The Dante Conspiracy (12 page)
‘It’s not yet been confirmed, but one of the neighbours who came
out of his house as soon as the first car arrived has already identified him as
Paolo
Bardolino
. If it is him, he was the owner of that
property.’
Perini looked over to where Lombardi was pointing.
‘Nice,’ he said.
‘Really old and really expensive.
Has anyone been inside yet?’
‘No, because we can’t get anyone to answer
either the bell or the phone.
The main street door’s locked, but the side
door, which you get to through that courtyard over there, looks as if it’s been
forced. There are fresh marks on the wood where somebody’s used a crowbar or a similar
tool on it, but the door won’t open. It’s as if something’s blocking it on the inside.
I’m thinking it might have been a burglary that went wrong. Maybe the owner – assuming
this is him – disturbed them and got shot for his trouble.’
Perini didn’t look convinced, and turned around in a complete
circle, taking in the body, the house and all the surroundings.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘There’s more to it than that.’
‘What? Why do you say that?’
‘Several reasons.
Burglars very rarely
carry pistols, because the penalties are so severe if they get caught.
A cosh, perhaps, maybe even a knife, but almost never a firearm.
And burglars always try to take the easy way out. They break in, burgle a property
and then get out as quickly as they can. In fact, the first thing many burglars
do after they’ve got inside a building is to open one or two doors, so they know
exactly what their escape route is going to be.’
‘Maybe they did,’ Lombardi said, ‘and the front door slammed
shut in the wind and locked itself.’
Perini shook his head.
‘No. Apart from the fact that there’s virtually no wind down
this street, I can see from here that there’s a deadlock on the main door. To lock
that you need a key, so either somebody locked it from the outside – and if you’re
a burglar fleeing from a house where you’ve just killed a man, why would you take
the time to do that? –
or
it’s been locked or bolted from
the inside. And then there’s the window.’
‘What window? Oh, you mean the one that’s open down the alley?
I assumed that was open just to let a bit of air into the house.’
‘Opening a window for ventilation normally only works if you
open two of them, to generate a through breeze, and most people crack them open
part-way and use the latch to lock them in position. That window is wide open, pushed
back against the frame. I think whoever was in the house probably left the property
that way, because they didn’t want to walk out into the street. And they didn’t
want to walk out here because of what had already happened to this man.’
It was Lombardi’s turn to look unconvinced.
‘You seem to be making rather a lot of assumptions there, Silvio.’
‘I don’t think so. Look at the alternative scenario. The owner
finds somebody burgling his house, opens the front door and runs away to summon
help. The burglar follows him outside, shoots him in the back once and misses twice,
at a range of just two or three metres, then turns around and locks the door before
making good his escape. Does that seem any more likely or reasonable?’
Lombardi shrugged.
‘If you put it like that, no.’
‘How many shell cases have you found?’
‘Three, all nine millimetre, and all near the
main door.’
He pointed at three small inverted ‘V’ shaped pieces of cardboard
fairly close together on the pavement, each bearing a number.
Perini nodded, and looked around again. The he stiffened as he
stared down the street, and strode briskly away, Lombardi following a few paces
behind, a puzzled expression on his face.
‘What is it?’ the sergeant asked.
Perini stopped beside a house on the opposite side of the road
and pointed at a gouge in one of the stones in the wall.
‘What does that look like to you?’ he demanded.
‘Maybe somebody hit it with a hammer,’ Lombardi suggested.
‘Or perhaps it was hit by a bullet. We could be looking at the
scene of a fire-fight, and that old man just got in the way. And before you tell
me I’m imagining things, Cesare, just take a look behind you.’
The sergeant turned quickly, and almost immediately spotted what
Perini had already seen: there was another brass nine millimetre cartridge case
lying in the gutter.
‘So that’s three shots, but four cartridge cases,’ Perini said,
‘so one of these people must have been using a suppressor, unless nobody living
here can count to more than three. My guess is that the man who fired the shot that
killed
Bardolino
was standing over here, and maybe only
fired once, and then somebody near the house shot back at him, and probably not
the old man, because it looked to me as if he was walking or running in the opposite
direction, but make sure the pathologist is told to test his hands to see if he
did fire a weapon.’
‘Right, Silvio, you’ve made your point. I’ll get the scene of
crime people to widen their search down the street. They’d have checked it anyway,
but I’ll get them on it straight away.’
‘Let me know how you get on. I’m going to get some breakfast,
and I’ll see you in the office when you’ve finished here, because I think I’ve worked
out something about our Dante mystery. And at least we can be pretty sure this killing
is nothing to do with that dead poet.’
Perini’s certainty about that particular aspect of the shooting
in Florence lasted for only another couple of hours, because of a visitor who arrived
while Lombardi was still out at the crime scene.
He was again looking over some of the notes he’d made before
he’d fallen asleep in the early hours of that morning when the receptionist downstairs
rang him to report that he had a visitor.
‘Who is it?’ Perini demanded.
‘The name in his identity card is Dino
Spagnoli
.’
‘Never heard of him.
What does he want?’
‘He’s a researcher, and he says he has some information to give
you about Dante.’
‘What?’
‘He says he –’
‘No, I heard you,’ Perini interrupted. ‘Send him up here, right
now.’
A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway a minute or so later,
a slightly untidy dark-haired young man standing behind him, clutching a black leather
briefcase. Perini waved them both inside.
‘I hope I’m not wasting your time, inspector,’
Spagnoli
began, taking the seat on the opposite side of the
desk, ‘but I recently found myself in an unusual position, though it didn’t seem
important in any way until this morning.’
