White Death (2011)

by Jones, Tobias

She started folding a pair of knickers into a box like her mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Where will I find Rosaria?’ I insisted.

  She put the lid on the box and turned around to insert it in one of the stacks behind her. Then she turned back towards me and shook her head. ‘Rosaria doesn’t want to be found.’

  ‘Doesn’t she want justice?’

  She laughed at the silly idealism of the question and started walking up the first step of the ladder. ‘She wants to be left alone.’

  ‘Give her this.’ I gave her one of my cards. ‘If she cares about justice for her husband, tell her to get in touch.’

  The woman looked at it, looked at me and nodded. She put the card between two fingers and flicked it onto the counter. It fell off and I reached down to pick it up and put it back on the counter.

  I stood there watching her. She was dark and feisty and looked like a strong woman. Her accent was from the south somewhere. She kept walking up and down the ladder, putting underwear in boxes and inserting them into the stacks, resolutely ignoring me.

  ‘Allora?’ she said impatiently, as if she was demanding to know what I was still doing there.

  I was about to go to the door when I heard a voice from the inside of the shop. ‘Rosaria, come here a minute.’

  The woman up the ladder froze, looking at me. The voice called her again and since it didn’t get a reply, the body behind it walked into the shop: a small, tense-looking woman who I imagined was the boss.

  ‘Buongiorno,’ she said, looking me over. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise we had a customer. Can I help?’

  ‘You just have.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I was just looking for Rosaria.’

  The small woman looked over at her assistant. Rosaria descended the ladder slowly, her head held back like she was still feeling defiant.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, staring at me with her black eyes.

  Her boss looked from Rosaria to me, feeling the tension.

  ‘Just what I said. I want to ask you a couple of questions.’

  ‘Why?’

  I explained to her how I had come across her husband. Told her about the fire at Bragantini’s factory and the possible link to Via Pordenone. Her chin was in the air whilst I was talking, her bottom lip jutting out like she was still suspicious of me. When I had said my piece she stood there, staring at me with her hands on her hips. After a couple of seconds she dropped her hands to her sides as if she had given up on resisting. She turned to her boss like she was asking advice or permission.

  ‘Why don’t you go and have a quick coffee?’ the older woman said, looking from Rosaria to me.

  Rosaria went into the back to get her coat. Her boss and I were left alone and she smiled at me. ‘She’s been through a lot,’ she whispered. ‘She’s a lovely girl, but she’s lost all trust in people.’

  I nodded, smiling at her silently as gratitude for the insight.

  ‘He’s still asleep,’ Rosaria said, coming through the back door of the shop. ‘Call me if he wakes up.’

  ‘OK my dear.’

  She walked past me and out of the door without saying anything. I caught up with her on the pavement and followed her. She turned into a bar on the corner and only when she was leaning on the curved chrome of the bar did she look at me.

  ‘What are you having?’

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Two coffees,’ she shouted at the barman.

  ‘Subito,’ he shouted back. ‘Two coffees.’

  We took them over to a table in the corner. There was a fruit machine next to the table that was making irritating noises. I could see the flashing lights reflecting on her shoulders.

  ‘Allora?’ she said again. ‘What do you want exactly?’

  ‘I want to find out who killed your husband.’

  She didn’t say anything, so I asked her the same question she had asked me. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To be left alone.’

  ‘You get bothered a lot?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Who’s bothering you?’

  ‘The same people who were hassling Luciano before he died.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  She snorted, looking at me with contempt. ‘You’re trying to broker a deal for them, right?’

  ‘For who?’ I couldn’t follow what she was saying.

  She stared at me and threw her coffee back. As she put the white tazzina back in the saucer she looked at me again and, for the first time, smiled. There was still a trace of contempt in her face, but she was genuinely amused as well. ‘You really don’t know anything?’

  ‘I only found out that your husband got hurt five minutes ago.’

  ‘Hurt?’ she said scornfully. ‘That’s one way to put it.’

  She was hard all right, but it was the kind of hardness that came from fragility. She seemed vulnerable despite that tough exterior, like an animal defending its young in the wild. The sort that would suddenly turn on you when you weren’t even threatening her.

  We sat there in silence for a while. I watched the jingling fruit machine spill colours at her back: lime green, bright orange. It kept making its demented tune. At least, I thought, it would keep our conversation private. If we ever got some conversation.

  ‘How old’s your boy?’ I said softly.

  She looked at me like she was about to lash out to protect him, but she closed her eyes wearily. ‘Almost two.’

  ‘And you have him with you there in the shop?’

  She nodded. ‘La signora is very good to me. She looks after him half the time. She gave us a room above the shop. She was widowed too about a year ago, more or less the same time that Luciano was killed. We sort of found each other. I had gone there before a few times, so we knew each other vaguely, but one day, soon after it happened, I went in to buy something and I stayed there all day, just talking things through with her. By the end of the day, she had invited us to stay in her spare room and had offered me a part-time job.’

  ‘Kind woman.’

