A Woman Much Missed

by Valerio Varesi

  “Your ears must be buzzing this morning,” Nanetti said.

  The autopsy! He had completely forgotten.

  “Saltapico and the police doctor have been going on about you. Where can he be? What’s he up to this time? He’s never there when you need him.”

  “Whereas Saltapico’s always there when you don’t need him,” Soneri retorted, not fully awake and not at his best.

  “Forget it. It was a quick, straightforward job.”

  “Like Ghitta’s death.”

  “More or less. She was laid out on the ground. Very probably the killer put his knees just below her shoulders, on her humerus, thus preventing her from using her arms, and then stabbed her in the heart.”

  Soneri tried to interrupt, but Nanetti went on: “He used a narrow blade sharpened to a point. The heart was ripped into a dozen pieces.”

  “It looked like a single stab wound,” the commissario said.

  “Yes, there’s only one entry point, so in fact the knife was pushed in and pulled out once. When it was inside, the blade was twisted round and round so as to tear the old lady’s heart to pieces.”

  “So you’re saying that without extracting the knife, he managed to take the heart apart.”

  Nanetti grunted in agreement. “What do you make of it?”

  “I’m amazed that Ghitta could arouse such hatred.”

  “That was my first reaction too. Who would have guessed? A landlady getting on in years. What was she caught up in? But then another idea crossed my mind.” Nanetti paused, waiting for some sign of curiosity from the commissario, but Soneri had not yet got over his ill humour at being so rudely awakened, and was in any case following his own line of thought. Nanetti went on: “Perhaps the killer was in a hurry.”

  “Anybody responsible for an act of slaughter like that is moved either by fear or hatred,” Soneri said.

  “Fear doesn’t tell us very much. You’ve got to understand fear of what,” Nanetti objected.

  “Just so. In my opinion, this killer was in the grips of the most dreadful of all fears, the fear of the unknown.”

  “Maybe he was a sadist, a madman.”

  “Do you know what Saltapico will be telling the journalists? We will not neglect any line of enquiry. Our investigation will cover the full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spectrum.”

  “Which means that after we’ve been once round the track, we’ll be back where we started.”

  Soon afterwards, by now in his office, Soneri did indeed have the sensation of being back at the starting line. From his window, he looked down at the courtyard of the questura, at the entrance gate at the far end, and the crowded street and fir trees in the cloister where Fernanda had first appeared as though springing up from his past. All that now remained of the world he had once inhabited had lost its sharpness and had faded into an unrecognisable dullness – with the corpse of Ghitta lying at its centre.

  Where to begin? He then remembered the material collected by the forensic squad, but when he had it all brought up, meticulously tagged, he found nothing of any particular use, and thought to himself that such objects wrenched from their context, drained of meaning, stuck inside a nylon bag and then laid out in a row on a table, had no story to tell. On the other hand, the diary, which he remembered only now, still seemed as warm as when it had been in Ghitta’s pocket, perhaps because it was so small, no bigger than a notebook carried in a handbag, and had a wine-dark cover evocative of passion and frenzy.

  Ghitta’s letters were childlike and uneven, which at first glace suggested that writing was not something that came to her naturally. The big handwriting made brevity a necessity, so all that was recorded were the times and names of those who came and went around the pensione. However, the woman gave her clients the most extravagant nicknames, taken from her dialect, and this rendered them unrecognisable. Soneri spent a quarter of an hour flicking through the pages, and came away with his head filled with a gallery of characters but with no clue as to who they were, like a list of code names in a spy story. Who was this Blackbag who had booked a room at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday? It was not even definitely a room. All that was written was the name with a time alongside. And Bolshoi? Who could he be? There followed a squad of odd characters: Fastlast, which seemed to mean “comes last”, and therefore in a hurry, Half-light, Bombardier, Duce, Abbess, Rasp. Names spread over the pages and the days of the month, including Sundays, but nothing on Thursdays. He checked week by week and found confirmation. No appointment or booking on Thursdays. Fernanda had told him that that was the day when Ghitta went to Rigoso to do her round of visits.

  He looked again at those baffling nicknames. One stood out because it turned up every so often but without a time listed against it, and the name itself could have been either a common family name or a feminine diminutive – Pitti.

  The door was flung open just as Soneri was looking up from the paper on which he was making a list of all the characters, hoping to find the explanation of the riddle. It was Juvara, out of breath even though he had walked only the few metres from his office to the commissario’s. “A friar has just arrived, a Franciscan from Sant’Uldarico,” he said, enunciating his syllables.

  “Did he come bearing Christmas greetings?” Soneri said, filling the extremely lengthy pause Juvara needed to get his breath back.

  “No, but he left this,” Juvara said, placing on Soneri’s desk a bundle wrapped in paper, inside which a knife could be made out.

