Death in Sardinia

by Marco Vichi

  ‘Very well, Inspector.’

  ‘And try to find out if Badalamenti had a cleaning lady. I want a detailed report of everything.’

  ‘That’s a lot of work, sir, but I think we can manage,’ said Rinaldi.

  Dr Diotivede, the police pathologist, arrived shortly thereafter, black leather bag in hand, wearing his seventy-two years like an ornament. He still had the face of a child not yet fully formed, and not even the bifocal lenses of his spectacles managed to make him look old. As he came in, he greeted everyone with an icy smile.

  ‘Who’s the victim?’ he asked, looking at Bordelli.

  ‘His name was Badalamenti. A loan shark …’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  Diotivede loved his work. Whenever a dead body turned up, he wanted to be informed at once, because he always insisted on seeing the victim at the scene of the crime.

  As the others covered their noses with handkerchiefs or ran off to vomit, the doctor knelt down beside the corpse without so much as a grimace, and brought his face, and therefore his nose, close to the wound, which was already ringed with maggots, squinting with the same expression as a collector examining the fine toothing around the edges of an antique stamp. The only thing that flustered him was a murdered child, and he’d had to look at several of them the previous spring, when a madman strangled four little girls …

  Cold gusts blew in from the open windows, and in the end they decided unanimously to close them all except for the one in the study, where the body lay.

  Diotivede spent a whole minute studying the scissors planted in Badalamenti’s neck. Then he pulled his little black notebook out of his pocket and started making his first notes. Every so often he would stop, looking thoughtful, and run a hand through his snow-white hair. He bent down again. He touched the dead man’s face with a finger, prodded his shoulder, then resumed writing. Nobody dared disturb him. When he had finished he stood back up and put the notebook away, looking satisfied.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ Bordelli asked, going up to him.

  ‘He must have died at least five days ago, maybe six. I’ll try to be more precise after the post-mortem, but don’t bother asking me the exact time of day … Too much time has passed.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I didn’t see any signs of a struggle. No bruises or scratches, no torn clothing.’

  ‘Caught by surprise from behind?’

  ‘Most likely. If the adrenalin tests confirm it, I’d say he had no idea, until the very last second, that he was about to be stabbed in the neck.’

  ‘What would you prefer, Doctor? Would you rather know or not know you were about to die?’

  ‘I think being stabbed with scissors like that must be a pretty nasty way to die,’ the doctor said with a chilly smile.

  Bordelli grimaced, unable to stand the stench any longer.

  ‘Can we take the body away?’ he asked as two cowled stretcherbearers from the Misericordia came in.

  ‘I’m all done,’ said Diotivede, raising his hands.

  ‘When are you going to work on him?’

  ‘Are you in such a hurry?’

  ‘Less than usual.’

  ‘I have to finish up an elderly lady, then I’ll do this one for you,’ said the doctor, looking down at the corpse at his feet.

  Bordelli gestured to the two men in black frocks.

  ‘You can go ahead,’ he said.

  The two cowled figures approached and without a word lifted Badalamenti on to a stretcher and carried him away.

  The lads from forensics were also done. De Marchi whispered to the inspector that they’d combed the place very carefully and taken a few specimens. But they hadn’t found much, he said, shaking his head. At any rate, he would send over the results as soon as possible.

  ‘No fingerprints on the scissors. They were either wiped clean with a handkerchief or the killer was wearing gloves,’ he said, throwing up his hands. And he added that everything would be analysed and catalogued using the new techniques and procedures developed in the US and the UK, and that—

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Bordelli interrupted him, convinced that nothing would come of these analyses.

  ‘When should I drop by?’ he asked Diotivede, calmly walking him to the door.

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll even give you a hand. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of opening up dead bodies and pulling out their guts.’

  The pathologist heaved a sigh of irritation at that thousandth idiotic quip about his perfectly normal profession. Bordelli knew such comments irked him, but that was precisely why he enjoyed making them. It was fun to see Diotivede tense up for a second like an offended child.

