When he was finished, Inspector Scarpa said, ‘Can we see the room?’
Massimo swallowed the last drops of the grappa; his ‘Sorry?’ was strangled slightly by its fire.
‘The room you checked. Where you heard the intruder.’
‘There was no intruder. Just a window that wasn’t locked properly.’
‘Can we see it?’
‘I don’t see why this is so—’
Inspector Scarpa held up his hand. In a soporific voice, he said: ‘Per favore, Signore Poerio. Please. Indulge us. We shan’t take up too much more of your precious time.’
The first sting of sarcasm. It hit home more acutely, coming from Inspector Scarpa’s affable mouth. They suspected him of something. Well, let them.
‘This way,’ he said, brusquely, and set off for the stairs without waiting for them to gather. On the second floor he slipped the bunch of keys, from his waistband and hunted for the relevant master. As he did so, the inspector ran his fingers along the slender knuckles of his opposing hand, eliciting cracks from the joints with little tweaks and twists. The sounds were unbearably loud in the corridor. Massimo dropped his keys. Nobody seemed to mind.
‘Adelina, you say?’ muttered the inspector, in a faraway voice. ‘Adelina?’
‘Yes. What of it?’
Another shrug. ‘It’s familiar. It’s familiar to me.’
Massimo opened the door and stood back to let the other four men into the room. In the mirror, before he could enter, he saw them looking down at a body. The crimson rug that it lay on had once been white. He reacted more quickly than he believed he could have, closing the door and locking it before the police had a chance to stop him. Fists pounded the door, yet still there was no rage in Scarpa’s voice. He sounded saddened. Perhaps he and his father had been closer than he let on. What was it pop had said? You don’t think your papa has his contacts?
Massimo hurried downstairs and pulled on his coat. His mind would not stand still long enough for him to formulate a plan. He should pack a suitcase. He should contact Adelina. Perhaps he should steal the police car.
Instead, he locked the hotel doors behind him and scurried west along the canal. Once past the Piazza San Marco he paused on the Calle Vallaresso, listening for sirens. In Harry’s Bar, he pushed past the lunchtime gathering and found a telephone. He dialled and let it ring for a full three minutes but his father did not answer. Then he tried Adelina’s number. An Englishman answered.
‘Adelina,’ Massimo said. ‘I need to speak to Adelina.’
‘Now capisco, amico.’ His Italian was frustratingly poor.
‘Adelina Gaggio. She lives there. Can you get her for me?’
‘Non. Nobody here by that name.’
Massimo had punched in the correct number. There was no doubt. ‘Please. You have to—’
‘Hey? You deaf? I said nobody here called Adelina. Testa di cazzo.’
Massimo slammed the receiver down. He could go there, to the street Adelina had mentioned, but without an address it could take hours to find her and even then she might not be in. She might be at work.
The glass company.
Excitedly, he dialled 12 and obtained the number from directory services. When he got through to the receptionist at Murano her contact list did not contain any reference to Adelina Gaggio.
‘Has she been with us long?’ the receptionist tried. ‘She might not be on our list if she joined us recently.’
‘Five years,’ Massimo said. A white, abject face stared at him from behind the bar. He was about to order a bellini from it when he realised it was his own, reflected in a mirror. ‘At least five years.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She must—’
‘Very sorry, sir.’
What now? He struggled to keep himself from crying out. He had nobody to go to, other than the police, and they would not be patient with a man who had locked some of their colleagues in a room with a woman he had ostensibly murdered. But surely they would see that his panic was inspired by innocence. If he had killed somebody in his own hotel, would he not take pains to dispose of the body, rather than blithely stroll around Venice having left the main entrance unlocked?
How could Adelina have lied to him? The coolness of the woman as she came out of the room. How could it be that he had called her after twenty years only to find that he had invited a deranged killer onto the premises? The police would not believe him if he told them this, but it was all he had to offer.
He dialled 112 and was patched through. He tried to explain but every time he finished a sentence, the police operator would ask him to expand on every iota of information or ask him to spell the names he mentioned. Then the operator would fudge the spelling and get him to repeat it.
‘Adelina,’ the voice buzzed. ‘What’s that? A-D-A.?’
It dawned on him then, and he replaced the receiver gently. He glanced out of the front windows but how could he chance it? Then again, they would have any rear exit covered too. They would not expect him to leave by the front door.
He saw a group of suits standing to return to the office and he hurried after them, catching up with them, and purposefully barging into a middle-aged woman. He put on a big smile and apologized profusely as they filtered on to the street. He put his hand on her arm. There was wine in her. She was happy and forgiving. She covered his hand with her own and said it was perfectly all right. He asked her what she had had for lunch. He asked her the name of the perfume she was wearing. In this manner he passed along the street with his new friends. He didn’t look back until he was in sight of a safe alleyway he could move down. Only now were the police cars drawing up outside Harry’s Bar. He ran.
This time his father did pick up the phone. But he heard a click, as soft as a pair of dentures nestling together, and he understood that what ought to have been the safest house of all was now the most dangerous.
‘I’m okay, pop,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Massimo,’ his father said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Massimo killed the connection, hoping that even those few seconds had not been enough to expose him to the authorities a second time. He had been running for days, it seemed, but it could only have been a matter of hours. The sunlight was failing now. The light on the canals was turning the colour of overripe peaches. From the east, a wedge of flat, grey sky was closing upon Venice like the metal lid to a box of secrets. Freezing air ran before it, as though the weather too was trying to escape the city’s confused sprawl.
His thoughts turned to the inspector, who had seemed so understanding, yet had contained an edge as hard as the coming cold snap. The policeman’s past seemed as caught up in the Europa as his own. He wished he had had the time to ask his father about the incident that Scarpa had mentioned. He would have been a ten-year-old when the hotel had provided a torture chamber for some of its guests. He couldn’t remember a thing about it, but then he would have been shielded from such an appalling event. He thought of the way his father had said sorry and did not like what his mind came up with.
With no better task to turn to, Massimo caught a vaporetto to San Tomàand hurried the two hundred metres or so to the Campo dei Frari. The woman at the reception desk of the Archivio di Stato looked as impenetrable as a bad clam but she was sympathetic to his needs, even if the five-hour window for requesting materials had lapsed.
It didn’t take long. Once he had been shown how to access the microfiches and blow them up on the viewer, it was simply a matter of trawling through the front pages of Il Gazzettino from 1973. A photograph of the Europa’s exterior halted him before any of the words did. The headline took up much of the page but this had no impact on him once he had noticed the small photograph at the foot of the page, the torture victim who had died. He didn’t need to read the caption to know it was the woman he had entertained in his hotel the previous night.