Marta stared at him intensely for a few moments, giving him the impression that her blue-grey eyes were peering into his soul. She nodded without saying a word.
“She was one of those that Ghitta . . .?” Marta kept her eyes glued to the floor, only gradually raising them towards the walls, avoiding Soneri as though she were afraid of him. Then suddenly, she said, “I couldn’t be sure. She was two years behind me. She had a different circle of friends.”
“Try to remember. Don’t be afraid of telling the truth.”
“Forget it, commissario. Don’t pay any heed to malicious gossip. I’ve only ever heard rumours. Resign yourself to the idea that the truth is beyond our reach. We’ve got to make do with what we see with our own eyes. It’s just a matter of having trust in them.”
She seemed immoveable and once again her eyes had the scornful glint they had had when she opened the door to him. He turned brusquely away and went down the stairs more ill at ease with himself than ever.
When he found himself on the street, he realised the afternoon had gone and that the light on one of the shortest days of the year was fading over the roofs of the houses on Via Saffi.
*
Juvara was slow to reply and was breathing heavily when he picked up the receiver. “Were you down in the cellar or sitting on Capuozzo’s knee?” Soneri said.
“He’s away on leave. His deputy’s in charge now.”
“Another one down! So there’s only you and me, and that arsehole Chillemi.”
“What can I do for you?”
“If there’s anyone still around, could you get them to pull out the folders on the Dallacasa case?”
“I’ll have them left on your desk.”
In Piazzale dei Servi the sky was growing darker as night approached. He thought of Fadiga’s refuge and went along to search inside it. Among the cardboard boxes, he found some new newspaper cuttings with a couple of photographs, one of a well-known lawyer, Aristide Zanni, and the other of the Chair of the Council Trade Committee, Romolo Gatti.
He hardly had time to study their innocent faces when his mobile rang. Angela wanted to meet him in front of the Battistero.
*
“This city’s a bordello,” were her opening words when they met.
Soneri was forced to agree. They made their way to the centre, with her insisting on taking his arm even if he disliked that way of walking. A crowd of people desperate to make last-minute purchases were crowded in front of the shop windows in Via Repubblica, like moths around a lamp. Angela tried to kiss him just as a police patrol was making its way slowly along the street.
“Do you want to ruin my reputation? That lot,” he said, pointing to the officers, “are capable of blabbing that Commissario Soneri has been seen in public smothering some woman in kisses while the murder inquiry is getting nowhere.”
“Alright, let’s go up to my office,” Angela said.
When they were inside, Soneri had another attack of anxiety. “Is this your first time?” she teased him.
The commissario made no reply. The thought of Ada tormented him. The woman he had known was so different from the woman he was discovering, and each time he thought about it, he felt wounded and embittered.
He tried to forget, taking refuge somewhat childishly in Angela’s arms, and she continued to give him comfort even afterwards. She sat down at her desk, making Soneri look like a nervous client in search of reassurance.
“Even when you speak about your wife you’re still thinking like a police officer. You examine only the clues which favour prosecution, without taking all the other things into account. Ada needs a good lawyer. Isn’t it odd that I’m the one called upon to defend her? Don’t you agree?”
This was true. Angela had always been retrospectively jealous.
“It seems to me that I’ve lived part of my life in a coma, dreaming of a world which never existed,” Soneri said, thinking aloud.
“If that made you happy, don’t stop. What does it matter if it turns out not to be true? Haven’t you always said that the inquiries you’ve been called on to conduct never uncover the salient facts, with all the inextricable tangle of motives, emotions and feelings that lie behind them.”
“Yes, of course I have. At best I manage to describe the facts, but that’s all I’m asked to do.”
“Even two people who live together never really know each other. There’s always one part of a person which remains in the shadows, some unspoken word which is jealously guarded. It happens with you and me,” she said, looking at him with serious, good-humoured severity. She seemed more than ever the lawyer giving advice.
