The Last Enemy (2 page)

They met the next day for coffee and every day after that. She became his guide and interpreter. She told him where to buy groceries, which restaurants offered good value, which coffee bars to frequent. She had even helped him to find an inexpensive apartment. He had complained of the cold, and for Christmas she had given him a cashmere scarf. She had hinted that they should spend New Year’s Eve together. When he didn’t respond, she had asked directly. “I won’t take no for an answer,” she had said.

His headaches had grown more frequent since the New Year. The nightmare that had haunted him since adolescence had assumed a different, more menacing shape. The hooded figure that lurked in every dark corner of his sleep had turned into a woman. She loomed over him, her breasts foul with the smell of fetid milk, urging him to drink. The nightmare had become even more persistent in the last week, the hour after waking more terrifying. He thought often of Addison’s dying words, “See in what peace a Christian can die.” If he could choose death he would, but without redemption, dying would bring no peace. He knew better than most that for those who shed innocent blood, there is no redemption.

They were still waiting for Rita, but the procession moved inexorably on, pausing for no one, through the Piazza del Comune and up via San Rufino, each drumroll a call to those seeking salvation to remember the passion of Christ, to seek forgiveness in his death. In their demonstration of faith, the processionists were indistinguishable from one another. They had shed the outward signs of age, wealth, and gender when they donned their robes in the Basilica and took up their crosses. Some of the onlookers would later claim that Rita had been among them, that she was the one who had stumbled as they climbed toward San Rufino.

Book Two

O death, where is thy sting?

1

It had been a long night. Only two tourists from New York, lost and looking for their hotel, had set foot in the station. And one telephone call, a complaint from the Sisters of the Redemption that Guiseppe Guido, drunk as usual, was camped out in front of San Ruffino, cadging contributions from the tourists leaving Good Friday services. Guiseppe had been delivered to his mother’s house on via Metastasio and the New Yorkers had been sent on their way with a map of Assisi, their hotel clearly marked in red. Genine wondered how any one could get lost in Assisi, a town of fewer than twenty main streets. But with its warren of winding alleys, hidden squares, and steep cobbled stairways, Assisi was a world away from the straightforward grid of Manhattan streets.

Good Friday is always slow in Assisi. The citizens of Assisi, if one excepts the nuns and priests living there, are no more religious than most Italians; the men and younger women leave churchgoing and godly intercession to their mothers and grandmothers. They prefer the footballs fields or the Collestrada mall, with its boutiques and fast food shops, for hanging out. But Good Friday is the most sacred of holy days in Catholicism, particularly in Assisi, rooted as it is in the legend of Saint Francis,
il piu santo dei santi.
The teenagers from Santa Maria degli Angeli, who normally liked to congregate in the Piazza Santa Chiara on Friday night, boisterous and happy, playing their boomboxes way too loud for Assisi’s more sedate residents, were at home with their families. The Irish pub in Piazza Matteotti at the top of the town, generally good for a few disturbances on a Friday night, was closed, its owner back in Dublin for the holidays.

The noise of the outer door opening stopped Genine’s musings. Franco had finally arrived, no doubt direct from a night of salsa dancing in Perugia. She was surprised when instead of Franco, she saw two women, both laden with baskets of flowers, standing in the doorway. She recognized the older woman at once: Sophie Orlic, a Croatian and something of a troublemaker. She knew the other woman too: a girl actually, of about nineteen, though not by name. She had passed her many times on Corso Mazzini wheeling her newborn—a sweet doeeyed infant daughter—Genine recalled. She knew from their faces that this was serious. The younger woman had been crying and her legs were buckling as she approached the desk. The Croatian was also visibly upset, her face flushed, her breathing heavy, as though she had been running. Genine motioned them both to a bench along the wall and hurried from behind the desk.

The older woman spoke in concise, stilted Italian. “We were arranging flowers in the cemetery for Easter. We found a dead woman in one of the vaults.”

“Was it someone you recognized?” Genine asked.

“It’s the American.” Sophie paused a moment before speaking again. “Rita Minelli.”

The younger woman started to cry, and her tears spilled down unrestrained onto her coat and into the basket of flowers at her feet. Orlic, who in their previous encounters had struck Genine as a woman of little feeling, surprised her by taking the younger woman into her arms. She cradled her gently, speaking her name in tender whispers. Genine thought she’d called her Christina but couldn’t be sure.

