by Marco Vichi
Once back at home, he’d lit a big fire. Now and then he turned to watch the flames twisting up into the flue. One vein in a still-fresh log was emitting a tongue of smoke that hissed like a snake. Blisk’s bowl was still in its customary place. Just looking at it was enough to make him see the white bear running through the woods again …
Now he was certain he would never tell the fable of the four ogres to anyone. Now that it was all over, he could grasp in full the enormity of what he’d done. He alone would bear the burden of the whole nasty affair; and that was only right. The responsibility was his alone; he mustn’t share it with anyone. He couldn’t quite work out whether he actually felt guilty or not. But he’d acted with conviction, and if he could go back in time, he would do it again. And you certainly couldn’t say it had been a walk in the park …
An era had ended, and another was beginning. Who knew what surprises awaited him? The following morning he would resume working with the police, and after the first murder he would set out to find the culprit … What was it, really, that drove him to hunt down killers? Was it only a simple desire for justice? Or was he driven by some dark motive that had found an outlet in his profession? Perhaps it was some kind of psychic flaw, an obsessive need to set shattered balances right again, to close circles. When he was a little boy he used to have trouble falling asleep when his father was in a bad mood for no apparent reason, or if he’d seen his mother furtively wipe away a tear.
He finished his supper and went and sat by the fire, with a glass in hand. He even lit a cigarette … All that was missing was Venus, to reduce him to ash …28 The death’s-head watched him, smiling, from atop the cupboard. Was it trying to tell him something? Perhaps what he was already thinking: now that it was all over, perhaps he could see Eleonora again. He could tell her the terrible fable was over, the ogre had been defeated … And they all lived happily ever after … Why couldn’t it actually be that way? He tossed his cigarette butt into the flames and stood up, feeling impatient. He grabbed a pen and paper and sat down at the table.
Dear Eleonora,
I have never once stopped thinking of you, but only now have I found the courage to write to you. What happened has weighed as heavy as a boulder on my conscience, but I cannot resign myself to the idea that evil could ever destroy something so beautiful. I have so many things to tell you, if you’re willing to listen. I’m not very good at expressing what I feel; only poets can find the right words. All I can say is that I wish I had you here with me now, in my arms. I’ve moved house, and now live in the country. I include here my new telephone number. If you want to call me, know that it would make me very happy.
Franco
He’d managed at last to write something acceptable, perhaps because he hadn’t worried about finding the right words. He’d wanted only to be sincere. Carefully folding the letter, he smoothed it out with one hand. The following morning he would buy an envelope, and after licking it shut, he would write Eleonora’s address on it … He pictured the moment when he would post it, imagining the metal hatch of the mailbox swallowing it up …
Shaking his head, he got up, went over to the fireplace and tossed the letter into the fire. Watching the flames devour it, he thought he would once again let fate decide.
He went out for a short walk, cutting through the olive grove. Although it was night, from the valley below came a great din of twittering birds in love … Every male was desperately seeking his female …
‘Do you, Marianna Salimbeni, take Peppino Diotivede to be your lawfully wedded husband, to love and to cherish, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?’
‘I do,’ said Marianna, as Rosa wiped a tear from her eye, looking over at Bordelli.
‘And do you, Peppino Diotivede, take Marianna Salimbeni to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love and to cherish, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?’
‘Of course, that’s why I’m here …’
‘You’re supposed to say “I do”,’ the priest whispered, as the people laughed.
‘Yes, I do …’
Acknowledgements
Laura and Enneli … Semper …
Neri Torrigiani: On the door of his bedroom in his country house he hung the handwritten sign of his great-great-great grandfather Davide, father of the poet Renato Fucini, the full text of which was quoted by Dante Pedretti at Bordelli’s birthday dinner party, as part of the story of the death of his grandfather Alfonso.
Stella Viera and Vania Dionisi, for their help with French.
Domenico Antonioli, for his help with Massese dialect.
Piera Biagi and Cesare Rinaldi, for their advice in farming matters.
Carlo Zucconi, for his long and profitable talks with me in the woods.
Laura Nosenzo, for giving me the Parker pen with which I corrected this novel. A Parker is always a Parker.
Inspector Franco Bordelli, for having generously told me one of the most harrowing stories of his life.
