Gold, Frankincense and Dust

by Valerio Varesi

  Quite suddenly, the atmosphere grew more excited. A name was passed from mouth to mouth, a name initially strange to the commissario’s ears, but which gained in clarity, like an echo becoming more precise as it was repeated: “Gortan, Gortan …” At that moment, the headlights of a black B.M.W. shone on the vehicles and shortly afterwards a portly figure, accompanied by a woman who looked much younger than him, got out.

  Soneri moved aside as lights were switched on near one of the vehicles. A decidedly suspicious looking individual, who had the look of a pimp with his favourite at his side, stepped forward. Six or so lackeys cleared a path for him, while several people hung about waiting to be received. He was plainly someone who had made his fortune, who now dispensed favours or work, and he was perhaps the most pitiless and ruthless of them all, Soneri thought, as he watched him pass in front of him, making his way towards the coach where he would receive the petitioners. The illusion of a happy community evaporated on the instant. In that area of mist he witnessed yet again all the familiar ways of mankind, but as he was falling prey to uncomfortable reflections, his telephone rang.

  “Commissario, that Ines, she’s not in the country now,” Juvara said, with unaccustomed abruptness.

  “I know. There’s somebody here who says he took her back to Craiova about two months ago.”

  “Here where?”

  “In the car park between the sports ground and the hypermarket, where the Romanians meet up once a week. They pick up some things here and send others off to their own country. They eat, dance, look for work and do deals. They reconstruct their own lives and then go their own way again. It’s the destiny of all of us, isn’t it?”

  Not for the first time, Juvara was left baffled. “But if this Ines isn’t here, who was the old man coming to look for?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself. Why do you think I’m taking an interest in this case?”

  “Commissario, I cannot …” Juvara stuttered.

  “For the reason that I believe in coincidences. On the one hand, a guy makes a hash of fleeing from the gypsy travellers’ camp, on the other there’s an old man who dies while searching … Behind every fact there is a certain scenario, and it’s up to us to find out if the principal actors are not by some chance the same.”

  The inspector remained silent, so the commissario went on: “Ines had a sister who was one year younger or older, I don’t know which. The easiest thing is to believe that this sister passed herself off as Ines, and vice versa. You know how many immigrants take on multiple identities.”

  “I’ve found a colleague in Bucharest who speaks good English. I’ll see if I can get him to explain this sister to me.”

  “Call someone in Craiova as well. The family comes from there.” As Juvara was hanging up, Soneri added, “And try to trace that photographer, Dimitriescu. If he’s not just a paparazzo who does snaps at weddings, maybe he can speak English as well.”

  The lights on the coach had been switched on, and the boss and his favourite were surrounded by people hanging around him like servants. The two were drinking calmly, while a group of people stood nearby, waiting.

  The commissario turned away, his path taking him past fold-down tables placed alongside vans in which people were eating standing up and warding off the damp weather with wine. When he came to the clearing, the mist confused him and he was unable to find his bearings. He decided to follow the white lines of the car park. At intervals, a lamp post would light up a few metres around it, giving the mist a strange colour. A stronger light made him believe he was near the road, but instead of the roar of traffic he heard people talking and occasionally raising their voices. He walked across a flower bed and found himself at the back of the hypermarket, where a cluster of desperate people were rummaging in the dustbins in search of something to eat. Two had climbed inside the bins and were passing stuff out to others who added it to a pile on the ground, while others again divided it up and put it into old wheeled suitcases.

  Soneri thought he made out a familiar figure standing on his own, and as he drew near he recognised Sbarazza, wearing an overcoat which was long out of fashion. “Destiny brings us face to face frequently,” Sbarazza said.

  “It is less elegant here than in the Milord.”

  “Undoubtedly, but here you are more sure of getting what you’re looking for. Recently, the Milord has been very crowded and it’s not easy to find the opportunity to … but here, there’s always something to eat.”

  “But it’s all refuse,” Soneri said.

