The Siena Mystery — Read Chapter One

Chapter One: The Pine Woods

On the second of July, 1944, a man named Gaetano Bindi walked out of his house in Siena at dawn with a pistol in his coat and a map in his head, and he never came home. The Germans shot him in a lane behind the cathedral, twenty hours before the Allies marched into the city. Whatever he knew, he took it into the ground with him.

Seventy-six years later, on a warm night in June of 2020, his son was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stone steps two streets from that same lane.

I did not know any of that on the morning this story begins. I was standing in the sea.

◆

The beach at Tirrenia runs straight and flat for miles along the coast of Tuscany, between the mouth of the River Arno at Pisa and the cranes of the port at Livorno. The sand is pale and fine. Behind it, the pine woods start right at the top of the beach and go back inland for miles, umbrella pines, the tall ones with bare trunks and flat green tops like open parasols, standing so close together that the light under them goes soft and green and the air smells all day long of resin and hot needles.

At six in the morning in late June, the sea was flat as a plate. Pale blue near the sand, darker further out, with a long low haze on the horizon where the islands should have been. Gorgona. Capraia. Elba, further south, where Napoleon was sent the first time. You could not see any of them. Just the haze, and the water, and one fishing boat a long way out with its engine going putt-putt-putt across the stillness.

Dale was already in.

He had gone in the moment I told him, chest first, the way he always does, and now he was thirty yards out, swimming a long loop parallel to the beach, his head up, his ears flat, his white tail out behind him on the water like a little rudder. Every so often he turned his head to check on me. I was standing up to my knees, and the water was warm. That was the astonishing thing. After Lake Garda in February and March, the sea at Tirrenia in June felt like a bath somebody had run for me.

"You're not going to stand there all morning," said a voice behind me.

Vasnti was sitting at the top of the beach, on a folded towel, in the shade of the first of the pines, with a coffee in a paper cup and her shoes beside her and her bare feet in the sand. She had a straw hat on that she had bought in Peschiera, too big for her, and dark glasses, and she was smiling.

"I'm working up to it," I said.

"It's like soup. I put my hand in it."

"It's cold at first."

"Robert. It is twenty-four degrees. I read it on Sandro's telephone, before we left. He made me promise to check it every day for him."

I laughed, and walked out, and dove under, and came up beside Dale. He swam a circle around me, very pleased with himself, and blew water out of his nose in my face.

We had been in Tuscany two days. We had left Peschiera on a Sunday, the twenty-first of June, after a week of swimming and sitting and eating Sandro's food and doing nothing at all, which was the first week of nothing at all I had had since February. Vasnti had told me I was not allowed to do anything else for at least a month. I had agreed.

Then Darnell Pruitt had called from Vicenza about his friend at Camp Darby, and an old man at the bottom of a stone stairway in Siena, and his grandson who said he did not fall.

Vasnti had not argued. That was the thing about her. She had sighed, the way she does when an argument is already lost, and said she had always wanted to see Siena. And then, the next morning, while I was still asleep, she had gone on the internet and found us an apartment for the summer, inside the walls of Siena, in a neighborhood called the Onda. And a little holiday room near the sea at Tirrenia for the first week, close to the Army base. She had booked both before I woke up.

"If we are going to do this," she had said, "we are going to do it somewhere nice."

◆

Camp Darby sits in the middle of those pine woods, about a mile in from the beach, between the sea and the canal that runs from Pisa down to Livorno. You could drive past the main gate a hundred times and never know what it was. It does not look like much from the road. A fence, and a guard post, and a long straight drive going away into the trees. The pines go right up to the fence on every side.

Inside, it is another small piece of America. Not as big as Caserma Ederle at Vicenza. Smaller, quieter, older. Low buildings among the trees. A commissary, a PX, a bowling alley, a little chapel with a white steeple. A post office with American mailboxes. There is a recreation area by the sea, with a beach club and cabins, where soldiers stationed anywhere in Europe can come for a vacation by the Mediterranean.

But that is the small part. Most of Camp Darby, the part that goes on for miles back into the pine woods behind a second fence, and a third, is something else. It is one of the biggest storage depots for American weapons and ammunition outside the United States. Bunkers, hundreds of them, under the trees. Long low mounds covered in earth and grass, with steel doors set into the ends, and railway lines running between them, and a canal running out to the port at Livorno so that ships can load. It has been there since the nineteen fifties, filled and emptied and filled again.

I knew all that before we went. Darnell had told me. He had also told me that the man in charge of security there was a man named Raymond Tolliver, and that Ray Tolliver was the best soldier Darnell had ever served under, and the only one who had ever made him cry.

"Cry?" I had said. "How?"

