Gold, Frankincense and Dust

by Valerio Varesi

Soneri groaned and his enthusiasm drained away. As though by magic, what had seemed a promising lead turned out to be a dead end. The same dead end as before. Once again, anguish overwhelmed him. It had been dark for some two hours, the days were slipping past and the investigation was making no progress. He took out his mobile and dialled Soncini’s number. He should have done so earlier, he realised, when the other answered, in no way put out by the call he was receiving.

  “I know you’ve already seen my wife and daughter.”

  Soneri noted with alarm he was losing his touch. He had not paid heed to that different number in the printout, he had failed to read Juvara’s notes and now he realised that Soncini had already been alerted by the two women to the possibility of an interrogation. In all probability they had agreed on their stories so as to ward off suspicion. His mind was not focused, as the magistrate Marcotti had gently suggested.

  “I need to talk to you,” the commissario said. “Could we meet at the wine bar in Via Farini in an hour?”

  “Alright,” Soncini agreed. He showed a surprising degree of compliance. Only when he had rung off did Soneri realise that he had fixed the meeting for dinner time. Out of scruple, he tried to call Angela. He very much wanted to go round to her place but would have preferred to receive an invitation from her. The mobile was switched off, but the office phone rang. Just as he was beginning to fear hearing the recorded message, she picked up the receiver. “You got me by pure chance. I was on the way to the prison.”

  “Can we meet later?”

  Angela hesitated a few moments before answering. Soneri detected an embarrassment which was now becoming all too familiar.

  “I think I’m going to be tied up for a bit, and I’m already feeling very tired.”

  He did not know whether to believe her or to view her reply as a diplomatic lie. It would have been easy to check up since each had the keys of the other’s house, but he had no wish to go snooping and he was in any case afraid of what he might discover.

  He was about to ask her what she was doing in the prison when she said: “Anything new on the Nina story?”

  Now it was his turn to remain silent for a few moments. He wanted to talk only about the two of them, but he felt so low that he launched into an account of his visit to Golden.

  “It can’t have been nice talking to those two harpies,” Angela said.

  “Do you know them?”

  “Signora Martini found making money her only raison d’être after her husband’s many betrayals. She takes revenge on him by making him aware he’s nothing more than a hired hand.”

  “Why doesn’t she dump him?”

  “You must be joking! They’re a deeply Catholic family and she works with priests. If she was separated or divorced, she could kiss goodbye to her dealings with the bishop. She cares more about her business than anything else. She’s turned her daughter’s wedding into a commercial deal.”

  “Why? Who’s she marrying?”

  “The eldest boy in the Dall’Argine family. You know, the ones who manufacture engines and hydraulic pumps.”

  “Ah!” Soneri said distractedly. He did not understand why they were talking about weddings.

  “I see my information fails to interest you,” Angela said. “I don’t know when I’ll get back but send me a text before you go to bed.”

  “I wanted to talk about us,” the commissario mumbled. “We should be making decisions, shouldn’t we? How long do you intend to keep me dangling?”

  “I am not keeping you dangling.”

  “You’re still seeing that other man. You can’t make up your mind.”

  He heard a snort from the other end of the line. “Listen, we’ll talk about this later. I’m not up to it at the moment.”

  As the conversation ended, the commissario felt short of breath and experienced the now customary agitation which made him feel he needed air. He left the office to seek relief from that state of quasi-asphyxiation but found his lungs filling with the dead miasma of the mist.

  He dragged himself to the wine bar where he had arranged to meet Soncini, but he noticed his rival’s Mercedes parked with two wheels on the pavement, and when he approached the door of the bar he made out, in the half light of the portico, a tall, trim figure. The other man slowed down, but when he saw Soneri turn the door handle to go in he changed direction slightly, with the gentle movement of a boat in a regatta, and walked on towards the far end of the road.

  The commissario was sure that he had been making for the wine bar, and that his being there had made him change his mind. Perhaps that was where he was to meet Angela and he preferred to avoid unpleasant encounters. Soneri watched him move off, speaking into his mobile phone. Suspicion prompted the idea that he was calling Angela to change their rendezvous.

  He had no more time to think about it before Soncini arrived. He recognised him instantly even though he had never seen him before. The idea he had formed of him corresponded perfectly to the man he now found standing before him – long hair, greying, smoothed down with gel, dark moustache, tall, lean, slightly stooped, skin suggesting exposure to a multiplicity of tanning lamps, all combining to give the impression of fragility, like a crumbling tower. He told him he had once been employed as a model and had worked on the catwalks in Milan. Perhaps it was there he had met his wife, a woman with money and anxious to show if off.

  “Were you recently Nina’s lover?” Soneri adopted the inquisitorial tone from the outset.

  “Our relationship had been ongoing for some time, with ups and downs,” Soncini replied, with irritating detachment. “We separated several times but always got back together again.”

  “Did you get to know her when she was working at Golden or earlier?”

  “No,” he said with an ironic smile. “Earlier. It was she who wanted me to find her a job. Ines was very keen on her independence and wanted a normal life. She spoke a lot about marriage and children.”