NOTES
by Stephen Sartarelli
1.– A Tuscan term for a sort of itinerant pedlar.
2.– Roughly the equivalent of several thousand pounds, which at the time amounted to a considerable sum.
3.– Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), ‘Il tramonto della luna’, XXXIII, Canti.
4.– The famous Fascist ‘battle cry’, invented during the First World War by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who claimed it was once the battle cry of the ancient Greeks. The latter part of the cry, alalà, derived from the Greek verb ἀλαλάζω (alalázo), is found in Pindar and Euripides and appears in the work of nineteenth-century Italian poets Giovanni Pascoli and Giosuè Carducci as well. Mussolini later adopted the eja eja alalà! as the vocal equivalent of the Fascist salute, itself derived from the Roman era.
5.– A comical Italian caper film from 1958 (I soliti ignoti in the original, released as Big Deal on Madonna Street in the US), by Mario Monicelli, starring Totò, Vittorio Gassmann, Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, among others, in which a carefully planned burglary comes to naught.
6.– The Carbonari (‘charcoal-burners’) were a widely scattered secret society of revolutionaries in early nineteenth-century Italy who fomented a number of uprisings.
7.– Primo Carnera (1906–1967) was a famous Italian boxer who was world heavyweight champion for 1933/34 and known for his tremendous size.
8.– By Italian custom, the offspring of titled nobility can use diminutive forms of the titles of their parents. Thus the daughter of a count or countess becomes a contessina.
9.– In Florence, the Lungarno is the avenue running above the banks of the Arno.
10.– Questo matrimonio non si ha da fare. A famous line from Alessandro Manzoni’s nineteenth-century novel The Betrothed, in which the marriage between the book’s young protagonists is opposed by a local feudal lord, who wants the bride for himself.
11.– In 1959 Socialist MP Lina Merlin passed the law that bears her name, outlawing organised prostitution, including brothels, while keeping prostitution – that is, the exchange of sexual services for money – technically legal. The upshot was to drive most prostitutes into the streets.
12.– A much-quoted phrase (‘corrispondenza d’amorosi sensi’) from the famous 1807 poem by the pre-Romantic poet Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), “I sepocri.” It refers to the communication, through love, between the living and the souls of the dead.
13.– That is, the red star of communism. The Case del Popolo were social centres established and run by the Italian Communist Party.
14.– In 1565, at the behest of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, Giorgio Vasari, famed author of the Lives of the Artists but also a painter and architect in his own right, designed an elevated corridor connecting the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river, passing by way of the Ponte Vecchio, where it can be seen as an upper storey above the sundry structures lining the bridge.
15.– That is because the March on Rome, when about thirty thousand Fascist militants marched upon the capital city, demanding that their party be handed the reins of power if the country wished to avoid a violent coup, occurred on 8 October 1922.
16.– That is, after Mussolini’s Fascist government fell, the Nazis occupied Italy, and the country had to be wrested back from German hands.
17.– In Italy the number 17 is believed to bring the same bad luck as the number 13 in the English-speaking world; hence Friday the 17th has the same connotation as our Friday the 13th.
18.– Lire, that is. Roughly equivalent to twelve thousand pounds at the time.
19.– In keeping with a fine Italian tradition, Botta prays to the Blessed Virgin to make his criminal endeavour a success. The exhortation means: ‘O my beautiful little Madonna, make it all go well.’
20.– That is, Bordelli was conscripted and sent off to war when Italy, as a member of the Axis and ally of Nazi Germany, joined the German war effort; but he ended up shooting at Nazis as a volunteer member of those Italian brigades which, after the fall of Mussolini’s government on 8 September 1943, joined the Allied effort to reconquer Italy from the Nazis – who had occupied the country after Mussolini’s initial fall, only to prop him back up as the puppet head of the quisling Republic of Salò in the north of Italy – often serving as an advance guard and taking on the risky responsibilities of reconnaissance and de-mining.
21.– A Latin saying. The full phrase is ubi major minor cessat, which means, roughly, ‘where [there is] the greater, the lesser gives way’.
22.– A series of untranslatable puns based on Ennio Bottarini’s nickname, ‘Botta’, which means, variously, ‘blast’, ‘burst’, ‘blow’ and so on. The play on words could be said to mean, roughly, and respectively, ‘Quip-counter-quip’ (or ‘Blow-counter-blow’), ‘A blast and then off’, ‘Sucker punch’ and ‘Chez Outburst’.
