by Marco Vichi
He stood there looking at the thousand-year-old church with the monumental cemetery of the Porte Sante around it. He knew some of his great-grandparents were buried in there, but he’d never managed to find them. One day he would have to go and calmly search the graves and family chapels, and read the inscriptions one by one. Once, when he was about six or seven, one of his relatives had taken him for a stroll through the tombs, and they’d shown him the grave of the man who had written ‘Pinocchio’. He hadn’t gone walking in a cemetery for a very long time. Some years back, he used to do it rather often, just to relax. He knew all the ones around Florence, from Pratolino to Gli Allori. He’d even gone a couple of times to the American cemetery at Falciani and walked for hours through those thousands and thousands of white crosses lined up like rows of vines.
Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was already ten o’clock. As he headed back down the same dark staircase, he noticed two shadows at the bottom coming towards him. A man and a woman. When they got closer, he heard them speaking German and stiffened instinctively. The language still made him shudder, there was nothing he could do about it. When the couple walked past him he looked at the man’s face. He must have been over forty. Bordelli realised he could easily be one of those Nazis who’d fled Florence in August ’44 when the Allies entered the city, and had now returned with his wife to see the bridges he’d blown up before leaving. Or maybe not. Maybe he was just a former Wehrmacht soldier who’d come to visit the city of Michelangelo and Leonardo.
Reaching the bottom of the staircase he told himself that the war had ended over twenty years ago, and he had to stop looking at the world through its prism. He turned to the left after Porta San Miniato. Via San Nicolò was dark as usual. When he reached the end and turned down Via de’ Bardi, a freezing drizzle started to fall. A bit farther on, he spotted Guido’s BSA and Raffaele’s Solex in the distance, parked along the pavement.
He walked past number 30 and, a few paces on, found himself in front of number 34. There was no number 32. Maybe Guido had taken the piss out of him. He turned round to have a better look, and between two majestic front doors he noticed a camouflaged door in the façade. There was only one buzzer, as Guido had said, enclosed in a carved marble setting. The doorbell was more precious than the door.
He listened hard but couldn’t hear any music. He tried pushing the buzzer, but heard no ringing within. He pressed again. It was quite cold outside. He stuck a cigarette between his lips but didn’t light it. He had a ticklish feeling in his stomach, like a child afraid to be caught doing something forbidden. Who knew whether those two had even heard the doorbell. He was about to ring again when the door opened. Guido invited him inside. The dark entranceway smelled of damp plaster and septic fumes. Behind the door were two staircases, one ascending, the other descending. Guido took the down staircase, with Bordelli following behind. It was a rather long, stone stairway. Some soft recorded music came from below, a sad sort of lament accompanied by a guitar. The inspector would have liked to ask who the singer was, but he refrained. He didn’t feel like being treated like an old fogey again.
They entered a large basement room with brick vaults, illuminated by a pair of light bulbs with red plastic shades. Raffaele was sitting on a mattress, changing the strings on a black electric guitar. Seeing the inspector come in, he put the guitar down and got up to greet him. The air smelled of stale smoke and you could practically sink your teeth into the humidity.
‘I hope you’ll leave us a little time to play,’ Raffaele said, shaking his hand. Bordelli smiled and looked around.
‘So this is your lair,’ he said, glancing at the record player on the floor and two amplifiers as big as refrigerators.
‘Call it whatever you like,’ said Raffaele. Guido sat down on the mattress and resumed the operation of changing the guitar strings.
‘Are there only two of you?’ Bordelli asked.
‘We’re looking for others.’
‘Do you play stuff you can twist to?’ the inspector asked, choosing at random a modern term that seemed appropriate. Raffaele and Guido exchanged an amused glance.
‘The twist is for snot-nosed mummy’s boys,’ said Raffaele.
‘What kind of music do you play?’
‘Satanic stuff … we climb walls and drink the blood of virgins,’ said Raffaele.
