Poisonville Read online

  I walked home, pulled my car out of the garage, and drove over to Giovanna’s house. It was foggy, as usual.

  My fiancée lived in a little town house on the outskirts of town. When we got back from our honeymoon, she would come to live with me. My house was a perfect modernist architectural gem, carved out of a venerable old 2,500-square-foot building. My father had spent a fortune to restore the original wooden roof beams that ran the length of the ceiling, and to uncover sections of wall built by Venetian masons in the sixteenth century. Her house, in contrast, was comfortable and attractive, but otherwise unremarkable. And I liked living in the center of town, just a short walk from the piazza, in the heart of town, where things were hopping. Where everything was just a short walk away.

  Giovanna’s red Mazda was parked in the yard. As I got out, I noticed that her wheels were caked with mud. I shook my head and smiled. Giovanna loved to drive out into the countryside, where she bought salamis and fresh eggs from farmers she knew. And she had put together a sizable network of suppliers for fresh farm products.

  I rang the bell, but there was no answer. I pulled my set of keys out of my overcoat pocket and unlocked the door.

  “Giovanna, my love! Where are you?”

  The house was silent. I continued calling her name. I climbed up the stairs that led to the bedroom.

  I walked over to the big canopy bed, and drew the curtains aside, but it was empty. Then I walked into the bathroom. The first thing I saw was her leg, dangling over the side of the bathtub.

  I took three urgent steps, and looked down into her wide-open eyes, staring at me through the still water.

  “Giovanna,” I whispered.

  “Giovanna!” I shouted, an instant later.

  I cradled her in my arms until the ambulance arrived. Expert hands took her away from me; I stood watching, awaiting a verdict that came as no surprise.

  “I’m sorry, the patient is dead.”

  I nodded without speaking, numb, inert.

  A medical technician helped me take off my overcoat and jacket, both drenched with bathwater, and guided me gently downstairs.

  From the living room, I could hear a voice calling the Carabinieri.

  Three of them arrived a little later. Sergeant Mele and two young Carabinieri I had never seen before. I had known the inspector all my life. He arrived in town with the rank of corporal and then he had worked his way up, spending the rest of his career here. He walked over to the sofa where I was sitting and placed a hand firmly on my shoulder. I felt his fingers squeeze my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, in a low voice.

  Then he climbed the stairs. He came back a few minutes later. With a fatherly tone of voice, he pulled words out of me one by one, but it was painful to relive the experience of discovering Giovanna’s corpse.

  “I have to call the investigating magistrate and the medical examiner so they can take a look at things. You know how these things work.”

  Sure, I knew, and I didn’t say a word. Giovanna was dead. Then and there, I didn’t care much how it had happened. It could have been an aneurysm, a heart attack. What did it matter? Giovanna was gone. Mele went out into the yard to make his phone calls. It couldn’t have been later than two in the afternoon, but it was practically dark already, the fog had gotten heavier and had turned ash grey.

  My father came running into the room. He saw me and hurled himself against me, his arms wrapped tight around me, his chest heaving with sobs. I thought to myself that the last time I’d seen him like this was at my mother’s funeral.

  “How awful, Francesco. I can’t believe it.”

  “Take him home,” Mele told him, draping over my shoulders a blanket he had picked up from an easy chair. Giovanna’s scent wafted up from the cover; I hugged it to my body like a second skin. It was her favorite blanket. In the winter, she’d curl up in her armchair, wrapped in that sky-blue cashmere blanket.

  Papa helped me into his Jaguar. “I’ll take you to the villa.”

  “No. I want to go home. I need to be alone.”

  Outside of my house, he held one of my hands in both of his. “I’m sorry your mother can’t be here right now. She would have known the words to comfort you.”

  My mother. The most important women in my life were both dead. I was crushed by a collapsing wall of grief. I wished I could pass out, plunge into unconsciousness, but I felt strangely lucid.

  “Can you tell Prunella?” I asked.

  “Of course. I’ll do it right away.”

  Prunella, the “white widow”—slang for a woman whose husband was far, far away, and as good as dead. She’d already lost her husband, and now she’d lost her daughter and only child.

  Her family had been the most important family in town until her husband, Alvise, had managed to squander a fortune playing roulette in the casinos of Slovenia and Croatia. Two hours by car. He’d leave the house after dinner and return home the next morning, coming back a little poorer from each trip. Until he wound up in prison on arson charges, for having set fire to his own factory. He had hoped to use the money from the insurance to pay off his debts with the banks. It might have worked out, too, if the fire hadn’t killed the night watchman, his wife, and their baby girl. After he served his time in prison, he vanished, and no one knew where he had fled. Prunella was left alone, to raise Giovanna. In town, she was known as the widow Barovier. To everyone in town, Alvise was dead.

  Prunella, who had once been an arrogant snob, took refuge in religion, her sole comfort against her grief and shame at her loss of social standing.

