Poisonville

by Massimo Carlotto

  “I’d like to do it, if that’s possible.”

  “No problem. Drop by the court building to pick up the authorization for a visit.”

  In the hospital I showed the paper with the prosecutor’s signature to the detention officer outside Lucio’s room. Lucio was flat on his back in a special bed designed for trauma victims. He was in bad shape, but the doctors had declared that he was no longer in danger. He looked at me with curiosity.

  “I know you,” he managed to say. His upper lip had been stitched all the way up to the base of the nose, and he was missing two of his bottom front teeth. “You’re Francesco Visentin.”

  I pulled up a chair and sat by the side of the bed. “I have some bad news for you.”

  He squinted unhappily. “I know all about it,” he said quickly. “The nurses told me.”

  “I’m sorry you had to find out like that.”

  “They were happy to give me bad news,” he commented. “Here everyone hates me.”

  He reached out with one hand and took a glass off the night table. He carefully inserted the straw into his mouth. “I don’t give a crap about that asshole. My home life was pure hell,” he went on. “But I am sort of sorry about Alvise. He was crazy, there’s no doubt about that. But he was okay, you know. He’d come to visit me, and talk and talk about taking me back to Argentina with him. Didn’t anybody ever tell him how many years I’m going to spend in prison?”

  The boy was striking poses. He wanted to seem like a gangster in the movies, but he was pathetic.

  “I’d like to take your case, be your defense lawyer.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Alvise asked me to.”

  He shrugged. “Fine by me. You’d be better than the court-appointed lawyer, that’s for sure.”

  “How did you meet Giovanna?” I asked him suddenly.

  He made a grimace that looked vaguely like a smile. “One day she waited outside my school and introduced herself. That’s all.”

  “How did she find out you were brother and sister?”

  “Someone told her. But I don’t know who.”

  “How many times did you see her?”

  “I don’t know, three or four times. We would meet in a restaurant in Treviso.”

  I stood up and moved the chair back to the wall. “I’ll be back to bring you papers to sign, naming me as your defense lawyer.”

  “I’m worried about my mother,” he said. “She’s an alcoholic and she needs treatment.”

  “I’ll talk to family services.”

  “Papa—I mean Zuglio—had a sizable chunk of money set aside. Momma can afford to go to a private clinic.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I promised.

  I stuck my hand out. He gripped it. “I’m sorry about Giovanna,” he said softly.

  I gave him a quick, formal smile, and I turned to leave.

  “I saw her that night,” he whispered uncertainly.

  I turned on my heel. “The night of the murder?”

  He nodded. “I was driving around with the guys and I saw her park her car in the front driveway of a house.”

  “What time was it?”

  “It must have been one.”

  “You’re wrong. At that time of night she was at home, in bed with her lover.”

  “It was Giovanna. I’m certain of it,” he replied firmly. “Then, around four-thirty I came back by and her car was still there.”

  I shook my head in annoyance. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I warned him harshly. “Giovanna was already dead by four-o’clock.”

  Lucio puffed out his cheeks in irritation. “They’re wrong about the time. If you don’t believe me, ask the Contessa.”

  “What does Selvaggia have to do with it?”

  “I saw her Mercedes drive out of the mansion.”

  * * *

  “Filippo! What are you doing in the dark!” Selvaggia had entered the studio like a gust of wind. She’d turned on the light and strode across the big room, busily opening the shutters covering the three big windows, allowing daylight to flood into the room.

  Filippo didn’t move from the stool where he sat, staring at his finished sculpture.

  “It’s done, what do you think of it?” asked Filippo as he sat contemplating the sculpture.

  Selvaggia gave the sculpture a quick and distracted glance and said only: “What a waste of time. Like the time you waste trying to drag me into Giovanna’s murder.”

  Filippo smiled. “The great Moroncini truly has an unusual idea of professional confidentiality.”

  “Careful Filippo, don’t push me.”

  “Or you’ll do what?” This was the first time that he’d challenged her so openly.

  He wasn’t expecting his mother’s reaction: she began to chuckle, quietly at first, and then harder and harder, finally in uncontrolled and raucous gales of laughter.

  “Oh, you really are an idiot,” she said, as she laughed.

  Then she left the studio, leaving the door open behind her.

  Filippo stood up. He closed the shutters again. He walked over to the main switch and turned off the overhead lights. He clumped back across the room, limping across the space he knew by heart, and sat down on his work stool, in front of the sculpture. Running his fingers along the wire, he found the push-switch that controlled the spotlight focused on the sculpture. With a constant, obsessive rhythm, he began turning it on and off, on and off.

  CLICK. CLACK. Dark. Light.

  The sculpture was finished. And she hadn’t even looked at it.

  Dark. Light.

  There the sculpture sat, before him. A smooth, white, waxen mother.

  He need only push his thumb on the switch and his mother disappeared. Another click and that chilly, funereal image returned to weigh him down.

  The darkness was comforting. The light was distressing.