‘I guess you don’t like giving straight answers either,’ said Bordelli. It felt like an encounter between two tribes that had never met before. The sad music kept playing on the gramophone, and it wasn’t at all bad. It entered one’s ears and stayed there.
‘I only try to avoid saying things you wouldn’t understand,’ said Raffaele, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans. Guido watched the scene in silence, all the while fiddling with the guitar.
‘It used to be old people who said that sort of thing to children,’ said Bordelli.
‘They still do, I assure you … but our ears have changed.’
‘Grown longer and hairy?’
‘We don’t need your rules any more,’ Raffaele said with a serious face.
‘You always speak in the plural,’ Bordelli observed, pulling out a cigarette.
‘Perhaps it’s because all dinosaurs look alike to me,’ Raffaele said, shrugging his shoulders.
Hearing this, Bordelli began to understand a little better what it was he felt when dealing with these youths, Odoardo included. He didn’t feel attacked so much as ignored. In their eyes he wasn’t a man, but a category. And yet just a few days before with Rosa, he’d smoked some of the same stuff they smoked …
The disc ended and Guido reached out to put another on. Bordelli lit his cigarette. A song began playing, but again it was completely unfamiliar to him.
‘I wonder where it is you’re all running to,’ he said, addressing them in the plural.
‘As far as we can get from Methuselahs like you – from your suits and ties and straight and narrow paths we’re supposed to follow without any questions … We’ve had it with all that crap,’ said Raffaele, pleased with his speech. Guido in his corner approved with a grunt.
‘What’s a Methuselah? You called me that another time, too,’ said Bordelli.
‘He’s an old man in the Bible.’
‘Ah, thank you,’ said the inspector.
‘It’s not your fault. You just happen to be an endangered species,’ Raffaele said quietly.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Raffaele shook his head.
‘Why did you come here, Inspector?’
‘I wanted to ask you a question.’
‘Go right ahead.’
‘I want you to tell me … how many times, and from what telephone or telephones, you called Badalamenti,’ Bordelli improvised.
‘What do you need to know that for?’
‘Never mind about that.’
‘I rang him only once, together with my sister, from a bar in Piazza della Libertà,’ said Raffaele. Bordelli still called the square Piazza Cavour, but he was careful not to reveal this, lest he appear even older.
‘All right, then, there’s nothing else,’ he said. Guido had finished stringing the guitar and looked at him as if expecting to be asked a question.
‘We want to play,’ said Raffaele, but the tone meant more or less Get the hell out of here.
‘Where can I put this out?’ asked Bordelli, holding his cigarette butt in the air.
‘Just throw it on the floor,’ said Raffaele. The inspector dropped the butt on to the flagstones and crushed it with the tip of his shoe. Then he gestured goodbye and went out, happy to leave that catacomb.
A fine freezing rain was falling, and the cold penetrated the skin. Bordelli walked quickly to the car, staying close to the buildings. When he finally got into the Beetle, his hair was dripping wet, and he tried to dry it as best he could with his handkerchief. His headache was making itself felt again, and at moments it was as though he had a nail stuck in each temple. Perhaps it meant that the weather was about to
get even worse. He looked up at the sky. It was a uniform grey. If the temperature dropped another couple of degrees, it might snow in earnest this time. He started up the car and drove off. He felt a little muddled, maybe even sad. An old melancholic, wandering through the night alone. He crossed the Arno and instinctively turned right. He took Via Lungo l’Affrico and continued straight all the way to Salviatino. Then he turned down Viale Righi, drove past Piazza Edison and continued down Viale Volta. That was where he wanted to go. He wanted to see the house he was born in, the mysterious garden where, as a child, he had waged battle against the fiercest monsters …
While driving past he slowed down as usual and looked at the ground-floor windows. They were all dark. He would have liked to see at least one of them lit up, just so he could imagine that his mother was still waiting for him behind the curtains, praying before her makeshift altar of holy images and candles. As he drove away he felt like an old fool again, and as he entered Piazza delle Cure he saw his father again, with that old sea-dog’s face of his … Whenever the old man got angry, his mother used to tell him to calm down, because mature men were not supposed to carry on that way. And Dad would always reply with the same thing: ‘What are you saying? Even your precious Jesus got pissed off once!’ And Mamma would start screaming that Florentines remembered the Gospel only when it was convenient for them, and they would start bickering about the Church and related matters …