2

Cenni laughed, “
Grazie
, Piero. For sure, your neutrality is appreciated by the Foligno team. What’s up?”

“The questore called. Trouble in Assisi. An American, niece of a friend of the PM’s, was murdered last night. Looks like she was raped. He wants us there as soon as possible.”

“Give me ten minutes to shower. And call Elena. We’ll need a woman with us if it’s rape. Tell her to meet us at Assisi headquarters in thirty minutes.”

Acknowledged by his colleagues to be the best midfielder in the Poliza di Stato football league, Cenni was currently assigned to a special task force established by the prime minister to deal with international terrorism and politically sensitive domestic crimes. The murder of the niece of a friend of the PM is hardly a sensitive domestic issue, Cenni thought as he soaped himself. But if she’s an American, then of course the questore will insist that we take over.

All Italy was on terrorist alert that week. Since 9/11 all of Europe had been on terrorist alert all of the time. But Easter was a particularly difficult period with a few million tourists in Italy, a good many of them American, to celebrate Holy Week. The American authorities had issued an advisory a few days earlier warning its citizens to stay away from Rome, Florence, and Venice. The mayors of Florence and Venice were livid. Tourism was their main source of income and Americans were their biggest spenders. The mayor of Rome was too busy looking after his political career to care one way or the other. Cenni was sure the PM had agreed to the warnings, probably even encouraged them. He was anxious to play with the big guys and he finally had his chance.

The threat of terrorism was nothing new to the Italian police. They had been living with domestic terrorism, right and left, for more than a hundred years. Cenni’s colleagues had been none too happy when they were forced to attend a lecture on terrorism given by the Americans. He could still hear Piero’s grumbles. “A whole lot they can teach us about terrorism. How many of their prime ministers and judges have been kidnapped and murdered?” Cenni had responded with gentle irony. “Perhaps that’s why!”

Piero Tonni was a complainer by nature. He complained when they had too much work and when they had too little. He didn’t like the food they served in the cafeteria—the pasta was from a box, the sauce too spicy, the cheese too old. When Cenni suggested that he go home for lunch, he complained that his mother’s cooking was too rich, it was making him fat. Only Piero, Cenni thought, would break the Italian code of silence on mamma’s cooking to serve a higher god, his need to complain. Cenni was sure that the entire ride to Assisi would be one long litany of complaints and was surprised when he got into the car to find Piero singing
Volare
off key. He was even more surprised when Piero pulled into one of the larger Ponte San Giovanni gas stations and instead of filling up with gas, ran inside the coffee shop. He returned with a roll of Baci chocolates.

“I thought you were on a diet?”

“They’re not for me,” Piero answered, his face pink with embarrassment. “You remember Sergeant Antolini. You know, the blonde who helped us when that painting was stolen from the Basilica museum. She loves chocolates.”

“The blonde!” Cenni responded laughing. “You’re very delicate. Isn’t she the one with the huge breasts? If I remember correctly, you couldn’t take your eyes off them. I’m surprised you even noticed the color of her hair.”

Piero flushed even darker.
“Dottore!”

Whenever Piero addressed him by his title, Cenni knew to tread lightly. “Sorry, Piero. Is there something I should know?”

“Not really. I took her to dinner a month ago. That new trattoria in Piazza Dante. I haven’t called her since.”

“If you’re not interested, why the chocolates?”

“Who says I’m not interested? I figure if I don’t call for a few weeks, she won’t get the wrong idea. I’m not sure I’m ready to get serious.”

“You don’t have to get serious with every woman you take to dinner, even if it’s more than once. In my experience, if a man takes a woman to dinner and he doesn’t call back within a week, she writes him off. You’ll need a lot more than a five pack of chocolates if you want to relight that fire.”

Their conversation came to an end as Piero maneuvered the car around the barrier at the Porta Nuova to show his identification to the officer on duty. Cenni thought it just as well. They were in new territory and he wasn’t sure if either of them wanted to stay there. In the four years that he had worked with Piero their talks, when they went beyond the details of a case, had focused on football or food.