  She was a good woman.

  I took Giovanna’s blanket off my shoulders and carefully folded it. Then I took off my clothes and dried myself with a towel. I had just put on a fresh change of clothes when I heard a knock at the door.

  It was Don Piero. Good old Don Piero. He was eighty years old, but as chipper and vigorous as always. He had retired years ago, but he’d never abandoned the rectory, where he lived with his elderly housekeeper, who was only a few years younger than him. The new parish priest, a blond Croatian who had tried without success to speak in dialect to bridge the distance with his parishioners, had been obliged to settle for a little apartment in the church hall. Don Piero was still the uncontested master of the souls of the town, and so he would remain until the day he died. There was no bishop persuasive enough to jolly him into a nursing home.

  He leveled his dark eyes at me, looking directly into my own. He patted my face with a rough hand, and sank down onto a chair.

  “The good Lord has decided to test you, Francesco,” he began in pure dialect. “And he’s testing the heart of this old priest, too. Poor Giovanna, she was unlucky in life. I had hoped that you could bring her a little peace, but the Lord decided differently. He took her away from us. He decided to gather her to His side. We understand this, isn’t that true?”

  Don Piero took in the grief and incredulity in my eyes. “Only God can help you through this moment. Surrender to His love, Francesco. Otherwise this grief will become intolerable.”

  He stood up and headed for the door. Then he thought of something and turned back toward me. “You, Giovanna, and Filippo. You’ve always had more than the others, but the Lord has reserved a painful existence for all three of you. You know how often I’ve prayed for you? Your curse is that you are only children. Families as important as yours cannot be entrusted to a single heir; that’s tempting fate. I told your parents time and again, but they refused to listen.”

  He walked back toward me, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and sketched a benediction with his fingers. Then he left without saying goodbye.

  The subject of children was a tough one for Giovanna, too. I had always assumed she wanted children. But during our pre-marriage counseling, she had told Don Ante, the Croatian priest, that she did not want to become a mother at that point in her l
ife.

  “I’m only thirty,” she had told him. “If I become a mother now, it would mean giving up my career.”

  The parish priest had done his best to change her mind. I said nothing. I was certain that once we were married she would see things differently.

  We told Don Ante that we were refraining from full sexual relations, and he pretended to believe us. Then he had launched into a tirade against contraceptives. It was obvious that he came from a backward religious culture, and that he had not yet grasped how things worked in the Northeast. His church was always crowded on Sunday and the offerings were sufficient to provide him with a more-than-adequate living, but the faithful, on certain matters, simply used their own common sense. Giovanna took the pill.

  Something distracted me from this line of thought. It was the silence. A silence so intense that I found myself listening to it, experiencing it. I found Giovanna in that silence, and I understood that between the two of us, there could only be the silence of absence. A wave of despair suddenly washed over me. I thought about death. I thought of my own death as a way out. I thought that not a word of what Don Piero had told me made any sense. The grief became physical, a pressure on my chest, making it hard to catch my breath. And still I felt a need to suffer more and more. It seemed to me that my despair was too little in the face of the enormity of the loss of Giovanna. These thoughts came to me in a procession of apparent lucidity. In reality, that silence was deafening, I was plunging into a maelstrom of confusion. Giovanna was dead. She was really, really dead. I would accompany her body to the cemetery. A coffin, a loculus, a marble slab, the letters in gilt metal: first name, last name, date of birth, date of death. And silence, a vast ocean of silence.

  The chiming of the church tower clock told me that it was already eleven o’clock, and I was still seated in the same position. My bladder was about to burst, but the idea of going to the bathroom struck me as intolerable just then. Someone rang the doorbell twice. “Papa,” I thought to myself. Instead, it was Inspector Mele. His face was lined with weariness and tension.

  “I have to take you in to the Carabinieri barracks. The prosecutor has a couple of questions to ask you.”

  “At this time of night?”

  He nodded with an imperceptible movement of his head. “Your father has already been informed.”

  I hurried into the bathroom. As I was emptying my bladder, I thought about how odd this summons was; I persuaded myself that it must have been the result of an excess of zeal because of the involvement of a Visentin. I followed in my own car behind the vehicle of the Carabinieri all the way to the barracks, a squat building protected by high walls and gates, video cameras, and bulletproof glass. In the late seventies, a terrorist group had planted a bomb, and since then it had been converted into a small fortress.

  In Mele’s office, the prosecutor, Zan, was seated behind the desk. He was a tall thin man. He was dressed like an American university professor, at least the ones we see in the movies. Tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, loose trousers over the skinny, age-wizened hips, an anonymous tie knotted around the collar of a flannel shirt.

  He stood up, grasped my hand, and gestured for me to sit down. Like Mele, the prosecutor was tense. I was about to ask him why when my father walked in.

  “I certainly hope that there is a sound justification for this summons,” he said, resting his hands on my shoulders in an affectionate gesture.

