The Salati Case

by Tobias Jones

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I can’t remember all the details, but that boy had a wanderer’s sort of lifestyle. He played cards, lost money, borrowed money. His woman, I can’t remember her name, she said something like that herself. I don’t remember much more about it than that. This insistent mother and her unreliable son.’

  I listened to the man slurring. He was the classic drunk, veering between the aggressive and defensive.

  ‘So there’s no file on the case?’

  ‘All you’ll find is the report listing him as missing.’

  There was something about the way he said it that made me distrust him, think there was more to it than that. He had said it too nicely, and nice didn’t come natural to the Colonello.

  ‘And?’ I said, making it sound like I knew there was more.

  Franchini caught me looking at him with suspicion. His face was blank, but he was blinking and he gave up the pretence.

  ‘When I retired,’ he said slowly, ‘I was looking forward to spending time travelling with my wife.’ He paused and stared at me defiantly. ‘When she died I didn’t have a lot to do and I went into the same line as you for a year or two. Did a little private work to help pay the bills.’

  ‘And you worked for Silvia Salati?’

  ‘It was five or six years ago. Nothing came of it. There were as many blanks then as there were before. You won’t find anything.’ He looked at me with a drunkard’s disdain, as if he were deliberately trying to give offence.

  I lifted my drink again and stared at Franchini through the bottom of the shot glass. I placed the glass back on the table and signalled to the barman for another round. ‘Tell me about when he went missing. Why was he catching a train?’

  ‘To go home. Had a woman in … Ravenna or Rimini.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Emma. Or Anna. Something like that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What was the story on her?’

  ‘She was one of those alternative types. Living out of a caravan by the beach. That boy Riccardo had cleaned her out of money, so she had a motive. They had a pretty tempestuous relationship. Ricky put it about a bit, and she didn’t hang around either. Less than a year after Ricky went missing, she had married someone else.’

  ‘Does she still live out there?’

  ‘Sure, last I heard. Rimini it was.’

  ‘And their girl, what was her name?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Cute little kid. There was a stand-off as I remember between the Salati woman and Anna or Emma or whatever she was called. When I came back from Rimini that poor old Salati woman was more interested in how her granddaughter was than in the progress of the case. She hadn’t been allowed near her since her son died.’

  He had said ‘died’, and saw me notice it.

  ‘You think he’s dead?’

  He nodded quickly, like it was a certainty.

  ‘And what was the progress?’ I asked, wanting to keep the drunkard on track.

  ‘Nothing that I recall. His woman seemed like one of life’s gamblers who had already written off Riccardo as a bad debt. She was moving on, that’s what she said.’

  I was trying to build up a picture of Riccardo’s family, but it was always hard when it was through someone else’s eyes, especially eyes pickled in grappa.

  ‘And the brother? Umberto?’

  Franchini squinted, trying to remember.

  ‘He had lent the lad money too. From what people told me, Riccardo only had to open his mouth and people seemed to part with their money. He begged and borrowed to avoid calling it theft. That Umberto was pretty furious about the whole thing. He was tight as a clothes line.’

  ‘And you think he snapped?’

  ‘You talk to him. He says he was with his pregnant wife that night.’

  ‘He said the same to me this morning. Why did they split?’

  ‘I can’t remember. This was years ago.’

  The barman brought over more drinks and Franchini threw his back. I looked out of the window.

  ‘And what did you make of the case?’

  Franchini looked reluctant to reply. Didn’t like defeat, I assumed.

  ‘I didn’t get anywhere and I was too honest to pretend to the old Salati woman that I was on the brink of a breakthrough. I told her as much but she begged me to keep looking. I had the impression she knew more than she was letting on, or that she was holding back on me. It was like she wanted me to prove something she already feared. You get a sense for these things,’ he said condescendingly, looking at me through the white wire of his eyebrows, ‘after forty years’ detective work.’

  ‘Was it about money?’

  ‘Certainly looked that way. Riccardo was borrowing from one person and pretending to pay back another. It all went on gambling debts from what I could work out. He used to play the tables at the hotel out on the coast where he worked.’

  ‘What hotel?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Franchini said, shutting his eyes dismissively. ‘I remember the older brother, Umberto, getting quite hot under the collar on the topic. Said that his brother had cleaned him out.’

  ‘Did you check out his alibi?’

  ‘His wife painted the same picture of domestic bliss.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘A real ice-queen. She looked like the kind of woman who could do anything she wanted to.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. You go see her. Very self-possessed and guarded.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ I said, wanting my turn at being dismissive.

  More men had come in by now and the windows were steamed up against the cold. I looked back at Franchini who was cracking walnuts in his fists and piling up the shells in an ashtray.

  ‘And there were never any sightings?’

  ‘Of the boy?’ He shook his head. ‘None. I convinced myself that he was done in that night or soon after.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You get a sense for these things. You know how it is. There were plenty of people who had a grudge against him.’

