by Tobias Jones
‘Is that so?’ Tonin said, amused.
‘That would be the charge. A young man goes missing and you forgot to tell the police that he was your son.’
Tonin stared at me with a stony face. ‘How did you find out?’
‘You show up the year Silvia Salati’s husband died in 1995. Ricky’s flush with cash for once and no one knows how. You go round there after he goes missing. You huff and puff the way an anxious father would.’
Tonin had lost his balance. He was trying to regain it by putting his fingertips on the edge of the table but I could see his fingers shaking. He was staring into the drying brown stains on his cup.
‘It’s not something I’ve ever been ashamed of,’ he said quietly. ‘I kept it secret only because Silvia wanted it that way.’
‘For decorum?’
‘No, for kindness. She didn’t want to hurt her husband. I don’t know why. He didn’t seem to have the same scruples.’
‘Meaning?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘He never found out?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘And as soon as he died, you decided you wanted to play the father after all?’
He looked at me with wry amusement. ‘I met Riccardo. It was completely by chance, but I met him and we got talking, and we got on.’
‘You told him you were his father.’
He nodded.
‘Never gave him any money?’
He looked up at me and nodded slowly.
‘He told me he was in danger. He had borrowed money from the wrong sort of people.’
‘And?’
‘I offered to help out.’
‘In what way?’
Tonin shrugged. ‘I lent him some money.’
‘How much?’
The pause was long enough to know that his next line was a lie. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘How much?’
He was shaking his head. ‘Eighty-five.’
I sucked in through my teeth. ‘Million lire?’
Tonin nodded.
I looked at him. That was enough to kill for. More than enough. It might even be enough to kill your child for. I’ve seen one killed for less, much less.
‘How did you give it to him?’
‘Cash.’
‘When?’
There was another pause. ‘I can’t remember.’
I put an elbow on the mantelpiece and deliberately knocked over a vase of flowers. The water and glass formed an icy lake on the floor.
‘When?’ I asked. The man said nothing and I nudged a framed photograph off the mantelpiece. The glass shattered on the floor.
‘Stop it.’ Tonin had his knuckles on his forehead and was trying to extend his fingertips upwards. ‘It was the weekend he went missing.’
‘Ninety-five?’
He nodded. ‘It was San Giovanni.’
Tonin must have known this was relevant. Eighty-five million. The amount and the timing said it all.
I looked at the little lawyer. He seemed broken.
‘Why have you never said all this before?’
Tonin was staring into space.
I couldn’t understand it. In most cases people withheld to protect themselves, but Tonin had kept quiet about giving money to his own son.
I bent down and picked up the photograph that was nude now, deprived of the frame and glass that made the two subjects look romantic. ‘Who are these monkeys?’ I asked, throwing him the photo.
‘Teresa and Sandro.’
‘Who are they?’
‘My family.’
‘Which family is this?’
He didn’t smile, but looked at me with resignation.
I suddenly felt myself losing control. I don’t often lose my cool, but sometimes people like Tonin really get to me: those kind of innocent idiots that don’t do anything bad, they just keep quiet so that bad people don’t get into trouble.
‘I should hand you over to the carabinieri right now,’ I spat. ‘How could you think that this had nothing to do with his disappearance? A boy that unreliable, that irregular, and you give him eighty-five million? And then he’s not around any more? You sat on this like you sat on the secret of your thing with the old Salati woman.’
The lawyer had turned white.
‘You make out you’re as pure as your cashmere but you’re like all the others. It wouldn’t surprise me if you suddenly wanted your money back and leaned on him a little too hard.’
I had gone too far, and Tonin was wagging a finger. ‘The only thing I ever did wrong’, he hissed, ‘was to make a bad marriage. That’s my only fault in all this.’
‘You really do think you’re innocent of everything? You withhold vital evidence in a missing person investigation, and you still make out like you’re a victim.’
Tonin looked up quickly at that. ‘The only victim in all this is that poor boy.’ He looked at me with pleading eyes. ‘What are you accusing me of?’ he said.
‘I want to know why were you still looking for Riccardo after he disappeared. I heard you went round to his woman’s house regularly afterwards.’
‘Sure. It’s true.’
‘Why?’
Tonin looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘Because I wanted to find him. Check he was all right.’
‘Why?’
‘He was my son,’ he shouted furiously, banging his fist on the table top.
‘It wasn’t a clever way of saying to the world that you had nothing to do with his disappearance? You kept going back there to prove that it wasn’t you that had buried him? Or were you going round there to look for your money?’
‘I’m not responsible for Ricky’s disappearance.’ Tonin was speaking through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve been suspected for fourteen years of a crime I would have laid down my life to avoid.’
‘And yet you’ve been keeping secrets all that time. Why didn’t you let people know you were the boy’s father?’
