A Woman Much Missed

by Valerio Varesi

  “How can you be so sure that’s how it went?” Soneri said with a touch of irony.

  Avanzini made a gesture, while his face was a mixture of scowl and smile. “I am sure, that’s all there is to it. He’d become a milch cow for that lot, the communists.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “How could I know? I do know that he was under pressure and was receiving demands by telephone. Cornetti’s secretary confessed everything to me – that he’d been living in fear.”

  Silence fell between them. The two men did not even look at each other for a moment as each fixed on some vague point in the room. Soneri heard Avanzini’s voice start up again, but it seemed more distant, as though he were speaking through a loudspeaker attached to the ceiling.

  “It was them that bankrupted him,” he stated with certainty, before adding in a more confidential tone laced with malicious delight, “You didn’t expect that, did you? But you’ll have to get used to the idea that even the great Cornetti was not the purest of men.”

  10

  WALKING ALONG VIA Saffi ten minutes later, Soneri felt somehow dirty. He ran into Dirce, that dumpy parcel of a woman, who greeted him with her usual piercing, brazen stare. His route took him to Piazzale dei Servi but as there was no trace of Fadiga, he continued at a brisk pace to Selvatici’s chambers.

  He pressed the buzzer and waited until he heard the click of the lock. In the entry hall, he saw to his right and left staircases leading to the upper floors, and straight ahead an inner courtyard with trees and parked cars. In the gloom a door opened.

  “This way,” the lawyer said.

  Soneri was ushered into a large, low-ceilinged office, furnished in the style of the Vittoriale, the former residence of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Crimson was the prevailing shade of the velvets and damasks. There were carpets on the floor and everywhere there were weapons. Sabres and rifles, pistols, and ancient muzzle-loaders were hanging on the walls, alongside bayonets, hand grenades, Fascist and revolutionary symbols. Skulls were arrayed prominently on the desk at which Soneri took a seat, and for a moment he had the impression of facing a satanic altar. Lower down, a collection of daggers lined the walls. The commissario searched in vain for the double-edged blade of a corador.

  “I am a collector and I have all the necessary licences,” Selvatici told him.

  The commissario studied him for a few moments. His hair was now white, but apart from that he looked as he had always done – low forehead, deep voice and a nervous twitch that caused the muscles between his chin and neck to contract.

  “I never doubted it. I remember you as being punctilious,” Soneri said.

  “Do we know each other?” Selvatici asked hesitantly.

  “Pensione Tagliavini.”

  Selvatici stared at him. It was impossible to say if his expression was alarmed or merely thoughtful.

  “The room opposite hers – Ada Loreti, I mean.”

  “Ah! Of course. It was so long ago. Anyway, I’ve lost touch with so many people. I’m out of town a lot.”

  “I know. You do a lot of work in political trials.”

  “That’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing with a circular sweep of his arm around his studio. He gave every appearance of being naively pleased with having earned that level of attention.

  “You were involved with the Dallacasa murder case, were you not?”

  Selvatici struggled for a moment to find the words, and then began to wag his index finger from side to side as a sign of denial. “I was still doing my apprenticeship. It was a big trial, but it got nowhere.”

  “You must have had your own ideas.”

  “It was an execution.”

  “That we know. A bullet in the back of the neck.”

  “The means employed in a crime tell us a lot. You ought to know that.”

  “It’s at the forefront of my mind.”

  “Then you must have reached the conclusion that everything is explained by that fact alone.”

  “It would seem not to have been the Fascists.”

  “Indeed. They wouldn’t have killed him that way. They’d have shot him down in the street, in an ambush.”

  Selvatici was on his feet, pacing up and down as he used to do in his room at the pensione when rehearsing an address to the jury in an imaginary court. As Soneri watched him walk to and fro in his office, it occurred to him that Selvatici could very well match the description of the supposed murderer provided by Mohammed. He picked up a hand grenade which had been defused and gazed attentively at its rough shell.

  “So you too are of the opinion that it was his ex-comrades?” Soneri said.

  “I wouldn’t rule it out. Or a woman. The means employed point in that direction. It wouldn’t be the first time,” Selvatici said, glancing at his bookshelves lined with criminology manuals and annual crime registers. “Dallacasa was a ladies’ man. Maybe he overreached himself.”

  Soneri shrugged sceptically. “Women don’t kill for that sort of thing. They have other ways of making you suffer.” While the lawyer went on pacing up and down without replying, he pulled out one of the photographs. “Do you happen to know where I can find Andrea?” he said as casually as he could.

  “Which Andrea?”

  “This one,” Soneri said, pointing to the man in Trombi’s photograph.

  Selvatici came over, bending his long body over the image Soneri held under the table lamp. “He was often photographed with you.”

  The lawyer straightened up solemnly. “I’ve no idea what became of him. I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “What’s his surname?”

  “Fornari.”

  “Were you friends?”

  “No, he wasn’t really friendly with anyone. I doubt if he had any close friends at all. He didn’t talk about himself much. How come you didn’t know him?” Selvatici stopped short, in obvious embarrassment.