  ‘Sounds like a good time to go missing.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been able to pull it off from what I remember. Sounded to me like he struggled to organise a tax return let alone an El Dorado one-way.’

  ‘He could have missed his train …’

  ‘I think that’s exactly what happened. The train he was expecting to get was over an hour late. That was the only lead we ever had. It meant he was hanging around the station for over an hour. I think he got bored, wandered off, and never got back to the platform. But you go to the station and ask if someone remembers his face from one Saturday night fourteen years ago. All that time, and with all the chaos that’s always going on there. People will laugh in your face.’ The drink was making him aggressive and as he spoke the hammocks under his eyes were rocking. ‘You might just as well ask a goldfish what they know about opera. Per carità!’ He laughed nastily, as if I were being a nuisance.

  I got up. ‘OK. I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Stay for another.’

  ‘Next time,’ I said as I walked out.

  Back in the car I opened the glove compartment and took out a map. It wouldn’t take me long to get to La Bassa, the lowlands. It was flat as a puddle of mud and smelt about the same.

  Without this fertile land the city wouldn’t survive. This is where the pork and milk come from. It’s a tidy, moody place. In summer you can’t move for mosquitos, and in winter you can’t move for fog. The roads are thin ribbons raised up on earthy banks and flanked by irrigation ditches. If you meet a man or beast on one of these roads you need floats to let the other pass.

  Everywhere there are willow and poplar plantations. They’re planted in perfectly parallel lines and create enough dry earth to sink the foundations for a new house. La Bassa, Mauro says, is like Louisiana, and he should know because he saw a photograph of Louisiana once.


  I always get lost around here. I confuse the small farming communities with their little, proud squares and their lonely village grandeur. I usually come out this way for some food fair or a sagra, one of those summer events in a field where you dance to pop music and ballo liscio and drink fizzy red wine out of white plastic glasses.

  As I approached Sissa the road became very narrow. There were abandoned houses dotted along the road. Many windows were empty of glass, or had only triangles of it left in their frames. There were barns whose beams were giving in to the weight of age and many of the long, half-cylindrical tiles lay broken on the ground.

  But then the road veered right and brought me into the centre of a picturesque village. There was a church on one side of a small square with long steps leading down towards the fountain in the middle. There was a bar on the other side of the square, and a shop. A bit further away I could see a building with an Italian flag flying next to the European one.

  There was no one around. The shop and the bar and what must have been the village hall were all closed. I got out of the car and looked down all the roads that led away from the square. They didn’t offer much. There was one old woman in black who was shouting for some animal or child to come indoors. In the other direction there was a man pushing a bicycle away.

  I went down one of the side streets with a row of small cottages, ancient peasant houses that were shut up against the cold. The street was asphalted but there were cracks across it. I nodded a buongiorno at a man who was peeling potatoes over a hedge into a field of pigs.

  ‘Know where the Salati house is?’

  ‘Sure.’ He pointed at a house where there was a cluster of shiny cars. I could see someone carrying in a tray of food. ‘The end of this road,’ he barked, pointing, ‘the last house before the orchard. It’s the one on the right where all the mourners are.’

  I walked down, trying to bounce my ankle into life.

  On the left was a woman in gardening gear. ‘That the Salati house?’ I said to her.

  The woman nodded.

  ‘You live here?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘I’m a private detective, Signora.’ I let the news sink in. ‘I’ve been employed by the executors of Signora Salati’s will to verify the legal status of Riccardo Salati. Have you lived here long?’

  ‘This is where I’ve been since I was born,’ she said proudly. She pointed across the road to the house opposite. ‘That’s Silvia’s house, the red one. She moved in the day she got married.’

  ‘Could we take a look?’

  ‘Not much to see. And now’s not exactly a good time.’

  I could see the orchard’s twisted branches to the side of the Salati house. Beyond the fruit trees were vines, their thin, bare arms wrapped around long lines of wire.

  ‘Are they going to sell it?’ I asked.

  ‘I expect so. Umberto has no interest in returning here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s part of the provincial jet-set. Sissa isn’t Portofino.’

  ‘I prefer Sissa,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a good village,’ the woman said, staring at me. ‘We’re close knit here, and some people think that’s bad. But we look after ourselves, we care for each other.’

  ‘Including Riccardo?’ I asked.

  She looked at me and nodded slowly. She started talking about how her friend had continued her dignified battle for justice for her boy.

  ‘I’m trying to work out what might have happened to him,’ I said. ‘I get the impression that he was unreliable …’ I trailed off, hoping she would pick up the story, but she was pulling up a weed that had sprouted in the window frame of her house.

  ‘He would leave on a whim,’ she said eventually, ‘or show up on another. You never knew where he was going to be from one minute to the next. He was often away all summer working in the hotels in Rimini. Then, out of the blue, I would be woken up by him shouting to his mother in the middle of the night, asking her to open up. No warning. There was no warning to anything he did, except when he went missing. That was the one thing which, looking back, might have been expected.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Just the way he lived. Like I say, he would be here one minute, gone the next. He was a wanderer without roots, and sometimes those kind of people just’, she had the weed in her hands and was looking at it, ‘don’t come home.’

