Campagna was sure that he was, even if he suspected that depression by this point was nipping at his heels. He’d never wanted to dig too deeply, lest he be forced to admit it. He was so widely disliked that they were likely to take advantage of the fact to relegate him to a desk covered with dead case files until he reached retirement age. His tantrums and his solitary investigations helped him to keep that profound and obscure sense of discomfort under control. Even at home, with his family. He finally managed to get his breathing back under control once he managed to admit to himself that this new investigation that the Alligator had served him on a silver tray would help him to keep his head above water. He was well aware, however, that it would be no walk in the park.
Marco Buratti, aka the Alligator, had a reputation as a crusader, one of those guys obsessed with the truth. Once he sank his teeth into a case, he wouldn’t let up until he’d solved it. But there were three problems. The first was that Buratti was operating outside the law, since he wasn’t authorized to pursue investigations; the second was that he was notorious for getting himself and everyone around him into trouble; and finally there was the fact that he worked with two questionable characters. Max the Memory had a history as an extreme left-wing militant and had been forced to go into hiding. He had also spent a certain period of time in prison. The other one, Beniamino Rossini, had a criminal record a mile long and a reputation for wearing a number of bracelets on his wrist that matched the number of men he’d shot to death.
To sweep away all and any doubts, he thought about that innocent man, kidnapped and murdered. He deserved justice and respect. And his full attention.
An hour later, the inspector handed the file on the disappearance of Professor Guido Di Lello back to his colleague. It contained nothing useful and ventured no theories. People disappear every day, sometimes never to be seen again. Amen.
Campagna was perplexed. He didn’t know exactly what to do next and, as he always did when faced with these kinds of situations, he went to knock on the door of the chief of the Mobile Squad, knowing he was about to ruin the man’s day.
Calandra welcomed him with a look of obvious irritation, staring at the pattern of white-and-blue flowers on his shirt. “To what do I owe this unscheduled visit?” he asked dryly. “I don’t recall asking to see you. Are you in trouble? Look, I moved heaven and earth to get you assigned to the robbery squad. No one wanted you after the mess you made in narcotics.”
The inspector raised both hands theatrically to interrupt.
“Nothing like that. I’ve just come to ask you a favor.”
“As long as it doesn’t involve vacation days, promotions, overtime, or reimbursements for expenses,” his superior stated flatly.
“I need a contact at the Mobile Squad in Rome. I’m looking for some information.”
“Follow standard procedures and talk to your chief. That’s his responsibility.”
“The thing is, this isn’t a robbery case.”
The chief grew suspicious. “Are you working a case without authorization?”
“No. But I want to.”
“What’s the story?”
“I’ve confirmed through a reliable source that a person whom we believe to be missing since March 2013 was actually kidnapped for ransom and then murdered when the ransom wasn’t paid.”
The chief pointed his forefinger toward the floor. “And here in Padua we knew nothing about it?”
“It seems certain that the man was kidnapped here in the city.”
“And just who would this reliable source be?”
“It’s better if you never know,” the inspector said carefully. “But what I do want to make clear is that if we ever do manage to discover the truth, it won’t necessarily be possible to make the facts public.”
“Giulio, would you explain to me once and for all why the fuck you always seem to get tangled up in these complicated messes?” his boss exclaimed. “You’re telling me that you want to use police department resources to pursue investigations that might never make it into a court of law?”
“That’s a risk.”
The squad chief grabbed a box of breath mints. He tossed a couple into his mouth and chewed on them with irritation. Campagna knew him well, otherwise he’d never have dared come to him with a request that was so clearly out of bounds. As he had had plenty of opportunities to learn in the past, his boss wasn’t the kind of cop who let his men fabricate evidence to toss someone into jail, even when everyone knew they were guilty of something, which was the kind of thing that Giulio had done without a twinge of remorse. But he was a cop through and through, and if, on the other hand, the objective was to keep a crime from going unpunished, he was willing to bend the rules and sidestep procedures. And forget to inform the district attorney’s office, while he was at it.
Calandra grabbed the receiver and asked to be put through to his colleague in the capital. After a friendly exchange of small talk, he forged ahead with an explanation of the reason for the phone call, though he limited himself to a brief description of the professor’s disappearance. “If you have no objections, I’ll send an inspector from my office down tomorrow—someone in whom I place the utmost trust—so that he can clarify certain key elements . . .”
The chief of the Mobile Squad sighed after hanging up. “You’ll need to ask for Inspector Valerio Robutti. He’s as much of a pain in the ass as you are and, just like you, he’s bound and determined to sabotage his career. The two of you will get along famously.”
“What am I supposed to say to the section chief?”
“I’ll talk to Buccheri myself. Now get going, and come back to see me if and only if we can start an investigative file; otherwise don’t bother me because I don’t want to hear about it.”