23.– A traditional dish of broad egg noodles (pappardelle) in a sauce of stewed hare (lepre).
24.– The protagonist of Tex, an internationally popular Italian Wild West serial comic book first created in 1948 by Gian Luigi Bonelli and Aurelio Galleppini and still published today.
25.– Giovanni Della Casa (1503–1556) was a writer and Roman Catholic prelate (who rose to the rank of archbishop) known above all for his book on good manners, the Galateo overo de’ costumi, known in English as Galateo: The Rules of Polite Behaviour, which was published posthumously, in Venice, in 1558.
26.– The actual quote is ‘Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same’, a bon mot uttered by Tancredi Falconeri, the beloved nephew of the Prince of Salina, Fabrizio, main protagonist of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), when trying to convince his conservative uncle why he must support the Garibaldian unification of Italy, which would purportedly bring about a bourgeois-liberal order, as opposed to the old aristocratic one.
27.– An Italian aphorism attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.
28.– In Italian there is a saying that Bacco, tabacco e venere, riducono l’uomo in cenere, which loses its sonority, and therefore its charm and purpose, in English translation (“Bacchus, tobacco, and Venus will reduce man to ashes”). As Bordelli has just poured himself a glass of wine and lit up a cigarette, his conclusion is that all that is missing is the goddess of love to finish him off.
Death in Florence
Marco Vichi
Florence, October 1966. The rain is never-ending. When a young boy vanishes on his way home from school the police fear the worst, and Inspector Bordelli begins an increasingly desperate investigation.
Then the flood hits. During the night of 4th November the swollen River Arno, already lapping the arches of the Ponte Vecchio, breaks its banks and overwhelms the city. Streets become rushing torrents, the force of the water sweeping away cars and trees, doors, shutters and anything else in its wake.
In the aftermath of this unimaginable tragedy the mystery of the child’s disappearance seems destined to go unsolved. But obstinate as ever, Bordelli is not prepared to give up.
Out now in paperback and ebook
Death in August
Inspector Bordelli I
Marco Vichi
Florence, summer 1963. Inspector Bordelli is one of the few policemen left in the deserted city. He spends his days on routine work, and his nights tormented by the heat and mosquitoes.
Suddenly one night, a telephone call gives him a new sense of purpose: the suspected death of a wealthy Signora. Bordelli rushes to her hilltop villa, and picks the locks. The old woman is lying on her bed – apparently killed by an asthma attack, though her medicine has been left untouched.
With the help of his young protégé, the victim’s eccentric brother, and a semi-retired petty thief, the inspector begins a murder investigation. Each suspect has a solid alibi, but there is something that doesn’t quite add up …
Out now in paperback and ebook
Death and the Olive Grove
Inspector Bordelli II
Marco Vichi
April 1964, but spring hasn’t quite sprung. The bad weather seems suited to nothing but bad news – and bad news is coming to the police station.
First, Bordelli’s friend Casimiro, who insists he’s discovered the body of a man in a field above Fiesole. Bordelli races to the scene, but doesn’t find any sign of a corpse.
Only a couple of days later, a little girl is found at Villa Ventaglio. She has been strangled, and there is a horrible bite mark on her belly. Then another little girl is found murdered, with the same macabre signature.
And meanwhile Casimiro has disappeared without a trace.
The investigation marks the start of one of the darkest periods of Bordelli’s life: a nightmare without end, as black as the sky above Florence.
Out now in paperback and ebook
Shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger 2013
Death in Sardinia
Inspector Bordelli III
Marco Vichi
Florence, 1965. A man is found murdered, a pair of scissors stuck through his throat. Only one thing is known about him – he was a loan shark, who ruined and blackmailed the vulnerable men and women who came to him for help.
Inspector Bordelli prepares to launch a murder investigation. But the case will be a tough one for him, arousing mixed emotions: the desire for justice conflicting with a deep hostility for the victim. And he is missing his young police sidekick, Piras, who is convalescing at his parents’ home in Sardinia.
But Piras hasn’t been recuperating for long before he too has a mysterious death to deal with …
Out now in paperback and ebook
