Gold, Frankincense and Dust

by Valerio Varesi

  His reasoning was delicate and light. Listening to him, Soneri drew some consolation from his words.

  Sbarazza went on. “I don’t envy you, you know. For someone who considers the absurdity of our life, it must be frustrating to have to reconstruct the actions of those who steal and kill. If we were to reflect a little, we would all be forced to be good and to weigh every act, but we are such profoundly irrational creatures, governed by the passions. Our animal side always prevails. The wise man is the one who resists the pull of the passions and ensures that the brain triumphs.”

  “If only it were that easy …” Soneri muttered. “Look at you with women.”

  “Purely intellectual caprice, aesthetic diversion. Age is of assistance here,” he said with a wink. “I can say that because it was not always thus. I was a fiery youth, and that was my ruination, yet I’d do it all again. The passions, even if they toss you about this way and that, impel you forward. It’s because of them that we keep ourselves active. They move everything forward, transforming the world, perhaps into a repugnant mess, but somewhere in that shambles there’ll be the spring of continual competition towards an ill-defined future.” Putting his face close to Soneri’s, he went on: “Wisdom is something for old men. And never believe it’s a conquest of time. It’s merely the decay of the body.”

  Inside himself, Soneri felt heartened. Any unhappiness over Angela was a sign he was still alive. Two police cars with sirens squealing passed by and he decided Sbarazza was right. The world was moved by the passions.

  “Have they got him?” Sbarazza said.

  “Looks like it,” the commissario replied without much conviction, and before Sbarazza could ask him anything else about the maniac on the loose, the commissario got up so quickly that he seemed to be running away.

  Refreshed and consoled by this conversation, Soneri set off for the lingerie shop in Via Garibaldi. En route he called Juvara. “So then, they got their sex maniac.”

  “If only! They arrested a Moroccan, but he was freed two hours later because he’d nothing to do with it. He was quarrelling with his girlfriend and somebody decided he was assaulting her.”

  “Give me some background. When did all this start?”

  “Yesterday evening, a woman was attacked in Via San Leonardo, and the description of the rapist fitted one given by another woman who’d been assaulted in Via Solferino two days ago. It was probably the same man who also sexually assaulted a girl in Via Toschi.”

  It was true. Instincts and passions were what motivated people, and when these exploded outside the confines of law, he had to take over. He could hear sirens in the mist as the city attempted to cope with the tension created in its innermost being by an insidious virus capable of spreading and striking randomly.

  The owner of the shop he went into shortly afterwards must have felt herself threatened, judging by the wary eye she cast on Soneri. She relaxed only when he introduced himself.

  “Is there a Romanian girl who comes here?” he said, showing her the photograph.

  “Ines. Certainly. A wonderful person.”

  Evidently she mistook her for her sister.

  “Does she buy her underwear here?”

  “She is a very faithful client. If only I had more like her.”

  “What kind of thing does she buy?”

  “Oh, all kinds. Unlike other clients of mine, she doesn’t have one definite style. One day she might purchase a very girly, matching set with lace and frills, and then two days later she would walk out with a much plainer outfit. Sometimes she would choose very sexy, see-through lingerie, but at other times she would take articles more fit for a young girl, with little angels embroidered into it. She would go from top of the range to economy items. In other words, there are no fixed rules with her.”

  “One of a kind, you mean,” Soneri said, trying to make sense of what the woman was telling him.

  “In general my clients have precise tastes and always choose the same type of article. Most times I get it right when I interpret their wants, but with Ines … in addition … such a beautiful young woman. I’m sure men go crazy over a girl like her.”

  “Did she ever come with a man?”

  “Women never buy lingerie in the company of men, if for no other reason than not to spoil the surprise,” she said flirtatiously. “However, now I think of it, I was once struck by seeing Ines get out of a dark car. There was a man at the wheel, but he stayed in the car and I didn’t see his face.”

