“An espresso with a little steamed milk,” I ordered.
When Carla heard my voice, she lowered the newspaper she was reading and stared hard at me. “I thought you only frequented the piazza café,” she said sarcastically. “This is hardly up to your usual level.”
I ignored her and sat down across from her. “What do you want?” she asked in a serious tone of voice.
I pulled the yellow sticky note out of my pocket and placed it in front of her. “What does this mean?”
“Nothing you’d be interested in.”
“Fine. I’ll take it to Inspector Mele. He’ll be sure to come ask you about it.”
Carla turned pale. “No, don’t do it.”
“Then answer my question.”
“Who else has seen it?”
“No one else. But what’s all the mystery about?”
She bit her lip. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her heavy jacket. Then she remembered that she couldn’t smoke indoors and cursed under her breath.
“Well?” I insisted.
Carla didn’t answer. She seemed frightened.
“I didn’t kill Giovanna. You have to believe me,” I said quietly and very calmly. “I want to find out who did. If you know something, you have to tell me.”
Carla tore open a sugar packet and poured it into her cappuccino. She slowly stirred it. Then she bit into her pastry.
“Frozen. It’s disgusting!” she blurted out. “There was a time when cafés got their pastries from local shops. Those were real pastries. Nowadays, they buy them by the bag, frozen, and pop them into the microwave. Just so they can earn an extra euro here and there.”
I nodded in agreement. Carla was stalling to try to figure out if she could trust me. I decided not to push her. My espresso was served, and I gulped it down.
“Even the milk is different now,” I said. “It used to taste of hay.”
“Giovanna didn’t like it.”
“She couldn’t even stand the smell of milk. She drank fruit juice for breakfast.”
“Pear juice.”
“Or lately, mixed carrot juice, other things like that.”
She stared at me yet again. “I didn’t kill her,” I repeated.
She pulled her coin purse out of her handbag and paid for breakfast. “Let’s go,” she said.
After about ten minutes of driving she told me to stop the car. Until then she had only uttered terse instructions on which way to turn.
“Get out,” she said.
We were parked by the river bank. She pointed to an irrigation canal that flowed into the river through a huge cement pipe that ran through the levee that formed the river bank here from one side to the other. Then she gestured to me, and set off. I followed her. We walked through the fields for ten minutes or so, following the line of the canal; then we climbed to the top of a low hill. My shoes and the legs of my trousers were spattered with mud. I still didn’t understand the point of that hike through the countryside, but I was afraid to ask any questions. I was afraid she would change her mind.
When we got to the top, Carla stopped and pointed to an enclosed area, surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire. Aside from a couple of large dogs running back and forth inside the walls, it seemed deserted.
“That’s where they hide it,” she said.
“What?”
“The toxic waste.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” I asked impatiently.
Carla lit a cigarette. She took a deep drag and then, finally, decided to talk.
Giovanna had called her a year ago. Carla had just broken up with her fiancé. He had persuaded her to move down to Caserta with him; now Giovanna asked her if she wanted to come back to live in the Northeast. Carla told her she was willing, there was no longer anything to keep her down south in Campania. She wanted to start over in new surroundings. Giovanna found her a job in town, at the local health board as a lab technician. Carla was happy with her new situation; she couldn’t have asked for anything better. Her mother was happy too. After her husband had died, she was alone in the world, and it was a consolation to have her daughter living nearby. As soon as she returned to town, though, Carla understood that Giovanna hadn’t helped her to return home out of friendship alone. She wanted something in exchange. And she told Carla so in no uncertain terms. She suspected that there was a massive fraud involving the disposal of industrial wastes, and she was pretty sure that a number of officials of the local health board were implicated. According to Giovanna’s plans, Carla would try to investigate from within. Carla didn’t want to do it. Giovanna took it pretty hard, and to save their friendship, Carla agreed to keep her eyes wide open and her ears to the ground. At the local health board, she hadn’t discovered anything solid, but a sudden fish kill reported by some fishermen a couple of months earlier had persuaded her to do some tests on the water. The fish had been poisoned by chromium and other substances that had washed into the river from the canal that we’d walked along before climbing the hill.
“The tests that Giovanna was waiting for had to do with several soil samples that I had dug up around the fence,” she explained. “There is no doubt, the chemical substances come from that dirt, and the lot is nothing other than an illegal dump for toxic waste. Giovanna was right. The fraud exists, and it’s well organized.”
“Why didn’t you report this to the Carabinieri?”
“I used the laboratory secretly, the very same night that Giovanna was killed. After that, I had other things on my mind.”
“How does the fraud work?”
“It’s really very simple. Instead of disposing of the waste as required by law, the companies save money by handing it over to unscrupulous individuals who get rid of it. No questions asked.”
“And why was Giovanna investigating this fraud?”
