Big Italy

by Timothy Williams

  “It’s really not necessary. And the little boy, Pioppi?”

  “What little boy?”

  “The baby—it’s going to be a boy, I suppose.”

  “The baby’s not due for another four months, Papa! I don’t wish to know whether it’s a boy or a girl. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll get a taxi from the station. Years since I last saw Zia Anna Maria. Just look after yourself, Papa. Ciao, amore.”

  “But Pioppi—”

  “I love you, Papa. Ciao.”

  21: Phone

  “PRONTO.”

  The telephone was taken off the hook on the second ring and he recognized Signora Magagna’s soft voice immediately.

  “Piero Trotti.”

  She did not try to suppress her squeal of joy, nor her Abruzzi accent. “Commissario, I’m so angry with you. You never come and see us. You never come and see the little boys.”

  “I’ll be retiring soon.”

  “You’ve been saying that for the last ten years.”

  “For the last ten years I’ve been wanting to retire.”

  “It was good of you to send the present for Mino, but like me, like us all, he wants to see you. In flesh and blood.”

  “Soon, signora. Once I’ve retired.”

  “See you, commissario. It’s time you got away from that awful Questura and you started visiting your real friends.”

  Trotti could not restrain a smile. “Your husband’s there, signora?”

  “He left this morning for Chiasso and he won’t be back before late.”

  “Can you ask him to ring me, signora?”

  “Signora? Don’t call me signora, Commissario Trotti. You know there’s always a plate of pasta and a bottle of wine waiting for you here. And there’s a kilo of acacia honey we’ve been keeping for you for goodness knows how long.”

  Trotti laughed. “In September, Giovanna, I’ll be free and then I swear I’ll come and see you all in Sesto—unless you’ve already moved back to Pescara.”

  “Gabri told you, then? There’s nothing I’d like more than to leave Milan.”

  Trotti heard her sigh, and he smiled into the mouthpiece imagining her sitting at the telephone in the neat apartment near the Rondò at San Giovanni. He had not been back in years and he had not seen Magagna’s wife since the birth of the second boy. No doubt her waist had thickened, but she had kept her girlish voice and her infectious laugh.

  “Do you have a pencil?”

  “Just a second,” Giovanna Magagna said, and he heard the click as she went to look for something to write with.

  When she came back Trotti said, “It’s about the Turellini dossier. Can you ask your husband to try and get a copy for me? We’ve already talked about it but I need to see it as soon as possible. Or sooner. If necessary, tell Magagna to get me a photocopy. It’s urgent.”

  “Turellini—wasn’t he the doctor they murdered at Segrate?”

  “Tell Magagna to tell no one. It’s a personal favor—I don’t want anyone other than Magagna knowing I’m interested.”

  “Commissario, why don’t you come here?”

  “Perhaps I will.”

  “I’d love to see you.” She added, “You’re phoning from the Questura? Very noisy, isn’t it?”

  “I’m in Brescia.”

  “You want Gabri to ring you in the Questura?”

  “Tell him to contact me on my home number. Tell him I’ve decided to go ahead with the inquiry.”

  “To go ahead?”

  “For personal reasons. I want to get Turellini’s murder sorted out before Christmas.”

  “Why don’t you spend Christmas with us?”

  “I’m staying with my daughter in Bologna but yours might not be a bad idea, Giovà,” Trotti said.

  Suddenly the line went dead and the blinking letters announced peremptorily that the credit had been used up.

  Trotti smiled as he replaced the receiver. He abandoned the magnetic card in its red tray.

  As he stepped out of the kiosk, Trotti glanced briefly at the huddled tramps. He noticed a syringe poking from a threadbare coat pocket.

  22: Funeral

  Thursday, 2 December

  THE DRY COLD of the hills?

  It had started to rain in Santa Maria. The clouds were coming up from the valley, encircling the pines, the fir trees and the gaunt power pylons and rapidly hiding the sun. The drizzle began to splatter down on the naked chestnut trees, onto the black umbrellas and the tombstones.