So as not to spoil the atmosphere, they ordered two pizzas which they ate at her desk in the office. Sitting there, they could hear the chaotic din, with its forced jollity and undertones of desperation, coming from the street below where crowds of people were rushing about doing their Christmas shopping. Little by little the hubbub subsided, and they could hear the shutters being closed as the city prepared to change character.
When he left Angela, Soneri walked across the Mercato della Ghiaia, past the arches of the Palazzo della Pilotta and out onto the wide, open space of Piazzale della Pace where he was struck by the rose-coloured outline of the Battistero, with the mist swirling about it. He walked slowly round it, while a solitary priest, bobbing up and down on the cobblestones, cycled diagonally across Piazza del Duomo. It was then that he saw Pitti. Dressed in a tailored, anthracite-coloured overcoat with tight-fitting trousers, a bowler hat on his head, he was the perfect image of a film star from the Thirties. Helped by the mist, Soneri was able to follow him from a distance without being seen. Pitti went down Borgo del Correggio before turning into Via Petrarca. Halfway down the street, he stopped at a doorway and disappeared inside.
There were many offices in the building. Among the brass nameplates the commissario noticed the Avanzini company. A photograph of the owner had been among the newspaper cuttings picked out for him by Fadiga. Evidently he was often to be seen at the Pensione Tagliavini, and this aroused Soneri’s curiosity. He decided to light a cigar and hang about. He did not have to wait long. A quarter of an hour later Pitti made his reappearance, setting off in the opposite direction from where he had come. His footsteps echoed in the night.
Acting on instinct, Soneri decided not to arrest him on the spot. He preferred to let him move about freely, playing him like a fish on a hook, deluded into believing it could escape. He enjoyed trailing him. It filled the night with mysteries. It was always a pleasing sensation to see his hypotheses come to fruition, especially when, as sometimes happened, one developed into a lead, a clue. They returned to the austere solitude of Piazza del Duomo, before turning into Borgo Pipa and coming out on the new offshoot of Piazzale San Francesco, opposite the old prisons. He found himself once more in the district where the Arditi del Popolo had been active against the Fascists, and where he had spent much of his time as a student, but which now seemed foreign to him. Had he really lived in a dream-filled coma? He hardly had time to glance at Bettati’s shopfront before Pitti led him into Borgo del Parmigianino, where he stopped in front of an elegant palace that had recently been renovated. Pitti rang the bell and went in, leaving Soneri waiting outside. Everything unfolded as previously, except that on this occasion Soneri did not recognise anyone on the mosaic of nameplates and buzzers on the intercom board. A quarter of an hour later, with the regularity of a busy delivery man, Pitti reappeared and plunged again into the labyrinth of streets. He was guided by memory, like a spider moving thread by thread over his web. Now he was moving towards the Duomo, but went round the back, swerving in the direction of San Giovanni Evangelista and turning into the rows of streets between Via Repubblica and the old city centre. He made his next stop in Vicolo al Leon d’Oro where he went into another doorway. Here again Soneri recognised no familiar names. The building was entirely occupied by offices, many with only internal numbers.
He waited and waited, smoking his cig
ar but shielding it in his cupped hand to prevent the glow giving him away. At last Pitti came back down and set off into the network of streets in the old town, in the general direction of the Duomo. Soneri followed him, listening to the uniform, cadenced fall of his footsteps in the misty night until he came out opposite the dark, imposing bulk of the apses of the Duomo and the illuminated façade of the episcopal palace. They again traipsed along Borgo del Correggio, but this time Pitti was headed for Via Saffi. In the darkness, the creaking of Fadiga’s trolley made itself heard as he made his way along the pavement like an unseen collector of bodies in time of plague.