  “Counselor, be seated,” Mele broke in.

  Zan ran his hand over his face. “We have requested your presence, counselor,” he explained to my father, “entirely in consideration of and respect for your reputation. I am obliged by circumstances to put certain questions to your son pertaining to the death of Giovanna Barovier, and I deemed it to be my duty to inform you of that fact.”

  My father nodded his head with a smile, acknowledging the collegiality of the gesture. “It strikes me that the urgent nature of these questions imply a development, something of which we would appreciate being informed before responding,” he replied in the purest lawyerly language.

  Zan looked hard at me. I could feel the sergeant’s eyes on me as well.

  “Giovanna Barovier was murdered.”

  “What?” I shouted.

  “Do you realize the gravity of such a statement?” my father inquired.

  Zan held up both hands in a signal of reassurance. “The preliminary results of the autopsy are unequivocal,” he explained. “A hematoma on her sternum clearly demonstrates that she was forcibly held underwater.”

  “By whom?” I asked.

  “That we do not know,” Mele responded. “That’s why we have to ask you some questions.”

  I looked at my father. He was clearly thinking the same thing. They were trying to determine if I was the killer. This is what always happens in this kind of investigation. They start with the people who were closest to the victim. Statistically, it was usually one of them. But not in my case. I hadn’t killed Giovanna.

  “When did you last see the victim?” asked Zan.

  The victim. Giovanna had become the victim. Until last night, she’d been my whole life. Now she was the corpse of a murdered woman. The subject of an investigation.

  “How was she killed?” I asked.

  The prosecutor shifted uneasily in his chair, glancing at my father in search of assistance. Papa took one of my hands in both of his. “Answer his question, if you feel that you can; otherwise the prosecutor will understand, and we’ll come back some other time.”

  I drew a deep breath. “Yesterday morning,” I answered robotically. “Giovanna slept at my house. We ate breakfast together, and then she left.”

  “And you didn’t see her again after that?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain that you didn’t go to her house last night?”

  “My son already answered that question,” my father broke in.

  Zan seemed increasingly uncomfortable. This time he looked over at the inspector.

  “We need to know where you were between 1 and 3 A.M.,” Mele said, brusquely.

  So that’s when Giovanna had been murdered. But what was she doing in the bathtub at that time of night?

  “I was at the Club Diana, for my bachelor party. Then I left the club, and I ran into Filippo Calchi Renier. I think I got back to my house just a little before 3 A.M.”

  My father shot me a disappointed look. It hadn’t been a very smart answer. But I didn’t give a damn. I hadn’t killed Giovanna. I wanted to shout that out with all my strength, but I couldn’t. No one had accused me of anything yet.

  “A little before three,” the inspector considered the answer out loud. “I guess, at that hour, no one saw you come home.”

  “No one, as far as I can remember.”

  “Did Giovanna try to call you during the day?”

  “We spoke on the phone a couple of times. She asked me for advice about a couple of details concerning our wedding plans.”

  Zan cleared his throat, signaling that it was Mele’s turn to take over the questioning.

  “Did Giovanna Barovier ever tell you that she needed to talk to you about a very important matter?”

  “No.”

  “A witness informs us to that effect, with absolute certainty, claiming to have learned it directly from your fiancée.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”

  “The witness told us that Giovanna wanted to inform you of a relationship she was having with another man. A relationship that had been going on for quite a while,” the prosecutor blurted out hastily.

  “That’s not true,” I mumbled.

  “We’re checking into it,” Zan drove the point home. “But now you must certainly understand why we need to establish with precision exactly what you did and where you were during the hours in which the murder was commi
tted.”

  “No. We don’t understand at all,” my father broke in harshly. “You’re treating my son as a suspect, not a witness. If you have any specific accusations to make, please do so. Otherwise, this interview is over.”

  “We are in the middle of an investigation,” Zan mumbled. “We are only interested in clearing up a few key points so that we can move forward as quickly as possible. You know as well as we do that, in cases of this sort, time is of the essence.”

  My father stood up. “Let’s go, Francesco.”

  “Hold on,” said Mele. “The prosecutor is right, and anyway, there is evidence that requires us to check out Francesco’s alibi.”

  “Well, at least that’s some straight talk,” I snapped out sarcastically.

  The inspector looked me right in the eyes. “Giovanna engaged in a sex act just before she was murdered. Either it was with you, or else it’s true that she had a lover.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. “She must have been raped,” I whispered.

  Mele shook his head. “The sex was consensual,” he explained. “We are asking you—and we are required to do so—whether by any chance Giovanna confessed to you that she had a lover, or whether you discovered somehow that she had a lover. If so, before returning home, did you go to see her, argue with her, and shove her head underwater in a fit of temporary insanity?”

  “A state of frenzy,” Zan specified.

  “You have the wrong person,” I said in a faint voice.

  “That’s probably true,” Mele replied. “But we need answers.”