White Death (2011)

by Jones, Tobias

  She stared into the distance for a couple of seconds and did a slow-motion shrug. ‘Youngish. Thirty, I suppose. Round face, thinning hair. He looked, I don’t know, a bit like a loser. Like he was a bit sad.’

  ‘Would you recognise him if …’

  ‘If I saw him again? Sure. I would have thought so.’

  ‘Can you show me the can he bought?’

  She came round the front and walked to one side of her booth. She pointed at a green five-litre can. ‘He bought two of those.’

  ‘Got a till receipt?’

  ‘Should do. I could work out how much it was. Two cans, five litres of petrol in each. I think he paid cash though.’

  ‘And you’ve got CCTV?’

  ‘You want to see yourself on television?’ She pointed at the grey screen by her till. I leant forward and caught a glimpse of my short hair leaning forward.

  ‘And it records onto tape?’

  ‘All digital now,’ she laughed at the idea of tape. ‘Gets stored on a hard-drive.’

  ‘So in theory the man’s mug is in there somewhere?’

  ‘Should be.’

  ‘You want to look for it?’

  ‘I’m kind of busy at the moment.’

  ‘And you work here full-time?’

  ‘For the moment.’

  ‘Thinking of leaving?’

  ‘I’m not going to work here for the rest of my life.’

  I looked at her, not sure if I was excited because I had a lead or because she was it. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Gaia.’

  ‘You got anyone who can stand in for you for a couple of hours?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To go look for this guy. I’ve got an idea where he might show up.’

  ‘Hang on.’ She reached for the phone and dialled. I listened to her conversation: ‘Any chance you can cover for me for a couple of hours? Something’s come up.’ She was listening and nodding. ‘I know, I know, thank you,’ she said and hung up. ‘He’ll be here in five minutes.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you in my car.’ I pointed at the vehicle.

  ‘No offence,’ she said bashfully. ‘But I don’t get into cars with complete strangers. You say’, she looked at my card, ‘you’re a private investigator. You got anyone who can vouch for you?’

  I gave her Dall’Aglio’s number in the Questura. He wasn’t exactly well disposed towards me, but he knew I didn’t take young girls for a ride without a good reason. She was picking up the phone again as I walked out.

  A few minutes later a man went into the office. Gaia came out and opened the passenger door. She sat down next to me and smiled. ‘You want to know what your friend the Carabiniere said?’

  ‘He’s not exactly a friend.’

  ‘He told me you’re a maverick and a loner.’ She was looking at me and smiling. ‘But that I would be fine with you. What makes you a maverick?’

  I shrugged and started the engine. ‘I do things my way. I don’t have a uniform or an operating manual. That makes Dall’Aglio think I’m dangerous.’

  I could feel her looking at me as I pulled out and it made me uncomfortable. ‘What’s this about?’ she asked.

  ‘The man who bought those cans last night set fire to a factory. The fire killed a man. I’ve got an idea where he might show up,’ I said.

  ‘So? What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Sit in this car with a pair of binoculars for a few hours, watching who goes in and who comes out.’

  ‘OK,’ she said breezily.

  We headed towards Via Pordenone, to the place where Lombardi used to have his prosciutto place. It was likely there would be more workmen coming and going there than at the Masi offices. And if Moroni really was the brains behind the scam, that’s where the action would be.

  It took a while to get there and I could still feel her watching me. We parked on the other side of the road, about fifty metres back from the portakabin and the entrance to the site. I passed her the binoculars and told her to watch for the man.

  She laughed quietly to herself.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s just funny. I’ve never been on a date like this.’

  I turned to look at her, but she had the binoculars to her eyes and was facing forwards. Now she had taken off her uniform she looked even better. She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt which looked a size or two too small. It didn’t look like she had brushed her short blond hair for weeks. It was slightly curly. There was something about her that looked less manicured than most women round here and I liked her for it.

  ‘So how did you get into this game?’ She looked at me briefly.

  ‘Same as everyone else.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Infidelity investigations. Almost everyone I know in this line started out checking up on errant spouses. It’s like the gutter work of the profession.’

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘Sure. There are thousands of people out there who want someone to check up on their wife or their husband. Thousands and thousands. They pay good money for you to tail them. It’s easy work and easy money.’

  She gave a non-committal grunt, sounding unimpressed.

  ‘Infidelity is like the apprenticeship. A lot of privates are ex-police or services. That or techno wizards. But most I know came up the same way as me, putting the final nail in the coffin of matrimonial bliss.’

  ‘Must make you pretty cynical about romance?’

  ‘Doesn’t take much to make me cynical.’

  She kept staring ahead, but then suddenly put the binoculars the other way round and turned them on me. ‘Does it take much to make you romantic?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I shrugged. I wanted to change the subject. ‘Seen anything?’

  She put the binos back the right way and looked over towards the portakabin. ‘Nothing. You’re avoiding my question.’

  ‘I can’t remember what it was.’

  ‘It was about why you wouldn’t know about romance.’

  ‘Yeah well.’

