Just One Evil Act

He took a sharp breath that hurt his chest. He wondered if Ottavia’s selection of translator was deliberate or merely a chance assignment given by whatever independent organisation the young police officer had phoned. For leaning against the police car across the piazza and gazing round through enormous sunglasses for the policeman she was to meet was Salvatore’s own former wife.

He’d had no idea Birgit had taken up doing translating on the side, away from her work at the university in Pisa. It seemed out of character in her although, as a Swede, Birgit spoke six languages equally well. She would be in demand if she wished to make extra money as she no doubt did. On a policeman’s salary, Salvatore had little enough to give her in the way of child support.

She leaned against the side of his car, smoking a cigarette, as blond and shapely and attractive as ever. Salvatore girded himself to greet her. When he got to the car, she peered at him. She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “Non voglio che i tuoi figli ti vedano cosi,” she said abruptly. Typical of her. Not a question about what had happened to her poor former husband but rather a declaration about the children not seeing him in such a state. He couldn’t actually blame her, however. He didn’t want the children to see him looking like this either.

He told her he was surprised that she had taken up translating. She shrugged, a quintessential Italian movement that she’d learned from her years living in Tuscany. He had never seen it from another Swede. “Money,” she told him. “There’s never enough.”

He looked at her sharply to see if this was a dig. She wasn’t giving him one of her sardonic glances, though. He contented himself with understanding that she was merely stating a fact. He said, “You will explain to Bianca and Marco why their papa cannot see them for a day or two, Birgit?”

“I’m not heartless, Salvatore,” she told him. “You only think I am.”

This was not true. He only thought that they had been from the first badly matched, and this was what he told her.

She dropped her cigarette, crushing it with the toe of one of the stilettos that made her six inches taller than he. She said, “No one sustains lust. You thought otherwise. You were wrong.”

“No, no. At the end I still lusted—”

“I’m not speaking of you, Salvatore.” She nodded at the pensione. “Our English speaker is here?” she said.

He was still trying to wrest the sword from his throat. He nodded and followed her to the door.

Signora Vallera greeted them. Si, Taymullah Azhar was still within the pensione, she told Salvatore, casting a curious glance at Birgit and taking in her great Swedish height, her tailored suit, her silk scarf, her sunlight hair, her silver earrings. The professor and his daughter had been making a plan to purchase flowers and ride bicycles to the cimitero comunale, but they had not yet left, she told them. They were in the breakfast room, studying the pianta stradale to plan a route. Should she fetch . . . ?

He shook his head. She pointed out the way, and he headed there with Birgit following. The pensione was small, so all that was needed was the sound of a conversation and in particular the sound of Hadiyyah Upman’s sweet voice. He wondered if, at nine years old, she was completely aware of what the loss of her mother meant to her now and was going to mean to her in the future.

Taymullah Azhar saw them at once, and he put a protective hand on Hadiyyah’s shoulder. His dark eyes moved as his gaze took in Birgit first and Salvatore second. He frowned at the state of Salvatore’s appearance. “Un incidente,” Salvatore told him.

“An accident,” Birgit translated. Her face looked as if she wanted to add “with someone’s fists,” but she didn’t do so. She told him that Ispettore Lo Bianco had some questions he wished to ask. She explained her purpose needlessly, but Salvatore didn’t stop her from doing so: Ispettore Lo Bianco, she said, had only limited English. Taymullah Azhar nodded although, of course, he knew this already.

He said to Hadiyyah, “Khushi, I will need to talk to these people for a few minutes. If you wait for me . . . Perhaps Signora Vallera will allow you to remain in the kitchen to play with little Graziella . . . ?”

Hadiyyah looked from his face to the face of Salvatore. She said, “Babies don’t play much, Dad.”

“Nonetheless,” he said, and she nodded solemnly and scooted out of the room. She called out something in Italian, but Salvatore didn’t catch it. He and Birgit moved to the table on which the street plan of the city was spread out. Azhar folded the map neatly as Signora Vallera came to the door of the breakfast room. She asked if they wanted caffe and they accepted. As they waited for her to bring it to them, Salvatore enquired politely about Hadiyyah’s well-being as well as Azhar’s.

He watched the Pakistani man carefully, the answers of little import to him. What he thought about was what he had learned about the London professor in the hours since Cinzia Ruocco had revealed what her findings were and what her thoughts were as they related to the findings. What Salvatore knew about Taymullah Azhar at that point was that he was a microbiologist of some considerable reputation. What he didn’t know was whether one of the microbes he studied was E. coli. Nor did he know how that particular bacteria might be transported. Nor did he know how, having transported it, one managed to get a single individual to ingest it without her knowledge.

He said through Birgit, “Dottore, can you tell me about your relationship with Hadiyyah’s mamma? She left you for Signor Mura. She returned to you at some point into her relationship with Signor Mura, si?, to soothe you into believing she’d come back. She disappeared then with Hadiyyah. You were left not knowing what had become of them, vero?”

Unlike so many people who rely on a translation of the speaker’s words, Azhar didn’t look at Birgit as she repeated Salvatore’s statements in English. Nor would he do so for the rest of the interview. Salvatore wondered at this unnatural form of discipline in the man.

“It was not a good relationship,” Azhar said. “How could it have been otherwise? As you have said, she took Hadiyyah from me.”

“She had other men from time to time, vero? While you and she were together?”

“I understand this now to be the case.”

“You did not know this previously?”

“While she lived with me in London? I did not know. Not until she left me for Lorenzo Mura. And even then I did not know about him. Just that it was likely there was someone, somewhere. When she returned to me, I thought she had . . . returned to me. When she left with Hadiyyah, my thought was that she had gone back to whoever it was she had left me for. To him or to someone else.”

“Do you mean that the first time she left you, she might have left you for someone other than Signor Mura?”

“That is what I mean,” Azhar affirmed. “We did not discuss it. When we saw each other again once Hadiyyah had been taken, there was no point to that sort of discussion.”

“And once you reached Italy?”

Azhar drew his eyebrows together as if to say, What about it? He didn’t answer at first as Signora Vallera came into the room with the caffe and a plate of biscotti. They were shaped like balls and covered with powdered sugar. Salvatore took one and let it melt in his mouth. Signora Vallera poured caffe from a tall crockery jug.

When she’d departed, Azhar said, “Non capisco, Ispettore,” and waited for elucidation.

Salvatore said, “I wonder if you carried with you the understandable anger at this woman for her sins against you.”

“We all commit sins against each other,” Azhar said. “I have no immunity from this. But I think she and I had forgiven each other. Hadiyyah was—she is—more important than the grievances Angelina and I had.”

“So you did hold grievances.” And when Azhar nodded, “Yet in your time here, those did not rise between you? You did not accuse? There were no recriminations?”

Birgit stumbled a bit with the word recriminations. But after a pause to consult a pocket dictionary, she carried on. Azhar said that there had been no recriminations once Angelina understood that he had had nothing to do with their daughter’s disappearance, although it had taken him much to convince her of