The Last Enemy Read online

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  The Last Enemy

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  The Last Enemy

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  GRACE BROPHY

  Copyright 2007 by Grace Brophy

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brophy, Grace,

  The Last Enemy/ Grace Brophy

  p.cm.--(Soho Crime)

  ISBN-13: 978-56947-459-4

  1. Americans--Italy--Fiction. I. Title

  PS3602.R6463L37 2007 2006052206

  813'.6--dc22

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my husband Miguel Peraza

  Poeta che mi guidi

  And in loving memory of my parents,

  William and Mary Brophy

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  Author’s Note

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  THE CITY OF Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis and a sanctuary of love, peace, and spirituality, is the least likely setting for a story of betrayal and murder that begins on Good Friday, the holiest day in the Christian calendar. But as Dorothy Sayers wrote in her disclaimer to Gaudy Night, writers of murder mysteries “are obliged by their disagreeable profession to invent startling and unpleasant incidents and people.” It is important, therefore, that I affirm that all events and characters in this story, unpleasant, startling, or otherwise, are entirely my own invention. As well, some of the history and dates, institutions, and place names, including Baranj in Bosnia, St. Andrew’s in Newfoundland, and the count’s language school in Assisi, were created out of whole cloth or reshuffled for dramatic purposes.

  The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

  Novissima autem inimica detruetur mors.

  1 Corinthians 15:26.

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  Contents

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  Prologue

  BOOK ONE

  Waiting for Rita

  BOOK TWO

  O death, where is thy sting?

  BOOK THREE

  Easter Sunday

  BOOK FOUR

  Little Rita

  BOOK FIVE

  Disentanglements

  BOOK SIX

  Things are what they are!

  EPILOGUE

  Bread of Angels

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  Prologue

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  RITA MINELLI WAS devoted to Saint Rita. When she was a very young child, she’d prayed to Saint Rita to make her mother love her. In high school, she prayed that she would be asked to join a sorority. When those prayers weren’t answered, she prayed for Michael O’Brien to invite her to the senior prom. He didn’t, but Rita doubted that her mother would have let her go anyway. Her mother didn’t like the Irish. “They drink,” she said.

  Not all of Rita’s prayers went unanswered. She was accepted to Barnard College, an answer to one of her more fervent prayers, but her father died the summer that she graduated from high school and her mother said there was little enough money to pay for household expenses, let alone to send Rita to an expensive private college. Rita thought that if her mother gave up smoking four packages of cigarettes a day, the savings, together with her Regent’s Scholarship, would go a long way toward paying the tuition, but she was ashamed of her rebellious thought and it went unuttered. She attended Brooklyn College, more devoted than ever to Saint Rita.

  She was twenty-two when she graduated from Brooklyn College in 1979. Between graduation and the age of forty-four, when her mother died of lung cancer, Rita’s life was uneventful. She taught English at Erasmus, a Brooklyn high school, went to the occasional movie with one of her unmarried women friends, and very infrequently went into Manhattan for dinner and a show. She was asked out a few times by a fellow teacher. He seemed interested, but her mother didn’t like him, even though he wasn’t Irish. It came to nothing in the end, and he married the Spanish teacher whose homeroom was across from his.

  When her mother died, Rita called her father’s only living relative, a married sister living in Vineland, New Jersey. Her Aunt Marie said traveling to Brooklyn for the funeral was too long a trip. She sent a mass card instead, a large one with gold engraving and her mother’s name written in script. Rita also called her mother’s younger brother, Umberto, in Italy. He told her it was a bad time of year for an academic; he had lectures and exams scheduled for the coming week. He held the Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Perugia, and Rita had to acknowledge that his work in promoting the Italian language was too important to drop at a moment’s notice. Umberto didn’t send a fancy mass card, but he did agree to let Rita bury her mother in the family vault in Assisi after Rita told him that this had been her mother’s dying wish. Her father, Salvatore, had been buried with his parents in St. Anne’s cemetery in Brooklyn. Livia, her mother, had rarely slept with Salvatore in life. It made no sense to change this arrangement in death.

  Rita’s parents had met in Assisi in 1946, at the end of World War II. Salvatore, a first lieutenant in the American Army, was employed by the American occupation forces to monitor the referendum that was to decide Italy’s future. He noticed Livia Casati as soon as she had joined the voting line. It was the first time that Italian women could vote, and only a small number had showed up at the polls. She stuck out from the rest, not only because she was taller, but because of her bearing. Like a queen, he thought. Her clothes were newer than those of the other women in line, and although it was a warm spring day, she wore a fur jacket. He could tell that she was a snob from her carriage and by the way she avoided physical contact with the others. But he didn’t mind. He enjoyed looking at her. Once he caught her eye and winked, but she looked away.

  Until she joined the line, the voting had been peaceful. Then an old woman, shabbily dressed in a man’s oversized wool coat, started talking in a loud voice, “It’s time for them to go, them that think they’re better than the rest of us.”