‘Silvia forbade it. Said it was out of the question. That was a condition of having him at all. And because,’ he paused, ‘that would only have hurt my wife, and Silvia’s family. I didn’t think I needed to publicise my relationship to Riccardo to prove my innocence. I still don’t.’
‘Your wife didn’t know?’
‘She found out.’
‘When?’
‘After Riccardo had disappeared. I told her. I think she must have known anyway.’
‘How come?’
‘Women know.’
I wondered. If that was true, maybe his wife had known long before.
‘There’s something phoney here,’ I said. ‘A man who loves his son, and gives him money, doesn’t keep it hushed up for so long.’ I looked at the lawyer. ‘And a man who has a granddaughter doesn’t ignore her.’
He looked up eagerly at that.
‘You’ve met her?’
‘I’ve spoken to her, sure.’
Tonin shut his eyes as if trying to picture her.
‘Listen,’ I said, trying to reach him, ‘it doesn’t seem to me like you’re the kind of man who would kill his son. Only thing is, you don’t seem like the kind of man to have a son, if you don’t mind my saying. Until you drop the respectable, suited lawyer act and start talking to me like a man, I can’t do anything for you.’
I got up and made for the door. Tonin just pushed himself up on his walking stick and nodded at me as I turned the handle.
I still couldn’t understand what Tonin was keeping to himself. He seemed impassioned when accused of hurting the boy, but was shifty when I had tried to press him for an explanation of his conduct. Maybe he was simply from the old school where discretion and appearances were paramount. He had kept a secret, he said, out of kindness. It sounded phoney to me, but kindness and love always sound phoney to me. Love is normally only the afterburn of remorse.
I walked to the station. It was crowded with the usual suspects: salesmen and students going to Milan, groups of North Africans in s
andy jackets; rounder, darker Africans with more colourful clothes and tall, elderly tourists looking at maps.
The boards announcing the reconstruction work in this square were decorated with all the most important symbols of the city: a bank’s crest, the seal of the town council, the arms of a construction firm.
I looked around. There was a bar opposite where I could have a drink whilst watching the anxious commuters. I ordered a pompari: a twist of pompelmo with a shot of campari.
I took my drink to the fruit machine and put in a coin. I pressed some buttons idly and looked around. The station square was being revamped, the whole area to the north was being given a face-lift. The workers gathered in this bar to eat large sandwiches and drink pints of icy water. The usual customers, the Romanian and Moroccan plasterers, were talking about the worst foremen in the city.
Bicycles and pedestrians and pushchairs were going in all directions. This was rush hour. The cars were backed up as far as I could see. I recognised many of the people. That was the thing about this city. No matter how often I hear it, it still amazes me how small it is.
I found the stationmaster in his office on the second floor. He was an elderly man, short and sprightly. He was wearing the green and purple outfit with the FS logo of Ferrovie dello Stato on his chest. He had a baseball cap on his head which, given his age and the weather, seemed incongruous.
‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said, holding out my badge.
The man took it from my hands and looked at it closely. Officially stamped documents have an alchemic quality in Italy, and the stationmaster bowed slightly, a gesture which meant he would be happy to help.
‘Taxes?’ He asked.
‘Murder.’
He shrugged and smiled. ‘I haven’t killed anything other than rabbits.’
‘You know the timetables from 1995?’
The man looked at me smugly and smiled. ‘Test me.’
‘A train to Rimini, San Giovanni, 1995. A Saturday night.’
The man looked at the ceiling.
‘1995? They had already started cutting out the trundlers. Those ones that stopped at all the villages. There would have been, let me see, the 18.32, the 20.32 and the 22.32.’
‘And through the night?’
The man looked at me seriously, like he didn’t like being pushed. ‘Well now. There would have been something around two, and another around five.’
I looked at the old man. ‘Your memory seems all right.’ I was trying to wean out the man’s jovial side. ‘How come you remember all these timetables?’
‘It was my work,’ he said, pleased I had finally asked the question he wanted; ‘it’s what I’ve done every day of my working life for forty-two years. People like you coming up to me, asking me impatient questions about this or that train to this or that town. My whole life has been remembering hours and minutes and connections.’
‘Snap,’ I said. ‘And the waiting room hasn’t always been where it is now, right?’
The man laughed. ‘It’s moved more times than I can remember. They move it every year. In 1995 it would have still been next to the bar, on platform one.’
I was looking into the distance. ‘Say someone missed a train, or the train was late, where would a young man go and wait?’
The man raised his eyebrows. ‘Depends what kind of young man.’
‘This one was unpredictable from what I hear. Probably prey to the usual vices.’
It was the first time the man had paused and let a question sink in. ‘Some men would wait around in the parks outside. There were always a lot of people to pass the time of day with, if you see what I mean.’
‘No, I don’t see.’
The man looked uncomfortable. ‘There were women. And boys.’
‘And where would they go?’
‘Parco Ducale, Via Palermo. One or two had flats nearby.’
‘And there are always people selling shit in the shadows I assume?’