But enough memories, old fart, or you’re liable to start crying and loosening your dentures …
He still felt strange. He thought again of Raffaele’s and Guido’s lair and had the sensation that he’d just returned from a faraway city. He needed to recover his bearings. To distract himself and not think about anything. He felt like drinking with a friend and making light conversation, but he was too tired. He drove over the railway lines and turned up Viale Don Minzoni … When he wasn’t careful, he still called it Viale Principessa Clotilde, which was what oldies called it. He instinctively looked up at the windows of the Montigiani flat. They were lit up. He imagined Marisa holed up in her bedroom, talking with a girlfriend on the phone as her parents dozed off in front of Mike Bongiorno on the telly. He shook his head and stepped on the accelerator. All those kids seemed to belong to another race – a strong race destined to survive. They moved through the world, as light as young colts and as heavy as donkeys laden with burdens …
Go home, old man, put on your longjohns and woollen nightcap and cover up. You’re fifty-five years old. Prehistoric. A Methuselah.
29 December
After spending the whole day at the office, the inspector left the station without a hint of appetite but a strong desire to go and see a movie. Rosa absolutely could not join him, since she was still busy rehearsing Doralice. The première was the following evening.
Bordelli parked the Beetle in Via Pacinotti, next to the Cinema Aurora. It was starting to rain. The cinema’s sign was made of neon tubes. One letter had burnt out and the others flickered as if about to blow, but they’d been doing that for years now.
That evening they were showing a Western, For a Few Dollars More. He’d already seen a couple of Sergio Leone’s films and found them amusing. He bought a ticket and went into the dark theatre. The newsreel was still playing, showing a feature on the latest Paris fashions. The models wore extremely short skirts and their legs did wonders for the eyes. Clouds of smoke and comments on the fashion models rose up from the seats.
The film began. The protagonist was a tough guy with a remarkable face. Rosa would certainly have liked him. Bordelli succeeded in not smoking for most of the film, but when the final duel started, he found himself with a cigarette between his lips. They were all shooting their guns like madmen, and the bad guys were dropping like flies. Finally, the last remaining heavy fell to the ground, and the hero rode away alone on his horse, accompanied by music to fit the occasion.
When Bordelli left the cinema, it was drizzling outside.With a shudder, he headed off at a fast pace towards his car. He felt hungry. He got in the car, turned on the heat, and drove off. As sequences of images from the film ran through his head, Odoardo’s face kept appearing. He would pay a call on him soon, but had to find the right moment.
When passing in front of Cesare’s trattoria, he slowed down nearly to a stop and glanced inside. Although it was already half past ten, there were still a lot of people. He parked the Beetle between two trees and slipped into Totò’s kitchen, hungry as a wolf. The cook greeted him with a glass of wine. After a succession of dishes, they arrived at last at the grappa.
By the time the inspector crawled out of that dangerous place with Totò at his side, it was almost three o’clock in the morning. The restaurant had closed a good while earlier. They had both drunk a great deal during their supper and, as usual, had talked about many things. Totò had not spared him the customary blood-curdling stories of his ancestral lands, and Bordelli had suddenly found himself drunk. As he was downing his umpteenth glass of grappa, he’d heard an alarm go off in his head. One more sip and he wouldn’t be able to drive home.
Totò pulled down the rolling metal gate and after a few failed attempts managed to stick the key in the hole. His little eyes were bloodshot and he could barely stand up, and he laughed at every idiotic comment he made. He wanted to drive home in his souped-up Fiat 600, but Bordelli wouldn’t hear of it and forced him to get into the Beetle. The German engine whirred quietly, at minimum speed, as they glided down the deserted streets. It was still drizzling, the gleaming festoons reflecting off the wet asphalt. Totò’s laughter resounded inside the car as he carried on with silly remarks that he alone found funny. A few long minutes later, the inspector dropped him off in Via Pisana and waited to see him go inside before driving off towards San Frediano, trying very hard to bring the road into focus.