  ‘I guess you’re right, Inspector. It’s much more fun to be a policeman. You have the pleasure of tracking a man down, slapping handcuffs on him … or maybe even shooting him in the back.’

  ‘Need a lift home?’

  ‘I’m happy to get some exercise.’

  ‘Forget I asked.’

  They calmly descended the stairs, side by side, without another word. Outside the front door was a throng of journalists, who immediately tried to get inside. Bordelli raised a hand and said nobody could go upstairs. Anybody wanting any information had to go to police headquarters and wait. The newsmen protested as usual, but in the end they left. Bordelli shook his head.

  ‘How the hell do they always find out so fast?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe it helps that they’re not policemen,’ Diotivede quipped, then waved goodbye and went off towards Santo Spirito.

  ‘Thanks,’ Bordelli muttered, watching him walk away.

  A little boy on a woman’s bicycle bigger than he was came out from Borgo San Frediano, standing on the pedals. He’d attached a folded-up postcard to the frame so that it rattled the rear spokes and sounded like a motorbike. Passing by the front door of Badalamenti’s building, the child shot a glance at the inspector and started pedalling harder. Bordelli followed him with his eyes and watched him disappear beyond Piazza Piattellina. A thousand years ago he too used to put a postcard in his bicycle’s spokes, and hearing the sound now only made him feel old. He ran a hand over his face and pressed his eyeballs with his fingertips. He wasn’t that old, really, but he was certainly too tired to start searching the dead man’s home right now. He realised he wished he had Piras at his side for the investigation. Sticking a cigarette between his lips, he decided at last to put the whole thing off till tomorrow. It wasn’t the kind of murder that made one feel anxious to get things moving, he thought, blowing the smoke towards the sky.

  He woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream and instinctively turned on the light. He looked around the room to reassure himself. Everything was the same as it always was, but the dream left him with a feeling of precariousness that seemed to presage death. It was almost three o’clock. He’d only been asleep for about an hour. His heart was beating wildly. He turned the light off and lay back down. He’d retained no precise image of what he’d just dreamt, and remembered only that he was struggling terribly to free himself from a sort of spider’s web in which he’d got caught. He was hoping to fall back asleep immediately. But, try as he might to keep his eyes shut and not move, his tired brain was still busy thinking about unpleasant and dangerous things.

  He was imagining his heart imprisoned between the lungs, contracting and expanding, and it looked to him like a repugnant muscle that after years of spasms wanted only to burst or simply stop. His heart had broken many times, always because of women. The muscle had functioned quietly and well during the war, never asking him for anything. The years had gone by, and he’d suddenly found himself, at fifty-five years of age, feeling as if he’d never actually lived.

  Deep inside he never really stopped thinking about death. It was always on his mind, every minute of the day, and had become a sort of habit. At moments he found himself imagining his own death in a variety of different ways. There was no good reason for it; th
at was just the way he thought. Even at the best of times. Now and then he would become fixated on heart failure, especially when he felt tired, as now. The idea of dying suddenly, without having the time to understand what was happening to you, frightened him even more than death itself.

  He was hoping to be conscious at the exact moment at which he went over to the other side. From time to time he would wonder whether his comrades who’d been blown sky high by German mines had had the time to realise anything. He’d made it back from the war alive, but there had been many occasions when he could easily have died. He’d been lucky. It was almost though he was protected by a star in the heavens. In 1941, shrapnel from a British torpedo had breached the wall of the submarine he was in. He’d heard it hiss a centimetre away from his temple and lodge itself in the side of the ladder. He’d gone and dug it out. Inside one of the metal curls a greenish strand of seaweed had got stuck. Wrapping the splinter in a handkerchief, he’d put it in his pocket. He must still have it somewhere.

  To take his mind off his beating heart he started thinking about the war, and he remembered the time he was trapped with five of his men in a field of maize under the sudden fire of the German artillery.

