Well, we’ve talked about it in our neck of the woods, too, thought Stefania, but only “confidentially.”
“But what do you think about it?” she asked.
“About the Cappellettis or the road?”
Stefania smiled.
“What I think is of no importance. It’s a fact, however, that the road passes right through their property, and that the value of the land and chalets in that area has already gone up, and it’s also true that the road project was approved after the senator’s election, and not before. But that all might be a coincidence. What do you think, Inspector?”
Stefania had the impression he was good-naturedly pulling her leg and felt uneasy, but she decided, nevertheless, to continue the discussion. She said the first thing that came into her head.
“I think that wealth and power are like a drug for some people. They always want more, whatever the cost. These rich and powerful families . . .”
She stopped, sensing Valli’s mocking gaze on her.
“Wiser words were never said, Inspector, but I’m afraid I have to disappoint you. This isn’t some sort of Lake Como Dynasty—the Cappellettis’ wealth doesn’t go that far back in time.”
“What do you mean?”
“My family is from Lanzo. I was born there and go back there whenever I can. Many in town know it, and some of the older folks even remember it.”
“Remember what?”
“When they were a family like any other, maybe even poorer than the others, since they were in Pian delle Noci, a remote district that didn’t even have a proper road leading to it at the time. A lot of children, like everyone else, a cow, a few chickens, and that was it. Their farmhouse is still there, but now there’s a road leading there, a very fine road, and they’ve actually turned it into a vacation rental with Tuscan furnishings.”
“I believe I’ve heard mention that the senator likes to proudly claim his humble family origins and talk about the struggle of surviving in a beautiful but impoverished environment.”
“Yes, he talks about it the way the Americans talk about the Far West, but he usually leaves out one detail, which is that his family’s wealth comes from smuggling.”
Stefania assumed a jaded air.
“Well, around here smuggling’s become some kind of epic tradition, with its legends and heroes. Nobody’s shocked by anything anymore—actually, they write good songs about it.”
“Sure, but they weren’t all smuggling human beings.”
3
“Hi, Cami, I just wanted to tell you I’ll be home by six-thirty, so you wouldn’t worry. Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine, Mommy. Me and Martina have done everything.”
“What do you mean, ‘everything’? Do you mean you’ve already done your homework and taken your bath and Martina has already made supper?”
“No, there’s very little homework tonight, I’ll do it later, and I can take my bath later, too, because we made a surprise for you that you’ll never guess, but you’ll see. Okay, we’ll be waiting for you, bye,” Camilla said, then hung up.
Stefania, feeling hardly reassured, accelerated. Or, she tried to accelerate, because in that traffic there was no way to go any faster than twenty-five miles an hour.
The last time Camilla said everything was fine and she had a surprise for her, Stefania had found all the furniture pushed up against a wall, the table chairs arranged in a circle, and her favorite bedspreads stretched across them, because “We were playing Indians, Mommy, and this is our tent.” Needless to say, Martina and Camilla had painted their faces, and it had taken half an hour to clean the girl up.
What could they have done this time? Stefania wondered with apprehension. Guido, her ex-husband, said that in hiring Martina she’d merely taken on another little girl instead of a proper babysitter.
But Stefania liked Martina a lot. She was the eldest daughter of Consalvo, one of their senior police officers, who was getting ready to retire.
Years earlier, when Stefania was still pregnant, Consalvo had told her: “Don’t worry, Inspector, when you need a hand I’ll send my Tina over, she’s a good girl and is very patient with little children. She has three younger brothers and takes care of them herself. She needs a little extra money for herself, poor girl. We can barely help her with her studies, and the rest is up to her.”
Stefania had immediately fallen in love with the girl’s smiling, round, makeup-less face, her black curls and slender figure. She wasn’t much of a cook and didn’t even know how to iron, but she just loved children.
And so Martina had now been with them for six years, cheerfully adding to the chaos of their household. Stefania wouldn’t have wanted any other babysitter, although sometimes . . .
At the start of Viale Varese, she dived into the usual downtown traffic. Returning from Switzerland, where she’d gone to get gasoline and provisions of chocolate, was always like this. From Cernobbio on, there was an endless queue of cars. At any time of the day, in every season. From there, if all went well, it would take her at least another fifteen minutes to get home. She distractedly turned on the car radio.
Valli’s words came back to her, along with images that those words called to mind: barely visible paths in the woods, hurried, silent steps, ears pricked up in the surrounding dark. A suitcase, perhaps, the past left behind, and an uncertain future ahead. Perhaps.
