The old man gave a polite, contented smile. ‘You know that’s what I thought too.’ It was an easy thing to think, because the craftier they are, the stupider they are. Craftiness is one of the forms of mental deficiency: lacking in intelligence, cretins try to compensate by playing little games. And then the old man told him that Silvano Solvere would leave his case there and say, ‘A friend of mine will come and pick it up,’ and he didn’t even tell him what this friend of his was called, or what he looked like.
‘And then?’ Duca said. The doors of truth were opening.
And then Attorney Turiddu Sompani – the Breton naturalised as an Italian with the Sicilian Christian name of Salvatore, which then became Salvaturiddu and eventually Turiddu – would come and pick up the case left by Silvano Solvere. He never came alone, but always with a woman, either very young women, so young that they looked like his granddaughters, because he must have been around sixty, only they were the kind of granddaughters who went upstairs with him to the rooms, or sometimes – this was how the owner of the Binaschina put it, sternly – his old whore.
‘Maybe,’ Duca said, ‘that was the woman who died with him in the accident in the canal, very near here.’
‘Yes, that was the one.’ On the evening of the accident, he said, they had been there having dinner, Attorney Turiddu Sompani, his old lady friend, and a young guest, also a woman. He did not smile when he said accident, he repeated the word Duca had used, accident, as if he hadn’t noticed the hint of irony: in fact he had noticed it, but didn’t want to get involved.
‘Was it always Silvano Solvere who came here to leave a case, and was it always Attorney Sompani who came to pick it up?’
‘Yes, that’s what always happened,’ the old man confirmed and, having revived a little thanks to the coffee, sat up again on the bed. ‘But they also came without leaving cases, or without picking them up, and they never paid.’
Those cases certainly went on quite a tour, starting at the butcher’s shop, from where a girl, now deceased, poor thing, would take them to a perfume shop, and from the perfume shop a certain Silvano Solvere would take them to the Binaschina, where a certain Turiddu Sompani would come and pick them up and nothing more was heard of them. One evening the tour had been extended, the girl had taken the case from the butcher’s shop to his apartment, the apartment of the doctor who was supposed to put her back together again for her wedding, and from there Silvano Solvere should have come to collect it and take it to the Binaschina. But he had not been able to collect anything, because that same night death had collected him from the Alzaia Naviglio Grande, along with the girl. So the case had stayed with him, Duca.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Better.’ The coffee had given the old man a little bit more energy.
‘Now tell me what the other waiter who works for your friends looks like.’
‘He’s as tall as the one who came here with the coffee, and he’s fair-haired, those two are the tallest people here.’
‘All right, we’re going to leave those two free.’
‘Oh, no, you have to get them off my back or they’ll kill me as soon as they find out I’ve talked.’
‘But they have to know that you’ve talked,’ Duca explained, gently. ‘You have to phone those people, your friends, as soon as possible and tell them everything that happened, tell them the police came, tell them they threatened to choke you with a wet towel if you didn’t talk, and that you had to tell them everything, apart from the two foot soldiers who are pretending to be waiters. Letting those two go free and informing your friends immediately of the police visit will be the proof that you’re on their side.’
He was starting to understand, but he was not convinced. ‘But if I phone them, they’ll get away.’ And what’s the point of that? his eyes added.
‘Of course, that’s what I want, I want them to get agitated, to think their cover’s been blown.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t want to waste time arresting them, they’ll only be free again after a month. They have to get away and leave Milan in peace for a little while.’
He wasn’t being honest at all, but sometimes, with some people, honesty is an expensive luxury. What he really thought was that the old man’s friends would realise that he had come to an arrangement with the police and would want to take revenge, but in order to take revenge they would have to come and get him, and in order to get him they would have to come out of their lairs.
‘Oh, of course they’ll get away,’ the old man said. ‘But before that they’ll do something nasty to me.’
