Daggers and Men's Smiles (35 page)

“Tell me again,
caro Eduardo
.”

“Sophia Maria Catellani is now a widow and she lives with her daughter and her son-in-law, who owns a restaurant and bakery in the town, and her two grandchildren, a boy and a girl.”

“And she is —?”

“I think she's my half-sister. My father's child by my godmother, Maria Colombo.”

“You never knew. Do you think your mother knew?”

“I don't think so — at least, not in so many words. She was not a fool, she may have guessed and decided to let the past alone. According to her adoption papers, Sophia Maria Colombo was a war orphan. Her true identity was buried to protect the unmarried mother. The birth certificate says ‘father unknown.'”

“But what makes you think you share the same father?”

The same gut feeling
, he wanted to say,
that made me pursue a past drama as the motive for murder. Masculine intuition
. Instead, he said, “Here we are. It's the best restaurant in town, they tell me.”

The restaurant was in a pretty stucco building with geranium-filled window boxes, green shutters, and small wrought-iron balconies that curved around the upstairs windows. Moretti and Sydney Tremaine were received by the owner, a strongly built man in his early twenties. The place was busy, but he found them a table near the window. The dull light beyond the glass took on a brighter gloss against Sydney's hair, the cranberry colour of her cashmere sweater.

They ordered their food and ate without much conversation, small talk not being the lingua franca of their particular country, a landscape across which they moved together in physical harmony. Not words; there were few words. She picked up a grape and put it in his mouth, and Moretti felt his body tremble as the world shimmered and spun around him with the touch of her fingers.

“So, are you going to ask —.”

Before Sydney could answer, a middle-aged woman came through from the kitchen, carrying a small child in her arms, and Moretti felt a chill run through him. He was looking at an older, female version of himself, with the dark eyes of his godmother.

“My God,” Sydney said.

Moretti watched the woman sit down with a middle-aged couple at a nearby table, handing over her grandson to be admired, watched her laugh and talk with them.

Moretti thought of another so-called war orphan and his father and mother. Stefan and Sylvia Vannoni, the father murdered, the baby wrenched from the
sepolta viva
, raised in a foreign land. Wouldn't Steve Romano of New York City have been better off not seeking his true identity?
Truth
, thought Moretti,
is not always the best thing, not always the right thing
.

“Well,” said Sydney, “are you going to do anything?”

Across the room, Sophia Maria held out her arms for the child. A line of Dante's came to Moretti from
The Divine Comedy
— one of the few works he had read in Italian.
Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.
Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on. He did not remember committing it to memory, and it seemed to him like a sign.

“What are you going to do?” Sydney asked again.

“I'm going to take you back to Florence and spend the night with you,” he said.

He stood up and held out his hand for Sydney.

“What do you think happened? How did it happen?”

Her hand was warm against his shoulder. Moretti picked it up and kissed it. The dawn light was just filtering through the curtains of the bedroom. Beyond lay the Uffizi and the Bargello, the candy stripes of Brunelleschi's Duomo. One day he would come back and explore his father's country, but for now the world was here, in her green eyes and her long dancer's limbs and her red hair.

“It's possible they really
did
believe she was a war orphan. My father disappeared, and even his own family didn't know where he was or what happened to him. So my godmother gave up her child, and gave up on Emidio Moretti, and moved away. He came back after the war, she had moved, and he'd fallen in love with my mother.”
Como un fulmine, Eduardo
. He could hear his father's voice.

“Enough about me. Tell me more about this movie.”

She sat up, and he could feel the excitement in her body already distancing her from him.

“It's about Marie Taglioni — she was one of the great Romantic ballerinas of the nineteenth century, daughter of a Milanese dancing master. She changed the look of ballet — Bournonville created
La Sylphide
for her. When I went to meet the director and producer, what I had in mind was to be an expert consultant on the dance of the period. What they had in mind was to cast me as Taglioni. I was amazed.”

“I can't think why.”

“I'd lost faith in myself. Some people are not — good — for you. Or maybe I'm not good for some people.”

“I'm trying to read between the lines.”

She turned to him. “Ed, my sweet tender Ed, at the risk of sounding trite, I have to find myself before I commit to anyone else again. Remember Giulia's statue? She is Arethusa, a water nymph who dived into a river to escape a river god and came up again as a freshwater spring in Sicily. God, I'm getting confused here, but what I'm trying to say is —”

“You don't want to metamorphose into a freshwater spring in Guernsey.”

“Something like that.”

