8
As soon as the wind came up, Duca Lamberti went and closed all the windows in the apartment, then came back to the study and together with Mascaranti took another look at the suitcase the girl had left. It wasn’t really a case, it was more like a crate or a small trunk, it wasn’t leather and the metal corners looked very solid, too solid for such a small trunk.
‘I’d like to open it,’ he said to Mascaranti.
‘It won’t be easy,’ Mascaranti said.
Duca stood up and fished in the glass bowl containing the instruments he had used on the girl, took two of them and tried them in the small lock of the case. ‘I thought it’d be harder,’ he said, standing up again and looking for another instrument in the bowl. ‘This should do it.’ He inserted it in the lock and slowly pushed.
‘But those are surgical instruments,’ Mascaranti said, regretfully.
Not Duca: he wasn’t regretful as he pushed the thin little instrument that looked like a bradawl into the lock, because he had already decided that all this – the instruments, the bottle of coloured or colourless Citrosil, the whole pharmacological Tower of Babel from which to choose the right medicine – just wasn’t his world any more. He didn’t hate it, but he was leaving it, saying farewell to it, and these instruments could just as well be used to force a lock, or even to open a tin of sardines.
And while the thunder rolled terribly and the rain beat against the shutters, he forced that lock and lifted the lid and they saw a layer of dark wood shavings.
‘How did you do it?’ Mascaranti said, admiringly.
He didn’t reply. He threw the shavings onto the floor. Beneath it was greaseproof paper, the colour of iodine, folded the way it was in big boxes of chocolates. He unfolded it, beneath it were more shavings. Then he stopped and lit a cigarette. He was making a mistake again, he couldn’t afford to make a mistake, and yet he was still making them. Why didn’t he keep out of things like this, why didn’t he become a pharmaceuticals salesman? Why didn’t he go and see his sister and Livia4 and his niece in Inverigo?
‘What do you think is inside?’ he said to Mascaranti.
‘Something fragile, I suppose, with all these shavings.’
Why not crystal glasses for pink champagne? But he didn’t say anything and took away the shavings and threw them on the floor again. Beneath, there was a dark cloth, as he had expected. It looked like the kind of cloth used to wash floors, but it was sticky to the touch, because it was soaked in grease.
‘It can’t be,’ Mascaranti said, starting to understand.
‘It is,’ he replied, lifting the cloth the way a stripper throws off her last undergarment.
Mascaranti stood up from his chair and knelt on the floor by the case, looking without touching. ‘It looks like a dismantled submachine gun.’
‘It is a submachine gun.’
Mascaranti kept staring at it, as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘It isn’t a Browning, a Browning is bigger.’
‘No, it isn’t a Browning, a Browning weighs nearly nine kilos, this one isn’t even seven.’ He took out one part, the barrel. The second part was the central body with the chamber, the two parts fitting together like the pieces of a children’s game, and the third part was the breech, with a false grip, which also slotted in very smoothly, because of all the grease. And finally, under another layer of wood shavings, the magazines. He inserted one vertically into the chamber. ‘It can do thirty shots per magazine, ten more than a Browning, and two more than a Bren.’ The bottom of the case was full of magazines. The bullet was a calibre 7.8, a higher calibre than other submachine guns. He put the bullet back and looked carefully down the barrel: there seemed to be eight striations, which meant the speed of firing must be at least eight hundred metres a second. ‘This gem is a Skoda,’ he said. ‘Everybody thinks they only make cars these days but they must have kept some of their military sections, here it is, it’s a very small mark: CSSR, which means, if I remember correctly, Ceskoslovenska Socialisticka Republika. This is the best submachine gun in the world, it can be hidden under a coat, and it has the power of a small cannon. You hold it like a bicycle pump, like this, you pull back the false grip with your right hand and the weapon discharges a hundred shots a minute and more. Remember a Bren, which weighs ten and a half kilos, can’t do more than eighty shots a minute. You let go of the grip and the gun stops. It cools in the air, look.’
‘Don’t shoot, Dr Lamberti.’
