The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 23



Perini’s certainty about that particular aspect of the shooting in Florence lasted for only another couple of hours, because of a visitor who arrived while Lombardi was still out at the crime scene.

He was again looking over some of the notes he’d made before he’d fallen asleep in the early hours of that morning when the receptionist downstairs rang him to report that he had a visitor.

‘Who is it?’ Perini demanded.

‘The name in his identity card is Dino Spagnoli.’

‘Never heard of him. What does he want?’

‘He’s a researcher, and he says he has some information to give you about Dante.’

‘What?’

‘He says he –’

‘No, I heard you,’ Perini interrupted. ‘Send him up here, right now.’

A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway a minute or so later, a slightly untidy dark-haired young man standing behind him, clutching a black leather briefcase. Perini waved them both inside.

‘I hope I’m not wasting your time, inspector,’ Spagnoli began, taking the seat on the opposite side of the desk, ‘but I recently found myself in an unusual position, though it didn’t seem important in any way until this morning.’

Perini held up his hand.

‘Please start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘First of all, who are you? What do you do for a living?’

‘I’m a freelance researcher. Most of the time I’m checking facts for authors who are writing guide books or novels, investigating the histories of old buildings in the area, or providing background information on notable Florentines, people like Giotto, Boccaccio and Villani. And Dante, of course. But I’m not a scholar in the usual sense of the word, because I do quite narrow research on very limited subjects, and always to order. So if you like I know quite a lot about very little.’

The way he said the last sentence made Perini suspect it was an expression he’d used many times in the past, and might even have been the kind of catch-phrase Spagnoli would have inscribed on his business cards.

‘So this unusual position was …’ Perini left the sentence dangling, hoping to steer the man back to the point of his visit.

‘Oh, yes. A few days ago I received a phone call that asked me to do a very specific piece of research. Usually, the requests I get include a certain amount of repeat business, as it were, asking for information that I have already retrieved for other clients, but this was unusual because it was something I had never before been asked to find out, and because it also seemed to me to be a completely pointless request. Anyway, we agreed a price and a timescale, and I started doing my initial research, but almost before I’d started I’d had another call from a different client who wanted me to discover exactly the same fact as the first one.’

‘Which was what?’ Perini asked, beginning to squirm slightly in his seat with impatience.

‘I’ll come to that in just a moment. For me, this second request was good news, because it meant I would end up being paid twice for the same piece of work, so again I negotiated the fee and delivery schedule. Apart from the singular nature of the request’ – Perini had never heard anybody use the word ‘singular’ in normal conversation before – ‘both clients refused to give their names or their addresses, and insisted in paying me in cash. Which I will obviously be declaring,’ he added hastily.

‘You can relax, Signor Spagnoli. I’m not a Grey Ghost, and we don’t talk to them unless we absolutely have to. Your secret’s safe with me.’

The Guardia di Finanza, colloquially known as the Grey Ghosts, is the organization set up by the Italian government to stamp out undeclared cash transactions and ensure that any income earned by a resident of that country was both declared and, more importantly, taxed. In the face of the lawless mentality of most of the inhabitants of Italy, the organization had always faced an uphill struggle.

‘Right. Anyway, I did the research the two men had requested. Usually, I can guarantee the accuracy of my work, but in this case there were too many gaps in the records for me to be completely certain of my conclusions, though I think I did finally obtain the correct answer. I wrote out a brief report for each man, and delivered these to the two clients in two different cafes on the outskirts of the city, on the same evening. They both paid my fee immediately, as they had agreed to do. One was Russian, I’m almost certain, because that accent is unmistakable, and the other man probably came from somewhere in the Balkans. That struck me as being a bit unusual.’

Spagnoli paused for a moment.

‘You don’t normally do research for people from those parts of the world?’ Perini asked. ‘I presume that the nationality of these two clients isn’t the reason you’re sitting here now?’

The researcher smiled slightly and shook his head.

‘No, inspector, it’s not. The reason I’m here is because this morning I tried to follow my usual route through Florence but I couldn’t, because there’d been what the police officer I spoke to described as an “incident”. It looked to me like rather more than that, because the shape of a body lying in the road was quite unmistakable.’

‘There was a death in the city last night,’ Perini said. ‘I can confirm that.’

The newspapers would be carrying the report within hours, so there was no point in not admitting what Spagnoli clearly already knew.

‘But I’m still not certain why you’re here. Do you think you know the victim?’

‘I’ve never met him in my life, but if it’s who I think it is, his name is Paolo Bardolino. And I only know that because of one address in that street. He is – or possibly he was – the owner of the house outside which the body was lying, and that’s how I know his name. You see, inspector, that address was the end-result of the research I did for these two men.’

Spagnoli stared at the puzzled expression on Perini’s face and smiled again, enjoying the moment.

‘I know it’s just an old house in a back street in Florence,’ he said, ‘but that was what those two clients wanted me to discover for them. The request they made was quite simple: they just wanted me to find the last property in Florence that was occupied by Dante Alighieri before he went to Rome and was then exiled. And that house, to the best of my knowledge, is it, and that’s what I told those two men.’