  The commissario stared at the object without touching it, as though he was faced with some exotic insect and was working out how to pick it up. With the tips of two fingers, he pulled open the parcel to see more clearly what it contained. It was a knife, long and slender, double-edged and with a rough wooden handle. He stood gazing at it for some minutes, moving his head from one side to the other to get a picture of its outline rather than taking it in his hand and turning it round. Memory came to his aid. He recalled perfectly where he had seen this type of murderous blade before. It was the kind used by pork butchers to slaughter pigs, and this was the season. He raised a distracted glance to Juvara’s puzzled face, and there rose up before his eyes scenes from years ago of freezing winter days with the frost on the trees, the farmyard made ready for the sacrifice, and the beast, grubbing about outside its sty, unaware that it was savouring the last moments of joyful life and liberty.

  Once anxious grandmothers had ushered the children away from scenes of the cruelty of death, everything then took place in a few harrowing seconds. The mysteries of life and death had to be concealed from small children, whether the bull mounting the cow or the slaughter of the pig, but Soneri had managed to peep through the shutters and had witnessed the hook being stuck into the beast’s throat to hold it still, the second slaughterman inserting the knife into the innards, and the animal screaming. It was that desperate, piercing screech of rebellion which remained most strongly imprinted in his ears.

  He was brought back to himself by a timid gesture from Juvara, to which he replied with a wave of apology.

  “The friar said that someone had brought the knife personally to the church at dawn this morning, at around six o’clock,” the inspector said.

  “Someone actually came to the church with the knife?”

  “He went to confession, and then begged Friar Fiorenzo’s pardon before leaving, saying he would be leaving a package.”

  “Is the friar still here?”

  “Yes. I asked him to wait because I thought you’d want a word with him, but I warn you that you won’t get much out of him.”

  “Show him in,” Soneri said.

  Friar Fiorenzo, a living icon of the Franciscan faith, had an appropriately subdued look about him.

  “Commissario, I know what you’re after,” he began, in a voice given its timbre by the pulpit and ecclesiastical chanting, “but you must be aware of the obligations that fall to a confessor.”

  “I know, I know, but I hope that since we are dealing with a case o
f murder . . .”

  Friar Fiorenzo gave a deep sigh and moved the conversation onto a spiritual level. “Evil is always present among us.”

  The commissario realised that the friar was going to be a hard nut to crack. He felt uneasy, like a bull charging the torero’s cape without ever making contact.

  “Was it a man or a woman?”

  Once again a deep sigh, but one that seemed this time to Soneri more impatient. “A woman.”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “Even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to make much out in the dark. It was six o’clock in the morning. I’d only just opened the side door to the church and had taken my place in the confessional. We always get up very early. In the side nave, it was almost completely black. The only light came from the candles burning under the statue of Sant’Uldarico. I heard the door open and someone coming towards me. I realised it was a woman only when she began speaking.”

  “I fully understand that you can’t tell me what she confessed, but are you able to give me a summary of the general sense?”

  “She asked forgiveness for her sins. The prior expressed in everyone’s name the joy we all felt for a person who appeared to be redeemed. God had touched her heart and now she was intent on living differently.”

  “When did she tell you about the knife?”

  “After her confession. I gave her absolution and a blessing and told her to say some prayers. We then waited a little in silence and I heard her sigh. She even wept a little.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “She whispered that I would find a package near the confessional, but said nothing about its contents. She asked me to wait a few minutes before going to collect it, so I understood she wanted me to leave her time to get away. There was no need for this request, because I never leave the confessional before nine o’clock, when another brother takes over. I wait there in the dark for others to come to make their confession, and I say prayers in the meantime.”

  “But in this case you did go out.”

  “I waited longer than was necessary, but I was afraid someone might trip over the package, so I went to find it. It was sealed with adhesive tape, but when I opened it I understood everything.”

  “You connected it with the confession you’d heard?”

  “I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.”

  Soneri stared at him with a mixture of admiration and disappointment. He really was stubborn, and it would be easy to be unnerved by him.

  “Did you know Ghitta?”

  “Very well. She came to us often because she said we were the only thing that remained the same in the midst of many changes. She was a bit lost, but that was in large part due to her boarding house, which was facing problems.”

  “What you say is true. Everything is different. So many foreigners, people from elsewhere. I imagine the churches are empty.”

  “If they are empty, that’s no fault of the incomers, but of those who place the centre of their being outside themselves. Evil has no other explanation. Take Ghitta . . .”

  Soneri detected a gleam of light and seized it. “You believe there was a conflict of interest involved?”

  “Commissario, you know more than me about the motives of criminality. The very fact that you put this question to me suggests you have something else in mind.”

  This was true. He was out to obtain as much information as possible from the friar, but he did not dare ask direct questions for fear of causing him to draw back.

  “I have only one aim: to find the killer, male or female. If the woman who presented herself to you . . .”

  The friar pursed his lips with the expression of a man deep in thought. “I am no policeman, but from what I know of souls I can confirm that she appeared to me sincere. And anyway,” he added, with a touch of irony, “they all come to me to make their confessions.”

  Soneri smiled. “Did she accuse herself explicitly?”