  ‘Yeah well,’ she repeated. ‘On most first dates men pretend to be all romantic and get less so each time you see them. At least you’re cold from the start.’ She chuckled gently, like it was more compliment than criticism.

  ‘I’ve spent a lifetime trying not to thaw.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  I didn’t want to go into it all. About losing my parents and all that bullshit. Whenever I go there, people start being sympathetic, wanting to hug me or mother me. They want to make up for it, like they ever could.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ she said simply, without offence.

  We sat there like that for a few minutes. Her watching the car park, me staring out of the window, wondering about her. There was a tense silence in the car now. Partly because we were there on the sly, but mainly because we were sitting together, two strangers, each one of us not looking at the other but hearing the other’s breathing, sensing the other’s electric presence.

  ‘How about you?’ I said eventually.

  She told me everything from start to finish. Gave me a whole biography in a few minutes. How she had lost her mother in a car crash, how her father had brought her up on his own. The petrol station was his little kingdom, and that’s why she worked there, even though she longed to do something else. She wanted to keep him company, help him out. As she was talking I watched her, feeling an unexpected desire to tell her about the symmetry to our lives.

  ‘That’s how I lost mine too,’ I said when she had finished.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My parents. They died in a car crash too.’

  Now she stared at me properly, searching my face. ‘Merda,’ was all she said. No false sympathy, just ‘merda’. I liked her for it.

  We didn’t talk much after that but the tension was gone. It was like we had found what we had in common and were comfortable. We were united by something s
o deep that there wasn’t any embarrassment. She just kept looking for the loser with the petrol cans.

  We were there for two hours in intimate silence. I listened to the sound of hammering and of falling gravel. I tried to read the letters on the huge white funnels of intonaci and malti. I looked at everything on the site: people had written the names of their favourite football teams on the thick planks upended like skirting boards around the scaffolding. There was a perforated orange sheeting wrapped around poles weighed down by sandbags. Concrete slabs and cigarette butts were strewn across the cracking mud. Film-wrapped bricks sat on pallets. Everywhere there were signs in yellow triangles: a black exclamation mark, a helmet. Weeds were already pushing up through the mud. There were neat hillocks of gravel, sodden cardboard boxes, a broken filing cabinet, a solitary bath, one hubcap, a fire extinguisher, long coils of plastic hose. Thick, ribbed plastic tubes poked out of the mud like science fiction plants growing in the ground. There were saplings amongst the dandelions.

  In the end we gave up waiting for the man who had filled up the night before. It had been a long shot anyway and I apologised for wasting her time.

  ‘Sometimes you expect a connection and it just doesn’t come,’ I said.

  ‘I felt a connection,’ she said, looking at me.

  I laughed self-consciously. ‘Me too.’

  I drove her back to the petrol station. ‘You’ll look through the CCTV footage and find him?’

  ‘As soon as I get off work.’

  ‘Give me a call,’ I said.

  She nodded, holding my stare like there was more to say. Then she patted the top of the car and walked back to her booth.

  I headed towards the city. I parked the car at home and walked into town through the oldest quarter. The thin houses, three or four storeys high, looked like books on a shelf, all at different heights, and none of them properly vertical any more. They looked timeless but for the aerials and satellite dishes on their tiled roofs. I looked up and saw the swallows soaring and diving in the sky. I could see an old woman leaning out of her window to pull the washing line towards her as the rain began coming down. The pulleys squeaked as the large clothes crabbed closer to her.

  As I came up Via Saffi towards Via della Repubblica, I saw a demonstration heading towards the piazza. There were people holding candles and flags and blowing whistles.

  Getting closer I could make out the familiar logos of various left-wing parties on the flags and the acronyms of the three main unions. Many had new-looking banners with, in identical style, one word: Basta.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked one earnest-looking boy who was trying to walk without the wind putting out his candle.

  ‘We’re holding a vigil in the piazza.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘There’s been another white death.’

  Anything white is supposed to be innocent. A ‘white voice’ is a boy’s voice before it breaks. A dead child is always given a white coffin. And a ‘white death’ is an accidental death, a tragedy that happens in the workplace.

  ‘You mean Bragantini’s factory?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s right.’ He walked on, holding the candle like it was a new-born chick that he didn’t want to drop. ‘A young immigrant was burnt alive there last night.’

  I followed the corteo as far as the piazza. They were mostly students and a few old crusaders. There wasn’t the usual stage, but someone had a megaphone that was being passed around so that people could broadcast their indignation. They kept saying ‘basta’. Enough white deaths. Enough workplace slaughter. They pulled out all the usual rhetorical stops, talking about resistenza and ingiustizia, talking about contempt for the padroni and solidarity with the workers. There wasn’t a worker amongst them by the looks of it.

  I watched it all with an air of detachment. People always seem to be longing for an excuse to get indignant. It’s like they’re almost grateful for another injustice which allows them to wring their hands. They identify with it because it underlines their belief that they themselves are the exploited, abused victims of some timeless oppression. That feeling lends an edge of anger to their indignation, and tinges their noble solidarity with personal pain. As usual, I felt that these left-wing parties had their hearts in the right place, but that they had it all wrong. They didn’t understand what had happened, or what was going on.