  “You were in no position to guarantee her these things.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “But she was young and she had time on her side. And we were very close. She went off with other men, but in reality we never separated from each other.”

  “Indeed,” the commissario murmured, thinking of his own situation. “In the last few weeks, had you got back together?”

  “Yes. She said she’d never have hesitated about getting married to me if I’d been free. She didn’t care about the difference in age. Believe me, we were very much in love.”

  “Why was Ines not with you on the night of the crime?”

  “I was busy. I was with a lawyer friend. There was a problem over an order for some goldsmith’s work. Then we went to a bar on Lake Como. I don’t know what Ines was doing that evening. She told me she’d be going out with some Romanian friends I didn’t know.”

  “What’s the name of your lawyer friend?”

  “What’s going on? Do you want verification?” Soncini sounded astonished. “Look, I’m not telling you lies. But you can call him, he’s Arnaldo Razzini. Check with him.”

  “It’s my job to double-check.”

  “Then go ahead,” Soncini declared brazenly. “I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t go around assaulting women the way these foreigners do. Ines told me all about what goes on in Romania.”

  “You say you are an entrepreneur, but your wife might take a different view,” Soneri said maliciously. “She tells me an employee paid by commission …”

  Soncini glowered at Soneri with deep resentment, but he could not hold that look for long. He was obviously a spineless human being, a man of straw.

  “Well then, say that I’m a manager, will that do? I’m a good salesman, and nobody can take that away from me. Not even my wife.” He spoke of her as though she had the right of life and death over him.

  The commissario stared at him and thought of Giulia Martini. A couple who hated each other but were held together by business interest, exactly like members of a board of management
. She kept him in exchange for being able to sell to bishops and cardinals the outward display of married life, while he moved from one bed to the next, deceiving young foreign girls. The commissario delighted in the opportunity to disrupt their minuet and cause trouble. “Your wife and your daughter tell me you spend money like water …”

  Soncini gave the slightest of shrugs, as though bored. “My daughter used to love me a lot, but she’s come under her mother’s control.”

  The distance between them seemed to bother him a great deal, but everything in Soncini appeared improbable. He was a man who must have dabbled in everything, but who had so completely wasted everything life had offered him that he was incapable of even one authentic emotion. The commissario looked hard at a face that could in another age have been Casanova’s, and had the displeasing impression of seeing in front of him a man embittered, exhausted and dissatisfied, let down by his body and by age. Quite suddenly, Soncini was transformed into a ghost.

  “I’ve nothing more to ask you,” Soneri said, anxious to be free of the man.

  Soncini rose slowly to his feet. He had maintained a kind of fading, early autumnal attractiveness, and his walk as he left the bar had the slow deliberateness of an elderly gentleman.

  Soon after, Soneri too went out. The discussion with Soncini added nothing to what he had already known, but did leave him with some impressions he could not yet manage to decode. And no-one knew better than him how important impressions were when everything appeared inexplicable.

  13

  THE NIGHT WAS a time of peace for the commissario, when the inexplicable ceased to torment him. The darkness of the borghi in the old town set itself up as a natural obstacle to anxiety, leaving it no option but to slink off. Momentarily washing his hands of his problems offered great relief and gave Soneri, as he strolled about in the mist, a break from his nightmares.

  It did not last long. Once more the sirens blared out in the labyrinth of streets around the Duomo. Excitement exploded and transformed itself into a mob. An ambulance raced by, pursued by the curious on foot. They made for the Vicolo del Vescovado, but the entrance was blocked by a pair of police cars. In the midst of things, he made out the figure of Musumeci and immediately afterwards saw a flushed woman being taken by the arm by Esposito.

  “We’ve made a cock-up of the whole thing,” Esposito shouted.

  “You mean it wasn’t him,” the commissario said, meaning the Moroccan now being crucified as the Brute of Parma.

  “No, no way. Oh, don’t get carried away. He was no saint, eh! He did try to hassle that girl.”

  “Him and how many others, Esposito? There are thousands of potential rapists, especially among respectable, apparently innocent fathers of families.”

  “Maybe so, commissario, but this is one weird human being,” he concluded with an eloquent gesture of his finger.

  Musumeci was conducting interrogations and a number of people were lined up along the wall of the Bishop’s Palace. There was something blasphemous or even perhaps deliberately provocative in raping a woman in that place. A symbolic coincidence, and Soneri had a continuing interest in both coincidences and symbols. A new piece of information crackled out on a radio held by one of Esposito’s colleagues. A man whose description fitted the rapist had been seen under the Portici del Grano at the City Hall. After a challenge to the spiritual power, it was the turn of the temporal power. Two cars sped off with tyres screeching. The commissario followed them on foot. A few metres on, some boys went racing past him, and he too broke into a run, abandoning himself to a puerile excitement that reawoke memories of leaping from stone to stone in furrows created by water or by tractors, and of boyhood competitions on sun-soaked paths lined by poplar trees, and at the same time contemplating how pitiless is time in burning us up.