"He told me my momma was going to be proud of me," said Darnell, "and she was in the hospital at the time, and he knew it." He had been quiet a second. "You'll like him."

◆

Master Sergeant Raymond Tolliver met us at the visitor center at nine. He was a tall, rangy, weathered man of about fifty, with a face as brown and creased as an old saddle, close-cropped gray hair, and pale blue eyes in deep crow's feet from squinting into a lot of suns. He wore the Army combat uniform with the sleeves rolled exactly to regulation, and a mask with the Kentucky Wildcats on it, and when he saw Dale come through the door at my left side, in the red, white and blue service-dog vest with the stars on it that Vasnti always put on him for American bases, he stopped where he stood and took his mask off and just looked.

"Well, I'll be," he said, in a voice like gravel in a coffee can. "Pruitt said. I thought he was exaggerating."

"Pruitt doesn't exaggerate about dogs," I said.

"No," said Tolliver. "No, he does not." He crouched down. He did not hold out his hand. He waited. After a moment, Dale walked across to him and sniffed his face, and his shoulder, and his ear, and then sat down in front of him, very straight, and looked at him.

"Huh," said Tolliver softly. He did not move. "I had one like you, son. Military working dog. Belgian Malinois, in Iraq. Name of Ronan. Found an IED in a culvert outside Ramadi that was meant for my whole convoy." He looked at Dale a moment more. "Ronan used to sit just like that. Like he was waiting for you to say something worth hearing."

Then he stood up and shook my hand, and then, after a second, Vasnti's, and he looked at her straw hat and smiled for the first time.

"Ma'am. Ray Tolliver. Welcome to the woods."

"Vasnti," said Vasnti. "And I'm not part of whatever this is. I'm here for the beach."

"Yes, ma'am," said Tolliver gravely. "Pruitt mentioned that too."

◆

Matteo Bindi was waiting for us at a picnic table under the pines behind the visitor center.

He stood up when he saw us coming. He was about twenty-nine, slim, dark-haired, in a pale blue short-sleeved shirt with a Department of the Army badge clipped to the pocket and his name on it. Neat, careful, the kind of young man who irons his shirts himself. He had a narrow, serious face and dark eyes with shadows under them. His hands were clasped together in front of him, very tight. When he saw Dale, something in his face moved and then stopped.

"Mr. Hethcoat," he said. His English was very good, with the soft Tuscan C's that come out almost as H's. "Thank you for coming. Thank you so much. I know this is—" He stopped. "I know Ray had to ask a big favor."

"Ray didn't have to ask," I said. "Darnell did. And Darnell can ask me anything."

We sat down. Tolliver sat at the end of the table, a little apart. Vasnti said she would take a walk and look at the PX, and squeezed my shoulder, and went. Dale lay down under the table at my feet.

Matteo did not say anything for a moment. He looked at the table. Then he took his phone out of his pocket and set it down in front of him, face up, and looked at it.

"My grandfather," he said, "was called Ettore Bindi. He was eighty-six years old. He was born in the Contrada dell'Onda, in Siena, in a house on Via Giovanni Duprè, and he lived in that house his whole life. His father was born there. His grandfather. He was the custode of our contrada's museum for forty years. The keeper. He had the keys. He knew every object in it, every banner, every costume, every drum. He could tell you who won every Palio since eighteen hundred, and on which horse, and who the jockey was, and what the weather was like that day." He swallowed. "He was not a man who fell down stairs."

"Tell me what happened," I said.

He told me.

◆

In March, when the lockdown came, the contrada had used the time to do something they had been planning for years. One of the treasures of the Onda's museum was a drappellone from 1719. A drappellone, Matteo explained, is the prize of the Palio, a long painted silk banner, and every contrada that wins keeps its banners forever, in its museum, like the trophies of a football club. Except that they are works of art, painted by real artists, some of them famous, and the old ones are as precious as anything in the Pinacoteca.

The Onda's banner of 1719 was one of the oldest surviving drappelloni in Siena. It was also falling apart. The silk had split in a dozen places, and the old linen lining sewn on the back had gone brittle and brown. For years the contrada had wanted to have it restored, but there was never the money.

"Then last autumn," said Matteo, "a man in our contrada said he would pay. A businessman. Very generous. He has given a lot to the Onda. He said, take it to the best textile restorer in Tuscany, and send me the bill."

The banner went to a restorer's laboratory in Florence in January. It came back at the beginning of June, beautiful, mended, the silk stabilized, on a new lining, in a new frame. On the fifth of June there was a small ceremony in the museum, with masks and distance, the Priore of the contrada and the board and the businessman who had paid. And Ettore, who had the keys.

On the night of the seventh of June, someone broke into the museum through a skylight in the roof, and took it.

