The Second Life of Inspector Canessa

by Roberto Perrone

  Carla sat up in bed, going over what had happened. She wasn’t a prude or naive, but she wasn’t ‘easy’ either. And she especially didn’t want to be seen as ‘the reporter who sleeps with her boss’. Maybe a colleague, if she really liked them that much. Which was something she’d always carefully avoided – until now.

  Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she saw a face she liked, despite the tangle of brown hair and the bags under her eyes. But what she liked most was what was behind it: her brains, her soul.

  Carla Trovati was a beautiful woman, but even more importantly, she was good. She wasn’t where she was thanks to her arse – she knew many a mediocre colleague, male and female, who’d used their bodies to get promotions and raises – but because she put effort, sweat, and intelligence into her work. She couldn’t ignore the fact that someone like her was bound to receive attention on the main floor of the paper, especially with all the men there. But she had no time for those games. And in any case, she definitely didn’t care to join the long list of Giulio Strozzi’s lovers. After her law degree – honouring a promise to her father, a famous Milan lawyer – she’d studied journalism and started her internship at the Corriere.

  Her breakthrough, the one every journalist dreams about, especially early in their career, had come when she’d been sent to the Town Hall for a city council meeting. Nothing special. A regular meeting. A normal, routine, boring reporting gig. During a moment of fatigue during the endless council session, she’d gone to the loo. In the corridor that led to the toilets, she’d found the deputy mayor in tears. He was a quiet, serious man in his forties, a physics teacher at the polytechnic, but politically engaged since youth. ‘Is everything okay?’ she’d asked him, sincerely worried. And he’d started talking like someone needing to let it all out, as if her formal gesture of politeness had been proof of kindness on planet Earth. He’d needed a shoulder, a confessor, a human being capable of listening. He told her his party was dropping him because he was gay. Of course, none of his colleagues, all parading as politically correct, had or would ever mention it. Too sly. The official reasons were something else entirely, but to him, the reality was plain and clear.

  Carla hadn’t taken any notes at the time. The first rule her journalism teacher, a retired reporter for the late and venerable Notte, had taught her was this: ‘Only use notepad and pens during press conferences, never when you bump into someone, never when you realise that someone is confiding in you. At that moment, they think you’re a good person offering them a shoulder to cry on, and not a stinking bastard, a cynical journalist who will jot down every last word.’

  Carla had memorised every single word and as soon as the deputy had left, she pulled out her phone. The story was on the first page for a week, and the director had called her to his office, the ‘red office’. He’d made her sit on one of the famous worn leather armchairs while he, solemnly leaning against the bookshelf that housed the Treccani encyclopaedia, had told her she was hired.

  Two years had passed since then. Carla had put serious effort into her work, staying at the office until the wee hours, standing in for anyone absent or sick, running back and forth in the archives when they needed to find an old cutting that hadn’t yet been digitised. ‘You know you have nothing to prove, right?’ old De Blasi would tell her. He was the established commissioner’s office reporter, worn out, scruffy, shrouded in a permanent cloud of smoke (he’d moved his office into the courtyard so he could keep smoking at work), the last of a dying breed of journalists. ‘This place is filled with total arseholes who should be licking the ground you walk on…’ he’d add, not entirely innocently. But Carla let some of his comments slide, realising he meant nothing by them. With everyone else, she was stony. Especially with Strozzi, though she clearly wasn’t immune to his charm.

  Now she knew: he had been subtly wooing her, never crossing the line, never pressing for more than friendship. They’d gone for a drink several times after work, but always with other people. Only now was she noticing the trap she’d fallen into.

  Giulio had made her feel comfortable, made her feel important as a journalist, special as a woman. He’d calmly waited for the right moment, and it had come the previous evening. They’d gone for dinner at the Navigli, this time just the two of them. It was a lovely night in mid-April when they could eat outside, her boss’s company was pleasant, the conversation stimulating. They drank together, laughed, joked, and locked hands, but especially gazes. Then he’d given her a lift home, without saying much more. When they’d reached corso Garibaldi, Giulio had got out to open her door, leaving the engine running, giving the impression that – for him – the evening was over, and they were both going home. That’s when she’d asked if he wanted to come upstairs.

  She lived in one of those blocks with communal balconies, once council housing but now fully renovated and gentrified, and only for the wealthy. The daughter of Trovati, Esq., prince of the courtroom, could afford it. Her flat looked like a loft: not so spacious, but very New York.

  ‘This is a nice place. You’ve decorated it really well.’ Giulio ran his eyes over the flat, lingering over the brass bed in the corner.

  ‘It’s not that big, but it’s enough for me.’

  He’d smiled mournfully. ‘I’d really like to leave via dei Missaglia. It’s too far out, and the area is depressing. But journalists’ houses are lovely and big, comfortable. For those of us with kids, space is important. Also, my wife hates the city centre.’