  She nodded slowly, staring beyond me to the outside world.

  I moved the tazzina round in its saucer, waiting for the right time to ask her about her husband.

  ‘You know,’ she started without prompting, ‘for a while they thought I had done it.’ She put her head sideways.

  ‘That’s always their first thought. Bound to be the spouse.’

  ‘Built up quite a case against me.’ She exhaled in derision, her smile turning into a bitter grimace. ‘Luciano had come into some money. The first time in his life. He was flush. They thought,’ her voice wobbled for an instant, ‘they thought I had killed him, or had him killed, for the money.’ Her lower lip was quivering now.

  ‘What money?’ I asked quietly.

  Her sigh sounded more like a growl. She pulled her hands apart, then put them back together. She shrugged, then looked at me shaking her head. ‘It was some stupid investment scam. The only investment in his life that ever went well. Trouble was, it wasn’t his money and it wasn’t his scam. He was just the frontman.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘He was lent money to buy a business.’

  ‘A prosciuttificio?’

  ‘How did you know?’ She looked at me suddenly, surprised and scared.

  ‘That’s how I got his name. From the Ufficio del Catasto.’

  ‘So you know all about it?’

  ‘Hardly anything. I know he bought the joint and sold it to Masi Costruzioni.’

  ‘That’s just about all I know,’ she said with regret. ‘That and the fact that he bought the place with someone else’s money.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’

  She laughed bitterly. ‘Wasn’t hard. Luciano never had money of his own to speak of. I knew he couldn’t afford to buy a beer, let alone a whole business. Someone put him up to it.’

  ‘He was someone’s stooge?’

  She nodded. ‘Only,’ she hesitated, ‘he s
tarted getting ideas that he wasn’t. The place he bought was placed inside the residential land belt a few months later, and he realised he was the legal owner of a goldmine. He thought he could make a lot of money and he did. He sold it to Masi Costruzioni for a huge profit.’

  ‘Only it wasn’t his money in the first place?’

  She shook her head, closing her eyes as if to try and blank out the memory. ‘Luciano thought he had hit the big-time. He said it was time to pack our bags. Said we had enough money to live on for a few years. He wanted to go to Spain.’ She put her forehead into the palm of her hand and stayed in that position for a few seconds, her shoulders bouncing like she was coughing silently.

  It sounded like her man had tried to trouser money that belonged to someone else and had paid the ultimate price. I asked her who had lent him the money and she rolled her eyes.

  ‘That’s what the authorities wanted to know. After his death, that’s what they asked me. I told them I had no idea, but they found out.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It was some bank. You should ask the Carabinieri.’

  ‘I will. Who was in charge of the case?’

  ‘Speranza. Never seemed very in charge to me,’ she said with bitterness.

  It sounded like a good lead. I looked at her and wondered if she was strong or honest enough to talk about her husband as something other than just a victim. I assumed that if he had bought the place he had had some hand in lighting the fires and making the threatening calls. I tried to ask the question as tactfully as possible.

  ‘The man who sold his prosciuttificio to your husband was subjected to arson attacks and threatening phone calls.’

  ‘So I heard,’ she said curtly.

  ‘Did Luciano ever talk about that?’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘What’s not possible?’

  ‘That Luciano would ever threaten anyone. If anything it was the opposite.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Luciano was getting some heat himself.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘When he sold the place on, a man came round here, shouting at him, threatening him, calling late at night. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Did you ever see him?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And you would recognise him again?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said quickly as if the question were stupid.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘An accountant. He didn’t look like the normal kind of thug.’

  ‘And what did Luciano do?’

  ‘He laughed it off. Said it was nothing, just some sfigato who was jealous of our success.’ So far she had confirmed what I already suspected. Masi was being tipped off about lucrative land deals. But he couldn’t make the purchase himself. His name was too well known. If he had stepped forward to make a deal, everyone would have known land was about to be redesignated and he would have had to pay through the teeth. So he was using frontmen. They bought the land and then sold it on to him. Masi had to trust those frontmen to sell at the price he wanted. But when Tosti found himself the proud owner of valuable land, he had started to think he had finally made it. He was dreaming of zeros in his bank account and had tried, like many before him, to take them to some sandy beach abroad. That’s why, presumably, he had taken a hit.

  ‘How much money did your husband make on the deal?’

  She looked up at me as if she didn’t understand.

  ‘It must have come to you when he died.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘So?’

  ‘He left me almost a hundred thousand.’

  ‘You’re a lucky woman,’ I said with more sarcasm than I intended. It was the wrong thing to say and she stared at me with scorn.

  ‘I’m a widow. I have no home and my son has no father. I don’t want that money. I don’t know where it comes from or where it belongs.’

  ‘So why not give it back?’

  ‘To who? To the first person who threatens my family? To someone who might be responsible for my husband’s death? Who should I give it to?’

  I didn’t say anything. She stared at me with her large black eyes as if it were my fault. I couldn’t give her a reply. She pushed back her thick hair and growled a sigh.

