Spring Cleaning

by Antonio Manzini

  “She’s a Saint-Rhémy-en-Ardennes.”

  “A . . . ?”

  “Saint-Rhémy-en-Ardennes. An extremely rare breed created by Baron Gaston de Veilleuse in the eighteenth century. Originally from the city of Sedan, it’s not very well-known because it’s a breed full of contradictions, but it’s also excellent company. It alternates moments of enormous affection with outbursts of ferocity and an estrangement from the well-known instincts for fraternity and friendship normally found in the canine species. Therefore, I’d advise you not to venture too close, she might lick you or she might take your hand off at the wrist . . . Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of a Saint-Rhémy-en-Ardennes, D’Intino!”

  “No, no, now that I think about it, yes . . . Saint-Rhémy . . .”

  “. . . en-Ardennes. Now, would you care to tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “There’s a thing . . . a bad thing . . . that happened at the prison in Varallo.”

  “All right. And now do you want to tell me what happened at the prison in Varallo?”

  “A dead man!”

  Rocco nodded. “You know something, D’Intino? At police headquarters, if you search carefully, there’s a man. Easy to find, because he must weigh about 265 pounds. He has an agreeable face, cheerful, and very, very intelligent . . .”

  “Deruta?”

  “Didn’t I say very intelligent? Do you think I just described Deruta?”

  D’Intino said nothing.

  “Fine. This man answers to the name of Carlo Pietra. He is the deputy chief of the Turin mobile squad. For the time being, you’re going to have to speak to him because yours truly is on obligatory leave until he feels like coming back. Have I made myself clear?”

  D’Intino stood in the doorway, mouth gaping open. “My good man D’Intino, which part of what I said isn’t clear to you?”

  “Dotto’. What isn’t clear to me is what I’m supposed to do now.”

  “All right then, write it down. First! Go back to police headquarters.”

  Under his breath, D’Intino repeated: “Go back to police headquarters . . .”

  “Second, speak to Carlo Pietra.”

  “Speak to Carlo Pietra . . .”

  “Third, stop busting the balls of Deputy Captain Schiavone.”

  “Third, stop busting the balls of Deputy Captain Schiavone.”

  “All clear?”

  D’Intino smiled. “I have to go to police headquarters, find Pietra, and tell him not to bust the balls of Deputy Captain Schiavone.”

  “More or less.”

  “So you’re not coming?”

  “Coming where, D’Intì?”

  “To the prison?”

  “Get out!” And he slammed the door in D’Intino’s face.

  End of his secret retreat. Life had come back, and it was demanding him in a stentorian voice. The following morning he’d have to go back to police headquarters.

  “You’re done goofing off, Rocco!” he said loudly.

  ALESSANDRO MARTINELLI HAD GENEROUSLY PUT HIS OFFICE at the disposal of both Baldi and Pietra. The penitentiary guards, Mauro Marini and Daniele Abela, sitting in two wooden chairs, were gazing up at the gigantic chief of the Turin mobile squad as he stood by the window. Baldi, on the other hand, was toying with a Bic ballpoint pen, sprawled out in the warden’s leather office chair, while the warden himself remained standing in the doorway, as if he were a guest. Italo Pierron stood behind him. He clasped his hands behind his back and observed the two penitentiary guards.

  Marini was over fifty; the other man was under thirty. Both of them had sullen expressions on their faces.

  “Would you explain to me, very clearly, exactly what happened?” Baldi began without looking either man in the face.

  “Abela and I were summoned to put down a brawl that had broken out in the courtyard next to the door to Wing 2. Four or five convicts were fighting, so Daniele and I and other officers stopped them.”

  “Four Tunisians were sent to the infirmary,” Abela went on. “The others were sent to solitary confinement. When the brawl was over, we noticed Cuntrera’s body on the ground and we realized that he was dead.”

  “This Cuntrera . . .” asked Pietra as he looked out over the roofs of the prison from the office window, “did he take part in the brawl?”

  “That we don’t know. A few people said that he was minding his own business, smoking a cigarette.”

  Baldi shot a glance at Pietra, who continued to look out the window. “Who did you put in solitary confinement?”

