by Marco Vichi
The inspector managed to free his hand, made a last gesture of goodbye and, as the salesman kept rambling on, headed for the door. He stopped for a moment in the doorway to turn up the collar of his jacket, and before he went out, he heard Gallon’s voice carrying on behind him.
‘I didn’t much like studying, but I did read some pretty good stuff in the end … Like everyone else, no? What do you think?’ At this point the salesman was talking to the bartender.
Bordelli got into the Beetle feeling pretty cheesed off. It had stopped raining and the sky was clearing, but a light wind had risen. When he got home the sun hadn’t yet set; the days were getting longer. He stripped off his damp clothing and took a hot shower to relax.
The bedroom stank of cigarette smoke. He went and opened the window, then immediately lit a cigarette. The air outside was saturated with spring. The sky was clear, and the swifts were screeching. He leaned forward with his elbows on the windowsill and tried to put all the thoughts dancing in his head in order. But he was too tired. He finished his cigarette and dropped it into the street.
Having no desire to budge from his office, he had asked Mugnai to go down to the bar in Via San Gallo and fetch him two panini and a beer, and was now chewing and swallowing without paying much attention to the flavours. But he wasn’t missing much. He’d slept little and poorly. He’d also dreamt about one of the dead little girls, who was walking along the edge of a chasm.
There was a knock at the door, and Piras came in and stood in front of the desk.
‘What is it?’ said Bordelli, noticing a strange twinkle in the young man’s coal-black eyes.
‘You won’t poke fun at me, Inspector?’
‘That depends.’
‘Tonight I’m going out with Sonia.’
‘Ah, so you’ve finally succeeded … But why are you telling me?’
‘Because I’m pleased.’
‘What about this business of Sardinians being so surly and reserved?’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Well, break a leg, Piras. Come back safe and sound.’
‘I’ll give it everything I’ve got, Inspector.’
Piras left with eyes sparkling, and Bordelli finished eating his panini. He opened the beer bottle with his house keys and lit a cigarette. Sonia and Piras. One could only imagine the sort of mischief a Sicilian and a Sardinian might cook up together.
Early that afternoon an envelope for Bordelli had been hand-delivered to the station by a very tall man who, based on Mugnai’s description, seemed in every way to have been Goldberg. Inside was a sheet of paper, unsigned, with a couple of typewritten lines on it: Our friend is waiting for you in his villa at Fiesole. Don’t keep him waiting. And that was all. Bordelli put on his jacket, got into the Beetle and headed off to Fiesole without telling anyone.
He pulled up in front of Karl Strüffen’s villa. As the gate giving on to the road was wide open, he drove into the garden and parked amidst the marble statuettes and flowerless earthenware pots. There was a bright sun overhead. A warm wind was blowing, laden with pollen, and a great many bumblebees buzzed in the air. As usual, the shutters were all closed.
As he approached the villa he noticed that the front door was ajar. Pushing it open, he went inside, pistol drawn. The lights were all on. He advanced slowly and, after passing through the vestibule, entered a rather long hallway. There was a nice smell of old furniture in the air. Farther ahead on the left was a great glass door thrown wide open. It led to a vast drawing room illuminated by two crystal chandeliers full of light bulbs. He went in without making a sound. There were a number of tiger skins on the floor, and suits of armour from various epochs lined up against one wall. It was all very grandiose. At the far end of the room was an armchair turned round to face a great stone fireplace, with a head of white hair sticking out, visible from the back. Bordelli approached, pistol cocked, holding his breath. He circled slowly round the armchair, but he’d already understood. He lowered his pistol and heaved a deep sigh. The man was Strüffen, of course, and he was obviously dead. His tongue was hanging out, his eyes half open, and there were rope marks round his neck. He’d been hanged, in keeping with the style of the White Dove. Between his contracted fingers was an envelope with two sheets of paper inside. One was handwritten: a confession to the murder of Casimiro Robetti, signed by Strüffen. It was quite detailed and described the whole affair pretty much the way Bordelli had imagined it. The second was typewritten and unsigned. It said:
Dear Inspector,
As you can see, I’ve kept my word. You’ve got what you wanted. But no one condemned at Nuremberg can escape his sentence.
