“I’ve heard from Dottor Capuozzo in Amalfi,” he informed him, and Soneri imagined the questore with a vast napkin round his neck, licking his lips as he bent over a mountain of spaghetti allo scoglio. “He advises caution. He agrees you should be removed from this inquiry.”
Knowing Capuozzo, the commissario assumed he was afraid of the problems that might be created for him if Soneri stirred up trouble with politicians, and he gave a little laugh.
Chillemi watched him without understanding. He was not particularly bright – just wily.
“So I sprang into action. I’ve spent the morning on the telephone,” Chillemi said.
Soneri remained silent, watching and waiting for what was to come next.
“In consultation with Dottor Capuozzo, I decided the way forward was to contact the magistrate and suggest uncoupling the murder investigation from the search for the parties involved in the bribery scandal.”
He never could reach a conclusion, and the commissario had no patience for his endless preambles. He nodded his head vigorously with the air of a busy man who simply wants to know where it’s all going to end.
“There we are. We’ve decided, Dottor Capuozzo and Dottor Saltapico and I, to entrust the bribery enquiry to Guardia di Finanza, who are experience in these matters. Not least because you yourself told me you were entirely familiar with questions of contracts and balance sheets,” Capuozzo added, becoming more self-righteous by the minute.
“Who in the Finanza will be directing the operation?”
“You can contact Maresciallo Maffetoni.”
Chillemi wrote a mobile number on a slip of paper and pushed it over the table to Soneri. “But you carry on, eh?” he recommended in the tone he would have used to encourage a child to concentrate on his studies.
*
Soneri made his way to his office with Chillemi’s final words ringing in his ears. He had no idea which direction to take. He was still of the opinion that the bribery network, while centred on the Pensione Tagliavini, had nothing to do with the murder.
“It’s not gone well for you,” he announced to Juvara a little later.
“What do you mean?”
“The inquiry into the bribery scandal has been entrusted to Maresciallo Maffetone of the Guardia di Finanza. Your career’s on hold.”
The inspector shrugged. “I’ve got plenty to do.”
“Neither of us is reliable enough for issues involving politics.”
“Just as well. That sort of case causes more trouble than it’s worth.”
The commissario’s mobile postponed further conversation.
“Come round to my office,” Angela said. “I’ll send out for a couple of pizzas.”
“Alright.” The commissario did not like arranging lunches and dinners, but he said, “At the very least make sure you get them to use real mozzarella – mozzarella di bufala – and prosciutto.”
He was in a grumpy mood as he got up from his desk. This time it was he who felt weighed down by the oppressive banality of meeting as a couple for lunch between one job and the next. Having a meal with Angela would scarcely disrupt his day, but he always looked forward to those strolls with only his own thoughts for company. These at least satisfied his insatiable desire for time alone.
“Would you like to run your eye over the list of Ghitta’s tenants?” Juvara asked him.
He peered at it in the flickering light of the lamp on his desk. It had every appearance of a job thoroughly done, everything neatly set out in columns or in boxes in accordance with the iron discipline of some computer programme.
“Do you notice anything?”
The inspector nodded. “In the early Eighties, Ghitta Tagliavini gave Cornetti an apartment rent-free in Borgo delle Colonne.”
Soneri stood for a moment in silence, his eyes fixed on the courtyard where some officers were chatting next to the petrol pump reserved for police cars.
“Cornetti was a house-builder. Why on earth would he have wanted a flat from somebody else? And why should Ghitta have made one available without charging rent?” Juvara said.
“That’s the strangest thing of all, considering how attached she was to money,” Soneri said.
“And yet according to the records she kept it would appear there was no income from that house in the period Cornetti had it.”
“Did you try to find out if he used the place as an office?”
“I went round, but I found only Africans and Arabs there. There’s not one of the old tenants left, and the all other apartments have been bought up by some big property firm.”
Soneri gave a snort. “This city has been broken apart and no-one can work out where to find the pieces.”
Puzzled, Juvara watched him put on his duffel coat and go out, but he was accustomed to the commissario’s enigmatic outbursts and knew it was pointless to ask for an explanation.
Soneri walked towards the city centre under a grey sky which hid the Campanile del Duomo and the spires of the Battistero. For some days now, the sun had been bouncing off a buffer of mist which allowed no warmth through, and beneath it the city was putrefying in a choking soup of exhaust fumes.
Angela had cleared her desk and saw that the first thing to do was to calm the commissario down. “My colleague is off sick,” she said, locking her studio door.
The office overlooked the Mercato della Ghiaia, and from there the view opened out onto the riverside walk and beyond to the River Parma and the far bank where a wall of houses marked the beginning of the Oltretorrente district. Soneri had always liked Angela’s office. It reminded him of the attic of his house in the country from where, as a boy, he had looked down onto the farmyard.
He cut the pizza in two, took his share, folded it to make it a sandwich and bit into it.
“You know how I hate eating from paper,” he justified himself.
“You sound like a student from Cambridge.”
“Where they eat rubbish wrapped up in paper and drink from plastic cups. I’ve always eaten off majolica. When you eat badly, there’s no real civilisation.”