  The commissario understood what he was getting at and felt it like a stab in the chest. Selvatici knew that Ada had become his wife, and he also knew about her and Fornari. Plainly ill at ease, he did not know how to get out of this awkward situation.

  “Relax,” Soneri said to minimise any embarrassment. “It might seem a delicate matter, but I assure you it interests me from a different point of view. Personal issues don’t come into it.”

  This was not true and perhaps that was obvious, because Selvatici gave him a perplexed look. “Be that as it may, I haven’t seen Fornari since those days, and I have no reason to believe he’s kept up with his other ex-comrades either. Maybe he’s moved to another city.”

  “Was he from Parma?”

  “From the mountains, Monchio di Corti, but he came to town ages ago.”

  “He made the same journey as Ghitta,” the commissario said.

  “His father knew her well. He sent him to the city as a student because she was there to look after him. Fornari was a very introverted boy and needed to be looked after.”

  “He doesn’t appear to have been one of Ghitta’s lodgers.”

  “He had a room in Fernanda Schianchi’s apartment, next door. He was so shy that you didn’t even notice him when he was there. That was his father’s fault. He crushed him with his over-exuberant personality. The boy tried to emulate him, but he never managed to go his own way.”

  Selvatici had taken once again to walking up and down, and was once more speaking as though addressing a jury.

  “Who was his father?”

  “In Monchio, he was known to everyone as ‘the vet’. As far as I know he was once an officer in the Communist Party in the Lunigiana district, and moved to this side of the Apennines in the Sixties. It might have been because of his job, or maybe he wanted to make a new life for himself. I came across his name a couple of years ago while I was looking through papers relating to an old case in Florence against some communist activists from Massa who were accused of killing a Catholic trade unionist during a strike. He was convicted of manslaughter, but got a lig
ht sentence because there were extenuating circumstances. From that time on, he distanced himself from the party. He didn’t even attend partisan reunions, although he’d been a member of the Garibaldi Brigade under the name ‘Rosso’. They say he had real guts and that the sight of him terrified people – ruddy complexion, imposing physique, fire in his belly.”

  Soneri said nothing, trying not to give away how significant this information was. Even though everything was still confused, he sensed he was close to a solution. He now knew who Rosso was, the man who so terrified Ghitta, and he also knew who his son was. He wondered how Ghitta had managed to unearth that nickname, which no-one at Monchio or Rigoso could have known since it was so deeply buried in the affairs of years long gone. He had hoped that the investigation would take a turn away from his private life, but unfortunately he was once again forced to recognise that it was charging at him full on. This awareness was so crushing as to discourage him from probing any further, but that had been the situation from the beginning.

  He pulled himself back together and noticed that Selvatici had sat down at his desk, and was observing him curiously.

  “I was thinking of this Rosso,” the commissario said, to excuse himself.

  “A remarkable man,” Selvatici said, plainly pleased with himself.

  “And his son? You were telling me he’s not made of the same stuff.”

  “Not the same at all. Introverted, with a complex about not being like his father, while the father, knowing what his son was like, went to all lengths to protect him, which only made matters worse.”

  “Was he active on the far left?”

  “Yes, he was involved with many groups. He was a somewhat woolly theorist who tried hard to move into the limelight. What really interested him was to be ‘someone’. I don’t think he cared much for ideals.”

  “He wasn’t the only one,” Soneri said sarcastically.

  “He was searching for something which would make him feel part of some grand project. Maybe he had never in all his life had to shoulder responsibilities.”

  “The ones who really believed in it all are the ones who came to a bad end,” Soneri said, thinking of Fadiga and others now buried in unmarked tombs or scattered in various corners of the world.

  A gleam of interest passed over Selvatici’s face, but his tone was resigned. “Or else they’re reduced to living out their passions by keeping them artificially alive,” he said, in a clear allusion to himself.

  Soneri ran his eyes over the weapons on the walls. “Is this all your past has left you?”

  “I am a criminal lawyer, and crime is my business.”

  “Mine too, but I see things differently.”

  With these words, he took his leave of the lawyer, but he was troubled as he left that quasi-shrine. A delicate chapter of the investigation was opening up, and something within him was protesting. He looked up at the clock on the Campanile del Duomo. It was not too late to telephone Juvara. He imagined him at home in front of his computer, surfing the internet. He had developed ideas of his own about his colleague’s solitary vice, which he threw in his face every so often as a joke.

  “Are you working or do you have company?”

  “No, I was looking at . . .” Juvara replied vaguely.

  “You remember Ghitta’s houses in Rigoso?”

  “Of course. I showed you the list of them.”

  “Yes, yes, but did it turn out that that some were let out on a virtually rent-free lease? In the village as well as elsewhere”

  “Yes, there was one in Monchio.”

  “With a nominal rent, like the one in Borgo delle Colonne?”

  “It was officially in usufruct – to an elderly woman, Desolina Galloni. She’s in her eighties and a bit soft the head.”

  “You’re my living archive,” Soneri said, satisfied with the answer even if it left confused thoughts whirring about in his head like tombola numbers in a bag. He felt he should at least have the patience to fix them one by one into the correct slots, starting with “Rosso”, the only man capable of frightening an iron lady like Ghitta. Why had he scared her so much? And why only in the last months, overturning an equilibrium of silences, complicities and compromises which had held good for years?

