convictions. I suppose they changed the licence plates here. What now? A warrant to pull this place apart?’

  ‘No, no. They were sitting in the kitchen drinking wine. We’d better go. They’re still waiting at the top of the lane?’

  ‘Still there.’

  The old woman appeared with food for her rabbits. The marshal asked her, ‘One of them is your son?’

  She made a grimace. ‘Piero. As spineless as his father but he’s all I’ve got now. That crook Giusti’s got him in bother again, hasn’t he?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to manage if you put him away? Can you tell me that? I know what goes on in prison. They sit around playing cards, smoking, taking drugs, planning more trouble for as soon as they get out while I’m struggling here by myself.’

  ‘No, Signora, you can’t possibly manage. You need some help.’

  ‘I do need some help. I do! I’ve a son, haven’t I? He’s supposed to help me! Him!’

  She peered up at them, her wrinkled face tearstained, a huge bundle of cut grass on her bent back. They didn’t know what to say to her and she knew it. Her lament was an automatic response like the charge of the chained-up dog. No answer was expected, no effect. Hope had long since evolved into habit.

  The two men left. The thunder rolled nearer.

  It had been decided that Lorenzini and the young carabiniere driver should take Giusti and Falaschi in. Falaschi, the one with the greasy blond ponytail, was the old woman’s son. If it occurred to him to be concerned about his mother’s struggling to keep a farm going in his absence, he didn’t mention it. No doubt his lawyer would make good use of the idea later on. Giusti, the heftier of the two with the dark shaved head, had a wife and two small children at home. Lorenzini would be giving them the bad news.

  The marshal was standing at the edge of a path through a little wood which sloped steeply down on the right. A notice was nailed to a tree beside his head saying ‘No tipping’. Somewhere down there out of sight, his driver and the two men from the squad car were searching. He was glad enough of the shade this pretty wood provided but the air was nevertheless still and heavy. Lightning flashed every so often, followed very quickly by thunder near enough now to crack and roar.

  ‘Marshal!’ They were waving at him. They were climbing back up.

  ‘It’s down there, all right. A safe, not very big, been opened with a cutter, axe, bludgeon, everything, just about unrecognisable.’ There’s some stuff in it but we need to get a move on, get forensic people out sharpish. It’s going to pour down.’

  ‘I doubt there’ll be prints,’ the marshal said. ‘What else—’

  ‘Blood. A lot of it on some men’s clothing and on the safe itself. There’s all sorts of junk down there so we’ve rigged up a makeshift shelter with bits of furniture and mattresses but we’ve got to move!’

  They moved. The marshal called in for a forensic team. It was useless. With a deafening crash of thunder the summer deluge began.

  ‘I can’t arrest this man.’ The prosecutor looked at the marshal and then at Captain Maestrangelo, who was receiving them in his office. He and the prosecutor were seated on a long leather sofa. The marshal hovered, hat in hand, staring at the oil painting in a gilded frame above their heads.

  ‘If you’ll give me a minute with those two …’

  ‘You seriously think they’ll talk?’ Maestrangelo looked doubtful. ‘It doesn’t need much imagination on their part to know that Rinaldi will cough up for a decent lawyer who’ll keep his name out of it. You could sit down, Guarnaccia.’

  ‘I’m all right as I am, thank you. Not everybody has imagination, do they? I don’t think I have any myself. They’ve been separated all the time, that’s what matters. Rinaldi, now, he’s arrogant. He wasn’t expecting this.’

  What was that look that passed between the other two? It was a split second but he saw it. Was it that they didn’t believe him?

  ‘The trouble is,’ pointed out the prosecutor—was he smiling? T wasn’t quite expecting this either. I don’t know … and you have a reputation—well—for being a bit slow, so it’s all the more—’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’ He did his best but it was always the same, he was always too late. ‘That downpour. It was just that I couldn’t call Forensics until I was sure where the stuff was.’

  ‘The stuff was still in evidence bags, spread on the Captain’s desk on the other side of the room: the seven-branched candelabra, the Talmud, the prayer shawl, and the skullcap the prosecutor called a kiphah, the sepia photographs.

  The captain got to his feet and went over to look at it all again. He shook his head. ‘It’s not going to help us because we don’t want what they left, we want what they took, whatever it was that caused her death, intentional or not.’

  Behind him, the marshal coughed. T don’t think …’

  ‘What?’ the two of them asked together. He was embarrassed and didn’t meet either gaze, saying to another oil painting, a shepherdess in a silk frock and pointed shoes—what would she be dressed like that for?—T doubt if they found what they were looking for.’

  Even with his gaze averted he sensed that look pass between them again. They shouldn’t be wasting time like this. Rinaldi was sitting there waiting in the next room for what had been called ‘an informal talk’. It was a way of defying him to be the one to recognise that he needed a lawyer. Up to now he had brazened it out, pretending that he didn’t. Something had to give. Once there was a lawyer involved, he would surely defend the two porters as well and information could go back and forth. Didn’t they see the danger?

  ‘Of course you’re right,’ the prosecutor said. He interrupted himself to take out one of his small cigars, caught the captain’s eye, and put it away again, consc
ious of the polished floor, the elegant rugs, the gleaming rubber plant, the mote-free air, so unlike his own habitat. ‘Keeping them separate is of the essence. But I can only do it by keeping them inside—there’s evidence enough for that—and letting him go.’

  ‘He’ll send them a lawyer.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, all right. He’ll send them a lawyer. Give me evidence for an arrest warrant, otherwise all I can give you is a search warrant. How do you know they didn’t find what they were after? That it’s not in his apartment?’

  Why did people spend so much time talking? Where was the use in finding words to explain why and how? There’d be time for all that in court. Words were lawyers’ business. He gazed hopefully at Captain Maestrangelo, needing to be let off, needing to be let loose. The deluge had washed away every trace of blood, yes, but downstairs there were two men in the cells, sweating with fear. It wasn’t their first time inside, but even so, they were car thieves and though probably up for any scam going, they were not hired killers. That was what they were thinking about now, down there in the claustrophobic heat, one to a cell so they couldn’t even talk. He’d been too late for the blood; he couldn’t lose more time now.

  He edged nearer to the door and mumbled some excuse or other, watching their faces. They were letting him go.

  ‘I’ve a feeling I should prepare that warrant. What do you think?’

  That was the prosecutor’s voice behind him. Did he mean a search warrant? No, no … that wouldn’t do at all, no. The two men downstairs would tell him. A couple of hours with the shaved chap. A couple of hours of near silence, most likely. Then the weaker one. Falaschi, with the greasy tail of hair. His had been the voice that made that weak threat, heard from outside Rinaldi’s door, ‘We’ll take you down with us.’

  His mother, that was the key. ‘He’s all I’ve got now. How am I going to manage?’ Falaschi had to be saved from a prison sentence and the marshal was going to save him. It took little more than an hour and a half. If Giusti, his shaven head gleaming even in the poor artificial light of the windowless cell, could be used against the weaker Falaschi, Rinaldi’s not being arrested was the best possible weapon against Giusti. The marshal got everything they knew and arrived home in good time for lunch. He had an appetite, too.