A Woman Much Missed

by Valerio Varesi

  “That’s her.”

  “She let out rooms, but not to immigrants like us,” he said, with some asperity.

  “Did you see her yesterday?”

  “Early in the morning when she went out to do her shopping. I didn’t see her after that.”

  “She normally went out at dawn and then again in the afternoon?”

  “Every day. She seemed to enjoy walking in the dark.”

  “You can see everything from here,” Soneri said, imagining whole days spent seated at the window with the mist almost rubbing against it.

  “I used to be a hotel porter in England,” the man said, as if justifying himself.

  “Did you notice any new faces yesterday afternoon? People you hadn’t seen before?”

  The man looked at him with his dark, shining eyes which almost gave the impression that a film of water was flowing over them. He turned towards the bar where his wife was standing, and the two of them spoke for a few moments in their own language. His voice had the tone of an order.

  “We saw a man coming out around midday,” he said. After a brief pause, he added with a malicious smile, “and he was on his own.”

  Soneri understood that he knew about the comings and goings of various couples. It was for that reason that a man on his own seemed out of place.

  “Do you remember how he was dressed? Did you get a look at his face?”

  “He was quite tall, dressed in a dark coat which reached below his knees and he had the collar turned up. He was wearing a hat and glasses.”

  “So you weren’t able to see the outline of his face clearly?”

  The man shook his head in denial, but gave the impression of holding back when he was on the point of saying something more. The commissario knew how to wait, so after a few seconds he made a tiny gesture with his hand to break the silence, and congratulated himself on his mastery of sign language, a code which overrode all the languages in the world.

  “I’m not sure if it’s fair, and I’m not even sure if it’s true,” he stuttered.

  “What?” Soneri said softly.

  “I had the impression that he was in a rush, but don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer.”

  He understood perfectly. People often failed to grasp some deep purpose which was not immediately decipherable.

  “Fat . . . thin . . .?” the commissario asked, inviting the man to continue, but still speaking softly.

  “Thin,” the man said, running his eye over his own body which was decidedly slender, and a little bent.

  “Do you know Fernanda Schianchi as well?”

  “She lives at number thirty-five as well. She doesn’t go out much because she can’t walk very well. Aref, the Moroccan fruit-seller in Via Dalmazia, delivers her shopping to her at home.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. She went out about three o’clock. It’s nearly Christmas, so I assumed she was going out to buy something.”

  Soneri digested this in silence until someone from inside the café, cutting the air with a wave of his arms, shouted, “Mohammed!” The man gave him a nod and turned away.

  Outside, Soneri stopped for a smoke in Borgo delle Colonne, once the most “red” street in the city, but now a place where the recently refurbished mansions of millionaires, with their reinforced doorways, alternated with more dilapidated dwellings previously inhabited by working-class people, but now home to a noisy, multilingual community which spilled out onto colonnades now pressed into service as verandas.

  “Has the police doctor established the time of death?” Soneri asked Juvara over his mobile.

  He heard the inspector put his telephone down on the desk and start to type on his computer keyboard. “Some time between eleven and twelve. The time was confirmed by Nanetti’s investigation of the coffee left in the cups and by other findings.”

  “The Pakistani owner of the bar on the other side of the street from number thirty-five saw a man coming out of Ghitta’s around midday. There was no-one with him and he seemed to be in a hurry. He’s the likely killer.”

  “We’ve found out quite a lot then?”

  “We know he’s a man who was wearing a coat and a hat. And you think that’s a lot?”

  Juvara, embarrassed by his undue optimism, made no reply.

  “Has Saltapico made up his mind about issuing a search warrant for the Schianchi house?”

  “The paperwork will be ready in the morning.”

  Soneri walked along the street, feeling the surprised and wary eyes of Arabs and Africans on him. They could smell the policeman in him, with the same unerring precision as had communists fifty years previously. The other common factor was the sense of being outsiders, but the newcomers felt no pride in that status. Once again Soneri was overwhelmed by that sense of the vanity of life which had accompanied him since he had embarked on this investigation. He was convinced that his loss of contact with that part of the city was not due to chance factors, but to an unconscious exclusion. The murder of Ghitta had compelled him to confront what he had suppressed, and the memories which now came flooding back were so disturbing because he was afraid of verifying their inconsistency.

  In the mist, the Campanile del Duomo and the spires of the Battistero seemed to have been sliced off. Every so often a car, its arrival announced by the roar of its engine, or a bicycle free-wheeling silently towards the city centre, would emerge from the grey of the fog. Soneri found the remedy for his anxieties in a plate of tortelli d’erbette, and in Alceste’s unashamed, open use of the dialect. The Milord, so firmly anchored in tradition, offered him reassurance against any wavering sense of identity.

