Big Italy

by Timothy Williams

Magagna asked, “You need the money?”

  “You’re in Milan, Magagna.”

  “You’re not getting involved but you want me to help you?”

  “You haven’t got the Questore telling you to stick to rape victims and abused infants.”

  “Sounds like good advice.”

  “Approach Abete. See if you can find out why he’s calling Bassi off. Turellini looks to me like a crime of passion. There’s no reason for the PM to go slow—unless there’s pressure from somewhere; I think the problem’s there.”

  “Why bother, commissario?”

  “Find out if it really is political, Magagna.”

  “Why don’t you ask Bassi?”

  “Bassi’s a womanizer who’s best sticking to divorce work—the kind of stuff he can understand. He wouldn’t know how to solve a murder even if you gave him a confession in triplicate.”

  13: Bianca

  IT HAD SUDDENLY turned into a beautiful day.

  Magically, the dampness had vanished into the air; to the south the sun shone bravely in a sky now cloudless. Overhead, a jet plane flew northwards, taking its encapsulated passengers over the Alps to Switzerland, Germany and beyond, to a land as cold and pure as the perfect sky.

  Trotti walked with his hands in his coat pockets; the sound of his footfalls on the cobbled street echoed off the closed buildings.

  A Tuesday morning in late November, and the city was strangely quiet. He crossed Piazza Carmine. Ochre walls, brown blinds and the morning smells of coffee and baker’s yeast. A fairytale city—except for the occasional car coming from behind and edging him towards the high, cold walls.

  (The Lega Lombarda mayor wanted to abolish the pedestrian zone; he was allowing it to die away, ignored and unregretted. The Greens complained, of course, although they had done nothing to save the traffic-free zone or indeed anything else while they were sharing power with the Socialists.)

  A woman was sluicing down the stone entrance to a building in via Tre Marie. Steam came from her mouth and from the head of the mop as she slapped it to the ground. Trotti could hear her singing. The song was in a Lombardy dialect that caused him to smile.

  Old posters along the walls in the city center, advertising hearing aids, announcing the recent death of dear ones and inviting the people of the province to vote for the League. There was the helmeted silhouette of the Lombard warrior of Pontida, his sword held way above his head, in a defiant stance against the new Barbarossa—Rome and the perceived ills of the South.

  Trotti popped a banana-flavored sweet into his mouth.

  He deposited the wrapper into one of the green bins that the city used for collecting recyclable paper.

  “Barbarossa,” he muttered under his breath. Distant memories of primary school in the hills and the unsmiling, asthmatic war veteran who had tried to drum Fascist history into Trotti’s bony head. In those days, before the Axis, Barbarossa was Adolf Hitler. Alberto da Giussano, the helmeted Lombard warrior, was Benito Mussolini.

  He reached via Mascheroni and stopped in front of the marble plaque. It was screwed into the bricks of a somber building, a seventeenth-century palazzo. The wall had blackened with age.

  MINISTERO DELLA GIUSTIZIA, CASA CIRCONDARIALE DI CUSTODIA PREVENTIVA.

  Then, as an afterthought, on another plaque, this time without the insignia of the republic, the star and the laurels, SEZIONE FEMMINILE. Rain had run from the bronze letters, staining the plaque.

  Trotti rang the bell and waited.

  An old man cycled past. He wore a brown coat and a battered, flat cap. The bicycle was painted a fluorescent green. No mudguards above the thick, knobby tires. There was even an electronic speedometer attached to the flat handlebars.

  It was time Trotti got the Ganna out of the garage, oiled it and pumped the tires. Time he started getting some exercise again.

  Time he gave up sweets and the after-hours chino. And the Sangue di Giuda.

  The door opened and the officer saluted cheerfully. “At least the fog’s disappeared, commissario,” the man remarked as he closed the wooden door. There followed a series of electronic clicks.

  Trotti crossed the courtyard, past the statue of a naked goddess and into the main building. There was no particular smell or sound that revealed the repressive nature of the place.

  The prison director was waiting for him.