When they pulled up next to the newsstand in Piazza Santa Chiara, they could see that Elena had arrived before them. Her yellow Volkswagen was blocking the entrance to police headquarters. The relationship between Fulvio Russo, Assisi’s Commissario, and his counterparts in Perugia was generally acrimonious. Cenni was sure he’d hear tomorrow about his officer’s lack of courtesy.

Inspector Elena Ottaviani was one of the new issue of woman officers who had come into police work within the last ten years. Cenni had worked closely with a number of EU police organizations in the fifteen years since he had joined the Polizi di Stato, and he inevitably made comparisons. He was impressed with the way Italy had accommodated its women officers without turning them into shorter versions of their male counterparts. They patroled the streets, manned the computers in the back room, answered questions at the front desk, took their places in the front lines of the riot police, and did so in long hair, short hair, painted nails and lips, even occasionally doused in perfume, and generally they performed their duties well and without complaint. Piero could take a leaf from their book, he reflected.

As he started to get out of the car, Elena emerged at the top of the stairway. She noticed at once the glance Cenni gave to her Volkswagen. “
Mi dispiace, capo
. I only intended to be there a minute. I’ll move it.” Elena was the only one of his officers who didn’t address him by his first name. He assumed it was a piece of her generally complicated nonconformist attitude.

“I’ll repark the car and ride with you to the cemetery. The body’s already there. Convenient, don’t you think?” After reparking her car, she slid into the back seat, still talking. “They found her shortly after seven-thirty AM. The police surgeon was called almost immediately, and he’s there too. Appears they don’t read directives very well,” Elena opined, a reference to the bulletin that had been issued nationwide at the beginning of the year.

Cenni needed no reminders. The wording of the directive had been unambiguous.
All police organizations will immediately
report any serious crime involving Americans to the Polizi di Stato Task
Force on Terrorism.
A regional phone number and name had been appended and Cenni’s name was listed for the Perugia Questura. He wondered why Fulvio Russo had waited so long to call, and why he had called Carlo Togni and not him directly. No doubt, it will come out during the investigation, Cenni thought. Whether it would have serious repercussions was another matter, one he preferred not to think about at the moment.

“Do you think we should go inside first, to introduce ourselves?” Piero inquired anxiously.

“The sergeant’s up at the cemetery,” Elena replied, nudging Cenni in the back. “You can introduce yourself up there. I’ll fill you in on the details before we get there. I have a copy of the murdered woman’s application for a
soggiorno
. They gave it to me—after some arm-twisting,” she appended, this time directing her words to Cenni.

On the short drive to the cemetery, Elena filled them in on what she had just learned. “The victim’s American. One Rita Minelli, niece of Umberto Casati. Old Assisi family, friends in high places. Oh, and he still refers to himself as
Count Casati
. Guess he was out to lunch when they passed the Act of 1947,” she added, referring to the law enacted at the end of the war abolishing Italian titles. A fervent antimonarchist, Elena had been raging for the past two weeks. A member of the PM’s party had suggested in Parliament that the time was ripe to bring back the monarchy. Cenni had ducked into the men’s room at least twice in the past week to avoid one of her tirades.

Elena ignored the pained look that passed between the two men and continued her recital. “Minelli was forty-five, if we’re to believe what she wrote on her application,” she tacked on needlessly. Cenni reflected that Rita Minelli would have had to submit some evidence of her age when she applied for a
permesso di soggiorno
, probably her U.S. passport. Elena knows this, he thought, but he also recognized that they each had their own way of dealing with violent death. Elena’s was to establish an immediate distance between herself and the victim. It was one of the few criticisms he had of her police work.

“She arrived in Assisi last June to bring her mother’s body home for burial and never left. She’s been teaching English since July at her uncle’s language school here in Assisi. Lives with him and his family. Two of the ladies who arrange flowers at the cemetery found the body shortly after seven-thirty AM, in the Casati family vault. Her head was bashed in, probably with a statue from the altar. Looks like rape! That’s sum total of what I got from the officer on desk duty. Sergeant Antolini will be our liaison on the case. She can fill us in on the rest.”

An aficionado of American culture, she finished by humming “Love Is in the Air,” a deceptively benevolent look on her face. Piero grinned but said nothing. Cenni was still struck by the amount of teasing Piero accepted from Elena. She needled him constantly, yet they remained friends. It appeared that she was also his confidante on the subject of Sergeant Antolini. But Piero was not the only one to get the needle.