  “No doubt, otherwise it would hardly be here, would it?” Sbarazza said with a little laugh. “But that is not the same as saying it’s not edible. The things here are the same as products displayed on the shelves, but they have ceased to be products.”

  Soneri looked at him in bewilderment, drew in a deep breath but said nothing.

  “Once there was no difference between food and products. Something could either be eaten or not. Not anymore. You see those tins of tuna fish with a dent in them? They are food but not products. No-one would buy them. Just as no-one would buy those packets of biscuits with a tear in the packaging, or those bags of over-ripe fruit, the blackening bananas, those lettuce leaves which would wither a little at the tips overnight, or even the confectionery past its sell-by date but still excellent. That is our good fortune,” he said, pointing to the group of the destitute.

  Some were already on their way, dragging their wheeled cases behind them. One came over to Sbarazza and presented him with a full holdall. He addressed him with the utmost respect: “Marchese, this is your share.”

  Sbarazza thanked him with a solemn gesture worthy of his ancient station. He spoke to Soneri in a whisper. “Tonight the Romanians are on the prowl, so we must move fast, otherwise they’ll come and chase us off.”

  “You mean that they too …” Soneri said, indicating the dustbins.

  “You can smell food a long way off when you’re hungry. I had to learn quickly, but there’s enough in there for everybody. You’ve no idea how much food is thrown away – enough to feed an army. That lot want to chase us because they’ll sell off anything they can get hold of. There’s no longer any solidarity among the poor. They’d cut your throat for a tin of mackerel.”

  Just then a shout was heard in the mist. “They’re coming,” he said in alarm, pushing his case aside. About twenty Romanians made for the dustbins and began emptying them.

  “They’ll have the night patrols down on us, and sooner or later we’ll all be sent packing. The management of the hypermarket doesn’t want us to take their refuse.”

  “Why?”

  “This might surprise you, but I think we’re upsetting their delicate consciences. It’s a co-operative, you see. For them it’s a worry to think there are people who have nothing to eat after they issued a guarantee of a full stomach for every person. They’ve turned into businessmen, but they still preach solidarity. In addition, they don’t want to admit to themselves that they waste food, because they still remember what poverty means. Better to pretend it’s all gone bad and then everybody’s happy. We remind them of a mortal sin.”

  “You’ve got your share, so you’ve no need to go scrabbling about …” Soneri pointed out to him.

  “I carry out other tasks. Let me put it this way: I look after the interests of these unfortunates and attend to bureaucratic procedures where knowledge, expertise and competence are indispensable. I am talking about subsidies, assistance, hospital appointments, medicines … They come to me and I make sure they’re treated the same as everybody else. This also helps me to keep alive the memory of what I used to be. Fortunately, in the eyes of many functionaries I am still the Marchese, and my image is intact. None of them knows that I come here to rummage through rubbish and that in order to eat I employ elegant stratagems, like at the Milord. They see me as a philanthropist, someone who looks after his fellow man, a charitable person. That way I am taken for a wealthy man and a good Christian as well.” S
barazza gave a little laugh.

  “Appearances are what counts,” Soneri said. “Or rather, appearances are everything. At least you conduct yourself with class.”

  “These poor souls don’t even have a piece of dirty floor to sleep on, ever since these foreigners turned up here. Young people with knives. For a bed in a dormitory, they wouldn’t hesitate to stick it in your belly.”

  They were walking round the perimeter of the hypermarket, keeping close to the wall. When they reached the road they said goodnight, and Sbarazza, pulling his case behind him, disappeared in the mist.

  *

  The commissario continued towards the city centre, but even when he had reached Via d’Azeglio he had not managed to shake off the feeling of alienation which had come over him in the car park. He tried to free himself of it by telephoning Juvara. “The girl in the photograph is not Ines. It must be her sister,” he said, with no preliminaries. He was following a hunch, but it was a hypothesis well-grounded in solid clues.