‘The son of a bitch,’ Bordelli said aloud. He couldn’t help but smile. Pulling out his matches, he went and burned Levi’s note in the fireplace. Then he returned to the villa’s entrance hall and phoned the station to send for a squad car and ambulance, telling them there was no hurry.
He went out into the garden to smoke a cigarette and looked out over the balustrade that gave on to the olive grove. Another year and the ivy covering the buttresses would reach the top of the wall. Sighing, he looked up at the hills in the distance ahead, covered with forest … The Strüffen case had finally been solved.
It was just four o’clock, the sun still high in the sky. Only a buzz of insects marred the silence. Dropping his cigarette butt to the ground, he went back inside the villa and started wandering calmly from room to room.
In one room he found a billiard table. He grabbed a cue from the rack and took a couple of shots. In the absolute silence, he liked the crisp sound the balls made when striking one another. But he’d never played very well. Laying the cue down on the green felt, he resumed his wandering about the house.
The kitchen was vast and had a small door at one end that led to a large pantry full of wine bottles. He started reading the lables. It wasn’t just any old wine … Saint-Julien, Margaux, Saint-Emilion, Clos Vougeot, Pouilly Fumé, Chambertin, Montrachet, Chateauneuf du Pape, Sauternes and, naturally, champagne. The goddamned French had created a heaven on earth, and not only at Cluny.
Continuing his little tour he found himself in front of a seventeenth-century glass-fronted cabinet full of liqueurs. As he opened it he smelled a lovely scent of old wood. The labels were from all the great houses, but he started looking for that cognac he hadn’t yet had a chance to taste. He found several bottles of it and picked one up: Cognac de Maricourt, 1913. It had been made over fifty years before, when he was barely three years old. He held the bottle up against the light. The cognac had a magnificent colour. On a lower shelf he found a proper glass for it. Leaving the fine cabinet open, and holding the bottle by the neck, he returned to the room where Strüffen’s dead body sat in the armchair. He dropped on to a rather uncomfortable sofa opposite the dead Nazi and wondered who all those bottles belonged to now … To the Italian government, the French government, or the White Dove?
He opened the bottle, poured some cognac respectfully into the glass, and took a sip. Diotivede was right. It was a masterpiece. He raised the glass in the direction of Karl Strüffen.
‘Regards to Adolf,’ he said.
As he drank, the memory of a night in April of ’44 came back to him. He was inside an old farmhouse with Tonino and Respighi a few hundred yards from the German lines. The moon was almost full and managed to light up the space enough so they could see one another’s faces. Tonino was, as usual, talking about girls. In a moment of distraction, he took a drag of his cigarette just as he was passing in front of the window. The sharp, dry sound of a gunshot rang out in the distance and a split second later the windowpane exploded into splinters. Tonino felt the bullet graze the back of his neck and instinctively fell to the ground, dodging by an eyelash the second bullet, which smashed into the wall.
Then silence returned.
‘Fuck!’ said Tonino, crawling towards the wall. He ran a hand through his hair and saw that there was a little blood. He’d been damn lucky.
The
sniper fired two more shots in rapid succession into the hole of the window, for no reason. It was a real nuisance.
‘What should we do, Commander?’ asked Tonino.
‘Let me think …’
Moments later Bordelli told Respighi to stay in that room and to try in some way to draw the sniper’s fire for a few minutes.
‘I’m going upstairs … Just take care not to get yourself killed,’ he said.
‘Thanks for the advice, Commander. I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Respighi, sneering.
Bordelli went out and Respighi calmly tied a white rag round the end of a stick and started waving it in front of the window. The sniper took the bait, and the bullets came crashing into the room. It was fun.