Angela grimaced. “Another of your pronouncements. Not even a giudice di tribunale . . .” She concluded with a gesture in which Soneri recognised an advocate addressing a jury.
“What’s this story about bribery and corruption?” She said when he failed to take the bait.
“Who told you about that?”
“Have you not read today’s paper? It says that the Guardia di Finanza is opening an investigation into corruption in the construction industry,” Angela said.
Soneri put down the slice of pizza. Chillemi must have briefed the newspapers the evening before, in time for them to get the news onto the front page. Quite suddenly, the mozzarella di bufala turned cold and chewy, the tomato mouldy, the pastry lumpy. A shiver ran up his spine, freezing his thoughts. He understood what lay behind Chillemi’s duplicity, but he also knew that he was only the executor: the instigator was Capuozzo. He could just see Capuozzo, with that greasy mouth of his, issuing orders in a noisy restaurant in Amalfi overlooking the sea, surrounded by obsequious waiters bowing and scraping at his every command.
He felt Angela’s warm hands massaging his neck before her arms wrapped themselves round him. Feeling like a semi-comatose patient being revived, he let her do as she wished, until finally, slowly, he abandoned himself to her warm body, finding refuge there with infinite gratitude.
*
Afterwards, the commissario felt the anger inside him cool down and settle into a crust of bitterness, more bearable in itself but more tenacious in its grip. It was yet another wound to be added to so many more.
“You shouldn’t have given up. You know perfectly well they detest you and they’ll seize any chance to trip you up,” his partner chided him affectionately.
“I’d rather have given up on the Ghitta case as well.”
“Free spirits like you are always a pain. If you’re not a member of the club, you’re going to have them all on
your back. You should have been a Philip Marlowe, not a regular commissario in a police force.”
Soneri snorted impatiently.
“You know that’s the truth. You’re not a resource, you’re a problem.”
Confronted with that remark, the commissario fell silent. It had passed over his skin like a razor pulled against the grain, painful but true.
“When all’s said and done, we’re all bit players, all of us – policemen, murderers, thieves.”
Puzzled, Angela looked at him with an expression that suggested she had not really understood. She changed tack. “Why are you so sure that the corruption scandal has nothing to do with it? Ghitta knew, and perhaps they were afraid she’d spill the beans. Or maybe she was blackmailing them. Didn’t she do the same to the old women?”
“But then why would they have carried on using the pensione, or using Pitti and Elvira? The night after the murder there were several telephone calls from people in the loop, who obviously didn’t know what had happened. If the order to get rid of her had gone out from that circle, they wouldn’t have called, because they ran the risk of betraying themselves or falling into a trap.”
“It’s a funny business,” Angela said. “And the deeper you go into it, the more the mysteries pile up – Fernanda disappearing, Ghitta deserted by all and sundry, her man disinherited, her son living like a hermit.”
“That’s the way it goes. The deeper you dig into someone’s life, the more likely you are to come up with something unexpected. We’d find an enigma as well if we were to search too deeply inside ourselves.”
“I knew that’s what you were getting at. Can you please just get over yourself? All it took was one glimpse of a photograph of your wife for you to end up gazing at your own navel.”
“I was desperate to look beyond my navel, but the whole investigation kept bringing me back there. Why do you think I was so keen to give up? I was relieved when I stumbled on this bribery business. At long last there was a twist which would take me away from my nightmares, but I still don’t think it’s the right track. Unfortunately, I can’t stop facing up to my past and everything that was part of it.”
“So what’s the way out? To go to a psychoanalyst hoping he’ll tell you in which corner of your mind the murderer is hiding?” Angela spoke brusquely in a deliberate attempt to shake him out of his mood.
“It’s got nothing to do with my brain, but maybe it has got something to do with my life. Anyway, it’s in the fertile dung heap of the Pensione Tagliavini that we’ve got to probe.”
Neither of them spoke for a while. Soneri always had the knack of finding the right word to bring a conversation to an close. Angela was now gazing at him with a half-perplexed, half-convinced expression.
Soneri changed the subject. “Do you know a lawyer called Selvatici?”
“A criminal lawyer, but he’s so odd that he doesn’t get much work, except from certain circles.”
“Which circles?”
“Extremist ones, both right and left, including violent neo-Fascist movements. Anything to do with politics. I know he’s always on the move and he’ll stay over in other cities for days just to follow a trial.”
“He was one of those who took to the streets in the early Sixties and maybe he was mixed up with the Fascists,” Soneri said, producing one of Trombi’s photographs.
Angela stared hard at it. “It looks like something from centuries ago.”
“Everything goes rushing past, and your perspective changes so quickly. You get distracted for a moment and you find the scenery has changed. What was there before? Who remembers? There are people who died for something which ten years later is dismissed as a trifle. If the ones who died had survived, they’d be the first to agree. Now I’m the one with the same job as the police medic who has to cut open corpses that have been exhumed and are putrefying.”
The more she listened to the commissario, the more Angela was reluctant to speak. Normally so talkative, she was gradually falling under the spell of the music he was playing, even if, unfortunately, the air was now a “Miserere”.
“Where can I find this Selvatici?”