"Only that," said Matteo. "Nothing else. There were silver cups in the next case. There were other banners. Older ones, some of them, and more valuable. They took only the 1719." He looked up at me. "The police came. The Polizia, from the Questura in Siena. They said it was probably a collector. Somebody who had read about the restoration in the newspaper. They said it was probably already out of Italy." He shook his head. "My grandfather did not believe it. From the first day."

"Why not?"

"He would not tell me." Matteo turned his phone around on the table, with one finger. "For four days, he would not tell me. He was different. Quiet. He went out at night, which he never did. He went to the archive of the contrada and sat for hours with the old books. He went to see his sister, my great-aunt Pina, who is ninety-one, and they talked with the door shut, and when I came in they stopped." His jaw tightened. "And then, on the night of the eleventh of June—"

He stopped.

"It was four days after the theft," he said. "In the evening my grandfather went to the church of our contrada, by himself, and lit a candle. He had not done that since my grandmother died. Then he went home. At eleven o'clock at night he went out again. My great-aunt saw him go from her window. He had his good jacket on. The one he wore for the Palio, every year, for sixty years."

He turned his phone face down on the table.

"At eleven fifty-two, he called me," he said. "I was here, at home, in Pisa. I was asleep. I did not hear the phone." His voice cracked. "I found the message in the morning."

"What did he say?"

Matteo turned the phone back over. He touched the screen. He held it out across the table toward me, between us, and pressed play.

It was an old man's voice. Thin and breathless and very fast, speaking in Italian. There was noise behind him, like wind, or like an echo, as if he was in a stone place. I could not follow all of it. Matteo said the words softly, in English, just behind his grandfather's voice, a breath behind, like an interpreter in a courtroom.

"Matteo. It's Nonno. Listen to me. It was never in the banner. Do you understand? It was never in the banner. It was in your great-grandmother's stitches. I know who has it now. I know where they are going. They have found Babbo's road. Matteo—"

There was a sound. A scrape, sharp. Then a different sound, sudden and flat and loud, a crack, that made the phone's little speaker buzz.

Then nothing. Just the wind noise, or the echo. For four or five seconds.

Then the message ended.

Nobody at the picnic table said anything at all. Somewhere in the pines over our heads, a bird was making a long, liquid call, over and over.

Under the table, Dale had lifted his head off his paws at the crack. He was looking up at the phone.

"Play it again," I said.

Matteo played it again. I listened to the crack.

I have heard a lot of sounds in my life. I have heard car doors slam, and fireworks, and engines backfiring, and a hundred kinds of things falling on a hundred kinds of floors. And I have heard the other thing, more times than I would like. I have heard it in deserts and on ranges and in a city I will not name, and once on a quiet street in Virginia.

"That's a gunshot," I said.

Ray Tolliver let out a long, slow breath at the end of the table.

"That's what I said," he said quietly. "First time I heard it."

Matteo was looking at me. His eyes were very bright.

"The police," he said, "say it was a door. Or the phone falling on the stone. They found him at the bottom of the steps of the Vicolo delle Carrozze, in the morning, at six, by a woman going to work. He had fallen. His neck was broken. He was eighty-six, they said, and it was dark, and the steps are very steep, and he had drunk a glass of wine with his supper." He swallowed. "His phone was beside him, broken. That is all. They did not find a gun. They did not find a bullet. Nothing."

"Did they look?"

"They looked at an old man at the bottom of a staircase," said Matteo. "They did not look for anything else."

◆

I sat at that picnic table under the pines and thought for a while. Dale had put his chin on my boot.

"Matteo," I said. "Your grandfather said, they've found Babbo's road. Who's Babbo?"

"Babbo is how you say Papa, in Tuscany," said Matteo. "His father. My great-grandfather. Gaetano Bindi."

"And what's Babbo's road?"

Matteo looked at me for a moment. Then he looked down at the table.

"I don't know," he said. "Truly. I never heard him say it before. Not once, in my whole life." He hesitated. "But my great-aunt Pina knows. I am sure she knows. When I asked her, after the funeral, she started to cry, and she told me to go home."

"Will she talk to me?"

"I don't know." He looked up. "She does not like strangers. Or Americans. Or the police. Or dogs." He almost smiled. "She does not like very many things. She is ninety-one, and she has lived in the Onda her whole life, and she remembers the war."

"Your great-grandfather. Gaetano. What happened to him?"

"The Germans shot him," said Matteo. "In 1944. The second of July. The day before Siena was liberated. He was a partisan. That is all anybody in the family ever said. My grandfather was eight years old." He was quiet. "There is a plaque, on the wall, where it happened. Behind the Duomo. His name is on it. We put flowers there every year."