  Signora Bianca Poveri was smiling broadly and held out both her hands as Trotti entered the bright office. “You got my message, Piero?”

  Her office was full of cut flowers, set in vases placed strategically around the room. They kissed. Or rather, he was about to kiss her right cheek when she turned her face, presenting the other cheek.

  “Karma,” she said, gesturing him to a seat. Bianca Poveri waited before sitting down opposite him on the far side of a wide desk. The inlaid surface was cluttered with piles of beige dossiers, newspapers and, incongruously, a doll in some regional costume. She moved a vase of carnations aside to get a better view of Trotti. “How are you, commissario? I thought you must have already gone into retirement.” There was laughter in her voice. “I see you so rarely.”

  “How’s Alcibiade?”

  A slight hesitation, as if she were not expecting the question. “I scarcely get home before nine most evenings. Just time to eat and then bed. Head on the pillow and I’m out like a light.” A sigh of her cashmere sweater. “With this job I don’t get time to see my husband or my daughter.”

  “And Anna Giulia?”

  “Thank heaven for the weekends. That’s when we can be together. My greatest source of joy, commissario.”

  “She must be three years old.”

  “She’ll be five in April.” A proud smile.

  “Nothing to stop you having another child. Anna Giulia will cease to be the center of attraction.”

  Bianca Poveri’s countenance hardened. “I don’t think so.”

  “There are times,” Trotti grinned, “when you don’t go out like a light.”

  Signora Poveri swiftly changed the subject, but not before Trotti noted her brief frown of displeasure. “And you, Piero Trotti? Isn’t it about time you settled down?”

  “I’m not divorced.”

  “Shame on you.”

  He shrugged. “I belong to a different generation.”

  “Divorce has been legal in this country for twenty years, Piero. You could easily find a companion. You’re an attractive man—in your way.”

  He held up his hand.

  “Although you must be a difficult person to live with.” Bianca Poveri laughed to herself and then, turning her glance away, started rummaging among the piles of dossiers on her desk. “You got the message?” she asked as she shifted a pile from the table on to her lap and started going through it.

  “You have something for me?”

  “A letter, Piero. A letter from a friend of yours. Should be here somewhere.”

  “A friend,” Trotti repeated absentmindedly, looking out through the window. The terracotta rooftops gave the city its fairy-tale appearance—everything neat, reassuring, cozy. His glance went from the sea of rooftops to the internal courtyard. A courtyard like any other in the city. Like any other in the city except for the high wire fence, topped with barbed wire and ungainly spotlights.

  “Ah!”

  Trotti returned his glance to Signora Poveri. She was a pretty woman beneath a harsh, brunette perm. She had married Alcibiade Poveri almost ten years earlier. At the time Poveri worked for a local publishing house, while the young Bianca was still a student in economics at the university. She had always been an ambitious girl and at the age of twenty-nine, thanks to a lot of hard work, she had become the youngest female prison director in Italy. Two months later she was pregnant. Her first posting should have been Sassari in Sardinia. Trotti had been instrumental in her being sent to her native city and the women’s prison.

  “I think you have an admirer, commissario,” the direttrice said, handing him a dog-eared envelope. />
  Trotti Piero.

  The envelope was grubby; the handwriting was that of someone who was unused to putting pen to paper.

  Trotti smiled as he opened the envelope.

  14: Eva

  “HER NAME IS Eva. She’s from Uruguay. She was a prostitute and she stayed at my place a couple of years ago before she was sent back to South America.”

  “Your friend’s not in South America anymore.”

  “Eva Beatrix Camargo Mendez,” Trotti said to himself as he turned the manila envelope over, looking for a sign of its place of origin. Just a smudge above the sealed rear flap.

  “Where is she?”

  “Trieste.” Trotti smiled sadly. “She seems to think I can help her.”

  “You know what we women are like?” Bianca Poveri raised her shoulders. It was warm in her bureau. She wore an unbuttoned cashmere cardigan. A white blouse and a thin gold necklace at the pale, freckled skin of her neck. Matching earrings. A gold brooch with a cabalistic motif on the lapel of her blouse. “Acts of genuine kindness are so rare in men. When we meet them, we think we can go on asking for favors indefinitely.”

