‘Masi,’ he said gruffly, holding out his hand as I stood up. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Can we talk in private?’
‘Like that, is it?’ he said, snarling at me as he turned to walk back towards his office. He held the door open for me as I went in, then shut it and stood there with his hands on his hips.
‘Allora?’ His body language suggested that he was impatient to get on with his day.
‘I’m investigating a fire in a car park a few nights ago.’
He nodded, the sides of his mouth pulled down in disapproval. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’
I explained the connection: the fact that another car had been torched some time ago. That Lombardi had sold up after a bad fire and a good offer. How he had started to receive unpleasant phone calls. Masi frowned when he heard about Lombardi, pushing his head back like he was trying to place the name. ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me,’ he said quickly, like he had really tried his best.
‘Lombardi used to own a prosciuttificio on Via Pordenone. He sold the land to someone called Luciano, who sold the land to you. Now you’re building a block of flats there.’
‘Via Pordenone?’
‘That’s right.’
We stared at each other.
‘So you’ve come in here to ask if I’m in the habit of setting fire to the property of people from whom I intend to buy land?’
I shrugged as if to ask him to answer his own question.
‘Sit down,’ he said, motioning to a chair with a headbutt to the air. He sat down behind his desk and studied me. ‘You’ve come in here with some pretty serious accusations.’
‘I’m not making any accusations. Just asking you to tell me what you know.’
‘It wouldn’t take long to tell you everything I know. I’m a simple man.’
‘Tell me everything then.’
He stared at me some more. ‘You know much about building?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s a very simple process. You buy land, you build houses or offices or airports or whatever, and you sell them. Straightforward. All you need is land, labour, materials. A bit of expertise and experience, and up it goes.’
‘And capital,’ I said.
‘Yes. And capital. Lots of it. Are you going to accuse me of being a capitalist as well?’
‘No accusation,’ I said, throwing my left palm in the air, fingers up. ‘I just know that you need a lot of capital to put up a block of flats.’
‘Sure you do,’ he said, ‘but I started with nothing. The only money I’ve ever had behind me is what I put in my back pocket myself, you with me? I started out as an apprentice when I was fifteen. I’ve worked every day since then. Every day. For years, if a worker didn’t show, I used to do their shift. I would still do it today if I had time. Look at me.’ He showed me his calloused hands. ‘Do I look like a lazy capitalist?’
‘No, no you don’t,’ I said slowly.
He stared at me and nodded. ‘I’ve been lucky, I’ve made a lot of money.’ He moved his hands so that his palms faced the ceiling, a gesture to suggest there was nothing dishonest in his wealth. ‘But I’ve given work to hundreds of people, given flats to—’
‘Sold, I assume.’
He shot me a glance as a reproach for the interruption. ‘I’ve sold flats to thousands of people. Flats that are safe, comfortable, good value for money. Look at the resale value of a Masi flat. It’s a great investment because everything works, everything has been thought through and done properly. My name is an assurance of quality. I’ve never left an invoice unpaid. I’ve never failed to pay a worker. I’ve never salted away millions and feigned bankruptcy. You ask any supplier if they’ve ever had difficulty with me. You won’t hear a bad word.’
He was talking faster, still trying to defend himself from my sideways accusation.
‘I’ve worked hard,’ he went on. ‘And I’ve helped other people work hard. People seem to think that working in construction is a licence to print money. You know what? It’s hard, hard work. It’s expensive, gruelling work.’ He showed me his rough hands again, then ran them over his desk, his palms brushing the papers that were strewn everywhere. ‘I’m not much different to any other labourer. I make more money, sure, but I work as hard as any of them. Harder.’
I nodded. I wanted to give him his head, let him vent a bit of pride.
‘The problem with this country’, he went on, ‘is that everyone resents success. If you sweat to build and nurture a company, if it grows and becomes successful, people point at you and start insinuating you’re bent, like you must have made compromises on the way. That’s the malice of envy. It allows people to think that the only reason they’re shabby is because they’re honest. Listen, I don’t deny I’m financially comfortable. I’m well off.’ He waved an arm around the room. On the walls there were photographs of himself in a hard hat shaking hands with dignitaries wearing tricolour sashes hanging obliquely across their chests. ‘Where’s the harm in being well off? I’m proud I’ve been successful, and even more proud to have helped hundreds of other people enjoy success.’
He was looking at me now, trying to work out if his words had sunk in. ‘So what’s this all about? You said there’s been some fire.’
‘Right. No accident either. It was arson.’
He was nodding slowly. ‘And you say the same thing happened over in Via Pordenone?’
‘The pattern was the same. Car set alight. Late-night intimidation.’
He looked at the ceiling the way some people ask for heavenly intervention. It looked false somehow, like the outrage or piety was manufactured. He snapped back to his usual self, fixing me with a stare and leaning forward on his desk. ‘Via Pordenone was a bad bit of business for us. I don’t often make mistakes, but that was a big one. I overpaid for it. Bought it at the top of the market a year ago and even if we manage to sell all the flats tomorrow we’ll be lucky to cover our costs on it.’