  They spread out and hit the ground. The earth was shaking violently. They had to prop themselves up on their elbows with bellies raised, tongues pressed hard against palates to keep from biting them, hands over the ears to protect their eardrums from the explosions. The clods of dirt thrown into the air by the mortar shells kept raining down on them without cease. Staccioli and Bordelli were lying next to each other. With each blast they pressed their faces into the ground, and between explosions they exchanged glances and cursed the Nazis. Before exploding, the mortar shells whistled through the air. There was a moment of hell, with grenades falling around them one after another, the earth flying up into the air as if catapulted.

  Bordelli closed his eyes and kept his face pressed to the ground until silence returned. All of a sudden he heard a dull thud, like a boulder hitting the ground. He turned towards Staccioli.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, but Stacciolo couldn’t hear anything any more. An unexploded shell had fallen on his neck, and his face was buried in the ground. Bordelli just looked at him for a few seconds, suppressing the absurd desire to talk to him. Then he yanked off his friend’s dog tags, not bothering to pull the chain over his head. If the shell had done what it was supposed to do, there wouldn’t have been a shred of either of them remaining.

  Very few were as lucky as he. Capo Spiazzi died in the Veneto three weeks before the end of the war because of a moment’s inattention. It was a dark night and, lost in thought, he’d lit a cigarette while standing in front of a window. The German sniper aimed a couple of inches above the flame and hit him square in the forehead. Bordelli heard the glass shatter and ran to see what had happened, and found Capo Spiazzi sprawled across the floor, face up and eyes open. The cigarette had remained between his lips, still lit.

  Giannino had died, too. Of gangrene. Bordelli had tried to stop the infection with the tools he had available. He poured two big glassfuls of cordial down his throat, tied a tourniquet of string very tightly just under the knee, then put a plank under his leg and amputated his foot with a hatchet. It took two consecutive, decisive chops. As a disinfectant he used some twenty tablets of sulphamide ground to a fine powder.

  But it was no use. Giannino lived only three more days. As he was dying he kept saying his right foot hurt, the one that had been amputated.

  The inspector felt his heart start to grow calmer. He lay down on his back and, looking into the darkness with eyes open, continued to wander randomly through his memories.

  He remembered Cayman’s broad smile. They called him that because of some silly resemblance he supposedly had with the animal. The war had reached Cayman during his third year of studying philosophy at university. He shamed everyone with his vast culture, but one was always sure to be amused in his company. He said Jesus Christ was just a poor fanatic who had read too much Plato, and that was exactly why he liked him.

  But to believe he was the son of God was a bit much. Despite the sophistication of his arguments, Cayman cursed like a docker, and when he wasn’t talking he looked like the coarsest of them all. He had survived five years of mines and bombs only to die at the hands of a drunken Pole after the war had ended. Stabbed twice in the back for an empty wallet. Bordelli saw again the train that had taken Cayman back home: a train full of corpses crossing half of Italy, dropping off more dead at each stop. A dirty train driven by dirty men. But there was also something cheerful about it, because it travelled through a country free at last of Nazis and home-grown Fascists, a destroyed, shattered country that nevertheless hoped for something better than having to deal with pricks like Badalamenti.

  16 December

  When he opened his eyes that morning, the first thing he thought of was his beating heart. Putting his hand on his chest, he had the impression it was more sluggish than usual. But it was only an impression, he told himself. It was already nine o’clock. Getting up out of bed, he immediately felt dizzy, but for only a second or two. No need to worry, Inspector, you’re just a little tired. You really ought to take some time off every now and then. A proper holiday. It’s probably been ten years since you last lay down on the sand by the sea, thinking of nothing …

  He went into the kitchen in his underpants to make some coffee, then drank it slowly, looking out the window. The sky was clean. He felt strange and ached a bit all over, but perhaps he’d only slept badly. He slowly got dressed and went into the bathroom to shave. Grabbing the shaving brush, he moistened it, slapped it across the soap a few times, and before lathering up his face, stood there with his hand in the air … He’d often heard such things as: He lathered up his face, started shaving, when suddenly, pow! He collapsed on the floor. No, he wouldn’t like that. He rinsed the brush and put it back in its cup. No shave today, he thought, looking at himself in the mirror … No shave, no heart attack. Not that he really believed it, but that morning he simply preferred not to shave, nothing more.

