Duca would have to get the truth out of him.
He sat down on one of the two little beds, and even sitting down he was almost as tall as the old man. ‘I only want some information,’ he said, sounding very calm, very democratic, almost constitutional, not at all the kind of policeman who tortures suspects. ‘You have lots of customers, and you can’t remember all of them, I know, but do you by any chance remember a certain Signor Silvano? Silvano Solvere? Obviously you don’t remember him, with all the customers you have.’
To his great joy, the old man shook his head, no, he didn’t remember. In fact he even got slightly annoyed. ‘How could I? I don’t know the names of my customers, people coming to a restaurant don’t give their names.’
‘I was thinking,’ Duca suggested, ‘that this Silvano Solvere might possibly have been called to the phone, and that way you would have found out that particular customer was called Silvano Solvere.’ He kept repeating the name, with constitutional politeness, respecting the constitution, which guarantees the freedom of the citizen from any abuse of executive or judicial power.
‘That might have happened, but who remembers all the names?’ the old man said, increasingly calm faced with this policeman who was so well-behaved, he didn’t even seem like a policeman.
‘You’re right, of course,’ Duca said, ‘but how about Attorney Sompani, Turiddu Sompani? Maybe you remember him.’
Benignly, the old man pretended to make an effort to remember, he knitted his brows until they were thick with lines like the rails near a terminal. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.’
Duca nodded, understandingly, and stood up, on his feet he was almost twice as tall as the old man, but the old man didn’t seem to be afraid. He really needed to get the truth out of him now, and fast. The mistake that crooks make is to deny everything, they’re so stupid, if you ask them, ‘How many fingers do you have on your right hand?’ they say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know a thing.’ That’s how they give themselves away.
‘You see,’ he said, going to the wash basin and turning on the cold water tap, Attorney Turiddu Sompani and a lady friend of his, Signora Adele Terrini, are the two people whose car fell into the canal, the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, one kilometre from here, not even that. I thought they might have had dinner here, and besides, I thought maybe you’d read the papers, that you were interested in an accident that happened so close to your restaurant. But maybe you don’t read the papers?’
He was too old and crafty to rise to the bait, he did not go so far as to deny that he read the newspapers, but his denial was more subtle: ‘Every other day there’s some kind of accident on this road, as there are on all the roads, am I supposed to remember all of them, and remember the names of all the people involved?’ He smiled, he was so sure of himself, he had to be protected.
‘So you don’t know anything about Silvano Solvere or Turiddu Sompani?’ Duca said without looking at him, because he had bent down to take one of the two towels from the bidet, a portable bidet, there was a blue towel for men and a pink towel for women, and he took the blue one, put it under the jet of cold water and soaked it thoroughly. He didn’t like doing what he was about to do, on such a glorious spring day, with the smell of sun-warmed earth at last entering this chamber of sin, but the old man had not left him any alternative, the old man took other people, and the police in particular, for cretins, for mental retards, he took the law and civil rights as jokes that had nothing to do with him, because he believed he had protection that was much stronger than the police and the law, and so, advanced in years as he was, he had to be taught to respect the law and the police: even on television they always said it was never too late.
Without losing his temper, he went up to the old man, who was watching, curious and bored, gently grabbed him by the back of the neck with his left hand, while with the right he simultaneously, instantaneously blocked his nose and mouth, his two channels for breathing, with the wet towel.
The old man tried to kick but Duca kept him still and laid him down on the bed, face up and with one knee bent. Four seconds had passed, the old man could hold out for forty seconds, maybe more, there was still time. A wet towel – they were of very fine terry cloth – sticks better and gives better insulation: air can neither leave nor enter the lungs.
‘Now look at me,’ Duca said, all politeness gone, only the threat left, ‘if you don’t answer my questions the way I want, I’ll keep this rag over your mouth. I don’t have any desire to suffocate you, but if you don’t indicate that you’re going to talk, I’ll keep right on. And the worst thing is if you resist, at your age you’ll have a heart attack, even if I take the towel away you’ll breathe but as soon as you start breathing again you’ll have a heart attack. I’ll give you some advice as a doctor, because I’m a doctor as well as a policeman: agree to talk right now. Twenty-five seconds have already passed, it doesn’t bother me if you die of a heart attack, I’ll just say it happened suddenly, and you won’t be able to deny it from the other world, and all your protectors, with all their power, won’t be able to bring you back to life, in fact they’ll be happy: one less accomplice to worry about.’
He lifted the hand with the wet towel, because the old man had nodded. He let him recover, threw the wet towel on the bidet, turned off the tap, went back to the bed and took the old man’s pulse. The old man’s face was no longer pink, but had turned lilac, he was like a dripping lilac. His pulse was agitated but quite regular, his breathing was questionable, his lips were also slightly lilac. Duca had said all that to scare him, but they had indeed been closer to a heart attack than might have been expected. He lit a cigarette and went to the window while the old man recovered. When he turned, his face hot with sun, he saw that the owner of the Binaschina was starting to look almost human again. ‘Lie back and let’s talk a bit,’ he said to him. He had no intention of killing an old man, although he didn’t make any distinction between killing old men or young men or whatever in order to find out the truth, not because he cared a lot about the truth, which was, after all, an abstruse abstraction, but simply because it would take him to the people who could do anything but were never seen, and he wanted those people to go to prison, and he wanted everybody to know and see that they were in prison. ‘So, do you know Silvano Solvere?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the old man said, humble and modest now. ‘He often came here.’
