couldn't let her work for months and get no money.' She chose to say no more.
'Then what?' he asked.
‘I asked her what she was going to do, and as I told you, she said all she wanted to do was go home. She had calmed down by then and stopped crying, so I said I'd go to the station with her and find out about the trains. She said she thought there was a train for Zagreb around noon’ It seemed simple enough to her, all of this. 'So that's what we did, went to the station.'
'And her train ticket, you claim you paid for that, too?' he asked, intent on plumbing the full depths of her gullibility. 'Yes.'
'And then?'
'And then I went home. I had to leave for London.' 'When?'
She paused to consider this. 'The flight was at one-thirty. The taxi came to get me at noon.'
'And you were at the train station until what time, Signora?'
‘I don't know, ten, ten-thirty.'
'And what time are you saying all of this began? When did you say you met this woman?'
'I'm not sure, nine-thirty, perhaps.'
'You were leaving the country for three weeks, you had a taxi coming, and yet you still had time to take this woman you say you barely knew to the station and buy her a ticket?'
She ignored his deliberate provocation. She wanted to explain how she always hated the final hours before leaving, how she hated walking around her apartment, checking and rechecking that the gas was off, the windows and shutters closed, the phone cable disconnected from the computer, but she did not want to tell any of this to him. All she said was, 'There was time.'
'Do you have any proof of this?' he asked. 'Proof?'
'That you were there?'
'Where?'
'London.'
She was tempted to demand what difference that would make but, recalling her husband and the way any sort of resistance had driven him to violence, said only, 'Yes’
'And you left her there?' he demanded, abandoning London.
'Yes.'
'Where?'
'In the station, by the ticket windows.' 'How long did it take you?' 'What? To buy her a ticket?' 'No. To walk home.' 'Eleven minutes.'
He raised his eyebrows at this and pushed himself back in his chair. 'Eleven minutes, Signora? That seems very exact. Have you been planning this?'
'This what?'
'This story.'
Before answering, she took two deep breaths. 'Lieutenant, it is exact, not because it is a story, but because it takes eleven minutes. I've lived in that house for almost five years, and I go back and forth to the station at least twice a week.' She felt the anger mounting in her voice, tried to control it, and lost. 'If you are capable of simple arithmetic, that is more than five hundred times, back and forth. So if I say it takes eleven minutes, that's how many minutes it takes.'
Ignoring her anger entirely, he asked, 'So that's how long it would take her?'
'Take who?'
'The Romanian woman.'
She started to tell him that the Romanian woman had a name, Flori, but she stopped herself and said only, 'That's how long it would take anyone. Lieutenant’
'And what time was it that you began to walk these eleven minutes, Signora?'
'I've told you. Ten-thirty, perhaps a bit after that.'
'And the train to Zagreb leaves at 11:45,' he said with the certainty of one who has checked the timetable.
‘I think so, yes.'
As if speaking to a person who had reached adulthood without having learned to calculate time, he said, 'That's more than an hour, Signora.'
The absurdity of this forced her to say, 'That's ridiculous. She wasn't the sort of person who would go back and kill someone.'
'And are you experienced in dealing with such people, Signora?'
She resisted the impulse to hit him. Instead, she took a quick bream and said, 'I've told you what happened’
'Do you expect me to believe all this, Signora?' Lieutenant Scarpa asked in a half-mocking voice.
She knew that she had acted out of human decency; thus, no, she did not expect Lieutenant Scarpa to believe her. 'Whether you believe me or not, Lieutenant, makes no difference at all. What I've told you is true.' Before he could say anything, she added, ‘I have no reason to lie about this. In fact, your response makes me realize it would have been far easier if I hadn't said anything. But I know the old woman would not let her into the apartment. I gave Flori the money, and I took her to the station.' He started to object, but she held up a hand and said, 'And it remains true, Lieutenant, whether you choose to believe it or not: she did not kill Signora Battestini.'
4
They sat opposite one another for some time, until finally Scarpa pushed himself out of his chair, came around behind hers, and left the room, careful to leave the door open behind him. Signora Gismondi sat and studied the objects on the lieutenant's desk, but she saw little to reflect the sort of man she was dealing with: two metal trays that held papers, a single pen, a telephone. She raised her eyes to the wall: Christ looked back at her from the crucifix as if equally unwilling to reveal whatever he might have learned from his proximity to Lieutenant Scarpa.
The room had only a small window, and it was closed, so after twenty minutes Signora Gismondi could no longer ignore how uncomfortable she felt, even with the door open behind her. It had grown unpleasantly warm, and she got to her feet, hoping it might be cooler in the corridor. At the moment she stood, however. Lieutenant Scarpa came back into the room, a manila folder in his right hand. He saw her standing and said, 'You weren't thinking of leaving, were you, Signora?'
There was no audible menace in what he said, but Signora Gismondi, her arms falling to her sides, sat down again and said, 'No, not at all.' In fact, that was just what she wanted to do, leave and have done with this, let them work it out for themselves.
Scarpa went back to his chair, took his seat, glanced at the papers in the trays, as if searching for some sign that she had looked through them while he was away, and said, 'You've had time to think about this, Signora. Do you still maintain that you gave money to this woman and took her to the train station?'
Though the lieutenant was never to know this, it was this flash of sneering insinuation that stiffened Signora Gismondi's resolve. She thought of her husband, who had been short and light-haired and looked nothing at all like Scarpa, and realized nevertheless how very similar the two men were. ‘I am not 'maintaining' anything, Lieutenant,' she said with studied calm. ‘I am stating, declaring, asserting, proclaiming, and, if you will give me the opportunity to do so, swearing that the Romanian woman whom I knew as Flori was locked out of the home of Signora Battestini and that Signora
Battestini was alive and standing at the window when I met Flori on the street. Further, I state that, little more than an hour later, when I took her to the station, she seemed calm and untroubled and gave no sign that she had the intention of murdering anyone.' Then, remembering his remark, she added, 'Whatever those signs might be.' She wanted to continue, to make it clear to this savage that there was no way that Flori, poor dead Flori, could have committed this crime. Her heart pounded with the desire to continue telling him how wrong he was; sweat accumulated between her breasts with the desire to embarrass him, but the habit of civilian caution exerted itself