  “Eva cost me a fortune in new locks.”

  An amused laugh. “Locks were the only precaution you took?”

  “After Eva had gone, I had to get everything changed in my house. I had no desire to see her friends come looking for her in via Milano.”

  She searched his face. “You enjoyed her company.”

  “A whore—with a son in Uruguay she hadn’t seen in years. She talked about him incessantly.”

  “Prostitute with a golden heart?” Signora Poveri laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one. And in my line of business I meet enough whores. Whores, murderers, addicts, thieves. I’ve long believed the Merlin Act should be revoked, that prostitution should be legalized—if only to control the spread of AIDS. But I’m forgetting, you’re a devout Catholic.” She added, “And a married man.”

  “A black girl. Eva was only nineteen when she came to Italy—thought she was getting a dancing job. Instead she ended up in Milan, along with the transvestites and the addicts, trying to keep warm over an open fire, near the Stazione Garibaldi.”

  “Somehow those golden hearts don’t go out to me,” Bianca continued. “Perhaps it’s something to do with my age and my gender. And I’m not a devout Catholic.”

  “A husband and a daughter who adore you, Bianca. What more do you want?” Trotti smiled. “Devout Catholic? Last time I went to church was when my daughter was here to visit me.”

  Bianca Poveri made an irritated movement of her hand. “You get involved with prostitutes, Piero?”

  “They’re human beings, too.”

  Bianca nodded wisely, “You’d be tempted to think otherwise if you worked here.”

  “Human beings.”

  “If you insist.”

  “The Questore’s given me a directive from the European Community on prostitution. Sixty percent or more of the women who go into the trade are the victims of incest. This woman,” Trotti tapped the letter, almost illegible in its blend of Italian and Milanese, “went back to Uruguay, courtesy of Alitalia and the Ministry of the Interior. Took her money with her. What’s she doing back in Trieste?”

  “What was she going to do in Uruguay?”

  “She was returning to her son.”

  “After years of absence, you think her son remembered her?”

  “Eva talked about nothing else.”

  “That’s what women do. I see it all the time. It’s a way of reassuring themselves they’re normal, that they have feelings, that they aren’t animals.” She sighed. “Your Eva—she was in Milan, a foreign environment she couldn’t understand. Her son was the one thing she could cling to, something belonging to a better past, and the promise of a better future.”

  “She could’ve gotten a job in Uruguay.”

  “A job—but not much money.”

  “A job, her son—and her dignity.”

  “You sound like the telenovelas, Piero. You watch too much Berlusconi.”

  “Because I think a mother should stay with her child?”

  “These women carry their prison with them—they’re like snails. Occasionally there’s a whore who breaks out. Who finds her Prince Charming or who manages to buy herself a restaurant near Amalfi. But for most, the only exit is disease and death.” Bianca shrugged. “Life isn’t like Dynasty.”

  “I can see what you watch, Bianca.”

  “Eva got back to South America—and in all probability found a son who was nothing like her dreams.” Bianca Poveri leaned forward and Trotti could smell her perfume—slightly musky, catching at the nostrils. “A bit like dying. You go through all the rigmarole, the pain and the fear.”

  “What’s like dying?”

  “Hope,” Bianca said simply. “You tell yourself the worst’ll soon be over. You hang on grimly to your rosary and you convince yourself you’re leaving this world for something better and more beautiful. And …”

  “And?”

  Bianca Poveri clicked her fingers. “No pearly gates, no Saint Peter.” She gestured to a vase of flowers on a filing cabinet. “No Saint Teresa waiting for you with white roses. No celestial Dynasty. Nothing. Death. You discover pretty fast you’ve been sold short.”

  Trotti frowned. “You don’t believe in the afterlife?”