“His office is in Via Collegio dei Nobili, next to the court.”
This information seemed suddenly to reanimate the commissario, who jumped from his seat and took out a cigar which he stuck unlit in his mouth. Angela put the remains of the still-wrapped pizza into his hand, and he felt like a husband accepting his packed lunch.
As he walked to Via Collegio dei Nobili, his mobile began to ring. He recognised the number of Chillemi’s secretary, a decidedly unpleasant individual. “Can I put you though?” she said, as though there was any choice. Soneri grunted something and heard the on-hold music strike up. Next came, “Commissario, I’m very sorry, but these shitbags of journalists! They write anything they like, and don’t give a damn.” The introductory theatrical flourish was one of Chillemi’s trademarks. It was his way of assailing the person he was addressing without giving them time to speak. It allowed him to vomit out sufficient apologies to turn anyone’s stomach, while hurling abuse at the supposedly responsible parties, in this case journalists. Swearing helped to make his speech more colourful, taking it down one step from bureaucratese, thereby making it sound more confidential.
While Soneri was wondering if Chillemi was further up his own arse than anyone else in the questura, the man himself continued to offer apologies and “communicate the regrets of Dottor Capuozzo, who was not at that moment in a position to do so in person”. He must have been in Amalfi still, squaring up to the challenge of a sea bass.
“I have to tell you that your name came up at the press conference. If you don’t believe me, ask Dottoressa Marinati or Dottor Columbro. It’s not the first time. Just a few months ago, it happened to Dottor Naselli.”
Chillemi beat out words at the speed of an auctioneer, but Soneri was waiting for the moment when he would exhaust the entire gamut of vulgarities and his voice would fade into a series of low moans. He could measure the seriousness of his own situation from the length of the scene. And he hadn’t even read the papers yet!
When the vice-questore finally drew breath, Soneri let a couple of seconds pass before announcing icily, “Doesn’t matter.”
He had the impression that the receiver at the other end of the line had fallen to the floor. Chillemi must have been disconcerted by the commissario’s detachment, because he could not manage to string two words together. Soneri had the satisfaction of ending the conversation without giving him time to start up again. “Goodbye for now,” he said, as he hung up.
Arriving at Selvatici’s office, Soneri rang the bell, and since there was no reply he pushed open the street door and found himself facing the concierge’s booth. “Selvatici? Unlikely to find him at this time of day,” the concierge said. He was a squat little man with a big head, making him look like an overgrown mushroom. “Try again this evening, perhaps after dinner.”
The commissario turned on his heel and decided to drop in on Marta Bernazzoli. Selvatici was known as the extremists’ lawyer, and Dallacasa came into that category. Perhaps she would know something about him.
*
She offered him a seat, all the while fixing him with her cold, attentive stare. As on the previous occasion, Soneri was struck by the orderliness and cleanliness of the steel and glass surfaces which filled the apartment with light and reflections. They both felt awkward as they sat down, he because he did not know where to begin, she because she feared some further probe into her past.
“Any news?” Bernazzoli said.
“You’ve heard about Cornetti, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “I never thought he’d do it. It’s enough to crush all hope.”
“He was done for – his company, I mean . . .”
“The company, yes, of course, but he could have soldiered on even without it. Can you really believe he had no money put aside?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“He a
lways had plenty, and he loved life.”
“So then, why?”
“Who knows? Why would anyone have killed Mario if the Fascists had nothing to do with it?”
“I’ve had a look at the file. The investigations got nowhere. There’s not the least trace of a possible line of enquiry.”
“In these cases, the solution might be the most banal imaginable, or else the least probable.”
“His comrades in terrorist cells?”
“That’s what some of his colleagues suggested.”
“Did you know Cornetti well?”
“I knew him. He was a man of the left, someone who counted in the city. His workers voted Communist. He used to say they were the best, because they had the party discipline in their blood and they applied it in the workplace.”
“No-one ever brought to his attention that he was a boss?”
“He thought of the company as a means of financing the class struggle. I understand he gave a lot of money to the party, but from about the mid-Seventies he began to fall out with it. He considered himself a purist and viewed the party leadership in those days as traitors.”
Soneri took out a cigar and put it in his mouth, but a dark look from Marta persuaded him to leave it unlit.
“Did he leave the party?”
“Why are you asking me these questions,” Marta said, with a smile of surprise. “Everyone knew he was a sympathiser with the far left.”
“Did he finance these groups?”
“How should I know? That was what was being said, but there’s so much gossip around nowadays. Cornetti was unique, and highly controversial. His roots were in anarchism, as was the case with many ordinary people from this area. Perhaps that was why – not forgetting his obvious vitality – he couldn’t stand being controlled by party rules and regulations. There were always quarrels and disputes, but the executive couldn’t expel him because of the money he was donating. He bought their indulgence.”
“If he’d been born earlier, he would have joined the anti-Fascist Arditi,” Soneri said.
“He certainly would. Like them he was a great drinker, a great womaniser, always up to something in the back stalls of the Teatro Regio. Everything he did was over the top. There was something theatrical about his death too. Don’t you think the act was a bit melodramatic?”
A Woman Much Missed Page 17