  “I heard again from our colleague in Romania,” Juvara said. “He has e-mailed the photograph to that Dimitriescu and has promised to get back to me.”

  “Want to bet he recognises the sister?” the commissario forecast, ending the call abruptly. At that point, a sudden recognition unleashed a rush of nostalgia which helped him shake off the feeling of alienation which had gripped him a short time previously. He was opposite Latteria Numero 51, one of the few of its type left in the city and once an affordable meeting place for hard-up students: caffelatte and politics, malvasia and revolution. For the last couple of days, he had been resisting the temptation to seek out that lost Neverland which had been his hope as a young man, but now in front of the latteria he gave in. From the moment he pushed open the glass door with its over-embellished handle, he felt he was back home, all the more so when he saw Jole, now very old, behind the bar, and Libero Manicardi, nicknamed “Picelli” after the historical hero of the barricades, seated at his table. An inflexible theorist who could tie even himself up in knots, Picelli represented that ideal mix of anarchism and communism which had set the city alight in the years leading up to the ’70s. He had been a school friend of the commissario and they had maintained an intermittent friendship in the intervals between one journey and the next.

  “Franco,” he cried out on seeing him. He was one of the few who called Soneri by his Christian name.

  They embraced under the delighted, tired eyes of Jole. “There’s more chance of winning the pools than of bumping into you,” the commissario said.

  They took a seat and stared intently at each other like two lovers. Both wore a sad smile as each noticed how the other had aged. Libero was just back from a trip to Cuba, but he had abandoned all dreams of socialist paradises to come. He had moved from the revolutionary phase to oriental meditation and on to Latin American rebelliousness before ending up in a mood of cynical detachment from the world. He had no time for Castro – everything was going to the dogs.

  “The only consolation is love,” Picelli declared, raising his glass. “I’m with a woman who is twenty years younger than me, and it’s like going back in time.”

  Soneri looked him up and down. The pockmarked face of a man who had lived life to the full, the long, nearly white hair still hanging down his neck, the clear eyes which shone against the leathery skin – all these things must have fascinated young women who in all likelihood saw in him a comic-strip hero.

  “I am losing even that,” Soneri said.

  Picelli’s face darkened. “That’s serious, Franco. Very serious. Keep a glimmer of life open. And if something closes it down, open another one. We’re not so old that we can’t manage that.”

  “No, we’re not, but at our age, after so many disappointments, maybe you don’t believe in fairy tales anymore.”

  “When that happens, we really are old. It’d be as well to put an end to it all. What are you supposed to do in the world? Better a bullet in the head.”

  “I’ve even got a gun.” Soneri laughed.

  “When I think back to school days, to our scrapes with Fascists and teachers, you remember? If I had to draw up a balance sheet, I’d have to bring the books to the court. There’s nothing left. Take a look at politics nowadays: two great bundles of what? Left and Right think the same way. One conformist line of thought with a ban on dissent and a mass of drivellers fucking about, looking forward to the weekend.”

  Soneri looked over at Jole getting on serenely with her own business: made of sterner stuff, the last generation with balls, a generation which had endured poverty and had lived during the war in close proximity to death. To people like that, even these vacuous years must seem bearable.

  “And don’t you dream of the weekend?”

  “I have other problems. I’m in a relationship with a woman who wants to get married and have children. She’s in her early thirties, she’s religious and she’s thinking of coming to live with me. I suppose she sees me as a conquest, not least because I’ve told her I’m an atheist and she wants to convert me.”

  “And has she?”

  “I’m in love and that’s more than enough. Everything else is bullshit. With her, I’ve at last escaped from loneliness, something I tried to do for years with my comrades, but with them I never managed to share anything that was genuinely me.” Picelli got to his feet with a dramatic expression on his face. “Franco, the fact is no-one ever believed, really, deeply believed. The majority only wanted to do their own thing.”

  “Well, I always did mine, I always went my own way. You know how I cannot abide the herd.”

  “I always used to criticise you for that, and I cut you off for a while, but you were right to keep your distance.”