  Mentioning his kids was part of his wooing, too: it set him apart from other men looking for an affair, the ones who hid their families, erased their other ties, played the teenager on a first date, slipped their wedding rings into their pockets. Not him. He was sly, kept his ring on display and talked openly about his family, letting a feeling of sadness come off him, as if staying married to his wife – whom he’d married in the past, when he’d also been ‘just anyone’ – was a sacrifice, but careful of playing the husband who felt ‘no more spark in the relationship’. Giulio Strozzi was clever. He never cut things off when the subject came round to his family. Oh no, he always let others draw their own conclusions.

  While they were having another drink, he’d told her that signing the kids up (a boy and a girl) for a private school had shown him the true joy of the weekend, when you could finally get up late. That was when she’d kissed him. She had no idea what had happened, or what had come over her. She pulled back immediately, regretting it, convinced that it would all end there, but the man who’d just been talking about his children with fatherly love had moved fast, as if he’d been waiting for it the whole time.

  Of course, she thought now.

  Giulio had followed her retreat, practically sucking her lips and tenderly reigniting the kiss. He’d caressed the back of her head, leaving his hand at the base of her neck – his way of preventing any further escape, something she hadn’t even considered, caught as she was in his web. Then, as if for the first time in his life, Giulio had run a finger down her entire spine. And there, as she was lost in the kiss, her mouth fully open, the poetry had ended. He’d grabbed her hips, throwing her onto the couch, and almost ripped her shirt open. Her breasts burst out of her bra and he sucked her nipples as he lifted up her skirt. He’d smiled, aroused, at the sight of her hold-ups. A moment later, he was fully naked. He’d got up from the couch, taken her by hand to the bed, and finished undressing her.

  ‘And then he fucked me, the bastard. Not bad, either. Vanilla, but satisfying.’

  The thing that had angered her and left her with a sense of nausea had happened that morning, just before she carefully reconstructed every detail of the encounter for herself as a lesson for the future. At some point, half awake, she’d heard Giulio move. She’d opened her eyes, propping herself up on an elbow. She didn’t immediately understand what that thing pointing at her face was – and then she realised: it was Giulio Strozzi’s
‘tool’. He was standing by her side of the bed, watching her tenderly, as if what was happening were entirely natural. He’d touched her face with measured technique, grazing her lips with a finger, circling, letting her mouth open. Suddenly, he’d pushed with his other hand on the back of her head, bringing her to his penis, plunging it into her mouth. Carla, though she felt trapped, hadn’t resisted. But when he was coming – ‘Yes, good girl!’ – she fully realised what was happening and remembered her promise to herself, not to become one of his many conquests. Sure, Giulio would never say anything about them. That fake gentleman had never spilled anything about his affairs. Yet all they needed was a word, a look, a smile, and everyone at the Corriere would know that she’d been added to the list. Before she could react, he’d filled her up. Disgusted more by her own weakness than what had happened, she ran to the bathroom. When she came back, Giulio Strozzi was lying on the bed, eyes closed, happily convinced that he’d lounge there until ten and then walk the couple of blocks to via Solferino for their eleven o’clock meeting. She picked up his clothes, including his shoes, and threw them at him in anger.

  ‘Get out. You got what you wanted, now go sleep it off at your own place.’

  That was the only moment in the entire encounter when she’d foreseen his next move. Giulio had been quiet and demure, no lashing out, no obvious anger. A gentleman. He got dressed quickly. At the door, he poured oil on the fire by saying, ‘I’m sorry, I might have let myself go too far, but you’re special. In every way.’

  An hour later, Carla was still there, staring at the blade of light coming in at the window, and thinking just what an idiot she’d been. She made her decision, pulled open the curtains and stared at the courtyard downstairs. The custodian was watering the flowers in the small communal garden. ‘I can’t sleep anyway.’

  She made herself a coffee as the clock from the New York Times read 6.48 a.m. She’d willingly have gone to New York there and then in order to put an ocean between herself and the office.

  5

  His seat was wide and comfortable, and the service excellent, but lawyer Giannino Salemme was mourning the time when you could even smoke cigars on planes. Almost pre-history now. The legal consultant for a British chemical giant that had ‘made a mistake’ – some thousand dead in Pakistan from a toxic cloud at a disinfectant factory built in that multinationals’ paradise – had asked for help from their partners in the States, and he’d said that you could still smoke absolutely anything on Pakistani airlines. Was it true? He’d never checked, though he’d always been tempted to book a return ticket Milan–London–Islamabad to find out.

  He’d spent the entire red-eye flight from Newark thinking about the packets of Partagas in his soft leather bag in the overhead locker: they were tucked in a chic travel humidor he’d found at a famous tobacconist on the Upper East Side. A gift from an American partner who knew his vices and carefully cultivated them: Bacchus? hardly, but tobacco and Venus were pretty hardcore interests.