The inspector stopped at the front desk to chat with the officers on duty, waiting for the downpour to let up. Before heading home astride his beat-up old bicycle, a family heirloom with old-fashioned rod brakes, he wanted to drop by his favorite wine bar for a glass of white wine. He was one of the very few denizens of the Veneto region under the age of seventy who didn’t drink spritzes. He loved aromatic white wines, those from Friuli and Trentino, and just then he needed their company. A glass of wine, a cigarette, and a chance to shoot the breeze. These things served as a kind of detox, wiping work from his mind before he headed home. In the past, his inability to let go of his work had come close to costing him his wife and daughter. It had taken a tremendous effort to keep his family together and he’d never again forgotten the lesson.
The rain showed no respect for his thirst and Giulio decided to leave his beloved bicycle in the garage at headquarters and accept a ride offered by a colleague.
He found the two women in his life intently running down the online checklist of textbooks. School was starting in just ten days and already parents and students were restless with anticipation.
“You won’t believe the money we’re going to have to spend this year,” his wife complained. “It’s a good thing we bring home two paychecks, I can’t imagine how other people manage to lay out this kind of money with the way the economy’s going.”
Campagna nodded, remembering for the umpteenth time that she made more money than he did. She was a first-rate architect and, unlike lots of other people in her profession, she’d never wanted for work.
He pulled open the fridge and uncorked a bottle of pinot grigio. Gaia joined him and pulled two wineglasses out of the dish rack. “What a shitty summer,” he complained, staring out the window. “It’s never once stopped raining.”
“And what an unforgettable vacation,” she said, adding her own two cents. “Three days of sunshine in two weeks.”
“We’ll make up for it with Christmas in the mountains,” Ilaria broke in loudly from the living room. “I can’t wait to go skiing.”
Campagna looked over at his wife and rubbed his thumb
against his index finger in the universal symbol for cash; he wanted to go skiing as much as his daughter did, but it all depended on money.
She sighed. “Plus I need a new car. The mechanic said the one I’m driving now isn’t long for this world.”
Campagna’s wine went down his windpipe. “You should get a second opinion,” he choked out while coughing. “Maybe we just need a more optimistic mechanic.”
Gaia burst out laughing and started setting the table.
“What’s for dinner?” the inspector asked. The wine was starting to stir his appetite.
“Stuffed peppers, stuffed tomatoes, and stuffed calamari.”
“You went to see your mother today,” he concluded unenthusiastically.
“I’ve always known you were an exceptional detective,” his wife ribbed him, putting on the voice of who-knows-which television character.
“I have to go to Rome tomorrow,” Campagna announced, clarifying immediately that he’d be traveling for work. “I’ll be gone a couple of days, at most.”
Gaia wrapped her arms around him. “Then you’d better get busy tonight, or when you miss me you’ll start to get strange thoughts . . .”
With a hint of panic, Giulio Campagna sensed that this wasn’t the night for it. Too much on his mind. He went into the bathroom and swallowed a tablet that the doctor at the reproductive health clinic had prescribed.
“Better living through chemistry,” he muttered, heaving a sigh of relief.
Robutti was a big, bearded man with a strong Ligurian accent. He greeted the colleague from Padua with unmistakable mistrust. “What’s behind this trip?” he asked, cutting straight to the chase.
Campagna looked him square in the eye to gauge how far he could risk going.
The other man clearly had no time to waste. He slammed one hand down hard on his desk. “My boss calls me up and tells me to hurry up and scrape together all the information I can find about a case nobody gives a good goddamn about and to put myself completely at your service. Which I’m delighted to do, of course, but I want to know what this is all about, I’m not going to blunder into something I’m in the dark about.”
The man had a point. “Kidnapping and murder,” Giulio put it tersely. “We’re working to identify those responsible, but discreetly.”
“How discreetly?”
“As discreetly as necessary.”
“Which means nobody knows a fucking thing,” Robutti laughed with gusto as he handed over the file. With that gesture, the inspector made clear he was willing to help and didn’t need to be looped in on other details. Campagna thanked him with a smile.
He started leafing through the various police reports. Nothing useful, just routine checks and rundowns. “I was hoping to find something I didn’t already know,” said the policeman from Padua as he carefully studied the first decent photograph he’d seen of Guido Di Lello.
A pointy little face, made manly and just barely interesting by a mustache and goatee, glasses with very light frames, dark eyes that protruded slightly, a shifty gaze, longish wavy hair hanging over his collar. He felt a twinge of disappointment and wondered just what his wealthy lover had found so irresistible.
“This poor idiot was a complete dick face, I have to say,” Robutti commented, without malice. “Still, I’ve done a fair bit of work for you and I’ve more than earned the lunch that you’re going to treat me to in less than an hour,” he announced, pulling a steno pad fat with scribbled notes out of his desk drawer.