He would gladly have fired the gun, very gladly: there was never any lack of targets. Instead of which he carefully dismantled the gun and put it back in place, almost the way he had found it, but without trying to hide the fact that he had handled it, he didn’t see any point in hiding that. He looked at his greasy hands, and went into the little bathroom. ‘Mascaranti, get out the coffee and the percolator and make us a bit of coffee.’ Mascaranti liked coffee and was good at making it. It took Duca some time to wash his hands clean, he had to use the bathroom tile detergent, and there were still marks on his fingers, then, with the thunder pealing convulsively outside, he went into the kitchen, sat down in the little corner where he had done the crosswords with Mascaranti while the girl had slept, and where Mascaranti was now grinding the coffee in a grinder that was not so much old as historic.
‘Which grocer did you get this coffee from?’ Mascaranti asked as he ground the coffee. ‘I’ll go and shut him down.’
‘From your boss Superintendent Carrua’s grocer.’ Another unpleasant aspect of his situation as a former doctor, currently unemployed: Carrua’s suppliers, from the grocer to the butcher, were also his. Lorenza, when she was in Milan, didn’t have to do anything except make a phone call and place an order. What should he call that? A loan, a gesture of friendship, charity? He and Lorenza were content to place their orders, without calling it anything.
‘Superintendent Carrua knows about police matters, and nothing about anything else,’ Mascaranti said didactically.
For a while the thunder was muffled and distant, the hurricane was subsiding. In the near-silence the grinder rasped domestically, good-naturedly, reminiscent of the kitchens of long ago, the ones with fireplaces. Duca slumped onto the chair and stared at the percolator on the stove, the livid, motionless little flame, a substitute for the brilliant, burning, reddish, dancing flames of a fireplace.
‘Let’s assume a small part of what the girl told us is true,’ he said, still staring at his imaginary fireplace, the silence growing around them, because the storm, the hurricane, was almost over.
Mascaranti stood up with the grinder in his hand. ‘I’ve gone mad. I put the percolator on without any coffee in it.’ He shook his head, turned off the gas, and waited for the percolator to cool down a bit.
‘Let’s assume a small part of what the girl told us is true,’ Duca repeated.
‘Yes,’ Mascaranti said.
‘She said, if she was telling the truth, that one of her fiancé’s two shops in Milan is near here, in the Via Plinio, and she walked here tonight.’
Mascaranti emptied the percolator, unscrewed it, put the coffee in the filter, screwed it up again, relit the gas and put the percolator over the little flame. ‘That may well be true.’
‘Let’s assume it is. She arrived here with the case. Which means she had the case with her when she finished work, she left the shop with it and came here.’
‘That’s possible,’ Mascaranti said, ‘but she could also have left the shop without the case and gone to pick it up from somewhere where it had been left.’
No, he thought, we have to use Occam’s razor,5 we have to be economical with our hypotheses, and the right hypothesis was the most economical. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely. First of all, this other place where she may have left the case would have to have been somewhere between the shop and here. Then it would have had to be a place she could trust, you don’t leave a case like this in a bar or in the apartment of some casual acquaintance. And it’d be odd if she found a place like tha
t halfway between the butcher’s shop and here.’
Mascaranti nodded, his eyes still on the percolator. ‘But if she had the case with her in the shop, then her fiancé, the butcher, must know what it is, because it’s unlikely she’d be able to keep a case like that hidden from her fiancé.’
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Duca said. ‘It isn’t certain but it’s very likely. A woman is quite capable of hiding her lover’s photograph in her husband’s wallet if she has to, but if she can she’d rather avoid it. So let’s assume she has the case with her in the shop, and that her fiancé knows it’s there.’ He opened the window because the storm was over, it was only raining now. He breathed in the damp air of concrete and rubbish from the courtyard, then sat down again. ‘And let’s also assume that her fiancé, the butcher, knows what’s in the case.’ He looked at the gas flame, half closed his eyes, thinking of the sparks rising, long ago, through the hoods of fireplaces, and imagining that those sparks were rising now from the little gas flame. ‘In fact, let’s assume that he was the one who gave the girl the case, in other words, that the butcher gave his fiancée a submachine gun to bring here. Nobody would ever think a girl like that was carrying a submachine gun. Then the case is deposited here, in the apartment of an honest if censured professional, and at a suitable time someone comes to pick it up.’