Bordelli had gone upstairs, into a completely dark space. Kneeling down beside a window, he glanced outside from behind the wall. Every time the Kraut fired, he saw a white flash on the dark hillside opposite. He gently set his machine gun on the windowsill and, with the help of a chair, he managed, with patient diligence, to wedge it in place with the barrel pointing directly at those flashes of light. He left everything just like that, and then went to get some sleep with the others. The following morning he awoke at dawn. The other two were still asleep. He went upstairs and, crawling across the floor, went and crouched beside his machine gun. Taking care not to move it, and without even aiming, he made it fire a short burst. There was no return fire. He waited a few seconds, then tossed his beret in the air. A shot rang out in the valley, and a bullet splintered the window frame. He fired another burst, and a few seconds later two bullets slammed into the wall. It seemed there wasn’t a bloody thing to be done. Perhaps the sniper was too far away. Bordelli fired another burst, then immediately another, longer one. Tonino and Respighi came up, flattening themselves against the wall.
‘What’s going on, Commander?’
‘I was hoping to get him,’ said Bordelli.
They waited a little while longer, but everything remained quiet. Bordelli tried tossing his beret into the air again, but the Kraut had nothing more to say about it. Maybe he’d been killed. After nearly an hour of silence, all three of them went outside to see what was happening. They had to be extremely careful. If the sniper was still at his post, it was like inviting him to take a little target practice. They started to climb up the hillside, hiding behind tree trunks, but no shots were fired. When they were halfway up the slope, they found the classic cement pillbox with the narrow slit for firing. The door was open, but all was silent. They didn’t even hear a fly buzz. They approached with great care, ready to open fire, but there was no need. On the floor of the sentry box lay the lifeless bodies of three German soldiers, their faces disfigured. Bordelli slung his machine gun back over his shoulder and shook his head. Three shots, three bull’s-eyes. At the country fairs he used to go to as a child, he would have won a piece of panforte.
That evening there was pandemonium at the station. A great many journalists had come from all over, even from Rome, all thirsting for details about the monster murdered in his jail cell and the ex-Nazi found dead in a villa in Fiesole. Mugnai was going crazy.
Concerning the Strüffen affair, the inspector – since he’d decided not to reveal to anyone that the old Nazi had been executed by the White Dove – pretended to be as stumped as everyone else by the incomprehensible murder.
Commissioner Inzipone was quite serene. True, Rivalta had been assassinated by unknowns, but in the final analysis he was only a murderer, and the case of the little girls had been solved, after all. As for the strange case of the hanged Nazi and the confession found in his hands … well, he really wasn’t too worried about it. The important thing was that they had successfully concluded their investigations. The rest was all detail.
Piras, on the other hand, was agitated. He was trying in every way possible to understand, not allowing himself a moment’s rest. Seeing that Bordelli wasn’t troubling himself with too many questions, he sensed that the inspector knew a great deal more than he was letting on, and he started giving him strange looks. He realised, however, that it wasn’t time yet for explanations, and so he decided, for the moment, to leave him in peace. Round about nine o’clock he took leave of Bordelli, a smile on his lips, and dashed off to see the beautiful Sicilian girl.
Half an hour later, Bordelli slipped secretly out of the station and went to get his Beetle where he had left it, far from the journalists’ reach, in a side street about a hundred yards from Via Zara. He drove placidly towards the centre of town, then parked in Piazza Antinori. Calmly getting out of the car, he lit a cigarette and slowly made his way to Via delle Belle Donne, all the way to Levi’s front door. After a moment of indecision, he tossed aside his half-smoked cigarette and rang the buzzer. He was almost certain that nobody would reply, but the lock clicked open almost at once. He climbed the stairs in a rush and found Milena standing at the door.
‘I was expecting you,’ she said. She seemed strange, too serious.
‘What’s going on?’ Bordelli asked. Milena didn’t answer. She gestured to him to come in, then closed the door and walked down the hallway. The inspector followed her into the room in which he had always talked to Levi. It was empty. There wasn’t even an ashtray.