Pitti advanced through the mist until it was pierced by the light from the window of the shisha bar, still crowded with drinkers. He slowed down in front of No. 35, then came to a sudden halt, leaving Soneri scarcely enough time to jump behind a van to prevent Pitti turning and seeing him. When he looked out, the commissario saw Pitti ringing the door bell. Was he looking for Elvira?
He waited at least a minute for an answer which did not come, so he chose to continue on his way, heading off in the direction of the barrier at the end of the avenues. Soneri pursued him. At the corner, an ageing prostitute pulled back her raincoat to reveal two enormous breasts supported by a scaffolding of lace.
Hunter and hunted trailed over a carpet of leaves which had fallen from the chestnut trees, until Pitti turned into Borgo del Naviglio and walked down Borgo Gazzola where the Arditi put up their resistance against the Fascist thugs and the lookout boy, Gazzola, was gunned down. They came out again in front of the old gaol, then turned a corner into Borgo Delle Colonne and were back again in Via Saffi. Pitti rang the doorbell at No. 35 again, this time with greater assurance, as though certain of finding someone to answer, and indeed there was a click of the lock and in he went. Soneri did not move. He would rather have gone over to the shisha bar, but the shutters were half lowered already and some customers were leaving the premises, stooping as they went out. Mohammed pulled the shutters right down with a bang, as he had done on the occasion when Soneri spent the whole night at the window of the pensione observing the street, waiting for something to happen, for someone to telephone and not hang up when they heard his voice. Now that its one place of business was shut, the street was asleep. There were only a few cars on the road, braving a mist which grew thicker as it eddied towards the city centre. He could still hear the creaking of Fadiga’s trolley as he trundled about somewhere among the houses. The mist had grown so dense that the few passers-by almost bumped blindly into one another, pulling up at the last moment. Soneri made out the roundish profile of a person coming towards him, moving slowly, swaying from side to side as though burdened by some weight. As the veil of mist shrouding her parted briefly, he recognised her as Dirce, the old prostitute of the district, long ago adopted and tolerated even by the most jealous of the wives who lived nearby. Over time she had managed to accumulate a fortune which was rapidly dispersed when she, whose trade was sex, fell deeply in love at the age of fifty with a much younger man who deserted her after squandering all her savings. The commissario gazed at her scowling face and brazen air, suggesting a woman who has nothing to lose but whose expression retains a hint of bewilderment. When she passed him, her enormous back stooped as she walked, he still felt those eyes of hers, with the arrogance of total unconcern, burning into him, and he was overcome by a sort of embarrassment as though he had been touched by the warm hand of a stranger.
Pitti remained in the pensione quite a while. Time passed, measured by the ringing of the bells of the Duomo. Life had slowed down even more until it seemed to be passing imperceptibly. He imagined Fadiga walking past the house where once he had been happy and thinking of his wife two storeys up, now sleeping with another man, or Dirce recalling all the street corners from where she had led beardless youths and grown men into temptation. These were the last representatives of a world which had gone and which had taken with it their role and identity. The bell rang out at two o’clock. In the stillness of the night, Soneri heard a car come screeching to a halt. It was the same black Mercedes he had seen that time he had kept the pensione under observation. An elegantly dressed man got out without switching off the ignition, rang the door bell and got back into the car. A few seconds later, Pitti appeared with one of the wheeled suitcases he had seen in Elvira’s room. He jumped into the passenger seat and sped off. Soneri threw away his cigar, which had died slowly in the damp air, and turned towards home, overwhelmed by a bitter melancholy of spirit.
7
HE WAS SURE he had dreamed that he was sleeping in Ada’s room in the Pensione Tagliavini. It was odd that a desire that belonged firmly in the past should surface after so long, but he struggled in vain to recall any clips from the nocturnal film that had haunted his sleep. As he walked towards the questura, a black mood descended on him once more, transforming itself into a general irritation with everything and everyone he met. He wished the mist would envelop him and render him invisible.