“Here,” Valli had said, referring to the site where the remains had been found, “we’re just a few steps from the Swiss border, and between ’43 and ’45 there were a lot of people traveling along what were traditionally the smugglers’ trails. People fleeing persecution, political refugees, partisans, former Fascists, even. But mostly Jews, who were the most defenseless and who gave the most to those who took them across.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because they were no longer anybody: they used false names, false documents, they’d managed by chance to survive among families that had vanished onto trains as though into thin air, and they themselves risked vanishing into thin air. Nobody would know for a long time, maybe never again, whether they’d managed to get away or were captured. Who died and how. During those months the end of the war seemed so far away. And on top of everything else, the Jews paid, and paid well, all these intermediaries, these mountain guides, these cogs in the extragovernmental system of the contrabandeers—though there were, of course, a few who did it out of Christian charity or for political reasons. Some were probably even playing a double game.”
“You mean they let them get caught?”
“Yes, or they demanded more money at a certain point during the escape, with the threat of turning them in if they didn’t pay. Have you ever read Renzo De Felice? His book on the subject is quite exhaustive.”
Stefania sat there in silence.
“Some more coffee, Inspector?”
“No, thanks, but if you don’t mind I’d like to smoke a cigarette.”
“Only if you offer me one, too.”
Stefania smiled.
She opened the front door grumbling to herself because nobody had come to let her in.
“Camilla! Martina! Where are you? What the hell is going on?”
She stopped suddenly, stumbling over the carpet. The red cat meowed. The apartment was in total darkness and there was a sweet sort of burnt smell in the air.
“Martina! Camilla!” she called again.
She climbed the stairs at the entrance, her right hand touching the wall. From the landing she headed for the living room. At that moment all the lights came on. She opened her eyes wide. The apartment was full of colored balloons—on the floor, on the walls, attached to the paintings, on the ceilings, hanging from the door and window handles. Camilla and Martina ran up to her, laughing, and put one of those cone-shaped hats, covered with spangles, on her head.
“Happy b
irthday to you, happy birthday to you . . .”
Right! It was March 26 and her forty-fifth birthday. Nobody had remembered, not even Stefania, at least not until that moment.
Stefania felt a lump rise in her throat, but she smiled and didn’t show it. Camilla and Martina took her by the arms and dragged her towards the kitchen table, where towered a huge, formless cake covered by a dense layer of sprinkles and a forest of precariously balanced candles. Popcorn, soda pop, potato chips.
“See what a nice cake we made, Mommy? We made it ourselves, and it came out perfect. Now you’re supposed to blow out the candles!”
They started laughing and dancing and popping the balloons. As they ate the cake the sprinkles fell all over the place, onto the chairs and the floor.
When Martina left to meet up with some friends, Camilla threw herself down on the couch.
“That was fun, but now I’m really tired, Mommy, so I’m gonna watch a little TV.”
“And what about your homework?” asked Stefania.
“Okay, I’ll do it now.” And she immediately fell asleep.
Stefania gathered up the remains of the balloons and everything else, and filled the dishwasher with the stack of dishes and pans cluttering the sink. Then she turned off the TV.
She took Camilla in her arms and carried her into her room. She didn’t wake up even when she put her pajamas on her.
Stefania went out onto the balcony. It was a clear, cold night full of stars. She lit a cigarette, then buried her face in her hands and started crying, in silence.
“If you ask me, it would have been better not to waste a roll of film than to take pictures like this,” Piras huffed as he opened the envelope that had just arrived from the Lanzo station.
Stefania examined them one by one. “Yes, they really aren’t top-notch. Put them in the file with everything else. What’s done is done. What about the testimonies?” Stefania asked her other colleague.
Lucchesi raised his chin to indicate a sealed envelope on the desk.
“We’re gonna go, boss. We’ll be outside the stadium till late tonight. The Italy Cup.”
“Okay, guys, see you later. Go Como!” she exclaimed ironically.
She opened the envelope and started reading.
All the workers and the site foreman present at the scene when the remains were found had been heard from. Fifteen utterly useless depositions.
What imagination, thought Stefania. Only the clowns in Lanzo could think of getting testimonies from every single worker at a huge worksite, including those who were working two miles away that day.
But where the hell was the guy operating the excavator?
She pulled from the stack the deposition of one Giandomenico Vitali, “authorized machine operator specialized in earthmoving.” Stefania studied it carefully. The style of the person taking the deposition was in perfect alignment with that of the workman.
“The foreman gave me the order to knock down whatever was left of the cottage and to load all the rubble onto the truck. After knocking down part of a stone drywall about four and a half feet high, I pointed the stick of the shovel at the foundation to load it up, but during the second maneuver I realized the bucket was coming up empty. So I got closer and noticed there was now a deep hole next to the wall. At that point I went into the hole and aimed my flashlight inside and saw bones and other stuff at the back. And so I informed the foreman right away.” Read, signed, and approved.
