by Marco Vichi
Dante kept looking at him with a mournful expression. He pulled hard on his cigar and kept spitting out large wads of tobacco. The inspector raised his receptacle in the air to request more fuel.
‘This whole business of the little girls is driving me crazy,’ he added, as Dante topped him up. He drank a long draught of grappa with gusto, following the burning sensation down his oesophagus. The inventor went over to his work table, stuck the remains of his cigar into a bottle already full of butts and immediately lit another with the flame of a candle.
‘If a wretch kills little girls, I imagine there must be, at the source of his crime, an even greater wrong,’ he said, emitting smoke from all his pores. Then he sat down slantwise on the bench, poking a finger through one of his smoke rings.
‘I only want to stop him,’ said Bordelli.
They remained silent for a few moments, smoking. The vials were already empty again. Dante refilled them once more to the brim and started walking about the great room. As the alcohol level in their blood increased, Bordelli sank ever deeper into the sofa, squashed by his thoughts. When he was in this kind of mood, alcohol did nothing to lift his spirits. On the contrary, it only made him feel heavier. He closed his eyes, trying not to think of anything, but his head kept spinning pointlessly round useless conjectures. Hearing Dante’s steps come to a halt, he reopened his eyes. The giant was standing before him. His face had changed, and his eyes looked like red-hot glass. He brought the fingers of one hand together, wiggling and rubbing them against each other, as one does to remove dirt.
‘We are insignificant beings, my dear Bordelli, fleas of the universe, and yet every one of us feels as if he makes the world go round. And perhaps we’re right. Perhaps we’re fleas that make the world go round … Have you ever read Pascal?’
‘A very long time ago.’
Dante came even closer, till he was looming over the policeman, and then he raised his big hands in the air in a slow, solemn gesture, like some high priest from thousands of years ago.
‘We are germs with the power to conceive of themselves and to imagine the existence of God,’ he said, smiling with compassion. Then he burst into laughter and lowered his hands.
‘Would you like to play a little game, Inspector?’
‘All right,’ said Bordelli, taking another sip that very nearly went down the wrong way.
‘Now listen carefully. Close your eyes and try hard to imagine what I’m about to tell you. Ready?’
‘Ready,’ said Bordelli, curious. He was very tired and glad to close his eyes. The inventor circled round behind the sofa and after a few moments of silence started speaking softly, slowly, in the tone of someone telling a fairy tale to a child.
‘Imagine you see the Earth from afar, and all the other little planets, circling round the sun, the same way you might look at a basket of oranges … Do you see them?’
‘I see them,’ said Bordelli.
‘Good … Now try to step back, calmly, until our vast solar system becomes as small as a swarm of gnats … But don’t stop there … Go even farther …’
Dante continued guiding Bordelli slowly through the galaxies, pushing him ever farther, sending him swimming through infinite space where time has no meaning … And he kept on babbling in this fashion for a good while. Bordelli obeyed without difficulty, with the grappa’s help. He navigated with pleasure through the limitless void, floating amidst the planets, nearly forgetting he had a body and a memory. Passing through hundreds of star systems, he went very far, farther than he had ever gone before in his imagination, and still he kept forging on, farther and farther … At a certain point, Dante’s booming voice made him reverse course and very slowly guided him back towards Earth. Bordelli passed through the Milky Way, past Jupiter, Saturn, Venus … then he descended, and before long he began to see the continents, as on a globe … then he saw the rivers and mountains, the Italian peninsula, the cities, the streets … until, after a long detour, he glided over a turreted farmhouse, isolated in the countryside …
‘… Go inside and have a look, Inspector, you’ll see two human beings talking and drinking grappa … two scraps of matter who in the face of infinity have about the same significance as the piss of a bacterium … two germs unable to see their own nothingness, but moved to passion by their greatness … That is why man is great … because, in spite of everything, he can stubbornly carry on living, believing in something, even the most inane things … Have you ever read Pascal, Inspector? Did I already ask you that?’
Bordelli didn’t answer. After that voyage through the darkness, he opened his eyes slowly, bothered even by the light of the candles, and he seemed to feel more deeply the nothingness of the entire human race, made up of single particles even more useless, able only to eat, shit, make war and produce tons of DDT …
It took him a while to recover from his swim through the galaxies, struggling against the disturbing sense of being a germ abandoned in the universe, as alone as the last star at the far end of space.