‘Alone or in company?’
‘Almost always in company.’
‘What kind of company?’
‘A girl.’
‘When you say a girl, do you mean always the same one, or different ones?’
‘No, always the same one.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Tall, brown hair, a pretty girl.’
He had tried to avoid raising his voice and getting angry, but people are too stupid. ‘Don’t make me lose my patience,’ he cried, raising his fist over the man’s face, ‘you know perfectly well it’s the same girl who died in the car with Silvano Solvere, machine-gunned by your protectors, the bastards who protect this little business for you, this little knocking shop for idle Milanese.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, really scared – it must be unpleasant to be old and defenceless against a mad policeman – and he blinked and instinctively turned his head away from that threatening fist. ‘I was about to say that, it’s her.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s his girlfriend, Giovanna Marelli.’ He should have said it was: you had to make a bit of a distinction between the living and the dead.
‘So Silvano Solvere and a girlfriend of his, Giovanna Marelli, came here,’ Duca said, calming down. ‘What did they come here to do?’ It was a curious question, but with crooks you had to ask unusual questions.
‘They came to eat.’
Of course, you go to a restaurant like the Binaschina to eat. ‘And then?’
The old man hesitated, but finally admitted the sin. ‘They came upstairs.’
; ‘And then?’ Duca said. He saw him move. ‘Don’t get up, you’ll only feel sick. And think carefully before you answer.’
‘Then what?’ the old man moaned. ‘I don’t know what you mean. Then they went away, that’s all I know.’
He seemed genuine, but with some people you can’t trust seems and appears. ‘Try and tell me everything, at your age the heart is fragile.’ He went to the wash basin and turned on the tap. ‘And don’t scream, that’ll only make it worse, everything will be worse as long as you trust your protectors more than you trust the police.’
He did not scream. He watched, with eyes that had grown round, as Duca soaked the towel, and his breathing became agitated again, and his words were agitated too, when he spoke: ‘He’d come here with the girl every now and again, like everyone else, most often by day, like everyone else, but sometimes also in the evening, that’s all I know, really, I know the name because he had a lot of phone calls, as you said, they called him on the phone, and that was how I found out his name was Silvano Solvere, but that’s all I know.’
Abruptly, Duca turned off the tap, and without a word approached the bed with the blue towel, which was soaking wet now and dripping water.
Wisely, the old man shook his head, and wisely he opened the last secret cabinet of his complex soul: ‘They recommended him to me.’ He must know all about people who intend to kill, at his age and with the kind of company he had kept, and maybe he had seen a determination to kill in this policeman’s eyes, he hadn’t expected to come across a policeman like this one.
‘What do you mean, they “recommended” him to you?’
‘Some friends phoned me and said to treat him well.’ He even smiled, in his terror, because now it was no longer a question of fear, but of terror: a wet towel can be more terrifying than a revolver.
‘And who are these “friends”?’ he asked the old man. Then he did three things: he dropped the towel on the floor, took the false owner of the Binaschina by one arm and gently raised him to a sitting position on the bed, and finally took from the pockets of his jacket a ballpoint pen and the only piece of paper he had in his possession at the moment, a coupon from the previous week’s football pools, in which he had scored four. ‘Write down the names and addresses of the people who give you these recommendations.’
‘I don’t know anything, I only saw them three times in three years, I only know the telephone number, when I need them I phone them.’
‘Write down the telephone number.’
The old man wrote the number on the coupon.
‘Try to remember it correctly and don’t make a mistake, if you tell me later that you made a mistake I won’t believe you.’
The old man shook his head sadly. ‘I know when I can cheat and when I can’t,’ he said, wearily, and lay back down on the bed, really worn out, morally too. ‘I’m a cook, not a criminal, I’ve never gone looking for trouble, I’ve always been a good cook, I keep the sauce for the lasagne on the stove for almost a week, night and day, I used to get up three times a night to look at it, that was how I made my fortune. This thing about the rooms just kind of happened, it’s the most I’ve ever done, and it isn’t even my fault, it’s the customers, after eating they say they’ve eaten so well, and drunk so well, they don’t feel like driving, could I provide a room, just so they can lie down for a moment, if I said no, they’d declare war on me, they’d tell all their friends and acquaintances that the food here was lousy and the prices ridiculous, once I started with all that I had to continue, I couldn’t help it, I’m old, I want to be left to work in peace, you don’t know what it’s like, how could you, the customers are wild animals.’
Duca let him pour it all out. The man, he thought, wasn’t basically wicked, he was actually quite interesting: he had character, he liked money, like everyone, but also philosophy, he was a bit despicable, a bit of a pimp, a bit of a criminal, but also a bit Socratic. But Duca needed concrete information, not digressions.