Mascaranti continued to nod, then stopped in order to flip over the percolator. Then he started nodding again as he went to fetch the cups and the sugar bowl.
Then Duca said, ‘Mascaranti, you heard what the girl said before?’
‘Yes, I heard, but I didn’t see,’ Mascaranti said, smiling ambiguously.
‘The girl said her fiancé made lots of money, hundreds of millions even, with the meat he brought in to his shop in Milan without paying duty.’ Sadly, the gas had been switched off, and the flame was gone. ‘I don’t think you can make hundreds of millions cheating on duty,’ he continued patiently. ‘Do you?’
‘Not really,’ Mascaranti said, pouring the coffee.
‘But do you think you could make that much money by importing guns like the one in that case?’
Mascaranti nodded and handed him the cup of coffee and then the sugar bowl.
‘And do you think these are weapons of war?’ He put in the sugar, stirred it, and waited for the reply.
Mascaranti put in the sugar and stirred it, and as he was stirring it, sitting there beside him, with the alarm clock ticking in the rainy night and the second hand in the shape of a hen swaying with every tick, he pondered unhurriedly. ‘No,’ he said. He sipped a little of the coffee and nodded to indicate that it was good. ‘I mean, even a rolling pin for making pasta could be a weapon of war, but you couldn’t mount a real attack with that kind of gun, at most some kind of commando action.’
‘Or something similar, like a robbery,’ Duca said. He tasted the coffee. ‘It’s good like this, it shouldn’t be too strong at night.’ He stood up and went and opened all the other windows in the apartment. In Lorenza’s bedroom, the lid of the steriliser in which Sara’s dummies were left to soak was off. Every night he saw the lid was off and every night he forgot to put it on, and Lorenza had been away for now ten days now. How embarrassing! He took the lid and put it on the steriliser, then looked for the cigarettes he had in the pocket of his jacket which was hanging in the hall, the plain national brand, not for export, and went back into the kitchen. Mascaranti was carefully washing the cups.
‘Or else it could be a sample,’ Duca said, sitting down behind him. ‘If someone’s looking to buy wholesale, you open the case and show him the sample, explain that it’s the latest model, and sell it at a reasonable price.’
Mascaranti dried his hands on the tea towel hanging next to the sink. ‘So we’re dealing with middle men in the arms trade.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, simultaneously shaking his head, ‘maybe, but that’s not the heart of the matter.’
Then the telephone rang. He stood up and went into the hall. It was Sergeant Morini. He listened to his story, and it didn’t even take long to listen to, because Morini was as laconic as Tacitus and the couple’s terrible death – blinded by headlights, riddled with machine gun fire, driven so mad that they threw themselves in the canal – became, in Morini’s description, terse, formal, official, which made the story even more chilling. When the call was over, Duca stood there looking at the telephone, and at the wall, and gave a shudder of disgust.
9
After the storm, the sky over Milan, because Milan does have a sky, became even bluer than the sky over the Plateau Rosa,6 and beyond the buildings, from the roof terraces, the snow-covered mountains were clearly visible. The man at the petrol station in the Piazza della Repubblica, where Mascaranti had stopped, was wearing sky blue overalls. He was keen, he didn’t read the newspapers and didn’t know anything, every night in Milan a number of people die, more than during the day, and for the most diverse reasons, from bronchial pneumonia to a machine gun slaying in the Ripa Ticinese, and he couldn’t mourn them all, and besides, not all of them were worth mourning. Nobody had ever tried to rob his petrol station, and so his world had a normal, liveable, even happy dimension. Duca Lamberti looked at the meter on the petrol pump, the triumphant sun, the vivid spring green of the geometrical little lawns in the Piazza. At this very moment, the girl in the red dress coat was in the morgue, without her coat, and in another cold chamber was her unfortunate companion, and these images had no meaning in a normal, liveable world like that of the man in the petrol station.
‘I’m just popping over to Ricci’s pastry shop,’ he said to Mascaranti, and he crossed the Via Ferdinando di Savoia, obeying the traffic lights, went in under the arcades of the skyscraper and then into the pastry shop.