Dante was still behind the sofa, and Bordelli could hear him puffing fiercely on his cigar. They remained silent a while longer, as if to allow the whole experience to dissolve by itself.
Bordelli slowly eased back into his customary existence, his banal life as a police inspector in a small Italian city. His mind reconstructed his customary small reality, which consisted of what his eyes could see, of convictions suited to everyday life, of his memory above all, so vague and yet so concrete, and vaster, perhaps, than the galaxies themselves.
Dante circled round the sofa and reappeared before him, an amused smile on his lips.
‘Sometimes I go through the whole silly routine by myself, to help me fall asleep,’ he said.
‘And do you fall asleep?’
‘Not always … Another grappa, Inspector?’
‘The last forty centilitres, thanks,’ Bordelli lied.
He left Dante’s house at about 5 a.m., completely fuddled from a great many centilitres of grappa. But at least he felt a little less agitated than before. He drove back down the Imprunetana at twenty miles an hour with his head spinning. He felt as if he could still see galaxies and planets, as if the Beetle were a starship that had got lost in space.
Once at home he quickly undressed and got into bed, leaving the window ajar. In spite of everything, sleep didn’t come easily. In the end he sat up and turned the light back on. He picked up a book, read one line, then set it down, open, on his legs. He lit a cigarette. The very last. Blowing the smoke up towards the ceiling, he started thinking about Milena – her mouth, her dark eyes full of life … She reminded him of a girl he once knew, Elena. He’d met her one evening in 1940, at a dinner at the house of friends, shortly before he embarked on a submarine. They spent a week together, staring into each other’s eyes and making love, then parted with heavy hearts and without too many promises. All of Europe was a shambles, and hope seemed to cause more pain than anything else. When he returned from the war, Bordelli went looking for her, but Elena’s house had been destroyed and nobody knew what had happened to her family.
He finished his cigarette, set the alarm for nine, and turned off the light. He lay down and turned on to his side, pulling the sheet up over his head. The grappa was still doing its part. Swimming in the darkness between stars, he slowly fell asleep.
At last, a day of sunshine. Crazed swallows darted in every direction against a clear blue sky, nosediving towards the rooftops and then veering away a split second before crashing. Bordelli went out at about half past nine. Except for a mild headache, he felt pretty good. He was about to get in his car when he changed his mind and headed towards the centre of town on foot, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. He realised with disgust that he’d smoked his last one only four hours before.
Crossing the Arno, he contemplated the bridges rebuilt after the war and suppressed the urge to light the cigarette. When he was in the Marches with his battalion, the Nazis had blown up all the bridges
in Florence with mines, to slow down the Allied advance. To save the Ponte Vecchio the Germans had torn down the ancient palazzi of Por Santa Maria and Via Guicciardini, and the new buildings put up after the war had nothing whatsoever in common with those around them.
At the San Lorenzo market there was the usual confusion. The pedlars shouted loudly to get the attention of the women shopping. The youngest women wore low necklines because of the warm sunny day, and as he turned to look at them Bordelli wondered whether the gleams of joy he saw in their eyes were only the fruit of his fantasy, or if it was true that when the sun came out, women blossomed along with the flowers, as Diotivede always maintained.
He turned on to Via Rosina, matches in hand, but he managed to get to Via San Zenobi without lighting his cigarette. Ringing the buzzer for Professor Vannetti’s flat, he pushed open the front door and went up the stairs. The professor was waiting for him in the doorway. He was short and rather plump, with the face of one who ate well and drank well. They shook hands and sat down in the professor’s study, a smallish room with books lining the walls. In front of the window was a worm-eaten desk with a typewriter on top with a sheet of paper in it.
‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’
‘I’m looking for a Nazi.’
‘You’re not alone.’ Vannetti laughed.
‘It’s a good thing …’
‘Can you tell me anything else about this person?’
‘He has a long black mark on his neck, from here to here,’ said Bordelli.
Vannetti brought his hand to his chin and pressed his lips tightly together.
‘That rings a bell, but I couldn’t tell you right off who it is. You can look through my archive, if you like.’
