Claudia smiled brightly, as though putting two and two together at last.
‘Lieutenant Ferrero? Certainly we knew him. He was one of Gaetano’s favourites. But that was all a long time ago.’
She finally seemed to become aware of Danilo’s silence.
‘So why bring it up now?’
‘Because on the basis of the information that we have received, and I must stress that this is strictly confidential, the preliminary identification of the corpse that has been found in those tunnels up in the mountains appears to indicate that it is his.’
Claudia went over to the window giving on to the courtyard of the building. The woman in the apartment opposite had opened her shutters, a thing she only did when she was entertaining one of her many younger lovers that evening. Later, just before the crucial moment, she would teasingly close them again. At least I’ve never sunk that low, thought Claudia abstractly. Flaunting one’s romantic triumphs was vulgar. She finished her cigarette, opened the window and tossed it out.
‘That’s absurd,’ she said, turning back to face Danilo. ‘Lieutenant Ferrero died thirty years ago in a plane crash. An explosion in the fuel tank. Gaetano and I attended the funeral.’
‘So did I. And that’s what we all believed, of course. But it seems that we were wrong.’
‘So what did happen?’
Danilo made a wide, open-handed gesture.
‘That’s what the authorities are trying to find out now. The point is that sooner or later they may come here, wanting to question you. It would therefore be best for you to prepare yourself.’
Claudia walked back to her drink, downing half of it at a gulp.
‘But what on earth has it got to do with me?’
Danilo looked her in the eyes in a way he had never done before.
‘I don’t think you really want me to address that question, Claudia. We both know the answer, and to discuss it would be unnecessarily painful for both of us. At our age one wants to avoid pain as much as possible, don’t you agree?’
The telephone rang, and for once she was eager to answer it. It turned out to be Naldo, making his usual weekly duty call.
‘ Ciao, Naldino! How are you, darling? And how’s the restaurant going? Really? Oh dear! Well, I’m sure things will pick up once spring comes.’
She carried on in this vein for several minutes, deliberately overdoing the maternal gushiness in hopes that Danilo might take the point and leave. But he showed no signs of doing so. Eventually the conversational flow began to dry up and Naldo even started to sound slightly alarmed, as though he suspected that his mother was drunk. And perhaps she was ever so slightly tipsy, for she had a sudden urge to tell Naldo that his father’s body had been recovered. Only Danilo’s presence saved her.
The drawback was that when she hung up, Danilo was still there. Claudia regarded him with the air of someone who has just noticed a very bad smell in the room and is speculating as to its origin.
‘Do forgive me if I’m being dim,’ she said, ‘but I still haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about.’
Danilo walked over and took her hands in his. More physicality. Not wanting to meet his eyes, Claudia looked down at the white, perfectly manicured fingers grasping hers. Not the hands of a soldier, one would have said, although Danilo had served for almost thirty years. He had handled guns, knives, shells, bombs, and perhaps a select number of the young recruits who had passed through the Verona barracks at one time or another, but none of this had left a trace. Then she looked at her own hands, and remembered what they had done.
‘ Cara, you cannot be unaware of the rumours that circulated at the time of Gaetano’s death…’
She snatched her hands away.
‘What rumours? I don’t understand. I refuse to understand!’
Danilo sighed deeply.
‘You understand perfectly well.’
He gestured towards the window.
‘And there are plenty of people out there who understand too, or think they do. You know what this town is like. They’ll be all too ready to gossip to some snooping cop. And this will be an investigation by the polizia di stato, not the carabinieri. They’ve been squared away, but apparently the Ministry of the Interior is now launching its own enquiry. Some political battle I don’t understand. Anyway, the crucial thing is that you’re prepared. Spend a little time thinking over what you want to tell them. Go through your papers to make quite sure that there aren’t any things you’d prefer not to fall into the hands of the judicial authorities. They may have a search warrant, you see.’
‘To search this house? Why on earth would they want to do that?’
‘Well, that rather depends on what they may have learned in the course of their earlier investigations. At all events, Riccardo and I feel very strongly that it would be better to take no chances. Both for your sake, and for the honour of the regiment.’
This last phrase was spoken with a peculiar emphasis. Danilo nodded once, jerkily, turned on his heel and walked out, almost slamming the door behind him.
Claudia stood there for a full minute after he left. Then she went through to the kitchen and refilled her glass from the open bottle of Cinzano Rosso on the counter. Danilo had never spoken to her in such a tone of voice before, like a parade- ground sergeant bawling out some raw recruit. What in the name of God was going on? If the body that had been found really was Leonardo’s, it was she who should be going mad. Instead, everyone else was.
‘For the honour of the regiment’! She’d never thought to hear that cliche again since Gaetano’s death. But once again, apparently, the ranks were closing, and this time against her. No wonder Danilo had wanted his friend to bring the matter up with her. Riccardo was a gentleman through and through, thoroughly decent even if stupendously boring, and given a little more time would have found a way to make her understand what had happened and what needed to be done while respecting her feelings and freedom of action.
She had thought that Danilo was much the same, but she realized now how mistaken she had been. He wasn’t kind; he was a sentimentalist, a very different thing. And like all sentimentalists, he could turn vicious in a moment if thwarted. But how had she thwarted him? What did he want? How much did he know? He’d hinted at this and that, but was it out of tactful discretion, as he’d claimed, or just out of ignorance? He had been playing some sort of game with her, of that she felt sure, but she didn’t know the nature, still less the purpose, of the game. In fact she really didn’t know anything much about Danilo at all, she realized.
On the other hand, she thought, returning to the living room for an unheard-of second cigarette, he didn’t know anything much about her. So there was really nothing to worry about, except of course for those concerned with ‘the honour of the regiment’. They must have been shitting their neatly starched knickers, she thought, using an Austrian expression occasionally voiced by her bilingual mother. If this investigator for the Ministry of the Interior ever found out even a fraction of what had really occurred all those years ago, the honour of the regiment would resemble a pair of those soiled knickers for the foreseeable future. It would be the scandal to end all scandals.
But those in power would of course take steps to prevent this happening, hence the discreetly menacing tone of Danilo’s parting shot. She was to be careful how she handled herself with the police, not just because of her own involvement in the matter, but because if she said the wrong thing and became a liability to those who had even more to lose they would not hesitate to sacrifice her in order to save themselves. Yes, that had been the message: a crude threat wrapped in a thin layer of superficial concern.
She swallowed another gulp of Cinzano, reeling from this revelation but pleased and proud that she still had the wit to work it out. Very well, the situation was clear. Now she had to decide what to do, a much harder matter, and one she certainly didn’t feel up to tackling now. She needed a bit of time to come to terms with what had happened and to work out a course of action. The best way would be to go to the garden and consult The Book. That would help her get things in perspective, as it had so often in the past. And then she might take one of her periodic trips to Lugano and just wait for the whole affair to blow over. She knew from experience that these things always did in the end.