  Soneri stopped in Via Repubblica, in front of the police station, unable to decide if his breathlessness was due to emotion or exertion. He had the impression that, quite suddenly, that night he had begun to make some headway. Something must have been happening under the mist which seemed to be continually rolling over the city, even if to all appearances everything was returning to its customary stillness and to the subdued sounds of the night-time hours. He walked along Via Mazzini, and observed the faint lights on the far side of the river pierce the darkness, while the bells of the Duomo rang a quarter to midnight. He leaned on the parapet of the Mezzo bridge and looked over at the river only a few metres below but almost silent. He was finally floating with a lightness he had been experiencing for some time, nothing more than a bubble released from the graceful hand of a child, rising without wind, tossed slowly about before bursting, forgotten.

  The ringing of his mobile brought him back to earth. “Commissario,” the voice of Pasquariello’s deputy came booming out, “we’ve got the car you described to us, the black B.M.W. Remember?”

  “The one with the horse on the side? Of course I remember.”

  “Well, you won’t see much of the horse, because there’s a scrape on the side of the car, but we think this is the one you’re after.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Here with us.”

  “Who was driving?”

  “Two Romanians. We’ve checked with the vehicle registration office, and it turns out the car’s stolen.”

  Soneri muttered something incomprehensible. “When?”

  “Couple of months ago. But that’s not all. The pair who were in the car are underage. The guy who was driving is seventeen and the other one’s sixteen.”

  “How did you apprehend them?”

  “They crashed into another car at the Crocetta and ran off. A squad car gave chase until they turned into a cul-de-sac. There may have been a third person who got away.”

  “Don’t let anybody touch the car, and first thing tomorrow morning call in the forensic squad. I want that car examined,” Soneri ordered.

  Shortly afterwards, he was at the police station. On the way he tried to get through to Angela, but without success. He sent her an ambiguous text: I don’t know if I’ll go to bed tonight. What about you? He saw the B.M.W. parked in the courtyard, not the most recent model, but one still in vogue. It had a long scratch on one side, but the galloping horse could clearly be made out.

  “Where are the two you’ve arrested?”

  A custody officer escorted him to the interrogation room, but before they went in he warned him: “I think you’re wasting your time. They won’t open their mouths.”

  They were young, but they had the look of having been through a lot.

  “You stole the wrong car,” the commissario began. “Any one in possession of it is in deep trouble, facing much more than a straightforward charge of car theft.”

  The two remained impassive. They seemed not to have understood what was being said to them. Soneri turned back to the officer.

  “Do these two understand Italian?”

  “They understand perfectly well. They’re bluffing.”

  “It’d be better for you to come clean, much better,” the commissario threatened. Not a muscle on the face of either man moved.

  “Even if you are underage, a murder charge is no trivial matter,” the commissario said.

  Only at that point did the two exchange a brief glance, but still did not say a word. They gave the impression of being in a waiting room rather than a police station, and the idea of ending up in jail seemed not to have crossed their minds. They stared straight ahead impassively, with an inexpressive, almost obtuse look on their faces. The commissario wondered how they could maintain that pose except by anaesthetising the brain, leaving it dulled during the hours and hours of waiting, with no other aim than to let time pass. He would have liked to punch the pair of them and shake them out of a silence he found deeply irritating.

  “Where are you from?”

  No reply. Soneri looked questioningly at the officer.

  “They had no papers on them, commissario. We’re making enquiries with the immigr
ation office.”

  He peered at the two young men impotently. Although in a fury, he did no more than take a seat opposite them, attempting to intercept any glance they exchanged. Their clear eyes darted about like lizards’, but when they were still they had the fixed vacuity of a pane of glass.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so keen to make trouble for yourselves! Ruining your lives before they’ve really begun.” Addressing the officer, he added, “The car was the one used in the Iliescu murder.”

  He hoped to make some impact on the boys, to shake them out of their apathy, but they were plainly hard cases. Or simply two lads who had been trained in a code of blind obedience to the clan, imposed by beating after beating. Or else they were terrified. Only once did the younger of the two display a sign of concern, throwing his mate a glance which the commissario read as a willingness to yield, but immediately afterwards everything settled back as before: the same apathy, the same immobility, the same lizard-like looks.

  The commissario cut short the interrogation. “O.K. You’ll be spending the night in the cells.”

  He got up and walked slowly to the door. As he squeezed past the custody officer, he stopped and turned round for a last look at the two Romanians staring into the void, as impassive as ever.

  In the corridor he bumped into Pasquariello, who had the grim expression on his face of a man dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.

  “So? Where are these two little shits?”

  Soneri nodded in the direction of the room he had just left. “It’s a waste of time going in. They’re like two statues.”

  They both went into the office of the head of the flying squad. There were three officers at work on the case, but at that moment the commissario felt the absence of Juvara and his computer skills.

  “The car was stolen from some firm,” one of the policemen announced.

  “Which firm?” asked Pasquariello.

  “It’s called Golden. It’s a goldsmith’s firm based in Lemignano.”

  Something clicked in Soneri’s mind, even if he would not have been able to identify the connection which was suggested. Unquestionably he was facing another coincidence: he had just been talking to the irreproachable family which held the reins in that firm.