The image of the girl lying in the frozen chamber was wiped out by the counters of that venerable temple to confectionery and tea and ice-cream, where half – or all? – of Milan came whenever it could for the ritual of the aperitif, the boxes of pastries that husbands took home to their wives and children on Sundays, and the bottles of French, Greek, German and Spanish wine displayed, slightly tilted, in a window, liquid delights that were hard to fathom if your palate was accustomed to table wines.
‘Police.’ He flashed an ID, which was actually Mascaranti’s.
The polite, well-built man looked at him uncertainly through his glasses, held his arm out, made a kind of bow and led him towards the back of the shop.
‘Are you the owner?’ Duca asked him. He was being excessively meticulous: after all, even he came here every now and again, and he recognised the man.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I need some information. I’d like to know if a wedding cake was ordered here.’
‘We get lots of orders for wedding cakes.’ Through his glasses the man was looking at Duca without either fear or curiosity, but with refinement, a gentleman looking at another gentleman.
‘This is a wedding cake that was supposed to be sent to a little village near Milan.’
‘I’d have to look at the order slips,’ the gentleman said, his expression indicating that he was starting to get a little irritated. ‘Do you know who ordered it?’
‘No, the cake was supposed to be sent to Romano Banco, in the municipality of Buccinasco, near Corsico. It could have been ordered by anybody.’
These geographical indications were a bit excessive, and the owner of the pastry shop continued to look at him coolly through his glasses, without saying anything.
‘I’m told it was a cake that cost two hundred thousand lire.’
The expression behind the glasses was now one of incredulity. ‘Well, they might make a cake like that for the Queen of England.’
Duca smiled: he liked this man, whose behaviour could not be faulted. ‘Maybe they were exaggerating. Let’s say a hundred thousand.’
‘As I said, we have to look at the order slips.’
They looked, and they found the slip for the cake, which was in fact a cake
for thirty-five thousand lire, because the girl who was now in a cold chamber in the morgue had had, when she was alive, a childlike tendency to exaggerate, which was how thirty-five had become two hundred, and the cake, which didn’t even weigh ten kilos, had been taken, three days earlier, in a Ricci’s delivery van, to Trattoria dei Gigli in the Via dei Gigli in Romano Banco, in the municipality of Buccinasco, and the cake had been paid for in advance by cheque, as was shown on the slip, a Bank of America and Italy cheque, number 1180 398, and it had been ordered by someone genuinely Milanese, at least to judge by the name, Ulrico Brambilla, who would have been the bridegroom if there had actually been a wedding, and who owned butcher’s shops in Milan, Romano Banco and Ca’ Tarino.
Duca went back to his car and sat down next to Mascaranti, who was at the wheel. ‘The cake was ordered and sent.’ He would have liked to know what had happened to the cake, however modest, only thirty-five thousand instead of two hundred, it must have been a good solid cake of about ten kilos, only one one-hectogram slice per guest, with a hundred guests to eat it. But the wedding had not taken place.
‘Let’s go to Romano Banco,’ he said to Mascaranti. ‘We can go by way of Inverigo.’ It was a poor attempt at humour, but Mascaranti understood: to get to Romano Banco you don’t go by way of Inverigo because it’s in the opposite direction, but it was ten days since Duca had last seen his sister, ten days since he had last seen little Sara, ten days since he had last seen Livia with the M-shaped and W-shaped scars all over her face.
The journey to the Villa Auseri was like advancing directly into the sun.
‘Is this it?’ Mascaranti asked.
Yes, this was it: Lorenza was already behind the gate, holding her child by the hand. They were fine, they were lovely, the girl’s cheeks and bottom were firm, and Lorenza’s ponytail looked good against the light green hilly background of the Brianza.
‘Livia’s stayed in her room,’ Lorenza said.
It was the least she could do: someone with seventy-seven scars on her face, at the corners of her eyes, the corners of her lips and on either side of her nose, couldn’t do much else besides stay in her room, even after all the plastic surgery. With Sara in his arms, he crossed the garden of the villa, more aristocratic in style than most in the Brianza, and entered the main room.
Traitors to All Page 6
