Last Voyage of the Valentina(98)

He felt rough hands as they pulled him off her and dragged him away. Suddenly the car was surrounded by men in blue uniforms and hats. Police cars had drawn up, their sirens wailing. The press had arrived from Naples too and there were cameras, flashbulbs, raised voices. In the midst of all this chaos it started to rain, and detectives hurried to cover the crime scene before the deluge destroyed the evidence.

Thomas was cast aside like an extra in a movie. He watched in confusion as the police hovered about the dead man. No one seemed to take any notice of Valentina. Then he saw a couple of men gesticulate crudely at her before erupting into raucous laughter. He realized that while he was dwelling in a Hell of fire and pain, everyone else around him was celebrating. There were smiles, pats on backs, jokes. A fat detective in a long coat rubbed his hands together before lighting a cigarette beneath his hat, as if to say, Right, all done here, case solved.

Thomas staggered over to him. “Do something!” he yelled, his eyes bulging with fury.

“And you are?” the detective replied, studying him with narrow, intelligent eyes.

“Valentina is my fiancée!” he stammered.

“Was your fiancée. That woman’s not in a position to marry anybody.” Thomas’s mouth opened and closed like a drowning man’s, but nothing came out. “You’re a stranger here, aren’t you, signore?” he continued. “The woman is of no importance to us.”

“Why not? She’s been murdered, for God’s sake!”

The detective shrugged. “She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “Pretty girl. Che peccato!”

As the rain fell, dripping down his hair and into his eyes, Thomas stumbled over to Falco and grabbed the collar of his shirt.

“You know who did this!” he hissed.

Falco’s big shoulders began to shudder. The iron backbone that held him up began to melt and he hunched forward, hugging himself. Thomas was stunned to see such a powerfully built man cry and felt a surprising sense of relief as he too began to sob like a child. They clung to each other in the rain.

“I tried to tell her not to go!” Falco howled. “She did not listen.”

Thomas was unable to speak. Desolation had winded him. The woman he was set to marry had all the time loved another and for that she had paid with her life. He withdrew from Falco’s embrace and vomited onto the ground. Someone had cut through Valentina’s soft, delicate throat with a knife. The brutality of the killing, in cold blood, left him crazed with anguish. Whoever had robbed Valentina of her future had stolen his too.

He tried to picture her gentle face but could only see the mask that lay slumped in the front of the Alfa Romeo. The mask of the stranger who had lived a parallel life about which he knew nothing. As he stood bent over the wet ground, the fog began to clear:

“War reduces men to animals and turns women into shameful creatures…I don’t want her to make the mistakes that I have made in my life…You don’t know me, Tommy.”

She was desperate to be taken away from Incantellaria. Was that all he was to her? A ticket to a new life where she could start afresh and leave her sordid, shameful ways behind her?

He felt a hand on his back and turned to see Lattarullo standing beside him in the rain. “I never knew her, did I?” he said, looking at the carabiniere in desolation.

Lattarullo shrugged. “You are not alone, Signor Arbuckle. None of us did.”

“Why do they behave as if she doesn’t matter?” The police still buzzed around the dead man like wasps about a honeypot.

“You don’t recognize him, do you?”

“Who is he?” Thomas blinked at him in innocence. “Who the devil is he?”

“That, my friend, is the devil. Lupo Bianco.”



Later when Thomas returned to the trattoria like a sleepwalker, he collected together the portraits of Valentina that he had drawn. The first was an illustration of her virtue and mystery, drawn the morning after the festa di Santa Benedetta on the cliffs by the lookout point, more lovely than the dawn but, as he now reflected, just as transient. The second was an illustration of motherhood. He had captured to perfection the tenderness in her expression as she had watched her baby suckling her breast. Her love for their daughter was genuine, unadulterated, pure. Perhaps it had even surprised her in its intensity. He rummaged around for the third, then remembered Valentina had taken it home with her.

Immacolata’s house was as still and quiet as a tomb. The old widow sat in the shadows, erecting a shrine for her daughter to accompany the two she had already made for her husband and son. Her eyes were fixed on her task with dull resignation. When Thomas approached her, she spoke in a soft voice. “I am called a widow because I lost my husband but what am I now that I have lost two children? There is no word because it is too terrible to articulate.” She crossed herself. “They are together with God.” Thomas wanted to ask her whether she knew about Valentina’s double life but the old woman looked so fragile sitting there in her own private Hell that he couldn’t bring himself to ask.