  Some women in the line nodded in agreement but most stared straight ahead.

  The old woman spoke even louder the second time, “We’ll take care of the Mussolini lovers.” She looked straight at the woman in fur and told her, “There’s plenty of rope left for the likes of you.”

  The newcomer flushed a deep crimson and her posture became even more rigid. At first the soldier thought she would reply, but she broke from the line and hurried away. On impulse, he ran after her. When he caught up with her, her eyes were bright with tears.

  He grabbed her hand. “Don’t mind her; she’s an old fool. Please come back. I’ll put you at the head of the line.”

  “I don’t care who wins! I hate them all!” she replied. Two large tears rolled down her cheeks but she left her hand in his.

  They were married three months later. They would have wed sooner but she had to be vetted by the American Army. His commanding officer was reluctant to approve the marriage. He told Salvatore of Livia’s father’s prominence in the Fascist party, that the man had been killed by a bomb meant for Mussolini. And because he liked the young lieutenant, he pointed out with some delicacy the differences in their social class. Livia Casati’s young brother was a count; her family were members of the Italian aristocracy. Did he think that the daughter of a count could be happy in Brooklyn married to a high school mathematics teacher? But Salvatore refused to take no for an answer. He loved Livia and knew that he would make her happy.

  The Casati family were more adamant than the American army. Livia’s mother and brother refused to attend the wedding. Her brother Umberto, only fifteen at the time, tried to forbid the reading of the banns, but Livia was twenty-two and there were no impediments beyond the family�
�s outrage. It was ten years before Livia and her mother were reconciled. The birth of Rita, and time and distance, effected the reconciliation.

  Livia returned to Assisi only once after that, when Rita was five years old. They stayed for a year and Livia hoped it would be forever. Although Rita missed her father, it was the happiest year of her life. Her grandmother gave her the affection she had always craved from her mother. But hers was a shortlived happiness. Her cousin Camillo was born at the end of the year, and her grandmother transferred her affections to her grandson, the future Count Casati. She no longer had time for little Rita. Shortly afterward, Rita’s father arrived in Assisi to reclaim his wife and daughter. They returned to Brooklyn, Livia more bitter than ever, and Rita with a new prayer to St. Rita: that one day she would return to Assisi.

  Livia’s wake, held in Brooklyn, lasted for two days and two nights. A few of Rita’s friends and colleagues attended, as well as the new neighbors from next door. The other neighbors, the ones who had known Livia, stayed away. It took twelve days to make the arrangements for shipping her mother’s body to Assisi, and Rita was very busy during that time. She put the house up for sale, at a bargain price, closed her savings account at Brooklyn Dime, and had the bank manager issue her a certified check. She notified Social Security of her mother’s death, called her high school to say she would not return in September, and sold all the household furniture and knickknacks, including her mother’s collection of majolica and Venetian glass, to Harry, the antique dealer on Ocean Parkway. He gave her $3,500 for the lot. A week before she was to fly to Assisi, she visited Manhattan for the first time in four years. She spent all but three hundred dollars of Harry’s money on new clothes. With what was left, she had dinner in a Spanish restaurant on Eighth Avenue. She took a taxi home to Canarsie later that night, something she had never done before.

  Rita’s new life started the day they interred her mother in the family vault in Assisi. She had no intention of returning to Brooklyn, although she had neglected to mention this to her uncle or to his wife. In addition to his teaching position at the University of Perugia, the count headed a language school in Assisi that catered primarily to the priests and nuns who came to Italy to study and pray. When one of his English teachers, a woman from Liverpool, gave notice the day before the summer session was to start, Rita volunteered to teach the course in her stead. When it turned out that someone was needed to organize a school trip to Florence, she volunteered for that as well. One night when the family was attending an art exhibit in Perugia, Rita moved her clothes from the small maid’s room in the attics to her grandmother’s bedroom, which was still empty two years after her death. She explained to her family when they returned later that evening that she had spent many happy hours there as a child. In early September, the countess casually inquired when classes would begin at Erasmus. The count was more direct. He asked when exactly she was going home. “I’m not returning to Brooklyn,” Rita announced defiantly. “Assisi is my home.”

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  The Last Enemy

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  Book One

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  Waiting for Rita

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  1

  A ROUGH WIND lifted the decaying leaves that lay in front of the burial chamber and sent them swirling through the iron gates that separate the living from the dead. Two figures occupied the chamber’s narrow inner space. The first, a woman, lay face up, her head resting on a stone altar step. One of the leaves had lodged in her hair. The second figure, enveloped in the cloak and hood of a pilgrim, bent and reverently removed the leaf. The woman gazed upward at the intruder, as though pleading for mercy or forgiveness, and the figure knelt and applied a firm pressure to the woman’s open lids, sealing her eyes in the first ritual of death. A sudden noise disturbed the stillness of the night, causing the cloaked figure to look up, but it was only the cooing of a pigeon. The figure then made the sign of the cross over the woman and whispered a benediction in Latin before proceeding to raise her skirt. The woman was dressed for enticement and her stockings, of black lace, had etched a deep red welt in her firm white thighs. The cloaked figure unhooked the garters and gently eased the stockings down the stillwarm legs, exposing the woman’s dead flesh to the frigid night air. The pigeon, nesting for the night, cooed again, but the intruder was too intent to hear.