It took him a few minutes to summarize dates, identities, family ties, and street addresses, before revealing his true skills as a first-rate investigator. “Having no idea as to the reasons for your request but guessing that they were fairly serious, I did my best to flesh out the individual’s personality,” he clarified as he glanced through his notes. “This Guido Di Lello wasn’t especially well liked in academic circles. He was one of those guys who thinks the world is against him. He’d write articles viciously lambasting books written by certain of his colleagues, while at the same time pestering others to review books of his own, which he was obviously assigning to his students. I talked to one academic who’d known him forever and he told me flat out that Di Lello was, professionally and personally speaking, ‘small.’ Spiteful, resentful, and envious, with no career potential to speak of, but just clever enough to win the heart of the daughter of someone powerful enough to toss him work as an assistant professor.”
“And what do we know about his girlfriend?”
Robutti licked his finger and searched for the right page of notes. “Enrica Sironi, a chubby little woman with poetic aspirations. Younger than Di Lello and head-over-heels in love with him. In fact, she seems unable to get over what happened to him. She can’t think about anything else and every day she wakes up with a new theory, each one more fanciful and geographically far-flung than the last.”
“Poor thing,” Giulio commented sincerely. “Not to know, never to be sure, with nothing but an endless list of questions about her fiancé’s disappearance—it must be pure torture.”
“I certainly don’t envy her.”
“What about friends, how he spent his free time, hobbies aboveboard or less than?”
“Music. He was the terrible lead guitarist in an ABBA cover band.”
“ABBA?”
“The whole deal: wigs, costumes, repertoire. They tried to be just like them, but they were sort of pathetic. He justified it with the kind of extended mental masturbation I couldn’t even begin to repeat back to you,” Robutti explained while hunting for a video on YouTube.
Campagna held out for two minutes then asked his colleague to spare him the rest. He’d seen enough. “I just can’t seem to figure the guy out,” he confessed.
The other man shrugged. “A small man,” he repeated. “A conceited blowhard. The world we live in is pretty much infested with guys like him. The smart ones climb to the top, have successful careers. They get elected to parliament, they get academic chairs at top universities, or seats on the boards of banks and major corporations. Now, I’m not interested in talking about politics, all I want to do at lunch is gossip, but why do you think this country is falling apart?”
Giulio nodded with conviction, because he was certain that Italy had already lost out once and for all. In fact, he was trying to persuade Ilaria to study abroad, and secretly hoped she’d never return home at all.
But he hadn’t taken a train all the way down to Rome to discuss politics and national destinies, so he forced Robutti to go back to the topic of the case at hand. He told him about the man’s secret affair without specifying his lover’s identity, and he talked about the considerable organizational and operative capabilities of whatever gang it was that had kidnapped and murdered the professor, all of which culminated in a very specific investigative query: That is, as far as his own experience and the information he’d gathered went, could the conspiracy to commit this criminal act have sprung from the circles in which Guido Di Lello moved?
“I’m afraid I’d honestly have to rule that out,” his colleague replied after a short pause, “but I can’t be a hundred percent certain of that, because just as honestly I’d have to say that even if we had an entire team of investigators working on it, we’d still never know. First of all, because too much time has gone by, and next because it would be practically impossible to prove that supposedly confidential information had been overheard by the wrong people. You’re going to need to narrow the hunt to Padua, where the first crime was committed: the kidnapping itself.”
Campagna had been hoping for a different answer, but he knew Robutti was right. The fact was that his city was full of closed-circuit surveillance cameras and citizens who were all too willing to testify in court. But the professor had stepped off the train and vanished into thin air. And now it was his job to get back on that same train and go home in search of a clue,
any clue at all.
“I hope you’re taking me somewhere that serves good Roman cuisine. Pasta all’amatriciana, spaghetti alla carbonara . . .” Giulio said, changing the subject.
“Not on your life! I’m from Savona. A fellow Ligurian has started a trattoria here that makes me think I’m back at my mother’s table.”
Giulio couldn’t manage to restrain a grimace of disappointment. Robutti shook his head and snickered. “All right, all right, I’ll take you out for a rigatoni alla pajata that’s out of this world. But you don’t know what you’re missing . . . for that matter, you’re from the Veneto and you all are certainly anything but gourmands, all you have is a couple of pathetic ragtag recipes.”
“Don’t push it,” Campagna said, mock-menacingly. “Otherwise I’ll keep certain pieces of gossip to myself that, I assure you, are juicier than the capòn magro.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I wondered why Campagna had decided to dress like a country bumpkin. It wasn’t just that he had terrible taste in clothes; it was clearly a conscious choice. There was a time in my life when I dressed like a blues singer from Louisiana but the reason was that I was trying to stand out, trying to tell the world I had once been a musician, after jail had thoroughly ruined my singing voice. Now I missed my python skin boots, the belts with buckles that weighed in at close to two pounds of scrap metal, the stovepipe jeans, and the garishly colored raw linen shirts, but at a certain point the basic imperatives of survival had forced me to start dressing like everyone else. That change hadn’t been painless. I’d started shopping in clothing stores where the clerks did their best once they understood I was a hopeless case, and I just let them try.
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