The first thing that struck Sandro about Giuliano Mascarello was how very old he was.
Perhaps because the lawyer hadn’t really been visible for twenty years, perhaps because when his activities in connection with this or that peace initiative, this or that protest against infringements of civil rights,
were
still reported, an ancient photograph was used, one of the lawyer in his heyday, a streetfighter, eyes blazing, hand aloft in a revolutionary salute. The same picture had, in fact, been used next to
the photograph of his dead wife in that morning’s paper. But the man who sat in front of Luca Gallo and Sandro in the lofty rooms that were his offices on the Borgo degli Albizzi was shrunken, liver-spotted and bald, his wrinkled neck retracting into his collar like an old tortoise’s.
The tawny, reptilian eyes that looked at his visitors were bright, though, his handshake was wiry and strong, and when he spoke it was quite clear that all Giuliano Mascarello’s faculties were intact.
‘You’ve told him about the email?’ was the first thing he said, addressed peremptorily to Luca Gallo. It was clear that there was no love lost between these two, and Sandro wondered if the mutual hostility was a result of Loni Meadows’s death, or had predated it. Almost certainly the latter.
Luca Gallo was polite, unsmiling. ‘Of course,’ he said.
So they’d shown the email to Mascarello, and presumably also to his wife.
Mascarello turned to Sandro. ‘You have read it?’
Sandro had.
At first he had wondered what Luca meant by unusual. The English was stiff, formal: entirely clear, even to Sandro, but he’d had a frustrating sense of missing something. This was not his language; but he couldn’t tell if it was the first language of the writer, either.
I write as a well-wisher to inform you that Doctor Loni Meadows should not be appointed to this position.
So far, so ordinary. But it had gone on, and Sandro had felt uneasy; even though he was reading a foreign language, he had had a sense of something in pain; something tormented.
Doctor Meadows is not what she seems
.
She is not beautiful
,
she is ugly
.
She has nothing to do with art
,
she cannot create
,
she can only destroy. Loni Meadows is evil.
Not explicit, not violent, but off-beam: woodenly repetitive in a way that became sinister, to Sandro at least. His immediate impression
had been that the words were neither calculated nor calculating, but rather that they were the product of a disturbed mind.
The email address was an apparently random set of letters and numbers. ‘Sent through a proxy server,’ Luca had said shortly, without even needing to be asked, and Sandro had scrabbled fruitlessly through his memories of the computer course he’d been on last year in an attempt to understand what that meant. ‘Completely anonymous.’
‘Completely?’
Gallo had shrugged; on this subject, Sandro could see, he was confident of knowing more than Sandro. ‘Apparently, there’s no such thing as complete anonymity, but the computer office in Baltimore said there wasn’t anything they could do to trace it.’ He had paused. ‘There was only the one. And the internet is full of crazies; do you know, if you ask for anonymous internet feedback on anything – on our courses, even – people will say things you could not imagine them saying out loud?’
Sandro had had to agree; the same applied in the police service.
Gallo had shaken his head in disbelief. ‘And we weren’t to know – were we? That it would be more than that.’
Sandro had nodded, musing. It said something, though, didn’t it? That the person who sent them at least knew that such things as proxy servers existed.
‘Do you think – your artists would know how to do that?’ he had asked. ‘Do they know about computers, these days?’ He had thought of the little workshops in the back streets of the city; an electric light bulb all the techonology required, old men in brown coats bent over a piece of gilding. But then perhaps they didn’t qualify as artists, only artisans.
The look Luca Gallo had given him then combined pity with curiosity. ‘Actually, these days – yes, they do,’ he had said. ‘Or they know people who do.’
It was only Sandro who was utterly ignorant then.
Gallo had replaced the printout of the email in the folder. ‘In any case,’ he had continued brusquely, ‘Mascarello has now put someone of his own on that; he says, if there is any method of tracing the sender of the email, then he will do it.’