  He went out into the street and pulled his trench coat tightly around him. The sun was shining brightly, but it was cold. He bought a newspaper in Piazza Tasso and started walking towards Badalamenti’s building. On the front page blared the headline: the most amazing feat in aeronautics history: rendezvous in space. Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 had met up in weightless space, and the astronauts had waved ‘hello’ through their portholes. Everything had gone quite smoothly, and the Americans had reconfirmed their supremacy in matters of space travel.

  Bordelli folded up the newspaper and stuck it under his arm. Before long they would be travelling to the moon, while back on earth, loan sharks still preyed on honest people.

  There was only one week left before Christmas, and the shop windows were full of blinking lights and colourful festoons to enchant children of all ages. He absolutely had to remember to get a present for his friend Rosa, a former prostitute. He knew how much it meant to her. Even at her age, Rosa was as innocent as a child, and she loved getting presents. But Bordelli lacked imagination when it came to such things, and he feared that on the evening of the 24th he would still be wandering about the centre of town without any idea of what to get her.

  When he got to Badalamenti’s building, he opened the front door with a key and climbed the stairs to the top floor, feeling winded. Bloody cigarettes. He removed the seals and pushed the door open. The sickly-sweet smell of death was still strong and seemed to stick to his skin.

  He started wandering lazily about the flat. The rooms were rather large and had high ceilings. There were two bedrooms, a sort of sitting room, the study in which the body had been found, a big kitchen and a spacious bathroom with a tub. The killer had had the sangfroid to remain a good while in the apartment and ransack every room, including the bathroom. To judge from the state the flat was in, it had been an angry and summary search. Drawers upended on to the bed, cl
othes scattered across the floor, papers everywhere. Who knew whether the killer had found what he was looking for? Maybe not. Otherwise, instead of continuing to turn the flat upside down, he would have stopped at some point.

  Bordelli postponed his first cigarette of the day until later and phoned police headquarters from the study. The previous day Rinaldi and company had continued to question the neighbourhood residents until late in the evening. He had faith in Rinaldi, who was young and efficient.

  ‘Anything of interest?’

  ‘Not much, Inspector. There was only one witness, an elderly lady called Italia Andreini, who lives in one of the buildings opposite Badalamenti’s …’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said that one night about ten days ago she couldn’t sleep, and so she bundled herself up, opened the window and started looking outside. It was raining hard. It was about two o’clock in the morning, and the piazza was empty. After a while, she noticed someone coming out of Badalamenti’s building. Average height, slender build. From the way he moved, she thought he was young. But that was all she could say, because the square was dark and the guy’s head was covered with a hood because of the rain. The lady is certain he didn’t see her, because she had the lights off. The guy walked fast and went towards Piazza Piattellina. But that’s all, Inspector.’

  ‘No cleaning lady?’

  ‘Nobody knows anything.’

  ‘Very well, then, go and get some rest,’ said Bordelli, hanging up.

  They were getting nowhere fast. He went back into the hallway, hung his trench coat on a peg and got down to work.

  He started searching the rooms calmly one by one. He rifled through armoires already ransacked by the killer, pulled them away from the wall to look behind them, searched under and on top of every piece of furniture, under the beds, pulled out the few drawers left in place and emptied these out on the carpets, climbed on to chairs and tables to search the ceiling lamps. In the kitchen he even looked inside the coffee can and the sugar bowl. In the study where the body had been found there was a brown jacket hanging from the back of the chair.