  Salemme wasn’t one for whores, meaning he didn’t like to pay. He preferred to think of himself as the Latin Lover of forty years earlier, as if those times at the Capannina club and the hot summers in Versilia, when women were more open and less demanding than nowadays, weren’t gone for good. His wife, bless her soul, had been the one to introduce him to Forte dei Marmi, before swiftly passing on to a better life for both of them. Bland, shy and awkward, but with plenty of dosh. The daughter of the boomer middle class. Her father had got a gong, and made his money through construction. He’d bought houses everywhere, from Cortina to Montecarlo. Now all those houses belonged to him, Salemme, the Neapolitan lawyer, ex-magistrate. His father-in-law (God, the irony of a southerner like him marrying the daughter of an industrialist!) had looked at him askance until his dying breath, a magnificent sound, for what it meant: the release of all that wealth destined for his daughter. Salemme organised a yearly mass and rosary, two, in fact: one for his wife and one for her entire (late) family. His feelings for her were a mixture of brotherly love and profound gratitude. In life, she’d done two crucial things: she’d given him a son in his image (he’d worried during the pregnancy that the baby would be a girl or turn out to be as bland and insignificant as its mother) and she’d buggered off quickly. Not that she’d taken up much space or been clingy. Poor thing, not at all. But things were better like this. He was free.

  And so Salemme – despite several suggestions of a second marriage – had ‘remained faithful to the memory of his late wife’ (as far as weddings went, anyway) and had been living his second life to the full. At nearly seventy, he was still handsome. Maybe not to women under forty, but he liked them young and didn’t want to pay.

  So the lawyer for foreign partners of an important American legal firm (even his closest affiliates were mystified about the link) had found him a good-looking girl, set her up in the Village and paid her rent and tuition fees. That way his Italian friend could have fun every time he crossed the pond with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. ‘Matters of productivity,’ he’d insist when the board of Harper, Johnson & Meredith of Madison Avenue queried the significant ‘rep costs’ in the books. However, what the book-cookers and Salemme didn’t know was that when the Italian partner wasn’t stateside – i.e. most of the year – it was the liaison lawyer who slept with the college student.

  Salemme disembarked the Newark–Malpensa Continental flight with a feeling of satisfaction, thinking about his past week in the Big Apple and looking forward to the mossy flavour of the Partagas he’d light as soon as he left the airport.

  He was a big man and, though the tight physique of his youth was only a memory, he’d retained some elegance. It wasn’t a matter of style. Sure, his grey suit from a famous Milan tailor hung perfectly despite the night spent at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic (bespoke, of course; he’d been a loyal customer since the beginning). But his elegance wasn’t a matter of his clothing alone.

  He fetched his luggage quickly and used a trolley to wheel it to arrivals, scanning the crowd for Germano, his chauffeur.

  Instead, among the dazed and sleepy faces waiting at the break of day, he spotted his son Claudio, waving at him. He felt a pang of worry: something was wrong. Claudio out of bed at dawn? Germano appeared behind his son and took the trolley.

  ‘Morning, sir. How was the flight?’

  ‘Not bad, thanks, Germano. Go to the car and wait there, please. I need a word with my son.’

  The chauffeur disappeared discreetly, and the lawyer led his son by the arm towards a semi-deserted area of the airport.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked in front of a still-shuttered flower shop.

  ‘What do you mean? Can’t I just come see my good old dad?’

  Claudio was tall, smart and handsome, but he’d been born arrogant, and that troubled Salemme. He’d built his power and wealth on silence, invisibility, and working under the radar. ‘Hidden power is a sure thing,’ he always said. ‘Visible power ultimately collapses.’

  Claudio was efficient and precise, and presumptuous as well. He was a good student but lacked discipline, convinced anything could be solved by instinct and not by hard work. He tended towards arrogance, at times unpleasantly so, and that was dangerous, for him as well as for others since it led to brash decisions. When he was younger, his father had had to get him out of his fair share of troubles: unwanted pregnancies, beatings outside clubs, drink driving. ‘At least no drugs,’ Salemme senior sighed. It all slid off a spoiled rich boy who wouldn’t grow up.

  Claudio was his only child and he’d been terrified of losing him, literally. Surprisingly, after the train wreck of his high-school years – he’d only graduated after hefty donations to private schools – and two years of a law degree, mostly hungover at his desk at university after rowdy nights out, he’d suddenly shifted gears. He’d actually started studying, given up his bad habits, graduated, and joined
his father’s company.

  The reason? He’d walked out of a literal car crash, almost unscathed. But his friends had died in it, a boy and an underage girl. Fortunately, he hadn’t been driving, or Giannino Salemme would’ve had to struggle to get him out of a sentence, despite his past as a magistrate and the contacts he still had almost everywhere. He remembered the police phone call and the nightmare of that evening spent in the Magenta hospital, shrouded in January fog.

  When the boy had opened his eyes after surgery and they’d been allowed to have a minute together, Salemme had stared at his son and said: ‘Read this, then sign it.’ He’d handed him a contract stipulating that he’d graduate within three years, taking the exams for all four years of the programme, and would pass the bar exam. Otherwise he’d be removed from the will – and that meant no pocket money, not even for a coffee. He would hand over receipts for every purchase. Salemme knew, however, that this wasn’t what had changed the kid’s path: he wasn’t afraid of losing money, but of having almost lost his life. Claudio had followed through on the agreement, but since then there’d been a cold light in his eyes that only warmed up when he was feeling arrogant. ‘Arrogance is a luxury you can only afford if you have solid foundations,’ Salemme often told him.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. Why are you here?’

  ‘I told you about it on the phone.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I’m taking care of it.’