Traitors to All

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  Never heard such a load of nonsense, he thought as he went behind the work bench, while still keeping an eye on the so-called human being Claudio Valtraga, who would be coming round very soon. Is a wolf a misfit? If it was properly educated would it learn to bow, would it learn to play ring-a-ring-a-roses with children? Had it never occurred to them, he thought as he searched through the various tools of the trade on the counter – three magnificent knives in increasing order of size, a couple of bradawls for making holes in meat, and two types of chopper, a small one, good for veal cutlets, the other so big that a Frank from mediaeval Gaul would have taken it for an axe, obviously used for quarters of beef, to break the spine – had it never occurred to these geniuses that some creatures have only the appearance, the physical aspect of humans, but are in reality, for unknown and so far inscrutable genetic reasons, hyenas, wild animals that no amount of education, except possibly the education of violence, would make less bloodthirsty? Had it never occurred to them? Yes, of course, Dr Lamberti, that was how people thought in the Middle Ages, do you want to go back to the Middle Ages? Well, maybe he did, but for now there was no time to waste.

  He took the Franco-Gallic axe from the counter – it was so heavy he needed to hold it in both hands – and turned abruptly: the bison had come to, he had already put his hands on the floor and was trying to get up onto his knees.

  Duca took a step forward. ‘Stay where you are and lie on the floor with your face down, or I’ll cut you in half with this.’

  Resting on his hands, Claudio Valtraga slowly lifted his head. His ears, still buzzing a bit, had heard the words, and his mind, still a little dazed, had taken them in, and his eyes, even though a little blurred, had seen the huge axe, which Duca was holding in both hands, the blade facing down, between his legs, ready to raise it and strike. This was his language too, it was the language he understood, so he crouched down, face to the floor, without any further attempt to stand up, convinced by the obvious persuasiveness of the argument, and it didn’t even occur to him that a normal man might threaten to strike him with an axe like that but would never go through with it. In fact Duca would only have hit him on the head with the back of the axe, and if the man had been clever, he wouldn’t have been afraid of being cut in half and would have leapt to his feet, but a man like that can’t be clever, even though he thinks he is, convinced that he’s running the risk of being split in two with an axe, so he stayed there on the floor, because if he’d had the axe, then he really would have chopped his opponent up.

  ‘Why did you kill Ulrico?’ Duca moved in towards him, holding the axe with only one hand now, close to his face.

  ‘Who’s Ulrico?’ Claudio Valtraga said, his cheek on the floor, crushing a cigarette end. ‘I didn’t kill anybody.’

  What a joker! ‘You don’t know a thing, right?’ Duca was finding it hard to control himself, the man’s insolence angered him, why wasn’t he allowed to chop his head off? ‘So you’ve never met Ulrico Brambilla, never seen a bone cutter, you were in here by chance, is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Claudio Valtraga said, thinking all the while, as his strength flowed back, that if he moved quickly enough he’d be able to crush the policeman’s head, as he had done when he was a child, with his thumb, to the heads of sparrows and frogs – in a democracy, everyone plays the childhood games he prefers – and in the meantime he was bracing the fingers of his cyclopean hands on the floor and, with imperceptible movements, manoeuvring his feet, which were as big as those of Egyptian sphinxes, into a better position to make the leap he imagined in his zootrophic brain.

  ‘We’ll do the interrogation later, when you’ve changed your mind,’ Duca said, watching these imperceptible movements: he had to be alert, or he’d be dead. ‘In the meantime, sleep a bit longer.’

  The two kicks full in the face did not surprise Claudio Valtraga, partly because he did not even notice them, he did not even have time to see them coming. The first, to his forehead, caused an immediate narcosis, the second, to his nose, sent the blood gushing out: a fine way to cool the man’s animal impulses somewhat.

  I’m sorry, Duca thought, as if talking to Carrua, or to the goddess of justice, I didn’t have much choice. If he hadn’t done it, in a couple of seconds he would have been pushed against the bone saw or thrown down on the wooden board where the vertebrae of oxen were broken.

  He put the big axe down on the work bench, looked for the least dirty, least bloodstained place in the shop, close to the shutter, and stood there waiting, beneath the blazing light of the six lamps.