‘I ask nothing more.’
‘It’s rather incomplete, as you can imagine,’ said Vannetti, throwing up his hands.
‘It’s just an attempt.’ The inspector sighed.
‘Come.’
Bordelli followed him into another room with large shelves full of file folders. The window gave on to an inner courtyard bathed in sunlight. Vannetti pulled out a folder bulging with papers and set it down on a Formica table.
‘You can start with this one,’ he said.
‘I don’t know how to thank you, Professor.’
‘Not at all. I’ll be in the next room. Don’t hesitate to call me if you need anything.’
‘May I smoke?’
‘Of course.’
Vannetti withdrew into his study, and the inspector went straight to work. While the archive might well be incomplete, it was very well organised, with photographs accompanied by notes listing the crimes committed. Bordelli turned the pages slowly, feeling hurtled back in time at the sight of those faces. He saw his comrades again, heard their voices again. He’d seen many of them die, too many, blown up by those bloody German mines.
As he kept turning the pages he remembered Gerhardt Gütten, a former, not terribly important Nazi officer he’d met by chance at a hotel bar in Munich a few years after the war. A Nazi officer and a San Marco commander. It was hate at first sight. When it came out that Gütten had been at Cassino during the period when Bordelli was there, their mutual hatred increased. As they continued chatting, they looked each other icily in the eye. Each wanted to challenge the other, it was clear, and they were trying to find a way to do so. Each wanted to show the other that he, in the end, had come out on top.
They started drinking rum and Cokes, and slowly those glasses became an undeclared challenge.
‘Will you have another drink?’ Gütten would ask, a sneer on his lips.
‘Another rum and Coke, thanks,’ Bordelli would reply.
They drank, looking each other in the eye, and they kept on drinking. They were two dogs on chains not long enough to allow either of them to reach and maul the other. All they could do was drink and stare at each other, as if each sip were a gunshot. There was much more in those glasses than liquid: there was the contempt that had never left them … And there was a lot more rum than Coca-Cola.
‘Will you have another drink?’
‘Another rum and Coke, thanks.’
By midnight they were both very drunk, but the alcohol hadn’t lessened their mutual scorn. The Italian ‘traitor’ and the Nazi tyrant carried on their war by means of drinks. The other people at the bar started watching them with interest. A struggle was under way, and everyone was waiting to see which of the two would collapse first. Before going to bed, Bordelli suggested they have another drink.
‘What would you like?’ Gütten asked.
‘Rum and Coke, thanks,’ Bordelli said, his vision blurred. Gütten signalled to the waiter to bring more drinks, inadvertently burping. The glasses arrived, and Bordelli proposed they down them Russian-style. They emptied their glasses in a single breath and both started to reel. Bordelli held his booze well, but that evening he had, in fact, gone too far. Gütten stood up to retire to his room, started to fall, but was held up by a friend.
‘See you in the morning,’ he said, staring at Bordelli with beady eyes drowning in his sweaty face.
‘Goodnight,’ said Bordelli. He stood up, trying not to stagger, and headed towards his room. The second he touched the bed, he fell asleep. And slept well. He woke up the next morning with a slight headache and could still taste the rum at the back of his throat. He took a hot shower, got dressed, and went down to the hotel dining room. Gütten arrived half an hour later. He looked a bit the worse for wear.
‘Sleep well?’ Bordelli asked.
‘Superbly. I feel like a lion. And yourself?’ said Gütten, red eyed.
‘All systems go, thanks.’
‘What’ll you have for breakfast, Commander?’ the Nazi asked mockingly.
Bordelli looked him straight in the eye and had trouble restraining a laugh.
‘A rum and Coke, thanks,’ he said.
‘Oh no you don’t! I can’t!’ said Gütten, raising his arms in disgust.
‘You lose … same as at Cassino,’ said Bordelli.
The Nazi dilated his nostrils and gave a forced laugh. He’d lost the battle, but he wanted to savour his defeat to the very end. He ordered the rum and Coke for Bordelli and personally handed it to him. Bordelli thanked him, downed the entire glass, and handed it back to Gütten with a smile. It was hard to swallow the stuff at ten in the morning, but the San Marco had won yet again. That was all that mattered.