  “Do you remember what make of car it was?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you there. All I saw was a horse design on one side.”

  The commissario remembered Manservisi’s account. It must have been the same sticker. “Do you have any idea where she lives?”

  “Nearby, in Via Cavallotti, but I don’t know the number. She didn’t speak much about herself, and if the conversation turned to her, she would change the subject.”

  The commissario moved towards the door, and the woman followed him.

  “Will you get him?” she asked apprehensively.

  He looked at her generous figure, her enormous calves, her feet spilling out of her shoes and decided that she ran no risk of being assaulted. He shrugged and walked away.

  A hundred metres further on he turned into Via Cavallotti, which in mid afternoon was deserted. He started peering at the nameplates like a postman on his first round, but there were so many names missing and those which were there belonged mainly to immigrants – Arabs, Moldovans, Russians, Albanians and Indians. Read in haste from top to bottom, the names sounded like the morning roll call in the Foreign Legion. At number 12, in a recently renovated block of flats, there were no names, only the numbers of the individual flats: 1/1, 1/2, etc. Instinctively he believed that Nina lived there, a belief suggested by the air of de luxe mystery hovering about the block and by its defensive, forbidding chestnut door with shining copper rings. He was tempted to go in, but elected first to obtain a search warrant from the magistrate Marcotti, who still knew nothing of his belief that Nina and the girl burned by the roadside were one and the same, with all that that involved.

  The light was fading under the advancing front of mist enveloping one side of Via Garibaldi and wafting around the arches of the Pilotta as though a river had suddenly evaporated and was gushing down from the parapets. The sky darkened as if it had been coloured by the stroke of a brush and the whole city was plunged into shadow. He dialled Angela’s number once more, but all he got was the voicemail. Seconds later, his mobile rang and he answered as quickly as a sprinter getting off the blocks.

  “I’ve disappointed you yet again,” Nanetti teased.

  “Cut it out,” Soneri said.

  “You’re waiting for a call, I know.”

  The commissario muttered something, but could not conceal his impatience. His colleague accompanied him along a street he had never liked. Like a tourist guide, he took note of every stage of the walk. He could not get Angela out of his mind, and still wanted her. “Anything new?” he said.

  “We have the girl’s identikit and she’s very like the one in the photograph. I’d say there’s no doubt,” Nanetti said.

  “I’ll send Juvara to visit Signora Robutti and the haberdasher who sold Nina her underwear to see if she recognises her.”

  “Haberdasher! The way you speak you’d think we were still in the Fifties. The place is called Intim Shop and it sells lingerie, not underwear. And it’s not even correct to call it a shop. Where have you been all these years? It’s a boutique!”

  “Fuck off!” Soneri said. The air all around was filled with the sound of sirens. He snapped shut the mobile without saying goodbye as he watched a police car screech to a halt under an ancient plane tree in Piazzale della Pace. Esposito jumped out as though he were in an American gangster movie and raced over the grass in the direction of the fountain and the monument to Verdi. The commissario followed him, but after a few strides he realised how seriously unfit he was.
The soles of his shoes slipped on the damp grass, and he lost ground with every step he took. The extra kilos made him almost bend double as he ran, but in spite of that after a few seconds he caught up with Esposito, who was himself out of breath and panting.

  “Did you see him?” Esposito managed to gasp.

  “Who was I supposed to see? I was coming after you.”

  “The bloody bastard,” Esposito swore. Other policemen emerged from the mist. “There was a call to say that the maniac had been sighted harassing some poor girl.”

  “Ah well, if you don’t slim down a bit, the only criminals you’ll catch will be the lame ones. I gave you a hundred metres’ start on a three-hundred-metre stretch.”

  “Hey, commissario, as if this life was not shitty enough, now you want me to stop eating.”

  In the meantime, a multitude of the curious had gathered round but they quickly showed their disappointment. “It’s time you got this dirty Moroccan,” yelled a heavily made-up woman with a crocodile skin handbag. Moroccans had become the whipping boys for all misdeeds committed by incomers.