‘I don’t think so. Anyway you’ll be protected, if they come here to hurt you they’ll get more than they bargained for.’ Abandoning him to his uncertainty, his bitter puzzlement, Duca abruptly left the little room that had seen so many scenes of love, went down the little staircase with the English – or almost English – prints, went out in the garden, and then back into the luxury stable. The Toulouse Lautrec-style waiters and waitresses were all there, sitting at the longest table, watched over by Mascaranti, and from the way Mascaranti was glaring at them, it was as if he was keeping them at bay with a revolver.
‘I took everyone’s names and details,’ Mascaranti said, in a low voice, ‘I stopped them from making any phone calls, and I sent away a few customers who wanted to come in.’
‘Now send them all back to work and say goodbye.’ He went out into the warm sun, walked to the car park, and got back in the car. He preferred not to drive, if he didn’t have to, and he sat down next to the driver’s seat. Mascaranti arrived a moment later.
‘Where are we going?’
‘The Charterhouse of Pavia,’ Duca said. ‘I haven’t been there for a long time.’
‘I’ve never seen it,’ Mascaranti said. ‘I’ve heard it’s very beautiful.
4
It was very beautiful, but it was closed: they had forgotten, in their absent-mindedness and because of the glorious spring weather, that even charterhouses have schedules, and all they could do was walk around the walls of the Charterhouse. Beyond those walls, invisible, were the great cloister with the cells around it, and the temple with the choir at the far end, and the small cloister with the library and the refectory, the old sacristy with the famous ivory polyptych – who was it by? no, they couldn’t remember – and a whole other universe, so totally different from our universe of today. And having done their little tour, they went back to the little square, where there were a couple of trattorias. Duca chose the less rustic of the two: he didn’t trust rusticity.
‘Let’s make a phone call and have a sandwich.’ On the phone he informed Carrua that they had found the syndicate’s base, the Binaschina, he told him about his conversation with the old man, omitting to mention the towel.
‘In a couple of hours I’ll send some men to keep an eye on the place,’ Carrua said. And so the Binaschina became another trap.
‘Thanks,’ Duca said.
‘You’re welcome,’ Carrua said, humorously, then in a darker tone, ‘But be careful not to make any mistakes, not only can you not make a mistake with those people, you can’t make a mistake with me.’ That final me sounded like an elephant’s trumpeting. Then he hung up.
At the non-rustic restaurant, with a few attempts at elegance and modernity, opposite the closed Charterhouse of Pavia, it proved quite difficult to obtain two sandwiches with salami and pickled peppers: they didn’t want to lower themselves to such a small order. The barman, the waiter and the woman owner, who was at the cash register, all dragged their heels, until Mascaranti went into the kitchen, said he was from the police, and that he wanted two sandwiches with salami and a little slice of pickled pepper but right now, not for the August bank holiday, and at the word police the sandwiches almost leapt like flashes of lightning from the hands of the kitchen staff, and Mascaranti went to the cash register, paid the owner for the sandwiches and the two bottles of beer and went to the car, where Duca was waiting for him and where they ate, with the doors open, i
n a corner that gave a vague sense of a green hermitage, beneath a row of little trees with clear, childish green foliage.
As he ate his sandwich, Duca read the two newspapers from the day before that he had found in the car. The front page of La Notte said: Lured by His Lover, Killed with Scissors and Thrown in the Lake! There was even an exclamation mark. The Corriere d’Informazione, on the other hand, preferred to present the news like this: Drawn into a Trap by his Lover, Strangled and Thrown in the Adda. In other words, what was missing was the detail of the scissors, which was relegated to the summary, and there was also a divergence of location and method: La Notte said that the murder victim had been thrown into a lake, whereas the Corriere d’Informazione, mentioned the Adda, which was a river; the Corriere said the man had been strangled, while according to La Notte it was the scissors that had killed him.