‘Never used to be. When I started back in the 60s, we didn’t know what drugs were. Nowadays,’ the man was getting worked up, ‘you see them hanging out there all day and all night, constantly selling stuff to young kids. There are half a dozen people within fifty metres of this office who are here selling drugs every day and the police never pick them up. Why is that? I’ve never understood it. They’re allowed to sell poison to our children in the broad daylight. Just don’t understand it.’
‘Me neither.’ I shook my head with what I hoped was enough indignation to persuade the man I was on his side. ‘And if someone just waited in the station? Where would someone go to kill time?’
‘There’s the bar.’
‘Which one?’
‘There’s the station bar. Or that other one outside the station, the other side of the bus-stops.’
I nodded. It was going nowhere. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you must have seen a lot in forty-two years. A lot of people coming and going. Did you ever see anything that you had to take to the police?’
He smiled whilst blinking slowly. ‘All the time. Every week I see couples screaming at each other. There are knife fights and the Ultras and political extremists. You see them all when you work here.’
‘But you never saw anything, back in the summer of ’95?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘This man.’ I pulled the mug-shot from my pocket. ‘He disappeared from this station in 1995.’
The man took the photo from my hand and held it up to the light. ‘I know the face, I’m sure.’
‘That’s because it was in the papers back then.’
‘That’s right.’ He squinted at the photograph again. ‘I don’t remember ever seeing him around the station, but there was some policeman who came and asked me all about it. The times of the trains and so on, just as you are.’
‘Colonello Franchini?’
‘I don’t remember his name. We went for a drink after work—’
‘That was Franchini.’
‘He asked me about the trains, showed me some photographs.’
‘Photographs of who?’
‘He didn’t say anything except they were suspects and had I seen them one particular Saturday night.’
I pulled out the photograph I had knocked off Tonin’s mantelpiece.
‘He show you either of these two?’
He looked very briefly, but looked at me with tiredness. ‘This was many, many years ago. I see thousands of faces every day. I see millions in a year …’
It was useless. I would have to ask Franchini if he had ever got this far, whether he had ever got as far as the Tonin link.
I decided to take the train back to Rimini. I had a box of photocopies of Riccardo and walked up and down the train distributing them.
The carriages had corridors down one side with little rooms of six seats off to the other. My arm was soon tired from having to yank the doors open, leaning away from the handle to pull with my chest as well as my arm.
In each I handed out the photocopies. People either looked at young Riccardo’s face in silence or else started asking too many questions. There was no middle ground. I answered them all patiently, telling them what little I knew.
‘I remember reading about this. I can’t believe it was fourteen years ago, it feels like three.’
‘That so?’ I said and let another door suck itself shut.
I had walked up and down the train before it even pulled into Modena. I changed at Bologna, but the connecting train was late. I sat on the platform wondering what percentage of trains were late. When I finally got into Rimini it was already past midday. As soon as I stepped out of the station the air smelt of seaweed and salt. There were fat gulls swooping on to the pavements to take any spare crumbs that the pedestrians left in their wake.
I walked over to Via dei Caduti. The di Pietro woman clicked the gate open after a little protest about wanting to be left alone. I walked up the short path towards the front door of her block of fl
ats. She was on the third floor, a door half-ajar at her back.
‘What is it now?’
‘I wanted to ask you a couple more questions. Has anyone ever tried to contact Elisabetta, someone claiming to be a relative?’
She shook her head.
‘No one? No calls or letters out of the blue …?’
‘You think Ricky has tried to contact her?’
‘No, not Ricky. I fear the only person he’s talking to now is his maker. I was thinking about someone from a different generation. Her paternal grandfather.’
‘Ricky’s father?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But he died in 1995.’
‘Massimo Tonin was Ricky’s father.’
She looked at me as if it were a wind-up. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Never sure about anything. But he didn’t deny it this morning.’
She stared blankly over my shoulder and considered the implications. I guessed that her first thought would be dismay that there might exist yet another man to destabilise her daughter. But when she spoke she seemed only piqued by the hypocrisy of the Salati woman. Her lips were pursed.
‘So all that time she was criticising the way we were living, she was lying to all and sundry. She must have known this might have something to do with Ricky’s disappearance, and yet she never …’ She looked into the distance and then stared at me. ‘You’re sure about this?’
I nodded.
‘Nothing surprises me any more,’ she said dreamily. ‘All the stability we construct around ourselves collapses sooner or later. I’ve had so much collapse that I don’t bother trying to construct anything any more.’
Except your hair, I thought to myself. ‘You said Tonin came round here looking for Ricky that week after he disappeared …’
She nodded.
‘What happened exactly? He came round to your caravan?’
‘Sure.’
‘And did he go inside?’
She shut her eyes. ‘I can’t possibly remember.’
‘Think about it. It’s important.’
She shook her head and looked at me. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know.’ Witnesses were unreliable at the best of times, but fourteen years later they’re as good as useless.