  ‘What do you think I would rather have? My husband or the filthy money that cost him his life?’

  I nodded, not needing to reply to the rhetorical question. ‘Before all this happened,’ I said slowly, ‘had you ever heard of Amedeo Masi? Did Luciano ever talk about him?’

  She shook her head brusquely like it was all useless. She was looking at the floor and I took the chance to study her face again. It seemed on the cusp between beauty and sadness. Her large, dark eyes were framed by a permanent, almost imperceptible, frown.

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ I asked quietly.

  She didn’t move, but started smiling slightly. ‘Monteleccio.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Somewhere in the Apennines. A tiny town way up in the mountains.’ She looked at me and then stared at her hands. ‘We had gone there for some sagra. I can’t remember what it was. Some cheap wine and food festival, and a couple of friends and I had nothing better to do. He was in the queue behind us with a few of his friends. You know what it’s like. They were talking and joking, we were pretending to ignore them. In the end we sat at the same table and things just went from there.’ She closed her eyes, like she was trying to see the whole scene again. ‘I should get back,’ she said abruptly, as if she were embarrassed at having wasted time in useless reminiscing.

  I walked her back to the shop and told her I would do what I could. She shrugged like she expected nothing but trouble.

  The Carabinieri caserma was a smart palazzo a few blocks away. In the courtyard there were half a dozen black cars with the oblique red stripe. There was an armed guard outside, a sign that the state here is still on a war footing against organised crime and home-grown terrorism.

  I was pointed towards the front desk and asked to see Speranza. He was out, and I was told to sit in a waiting room. There were two other people in there who looked bored.

  An hour later a harsh voice called my name. I stood up and followed the man down a corridor, up some steps, along another corridor. The man accompanying me kept saying hello to people he passed.

  ‘Ecco,’ he said, knocking very loudly on a wooden door.

  ‘Avanti,’ I heard from inside.

  The man opened the door and I was shown in to a large office. I could tell Speranza was high-ranking just by the size of the room. There was an old, threadbare carpet thrown over the marble floor. Rising to greet me was a man with thick blond hair who held out his hand.

  ‘Speranza, piacere,’ he said.

  ‘Castagnetti,’ I said as I moved towards the chair he had pointed towards.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  I nodded. ‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said tentatively. Most Carabinieri don’t take kindly to my profession. They find we get in their way and, occasionally, steal their glory.

  He nodded silently.

  ‘I’m here about an old case.’

  ‘Plenty of those. Which one?’

  ‘Luciano Tosti.’ I looked at him briefly. ‘He was killed last year.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘I remember.’ He cocked his head. ‘What’s your interest?’

  ‘I was investigating a couple of cases of arson back home and one of them led me to Tosti. So I came round here today hoping to ask him a couple of questions but I find he was whacked last year. It kind of made me curious.’

  He looked at me through his eyebrows. ‘You want to tell me about these fires?’

  ‘If you’ll tell me about Tosti.’

  He snorted a laugh.

  I told him about the case, what little I knew: that Tosti had been the frontman for a construction company called
Masi that wanted to buy land which was about to be redesignated. That he had got a taste for being a landowner and rebelled against his puppeteers. Speranza listened distractedly, turning round to type something into his computer as if I weren’t there.

  ‘We heard about that,’ he said when I had finished. ‘We figured it just like you said. We pursued it for a while but the curtain came down pretty quickly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He pushed his head back and rolled it left and right like he was trying to remove a crick in his neck. ‘Pressure from above.’

  ‘The investigation was shut down?’

  He tutted like I was an errant schoolchild. ‘It’s never put that way. We’re simply told there are other priorities.’ He mimicked an officious voice. ‘Other leads to pursue. Other cases that need our time and resources.’ The resentment was clear.

  ‘How far did you go down the Masi line?’

  ‘Far enough for it to get interesting. Tosti didn’t turn out to be quite as much of a stooge as Masi had expected. Once Tosti was in possession of that prosciuttificio, and once he realised it was going to benefit from a cambio di destinazione d’uso, he realised he had something quite valuable. He started touting it around and Masi took exception. Masi had set up the deal in the first place, and to have Tosti betraying him like that must have got him pretty steamed up.’

  ‘But Tosti sold it to him in the end?’

  ‘Sure, but for a six-figure profit. He made Masi pay through the nose for something Masi thought was his in the first place. It must have been like finding your servant outside your house selling your silver.’

  ‘And having to buy it back from him?’

  The man nodded. ‘We interviewed Masi once. He didn’t seem like the sort of man to take it lying down.’

  ‘He’s quite a bulldozer, eh?’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him too? Bulldozer’s the word. The man looks like he’s fought his way to the top.’

  ‘And you think he fought Tosti?’

  He bounced his head to the side. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me. He certainly sent some of his lackies to squeeze him. The widow told us about a man who was threatening him in the weeks before he was killed.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘We never found out. Never traced him. Seems safe to assume he was a Masi missive.’