The second of July, 1944. In any ordinary year, the day of the Palio. And this year, for the first time since that war, there would be no Palio at all.

I looked at Tolliver. He was looking at me.

"There's one more thing," Tolliver said. "That I didn't tell Pruitt on the phone. And it's the reason I wanted you here, and not just a phone call to some captain in Florence."

"Go on."

He leaned forward with his forearms on the table.

"Matteo works in the logistics office," he said. "Ammunition supply point. He's good. Real good. Sharp eyes, and he don't let anything go." He glanced at Matteo. Matteo was looking at the table. "Ten days ago, a few days after his granddaddy passed, he came to me with something. We'd had an inventory reconciliation on some training stock. Demolition stuff. Not much. Few blocks of C-4. Some detonating cord. Some blasting caps. Training issue, for our EOD folks to practice with." He paused. "The paperwork said it got used on a range exercise in May. Matteo went and checked the range log. There wasn't any exercise in May. There wasn't anything in May. We were locked down like everybody else."

"So it's missing."

"So it's missing," said Tolliver. "Or somebody fat-fingered a form. Which happens. Which I would have bet my house on, honestly, a month ago." He looked at Matteo again. "Then the kid's granddaddy turns up at the bottom of a staircase, and there's a gunshot on his voicemail, and he's talking about somebody going somewhere under some road."

"Under the city," Matteo said quietly. "He did not say under some road. He said Babbo's road. And the last time I saw him alive, at Sunday lunch, he said something to me in the kitchen. When nobody was listening. He said, Matteo, did you know that Siena has a whole other city underneath it? Made of water?" He looked up at me. "I thought he was talking about the bottini. Everyone in Siena knows the bottini. I thought he was just being an old man."

"What are the bottini?"

"Tunnels," said Matteo. "Medieval tunnels, under Siena. Twenty-five kilometers of them. Dug by hand, in the twelve hundreds, to bring water from the hills into the city, to the fountains. Siena has no river. So they made one. Underground." He spread his hands. "You can walk in them, still, some of them. They give tours. I went once, at school."

I sat there under the pines and thought about a missing box of demolition training stock from the biggest American ammunition depot in Europe. I thought about an old man in his good Palio jacket, on a stone stairway in the dark, saying they have found Babbo's road.

I thought about a crack on a voicemail, and then five seconds of nothing.

Dale had sat up under the table. He put his head on my knee, and looked at me.

"Mr. Hethcoat," said Matteo. His voice was very low. "The police will not listen to me. They say I am grieving. They say I am imagining. Ray says you are a man who finds things. With your dog." He looked down at Dale. "Will you help me find out what happened to my grandfather?"

I looked at Tolliver. I thought about Vasnti, walking around the PX in her big straw hat. I thought about the month of doing nothing at all that I had promised her.

Then I thought about Gino Battaglin, under the arches of the Basilica, with his little dog in his coat.

"I'll need to meet your great-aunt Pina," I said.

Matteo closed his eyes. His shoulders came down, for the first time since we had sat down, as if somebody had taken a sack of stone off his back.

"Thank you," he whispered.

"And I'll need to see those steps."

"Tomorrow," said Matteo. "I will take you tomorrow."

◆

Vasnti was waiting by the truck in the parking lot when we came out, with a bag from the PX in her hand and her straw hat tipped back on her head. She looked at my face, and then at Dale, and then at Matteo, walking back toward the office with his head down.

"Well," she said. "How long did the month of doing nothing last?"

"Four days," I said.

"That's longer than I thought." She opened the passenger door. Then she stopped, and looked at me over the top of it. "Is it bad?"

"An old man is dead," I said. "His grandson thinks he was murdered. I think he's right."

She was quiet a moment.

"Then you'd better find out who did it," she said. "And then, Robert Hethcoat, you're going to take me out to dinner in Siena, somewhere with a view, and I'm going to wear the dress I bought in Verona, and you're not going to talk about any of it."

"Deal."

"And Dale's coming."

"Dale always comes."

She got in. Dale jumped into the back seat and put his chin on the console between us. I started the engine.

In my pocket, my phone buzzed once. A text. From a number I did not know, an Italian mobile. I took it out and looked at it.

It was a photograph. Nothing else. No message.

A picture of the three of us, taken an hour before. Vasnti and Dale and me, on the beach at Tirrenia in the early morning, Vasnti on her towel in the shade of the pines with her coffee, and me standing in the water up to my knees, and Dale out beyond me, swimming.

It had been taken from somewhere up in the pine woods behind the beach. From the shadows. With a long lens.

I looked at it for a while. Then I put the phone face down on my knee, and looked out through the windshield at the long straight drive going away through the trees, and said nothing to Vasnti at all.

Dale, in the back seat, had gone very still. He was looking at me.