  Soneri decided to go back to the pensione. He stood in front of No. 35 and took out his keys, but there was no need of them because the outside door was kept ajar by a wad of cloth jammed between the two panels. He climbed the stairs, lighting his way with a pocket torch to the apartment door, where he stopped to listen.

  He could hear nothing. He put his key in the lock and turned it, but was assailed by a waft of gas which prevented him from breathing and forced him back out onto the landing. He went back to the door and pulled both panels wide open to allow the gas to escape. With a handkerchief pressed against his mouth he went in, holding his breath. He threw open the windows before proceeding to the kitchen, where he remembered having seen the gas tap.

  A few moments passed before the cold air blew through the room, and only then did the commissario switch on the light. He checked the cooker plates and noticed that the switches were off, as was the main gas cock at the wall. He did not understand. He looked at the heaters in the bedrooms, but they too were all at the off position. Had there been a gas leak which someone had come along to attend to, even though they had then left the house filled with an explosive mixture? Or perhaps the apartment was not quite sufficiently saturated? Did someone intend to blow up the house to eliminate Ghitta’s world once and for all? Or was he dealing with an aborted suicide? Only when this thought occurred to him did he realise the danger he had been in. All it needed was the ring of the door bell. Nevertheless, he was not convinced it was a trap, nor that he was the target. And yet, suppose that his cigar had been lit . . .

  He searched the empty rooms. In Ghitta’s room, everything was as it had been when he was last in it. Even the overturned drawer was exactly where it had been left by the forensic squad. Elvira’s room was empty. It looked as if she had gone for good. It gave the same impression as looking at the camp beds of soldiers the night before demob. Ghitta’s world was now finally fading away. The building was ready for the workmen who would transform it into an estate agent or the branch of an insurance company. The city devoured its provisional symbols with the voracity of vermin, and thousands of people of Soneri’s age would soon be speaking in the past tense of that corner of old Parma: “There, in Via Saffi, where there used to be . . .”

  For him it had been a close shave. The explosion which Soneri had only just avoided would have done the demolition workers’ job for them. He began to wonder where Elvira might be. Perhaps she too had vanished like Fernanda. The list of missing persons was growing too long, and in a murder case they could be counted as dead, even if officially only “presumed dead”. When he closed the windows, he was aware of a lingering smell of gas, so he left the shutters in the small drawing room beside the entrance open, and sat down for a smoke. As he looked out on the deserted Via Saffi, sprinkled with hoar frost, he reflected that this would likely be the last time he entered the pensione. He did not know where his certainty came from, but he was sure of it. Very rarely is it possible to have an awareness of the last time you will meet a person or find yourself in a particular place, but at that moment Soneri was convinced he would never come back there, and for that reason he lived those minutes with great intensity, conscious of the intolerable weight of a past which was coming to an end for him.

  He sat a long time on the couch where he had spoken to Elvira on the night after the murder, but now imagining he was there with Ada. He loved the night as it was seen through that window, almost making him believe that he had somehow come home, but that feeling was replaced by foreboding – someone was on their way. He surmised that the gas been prepared for one specific person. As he looked along the street, which was growing whiter and whiter, he was surprised not to see Pitti approaching. Perhaps he too had vanished? The main players in the s
tory seemed like fugitives from the stage, a further sign that something was about to happen. At around four o’clock sleep overcame him and when he awoke, although the dark and the mist were almost as impenetrable as before, he knew the city was reawakening. He listened intently, and from outside a sort of subdued rumble could be heard.

  It was followed by footsteps. Soneri looked out cautiously and on the pavement, undecided and hesitant, he saw Chiastra wrapped in a heavy overcoat and wearing a dark felt hat with a little feather stuck in the band. He watched him push open the outside door and disappear inside. He heard his feet land with heavy thuds on each step. When the old man reached the landing, he dragged his feet as though unsure which bell to ring. Finally, the bell rang out loudly, breaking the prevailing silence. Soneri stared at the door, thinking that the bell would have made the perfect detonator for the gas-filled apartment.

  He pulled open the door and for a few seconds before the light went off, he saw the figure of the old man standing before him. Chiastra stood impassively in the dark, undecided, until the commissario took him by the sleeve and pulled him inside.

  “Are you always an early riser?” Soneri said.

  “I don’t sleep very well and there are a lot of shift workers in the village. I take advantage of that.”

  “Did you have an appointment with Elvira?”

  Chiastra nodded.

  “She’s gone, like Fernanda, but she was planning a great send-off for you. One almighty bang.”

  The old man stared at him, not understanding what Soneri was driving at. He took off his hat, which made him appear even more awkward.

  “Did she tell you to come at this time?”

  Once again Chiastra nodded.

  “What was so urgent that she had to tell you now?”

  Chiastra looked up with the expression of a frightened child. “I don’t know.”

  The commissario took out a cigar to calm himself. “She told you to be here at five in the morning and that there was no urgency?”