  “The ringleaders. One is Enrico Carini, a.k.a. Erik the Red. The second is Oluwafeme Chiama, a Nigerian former amateur boxer, and the third is Agostino Lumi, a.k.a. the Professor. They started the brawl. The real victims were Omar Ben Taleb and his cousin Aziz. Tarek Essebsy and Karim Lakal got off easy.”

  “Motive?”

  “There’s not much to it . . .” Marini started out. “I’ve been working in the prison system for twenty-five years now, Dottore, and riots and brawls are always about the same things. Money, narcotics, cigarettes, or when someone fails to show proper respect for their betters. Inside here, there’s a whole other world, you know? And people will kill to make sure they’re respected. There’s a hierarchy of power, and the Professor with his two underlings are very high in the pecking order. Obviously, Omar failed to live up to some understanding. Or else, just as likely, he owed them money.”

  Baldi ended the conversation. “For now, you’re free to go. Thanks.” The two guards stood up and left the warden’s office.

  “Can I talk to the guy in solitary confinement?” the judge asked, looking at Martinelli.

  “With all three of them?” Martinelli asked.

  “Only with the boss. This Agostino Lumi.”

  “I suggest you take a look at my files. That might give you a sense of just what sort of person we’re talking about.” And he pointed to an old metal filing cabinet that had a letter of the alphabet for every drawer. Baldi gestured to Pietra, who immediately riffled through the folders for the letter L. The judge stood pensively gazing at the usual photo of the president of the Italian republic, the crucifix, the flag, and the small Ikea bookshelf with dozens of books packed together in no particular order. “Here you are. Agostino Lumi.” The chief of the Turin mobile squad handed the binder to Baldi, who proceeded to open it.

  “All right, let’s have a look.”

  Agostino Lumi was a criminal who could fairly claim title to the term. Born in Varese in 1968, he had committed a dozen or so armed robberies, been involved in three shoot-outs with the Carabinieri, been charged with a double homicide for rubbing out a couple of the men in his gang, as well as an attempted murder, and then, along with those, assorted crimes such as theft and fraud, which netted him various sentences in his thirty-eight years of criminal endeavors and now added up to two separate life sentences without possibility of parole. The second of the two life sentences had been handed down while he was an inmate of the Viterbo house of detention. Later transferred to Varallo for disciplinary reasons, he had clearly re-formed his little retinue of enforcers, a gang that would allow him to rule the roost within the walls of that prison, too. “Quite an estimable individual, in other words.”

  “Unless experience misleads me, Dottore, you’re not going to get much out of a guy like that . . . and in any case I’ve already requested and obtained a transfer order for him,” Martinelli said.

  “Fine.” Baldi sighed. “One last thing. Do you have the video footage from the security cameras?”

  “Certainly. Do you want it?”

  Baldi said nothing. He just nodded. Then he looked at Italo Pierron, who had remained silent throughout the questioning. “Pierron, arrange to take delivery of the material from Dottor Martinelli.”

  “Ah, Dottore,” Pietra said. “Tomorrow I’m going to have to head back to Turin.”

  Baldi nodded. “Pierron, any news concerning the mental defective?”

  Italo threw both
arms wide, disconsolate.

  “Officer, just remember that you promised to deliver him to me.”

  “Of course, Dottor Baldi! Don’t worry!”

  “ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO WAS BEHIND BARS?” Seated at her little writing desk in front of the window, Marina is doodling on a sheet of paper, random meaningless patterns. She doesn’t like it here at the residence. Not much room—she feels confined. She’d like to go back to a normal living situation, I know that.

  “Maybe . . .” I answer her. “Otherwise, why would they have waited so long to lash out at me?”

  “Maybe they were just out of the country.”

  “Good point. That’s another suggestion I’ll have to give to De Silvestri.”

  “You never talk to me about your work.”

  “Because that’s not my work. I’m talking about a son of a bitch who shot Adele to death when he was actually trying to kill me. It’s called survival.”

  “Obfuscate,” she says to me, pulling out her usual notepad. “Isn’t that a lovely word? ‘Obfuscate.’ It gives the idea of someone scowling like a guard dog.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “You don’t know? It’s important, Rocco. Very important.”

