Just One Evil Act

reason.

Roberto had not been a source of pride to his family. Indeed, just the opposite was the case. At fifteen years old and enterprising well beyond his years, he’d found easy money available in running a minor prostitution ring featuring the services of immigrant women from Africa. His parents had got him out of Rome one step ahead of being arrested not only for this but also for having enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh offered—at least to hear Roberto’s account of the interlude—by the twelve-year-old daughter of a family acquaintance. The parents of the violated girl agreed to a hefty financial settlement for her deflowering, and the public prosecutor had been cajoled into accepting an arrangement that guaranteed Roberto’s absence from the Eternal City well into subsequent decades. Hence, an arrest and a trial associated with either matter were avoided and familial disgrace had been buried by means of the boy’s removal to Lucca. There he’d remained for the past ten years.

“He is not a bad boy,” Signora Medici avowed to Salvatore, less with passion than with the habit of repetition. “It is just that . . . for Roberto . . .” She glanced at her husband. It seemed a wary look.

He went on. “Vuole una vita facile” was how the signore put it. And to Roberto, the easy life had been defined as working as little as possible since there were pickings aplenty in their society and he’d been determined from childhood to be ready with a basket whenever something was hanging low enough on the tree. When he worked at all, it was as a waiter in one fine restaurant or another, either in Lucca or in Pisa or occasionally in Firenze. Charming as he was, he never had trouble finding employment. Keeping it, however, had always been another matter.

“We pray for him,” Signora Medici murmured. “Since he is fifteen years old, all of us pray that he will perhaps grow into a man like his father or like his brother.”

The fact that Roberto had a brother was a subject worth exploring, but the topic was dispatched fairly quickly. Cristoforo Squali, as things turned out, was the blue-eyed boy in the family, an architetto in Rome, married three years, and producing a grandchild for his proud parents eleven months after the I dos were said. With another child on the way, he was everything Roberto was not, this Cristo. He’d never put a foot wrong since the day of his birth. While Roberto . . . ? Signora Medici crossed herself. “We pray for him,” she repeated. “Weekly novenas, his mother and I. But God has never heard our prayers.”

Salvatore told them, then, about the location of their nephew’s accident. They appeared to know little enough about his doings in Tuscany, but there was a chance that his trip into the Apuan Alps would trigger in them a memory of a conversation with him, the casual mention on his part of a friend, an associate, or an acquaintance who lived there. He did not tell them that Roberto was involved in some way in the disappearance of the English girl that had been reported in the newspapers and on the television. Telling them that would put them all on the fast track to family secrecy, considering Roberto’s hushed-up brush with the law in Rome.

Salvatore didn’t expect them to know much about what Roberto had been doing in the Apuan Alps. He was surprised, then, when Signora Medici and her husband looked at each other in what appeared to be consternation when he told them where their nephew’s car had been found. The air among them fairly crackled with tension as the signora repeated, “Le Alpi Apuane?” As she spoke, her husband’s face hardened on an expression that mixed loathing and fury equally.

“Si,” Salvatore said. If they had a carta stradale of Tuscany, he could show them approximately where their nephew’s car had been found.

Signora Medici looked at her husband. Her glance seemed to ask him if they even wanted to know more at this point. They were worried about something, Salvatore concluded, perhaps trying to decide if they preferred to remain in ignorance about Roberto’s activities.

Signor Medici made the decision for them both. He pushed himself to his feet and told Salvatore to come with him into the house. Salvatore followed him through an open doorway shielded from bugs by strips of plastic. This gave way into a large kitchen floored in well-scrubbed terracotta tiles. “Aspetti qui” told Salvatore that he was to wait, and the signore vanished through another doorway to a darkened part of the house while his wife went to the stove and from a shelf above it took a large Moka into which she began to spoon coffee. This seemed more something to do with her hands than an offer of hospitality since once she added water and put the Moka onto the flame of the fornello, she promptly forgot all about it.

The signore returned with a dog-eared road map of all of Tuscany. He spread it out upon a deeply dented chopping block that was a central feature of the kitchen. Salvatore studied it, trying to recall at what exact point the final turnoff appeared on the route to the accident site. With his finger he traced the route he and DI Lynley had taken. He got as far as the first turn they’d made off the main road when Signora Medici gave a whimper and her husband muttered a curse.

“Che cosa sapete?” Salvatore asked them. “Dovete dirmi tutto.” For it was obvious to him that they did know more than they wished to say about the Apuan Alps. To convince them that they indeed had to tell him whatever they knew, he saw he had no choice in the matter and told them of Roberto’s possible involvement in a serious crime.

“Ma lei, lei,” the signora murmured to her husband. She grabbed on to his arm as if for some kind of reassurance.

“Chi?” Salvatore demanded. Who was this she to whom the signora referred?

After an agonised glance between them, Signor Medici was the one to speak. She was their daughter, Domenica, who resided at a cloistered convent high in the Apuan Alps.

“A nun?” Salvatore asked.

No, she was not a nun, the signore told him. She was—and here the man’s lip curled with his disgust— una pazza, un’ imbecille, una—

“No!” his wife cried. This was not true. She was not crazy, she was not an imbecile. She was, instead, just a simple girl who wanted and had been denied a life spent in the presence of God and a holy marriage to the Lord Jesus Christ. She wanted prayer. She wanted meditation. She wanted contemplation and silence, and if he did not understand that her deep love of her Catholic religion had created within their daughter a nature both massively spiritual and completely innocent—

“They would not take her,” Signor Medici cut in, waving away his wife’s defence of their child. “She lacked the brains. You know this as well as I do, Maria.”

From all of this, Salvatore attempted to put together the pieces of a puzzle that seemed to be growing by the minute. Domenica was not a nun, then. But she lived in the convent with the other nuns? She was, perhaps, an acolyte of some sort? Perhaps a servant? A cook? A laundress? A seamstress assisting with the manufacture of vestments for the province’s priests?

Signor Medici barked an unpleasant laugh. All of Salvatore’s suggestions, it appeared, were far more challenging than his figlia stupida could have contended with. She was none of these things. Rather, she was a caretaker on the convent property, and she lived there in rooms above its hovel of a barn. She milked goats, she grew vegetables, and she fancied herself part of the community. She even called herself Sister Domenica Giustina, and she’d created out of table linens from their home here in Lucca a form of nun’s habit that resembled that which the sisters themselves wore.

During the man’s recitation, his wife began to weep. She looked away from her husband and clasped her hands tightly in her lap. When the man was finished, she turned back to Salvatore and said, “Figlia unica,” which explained something of the grief she felt and the anger harboured by her husband. Domenica was their only child. She’d held her parents’ hopes for the future, which had been dashed as over the years it had become more and more obvious that the girl was not normal.

Salvatore had to ask the next question, despite their distress at having to speak of Domenica at all. Could Roberto Squali have been heading to the convent where Domenica lived? Had he and Domenica stayed in touch since she’d gone to live there?

This they did not know. Their nephew and their daughter had been close at one time as adolescents, but that time had passed as Roberto had learned the limits of what Domenica could offer anyone in companionship. This had not taken long and it was to be expected. Indeed, Domenica’s life had largely been defined by abridged relationships with people who came to understand that what appeared to be a deeply spiritual nature was, in reality, an inability to exist in the world as it was.

All of this Salvatore gleaned, but none of it could eliminate the possibility of Roberto Squali’s driving his convertible into the mountains in order to see his cousin. It would be a piece of luck if a visit to the convent had