  “There’s a psychosis abroad, and it’s spreading,” Esposito was heard groaning as he walked over to his car. “Thank God I’m not on night duty. Everybody sees monsters when the lights go down.”

  The two men stood in silence in the thick mist, getting their breath back.

  “Alright, commissario. The fun’s over,” Esposito said as he got into the car and switched on the engine. At that moment Soneri’s mobile rang, but he was once again disappointed when Juvara’s voice came on. “Have you heard about the identikit?”

  “Nanetti told me. Will you go over to Signora Robutti’s for an official identification?”

  “O.K., but I wanted to inform you that we have the details of the calls made to Nina.”

  “Recognise any?”

  “There are lots of them, nearly all male.”

  “There’s a surprise!”

  “I mean, they’re from people who don’t seem to be the same age as her, mature men.”

  “Does it give their ages on the printout?”

  “No, but if there’s a lawyer or accountant who’s got his own office, he can’t be all that young.”

  “Are they all like that?”

  “One phone number belongs to a company. I looked it up on the internet and I see it’s a goldsmith’s. It produces and deals in top-of-the-range items.”

  “Leave everything on my desk. I’ll be there shortly and I’ll have a look.”

  He felt that things were starting to come together, nothing that could be proved, just impressions, feelings and affinities between tiny clues that were beginning to establish a plausible framework in his mind. His imagination and his experience in dealing with the all-too-human fact which is evil did the rest.

  The mobile distracted him once again. This time he reached for it absent-mindedly, expecting a call from Capuozzo or Marcotti with a rebuke for being out of touch for days and not filing a report.

  “You’ve been looking for me several times,” Angela said, with some heat.

  “Your mobile’s never switched on.”

  “These days, I often have to keep it off. Clients call me in my office. The only ones who have my mobile number are you and a few others.”

  “You mean one other.”

  He heard a slight inhalation of breath, but it might have been a sigh. Angela changed tack. “I’d like to see you right way. Why don’t you come round to my office? I’m on my own.”

  He felt a surge of desire for her, but the impulse was dampened by her silence about the other man. She tantalised him with a lover’s flattery but wounded him by declining to give a reply which would give him reassurance or hope. Angela was keeping him on tenterhooks, in an anguished limbo of uncertainty. At times he detested her for this, and never before had Sbarazza’s monologue on the prison of the passions seemed to him so profoundly true.

  “You don’t seem too keen,” she said.

  “It’s not that. I’ve had a call from the office.”

  “You see? For you work is more important.”

  “No, if you only knew …”

  “Well then. What’s keeping you? I wouldn’t like to pressurise you, or interrupt the work of a public official.”

  “I’m on my way,” Soneri said, with unwonted ardour, snapping his mobile shut.

  *

  Angela wrapped herself around him before he even had time to take off his coat. She was aggressive, as she had been in earlier days when their passion fed off their desire to discover each other. With an equally unusual urgency which she seemed deeply to appreciate, he offered her every assistance, so there developed between them an invigorating struggle, something like the nuptial dance of insects in spring, on the divan, desk and armchairs.

  Afterwards, exhausted but gratified, they flopped onto the floor, looking around in disbelief, with childlike wonder. Even in his euphoria, the moment he pondered the roots of this excessive reaction, Soneri’s mood turned grim and he was again overwhelmed by the bittersweet acknowledgement of the precariousness of his condition. Their lovemaking did nothing to take away the savour of dying summer or of the final act of folly.

  “You like the other guy and he excites you. It’s him you want, not me,” Soneri said.

  “So why would I want to make love to you?”

  “I’m an old habit dressed up in new attire. The other man has got you fired up and your desire is projected onto me.”

  “No.” She shook her head, but the gesture seemed to Soneri dictated more by will power than by conviction. “In that case, I’d have gone to him, but I didn’t. I came to you.”