  Piero Trotti stood beside his cousin. He held Anna Maria’s arm. There were one or two people from the village whom Trotti recognized. There were also a couple of distant relatives who had hurriedly driven up from Milan. A few colleagues from the clinic in Brescia, including two pretty young women, probably nurses. There was nobody from Trotti’s side of the family.

  Anna Maria was wearing her black coat and the pillbox hat with its veil. She held a white handkerchief in her hand.

  (The funeral arrangements, the transport from Brescia had all been organized by the vice director at Sandro’s clinic, Riccardo Germani, a man with stooped shoulders and an ingratiating manner. He had seen to everything and Trotti was very grateful.)

  Somebody had opened an umbrella for the priest.

  Germani had arranged for the priest to be driven up from Tarzi. Trotti had never seen the ecclesiastic before. A plump man with slicked back hair and neat robes. He was from the South. He mumbled the prayers, as if embarrassed by death in general and by the death of Sandro in particular.

  Trotti assumed that Anna Maria had not informed him that the cause of death was suicide.

  The years that Trotti had spent with his two cousins had been hard. They had been the years of Fascism, of numbing poverty, of war and of sacrifice. They were in many ways the best years of Trotti’s life. Years of innocence and hope. Innocence that was soon to be defiled and hope that slowly atrophied as Italy put poverty aside and finally found its place among the wealthy nations.

  Days of innocence, and now Sandro was gone.

  Suddenly the funeral was all over. The rain fell on the damp casket and the distant relatives threw their flowers, paid their last respects, crossed themselves beneath the drizzle and then headed towards the gate, the waiting cars and the Po valley.

  Trotti dropped the flowers on to the grave, not knowing whether he was crying or whether the damp of his cheeks was simply the cold rain. Then the men began to shovel the hard dirt of the hills on to the casket. A harsh, scrabbling sound and Sandro was gone.

  Germani was hovering at his side. He had intent blue eyes behind thick lenses.

  “I’ll need to see the death certificate, of course,” Trotti told Germani as he turned away from the grave.

  Santa Maria was emptier than Trotti remembered it. Many villagers had emigrated to the Po valley or to the mines in Belgium. The fields where people used to toil had grown into unkempt woodland.

  Somebody had daubed Viva S. Maria Ultras on the low wall of the graveyard, exhorting the local football hooligans.

  For a brief moment Trotti wondered how the village managed to find eleven players, let alone supporters.

  Then he saw his daughter.

  Pioppi was climbing out of a taxi at the cemetery gate. She wore a fur coat that could not hide the swell of her belly.

  “Life goes on,” Trotti said to himself.

  Pioppi was holding a bunch of flowers. Pregnant and slightly overweight, she radiated beauty.

  Behind her was Nando holding the sleeping, precious Francesca in his arms.

  “Cheese in the mousetrap?”

  Anna Maria turned her broad face towards him. “What are you mumbling, Piero Trotti?”

  For the first time in a long, long time, Trotti felt there was indeed a purpose to his existence.

  His eyes focused on his cousin. “What you need is a cup of coffee, Anna Maria.” He smiled as he added, “I could do with a packet of rhubarb sweets.”

  23: Cyclamen

  Friday, 3
December

  TROTTI TRIED TO push the hammering away and rolled on to his side, but the banging continued and he opened an eye, squinted at his watch—an ancient present from Agnese.

  Ten to four.

  It was cold and Trotti wanted to burrow back beneath the warmth of the sheets but the banging would not go away.

  Banging accompanied by the jabbing ring of the doorbell.

  Trotti threw back the bedsheets. He could not find his slippers and the stone floor was cold. He slipped into his nightgown.

  Ten to four, Friday morning.

  A further burst of knocking and the bell was ringing with unbroken insistence.

  “I’m coming,” Trotti shouted irritably. He had no idea who the visitor was. It was now more than fifteen years since his wife used to come home at all hours of the night.

  It briefly occurred to Trotti that it was stupid to risk your life when you were a grandfather, when you were only a few months from a well-deserved retirement in the hills of the OltrePò and when you could receive a bullet fired through the flimsy wood of the front door.

  A friend of Eva’s?

