The Last Enemy Read Online Free Page B

in the back room, answered questions at the front desk, took their places in the front lines of the riot police, and did so in long hair, short hair, painted nails and lips, even occasionally doused in perfume, and generally they performed their duties well and without complaint. Piero could take a leaf from their book, he reflected.
    As he started to get out of the car, Elena emerged at the top of the stairway. She noticed at once the glance Cenni gave to her Volkswagen. “ Mi dispiace, capo . I only intended to be there a minute. I’ll move it.” Elena was the only one of his officers who didn’t address him by his first name. He assumed it was a piece of her generally complicated nonconformist attitude.
    “I’ll repark the car and ride with you to the cemetery. The body’s already there. Convenient, don’t you think?” After reparking her car, she slid into the back seat, still talking. “They found her shortly after seven-thirty AM. The police surgeon was called almost immediately, and he’s there too. Appears they don’t read directives very well,” Elena opined, a reference to the bulletin that had been issued nationwide at the beginning of the year.
    Cenni needed no reminders. The wording of the directive had been unambiguous. All police organizations will immediately report any serious crime involving Americans to the Polizi di Stato Task Force on Terrorism. A regional phone number and name had been appended and Cenni’s name was listed for the Perugia Questura. He wondered why Fulvio Russo had waited so long to call, and why he had called Carlo Togni and not him directly. No doubt, it will come out during the investigation, Cenni thought. Whether it would have serious repercussions was another matter, one he preferred not to think about at the moment.
    “Do you think we should go inside first, to introduce ourselves?” Piero inquired anxiously.
    “The sergeant’s up at the cemetery,” Elena replied, nudging Cenni in the back. “You can introduce yourself up there. I’ll fill you in on the details before we get there. I have a copy of the murdered woman’s application for a soggiorno . They gave it to me—after some arm-twisting,” she appended, this time directing her words to Cenni.
    On the short drive to the cemetery, Elena filled them in on what she had just learned. “The victim’s American. One Rita Minelli, niece of Umberto Casati. Old Assisi family, friends in high places. Oh, and he still refers to himself as Count Casati . Guess he was out to lunch when they passed the Act of 1947,” she added, referring to the law enacted at the end of the war abolishing Italian titles. A fervent antimonarchist, Elena had been raging for the past two weeks. A member of the PM’s party had suggested in Parliament that the time was ripe to bring back the monarchy. Cenni had ducked into the men’s room at least twice in the past week to avoid one of her tirades.
    Elena ignored the pained look that passed between the two men and continued her recital. “Minelli was forty-five, if we’re to believe what she wrote on her application,” she tacked on needlessly. Cenni reflected that Rita Minelli would have had to submit some evidence of her age when she applied for a permesso di soggiorno , probably her U.S. passport. Elena knows this, he thought, but he also recognized that they each had their own way of dealing with violent death. Elena’s was to establish an immediate distance between herself and the victim. It was one of the few criticisms he had of her police work.
    “She arrived in Assisi last June to bring her mother’s body home for burial and never left. She’s been teaching English since July at her uncle’s language school here in Assisi. Lives with him and his family. Two of the ladies who arrange flowers at the cemetery found the body shortly after seven-thirty AM, in the Casati family vault. Her head was bashed in, probably with a statue from the altar. Looks like rape! That’s