  2

  IT WAS LATE March, crisp and cold, with the smell of snow in the night air. Those who stood on the steps of the Bar Sensi waiting for the procession of the cross to pass were shivering with cold. Some had ordered red wine or grappa to warm them. But the Casatis were traditionalists. They would wait to have their wine—a good French Chardonnay—and mandatory fish dinner later in the evening.

  Viewing the Good Friday procession together as a family was a Casati ritual. For the first few hundred years, they had viewed it from the portico of their home on via San Francisco. (The family had been resident in Assisi since the Fourth Crusade.) For the past thirty years, they had viewed it in the Piazza del Comune and from there gone to dine with family and friends at a local restaurant. Five of them were gathered together that evening: Count Umberto Casati, Amelia Casati, his Englishborn wife, their daughter Artemisia, their son’s daughter Paola, and John Williams, a Canadian cartographer. They were waiting for a sixth. Rita Minelli, the count’s niece, was missing.

  “Perhaps we should go back to the house to see if she’s all right? You know how devout she is,” the countess whispered to her husband. “She won’t want to miss this.”

  “Leave well enough alone,” the count replied sharply. “Let’s have at least one evening free of her simpering platitudes.”

  He spoke louder than he’d intended and Amelia quickly glanced around, hoping that John Williams hadn’t overheard. “He’s right behind us. He may have heard you,” she murmured.

  “Good,” the count responded. “Perhaps he’ll get the hint and leave. Who gave her permission to invite him, anyway?” He looked at his wife accusingly.

  “I couldn’t refuse when she asked. If I had, she would have come alone and made it evident to everyone that she’s the despised relative. I did my best in a difficult situation.”

  The count was only half-listening to his wife’s excuse. He’d just heard the distant drumroll from below, an indication that the procession was fast approaching the Piazza. Two men moved quickly through the Piazza, filling and lighting the cressets that adorned every public building in Assisi. Soon the electric lights in the Piazza would be extinguished. The evening stars and the flicker of flames from the cressets would serve as the only guides to those carrying the crosses symbolizing the passion and death of Christ.

  Umberto had carried one of those crosses when he was only twelve. The Franciscans had wanted to cancel the procession that year. “The war has caused enough suffering,” they’d told his father. “The people don’t need further reminders. And where will we find the young men to carry the crosses?”

  His father, who was head of the Fascist party in Assisi, viewed the procession as emblematic of Italy’s great strength, its ability to observe its rituals despite the hardships of war. He volunteered his son. Although still too young to wear the black shirt, Umberto could don the white robe of a crossbearer.

  Most of the other processionists that year were elderly, former cross-bearers who had volunteered to replace the young men who’d been sent to war. One of them, a pensioner of his father’s, had offered Umberto a folded towel as padding for his shoulder while they were dressing. “The cross bites into your skin,” he said. Umberto had rejected the offering.

  When they’d first exited the Basilica, the drumroll, one long beat and two short, had invigorated young Umberto. He had fasted all day and his dinner was waiting; he was impatient to get to the bottom of via San Francisco to begin the ascent to via Portica and the Cathedral of San Rufino. He soon realized how foolish he’d been to reject Pietro’s towel and the reason for the other processionists’ deliberate pace. The cross
, a minor burden when he had first assumed it in the Basilica, grew in size and weight with each step. He could feel the rough wood biting through the cheap cotton of his robe; he was sure he had a splinter in his shoulder. He had tripped twice on the long robe, the hood obscured his vision, and his feet were raw from the cobblestones that bruised his tender unshod flesh. The unvarying drumroll was maddening.

  He never again participated in the Good Friday procession. The memory of that night in 1943 would suffice him for eternity.

  His wife could tell by the frozen look on Umberto’s face that he was not listening to her. He rarely did. Good Friday was always difficult. She couldn’t understand why he insisted on punishing himself by watching the procession each year. She knew he had dropped out once when he was only a boy, before the procession had reached the cathedral. For most people this would have been a minor failure; for Umberto it had assumed the proportions of a tragedy.

  Looking at her husband by the light of the cressets, she could see how little he had changed in the years since they’d married. He was still strikingly handsome. His black hair, once worn long in the fashion popular at the University of Perugia, was now gray and cut close to his head, but it was still ample for a man of seventy-one. He stooped a little now, but other women still looked at her with envy when they appeared together in public.