  “It’s fear that’s keeping you tied to me. The fear of change.”

  “Me afraid of change?” Angela said in tones of injured pride.

  “If we were angry with each other, it’d be easy for both of us to walk away. Everything would be simpler, but the fact is we’re tied to each other by a deep understanding, and maybe we believe that at our age this cannot be repeated. That’s where the fear springs from,” Soneri said, looking his partner straight in the eye, “but at the same time, we want the thrills we can’t give each other any longer, and so we look for them somewhere else. You’ve found them with that guy, but the excitement you feel is like playing blind man’s buff with your future, and that scares you. You come back to me all charged up, and you try to transfer onto the man who gives you security the excitement you feel with your lover. If you were younger, you wouldn’t give it a second thought. You’d be off already, because you’d have plenty of time ahead of you for correcting mistakes, but as you grow older, you become more careful.”

  Angela made no reply and her silence wounded Soneri, who was doing all he could to wring from her some indication that she still loved him.

  “He doesn’t know about you.”

  “That goes without saying. Adultery and betrayal are based on deception.”

  “I’ve told you everything.”

  Angela, speaking only in staccato sentences, had a sulky expression. She too seemed to be in search of some form of reassurance which neither was able to give the other.

  “You’ll have to make up your mind, Angela. You’ll have to choose between the exhilarating uncertainty of the new and the reassuring continuity of what you have. In each case, you are running risks.”

  He got up to go. Angela came with him to the door and hugged him, but said not a word.

  10

  HE MADE HIS way back to the office, walking quickly along the pavements of the already dark city and feeling empty inside. In quick succession, calls came from Capuozzo and Marcotti, both putting the same questions, his superior officer with overblown, plaintive pomposity and the magistrate neurotic and rapid.

  “Where do we stand?” Marcotti said, straight to the point.

  “The victim’s name is Nina Iliescu,” Soneri said.

  She gave a mumbled assent, as if she knew everything already. Soneri assu
med she had been talking to Juvara.

  “I think I’ve found out where she used to live, but I’d need a warrant.”

  “No problem. In these cases, it’s normal practice, isn’t it? Was the house hers?”

  “We don’t know. This girl’s life is a mystery that is still to be unravelled. All we have to go on at the moment are telephone printouts, an apartment we need to search and a car with the design of a horse on the side.”

  “A horse?”

  “It’s the car that dumped the body on the side of the autostrada. The same car was seen by the woman who sold the underwear to the girl, and by Manservisi, the chief of the gypsy community which set up their camp alongside the rubbish dump near the Cortile San Martino service area. That’s where Mariotto comes from, the only witness that we have so far.” The commissario had to stop, because the magistrate had started yelling down the telephone.

  “You’re making my head spin, commissario! I phoned you to get you to clear up some points and you’ve launched into an incomprehensible catalogue.”

  It had not occurred to him that he was making a summary for his own purposes rather than recounting facts to her. Until that moment, he had been accumulating sensations and unconnected fragments, and the recitation had given him the opportunity to put them all together.

  “No, don’t start again,” Marcotti begged him. “Prepare a report and I’ll read it at my leisure.”

  The conversation ended with that request, which seemed to him absurd. What could a report explain? The investigation was at a point which made it the equivalent of a photograph without a caption, or at least that was how it felt to him as he walked among people crowding into bars or heading home. From time to time he felt he was losing his internal balance and was under the influence of some kind of emotional anaesthetic which dulled every sense into indifference. He knew this was a means of avoiding pain. At other times he sought refuge in the past, in the years he had been living with Ada, in his unborn son whom he continually imagined as being close to him and whom he identified with some boys he ran into by chance on his long walks. When this happened, he always ended up remembering Nina. The faces of the two women superimposed themselves – one on top of the other – and their affairs ended up criss-crossing. Perhaps that was why he had taken this case so much to heart.