‘Right,’ Sandro had said at that, unable to disguise his relief that he – or Giuli – wouldn’t be expected to solve an internet deception.
Luca Gallo had held up a hand. ‘What Mascarello will tell you is that he suspects someone from among the castle’s guests. In here,’ he had said, now passing the folder to Sandro, ‘are copies of each guest’s file. It might perhaps impress Mascarello that we are taking him seriously.’
And are we? ‘Suspects them of what?’ Sandro had felt the need to be circumspect.
‘Of – well, he will tell you,’ Gallo had said, his face closing.
And now, under the high-coffered ceilings, the whitewashed walls and the beady-eyed portraits on Mascarello’s walls, Sandro held the lawyer’s gaze and said, ‘Yes. I’ve read it.’
Mascarello regarded him carefully. ‘Of course, they’d rather I – we, my wife and I – had never found out,’ he said. ‘Much easier for them.’
‘They?’ Sandro inquired mildly.
‘The great Trust. They might have carried out their investigations into my wife unhindered by any objections she or I might have had.’
Sandro could hear the adrenaline in the man’s voice and he understood that this was meat and drink to him. The fight. Was that why he was embarking on this crusade? For the thrill of the chase? Sandro had to admit, though, that after weeks – months – of inactivity, he could guiltily feel something of the same spark igniting in himself. He looked across at Gallo’s face: it was unreadable, but pale.
‘But of course, I found out,’ Mascarello went on. ‘Did they think I wouldn’t? Did they think I wouldn’t know that investigations were being carried out, behind our backs?’ Sandro smiled a little, to conceal his disquiet.
‘Naturally we would have informed you,’ said Gallo levelly. Mascarello snorted.
‘You raised objections, then?’ asked Sandro. ‘To my – to any investigation?’
‘By then it was too late,’ said Mascarello, pursing his thin lips, staring out of the window. He turned back and fixed Sandro with a prosecutor’s look. ‘And what did you discover about my wife, Mr Cellini?’ he said with disdain.
He wouldn’t ask Sandro to pursue this investigation, would he? Not in a million years; he must have any number of dubious types at his beck and call who’d make inquiries, call in favours and, no doubt, encourage betrayals of confidence. Giuliano Mascarello might be a defender of human rights and an attender of marches for peace and justice, but Sandro didn’t like him much. And didn’t trust him, either. He reached down and took his own slender file on Loni Meadows from his briefcase – the file he had removed from the cabinet in his office on the Via del Leone as Giuli had stood there, reproachfully watching his every move.
‘I discovered that her CV was accurate and all her references genuine,’ he said quietly. ‘That she had no criminal record and no driving offences.’ The lawyer’s eyes flickered, but he said nothing on the question of how Sandro might have obtained this information. Because she was dead, perhaps; or because Sandro had not discovered anything incriminating.
The room was silent, and the thin February light fell wan and beautiful through its long windows; for the first time in months, thought Sandro, it held a trace of warmth. He turned to Luca.
‘Were all of the present guests of the Castello Orfeo already selected,’ he asked, ‘before Dottoressa Meadows was appointed?’
Luca Gallo frowned. ‘Almost all,’ he said, after a while. ‘One was chosen afterwards,’ he looked down at the page. ‘In the um – the July. Per Hansen. The Norwegian. Unfortunately one of the original selection died. He was a composer, Joseph Connor, husband of Michelle Connor, and we had to appoint another.’
Mascarello made a sound of impatience, which was perhaps why Sandro said what he did next; out of recklessness born of anger, out of a sense that it was a lost cause, anyway, a set-up of some kind, in which Sandro’s lowly status as a reject from the police force was on trial, and he would be exposed and humiliated as no more than a cheap snoop and a superannuated piece of hired muscle.
‘If I were investigating that email,’ he said, holding up Loni Meadows’s CV and looking coolly at it, ‘or indeed, your wife’s death, I think that this – ’ and he held the little passport shot of her between
finger and thumb and turned it to face them, ‘this would be more useful to me than anything else, don’t you?’