  There was a service revolver somewhere in the house that he had brought home after Eva’s sudden departure. Trotti did not bother searching for it. The experience of a professional policeman, the training from the police school in Padua were forgotten in a sleepy mist. “Who’s there?” he asked, more annoyed than worried.

  The ringing suddenly ceased and in the silence, he heard the voice, almost apologetic. “Pisanelli.”

  Trotti laughed as he pulled back the iron bolt and opened the door.

  Tenente Pisanelli of the Polizia di Stato stood in the yellow circle of light of the doorstep. He had knocked over one of the pots of cyclamen by the balustrade.

  “Who is it, Piero?”

  Trotti spun round.

  Anna Maria was in the hall, wearing a shapeless cotton nightgown and a bed cap from a different century. Concern had tautened the sleepy features of her face.

  “A colleague.” He gestured Anna Maria away, back to Pioppi’s old bedroom.

  Now that Pisanelli’s hands had ceased their knocking, they were returned to the pockets of baggy trousers. Pisanelli was wearing his old suede jacket. With his bald head, with the long side hair hanging over his ears and down to his collar, he looked more like an unemployed mechanic than a lieutenant in the state police. He needed a shave.

  “Felt like dropping by for a chat, commissario,” Pisanelli said cheerfully, and ducking his head, slightly brushed past Trotti into the hall.

  “You’re carrying that Beretta of yours?” Trotti asked. He added, “I enjoy being woken up in the middle of the night.”

  “Then you’d better get dressed.”

  “Keep your voice down.” Trotti gestured to the open door of Pioppi’s bedroom. A myopic teddy bear stared down from where it perched on the top of the wardrobe. Its one glass eye was dusty. “There’s somebody in there trying to sleep,” Trotti said in a hoarse whisper. “Like most people in Italy at this time of night.”

  “I thought I’d have to wake up the entire city. The way you sleep, commissario, you must have a blameless conscience.”

  Despite the cold, Pisanelli was sweating. He ran the back of his hand along his forehead. “Which I find very hard to believe.”

  The two policemen went along the hall to the kitchen.

  Trotti turned on the light. Plates and utensils were in the sink. The tap was dripping slightly. There was a smell of wine and chamomile and Anna Maria’s eau de cologne. The clock faithfully continued its ticking on the top of the refrigerator.

  “You’d better get dressed, commissario,” Pisanelli said and unceremoniously slumped down on one of the chairs. He took out a packet of cigarettes.

  “At four in the morning?”

  “Perhaps I’m interrupting something.” Pisanelli gestured towards the bedroom door.

  “A seventy-two-year-old lady.”

  “Can you be fussy?”

  “You’re not going to smoke a cigarette here,” Trotti said, but there was no anger in his voice. He noticed in the kitchen light that Pisanelli’s thin hands were trembling as he fumbled with the packet of untipped Esportazione. “Want a coffee?”

  “Not a bad idea, commissario. Go and get dressed before your feet drop off from frostbite. I’ll make some coffee. Six sugars?” Pisanelli stuffed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth—the stubble was grey beneath his chin—and went to the sink. “We’re in a hurry.”

  “We? I’m in no hurry.”

  “Get some clothes on fast, commissario.” Pisanelli unscrewed the espresso machine. “A cold night to get murdered.”

  24: Corollary

  LIKE DRIVING THROUGH watery anisette.

  Trotti sat beside Pisanelli in silence. It was freezing in the old Citroën and Pisanelli concentrated on his driving, leaning forward over the steering wheel, trying to peer through the thick fog now whitened by the street lamps.

  They went under the ring road, finally completed after twenty years, and took the turning for Melegnano. No sooner had the last lamp fallen behind them than the fog became an almost impenetrable pitch-black.

  Pisanelli drove slowly, following the line of the ditch that separated the provincial road from the rice fields.

  Occasionally a voice spoke over the two-way radio Pisanelli had installed in the car. A woman’s voice, reassuringly metallic and timeless.

  Trotti looked at the speedometer. The needle wavered at thirty-five kilometers per hour. Trotti huddled down into his waxed jacket; he felt dirty, and beneath a pair of trousers he was still wearing his pajamas. His feet were cold under the two pairs of unmatching socks. There was sleep in his eyes.

