The Last Enemy Read online

  I still love him, she thought with some surprise. He’s demanding, arrogant, and most of the time not very likeable, but when has love been rational? She’d blamed her husband for alienating Camillo, their only son, and when Camillo died, she’d blamed him for his death. But despite his own loss, and Amelia knew it was great—the title would now die with him and family name and honor were paramount to Umberto—he had held her in his arms every night for five months, some times through the night, when she was in despair and spoke of killing herself. I love him, Amelia acknowledged to herself. And now more than ever, he needs me.

  Artemisia Casati watched her mother watching her father. I’m still outside their circle, she thought, and blamed her mother for excluding her. She couldn’t remember ever having loved her mother, not even when she was a young child. Marie, their maid, had fed, washed, dressed, and loved her, had supplied all her physical and emotional needs for the first ten years of her life. She supposed that she had loved Marie in return. She had certainly cried when Marie left, the day after her tenth birthday, to return to Sicily. Her father’s response to Artemisia’s tears was that she was too old for pampering, but Artemisia knew it was her mother’s decision that had sent Marie to Sicily and her to boarding school in England.

  She leaned against one of the portico’s pillars, the darkness creating a wall of privacy between herself and the others. The muffled drum acted as a prompt to her memory. She remembered exactly the day and hour when her father had first really noticed her. It had been the Good Friday after her brother’s death. Artemisia had volunteered that year to carry the cross that Camillo had carried in previous processions—begged, in fact, since no woman had yet carried one of the crosses. It wasn’t until Good Friday morning that Artemisia told her parents that she would be one of the processionists that year. When she took the cross in her grasp, the look of pride on her father’s face provided her first moment’s assurance that she was loved, perhaps had been loved all along.

  Artemisia did not repeat her father’s failure. Tall, athletic, and a Jesuit in temperament, she’d planned with care to ensure her success. She had practiced carrying the cross in the cloisters during those long winter twilight hours when only the Franciscans had access to the Basilica. The robe, made especially for her, had shoulder and torso padding built in.

  She had grown close to her father since that day seventeen years ago. He had helped with her career, discussed art with her, and introduced her to the right people in the Italian art world. Her first job, as an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Umbria, had come through his influence. Last week, the count had called her into his library to tell her the news: She was front-runner to become the new director of the Umbrian National Gallery.

  Her recently published book, A Woman’s Art, had received international acclaim. Without this achievement, she wouldn’t even be a candidate. But Artemisia also knew the Italian art world and acknowledged to herself that her father’s influence had made the difference. She smiled with some satisfaction at the thought that not only would she be the Gallery’s first woman director but, at thirty-seven, the youngest director of a regional art museum in Italy.

  Her mother’s overloud whisper directed at Artemisia, but probably overheard by everyone on the steps, brought her out of her reverie.

  “Do you have any idea where Rita is?” Amelia asked. “When we left the house, I thought she was in her room dressing and was going to come later with you and Paola.”

  Artemisia shrugged her shoulders. “No idea. I walked here by myself. Ask Paola,” she responded, showing no particular concern. She hadn’t told anyone about Rita’s visit to her room earlier that day, certainly not her mother.

  It was too late, however, for further questions. The lone drummer had reached the crescent of via Portica and could be seen entering the Piazza. A drumbeat reverberated through the Piazza and through history. The drummer passed the Piazza del Populo, where noblemen from the upper town had fed pork stuffed with human remains to their enemies in the lower town. He passed the Torre del Populo, where an Assisi barber was rumored to have murdered his cuckolding wife by throwing her from the tower. He passed the Temple of Minerva, whose steps had been consecrated first by Roman and then by Christian zealots with the blood of their enemies.

  The mournful beat of the drum moving ever closer had also reminded Paola of previous Good Fridays. She hated the ritual of the Good Friday procession, and for most of her teen years she had managed to avoid it by sneaking out of the house to meet her friends. But no matter where they went in Assisi, they could still hear the lamentations of the drum. Her high school boyfriend had devised a contest: See who can inhale and hold it for the full drumroll. They were smoking pot, and it was no small feat to keep the smoke down for the full ten seconds. She usually arrived home and was in bed, feigning sleep, before her grandparents returned from their precious dinner and their pretentious friends.

  This year Paola was in Assisi on sufferance and had decided that accommodation might be the wiser course of action. Orlando, the bar’s manager and an old friend, had found her a spot in the corner of the portico, immediately outside and to the left of the bar door. He’d even found her a chair so that she—a slight five-foot-two-inches tall—was well hidden seated among a standing crowd of German and English tourists. In the twenty minutes that they had been waiting for the procession to reach the Piazza, she had smoked a half package of cigarettes, nervously lighting each new cigarette from the previous one before stamping it out on the cement floor.

  She’d always found it hard to concentrate when she had an important decision to make. In the past, she had let the decisions make themselves, generally following whatever person or idea seemed strongest at the moment. It was different this time. She knew that whatever decision she reached, its consequences would affect her for the rest of her life. She had desperately needed someone to turn to. God help me, she thought, why did I choose Rita?

  It was John Williams’s first Good Friday in Assisi, yet perhaps more than other onlookers, he understood the need of the cross-bearers to lessen their future purgatorial torment through an imaginative recreation of the torment of Jesus. Rita had repeatedly urged him to join the processionists this year and had even asked permission on his behalf, but in that, at least, he had resisted. He and Paola were both suffering from the effects of too much Rita.

  He had arrived in Assisi in early December and had met Rita as their fingers touched in the holy water font after mass at San Stefano’s, on the Sunday before Christmas. She had approached him outside, smiling, hand extended. “You’re new here,” she said in English. “I saw you a few days ago buying meat at the butcher; you left your guidebook on the counter. I called after you, but I don’t think you heard me! How is your Italian coming? Please don’t think I’m meddling, but I’d noticed that you had trouble ordering your groceries. I teach at a language school here in Assisi. Most of our students leave after three months speaking basic Italian. I teach English there. It’s obvious you don’t need my course. You’re Canadian, aren’t you? I could tell by your accent.”

  She was right about his need to learn Italian. He had always been a loner and had believed himself to be self-sufficient. He hadn’t realized until he arrived in Assisi how much comfort and human interaction there is in the simple act of buying groceries or of ordering a meal in a restaurant. In Assisi, he was cut off from the comfort of shared language. The tradespeople smiled politely when he tried talking to them. At least Rita talked back.

  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 WAS EARLY morning and Sergeant Genine Antolini was thinking about chocolate while waiting for her replacement to appear. Genine was always thinking about chocolate—éclairs, cornetti with dark chocolate filling, and her favorite, Baci creams. Just thinking about the moist fudge center of a Baci with its nut topping had her salivating. Like most people, Genine had a number of bad habits but she publicly acknowledged only one, an incessant craving for chocolate. It was Lent and Genine had restricted her chocolate intake to one café marocchino a day. But tomorrow was Easter Sunday, Lent would be over, and Chocolate Heaven awaited. As soon as her replacement signed in (Franco was late as usual), Genine would stop at the Bar Sensi for a café marocchino and then catch the bus to Santa Maria degli Angeli and home.

  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

  COMMISSARIO ALESSANDRO CENNI, Alex to his friends, had just won the football match for Perugia with a free kick directly into the upper right corner of the goal when Inspector Piero Tonni, the game referee approached. “Beautiful goal, Alex. We’ve got the championship locked up this year, for sure.”

  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.