  SERGIO MOZZICARELLI WAS LOOKING AT THE SAGGING METAL mesh of the bunk bed above him, bulging under the weight of Aldo, one of his cell mates. He lay there with both hands crossed on his chest. It looked as if he were praying. Instead, he was thinking. The night was silent. People were snoring. People were coughing. A mass of men, alone and forgotten, were trying to get to sleep, just as he was. Sergio rolled over, facing the empty bed, the bed that for a few days had belonged to Mimmo Cuntrera. They had taken away his sheets, and the thin mattress was folded over on itself, baring the metal mesh beneath. The two other men in the cell seemed to be deep in sleep. The moonlight bathed the walls and reflected off the green-painted window grates. The water in the drain of the little squat toilet was gurgling. He drew a deep breath. He tried to shut his eyes, to abandon his thoughts and pretend that the sound of the drain in the squat toilet was actually a high mountain stream, full of fresh flowing water, good to drink. But he couldn’t do it: that sound remained a plumbing problem and he was still in a prison cell, not out in the meadows of some alpine valley. His eyes slid open as if there were a well-oiled spring behind them. He glanced at the bunk bed next to his. Karim seemed to be sleeping. Then he rolled over in his direction. Sergio saw the young man’s eyes glittering in the dark. The Tunisian was awake. Their eyes met.

  “You’re not asleep?” Sergio whispered to keep from waking up Aldo, who was right above him, snoring and weighing down the springs with his two hundred pounds of flesh.

  “No . . .” Karim replied, “and neither are you . . .”

  Sergio turned over on his side. “How do you feel?”

  “My mouth hurts a little . . . but that will pass.” And the young man brushed his fingers over his jaw where he’d taken the hardest hit. “Those assholes. I’ll make them pay for it.”

  “Never mind. If there’s one reason I’ve lived to be sixty-eight, it’s because I’ve often let things slide.”

  The North African nodded. Then he rolled over, turning the back of his head to his cell mate. A sign that he had no desire to speak. Sergio, on the other hand, would gladly have continued. He couldn’t bring himself to be alone with his thoughts. And these weren’t thoughts of yearning or dismay. There was no one outside of that prison waiting for him. His wife had remarried; his two children had jobs in other countries. His brother was serving a life sentence in Lecce prison, and the only way he was getting out was feetfirst. Sergio was alone in the world, and the burden of his solitude had never weighed on him the way it did that night.

  Who can I trust? he’d been wondering obsessively for hours now. He needed to talk to someone, spit out the thing that had been killing him minute after minute. Because Sergio Mozzicarelli had seen.

  He’d seen it all.

  STRETCHED OUT ON THE EXTREMELY HARD MATTRESS OF HIS residential hotel, Rocco was staring, eyes wide-open, at the ceiling, illuminated by the neon light of a sign outside a pub down in the street below. It blinked at regular intervals, like a metronome, changing color as it blinked. Light pink, dark pink, purple. One two three, one two three. A waltz. Still midnight. How could it be? How could the nights in that residential hotel be so everlasting? One two three. One two three! He got up from the bed. Lupa looked at him, baffled. “I’m going out, Lupa. What about you, want to come?”

  He put on his trousers. The dog was already standing next to the door.

  It was a May evening, the stars were bright in the sky, and only the occasional straggler was still out wandering the streets of the city. He walked down Rue Piave, where he had lived for nine months. He looked up at the building. He looked at the downspout that the nameless murderer had used just a few days earlier to scale the wall and enter his apartment. There it was. Shutters fastened tight. Eyes closed. Dead and blind. Like Adele. Who was now sleeping forever in the cemetery of Montecompatri, near Rome.

  “What’s the name of the street where the police chief found me an apartment?” he asked Lupa, who was sniffing at a manhole cover. “Via Laurent Cerise . . .”

  Lupa trotted along next to him. “Let’s go over to Ettore’s bar right now and ask him where it is . . .” And he headed off toward Piazza Chanoux.

  VIA CERISE WAS A NONDESCRIPT STREET. ONLY A FEW HOUSES, none of them tall. He liked it. Above all, he liked the arch under the building where Via Archet ran through. He hoped that the street number with the apartment that the police chief had found him was right in that building. He walked up to the front entrance. On the large wooden door there was a “For Rent” sign, prominently displayed. Rocco Schiavone smiled. “So it seems this may be the exact building. We’ll come take a look tomorrow, eh? Do you like it? It’s nice. Look, there are mountains over there, and there are mountains over there, too. Not bad, not bad at all!” And he made a smart about-face and headed back to the residential hotel. But then he noticed that the street was directly behind the courts building. “What? Come live right next to the prosecutor’s office?” he mused into the night. “Entirely out of the question!” He would be subject to every whim of Baldi and the rest of them, every minute of his life. “They’re not getting me on this street, not if I was a cold, dead corpse!” Lupa barked in agreement.