“I don’t know why,” she replied, crumpling up her empty packet of cigarettes. “She wouldn’t tell me, but I think it had something to do with her father’s case.”
“Alvise? How did he fit in?”
Carla pointed to the walled-in area with a quick flick of her hand. “That’s where his furniture factory once stood. You know, the one that burned down.”
I thought it over. Alvise had told me the truth. Giovanna was digging into the old story, and somehow she had found a link with the toxic waste fraud.
“Alvise is here,” I told her.
“Really?” she exclaimed in surprise.
“He’s hiding in an abandoned villa,” I added. “He believes that Giovanna was killed to keep her from uncovering the plot that sent him to prison.”
Carla shook her head skeptically. “I don’t know. It’s possible.”
“Giovanna was killed by her lover. It was a crime of passion,” I pointed out. Carla nodded, with a trace of sadness in her eyes. “Take me to Alvise. I want to meet him.”
* * *
Hush, little baby, little baby of mine
I’ll stitch you a smock of cambric fine.
I’ll stitch it with thread of pink and of white
To your bride I will give it, ’twill be her delight.
It was the only nursery rhyme that Filippo could remember.
His aunt Adelina, his father’s sister, used to sing it to him; she was an elderly woman, and he remembered the way she smelled of vanilla, as well as the crocheted shawl she used to pull around her shoulders to ward off the chill of old age.
Of his early childhood with his mother, however, all that he could recall was the sensation of her lifting him up to hand him over to grandma, a ritual that was repeated every evening. She had never spent time with him, reading him fairytales or pretending to sleep to lull him into slumber. She had always been dressed in an evening gown; she was always impeccably elegant.
That was the image that
he was trying to shape in wax. The image of an unattainable woman.
It had taken a lot of insistence to persuade her to model for him. His mother had understood that there was a sarcastic edge to that request. Selvaggia used to model for the students of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts.
She understood that with his sculpture, Filippo wanted to remind her of who and what she had once been.
Moreover, all that gouging with a red-hot iron into a wax face that was beginning to resemble her in an unsettling fashion was making her feel quite uneasy.
Once she had tried to change his mind about using wax, suggesting that he do a plaster bust of her, but he had mischievously explained that plaster wasn’t suitable, that it was an unrefined material, and that for plaster first you had to use a clay model which, after the moulding, had to be split in two. And that he didn’t think he could bring himself to split her head in two.
Selvaggia had accepted out of vanity, but she soon regretted her decision, and now she was taking her revenge, with continual, intolerably late arrivals and other delays.
She had been missing their sessions for more than a week now. During the day she was far too busy with the Foundation, and at night she was involved with her latest lover.
And recently she had been showing up later and later. He didn’t care, he was happy to stay up late. His insomnia was his most powerful ally.
But the wait unnerved him. It was like the night Giovanna was killed, when his mother hadn’t come home. He had become so exasperated that he had been forced to go look for Francesco at the Club Diana.
And when he came home, she still wasn’t there. She finally arrived at dawn.
When he told her about his fight with Francesco she had flown into a rage, and had ordered him to forget about Giovanna. Then she had given him his usual cocktail of tranquilizers.
Neither of them could get to sleep, and so they wound up playing pinochle until lunchtime. They hadn’t spoken again, looking one another in the eye only when it was the other one’s turn to play. There was the usual silence full of tacit allusions that had built up over the years, and underscored by the snapping of the cards that his mother shuffled like a professional.
But not tonight. Tonight we have to talk. When will she be here? he wondered, overwhelmed with anxiety.
An hour later he heard the sound of tires on gravel.
He had built his studio on the ground floor so he could keep on eye on her comings and goings.
The sensation that his mother was trying to elude his surveillance drove him crazy.
“Who were you with?” he asked her as soon as she appeared at the door to his studio.
“The usual friends,” she answered laconically.
“Who?” he insisted.
Selvaggia puffed out her cheeks in annoyance. She tossed her bag on an armchair and took off her evening coat. She was as elegant as Nefertiti and her cleavage demanded the attention of any man older than twenty.
As she removed her Cartier earrings, she poured forth the list of friends like a schoolteacher with a migraine performing the enormously tiresome task of taking attendance.
“Tormene, Cesaretto, Ostan, Judge Morbelli . . .”
“That’s fine,” said Filippo with a note of hysteria in his voice. He stood up and grabbed the cordless phone.
“Let’s give them a call.”
“What are you doing, have you lost your mind? Put down that telephone. You can’t call people up at this time of night!”
They had battled for the phone. Filippo held it hidden behind his back, and in order to grab it out of his hands, Selvaggia was forced to wrap her arms around him in an embrace.
Filippo looked into her green cat’s eyes. No one could hope to resist that gaze. He let the cordless phone fall to the floor and held her arms firmly.