The inspector finished thumbing through the first file and moved on to the second, then the third, then the fourth, and so on … Round about half past twelve he pulled down the umpteenth folder swollen with Nazis and patiently laid it on the table. He started turning the pages, increasingly nauseated by all the faces passing before his eyes. There was every kind of face, but all had the same avid, feckless gaze. By this point he was getting discouraged, but suddenly he came across a man with a broad face, blue eyes and a long black mark on his neck. He clenched his teeth hard. He’d found him at last: ‘Karl Strüffen, Hamburg 1901, Nazi criminal, grey eminence of the Third Reich, condemned to death in absentia at the Nuremberg trials, located in Brazil in ’49, in Argentina in ’50, and in Switzerland in ‘53, after which he vanished without a trace.’
Now he remembered. He’d seen him in Levi’s archive, in ’47. Casimiro had really been unlucky. He’d played cop with the wrong person.
He remembered the White Dove’s dossier on Strüffen, which was detailed to the point of obsession. Their dossiers always ended with the same three words: To be eliminated.
The trattoria Da Cesare was always very crowded. One ate well there and spent no more than was necessary. The walls were covered with naif paintings, mostly rural landscapes, painted by the hundreds of artists who had swarmed in the wake of the Macchiaioli16 like chickens in the furrows of the plough, endlessly copying and recopying, paying for their meals with pictures in order to survive.
Bordelli greeted the owner and slipped into the kitchen, where at that moment Totò, the cook, was
busy with a basin full of spaghetti and mussels.
‘Hello, Inspector.’
‘Hello, Totò, will there be any of that left for me?’
‘Of course.’
Totò finished filling the bowls, passed these on to the waiter, and handed Bordelli a generous serving of spaghetti.
‘Wait till you taste this, Inspector. It’s Totò’s own recipe.’
Bordelli ate the first forkful and raised his eyebrows.
‘Mmm,’ he said, mouth full. The cook made an expression of satisfaction and put a bottle of white wine from the north in front of Bordelli before running back to the cooker to get more food for the waiters. That done, he finally had a moment to relax. He came back to the inspector and poured himself a glass of wine.
‘You’re a born cook, Totó,’ said Bordelli, mopping up the sauce with bread.
‘No, Inspector, I was born a labourer and only became a cook later on.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘When I was still just a kid my parents sent me out to earn my keep, down in the village. Ten hours a day, mixing cement with a shovel and carrying pots of lime up ladders. For a beggar’s pittance, Inspector. Evenings I’d come home so tired I wouldn’t even eat … I remember one morning … I was twelve years old, maybe less … A fancy car with a chauffeur pulled up at the worksite, and a big fat guy with a beard and hat got out. You could see he was a bigwig. He walked with a cane, as if there was something wrong with his leg. He calls the engineer over and, with his hands in his pockets, tells him: “We’re closing this place down tomorrow.” The engineer says: “What do you mean, ‘we’re closing?’The engineer was from the north, a skinny bloke, always well dressed. “We’re closing the place down tomorrow,” the fat guy repeated. “And who the hell are you?” the engineer asked him, eyes popping out of his head. “And why should we close down?” The rest of us were all frozen, watching the scene. The fat guy didn’t answer, but just turned and walked back to his car. Before getting in, he turned round and looked at the building under construction. The skeleton was already in place, as well as a few internal walls. “Nice building,” he said, then, all sad, “Too bad it’s so frail.” Then he got in his car, made a signal to the chauffeur, and drove off. The engineer started cursing at him and then turned and looked at us. “Tomorrow’s a workday,” he said. “Nothing’s changed. Tomorrow’s a workday like any other.” So the next day we were there working as usual, when the same big car pulls up round nine o’clock. The fat man steps out, taps his cane on the bricks to get our attention, has all of us gather in front of him, kids included. The engineer wasn’t there. The fat guy looks at all of us and says: “How much do they pay you for a day’s work? Actually, never mind, I don’t even want to know. Whoever comes with me, I’ll double his pay. But you’ve got to come straight away. In a minute it’ll be too late. I’ll count to three: one … two …” He never even got to three, because we were all ready to leave with him. When the engineer got there at half nine, there was nobody left. The worksite was shut down and he went back to Milan … That’s the way things go in the south, Inspector.’