  Someone was waiting for him in front of the wrought-iron and glass door of the residential hotel. The shadow was that of a man. And he was smoking a cigarette. He would have expected Anna. And deep down, he was glad that it wasn’t her; at that hour of the night he couldn’t have withstood a heated argument about the future of monogamous relationships and couples in the society of the twenty-first century. In an automatic, instinctive reaction, Rocco put his hand underneath his loden overcoat. But he hadn’t carried a pistol for years now. The shadow stepped forward, and under the glare of the pub sign it took on the semblance of Italo Pierron.

  “Ciao, Rocco.”

  “Ciao, Italo. What are you doing here at this hour of the night?”

  “When are you coming back to the office?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lupa went over to sniff at the trouser legs of the officer in civilian clothing, who shooed her away with a faint lurch of annoyance. Italo didn’t like dogs. “That business at the prison. It’s serious.”

  “How serious?”

  “Plenty serious.”

  “Give me a cigarette.”

  Italo pulled out his pack and Rocco’s eyes lit up. “Camels? You bought Camels?”

  “I was out of my usual smokes.”

  While he was lighting one, the deputy chief looked Italo in the eyes. “Are you trying to bribe me?”

  “No, I’m not kidding around. I was at the cigarette machine, I was free to choose, and I said to myself, since I’m going to see Rocco anyway, why not just get the brand that he likes best?”

  “Thanks.
It’s a very feminine thought.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “How did you know that I would be awake?”

  “Because since you’ve moved into the residential hotel, I’ve been calling the receptionist every day and by now I know your habits.”

  Rocco spat out the smoke, looking up at the sky that was spangled with stars. “In that case, let’s come to the gravity of the matter.”

  “The dead man in prison. It’s Mimmo Cuntrera.”

  At that name, Rocco shut his eyes. “Goddamn it to hell . . .” he murmured. “How can that be? Did someone murder him?”

  “It looks like a heart attack, but the judge seems to be convinced that it’s something else.”

  “Right. Mimmo Cuntrera isn’t going to die like that. It would be too nice if pieces of shit like him were taken down by heart attacks. No, he’s a weed, it’s a lot harder to kill his kind.”

  “Rocco, maybe you’d better come back into the office.”

  Italo was right, and the deputy chief knew it. Mimmo Cuntrera was the irritating aftermath of the Berguet case. And of the investigations that Rocco had carried out in order to save the hide of the Berguets’ daughter, Chiara. He couldn’t just remain shut up in the Vieux Aosta. Adele was dead. And he felt personally responsible, even though his old friend Seba didn’t see it that way. Those 6.35 mm bullets had been meant for him, for Rocco Schiavone.

  “Put this in the log, Italo. On a May night, at . . . ten minutes past one, Deputy Chief Rocco Schiavone came face-to-face with a pain in the ass of the tenth degree!”

  Italo smiled as he thought back to the chart that he’d hung up outside the deputy chief’s office. “All right, I’ll log it in tomorrow.”

  The deputy chief looked at him blankly, uncomprehending.

  “So, Rocco, what are you going to do?”

  “I’ll sleep on it.”

  “Are you feeling sleepy?”

  “No. Lupa’s feeling sleepy.”

  It was true. The puppy had fallen asleep on his Clarks desert boots.

  HIS THOUGHTS TURNED BACK TO MIMMO CUNTRERA. AND the story of the Berguet family. Something didn’t add up in that coil of connections. There was one note that was out of tune in the musical score. Cuntrera had been discovered, Rocco and his officers had freed Chiara Berguet, the attempt of the Mafia conspiracy to take over Edil.ber had failed utterly, so why rub Cuntrera out? What had he known? Who wanted him dead? Drowning in his thoughts, he climbed the stairs and found himself once again lying on the hard-as-hell mattress of the Vieux Aosta. On the ceiling, the same old waltz of the three colors of the pub sign in the street below. “One two three, one two three . . .” And suddenly he was fast asleep.