“Who are you seeing now?”
She boldly refused to answer.
He grabbed her by the wrists.
“I’m still young, I have every right to have fun . . .”
“With who?”
“Let me go,” she said as she broke free of his grasp. As she rubbed her wrists, she murmured:
“Davide Trevisan.”
“Davide Trevisan! I went to school with him. He’s my age, do you realize that?”
“I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, least of all yours.”
“Papa would turn over in his grave if he knew.”
“Oh spare me, your father! All he knew how to do was waste time with his wines, just like you. Don’t bring him into the argument, please. I gave your father everything I had.”
“You got quite a bit in return, it seems to me.”
The slap rang out unexpectedly.
Massaging his cheek, Filippo was flattered. It wasn’t a mother’s slap, it was the slap of a woman accustomed to keeping men at bay.
Selvaggia swept out of the room, throwing her earrings onto the floor as she went.
Filippo knelt to pick them up, yelling after her in a fairly steady voice:
“I’ll expect you tomorrow for the sitting.”
The sound of a slamming door was his mother’s eloquent response.
* * *
For the second time in two days, I was going back to Prunella’s house. I had something important I wanted to ask her. Alvise had left his country hovel, and had moved into Carla’s apartment. At first he resisted the idea, but Carla had insisted, after promising him that she would help him in his investigation. Even though it had been years since they had spoken, they had hugged warmly the first time. Carla, too, had always believed he was innocent.
“I knew him well,” she told me in the car. “He loved that furniture factory. He would never have set fire to it.”
“He was over his head in debt. Gambling debts,” I shot back.
Carla lit a cigarette. “He would have sold it. He wasn’t stupid enough to attempt such a clumsy piece of fraud.”
I apologized to Alvise. He had told the truth on least one point: Giovanna had pulled out the trial record and studied it carefully and thoroughly. She really was a fine lawyer. Carla told him the rest of the story. The news that the land where his furniture factory had once stood was now a secret toxic waste dump left him speechless. He picked up a two-liter bottle of red wine and took a long, gulping swig.
“Once there was a fine factory on that land, now it’s a fucking toxic waste dump,” he commented bitterly. “Before the trial, I had put all my property in Prunella’s name, to avoid losing everything in damages in case I was convicted. At least on that point your father was farsighted.”
And now I was on my way to see his ex-wife to ask for information about the land. She wasn’t actually his ex, to tell the truth. Alvise and Prunella had never divorced. For her, it was a sacrilege to break the sacred bond of matrimony.
When I parked outside the front gate, Prunella came to meet me with a rake in her hands.
“Gardeners cost a fortune nowadays,” she said, as if to justify herself. “I was just going in to have a cup of tea. Would you like to join me?”
“No, thanks,” I answered hastily. “I only have one question for you: what did you do with the land where the furniture factory stood?”
Prunella’s face darkened. “I sold it. About three years ago. I have nothing else, you know? Just this home. And I don’t know how I can ever keep it up in the years to come.”
“If you need money, just ask. Papa and I are at your disposal.”
“I’m not used to asking for charity. To think that we were once the wealthiest family in town. That damned Alvise managed to squander a fortune in just a few years.”
“There’s still Giovanna’s house and bank account,” I reminded her, annoyed by her squalid concerns.
“When the courts free up the estate. That’ll take a long time.”
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“Papa could help you with that. I’ll mention it to him,” I said, to cut short the conversation. “Do you remember who bought the land?”
“A scoundrel,” she replied without hesitation. “Alvise had already had dealings with him. He bought it for pennies. ‘It’s just a heap of charred ruins,’ he told me. And I sold it to him without asking questions; back then nobody was offering to buy. In town, they said the place had a curse on it because of the people who had died in the fire.”
“What was his name?”
“Giacomo Zuglio.”
Alvise Barovier was seated in a chair in the middle of Carla’s living room. A towel was wrapped around his neck, reaching all the way to his knees. Carla stood behind him, cutting his hair with a certain self-assurance.
“That hair made him look older,” she explained.
“Well?” Alvise asked.
I said the name. Barovier leapt to his feet and snatched the towel away from his neck. “Zuglio, that bastard son of a bitch,” he snarled. “He was the bank officer who destroyed my business. I had a contract to manufacture furniture for a chain of hotels in Turkey. It was two solid years of production, but he cut off my line of credit, out of the blue, and demanded all the money back. It was a knockout blow. I couldn’t find any other banks willing to help. My friends wouldn’t help either, for that matter.”
“Do you think that Zuglio was involved in the plot to send you to prison?” Carla asked.
“I’m sure of it. He made the first move, to establish a motive.”
I said nothing. I could easily have refuted the statement, but why bother? Alvise, however, noticed my silence.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
Poisonville Page 10
