‘Yes, yes,’ she said, crying, and started looking in her handbag. ‘All I have is my driving license, but I have my passport at home.’
Duca looked at the licence for a moment (twenty-nine years old, though she looked older: like many Milanese women who work, she overworked and ended up looking like that) then passed it to Mascaranti. As you have to be gentle with women who are expecting, he gave her a little speech: ‘You mustn’t be afraid, we only want to know something about that girl, you know a lot more than you’ve told us, and you have to tell the police. For example, go on with that story about the nail polish, it interests me, you said she even painted each nail a different colour, but she didn’t go out in the street like that, did she?’
‘No, can you imagine?’ She had stopped crying. ‘It was only for her man.’
‘Her fiancé, the owner of the butcher’s shop?’
‘That’s right,’ she said, starting to become really involved in the subject. ‘She told me about all the things he wanted her to do, except give up her virginity, you know, I realised she wasn’t exactly a virgin, from some of the things she said, anyway he liked her to stroke him with her nails painted different colours, that made an impression on me, and other things I really can’t repeat, but you know, you can’t choose your customers, but I didn’t think she was really a bad girl.’
No, whoever said she’d been a bad girl? An instrument is neither good nor bad, it depends on how you use it, you can even choke someone with a rosebud if you push it far enough down his throat. So the butcher, among other things, was a fetishist, a kind of chromatic fetishist: nothing bad about that, we all have our little quirks. But this twenty-nine-year-old woman who looked thirty-five through overwork must know other things. ‘And did you ever meet the other man, the one who died with Signorina Marelli?’
She glanced at Mascaranti, who was sitting next to the window, looking like a pensioner writing his memoirs, the story of his life, with that little book in his hand and that horrible pink plastic ballpoint pen between his fingers. She couldn’t have imagined that he was taking down everything she said: she didn’t have much of an imagination about police matters. ‘Signor Silvano?’ she said. ‘Yes, once.’
‘At Frontini’s, perhaps?’ he suggested.
‘Oh, no,’ she burst out, surprised at such naivety, ‘do you think they wanted to be seen together so close to the butcher’s shop, where the assistants would tell the boss everything? No, it was because of a case.’
Suddenly the spring stopped coming in through the window, at least for him and Mascaranti, even though the word she had used was so simple, so bland, that she could not have imagined the effect it caused.
‘One evening, leaving the butcher’s shop to go home, she came into my shop with a case and asked me if I could keep it until the following morning, when her Silvano would drop by to collect it.’
‘And so the next morning, Signor Silvano came to your shop and picked up the case?’
‘Yes, he was really a handsome young man, I started to understand why she wasn’t so happy about being engaged to the butcher.’
What women understand by handsome young man never has anything to do with morality. Not all women, not Livia Ussaro: he needed her, sometimes sharply, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone any more, about anything, not even about abstract subjects, not even with him, after all she was a woman, and seventy-seven scars on her face can make a woman a bit depressed. ‘And what did he tell you: “I’m Silvano”?’ he said, dismissing Livia Ussaro from his mind.
‘Something like that, yes, first he asked me if Signorina Giovanna had left a case for him, and I said yes, and then he told me he was Silvano, but even if he hadn’t told me, I’d already guessed it was him.’
He was clearly of great interest to women, that fine figure of a man, Silvano Solvere. But it isn’t right to speak ill of the dead. ‘Mascaranti,’ he said, ‘get me the photograph of Signor Silvano from the file.’
It wasn’t a very good photograph, the one Mascaranti brought, and it might not have been a good idea to show it to a pregnant woman, but apart from the fact that there were no amateur photographers at the morgue, just simple functionaries who captured in all their cold nakedness the corpses who had ended up on a marble slab, the discovery of the truth had precedence over such delicacy. ‘Is this Signor Silvano?’ It might not even have been a good idea to show a woman a naked man, but this was the only photograph they had of him.
She took a good look at the photograph, obviously the image she had inside her of the handsome young man was better than the one she was looking at on the glossy 18 × 12 black and white photograph without margins, but it was immediately obvious that she had recognised him, even though it took her a while before she said, ‘Yes, that’s him.’