Mascarello leaned forwards just a little over his heavy polished desk, but said nothing.
‘She was a beautiful woman, much younger than her husband. And you will no doubt tell me if I am wrong, but I would say that your wife had considerable influence over men, and exercised it regularly.’
Sandro had not even known himself that he had deduced these things, until he spoke.
‘Clearly,’ said the lawyer in his rusty voice, ‘no such information can be discovered from a photograph.’
‘If you wish,’ said Sandro. ‘I think, however, we both know that it can.’
Mascarello sat very still; Luca Gallo looked petrified.
‘I would like to know what it is that are you saying,’ said Mascarello with quiet menace.
Sandro could see how the man might skewer and terrify any witness, any government minister, any criminal or indeed any innocent into confession. But he held his nerve.
‘I’m saying that she was an extremely attractive woman who lived apart from her husband and had done so for some years. I am saying that it is not impossible that she may have been in another relationship, or possibly more than one, or that she used her – her femininity – to her advantage. And those things might have been the source of animosity towards her.’
Mascarello regarded him steadily, saying nothing. Sandro went on. ‘If I were investigating this – accident, I should begin by speaking with those closest to your wife: those with whom she was intimate or those who wished for intimacy with her, which I suppose would include yourself. That is what I am saying.’
There was a silence.
‘My wife and I were close,’ said Mascarello, ‘but we have not lived together for more than ten years; that kind of intimacy is – was – not what I required of her, nor did we discuss her life, in that way.’ He paused, taking a careful breath. ‘Put plainly, in answer to your
implication I did not know who her lovers were. And put even more plainly, on the night my wife died I was in the hospital at Santa Maria Nuova, receiving – a routine treatment. Forgive me if I do not oblige you with the details. I was accompanied back to my apartment by a nurse, who remained with me that night. Would that satisfy you, as an alibi?’ There was the ghost of a smile on the man’s lips.
Sandro inclined his head stiffly. ‘I would need to speak with the nurse,’ he said. ‘But yes, I think so.’ He paused. ‘And now I wonder if you would be kind enough to tell me what it is you suspect?’
There was a silence so long that Sandro could have sworn the light cast on the whitewashed wall had time to shift.
And then, slowly, Mascarello stood, set his splayed fingers on the desktop and faced them.
‘My wife was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. And she made sure she got it. That email was sent in the days following the announcement in the arts and educational media of Leona’s appointment. It was not widely known or broadcast; we are talking about a small set of those people – ’ and he seemed to sneer ‘– who move from retreat to retreat, from reading to festival to internship, all around the world. They live on the misplaced charity of others.’
Pausing, Mascarello took a breath, apparently reconsidering this line of attack.
‘My wife – Loni was not some kind of courtesan. She was an artist, she was active in arts administration and an influential critic, in the press and on the internet.’
She cannot create, she can only destroy.
A critic.
‘She wrote for a very widely read weblog. What’s known as a blog.’
‘A blog.’ Had his tone betrayed a measure of ignorance? Sandro thought it hadn’t, but Mascarello explained anyway.
‘A kind of running commentary on matters of interest,’ he said impatiently. ‘In this case the arts, through the medium of the internet. Often anonymous, although their writers’ identities are the subject always of much speculation.’
‘Was hers anonymous?’
‘She wrote under the name Lonestar,’ said Gallo, darting a glance at Mascarello. ‘Certainly I was aware that she was the author of the blog; I imagine others were.’
‘What I am saying,’ Mascarello went on abruptly, leaning forward as if in pain, ‘is that I believe – ’ and from the way he said it this was not a matter of belief but of certainty ‘– I believe that the email was sent by someone who had applied to be a guest at the castle, and I believe that that person, in the writing of the email, in the taking up of a fellowship that would place the person close to her, was motivated only by a desire to wreak some kind of revenge on my wife. To exercise some kind of punishment.’