  “No, she spoke to me about responsibility, but in a wide sense.”

  Soneri had before him a way out of the impasse, but the friar seemed immovable in his justified reticence. Dealing with a hardened villain would have been more straightforward. He looked again at the knife. At least they had the weapon used in the crime.

  “How many people come to make their confession at dawn?” he said.

  “Very few. Most people come to pray. Some mornings I hear someone coming in, but they don’t kneel down on the other side of the grille from me. I am aware of them moving about between the benches until the sound of creaking wood announces that they’ve knelt down to say a prayer. Or perhaps I hear a coin being dropped into the steel collection box containing money for the candles, and when I come out I notice an additional light beneath the statue of Sant’Uldarico. Like this morning.” The friar paused, making the last phrase stand on its own as though it had nothing to do with the rest of what he had been saying.

  But the commissario could not help asking, “Did someone light a candle this morning?”

  “Two candles,” Friar Fiorenzo said, raising the same number of fingers of his right hand. “Something which happens very rarely, so when I heard the second coin being dropped into the steel box I did something I never do. I pulled the little curtain over the confessional aside and peeped out.”

  “What did you see?” Soneri said, with some urgency.

  “Unfortunately very little, on account of the dark. It looked like a man of average height, elegantly dressed. He had his back to me as he went out.”

  “How long had he been in the church?”

  “If I counted accurately the number of times the door opened and closed, he was there quite a while. At the beginning, I paid no heed. There are one or two elderly people who come to pray early in the morning because they can’t sleep at night. It was the coins which aroused my curiosity: two candles in the one morning.”

  “Do me a favour, Father. From now on, keep an eye open for people coming into the church.”

  The friar nodded, and bowed his head as though he had just been told off, but then, with a flowing gesture of his habit, he pulled back a sleeve to reveal a white, hairy wrist on which a steel watch shone out incongruously. He gave the slight bow of a humble page before turning to leave silently. Soneri and Juvara exchanged looks expressive of the sense of impotence they felt in the presence of the friar, and which they felt about the crime itself. Vexed by thoughts which led nowhere, the commissario rose abruptly to his feet and went out. He was a few hundred metres down the road when his mobile rang. As he stopped to reply, he realised that he was heading for Via Saffi.

  *

  “Did you find anything in that brothel?” Angela said, with brutal directness.

  “It’s not a brothel.”

  “It is, at least in a metaphorical sense.”

  “That may be so,” the commissario agreed. He had arrived at 35 Via Saffi, and was staring at the building which housed the pensione. The only residents in the area seemed to be immigrants, mainly Arabs and Africans. From the window of the bar opposite, a Pakistani man in a flowing, caffelatte-coloured tunic kept him under observation. An elderly gentleman passing on his bicycle had the air of a survivor.

  “There are only foreigners here now,” Soneri said.

  “The city has changed, commissario,” Angela intoned, as though beginning a lecture. “It’s too long since you were last involved with this district. Anyway, you always attach too much importance to memories.”

  “I rely on them, like everybody else. Otherwise, what’s left?”

  “I did hope that our present would have given you some consolation. Anyway, it’s time you faced up to the fact that all those things you so jealously guard in your locker give off a nasty stench. They’re as phoney as a piece of badly executed restoration work.”

  “You can’t accept that I had another life before I met you. You should have got me when I was young.”

  “You could take that as a sign of love.”
<
br />   “Alright, but leave me on a long leash. I’m an anarchist and a stray, like the people who now inhabit this district. And so are you, by the way.”

  “We’re made for one another.” Angela gave a sardonic laugh. “We spend our time sniffing out traces of ourselves in the hope of bumping into each other every now and then. But don’t fool yourself about memories. They only sparkle because they’re so far away. You know those oxen’s yokes you see hanging on walls? They’re admired now because they’re freshly varnished and shiny, but before they became collectors’ items they stank and were grimy with shit.”

  “Rather the shit than the aseptic sterility that’s all around us. At least shit’s a fertiliser.”

  “I just wanted to say that you should bear in mind that Ghitta may not have been entirely whiter than white.”

  “I have learned that no-one in this world is whiter than white, and that includes you and me. It’s a question of timing. We perform different roles at different times.”

  “And your role at the moment is to play the sleuth, but it seems to me you could do with a lesson in the geography of the old city,” Angela said.

  “You can play the part of teacher this evening. It’s embarrassing at my age to have to take private lessons, so it’s better to do it under cover of dark, in the mist.”

  After he had hung up, he turned and noticed that the Pakistani was still watching him through the windows of the bar, so he pushed open the door and went in. There was the scent of incense from a few sticks which were burning slowly, spreading their aroma around. In the centre of the room, some men dressed like the barman were chatting in their own language.

  “Did you know Ghitta?” Soneri asked the owner.

  “The old lady who lived at number thirty-five?” the Pakistani said, examining Soneri’s cigar with such admiration that the commissario, out of professional instinct, wondered if he had mistaken it for a joint.