  The work of the past year was finished, and there was nothing left to be done, no way to improve on it.

  “A waste of time,” she’d called it.

  There was nothing left to do but destroy it. Or transform it. Create a new sculpture. A rebirth from his mother’s dead body. From a portrait of his mother to a self-portrait.

  Light. He needed to bring light. Enough with running away. Enough with chasing the one who had always escaped him.

  He needed to use the red-hot iron to carve deep within himself. Without subterfuges. Without extenuating circumstances.

  He’d start from the external wounds, and then he’d dig down to remove the internal ones.

  Reshape himself, without fear. Out of the darkness.

  He’d start from the bottom, from his fractured femur. Then, as soon as he felt ready, he would carve into the right cheek. Then he’d venture into the slight deviation of the nasal septum. He’d shrink the eyes and reshape the hair. He’d eliminate the breasts and round out the biceps. Wrists and ankles could remain as they were, slender and elegant.

  A metamorphosis. A passage from death to life.

  Dark. Light. Her. Him. With iron and with fire.

  Not a son anymore.

  To work.

  Light. And then? Dark.

  * * *

  The house described by Lucio was a small but elegant one-story building, set at the center of a broad lawn and surrounded by a towering and impenetrable boxwood hedge. You couldn’t see anything from the street, and it had taken a considerable effort just to find the driveway. I stepped out of my car and walked over to the front door. I rang the bell, even though I was certain there was no one inside. I walked around the house, trying to peep in through the wooden shutters, but they were shut tight. Lucio’s story made no sense. He couldn’t possibly have seen Giovanna the night of the murder; it must have been the night before, or a few nights before. A
nd what would she be doing there with the Contessa? They couldn’t stand the sight of one another, and they certainly had no reason to be socializing at night. But, if the boy was telling the truth, I might finally be looking at the house in the video. That was why I did not hesitate to slip a heavy-duty screwdriver between the two panels of one of the shutters. The wood strained and then cracked open with a sharp sound. Behind it was a window covered by filmy curtains that blocked my view. I had no choice but to force it open in turn. The sound of an alarm siren split the air. After an initial moment of panic, I recovered my nerves and pushed the window open. I immediately recognized the cupboard, the kitchen table, and the chairs. And the door that Giovanna had shut in the camera’s face. I heard her voice repeating: “Come on, cut it out.”

  “I found you, you bastard,” I shouted, louder than the wailing alarm.

  The officer on desk duty informed me that this was the inspector’s day off. I told him that I urgently needed to speak with him, but it was only after insisting at length, and only with great reluctance, that he told me that I could find him at the bocce lanes at a certain tavern down by the river.

  Mele was playing a team bocce match. He was on the same team as the town barber. His adversaries were ahead, with two bocce balls practically glued to the little boccino ball. After talking it over with his teammate, he took a short run-up to the line and then hurled the bocce ball in a low flat arc that sent the boccino whizzing against the far wall.

  I called his name. He came over, cleaning his hands on his handkerchief. “Every so often I come here to teach the Venetians how to play,” he joked. Then he noticed how tense I was. “What’s up?”

  I pulled Giovanna’s digital camera out of my pocket. “I have something to show you.”

  Mele said goodbye to his friends, to a chorus of objections at the interruption to the match. We climbed into his car. I showed him the video and told him about Lucio and the house in the suburbs.

  “You say you set off the alarm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then someone must have broken in, I take it?”

  “Certainly, it was me.”

  He grabbed me by the arm. “We have no idea who broke in,” he corrected me. “All we know is that a crime may have been committed. For all we know, the burglars are still inside the house.”

  “Inspector, I don’t understand,” I blurted out impatiently.

  He smiled. “If we think of it that way, then there’s no need to ask the prosecutor for a search warrant.”

  “Are you saying you don’t trust Zan?”

  Mele didn’t answer. “Go to the house and wait for me there. I’m going to run by the barracks and get an agent from the forensic office.”

  “But why? All we need to do is find out who owns the house and we’ll know the murderer’s name.”

  “No, that’s not enough. Now we’re going to do things my way.”

  The alarm had stopped wailing. The sergeant from the forensic office slipped on a pair of latex gloves, stepped in through the window that I had forced open, and unlocked the front door for the two of us.

  “I disconnected the alarm,” he announced.

  “Don’t touch anything, Francesco,” the inspector warned me.

  The house was completely empty, except for the furniture. The expert from the forensic office only managed to find a few blurry fingerprints. “Inspector, this place has been cleaned professionally.”

  “Let’s take a look at the bathroom,” said Mele.

  The sergeant pulled out a long narrow pair of steel tweezers and began reaching down into the bathtub drain. He managed to extract a few long blonde hairs and placed them carefully into a clear plastic bag.

  “Do you think that’s Giovanna’s hair?” I asked.

  He nodded confidently. “I think she was killed here.”

  “Here? But her body was found in the bathtub in her house.”