  Mascaranti soon returned from having phoned, and some time later, because he had had to come all the way across the city, Carrua arrived with four officers, by which time Claudio Valtraga had again come to but was sitting quietly on the ground with Mascaranti’s gun pointed at him. At last Duca could get away from that laughing stock. A little group of people had gathered outside, even though it was lunchtime, and they were looking avidly at Claudio Valtraga’s battered face.

  ‘Go back to your houses,’ Carrua shouted, ‘go home.’

  2

  Claudio Valtraga wasn’t looking so elegant now, his pale blue jacket was crumpled, it had lost the shape, the fall, that makes for true elegance, his trousers were torn over the knee, and he was no longer as handsome as before: the pieces of sticking plaster on his nose and jaw didn’t look good on him. Nor was the office particularly beautiful, it was a clean, respectable office in Milan Police Headquarters in the Via Fatebenefratelli, but it wasn’t exactly a model of elegance in furnishings, there was nothing but a table and four chairs and, in a corner, a sorghum broom left there by the cleaning lady.

  Claudio Valtraga was sitting halfway along one of the four walls, the one facing the window, with the sun on his face, on the sticking plasters and the feral blue of his beard. Against the wall opposite, next to the window, was a little table and at this table Mascaranti was sitting with his little exercise book and his pink ballpoint pen in his hand. There was also an officer standing next to Claudio Valtraga, a uniformed officer, theoretically armed because he had a gun in his holster, but in practice, even if he had taken it out, Claudio Valtraga would have had time to crush him and Mascaranti. But with all his plasters it didn’t look as if he had any more desire to crush anybody, he was sitting quietly on his chair, the fingers of his hands together and his hands crossed on his knees and his eyes a little blurred.

  And in a corner, next to Mascaranti’s table, was Duca, asking questions. He had just started and Claudio Valtraga was answering well and promptly.

  ‘I want to know about the first two people you threw in the water,’ Duca said. ‘The girl was Michela Savorelli, she was a prostitute, and the man, Gianpietro Ghislesi, was her pimp. Why did you kill them?’

  ‘Because they were strung out.’

  ‘What do you mean, they were strung out?’

  ‘They were taking M6, they were always strung out, they couldn’t work anymore.’

  ‘M6 means mescaline 6?’

  ‘Yes, they were supposed to be circulating it, but they always kept a few packets for themselves, and when they were high they talked, they were a danger to everybody.’

  Mescaline 6: this alkaloid, one of the most remarkable hallucinogens known to man, is extracted from a small cactus originating in Mexico, the peyotl. It would have been strange if there hadn’t been drugs involved, the business had various branches, the usual predictable and disgusting activities, prostitution, arms smuggling, robberies of course, and, inevitably, drugs. ‘What do you mean by circulating the M6?’ Duca knew perfectly well, he only wanted Claudio Valtraga to explain it to him so that Mascaranti could write it down.

  ‘Getting it to the customers,’ Claudio Valtraga said. ‘It isn’t easy work, you have to make sure you’re given the money first, you have always to watch out for the police, and then there are customers who are in detox and are being watched over by a nurse, and you have to sell the sachet and get the money without the nurses n
oticing.’

  ‘And why did you decide to kill them?’

  ‘A couple of times, when there were just a few sachets missing, we forgave them and told them not to do it again, but once they did away with a whole load.’

  ‘What do you mean by a load?

  ‘A plastic bag with a hundred sachets in it, it fits snugly in any pocket.’

  ‘So Turiddu Sompani decided to kill them.’

  ‘He didn’t, THEY did,’ and the way he said they, it really was as if the word was in capital letters. Duca already knew who THEY were: Valtraga had given the names and Mascaranti had written them down in his magic exercise book, and they had already been phoned through to Carrua, half the staff of Headquarters was already scattered through Milan, and three telephone operators had lost their voices dictating bulletins to alert the border posts, the stations, the motorways, from the Alps to Sicily. That was why Claudio Valtraga, the bison, had become so docile.

  ‘And they gave Turiddu Sompani the job of killing them?’