Once at home, he undressed and collapsed in bed. The room was spinning round with all its furniture. He closed his eyes and was asleep in minutes.
30 December
At 7 a.m. his alarm clock woke him up unceremoniously. He turned it off and stood up, staggering, went into the bathroom, stuck his head in the sink and ran cold water over it. Then he sat down in the kitchen and, one cup after another, ended up drinking a whole pot of coffee. He thought of Odoardo, of course, and immediately felt like smoking. Unable to resist, he lit a cigarette. Odoardo was the one. He did it … He killed Badalamenti. The inspector was increasingly convinced of it. But the realisation gave him no satisfaction. He sat a while longer, ruminating, then got up and went into the bathroom to take a hot shower.
The day passed slowly, and at no point was Bordelli able to get in the right mood to go and have his little chat with Odoardo. He kept on putting it off, even if he didn’t quite know why.
The national news programme that evening broadcast the photograph of Agostino Pintus, as Piras had promised. All they could do now was wait, hoping that someone would recognise him. His comrades from Salò certainly wouldn’t talk, and nobody he’d paid a visit to was still on this earth … But perhaps there was someone who might remember him just the same. One had to hope for a little luck, following Piras’s example. And secondarily, as they liked to say in the courts, there was always the charge of premeditated murder. There were some serious obstacles between Mr Frigolin and freedom, Bordelli thought … Even though, if the guy walked, it wouldn’t be the first time someone of his ilk had got away with murder. He rang Rosa to wish her a final ‘break a leg’ before the performance. Tonight was opening night.
‘So you really can’t come?’
‘No, Rosa, I’m so sorry …’
‘Oh, come on! What could be so important?’
‘I have to go to … There’s going to be a big meeting with people from the ministry …’
‘At night?’
‘When they come from Rome they always arrive late, you have no idea what a ball-ache it is … and these things usually last late into the night,’ said Bordelli.
‘Oh, g
o on …’
‘Really, sometimes till three, four o’clock … You’ll see.’
‘Poor monkey …’ said Rosa, touched. She’d swallowed it whole.
‘Break a leg,’ said Bordelli.
‘Thanks.’ Rosa blew her usual barrage of kisses and hung up. Bordelli felt a little guilty, but the thought of going to Rosa’s and finding the place full of people made him feel strange. For him, going to Rosa’s was … well … how would you call it …
He lit a cigarette and went back to the television. The National channel was showing some sort of serial drama, so he switched to Channel 2 and started watching a Donald Duck cartoon. He thought of the president’s arrival that morning from Rome. Saragat had met the mayor at Palazzo Vecchio, done a tour of the city, and then returned home …
‘I really have to go and see Odoardo,’ he muttered to himself. Tomorrow. He would go tomorrow. Or maybe the day after tomorrow.
31 December
Round mid-morning Diotivede went into the cellar of his home. He hadn’t set foot in it for years. He measured the room in paces, then stood and reflected for a few minutes. Perhaps Bordelli was right. Perhaps someone who’d been cutting corpses open his whole life couldn’t suddenly just stop. He went back upstairs and picked up the telephone.
‘Hello, Bordelli. This morning I went down to my cellar.’
‘You have a cellar? With wine in it?’
‘It’s full of rubbish, actually … But I could imagine a nice laboratory in it.’
‘Ah, I see. And I could bring you the corpses, if you like.’
‘You Igor, me Frankenstein?’
‘I’m sure your monster would be a lot nicer.’
‘Well, for starters, I would create a woman,’ said the doctor.
‘You know what? I myself think of moving to the country to live the peasant life.’
‘I can’t picture you doing that.’