‘Mascaranti, the case,’ Duca said, giving Mascaranti the photograph, and after a minute Mascaranti came back into the surgery holding the green case, or small trunk, with the beautiful shiny metal corners. ‘Was the case Signorina Marelli left in your shop, the one Signor Silvano later came to pick up, anything like this, by any chance?’
‘Oh my God, it’s the same one, I’m sure it is.’ She was extremely surprised. ‘That’s Signor Silvano’s sample case, isn’t it?’
So the girl in the red dress coat had led her to think the case contained Signor Silvano’s detergent samples. That was only natural: she certainly couldn’t have told her the truth. Nor did he tell her the truth now. ‘Yes, it’s a case for detergent samples,’ he lied bluntly and gave the case back to Mascaranti.
‘How long ago was the case left with you?’ he asked after a moment.
‘Quite a while ago, at least two months,’ she said confidently, Milanese women are confident when it’s a matter of dates or figures, ‘my mother was still in Nervi because it was too cold here.’
Two months. He looked at the cuffs of his shirt and realised that they were frayed, but you had to use old shirts for as long as you could. The problem of his wardrobe aside, two months earlier Signor Silvano had gone to pick up the case from the shop selling perfumes, cosmetics and so on, but two months earlier the Milanese lawyer Turiddu Sompani, originally from Brittany, was still alive.
‘Did you ever see him again after that?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but the evening before Giovanna died, she left the case with me for a while, yes, for a couple of hours, then came and picked it up again.’
‘Now listen.’ It was true that it was Mother’s Day and she was a mother-to-be, but he had to carry on, at all costs. ‘I get the impression she told you quite a lot about her relationship with Signor Silvano.’
She nodded. She seemed to be taking more of an interest now, in the situation, the drama, the adventure: the Milanese sometimes have an unsuspected taste for strong-arm tactics, police methods, interrogations. She liked it, it took her away a moment from her shop, from her mother, from her situation as an unmarried woman absent-mindedly seduced and not even abandoned,8 but forgotten, mixed up with someone else: her seducer must have wondered every now and again, ‘Who was she, that night? Was it that one or was it this one?’ And so she stopped crying, she wasn’t even afraid any more, she wanted to help, she was the kind of citizen who helps.
‘She told you lots of things, even quite delicate things,’ Duca said didactically, ‘so it’s quite likely she told you where she met Signor Silvano.’ In an attempt to clarify things he went on, ‘She lived in Ca’ Tarino, near Corsico, and every evening she had to go back home, it was usually her fiancé, the owner of the butcher’s shop, who drove her home. By day she had to be in the butcher’s shop, at the cash desk, so maybe she told you when it was that she saw Signor Silvano?’
But she had already understood. ‘There were days when the owner of the butcher’s shop had to go away,’ she explained, informatively, ‘sometimes he was away five or six days, and that was when they saw each other.’ She paused for breath, engrossed in her role as a collaborator in the discovery of the truth.
‘She’d leave the assistants alone in the shop, and go with him.’
‘And did she tell you where they went?’
‘They didn’t always go to the same place, and besides, she didn’t tell me everything, but two or three times she mentioned a place she liked a lot, the Binaschina.’
‘The Bi – ?’ he echoed, he hadn’t quite caught the word.
‘The Binaschina. Yes, after Binasco, on the road that leads to Pavia, it’s a bit further on, not far from the Charterhouse of Pavia. She told me such good things about it that I went there with my mother one Saturday last summer, it’s a really nice place, and very close to the Charterhouse.’
‘Is it a hotel?’ he interrupted.
‘Oh, no, it’s only a restaurant,’ she said, bowing her head modestly, then continuing with her endless you knows, ‘you know how it is when they have regular customers, they must have rooms upstairs.’
Pleasant little places, in the middle of all that nature, all that greenery, with bedrooms upstairs, out of the way of the Milan road: you take your friend’s wife there, or an underage girl, you have a nice lunch, because it’s better to go there by day, that way it’s even more innocent, and then you go upstairs, broadly speaking, just like that, and then, broadly speaking, you come down again and nobody can say anything about it. It was the kind of place you chose to go to, not a place you discovered by chance.
