Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Once the mother of the child had made it apparent through various means of hysteria that the child wasn’t a runaway, that she wasn’t playing with friends somewhere, that they—the mamma and her lover—had searched the area, that every corner had been poked and every loose stone had been overturned, Salvatore had rounded up the usual suspects. He’d ordered them brought to the questura , and there on Viale Cavour, he’d grilled eight sex offenders, six suspected paedophiles, a recidivist thief awaiting trial, and a priest about whom Salvatore had had suspicions for years. Nothing had come of this, but the local paper had the story now. It wasn’t big yet—it had not, thank God, gone either provincial or national—but it would if he didn’t come up with this child soon.

He took a final sip of his caffè corretto. He turned from the sight of the sunset and headed for the rooftop opening that would take him back down to his mamma. His mobile rang, and he glanced at the number. He groaned when he saw it and considered what to do.

He could let the call go to voice mail, but he knew there was little point to that. The caller would continue to ring him four times an hour all through the night. He gave a moment’s thought to tossing the mobile over the tower’s edge to break in the narrow street below, but instead he answered.

“ Pronto ,” he sighed.

He heard what he expected to hear. “Come to Barga, Topo. It’s time you and I had a little talk.”

BARGA

TUSCANY

It was only natural that Piero Fanucci could not possibly live in a town convenient to Lucca. That would have made everyone’s life easier, and il Pubblico Ministero was not a man interested in making anyone’s life easier, least of all the policemen who did his bidding. He liked to live in the Tuscan hills. Thus he lived in the Tuscan hills. If someone he wished to converse with concerning an investigation had to sweat an hour’s drive on an April evening to get to him, that was simply how things were.

At least il Pubblico Ministero didn’t live in the old part of Barga. Getting to him, then, would have meant a climb up endless stairs and a negotiation of the maze of passageways that led in the direction of the Duomo, high on the top of the hill. Instead, thank God, Fanucci lived along the road from Gallicano. It was a dangerous series of switchbacks climbing at a hair-raising angle from a village in the valley, but at least one could get there by car.

When Salvatore arrived, he knew that il Pubblico Ministero would be alone. His wife would be travelling to the home of one of their six children, which was how she had navigated her marriage to Fanucci since those children had become old enough to marry and to purchase homes of their own. His occasional lover—a long-suffering woman from Gallicano who cleaned and cooked and obeyed a single word from Fanucci, resta , by taking herself to his bedroom once she’d finished her solitary dinner in his kitchen and had done the washing up after his solitary dinner in the dining room—would also have departed. Fanucci would be with his only true love, among the cymbidiums he tenderly babied in a manner he might have applied, but did not, to his family. Salvatore would be meant to admire whichever of the orchids was currently in bloom. Until he had done so, and at a length and with the level of sincerity il Pubblico Ministero required, he would not be told the reason that he had been summoned to Barga.

Salvatore parked in front of Fanucci’s house, a stout and square terracotta-coloured villa that stood in a plot of expensively maintained gardens behind a wrought-iron gate. This was, as always, locked, but a code admitted him.

He didn’t bother with the house. Instead, he walked around to the back of the villa where a terrace overlooked a steep drop to the valley and the hillsides opposite, into which dozens of Tuscan villages were tucked. Lights were coming on in those villages now. In another hour, they would provide a scattering of sequins on the cape of night.

At the far corner of the terrace rose the roof of the orchid house, which stood on the lawn below. Steps led down to this lawn, and a gravel path edged it. Salvatore followed this to the grape arbour that provided shade for a seating area. A table and chairs stood here, on the table a bottle of grappa, two glasses, and a plate of the kind of biscotti that Fanucci favoured. Il Pubblico Ministero himself was not seated here, however. As Salvatore had anticipated, he was within the orchid house awaiting compliments. Salvatore mentally readied himself and entered.

Fanucci was in the midst of spraying the leaves of a dozen or more of his plants. These stood on a potting shelf that ran along one side of the orchid house. They were spindly in that way of orchids, tied to thin bamboo poles to keep them upright, each offering a single spine of blooms that Fanucci was tenderly keeping away from the spray. He had his spectacles on the tip of his nose and a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips. His gut hung over the cintura that cinched his trousers.

Fanucci didn’t look up from what he was doing. He didn’t speak. This gave Salvatore time to evaluate his superior in an effort to know what to expect from him during their encounter. For Fanucci was notoriously volatile, il drago to some and il vulcano to others.

He was also the ugliest man Salvatore had ever seen, deeply swarthy like the contadini in Basilicata, the land of his birth; cursed with warts that exploded from his face like something only San Rocco could cure; in possession of a sixth finger on his right hand which he waved about in conversation, all the better to read upon the faces of those to whom he spoke the level of their aversion for him. His appearance had been a torment in his impoverished youth, but he’d learned to use it. At an age and of a level of success at which he now could have done something to normalise his looks, he refused to do so. They served him well.

Salvatore said, “Beautiful as always, Magistrato . What do you call this one?” and he gestured to a bloom whose fuchsia petals bore flecks of yellow that eased into the interior of the flower like spots of sunlight banishing the night.

Fanucci glanced briefly at the orchid. He dislodged ash from his cigarette down the front of a white shirt already spotted by olive oil and tomato sauce, no concern to Fanucci who would not, of course, have to wash the garment. He said, “It does nothing, that. One flower a season. It belongs in the garbage. You know nothing of flowers, Topo. I keep thinking you will learn, but you’re hopeless.” He set down his sprayer. He drew in on his cigarette and coughed. It was a deep and wet cough and his breath wheezed in his chest. Smoking was suicide for the man, but he persisted. There were many officers in both the polizia di stato and the carabinieri who hoped he would succeed in his efforts. “How’s your mamma?” Fanucci asked him.

“Same as always,” Salvatore said.

“That woman’s a saint.”

“So she would have me believe.”

Salvatore strolled to the end of the potting shelf, admiring the flowers as he went. The air inside the orchid house was fragrant with the scent of fine potting soil. Salvatore thought how he would have liked to feel it—rich, loamy, and crumbling—within his hands. There was an honesty about this soil that he liked. It was what it was, and it did what it did.

Fanucci finished his nightly babying of his orchids and stepped out of the orchid house. Salvatore followed. At the table, he poured two glasses of grappa. Salvatore would have preferred San Pellegrino, but he accepted the grappa as he was meant to do. He said no to the offer of the biscotti , however. He slapped his hands on his stomach and made noises to suggest his mamma’s fine cooking was doing him in, although he was, as always, scrupulously careful about his weight.