  ‘Yes, but they didn’t want it to look like murder.’

  ‘And what did Sompani do?’

  ‘He took them to a trattoria near the Conca Fallata, that restaurant that’s almost on the Lambro, he said he was their friend and to convince them he gave them a sachet. So, what with the eating and the drinking and the sachet, they were in a high old mood and then Turiddu said to Gianpietro, “Do you think you could cross the Lambro in a car?’ ”

  That was it. When a man has taken a dose of mescaline 6, he feels capable of anything: raping dozens of women, killing dozens of enemies, crossing the Lambro in a car, swimming the Atlantic, M6 gives you power, sexual desire, imagination, lots of imagination, and Attorney Turiddu Sompani had precisely calculated the dose of M6 he had given them. ‘So Gianpietro Ghislesi got in the car with his girlfriend Michela and tried to cross the Lambro?’

  ‘Yes,’ Claudio Valtraga said, and despite the sticking plasters he seemed on the verge of laughter, even now, at the thought of a man strung out on drugs trying to cross the Lambro in a car.

  Unfortunately, Turiddu Sompani had not reckoned with the fact that the waiter who had served them, a short, honest, surly but likeable fellow from Puglia, had followed their conversation and, after the car had plunged into the Lambro, had told the police that he, Turiddu Sompani, had told the two drunk young people – the honest Pugliese thought they were just drunk, he didn’t know anything about mescaline – to cross the Lambro by car. At the trial, Turiddu Sompani had firmly denied that he had driven the couple to it, but the surly Pugliese, without any fear, out of simple respect for the truth, insisted on blaming him, and despite all the protection he had, Attorney Sompani was sentenced to two and a half years in San Vittore prison, which was where Duca had met him.

  ‘And why was Turiddu Sompani killed?’ He was asking the questions only out of logical curiosity, to see the mental process of these criminals, but by now he’d stopped caring about this whole murky business.

  ‘Nobody wanted to kill him, it was Ulrico.’ Claudio Valtraga’s eyes, maybe violet, darkened suddenly, gleamed with hate.

  ‘And why did he kill him?’

  ‘Because that evening Turiddu Sompani was supposed to be getting two loads of M6.’

  ‘So according to you, Ulrico Brambilla took the mescaline 6 off Turiddu Sompani and then threw him with his car in the canal?’

  What extraordinary people!

  ‘Yes,’ Claudio Valtraga said.

  ‘But why would Sompani have given him the mescaline 6, and how did he manage to throw them in the Naviglio? Couldn’t it have been an accident?’

  ‘No, because the M6 disappeared,’ Claudio Valtraga said. ‘If it had been an accident the police would have found the M6 on Turiddu.’

  There was a logic to all this, but it still didn’t quite make sense. ‘Let’s start again from the beginning, because I really want to get this right,’ he said to Claudio Valtraga. ‘Who gave Sompani the mescaline 6?’

  His eyes lowered in order not to be blinded by the sun that was coming in through the window, as if the sun was functioning as a glaring light in an old-style third-degree interrogation, Claudio Valtraga said, ‘Could I have a coffee? I feel really down.’

  Duca made a sign to Mascaranti, and Mascaranti in an impulse of criminal rehabilitation said, ‘Do you want something strong in it?

  ‘Oh, yes, thank you, grappa,’ the bison moaned.

  Mascaranti phoned the switchboard to get a coffee from the bar, and Duca repeated, ‘Who gave Sompani the mescaline 6?’ Coffee and grappa for people who chopped up men alive with a bone saw: a policeman couldn’t get more civilised, more polite than that.

  ‘It was Ulrico who went to get the stuff in Genoa, and then had to bring it to Turiddu.’

  So Ulrico Brambilla had been the courier, he didn’t only transport the latest model of submachine gun, but also consignments of drugs. ‘But then explain to me,’ Duca said, slightly irritably – here in Headquarters, surrounded by the representatives of the law, he couldn’t kick anyone in the face – ‘Ulrico Brambilla goes to Genoa to get the mescaline 6, brings it to Sompani, then takes it back from him and kills Sompani. What kind of story is that?’