  More people were arriving now, some waving flags saying ‘Bragantini Assassino’, others cheerfully blowing whistles like they were at some Brazilian carnival. It was like they were happy they finally had something to shout about. A few old-fashioned red flags with a hammer and sickle were being unfurled. It was becoming the familiar pageant of an outraged public.

  I didn’t mind the outrage. It was the pageant I had problems with: that habit of wearing a logo like the latest fashion. The trouble was that they were shouting other people’s words. It seemed to me to be prepackaged: the kind of indignation that was kept on a tight lead, that was targeted, pointed in a particular, predictable direction. It all felt phoney because I knew the fire at Bragantini’s wasn’t the usual white death. It wasn’t the usual story of a negligent employer cutting corners with health and safety.

  At the back of the crowd I saw an old mentor. Giacomo was one of the local left-wing politicians, the sort that was so sincere and straight that he had never had much of a career. He was an old-fashioned type. He was still wearing the same fat-rimmed brown glasses that he had had since the seventies.

  As I walked up to him he recognised me. ‘Casta!’ He slapped me gently on the shoulder. ‘What’s with the limp?’

  ‘Perks of the job.’

  His face had got even softer since I had last seen him. His eyes almost closed as he smiled and his white eyebrows looked like they were growing towards the light.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  ‘I’m working for Bragantini.’

  His whole face twitched as he blinked. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He hired me a few days ago. His car had been torched. And now his factory’s been burnt to the ground.’

  ‘Along with a young man.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s his fault.’

  Giacomo looked at me with grit in his kind eyes. ‘Casta,’ he said, ‘a young man was locked in his factory at night. He had no contract. You’ve got to see that Bragantini’s responsible for his death.’

  I tried to nod and shrug at the same time. ‘Someone deliberately lit that fire.’

  ‘Why isn’t it public then?’

  ‘It will be, eventually. But until then, they’re putting the heat on Bragantini.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to work out. And in the meantime, demos like this’, I jabbed my chin at the loud, earnest crowd all around us, ‘are embarrassing. You’re dancing to someone else’s tune. You’ve got it all wrong.’

  Giacomo looked at me and frowned. He seemed confused, unsure whether to feel sorry for me or the demonstrators.

  ‘Come on, let’s get a drink,’ I urged.

  He looked at the piazza: the day’s last light was bouncing off the yellow plaster. People were passing round flasks of wine. This was where he belonged and he was reluctant to leave. But he looked at me and saw there might be something else to it. He eventually tapped a friend on the shoulder, put his fingers at a right angle to his palm, and bounced them to say he was off. Two or three people shouted ‘Ma dove vai?’ at his back as we walked towards the nearest bar. ‘Ma dove vai, Giacomo?’

  Once we were sat in the corner of a bar with a bottle between us I started complaining. ‘I just,’ I didn’t know how to say it, ‘I just don’t understand what it is about this country. We’re famous the world over for our scams. Even the most famous scam in the world is named after an Italian.’

  ‘Ponzi?’

  ‘Right.’

  He rolled his head around his shoulders like he was considering the thing. ‘It’s because we’re creative,’ he said, s
miling. ‘We’ve just got more fantasy than everyone else. Whatever we turn our hand to, we can’t help being inventive and creative.’

  ‘Creativity isn’t always a good thing,’ I said.

  He bounced his head from side to side like he wasn’t sure. ‘Depends what you’re creating.’ He looked at me. ‘What have you been creating recently?’

  ‘Huh,’ I said, closing my eyes and thinking of the case. ‘Un casino.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  I looked at him, and repeated it slowly. ‘Un casino.’

  ‘You want to tell me about it?’

  I gave him a brief outline of what had happened. I told him that cars were being burnt on land that was being eyed by a construction company.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Which construction company? Masi.’

  He smiled and nodded, like he might have guessed.

  ‘Someone is tipping him off about what land is about to be redesignated before the piano regolatore is published. So Masi seems to be putting people up to buy the land on the cheap. Not Masi actually, but someone inside his organisation. The company can’t buy the land itself because it’s too well known, so they use a frontman to do the deal on his behalf. At least, that’s what they did last year.’

  ‘And you’ve spoken to the frontman?’

  ‘He’s dead. Killed last year in Milan.’

  ‘Merda.’ Giacomo looked at me. His kind face was suddenly stern, like he realised the gravity of the case.

  ‘And now they seem to be targeting Bragantini’s factory. Only this time the land they want isn’t up for sale. Bragantini’s a tough cookie and he doesn’t like to be bullied. He’s not selling, and so they’re lighting a few more fires. A young boy got killed and suddenly everyone from your side of the fence is pointing the finger at Bragantini like it’s all his fault, like he’s some kind of murderer.’

  ‘Well, he’s not exactly without blame.’

  I opened my fists, unfurling my fingers in his direction to say he was right. ‘But it seems someone in the commission is tipping off Masi about urban planning long before it becomes public.’

  He was moving his head rhythmically, like he was listening to music and keeping the beat. He was staring into the distance, trying to think it through. ‘Have you looked into his operation, seen which way the money is flowing?’