  ‘Did he have many friends here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. But he wasn’t disliked. And he certainly didn’t have any enemies.’ She looked over to the house opposite. ‘But ever since he moved out east we all lost touch with him.’

  ‘And who was Riccardo’s woman?’

  She paused. ‘A girl called Anna. She came up here once or twice, but she and Silvia fell out. They were both strong women and both had their opinions.’

  ‘What did they fall out over?’

  ‘I don’t know and I didn’t ask. But I expect Silvia thought she wasn’t good enough for her son and probably said as much.’

  ‘Riccardo and Anna had a child, right?’

  ‘They had a little girl. She was the other reason that Ricky’s disappearance hit Silvia so hard. It meant she lost her little granddaughter as well.’ She inhaled deeply and seemed to shudder with the effort. ‘Silvia mentioned them more and more towards the end. I got the impression she had an idea of what had happened. She felt guilty in some way for letting it happen.’

  ‘Letting what happen?’

  ‘Letting Riccardo disappear. Allowing him to walk out on his life and his family. Maybe it was just she felt guilty for giving up on him. She always said she just wanted to know. She said that until she knew she couldn’t get on with her life, and she said that even as she was dying – as if she had any life left to her. I can’t get on with my life until I know, she used to say.’

  I frowned. I was used to these pat phrases by now. People always said the same sentences over and over, and always with such solemnity.

  ‘She knew she was about to die’, the woman was carrying on, ‘and she wanted to straighten everything out.’

  ‘How did she intend to do that?’

  ‘Hire you, I assume.’

  I nodded. ‘Her other son, Umberto,’ I said. ‘He and his wife separated, right?’

  ‘Yes, they’re separated, but she was up here too when Silvia was dying. Roberta she’s called. A nice lady.’

  I tried to remember all the names I was accumulating. I didn’t want to write it all down for fear of freezing the old woman. I looked at her again. She was petite. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun so that you could see her wrinkled, elegant face.

  ‘Did they have a happy marriage?’

  ‘Umberto and Roberta?’

  ‘No, Silvia and …’

  ‘Paolo?’ She looked at me with stern, blue eyes. She looked over my shoulder as if the distance might be able to provide her an answer. Eventually she looked back at me.

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘But you have an idea?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m uncomfortable speculating on anyone’s marriage, let alone that of a friend who isn’t yet buried.’

  I nodded slowly, as if in recognition of her tact. Tact, for once, was enough. It was as good as an admission that the marriage wasn’t a bed of roses. Marriage never is from what I’ve heard.

  ‘Were there other people?’

  She shrugged and said nothing. We stood there side by side in silence for a few minutes. I’ve never come across the family that doesn’t have secrets, and the Salati family sounded like it might have a few of its own.

  ‘I’ll go and pay my respects,’ I said, bowing slightly to the woman. ‘I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘Lucentini. Maria Lucentini.’

  I nodded and walked towards the Salati house. As I was going through the door, I saw Umberto.

  ‘I thought I would come and pay my respects,’ I said.

  Umber
to nodded and pointed me to the end of a corridor and towards the stairs. He looked different. He must have shut up the shop for lutto and it looked as if he had been crying. There were other women going in and out of the rooms, carrying drinks on trays. The whole house smelt of incense and spices, of cinnamon or cloves and candles.

  I walked up the stairs and found the coffin in a room beyond the other bedrooms. It was on varnished trestles and the lid was held open at an artistic angle. I looked at her marble face. I’m so used to seeing violent deaths that it surprised me how serene she looked. No blood and no bruises. I stared at her for a minute, half expecting her to twitch back to life.

  There was no one else in the room. I pushed the door slightly shut and looked around. There was a chest of drawers covered with photographs.

  I looked at them all quickly and saw one of Umberto and another man from what I hoped was fifteen years ago. It must have been the two brothers, they looked so similar. Umberto already looked like he was widening out. He was simply staring at the camera. But Riccardo, if it was him, was smiling, showing a wide gap between his teeth. It was a roguish kind of face. He looked like a man who could switch on the charm like a tap.

  I slipped the photograph out of its frame and into my pocket. I shook Umberto’s hand on the way out, but didn’t say anything. There’s not much you can say when someone’s dead and ‘sorry’ is pointless the first time, let alone the second.

  I drove back to the office slowly. It was getting dark and I got lost as usual. I had turned left too soon and ended up driving through hamlets I had never heard of.

  By the time I got back it was gone six. I took the photograph and ran off 200 copies on my cheap paper that warped with the warm ink. I looked at the photograph again: Riccardo’s face was thinner and more melancholy in black and white. The lack of colour made him look like something from long ago, a relic from another age.

  I put all my equipment in the safe: the notebook, the gun, the camera. I was about to go to bed when the phone went.