  ‘He was supposed to give him the M6, but he didn’t, he kept it for himself.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then Ulrico found out that Silvano would be going to get the M6 from Turiddu that evening, to get it circulated, and if Turiddu told Silvano that Ulrico hadn’t given him the M6 he’d got in Genoa, Silvano would have known that he still had the M6, so he went to the Binaschina and crashed into Turiddu with his car and pushed him and his lady friend into the Naviglio.’

  This too was quite logical: the courier keeps the drugs for himself, instead of passing it to the man who distributes it to the salesmen – it’s more advantageous to work for yourself – then kills the distributor to cover up the fact that he didn’t hand it over to him. ‘And then?’ he said to Claudio Valtraga, disgusted.

  ‘And then, as soon as Turiddu died, we waited a couple of days to see if the police had found the M6 on him but it was obvious from the start that you lot hadn’t found anything, because he’d never received it, and we went to Ulrico, and he told me he’d handed the M6 over to Turiddu, and I believed him, that’s why I can’t forgive him.’ He’d cut him in half with a saw, but he still couldn’t forgive him.

  Duca felt his stomach heave up into his throat, a wonderful sensation of moral nausea. ‘Go on, toerag,’ he said in a muted voice.

  He went on. ‘It’s because if Ulrico had handed the drugs over to Turiddu, then the person who killed Turiddu had to have been Silvano, who’d got the M6 off him and then, to keep it for himself instead of circulating it, threw him, Turiddu, in the Naviglio. That’s why I had to deal with Silvano and Giovanna. Because as soon as THEY found out that Ulrico had handed the stuff over to Turiddu, they told me, Deal with it, and I dealt with Silvano, but Ulrico had tricked me.’ His anger at having been tricked distorted his face even more than it was already distorted by the sticking plasters and he looked even more repulsive, sitting there with the sun still beating down on him. ‘It wasn’t Silvano who’d taken the stuff from Turiddu, it was Ulrico who’d kept it for himself.’

  Inside himself, Duca started to laugh: Carrua was right, it was a good thing they were killing each other, a good thing they were betraying each other, a good thing they were stealing drugs from each other. Those three falls into the Naviglio and the Lambro made perfect sense now: it was an internal feud among the members of a large concern with wide and varied activities, both national and foreign. There was only one thing that still remained obscure. ‘So what happened to the two loads of mescaline 6?’

  ‘Ulrico hid them, but I couldn’t get him to tell me where, he kept saying he didn’t know anything about it, and then – then I lost patience.’

  Of course, a person can lose patience, and that’s when he kills. Duca lowered his eyes and looked at the gro
und, in order not to see that piece of trash, and luckily at that moment an officer came in with the coffee with the grappa and the other officer who was already there served it to the citizen Claudio Valtraga, to give him a bit of a pick-me-up because he was feeling very down, and, until he had had a proper trial, it was forbidden to call him a killer.

  ‘When he’s finished his coffee,’ Duca said, his eyes still lowered, ‘take him back to his cell. I want him out of my sight.’

  Yes, Dr Lamberti,’ Mascaranti said.

  And when the officer had left the room with the citizen Claudio Valtraga, Duca looked up and said to Mascaranti, ‘We’ve finished here, I’m going home,’ He lit a cigarette. ‘The only thing left is the business of those two bags of mescaline 6. If Ulrico kept the bags for himself, he may have given them to his old friend Rosa Gavoni to hide. These idiots didn’t think of looking at her place. Go there and talk to her, for me the whole thing’s over.’

  ‘She’s in hospital,’ Mascaranti said. ‘She was taken there in shock after she identified the body of Ulrico Brambilla.’

  It was a lot more than shock, he understood her very well. ‘Question her as soon as you can, she’s bound to talk, to get her revenge on the people who killed her man.’

  They left the office with the broom abandoned in a corner and went upstairs, to Carrua’s office. Carrua was writing. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Mascaranti wrote it all down, he’ll tell you,’ Duca said. ‘I’ve finished and I’m going home.’

  ‘We’re getting some big fish here,’ Carrua said, ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the names I’ve arrested.’