  “Anyway, here we are empty-handed, more than half our lives gone by and a sense of despair gripping us by the balls,” the commissario summed up, looking out at the mist thickening in Via d’Azeglio.

  Inside the latteria, he felt wrapped in a blanket as comforting as a mother’s embrace. Outside, loneliness lay in wait. That was the root of his sense of alienation, and without the presence of Angela it would be total. Picelli had told him that there was nothing else: two souls seeking each other, feeling fully alive only when together in that ancient, arcane activity of striving to lose the self by clinging tightly to another person. He jumped to his feet as though galvanised by a new consciousness. He said goodbye to Picelli and did not turn back. He did not know if he would see him again. Only Jole understood it all, because she was in the habit of viewing the world and the destiny of the people in it without regret.

  8

  CONFIRMATION ARRIVED HALF an hour later. The girl in the photograph was not Ines but her sister Nina. “The Immigration Bureau checked the data supplied by the Ministry as well, and it turns out that more than one residence permit has been issued in the name of Ines in the last two years,” Juvara called to inform him. He did not go any further, intimidated by Soneri’s silence.

  “Go on,” the commissario said.

  “In spite of having received these permits, Ines remained in Romania.”

  “So the old man on the bus was coming in search of Nina. But what’s Ines up to?”

  “From what I could gather, she works in clubs for foreigners in Bucharest. My police contact was a bit vague on this point, but you know what westerners are after in Eastern European night clubs. Ines is very pretty.”

  Angela came back into Soneri’s mind and he felt a pang of anxiety over the time that had elapsed since he had last heard from her. He went into his pocket to find the Romanian girl’s mobile number on the slip of paper Signora Robutti had given him.

  “Nina doesn’t use this number any more,” the commissario said, in dictation mode. “I’ve tried several times, but the phone always rings out. See if you can find some lead from the record of calls.”

  He rang off and continued on his way to the courthouse. He had decided to wait for Angela to come out, but he had to be careful not to bump into som
e lawyer or magistrate who might recognise him, such as Dottoressa Marcotti who was in charge of the case of the girl whose body had been burned. What if Angela were to come out with the other man? Every time he thought of it, he felt unwell and keen to hear her voice, but he was irked by the telephone ringing out.

  Having sent a couple of texts from which came no reply, he decided to wait a few hours under the arches or in a doorway. All the while, the mist sailed heedlessly past at walking pace. He felt ridiculous and guilty at the same time, ridiculous for harbouring the thought that at her time of life a woman like Angela could change her mind after some attempt to court her, guilty because he was shadowing her instead of dealing with the case of the dead girl. In addition, all this was taking place in the vicinity of the court to which he was answerable. Fortunately, it was nine o’clock, the city seemed asleep and everyone was free to spend their after-dinner time as they pleased.

  He hung about for two hours, walking up and down the deserted lanes which were as silent as a graveyard. Towards eleven o’clock, the doors of the courthouse opened and a group of people, among whom he recognised Angela, the magistrate and a lawyer, emerged. The last two moved off in the direction of Piazzale Boito, while Angela and another man turned into Vicolo Politi, heading in the direction of Via Farini. That had to be him.

  Soneri followed them until he saw them go into a wine bar. He knew he could not afford to do anything stupid since that would definitively compromise everything. He also knew he would not be able to do nothing, so his pursuit ended at that point, with him feeling so lost that he sought the protection of his own house, the only place that still had a familiar feel for him. He imagined her in bed with that man, or in the back seat of a car on a country road. He burst out laughing at himself, fearing that he was losing all his dignity, and this thought allowed impotent rage to take over from irony.

  *

  Angela appeared unexpectedly, as though ambushing him. Soneri had fallen asleep on a sofa and awoke to find her bending over him. He did not understand a word she was saying, but her voice was so gentle that the commissario forgot the scene he had witnessed. When he came round fully, he realised he was cold and ached all over.