Free The Last Enemy by Grace Brophy

shrines, the Casati home was the last fully private residence on via San Francisco. The others had all been sold to religious foundations, turned over to the government to pay taxes, or subdivided into apartments or into stores selling religious kitsch.
    “The family had either great wealth or even greater determination, to hold on to this place through greed, famine, pestilence, and taxes,” Cenni remarked idly to Piero as they waited for someone to answer the door. It was, he also noted to himself, a rare example of a medieval townhouse that had not been tortured in later centuries to conform to more elaborate architectural fads. He was curious to see the inside.
    The young woman who answered the door, a servant judging from her demeanor, was dressed in street clothes rather than a uniform. A good sign, Cenni thought, that the family might not be as pompous as the questore had suggested. Cenni showed her his credentials and smiled. That appeared to fluster her for the moment, but she gathered her forces admirably and asked them to follow her.
    The entrance hall to which they had been admitted cut through the center of the house, from front to back. A series of vaulted arches suggested to Cenni that the hall had been carved out of multiple smaller rooms. The walls, painted a Tuscan yellow, were hung with family portraits—some of them quite good, he thought from his quick appraisal as he walked down the hall. At the end, she opened a door into what appeared to be the family sitting room.
    “The count will be with you in a moment. He asked that you make yourself at home,” the servant said, smiling faintly. She left by a different door.
    Piero accepted the invitation to make himself at home by sitting on the largest, most comfortable-looking chair in the room. Cenni wondered if Better sit than stand was the Tonni family motto. He walked about the room slowly, using this opportunity to get to know its inhabitants before he met them in person.
    It was a room he liked. It was at the back of the house and he could see a large stone terrace through the French doors that stretched across the south end of the room. The ceiling was high and vaulted, yet the room seemed intimate and informal. Various-sized oriental rugs, mainly tribal, covered the highly polished chestnut wood floors, and one prayer-sized Persian lay in front of the fireplace. Painted a warm white, the walls were covered with family photographs and a few amateurish-looking watercolors. The only important work of art in the room was an Impressionist painting hanging over the fire-place mantle, a Sisley he found upon examining the signature.
    Built-in shelves on each side of the fireplace held a stereo, an old-fashioned record player, a small portable television, a VCR, and lots of books, about half of them with English titles. He smiled, noting the number of murder mysteries shoved in among the Dickens, Thackeray, and Austen novels. There were two full shelves of works on and by feminists— Italian, French, and English authors mixed together—and a number of books on the occult; surprisingly, three of them written by Aleister Crowley, the Englishman who had been expelled from Sicily in the 1920s for scandalous acts of black magic and for trafficking in heroin and cocaine. Some Sicilians had even accused Crowley of human sacrifice. Umberto Casati’s father had been a close friend of Mussolini, and as Cenni recalled from his studies of drug use in Italy, it was Mussolini’s followers who had driven Crowley from the island. He wondered if there was a connection?
    The record, tape, and CD collections were diverse, suggesting an eclectic taste for rock, blues, jazz, and opera. The furniture was chintz-covered, overstuffed, and worn, and a small fire burned behind the grate. It was a room in which people could put their feet on the coffee table, he thought with envy, remembering the rigid enforcement of his mother’s rules: Shoes off in the house, feet off the