One quick look in Soneri’s direction was enough for Juvara to decide it would be unwise to address him, so he kept his head down over his keyboard. Soneri found the files on the Dallacasa case on his desk and immersed himself in them without so much as a glance at the rest of the post. The murder had been committed some twenty years ago and the body found in a field one week after the disappearance, with a nine-calibre bullet in its skull. There were also signs of a blow to the neck, making the death look like an execution. Mario Dallacasa was described as a leading light of the extreme left, even if in the years before his murder his commitment seemed to have wavered and he had been away from Parma for weeks on end without leaving an address with his family. There was one photograph among the pages of the report. He seemed to have been a man of healthy, robust appearance who could have been an outdoors type, judging from the bushy beard covering a large part of his face. He came from the Apennines. On the accompanying index card, Soneri read that he was born in Tizzano Val Parma. It occurred to him that this was not far from Rigoso.
When Nanetti strode in, Soneri had largely got over his ill humour. “I didn’t knock because I’d was sure you’d be out,” Nanetti said.
He had a folder under his arm which he laid on the desk, glancing at the pages of the file as he did so. “A major breakthrough?”
“It’s material which is new to me,” Soneri said. “I’m looking into by a crime committed some years ago.”
“It’s always necessary to go back in time to understand what’s happening today,” Nanetti said with a chuckle. “And you’re a great one for the long game.”
That phrase made him reflect for a few moments before he remembered the routine of their encounters. He turned round, opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of port, lifting it up to the neon light to check the level of wine left.
“I’d have been worried if you’d forgotten that,” Nanetti said.
“People either forget or delude themselves. There are no other possibilities,” Soneri replied, only half serious
“Your port inspires healthy delusions,” Nanetti said, taking a sip and smacking his lips. “I regret to have to say that the analysis made by my team does not open up similarly promising perspectives.”
“So yet again I’m going to have to get by without your assistance,” the commissario said, feigning disappointment
“The tests tell us nothing, so you’ve got a hard nut to crack. I mean, you’re dealing with a real professional.”
“Not an opportunist criminal?”
“I don’t believe so. There are no fingerprints, no cigarette stubs, the prints left by the soles of the shoes are indistinguishable from hundreds of others and there are no biological traces. We’re still trying to find some on the rim of the cup he drank his coffee from, but he seems to have cleaned it well before he left.”
“He could have been in counter-espionage.”
“Even clever killers nearly always leave something, but not this time.”
They poured themselves another glass of port and the beginnings of a euphoric mood came over the commissario, although the grey light filtering in through the curtains did little to encourage good cheer. Soneri’s eyes fell on the folder open in front of him. According to the report of the political branch, Dallacasa was completely au fait with the rules of the armed struggle and the underground movement. A foreign manual on the principal techniques adopted by spies and infiltrators had been taken from his apartment, something which perhaps the killer . . . On the other hand, there were strong suspicions that Dallacasa might have been a supporter of, or have had contacts with, actual terrorist groups. Several extra-parliamentary activists had established such contacts without actually turning terrorist themselves. And then there was that strange telephone call which, according to Chiastra, had put Ghitta in a state of fear and alarm – the call from the person she had called “Rosso”.
But were these only bold hypotheses which owed something to the wine, or could there indeed be some connection with this old murder case? It could be anything.
“A professional, a real professional,” Nanetti said with a touch of admiration in his voice. As a professional himself, he tended to see crimes from a technical perspective, without any concern for ethical questions. Considerations like screams, anguish or horror meant nothing to him. All that mattered were ballistics, the angle of entry of a blade, the calibre of a bullet, the chemical composition of a poison or the geometry of a blunt instrument. It wasn’t that he was bereft of feelings, but simply that he momentarily stripped himself of all trace of them to put himself in a position where he could reason as a scientist. However, his remark on the professionalism of the killer brought back to Soneri the idea that the murderer might have acquired specific training in some sector, and had a secret skill concealed under other appearances.
A Woman Much Missed Page 11