‘We don’t carry knives, sabres and swords anymore,’ Duca said, ‘so we kill with whatever we find close to hand. If we’re in our car we take a screwdriver from the glove compartment and plunge it into the neck of the person who’s just overtaken us on our right. If we’re at home, in a healthy domestic environment, we choose scissors from among the household tools, and with fifty or sixty stabs we finish off the friend who hasn’t given us back the money we owed him.’ The salami was very dubious, and the pepper tasted slightly of turpentine rather than oil, but that was nobody’s fault, was it?
On the inside pages, in the Milan city news, there were the usual little items of the day. One of the headlines in La Notte was Bride Posed for Three Thousand Pornographic Photographs. Another was Skull Found – may be that of the Singing Cobbler. The Corriere d’Informazione reported, but without giving it much prominence, the news of an assault on an optician’s shop in the Via Orefici, the headline said: Hunt is on for Armed Drug Dealers. For two film cameras and a radio, a trio of young idiots had actually opened fire, risking life imprisonment.
Duca finished the pitiful sandwich, drank his little bottle of beer, and shook his head. ‘Some people haven’t yet understood that Milan is a big city,’ he said to Mascaranti. ‘They haven’t yet understood the change of scale, they still talk about Milan as if it finished at the Porta Venezia or as if people didn’t do anything else but eat panettone or millet cake. If you say Marseilles, Chicago, Paris, those are real metropolises, with lots of criminals, but not Milan. Some stupid people don’t think of it as a big city, they still look for what they call local colour, cafés with braziers, weigh houses, and maybe even steam trams. They forget that a city with a population of nearly two million has an international, not a local feel, a city as big as Milan attracts criminals from all over the world, madmen, alcoholics, drug addicts, or simply desperate people in search of money who get hold of a revolver, steal a car and jump on the counter of a bank shouting, “Everybody down on the ground!” just as they’ve heard you’re supposed to do. There are many advantages to the increasing size of the city, but there are also changes that give us pause for thought. These settlings of accounts’ – he refused the cigarette Mascaranti was offering him – ‘should really make us stop and think. There are armed gangs organised militarily, with members ready for anything, with a whole series of strategic bases and hideouts, spread all over the place. We found the Binaschina by chance, but how many bases must there be like that within the borders of the province of Milan or even outside, but still in this big sweet cake called Milan? Milan is where the money is and this is where they come to get it, by any means possible, even with submachine guns.’ He shook his head again. ‘And now, talking of submachine guns, let’s go back home. One of these days they’ll realise I have their gun and they’ll come and ask for it. I want to live until that day.’ He clenched his fists, then looked at Mascaranti to indicate that he should get going. A pity, but he would come back to the Charterhouse another time. When they got home, the green case with metal corners was still there, in the hall, perfectly visible. It was the first big trap, and maybe the fox would fall into it. The case must be of interest to lots of people, and in fact other people did come.
The first was that black-clad woman with her hair in a bun, the woman from Romano Banco who didn’t know anything. He had been right to give her his own address: time had passed and she had made her mind up, and here she was, having come straight from Romano Banco, not old, and yet already old.
When she arrived, it was late afternoon and almost hot, just a slight breath of heat. In the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, imponderable white flakes were flying in the sun, and Duca and Mascaranti were watching them when she rang the bell. Duca went and opened the door and when she had come in she looked at the case on the floor, it was so clearly visible, and she seemed to recognise it, and it looked as if she was about to cry, but she didn’t, she said, ‘He hasn’t phoned again, I haven’t heard from him, I don’t know what’s happened to him.’
Duca led her into the surgery and sat her down. ‘I need to know everything, otherwise I can’t help you.’ He looked her straight in the face, but without harshness, because he could see she was suffering. ‘I’m not a friend of Silvano’s, I’m with the police. There’s a lot we already know, but we need to know everything.’
The word police took her aback, but the surprise only registered on her face: it was as if the skin of her face quivered, like the skin of horses. Then she started crying.