‘Who did you buy it from?’
He looked at his desk and shook his head. ‘I really can’t remember.’
‘I’m sure a successful businessman like you finds it hard to forget the bad deals. I heard you bought from a Luciano somebody. Ring any bells?’
‘I do a dozen deals a month, hundreds in a year. I don’t remember every person I shake hands with.’
Most businessmen I’ve met remember every detail of every deal: the figures, the people, the circumstances, the coincidences. Each deal has an anecdote or two. I didn’t buy his memory lapse.
‘And did you know this Luciano character? Had you ever met him before?’
‘I don’t even know who you’re talking about.’ He said it like his confusion, or my insistence, made him angry.
‘Luciano, the person you bought Via Pordenone from. Did you know him?’
‘I told you …’ he started.
‘And when you bought the land, did it already have planning permission?’
He looked at me with contempt. ‘I don’t buy land without it. What do you think I am, some kind of farmer?’
‘Would you have any objection to me asking your office’, I thumbed over my shoulder, ‘to look out the paperwork, find me a name?’
‘They’re busy,’ he whispered, staring at me in defiance. ‘So am I.’ Any friendliness he had was gone and his whisper seemed more intimidating than his shouts.
‘You don’t understand why this is important?’
He had stood up and his hands were by his sides as if he were about to shoo me out of his office. ‘I don’t like mudslingers,’ he said, headbutting the air with the side of his head again to show me which direction to walk.
‘I’m not slinging mud,’ I said, staring back at him. ‘Just trying to understand who is burning cars.’
‘I can’t help you there. I build flats. That’s all I do. I’m just a simple builder.’ He moved to the door.
As I walked past him I could feel his animal energy, like he was ready to atta
ck. I stood in front of him for a split second, to let him know that I had that sort of energy myself. I headed out and heard the door slam behind me.
The Ufficio del Catasto was the local land registry office, the kind of place where time seemed to slow down. Like a lot of the people in public offices, they appeared to have been expelled from charm school a long time ago. You stood waiting by a window for ages before anyone even came by, and when they did they walked past without looking at you. You could spend a lifetime in there before you met something called service. If you succeeded in getting their attention, they gave the impression of being disturbed and irritated, like you had woken them up from an enjoyable dream.
The only way to get the information I needed was to waft a couple of fifties in the air. A surly man who had taken pleasure in ignoring me for a long time found his smile all of a sudden. ‘Via Pordenone, you say?’
‘Number 17. I’m interested in the owner who came between Lombardi Carlo and Masi Amedeo.’
He scribbled down the names and disappeared through a small door. I went and sat down on a plastic chair. They had a couple of old copies of Bell’Italia on a table and I picked one up. It had stunning photographs of emerald coves and mountain peaks and strong stallions in gentle meadows. It made me think about everything Lombardi had said, about how our peninsula was so blessed with beauty. Beauty in this country is like the ice on a lake in spring, so fragile and thin that as soon as you touch it the whole surface will splinter and crack, and you’ll fall into the cold, dark waters beneath. We’re obsessed by beauty because it allows us to escape the terrors of life, it allows us to cover up the brutal realities. We’re illusionists, battling against ageing and death. It’s a way of life, an attempt to defy decay. We beautify ourselves and our houses incessantly to make them appear nobler, stronger, more civilised, to make life appear fairer and kinder. But then you begin to realise that behind the pristine flat lies a burnt-out shell of a car, that our obsession with looking good is actually an attempt to look away, to ignore reality. We don’t want to see things as they really are. We would rather have good-looking lies than the dull, ugly truth. That’s how we ended up with the politicians we’ve got. We prefer fantasy to fact.
‘Scusi.’ The man was back with a piece of paper and was knocking on the glass. ‘Ecco.’
He passed a slip of paper underneath the window. I read the name: Luciano Tosti. There was an address too. I pushed the two bank notes towards him and flashed him a false smile.
As I walked down the wide staircase I looked at the name. It meant nothing to me. The address was somewhere in Milan.
It took me a couple of hours to get there. The place was in a nondescript suburb. Every balcony had Inter or Milan flags hanging on its railings. Black and blue and red and black. I parked up and found the right block. I stood outside the building looking at the buzzers and there was no Tosti. I assumed the man at the Ufficio del Catasto must have given me the wrong address. I buzzed another name at random. No one answered. I held down another, but still nothing. I stepped back and waited. Either way the pavement was deserted. No one appeared to be coming in or out of the building. I rang all the buzzers one after the other. Eventually someone squawked ‘Chi è’?
I told her I was looking for Luciano Tosti. She didn’t say anything. I repeated what I had said and heard her calling a man’s name.
‘Who is this?’ A gruff voice came on.
I told him my name and that I was trying to find Luciano Tosti. ‘I haven’t seen him for years,’ I said, which wasn’t, after all, a lie. ‘I used to be at school with him,’ I went on, which was.
‘I better come down,’ the man said.
