Rosa and the lawyer turned to me.
“Cause of death,” I said. “The official cause was drowning.”
“How do you know this?” the lawyer said, beginning to write on his notepad.
“Cavallini told me when I identified the body. Check the coroner’s report.”
“Yes,” the lawyer said, “it’s an interesting technicality. Maybe useful, the actual cause.”
“What difference does it make?” Moretti said, his voice sullen.
“Listen to me,” Rosa said. “Everything makes a difference. It’s going to be all right.”
“No, it’s not,” he said, looking down.
“We’ve found a witness,” she said. “For that night.”
“You should have told me,” the lawyer said, surprised.
“The man with the umbrella,” Rosa said, still looking directly at Carlo. “You remember, he offered you an umbrella. When you were walking. In front of the Londra Palace. By the statue of Vittorio Emanuele.”
“The man with the umbrella,” Carlo said numbly, not understanding.
“Yes, he remembers the time exactly. How wet you were. If you think, you’ll remember him,” she said, tapping her finger on the table.
He glanced at her in recognition, then shook his head. “It won’t make any difference. It’s what you used to say-don’t get caught. Once they have you-”
“That was different. That was the war,” Rosa said.
Moretti shrugged, all the answer he could manage.
“Talk to him,” Rosa said, pointing to the lawyer. “Every detail. So he can help.”
“To find another technicality?” Moretti said. “What does it matter to them? They’ve already decided. They want to put me in prison.”
“No,” Rosa said, suddenly stern, a kind of slap. “They want to kill you. That’s the punishment.”
He stared at her, his face pale, all the defiance seeping away, then rushing back in a flash of panic as she pushed back her chair and stood. “So talk to him.”
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Talk to him now. He’ll tell you what to say. I’ll be back tomorrow.” She reached over and put her hand on his. “Listen to me. You didn’t kill your father. They did. Do you think I would let them do this to you?”
He lowered his head. “And if it was my fault?”
“I was in that house too. Do I blame you? I blame them. No more. Just talk to him.” She placed her hand now on the lawyer’s shoulder, then motioned for me to get up. “Come,” she said, shooing me away with her. “Too many ears.”
The abruptness of it surprised me, so my question seemed blurted out. “Did he give you the medicine himself, or did someone else?”
Moretti looked at me for a second as if he were readjusting a dial, going back to an earlier program. “He did.”
“So you knew him?”
“No, I’d never met him. But I knew my father had been in the hospital, so I wasn’t surprised.”
“He called you himself?”
“Yes. ‘Come to the hospital. Tell your father I have his medicine’-you know, as if he thought he was at home, in bed. So I went. And he gave me the pills. ‘Does he have any fever?’ he said. No. ‘Tell him one more week with these.’ As if I knew all about it. So I said all right, and I took them and that was that.”
“And you took them to the safe house?” Next to me I felt Rosa stir, annoyed that I was going back over this.
“No, I didn’t know exactly where he was. I thought Verona. But then when he wasn’t there, I tried the house.”
“Was he surprised? To get the medicine?”
“Yes. He said it was nice of the doctor to worry, but he felt fine. Maybe somebody else could use it. It was hard then to get anything, even aspirin. But there was no label on it, so we didn’t know what it was for. How could we use it?”
“No label?”
“No. That’s when I thought, you know, He knows what my father is. He doesn’t want it found-to be connected.”
“Did your father take any?”
“Yes, one, to see what it was. He said he felt the same. It wasn’t the medicine that killed him. Not that way.”
“Not any way,” Rosa said, putting her hand on his arm again. “Are you finished?” she said to me.
“And then you stayed the night?” I said, still trying to make a picture.
“No, never there. Back to Verona.”
“Not Venice?”
“Not with the curfew. I had to leave the house after dark, so there was only enough time to get to Verona.”
“To a safe house there.”
“Yes.”
“And you’d done this before?”
“Many times,” Rosa said. “He was the best.”
“Yes,” Carlo said, “except this time.”
Rosa was still angry when we left the Questura.
“What are you trying to do, make him crazy? You can see he blames himself. And how do we know they followed him? Do they come while he’s there? No. The next morning? No, another day. So who knows? Maybe a tip. Maybe they already knew.”
“Then why did Gianni send his father medicine he didn’t need?”
She looked away, stymied. “A fine thing we did. You know, a boy who blames himself for one thing, sometimes he takes the blame for another. I’ve seen this. A confusion in the mind.” She was quiet for a minute, folding her arms across her chest as if she had caught a chill. “You know that if it’s true, it strengthens Cavallini’s hand. It gives him a case.”
“He already has a case. That’s why it’s important to know what really happened there.”
“If it’s connected. It’s too many ifs now-there’s no time for that.”
“Just inventing witnesses.”
“Why not? The police are inventing a case.”
I said nothing. For a few minutes we pretended to look at buildings as we crossed over the bridge to Santa Maria in Formosa.
“It’s the only way it makes sense, you know,” I said finally. “If he was followed.”
“Yes,” she said, half aloud, as if it had been pulled out of her.
“What happened to the house in Verona?”
“It was betrayed. Not then,” she said quickly. “Later. Everything was betrayed eventually.” She thought for a second. “Why did they wait another day?”
“To see if he went anywhere else. When he came back to Venice, they knew he’d delivered the medicine. So it had to be that house or Verona.”
“And it had to be the house, or he wouldn’t have gone there-just stayed in Verona. So they came.” She stopped, looking away from me, toward the far end of the campo. “You know what they did? First they poured the gasoline. And then they were all around the house, with machine guns. So if you came out, they shot you. Then the matches. So you had a choice. Run out to the guns or stay inside. And of course people stayed-at least you had a chance. Nobody was burning yet. But then the smoke got you, and after that you burned.”
I looked down at her arm. “But you got out?”
She gave a weak smile. “I’m afraid of fire. I ran into the guns.”
“And they missed?”
“No, they shot me. Twice. They left me for dead. So that’s how it happened.” She turned to me. “He knows this. Carlo. He knows how his father died. And if it were you who led them there? How would you feel?”