  “Uruguay’s a long way away from the bonfires of the Stazione Garibaldi. Home, where your Eva had her son. The one person she loved. And the only person who loved her. Of course, it was a dream, her own. But these women are always dreaming, always running from one failed dream to the next. Your Eva returns to the harrowing poverty of Uruguay. The poverty she’d hoped to escape in the first place.”

  “Spending the night in Milan or along the via Aurelia—that’s not poverty?”

  “Emotional—but not necessarily economic. That’s the trouble with money, Piero. You know that better than I do. We all like to think we’re above money, that we have values other than those of wealth. But once you’ve gotten used to a comfortable existence—it’s hard to return to the bad old days.”

  “You’re very materialistic for a young woman.”

  “Realistic.”

  “Then why don’t these prostitutes get married?”

  “Perhaps because they’re more afraid of family life than of the via Aurelia.”

  Trotti bit at his lower lip. “I don’t see what help I can give Eva.”

  “If you care to write her a note, I’ll get it sent through the administrative hierarchy.”

  “What can I tell her?”

  “I always credited you with a better understanding of female psychology than that, commissario.”

  “Trying to flatter me?”

  “I deal with women every day and, unlike men, I don’t allow my judgment to be influenced by a pretty nose or a pretty silhouette. Or by the sly promise of intimacy. Those bits of our anatomy that get men excited—they’re just the equipment we need for bearing children.”

  “Glamorous equipment.”

  “The women here—they’re all victims. Five, ten years ago when I was a feminist, Piero, I’d’ve said all women everywhere were victims. That was before I had a daughter of my own. Didn’t take me long to realize a married woman gets a better deal for sex than the best-paid prostitute. These prisoners—they’re in their cells long before ever turning up here. They come into the world as victims and they leave it as victims. Whores are not like you and me, Commissario Trotti. There are things that you and I believe in—things like affection and caring and warmth. We don’t need Berlusconi’s telenovelas to teach us how to feel, because our emotional equipment’s already soundly in place, given to us by our parents, by people who care. At home and at school. You and I, when we were little, we mattered.” She shook her head. “Whoring’s merely the end result of everything that’s gone on before. They’ve never been loved, and so they don’t know how to do it.”

  “Eva loves her
boy. She loves him as she loves herself. She wouldn’t talk of anything else.”

  “Whores don’t know what love is.”

  “Then why do they have sex?”

  “Whatever love is, for the prostitute it’s got nothing to do with the physical act in the back of a stuffy Fiat or behind the bushes off the highway. Whores can open their legs but not their hearts. What affection they have, they pour into animals or stuffed dolls or into people they don’t have to live with. People like you, Piero.”

  “Like me?”

  “You can’t imagine how many dolls and little animals these women have—each cell is a menagerie.” Bianca Poveri pointed to the letter. “That note’s not really for you at all. It’s for hers.”

  “What can I do to help her?”

  “Your Eva realized long ago her son was beyond her.” Bianca raised the silk shoulders of her blouse. “How old is he now? A grown man? What does her son need from a woman he’s scarcely ever met? But you see, commissario, unlike her son, you’ve been good to her. In Italy, she dreamt of Uruguay. And back in Uruguay she spent her time dreaming of Commissario Trotti.”

  “I can’t help her.”

  “Your Eva doesn’t want help. She simply needs somebody to remind her she’s a human being.”

  He shrugged. “Human being? I gave up being that years ago.”

  “Wrong again, commissario.”

  He put his head back and laughed.

  “You’re a good man—in your way.”

  “How on earth does Alcibiade put up with a wife wearing the trousers?”

  Unexpectedly the face softened and a gentle grin made its way along her lips. “You think I wear the trousers in the Poveri home? You underestimate our little girl. Anna Giulia has both Alcibiade and me around her chubby finger. In the organization chart of the Casa Poveri, I come just after the tortoise, just before the yucca plant.” The proud smile vanished. “You’re going to take it, aren’t you?”

  “The letter?” Trotti frowned. “Of course I’m going to take it—though for the life of me, I don’t see how I can help Eva.”

  “You’re going to take the job?”

  “Job?”