‘Did she mention anywhere else?’
She tried hard to remember, then said, ‘No, I really don’t think so, you know, I don’t have a very good memory, but if she’d been with him the day before, the day after she’d tell me so much about the Binaschina, she’d say the food was really good, but to tell the truth, that time I went there with my mother, the food wasn’t so great, in fact the meat was a bit tough.’
He let her talk, it had been a more instructive encounter than it might have seemed, thank you, thank you, young lady of the cosmetics, Mascaranti had written her name down, but Duca didn’t care about names. ‘Thank you,’ he said, quite sincerely, and then, equally sincerely, he started to give her advice, professional advice to start with: if by chance anyone came asking questions about Signor Silvano and Signorina Giovanna Marelli, she should immediately inform the police, she mustn’t forget that, or the police would be angry. The next advice he gave her was more in the nature of moral advice, or not exactly moral, in practice they were more like threats – when you came down to it the expression ‘I’ll smash your head in’ was more effective than a lot of highly ethical and noble phrases – he told her that if she was expecting a child, she had to keep it, for two very simple reasons: one, that if she had an abortion she could go to prison and then they would even take away her licence for the perfume shop; two, that in many cases – he was a doctor and knew what he was talking about – an abortion could, among other things, cause septicaemia, and septicaemia is a general infection, in case she didn’t know, which not even modern medicine could keep under control. But when they were at the door, and before he opened it, taking advantage of the fact that it was Mother’s Day, he told her, in a low, persuasive voice, that the child might be a boy, but even if it was a girl, in a mere twenty years or so, it could keep the shop going, why work so hard for a business if you don’t have anyone to leave it to?
When he had got rid of the woman, he ran into the kitchen. The loved and hated files were still there, on the shelf of the larger dresser.
‘Mascaranti, show me the map of the spot where Turiddu Sompani’s car fell.’
They both grabbed the Breton’s file and there they were, the maps, along with the photographs of the car being lifted from the water. The spot where Turiddu Sompani’s car had fallen into the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese was almost halfway between Binasco and the Charterhouse of Pavia.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ he said to Mascaranti.
3
At the moment, there wasn’t much to see. It was only twelve, and despite the sun and the clear sky and the tender, resplendent expanse of green and the acute sense of spring, so rare in Lombardy, the place, seen from the outside, had the discreet air common once upon a time to high-class brothels. From the road you couldn’t see anything at all, then, once past the curtain of trees, the road led to an open space, with a sign saying car park, but even here you couldn’t see the brothel itself, you had to go further, on foot, past another little barrier of trees, and then there it was, apparently innocuous, a bit of folklore, architecturally horrendous, its style a mixture of a lower Lombard farmhouse and a Swedish Protestant church.
It was midday, exactly midday. They went in. At that hour nobody came to greet them, it was too early, everyone was in the kitchen preparing the food. They had to go through two doors, very heavy ones, and the opulence of the doors with their decorated bronze handles half a metre long were already clear evidence that whoever owned these doors earned a comfortable income.
‘I don’t think there’s any point trying to pass ourselves off as customers,’ Duca said, ‘they won’t believe us.’ He was starting to feel very much a policeman.
The main room could – if you were trying to be funny – be called pretty. It was done up like a stable or cowshed, there were saddles, cartwheels, heaps of straw on the ground and hay in the mangers lined up against the walls. But, tactfully, neither the saddles nor the spades nor the cartwheels took anything away from the spotless white tablecloths, the trolleys filled with hors d’oeuvre and fruit, and the little mustard-yellow velvet chairs. The place had the look of a stable without any of the disadvantages, rustic lamps hung from the ceiling, a little barrow stood in a corner crammed with sorghum broomsticks, but everything was very clean, well hoovered, and the few copper pans displayed here and there testified, in their bright sheen, to the general cleanliness (hygiene is so important, after all, especially where you eat).