‘Has everyone left?’ Bordelli asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll be leaving soon. But I wanted to see you one more time.’
‘Where are you going?’ Bordelli asked, shuddering. Milena was about three feet away from him, her arms folded over her breasts, hair somehow held back behind her neck by a pen.
‘I’m going wherever my work takes me,’ she murmured.
‘And who is it this time? Mengele? Or another mediocrity like Strüffen?’ Bordelli asked. But his mind was elsewhere.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she said with pain in her eyes. They sat for a few moments in silence, looking into each other’s eyes. Bordelli pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
‘Thanks for Strüffen, but I wanted him alive,’ he said.
‘You can’t always have what you want,’ she said.
‘Is that why you wanted to see me? To tell me that?’
‘I needed to tell you a story.’
‘You’re already with someone?’
‘No, it’s not about that.’
‘Then what’s it about?’
‘Davide Rivalta,’ said Milena, eyes flashing.
‘What’s Rivalta got to do with any of this?’
‘His real name was Davide Rovigo … He was Jewish.’
‘Did you know each other?’ asked Bordelli, increasingly surprised.
‘He was one of ours until a little while ago,’ Milena said with a bitter smile.
Bordelli’s eyes popped out.
‘That’s really something … And why did he stop being one of yours?’ he asked, staring at her.
Milena sighed and leaned her back against the wall.
‘He’d started doing things that were against our principles,’ she said, lowering her eyes. She seemed very tense.
‘For example?’
‘Last year … when we were supposed to liquidate a Nazi in the Madrid area, Rovigo tried to eliminate his companion as well, a young Spanish woman who had nothing at all to do with the crimes of our target. We don’t do that kind of thing. Our organisation is not interested in vengeance. We only execute the sentences passed at Nuremberg.’
‘Of course.’
‘After that episode, Rovigo was expelled from the Dove, and he took it very badly. When he left he threatened to throw a wrench into our plans and reveal everything he knew about the organisation, and we couldn’t allow that. We spend a great deal of money and time locating a person, and we abhor waste. We cannot run the risk of getting any grains of sand in our engine. We’d been keeping an eye on him for some time, but he hadn’t done anything unusual.’
‘Were you aware the police had him under surveillance?’
‘We realised it on
ly a few days ago and were trying to find out why.’
‘You could have asked me …’
‘I decided against it,’ she said. Bordelli nodded. He didn’t know where to dump his ash, and in the end he let it fall to the floor.
‘Did any of you know that Rovigo could leave his house without being seen?’ he asked.
‘Nobody knew about that passageway. It must have been made during the war. Rovigo seemed to have calmed down. We were becoming convinced he would never carry out his threats against us, and that he’d only been letting off steam. I never imagined—’
‘Was it your organisation that killed him?’ Bordelli interrupted her.
‘Yes … because of the little girls,’ she said, biting her lip. And she walked slowly to the window and started looking outside. Bordelli took a few steps towards her and stopped behind her. Even then, at such a moment, he could not help but admire her figure, whose beauty showed through her clothing. Milena kept on talking, without turning round.
‘Rovigo spent seventeen months at Auschwitz. He suffered unbearable humiliation. He lost a finger there. It was torn off with pliers by camp guards. He managed to survive because he has a degree in chemistry, they’d put him to work in a laboratory. By the time the Russians arrived, he weighed sixty-five pounds. He lost almost all his family in the camps: father, mother, grandparents, cousins, brothers, his wife and … his daughter Rebecca, a little girl of eight whom he was madly in love with. He killed those children out of revenge, only because they had German fathers …’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Bordelli muttered.
‘He’d become a monster, and we hadn’t realised it …’
The inspector shook his head.
‘He certainly was good at finding those children. In some cases it couldn’t have been easy to know they were daughters of Germans,’ he said.
‘For someone who’s worked with us it’s easier than you think,’ Milena whispered. They remained silent for a moment, not moving. She was still looking down at the street, as he looked at her.