A few minutes later I heard the front gate click. I looked up and saw an elderly man walking towards me, head down. He struggled to pull the gate open on his own, so I stepped forward and tried to help him. It was so well sprung that it almost knocked him sideways as it started to shut.
‘What did you say your name was?’ he asked.
I told him and he looked at me with suspicion. ‘I thought you said you were at school with Luciano.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded as if confirming it.
‘You look older than him,’ he said.
I ran a hand across my short, greying hair. ‘To be honest, it was my younger brother who was at school with him.’
He was still looking at me sideways. ‘And what is it you’re after?’
‘My brother’s ill. Very ill. And he’s asked me to contact a few of his old friends before … you know, before …’
At the mention of illness the man seemed to soften. He looked at me and nodded. ‘I don’t talk in front of citofoni,’ he said, glancing at the box of buzzers. He started walking slowly along the pavement. ‘It was an ugly thing,’ he said, stopping to look at me. ‘A very ugly thing.’
‘What was?’
‘What happened to Tosti.’ He looked at me again, as if to make sure that I really was as ignorant as I sounded.
‘What happened?’
He stared at me as if preparing me for bad news. ‘He was killed. Killed right here.’ The old man pointed at the ground. We were just in front of a larger gate which sloped downwards to the block of flats’s garages.
‘When was this?’
‘Less than a year ago. He was sitting in his car, just waiting for these gates to open and they …’ He tailed off.
I looked around. It was strange how normal the place felt, like a battlefield decades later that becomes just a field again. There was no hint of the blood-spilling, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. The yellow light above the gate started flashing and the man stepped back as the gate began to open in automated jerks. I moved to the other side and we watched a car drive in.
We came back together as the gate started to shut. ‘Did they ever find the person responsible?’
He smiled briefly. ‘You know what it’s like. They accused plenty of people but convicted no one.’
‘Who was accused?’
‘Mah!’ he said like he didn’t believe any of it. ‘They said he was involved in big money deals.’ He shook his head.
‘You don’t believe it?’
His shoulders rose slowly like they were being inflated. ‘He always seemed, excuse me saying this of the dead, he always seemed a little sfigato, you know? From what I heard, he struggled to pay the ground rent each year. He always paid late if he paid at all. He drove around in an old Fiat Duna.’ The man laughed gently at the memory and shook his head. ‘He just, he didn’t seem like the sort of person who would be making big deals.’
‘Who said he was?’
He looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You’re asking a lot of questions. I thought you were only looking for an old schoolfriend.’
He had the honest intensity of a good man smelling a rat and I didn’t like being the rat. I told him why I was really there, told him that I was investigating property deals a while back in a nearby city. He stared at me in surprise, like he didn’t know whether to be offended or excited by the revelation.
‘Why’, I said slowly, not wanting to rush the questions, ‘did you say he was involved in financial deals?’
‘Something his widow said. Said he had come into a lot of money.’
I looked up at the block of flats behind him. There was a woman on a balcony hanging out her laundry. ‘Does his widow still live here?’
He shook his head. ‘They moved away.’
‘They?’
‘She had a little boy. She was called Rosaria something. Can’t recall the surname, but she’s from down south. Nice girl.’
‘Where did they move to?’
‘No idea. Can’t blame them though. It must have been terrible, seeing this spot every day.’ He grimaced and pointed at the pavement again as if there were still blood down there.
‘Did she leave a forwarding address?’
‘You would have to ask the administrator.’
‘Who’s that?�
�
‘Giancarlo.’
‘He in?’
He led me back towards the citofono. He buzzed Giancarlo and we went into his apartment. He fussed around looking through his files and eventually came up with a piece of paper. ‘Ecco,’ he said, pulling on his glasses. ‘It’s not exactly a forwarding address. Just a note to say any post can be left for her at some shop. Carla’s Intimo, Via della Salute.’
The shop was a few blocks away. I had to stop a woman to ask her where exactly and she pointed me in the right direction. Carla’s was the cheap end of the underwear market. The window displayed rows of knickers and bras and pyjamas that seemed to have lost their colours in the sun. Inside, the place felt unexpectedly like a library. There were boxes piled high on neat shelves behind the counter and in front of them there was an old wooden stepladder.
‘Buongiorno,’ said a dark-haired woman as I walked in. She was half-way up the ladder so that her waist was at eye level.
‘I’m looking for Rosaria,’ I said.
‘Join the club,’ she said without humour. She stared at me. Her dark eyes had a very slight squint.
‘A lot of people looking for her?’
‘Were a while back.’
‘You know why?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Name’s Castagnetti. I’m a private detective. I’m trying to work out what happened to her husband.’
‘Or to his money?’
‘What money?’
She snorted like she didn’t believe my ignorance. ‘Why do you care what happened to her husband?’
‘Did I say I cared?’
She looked at me with disdain.
‘I’m trying to find out what happened to him because his name came up in an investigation I’m involved in. I traced him to a block around the corner and then found out he was killed a while back. That kind of thing arouses my curiosity.’
White Death (2011) Page 4