5
Then she started speaking. She had stopped crying, because you don’t cry in front of your confessor, and that was what she wanted to do now, urged on by her own anguish and the way Duca was looking at her: to confess. The police knew a certain amount about her, that her name was Rosa Gavoni, that she was born in Ca’ Tarino, forty-nine years ago, which meant there were three famous women from Ca’ Tarino: Rosa Gavoni, the girl dressed in red named Giovanna Marelli, and Adele Terrini, the woman who had ended up in the Naviglio Pavese together with Turiddu Sompani, Ca’ Tarino really was a centre for important people; but now she told them what the police did not know and could not have documented. She had known Ulrico, Ulrico Brambilla, the powerful butcher, since he was three years old and she was twelve and she was the one who looked after him in the fields around Ca’ Tarino, just as all the girls of five or more looked after the smaller children, because the mothers were either washing, or in service, or in the factory. Both their families were very poor, like all the families in Ca’ Tarino, but they were the poorest of the poor, and by the time he was six he was already well-known as a thief, skilfully stealing hens and taking them to his mother.
Nothing might have happened between them, partly because of the age difference, if it hadn’t been for the war. When, after 8 September 1943, the Germans arrived, he had to hide and he had become the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Corsico area, of Buccinasco, Romano Banco, Pontirolo, Rovido. Every night he slept in a different house in his personal resistance zone, and they were happy to put him up because he was a handsome young man, he was thought of as a young stud. Several girls and even a few married women had strayed into sin with him, and even she, Rosa Gavoni, had sinned, but out of love, she said, not out of carnal lust like the others: she actually used the words carnal lust.
When the war was over, Ulrico Brambilla, the young stud – as she confessed it, her yellowish face went red and she lowered her eyes with that bluish halo around them – had quickly got rich by supplying girls to the American soldiers, especially blonde girls for the Negroes, and underage girls for the older officers. It was a nasty business, but she had only learnt about it later, when he had opened a butcher’s shop in Ca’ Tarino and stopped doing that work, which even he hadn’t liked.
‘Are you sure he really did stop?’ Duca asked. He had probably continued: a butcher’s shop was a good cover.
Yes, he had stopped, Rosa Gavoni fervently assured Duca, his one concern was his butcher’s shop and the butcher’s shop did so well that he had immediately opened another in Romano Banco, and then another in Milan, and then one in Buccinasco. She had helped him a great
deal in his work, she had been close to him throughout the years, she had been everything to him, his maid, his cashier, his manager, she had even been like a wife, and indeed he had sometimes talked about marrying her, but then he always seemed to forget, and she did not insist: she knew she was nine years older than him, she knew she had faded prematurely, and when he had got involved with Giovanna Marelli, she had not even despaired, she had only asked him if, after he was married, he would keep her on as cashier in one of his shops, and he had generously told her he would, because she was old and couldn’t go back to Ca’ Tarino after the scandal of living for so many years with a man who was not her husband.
All this, thought Duca, had its interest – humility and resignation can reach hysterical heights in some human beings, and she, Rosa Gavoni, had spent more than twenty years with a man who had abused her in every way, paying her poorly, and when he found another woman, all she had asked was that he shouldn’t fire her but keep her on as a cashier – but what he really wanted to know about was the cases. He went to get the case from the hall and opened it on the floor in front of her. ‘This,’ he said, nervously lifting the barrel of the submachine gun, ‘I want to know about this.’
She knew. She said she hadn’t known anything at first, only that he, Ulrico sometimes went to Genoa in his car and came back in the evening with a case: it was often green like this one, but there were other kinds too. Then one evening he had got drunk, he had started crying and told her that he was scared, very scared, and she had pitifully asked him what he was afraid of and in the end he had told her.
So this modest, weary, humble woman knew everything about these dangerous activities: in his drunken, scared state the man had confided his heavy secret to her. Now to see if she really knew everything. ‘When did this business with the cases start?’ Duca asked.
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