  Too old to be driving across the Po valley in the middle of a December night. The taste of sweet coffee mixed with bile rising from his stomach.

  They traveled without speaking for twenty minutes, only once overtaking another vehicle, a bundle of a man sitting astride a squat Vespa that was immediately engulfed into the fog behind them.

  Through the darkness, suddenly strangely near and quite silent, Trotti saw the revolving blue lamp; then the red taillights. Finally he saw the spotlight. It was directed downwards and it was only at the last moment that he caught sight of its uncertain rim on the cold, wet earth.

  “Thanks for fetching me, Pisa.”

  Pisanelli did not reply. He pulled the aging Deux Chevaux on to the edge of the road, the front wheel only centimeters from the open ditch. Trotti had to wait for Pisanelli to get out before he could slide across the seat. He caught his sleeve on the stupid gear lever.

  Polizia di Stato and a car of the Polizia Stradale. There was also another van, and in the flashing light Trotti read the inscription: ASSESSORATO ALL’ECOLOGIA/PROVINCIA DI MILANO.

  The lamp on the police Campagnola was pointing down into the water of the stream. Two men in city shoes were leaning over the corpse. One looked up and recognizing Trotti, gave him a weary smile. “You got here fast, Rino.”

  Piero Trotti had seen his first corpse at the end of the war, and during his years in the Questura, Trotti had subsequently been required to deal with many dead bodies, some in an advanced state of decomposition. Each time the sight of death remained a shock. The sudden, abrupt end. The indignity. The complete futility of death—or perhaps worse, the implicit, unmentionable corollary: the futility of life.

  A dead body was always a painful sight. When the dead body was a friend or an acquaintance, it was still more painful—a lot more painful. A face that he had once known, features that Trotti had once recognized, now frozen into terminal immobility. An end to the familiar intonation, an end to the mannerisms, the ticks, to the shared moments, to the shared passage through this life.

  Trotti knew it was Bassi even though Pisanelli had not spoken a word.

  He tried to force himself into adopting the well-worn professional approach. A matter of habit, but a habit that now deserted him. Before th
e reality of the pale face, the lolling tongue and the sightless eyes, the damp black hair no longer able to hide Bassi’s incipient baldness, Trotti felt angry and ill.

  (Despite the cold, Trotti could smell the stench of the polluted water.)

  He crouched down and he noticed that Bassi was wearing his camel coat, that the tie was still undone at his neck. Even in death, Mister FBI had been faithful to his American models, only instead of the end coming in exotic Flatbush, Brooklyn, or beneath the Verazzano Bridge, Fabrizio Bassi had been dispatched, shot in the head and possibly drowned, in a foul-smelling tributary of the Lambro, between the dark rice fields and the Strada provinciale 22 to Melegnano.

  The ambulance arrived, lit up by two revolving blue lights. An orange strip and a schematic snowdrop along the side. Two men jumped out from the rear.

  Trotti turned back to Pisanelli, who was leaning against the bonnet of the Campagnola. “Pisa, give me one of your Esportazione.”

  25: Friend

  “WHY DID YOU come looking for me, Pisa?”

  “Thought you might be interested.”

  “Three years that I haven’t worked on a murder case.”

  “Bassi was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Pisanelli said sourly. He was driving with caution, following the irrigation ditch.

  At regular intervals, they drove past a billboard advertising furs or parmesan cheese or Pirelli tires, standing in isolation like abandoned sentinels, caught in the yellow beams and then forgotten. It was still another half-hour before the sun rose to the east. Pisanelli added, “Poor bastard.”

  “Bassi was never my friend.”

  “He worked for you, commissario.”

  “You worked for me. Nobody’s ever accused us of being friends.”

  “Thank you for those kind words.”

  “Bassi was kicked out of the Questura.”

  “You know why, commissario.”

  “Because it suited the Questore and all the Questore’s Socialist friends.”

  “Socialists? I’m not sure I know that word.”

  “You should do, Pisa—they ruled this country for long enough.”