young recruits who had passed through the Verona barracks at one time or another, but none of this had left a trace. Then she looked at her own hands, and remembered what they had done.
‘ Cara , you cannot be unaware of the rumours that circulated at the time of Gaetano’s death …’
She snatched her hands away.
‘What rumours? I don’t understand. I refuse to understand!’
Danilo sighed deeply.
‘You understand perfectly well.’
He gestured towards the window.
‘And there are plenty of people out there who understand too, or think they do. You know what this town is like. They’ll be all too ready to gossip to some snooping cop. And this will be an investigation by the polizia di stato , not the carabinieri . They’ve been squared away, but apparently the Ministry of the Interior is now launching its own enquiry. Some political battle I don’t understand. Anyway, the crucial thing is that you’re prepared. Spend a little time thinking over what you want to tell them. Go through your papers to make quite sure that there aren’t any things you’d prefer not to fall into the hands of the judicial authorities. They may have a search warrant, you see.’
‘To search this house? Why on earth would they want to do that?’
‘Well, that rather depends on what they may have learned in the course of their earlier investigations. At all events, Riccardo and I feel very strongly that it would be better to take no chances. Both for your sake, and for the honour of the regiment.’
This last phrase was spoken with a peculiar emphasis. Danilo nodded once, jerkily, turned on his heel and walked out, almost slamming the door behind him.
Claudia stood there for a full minute after he left. Then she went through to the kitchen and refilled her glass from the open bottle of Cinzano Rosso on the counter. Danilo had never spoken to her in such a tone of voice before, like a parade- ground sergeant bawling out some raw recruit. What in the name of God was going on? If the body that had been found really was Leonardo’s, it was she who should be going mad. Instead, everyone else was.
‘For the honour of the regiment’! She’d never thought to hear that cliché again since Gaetano’s death. But once again, apparently, the ranks were closing, and this time against her. No wonder Danilo had wanted his friend to bring the matter up with her. Riccardo was a gentleman through and through, thoroughly decent even if stupendously boring, and given a little more time would have found a way to make her understand what had happened and what needed to be done while respecting her feelings and freedom of action.
She had thought that Danilo was much the same, but she realized now how mistaken she had been. He wasn’t kind; he was a sentimentalist, a very different thing. And like all sentimentalists, he could turn vicious in a moment if thwarted. But how had she thwarted him? What did he want? How much did he know? He’d hinted at this and that, but was it out of tactful discretion, as he’d claimed, or just out of ignorance? He had been playing some sort of game with her, of that she felt sure, but she didn’t know the nature, still less the purpose, of the game. In fact she really didn’t know anything much about Danilo at all, she realized.
On the other hand, she thought, returning to the living room for an unheard-of second cigarette, he didn’t know anything much about her. So there was really nothing to worry about, except of course for those concerned with ‘the honour of the regiment’. They must have been shitting their neatly starched knickers, she thought, using an Austrian expression occasionally voiced by her bilingual mother. If this investigator for the Ministry of the Interior ever found out even a fraction of what had really occurred all those years ago, the honour of the regiment would resemble a pair of those soiled knickers for the foreseeable future. It would be the scandal to end all