Moretti saw the armless woman bathing her blue-green body in the lake at the Manoir Ste. Madeleine. Sydney's underwater Ophelia smile was gone. Immobility and immutability were only good for statues, and that was what commitment could do, if it was one-sided. The irony was not lost on him.

“I understand,” he said. “Something I keep meaning to ask you — the name of your perfume.”

“
Je reviens
, Eduardo.”

Together they laughed at the apposite name, the triteness of the cliché.

The ATR was bringing them in across the harbour. No clear blue sky this time, but the soft grey light of approaching winter on St. Peter Port below. How could he have thought that Castle Cornet still looked like an eighteenth-century print? The old tower on the engraving was long gone and facing the sea was the great concrete rampart of a German gun emplacement, built on earlier foundations.

One saw what one wanted to see. Monty Lord had clearly seen a sword in the hand of the angel on the ceiling at San Jacopo.
But the hands were no longer there, and it could just as well have been a lyre, or a harp
, thought Moretti. Soon they would pass over the military underground hospital, the manor with its hidden bunker.
Festung Guernsey
. A world buried beneath the rock of the island. War buried many things: crimes, past passions, motivations.

He thought about his father. Had the discovery of Sophia Maria changed how he felt about him? Theirs had been a relationship both abrasive and tender, his mother often the buffer between them. Now all he remembered, all he felt, was tenderness. After what Emidio Moretti had been through, and survived, how could he pass up the chance to live his life with the woman he called his angel of mercy?

Como un fulmine, Eduardo.

* * *

Liz Falla was waiting for him with the police Mercedes.

“Congratulations on your promotion, Detective Sergeant Falla. Giorgio Benedetti sends his best.”

She was giving him one of her looks again. “Thank you. Good holiday, Guv? How was the weather?”

“The weather was good.”

The weather kept them going for a while, a bridge between the personal and the professional.

“The Martello tower on Icart Point is up for sale, Guv.”

“So, Giulia Vannoni is leaving the island. How about the marchesa?”

“Well, there was talk she was going to leave when the media were after her, but things have quietened down now. You were right to get away. You're no longer headlines in the
Guernsey Press
, and you don't hear much about the case on BBC Guernsey or Channel Television any more. Are they still on about the Vannoni story in Italy?”

“No. No one is that bothered about two possible, and unproven, murders and a suicide back at a time many people would rather forget. Most of the reporting was of the ‘unbalanced American producer kills writer and member of distinguished Italian family' kind. That's the very last thing Monty Lord would have wanted, now that the Vannonis have lost their nemesis, the last real chance of disclosure.”

“It was Bella Alfieri who picked up the daggers wasn't it?”

“Wearing a red wig, yes. And Signor Baza was named after the headquarters of the Slovenian resistance at the end of the war. PC Brouard found that on the internet.”

They passed the bottom of Fountain Street, where the condemned walked down from Beauregard Tower to a terrible death.

“That business at my place,” said Moretti. “It wasn't your imagination, Falla. It was Monty Lord, I'm sure, and if Sydney had stayed there, he'd have got to her. She could have held up the completion of
Rastrellamento
, and that was the last thing he wanted.”

“She spooked me.” His partner sounded gruff, offhand.

“Okay, she spooked you.” Liz Falla could hear the smile in his voice. “But I'd hate to see your grandmother's tall tales cost you the use of your instincts. Remember what you said to me when I was questioning my own?”

“I remember. I met Dwight Ellis in town yesterday — he was asking after you.”

Moretti was happy to change the subject. “I'll drop in to the club tonight. You know Dwight?”

“I'm partial to salt beef and red peas, that's how I met him.”

Moretti could hear Dwight now in his head, playing. “He's a good musician — you'll have to come and hear him some time,” he said. “Sydney Tremaine says you sing like Enya with a touch of Marianne Faithfull. Is that possible, I ask myself.”

Liz Falla turned and grinned at him. “And you'll have to come to one of
our
gigs some time,” she said. A stray glint of sunlight caught her hair, streaking it with bronze, and Moretti remembered the cat he'd bought from the guy in Grosseto selling fake Etruscan shit. It was up on the windowsill in his kitchen, awaiting a decision.

Too much time has passed
, he told himself, and a gift now would look somehow calculated, certainly not spontaneous. So he sat silent, listening to Dwight. He and Garth Machin were now playing a riff on “You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me.”

The music was playing once more in his head, thank God. That was all that mattered. Case closed, bury the past.

A thing once done has an end.