  “But there were no fingerprints other than yours, Giovanna’s, and the cleaning woman’s. In order to erase his own fingerprints, the killer would have had to erase yours as well. That was the first piece of evidence that aroused my suspicions,” he explained. “And then there was another detail. The bathwater found in her lungs contained bath salts that didn’t match the ones found at her house. And there were minor abrasions on her heels, as if the body had been dragged for several yards.”

  “I don’t understand why the killer would have run such risks to take Giovanna’s body back to her house.”

  “We’re dealing with a smart but careless murderer,” he said. “He tried to convince us that Giovanna was the victim of a mishap, but he committed a series of errors.”

  Then I suddenly remembered an important detail. “If Giovanna was killed here, then it means that Lucio told the truth about the Contessa, too.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he grunted. “Though it strikes me as unlikely. What was she doing here with Giovanna and her lover? Having an orgy?”

  I had another theory, but this wasn’t the time to talk about it. “Are you going to tell Zan about this?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he replied. “First I want to find out the results of the tests on the hair samples. In the meanwhile, I’m going to find out who owns this house and do some discreet investigating. I want to present an airtight report.”

  “Discreet investigations are also slow investigations,” I commented.

  “It’s been more than a month and a half since the murder. Another day or two won’t change a thing,” he replied. “The important thing is to catch the killer.”

  The sergeant did his best to repair the shutter that I had forced open, and we left the house.

  “I don’t need to tell you not to speak to anyone about all this. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I find out something,” said Mele. Then he pulled the digital camera out of his jacket pocket and extended it to me. “We don’t need to include this in the official evidence. At least for the moment.”

  I smiled in gratitude and got into my car.

  * * *

  Antonio Visentin wasn’t very happy with Selvaggia’s latest maneuver. They weren’t handling their children right at all. Professor Moroncini’s report laid out a clinical picture that made Filippo out to be little more than an idiot with no independent judgment, a danger to himself and therefore to society at large.

  The appointment with the local magistrate who would order the interdiction if he found just cause was set for the following morning, and Visentin had decided to make a last attempt with Filippo, even though he knew it would spur Selvaggia’s wrath. But in Visentin’s eyes, their children offered the sole possibility of living on after one’s own death, and continuing through them into the future. To have Filippo interdicted would mean chopping off the deepest roots, breaking off the continuity through family inheritance that had allowed their families to rule and flourish through all the twists and turns of history, through all the political regimes. Every political and social transformation in the history of the Northeast had been guided and controlled by their families. And Selvaggia could not fully understand this. For the first time, he had sensed the depth of the difference between them. An ocean as vast as the dozens of generations that had resulted in Antonio Visentin. Selvaggia was violating the only true taboo: the hereditary taboo. And Visentin felt obliged to prevent her from breaking it. For all the transformations sweeping the Northeast, the power of the families must remain intact. Otherwise, it would be the beginning of the end for all of them.

  When he saw him come into his studio, Filippo hastily threw a white sheet over the sculpture he was working on. Visentin discussed the topic tactfully, explaining the legal and psychological consequences of interdiction, the mark of shame that this legal act would stamp on the name of the Calchi Renier family. They were the same arguments that he had attempted to use on Selvaggia, but to no ef
fect. He was surprised and disappointed to see Filippo’s obedient, even passive attitude.

  “I’ve always done what my mother told me to do,” he had answered. “If this is what my mother wants, so be it. All things considered, I don’t really care either way.”

  The venerable old lawyer had insisted, he’d spoken to him like a father, but Filippo had closed down, shutting himself up in a mute obstinacy that had persuaded the lawyer that Selvaggia might well be right. With Filippo, sole heir to the Calchi Renier fortune, the dynasty was on the verge of extinction. Selvaggia had told him about Filippo’s latest act of folly. The Contessa had arranged for a date between her son and Isabella Beghin, a girl of unusual beauty and a tractable personality, the daughter of the Beghin family that owned the tanneries. You might say that Selvaggia had selected her genetically. But during their first date, Filippo had convinced her that he had barely a year left to live. The girl had fled without a backward glance, after earnestly advising Filippo to seek medical help overseas. By now, Filippo lived in an isolation that bordered on the autistic. How could she entrust her son with business responsibilities if he accused his mother of being an accomplice to murder? And, in the end, Visentin had left that gloomy studio persuaded that, after all, interdiction was the only reasonable solution.

  Visentin was growing confused about everything, about what was right and what was wrong. Maybe Selvaggia had been right when, during their last argument about Filippo, she had called him the biggest hypocrite in the land of the hypocrites, and had then added: “You and I are a perfect pair of carnivores: a lioness and a jackal, and what he have in common is our love for gazelles.”

  The only difference between them was that Selvaggia had no hesitation in saying it, while it frightened him even to think it.

  * * *

  Inspector Mele had nothing to report for three long days. Three days of intolerable anxiety. Then he showed up late on the third night. It had been snowing for a few hours. Fresh wet snow that didn’t stick to the ground. When I was a little boy, the snow lasted for a whole week.