Perini held up his hand.
‘Please start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘First of all, who
are you? What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a freelance researcher. Most of the time I’m checking facts
for authors who are writing guide books or novels, investigating the histories of
old buildings in the area, or providing background information on notable Florentines,
people like Giotto, Boccaccio and
Villani
.
And Dante, of course.
But I’m not a scholar in the usual sense
of the word, because I do quite narrow research on very limited subjects, and always
to order. So if you like I know quite a lot about very little.’
The way he said the last sentence made Perini suspect it was
an expression he’d used many times in the past, and might even have been the kind
of catch-phrase
Spagnoli
would have inscribed on his business
cards.
‘So this unusual position was …’ Perini left the sentence dangling,
hoping to steer the man back to the point of his visit.
‘Oh, yes. A few days ago I received a phone call that asked me
to do a very specific piece of research. Usually, the requests I get include a certain
amount of repeat business, as it were, asking for information that I have already
retrieved for other clients, but this was unusual because it was something I had
never before been asked to find out, and because it also seemed to me to be a completely
pointless request. Anyway, we agreed a price and a timescale, and I started doing
my initial research, but almost before I’d started I’d had another call from a different
client who wanted me to discover exactly the same fact as the first one.’
‘Which was what?’ Perini asked, beginning to squirm slightly
in his seat with impatience.
‘I’ll come to that in just a moment. For me, this second request
was good news, because it meant I would end up being paid twice for the same piece
of work, so again I negotiated the fee and delivery schedule. Apart from the singular
nature of the request’ – Perini had never heard anybody use the word ‘singular’
in normal conversation before – ‘both clients refused to give their names or their
addresses, and insisted in paying me in cash. Which I will obviously be declaring,’
he added hastily.
‘You can relax, Signor
Spagnoli
. I’m
not a Grey Ghost, and we don’t talk to them unless we absolutely have to. Your secret’s
safe with me.’
The Guardia di
Finanza
, colloquially
known as the Grey Ghosts, is the organization set up by the Italian government to
stamp out undeclared cash transactions and ensure that any income earned by a resident
of that country was both declared and, more importantly, taxed. In the face of the
lawless mentality of most of the inhabitants of Italy, the organization had always
faced an uphill struggle.
‘Right.
Anyway, I did the research the
two men had requested. Usually, I can guarantee the accuracy of my work, but in
this case there were too many gaps in the records for me to be completely certain
of my conclusions, though I think I did finally obtain the correct answer. I wrote
out a brief report for each man, and delivered these to the two clients in two different
cafes on the outskirts of the city, on the same evening. They both paid my fee immediately,
as they had agreed to do. One was Russian, I’m almost certain, because that accent
is unmistakable, and the other man probably came from somewhere in the Balkans.
That struck me as being a bit unusual.’
Spagnoli
paused for a moment.
‘You don’t normally do research for people from those parts of
the world?’ Perini asked. ‘I presume that the nationality of these two clients isn’t
the reason you’re sitting here now?’
The researcher smiled slightly and shook his head.
‘No, inspector, it’s not. The reason I’m here is because this
morning I tried to follow my usual route through Florence but I couldn’t, because
there’d been what the police officer I spoke to described as an “incident”. It looked
to me like rather more than that, because the shape of a body lying in the road
was quite unmistakable.’
‘There was a death in the city last night,’ Perini said. ‘I can
confirm that.’
The newspapers would be carrying the report within hours, so
there was no point in not admitting what
Spagnoli
clearly
already knew.
‘But I’m still not certain why you’re here. Do you think you
know the victim?’
‘I’ve never met him in my life, but if it’s who I think it is,
his name is Paolo
Bardolino
. And I only know that because
of one address in that street. He is – or possibly he was – the owner of the house
outside which the body was
lying
, and that’s how I know
his name. You see, inspector, that address was the end-result of the research I
did for these two men.’
Spagnoli
stared at the puzzled expression
on Perini’s face and smiled again, enjoying the moment.
‘I know it’s just an old house in a back street in Florence,’
he said, ‘but that was what those two clients wanted me to discover for them. The
request they made was quite simple: they just wanted me to find the last property
in Florence that was occupied by Dante Alighieri before he went to Rome and was
then exiled. And that house, to the best of my knowledge, is it, and that’s what
I told those two men.’
‘You were right about there being a fire-fight,’ Cesare Lombardi
said, when he walked into the office about half an hour after
Spagnoli
had left the building. ‘We’ve found six nine millimetre
shell cases outside the house and pulled one slug out of a wall further down the
street. It’s pretty badly deformed, and the techies doubt if they’d be able to match
the rifling marks to any particular pistol. Assuming that at some point we find
a pistol, of course. And we found some bullet fragments as well, but they’re not
going to help us very much. The only good news, if you can call it that, is that
the bullet which killed the old man is still inside him, so that might provide a
match if we do find the weapon that fired the shot.’
The sergeant sat down heavily in his chair and out his feet up
on the desk.
‘You said you’d had a bit of a light-bulb moment over the Dante
thing,’ he said. ‘Care to enlighten me?’
‘You remember the last thing I said before I left the crime scene
this morning?’ Perini asked, and Lombardi nodded. ‘Well, I was wrong again. That
killing is inextricably linked with everything that’s gone before, and we’re dealing
with two different groups of criminals. They’re both on the trail of Dante, or something
to do with him, at least.’
He outlined what
Spagnoli
had told
him that morning and, just as the researcher had done, he saved the significance
of the address until the very end.
‘So that was where Dante lived?’ Lombardi asked.
‘His actual house?’