‘How did you meet these “friends”?’ he asked. One thing was for sure: the wet towel had persuaded the owner of the Binaschina to tell the truth. It might not be a particularly praiseworthy system of education, but it got results.
‘They came here once, three years ago. I’d only just opened, and the Carabinieri had already closed me down because they’d found a couple upstairs. The place was closed, but they knocked at the door and asked to come in.’
‘And then?’
The old man’s breathing was irregular and his lips even more lilac, and Duca didn’t want him to die before he’d told him everything.
‘Ask them to bring up a coffee, a strong one.’
‘I haven’t drunk coffee in twenty years, because of my heart.’
‘You’ll drink it now.’ There was a little intercom between the two beds, a nice touch, it was there so that the owner could warn the couple, if the police came, at least to get dressed, or so that the couple could order a stirrup cup before the sin started. ‘A ristretto, right away,’ he ordered the thin, false little female voice that answered him.
And then those three men had come in, even though the restaurant was closed, and they had looked surprised and said, ‘This is such a lovely restaurant, we’ve heard a lot of good things about it, we came here to have a nice meal, and yet we find it closed, how come?’ He had explained that, unfortunately, the Carabinieri had found a couple in one of the rooms, and not only had the restaurant been closed down, he was also about to go to prison. ‘No, what are you saying?’ one of the three men had said. ‘If they had to close all the places that give lovers a helping hand, they’d have to close everything, they’d have to close the whole of the Po Valley, but don’t worry, we have friends, we’ll see to it.’
‘And then?’ Duca asked with childish insistence.
And then the three had been as good as their word: two days later he had been issued a provisional licence to reopen the restaurant.
‘After just two days?’ Duca said, politely incredulous.
‘Just two days.’
Just two days. There were poor but honest people who had to wait six months for a licence to sell fifty kilos of rotten apples from a cart, and in two days, despite the Carabinieri, the police, the local authorities, these people managed to get a place that was publicly a restaurant, but actually a brothel with a restaurant car and sleeping car attached, reopened. Duca gritted his teeth and tried to stay calm. ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ he said, ‘that the pimps who came along to save you were the same people who’d previously informed on you?’
The word pimps pleased the old man: he probably didn’t like them very much himself either, these protectors of his. ‘Yes, I realised that almost immediately, nobody does anything for nothing, but they were so good to me, all they said was that every now and again they’d recommend somebody to me, and that I should treat that person well, even if he didn’t have any money, and that they’d pay me later.’
And indeed, they had phoned him every now and again, to inform him that a brown-haired man, in a grey suit and a small mourning button in the buttonhole of his jacket, would arrive with a girl, also brown-haired, dressed in such and such a way, and that they needed to stay for a couple of days, but without being too conspicuous, and it hadn’t taken him long to realise that they were using his restaurant as a base, but he had also realised that he couldn’t say no, unless he had wanted, if not to die, to have all his bones broken, one by one. They had even told him once, at table, about someone who hadn’t been a friend, according to them, and so one of them, who was a bit highly strung, had broken all his bones, one by one, and as they were telling him about this person who hadn’t been a friend and whose bones they had broken, they had stared at him without batting an eyelid, so that even if he had been a cretin he would have understood.
And then the old man told him everything, because he was old and desperate, afraid of death but exhausted with the burden of living, he told him that every now and again people came there and left
a case, and then other people came and took the case away.
‘And what did these cases look like? Were they always the same? Were they green, not made of leather, with metal corners?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘yes, yes, twice they were exactly like that.’
There was a knock at the door. Outside stood a waiter, almost two metres tall, bearing a small tray with a little cup of coffee and a bowl of sugar on it. Duca took the tray. ‘Thank you,’ he said and almost slammed the door in the giant’s face. ‘Is he one of the waiters who were forced on you by your friends?’ He helped him to sit up on the bed, put a single spoonful of sugar in the coffee. ‘The coffee takes effect quicker if you don’t put in too much sugar.’
‘But what about my heart?’ He was almost as afraid of the coffee as he was of the wet towel.
‘I said drink.’ He put a hand on the old man’s shoulder and moved the cup closer to his lips. ‘So, was that waiter a friend of your friends? Drink first and then answer.’
Under duress, the old man drank the coffee, then said, ‘There’s another one as well. There are two of them. They don’t even know how to wash the dishes, in fact they don’t wash them, they don’t do anything, they just keep an eye on me.’ He gave a weary, colourless smile. ‘Can I lie down?’
Duca helped him to lie down. ‘So,’ he said, ‘about those cases.’
Yes, those cases, he told him all about them, docile now, sincere. Silvano Solvere had come several times, yes, four or five times, with cases, and yes, twice they were green with metal corners, like small trunks, but the other times they were old leather cases, or ugly-looking canvas cases.
‘It’s possible, then,’ Duca said, ‘that inside these big cases were those other cases with metal corners that look like small trunks.’
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