‘Really despicable,’ Duca said.
Nobody had come to greet them and there was nobody to be seen. Through the three large open windows birdsong came in along with the light, but from somewhere close by that must have been the kitchen, you could hear banging: they must have been beating a piece of meat, or chopping something with a knife. Then an old man came out, short and thin and pink, wearing black trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no hat of any kind. He looked as if he had a lot of experience and an uneasy conscience, because he did not approach them as if they were likely customers, but with the uncertain look of someone who doesn’t know what the doctor is about to tell him: hay fever or neoplasia?
‘Your ID, Mascaranti,’ Duca ordered. And as Mascaranti showed the old man his ID, a number of white-clad waiters, slender but rather well-built, appeared behind the old man, and even two female cooks with white caps like ice bags on their heads, they looked very nineteenth-century, Duca was reminded of Toulouse-Lautrec for a moment, was Toulouse-Lautrec also a Breton, like Turiddu Sompani? He tried to remember, no, he wasn’t a Breton, he was probably a Gascon.
With all those waiters standing behind him in long white aprons, as if they were at the Moulin Rouge, the old man looked at Mascaranti’s ID and said ‘Yes,’ he was probably quite familiar with the police, he did not smile, he was not servile, that yes was even a little cold and stiff.
But Duca shook him, warmed him. ‘We need to talk to you. Let’s go upstairs, to one of those rooms you rent by the hour.’
The old man liked his clarity, he liked it in a bad way, even his skull turned pink. ‘Everything’s above board here,’ he said and then repeated, ‘Everything’s above board. The rooms upstairs are for my daughter and my son-in-law, and apart from that there are two more for the cook and the waitresses. We close at one in the morning and the girls can’t go home alone at that hour.’
No, of course they couldn’t. Not in such virginal surroundings. ‘Yes,’ Duca said, ‘let’s go upstairs to talk,’ and he took him by the arm and pushed him, physical contact is more effective than any words could be, it’s like a kick. ‘Mascaranti, you stay here a
nd keep an eye on these people, and on the phone.’
Reluctantly, the old man led him upstairs. To do so you had to go out in the garden, so that a couple would look as if they were leaving, instead of which you turned right and went through a small, very ordinary wooden door, so ordinary that no one would have thought of opening it, and behind the little door there was an ordinary little staircase, just one flight, but on the walls hung – who would ever have thought it? – fox hunting prints.
‘Show me the rooms,’ Duca said, with delicacy, not boorishly like a policeman, gripping him by the elbow and pushing him up.
The old man showed him the rooms. He explained that one of them was his and his wife’s, it was very elegant and very clean, nothing exceptional, except for the bathroom: in such a rustic restaurant, with the downstairs room got up like a stable, a Pompeian bath like this jarred somewhat.
‘This is my son’s and daughter-in-law’s,’ the old man said in the next room. It was a copy of the first room, except that the furniture, apart from that in the bathroom, was of lighter wood, and not suitable for a long stay.
The three rooms for the waitresses did not have double beds, only two small beds next to each other, so close that it was hard to see why they were not joined, and there was no bathroom: each room had a wash basin with a bidet beneath it, modestly covered by a pink or sky blue or yellow towel. The blinds on the windows were permanently lowered, creating, even at midday, a languid atmosphere of sin, but in the third of the three waitresses’ rooms – or what the old man had indicated were the waitresses’ rooms – Duca raised the blinds and the sunlight came flooding in.
‘Right, let’s talk here,’ he said to the old man, and closed the door.
‘Everything’s above board,’ the old man said, ‘the Carabinieri have been here and they found everything in order. I have competitors who talk about me, even in Milan, trying to ruin me, but it’s all above board here, I don’t do what those bastards say, I do well enough with the restaurant, I don’t need to rent rooms by the hour.’ He wasn’t pleading, and he wasn’t exaggerating: he was right, he was the owner of a restaurant that had been checked by the authorities, he was small and old and completely bald, but he had his own repulsive form of nobility: it was obvious he was being protected and that was why he wasn’t afraid.
Traitors to All Page 9