Stefania thought about this for a moment, then took two photos out of the other envelope. The first had been taken in bright daylight from a few meters away from the ruin. On the left you could still clearly see the pile of rocks and earth freshly moved, corresponding perfectly with the scoop of the excavator. On the right, however, about three feet of wall was still standing. It was slightly hidden by the roots of a wild fig tree that had grown on top of it, which she’d already noticed when she was at the site. The right edge of the wall was sharp, and some of the stones might well be cornerstones. Curiously, however, the sharp edge, which looked like a corner of the house, plunged into the ground. The “hole,” as the worker called it, was behind this length of wall, but the underground hollow extended a good ways to the right of the corner, because the little well, or whatever it was, was almost two meters long, and one of its sides went below and to the right of the corner.
The other photo showed the entire cottage—or rather, the entire ruin—from a certain distance, and enabled one to see its placement in the surroundings: the part where the length of wall rose above the underground chamber was without a doubt towards the mountain, but the underground “room” extended for a brief stretch farther to the right, into the part that must have been buried.
Yes, of course, thought Stefania: towards the mountain, not into the mountain. The other photos, shot inside the little underground room, were utterly indecipherable, black on black. You couldn’t even see the man’s bones and remains.
She grabbed the phone and called Giulio Allevi.
“Hi. Any news on those specimens I sent down to you?”
“Hi. You could at least ask me how I am.”
“You’re always perfectly fine, Giulio. You’re a rock. Have you found out anything interesting?”
“Nothing special. It’s not the most thrilling of cases, Stefania. Selvini left an envelope for you. He wants you to call him.”
Giulio always knew everything about everyone.
“But where’s the envelope now?”
“I’ve got it here, so you’ll have to come and have it. Then I can get a good look at you once and for all.”
“Around ten-thirty okay?”
“Okay, I’ll be waiting. And when are we getting married?”
“Later, after you give me the envelope. Be sure you’re ready.”
Downstairs she ran into Marino, who was busy distributing the mail.
“Good morning, Inspector. Carboni’s looking for you. He said that if I saw you I should tell you—”
“Except that you never saw me this morning, Marino,” Stefania said hurriedly, winking at him.
“And what about your mail?”
“Read it yourself and tell me about it later.”
She went out through the garage door and took a squad car, telling a colleague that she was going to see Allevi. Not that she didn’t want to talk to Carboni, but, first of all, she had nothing concrete to tell him, and second, he might not have approved of what she had in mind. Carboni was someone who tried to avoid trouble as a matter of principle. But he always ended up doing the right thing.
It was better to wait and present him with a fait accompli.
“Nice. Panoramic position, breathtaking view of the lake. With a little fixing up, it could be the perfect place. But is it right for us?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s the cottage at San Primo where we found those bones,” said Stefania.
“Then I’m not interested.”
“Come on, look at that piece of wall on the left.”
“I see it. And so?”
“Does that look normal to you, for it to end that way, at a right angle against the embankment? Doesn’t that look to you like the corner between the side and the back of the cottage?”
Giulio studied the photo, bringing it up to the tip of his nose.
“You’re right, it looks like the rear corner—but that wouldn’t make sense, no stone mason would build an outer wall right up against an embankment, without leaving a little air space in between.”
He looked at the photo a third time, then looked at Stefania, who pressed him.
“Okay, and so?”
“And so I can imagine that the cottage was originally freestanding on that side, too, and that later, for whatever reason, the embankment slid down, enveloping the whole back of the house, maybe even bringing down some other walls with it
. And time and the vegetation took care of the rest.”
Bingo! thought Stefania.
“Right. If you walk past it without paying attention it almost looks like a natural slope. You see the crumbling walls, it could be just about anything. Nobody’s going to imagine that there’s an empty space underneath, a cellar, a nevera or whatever it is—also because you don’t see any door leading to it. And of course there was no trapdoor leading to it from the inside, because in that case we would have seen at least some kind of opening in the vault, even if the wooden lid had rotted in the meanwhile.”
“Okay, I’ve got that, but where do you want to go with this?”
“I want to be able to say that that young man was killed and then put in the nevera. But whoever killed him had a reason for not wanting the body to be found, so he managed to make the embankment behind the house collapse, completely covering the rear entrance to the cellar, below the ground and the floor level of the cottage. At any rate, whoever it was, they also brought down part of the outer wall, even though there was no need, since at that point the house looked as if it was up against the bank.”
Giulio looked pensive.
“But if we assume people were looking for a missing person, might they not have thought of looking in that very place, seeing that the embankment had collapsed and maybe even the walls, even if they only thought it was all an accident?”
“If anyone was looking for a missing person and suspected he might be in that area, then, yes, at least at first, people who knew the area might have thought of it. But there’s also the possibility that nobody knew that person was missing, or could have imagined he would be there, for whatever reason. At any rate, time passed, and meanwhile the vegetation grew and memories faded.”
“Okay, Inspector, so far, it makes sense. But what about the owners of the cottage? Maybe it was inhabited, at least in the summer. And what if they had wanted to rebuild it? They would have found the corpse inside.”
Shadows on the Lake Page 4