  Not even a bottle of Bonarda was sufficient to cheer him up, so he was still in a grim mood as he rose from the table and made for the door, giving Alceste a wave as he went. He had no wish to see anyone, much less face the daunting uproar at the questura and the thousand useless words his colleagues would throw at him, their good humour on show like a pennant at one of that endless round of meetings in the capo di gabinetto’s office. He slipped into his office without looking right or left, but once on his own he found himself dispiritingly bereft of any inspiration as to how to breathe life into the inquiry. There was the corpse of an old woman, a knife mysteriously delivered to a friar confessor in a church at dawn, and a tall, thin man with no recorded distinguishing features seen coming out of Ghitta’s house around noon, alone and in a hurry. All the rest was smoke and mirrors, starting with the house itself where in his youth Soneri had faced life with such enthusiasm, and continuing with those shadowy beings who had gone there on the night of the murder when many people, still unaware of what had occurred, would have dropped by for a regular visit or to renew old friendships.

  “Juvara!” he shouted down the internal line. When the inspector appeared, the commissario found himself noting his loosened belt. “Just think what you’ll be like after the feast of the Epiphany, with all those sumptuous dinners lying ahead of you.”

  Juvara did not reply immediately and when he launched into some form of self-justification, Soneri cut him short by issuing an order: “I want you to start gathering information on Giuditta Tagliavini.” But even as he spoke the words, he knew he would be doing the job himself. He was no good at delegating responsibility, as the head of the force was forever reminding him. Now they just let him get on with it, having slowly come round to the idea of having a foreign body linked to the police only by the obligatory practices of investigative procedure.

  “Is Nanetti examining the knife?” he asked Juvara.

  “Yes, he says it’s not something you can just buy in the shops. It’s very unusual.”

  “I know, “Soneri said. “It’s used by a pig butcher, the so-called corador.” He knew he had no proof that would stand up in court, but the first glance had been sufficient to convince him.

  “The what?” Juvara said.

  “The corador. He’s a specialist pig butcher whose
job it is to pierce the beast’s heart when it’s slaughtered. It’s the dialect word for one of the two butchers. The other is the one who sticks the hook in under the throat,” he said, leaving the inspector gawking with an air of infantile amazement. “Do you have the search warrant for the Schianchi house?”

  Juvara went back to his office and returned with the headed form, indicating that it had been issued by the office of the Procura della Repubblica. Soneri gave it a distracted glance and decided it offered him the only way forward on an afternoon which was as grim and dark as his mood.

  He set off to follow the same route he had seen Fernanda Schianchi take, and when he reached the centre of the cloister he stopped to look around, as the old woman had done. It was indeed very attractive, as he realised for the first time, having never before taken the time to look. He went through the main gate to Via Repubblica. From there he was less sure of the path the old woman would have taken, but he did not waste much time dwelling on it. Her disappearance merged with the wider mystery of the Ghitta affair. When he got to Via Saffi, the night was drawing in. On the landing, he ran into the Slav woman.

  “Did you notice a man around here yesterday? Thin, tall, with a black overcoat. In the morning, I mean,” he said.

  The woman’s eyes opened wide and she shook her head vigorously before saying, “Us always away. Not much home.”

  She did not manage to add anything else before her husband appeared behind her. He gave a backwards jerk of his head, an order issued by a master, and she scuttled into the house as obediently as a dog dispatched to its basket. Soneri felt an instinctive dislike of the man, and he introduced himself without so much as offering his hand. When the man discovered he was dealing with the police, he tried to put on a smile which he meant as deferential, but which only appeared hypocritical.

  “We work, we always out,” he said, anticipating the questions.

  “I’m talking about yesterday, a Sunday.”

  The man was temporarily caught off guard but quickly recovered his air of brazen insouciance. “Sundays, go visit relatives.” His tone revealed a man who feared the authorities, but was not above mocking them.

  Soneri glowered at him, angling the tip of his cigar upwards with his teeth. He would not have hesitated to put pressure on him, but he believed his reticence could be taken as a silent clue, so he backed off without for a second taking his eyes off the man, who beat a flustered retreat. The commissario stood alone on the landing until the light went off, but before he could switch it back on, he heard the sound of Fernanda’s buzzer. As he made his way silently down the stairs, the buzzer was pressed again, echoing in the empty space. When he reached the outside door, he thought he could hear someone speaking on the other side, out in the street. He pressed the button to open the door, as though Fernanda had replied, but no-one came in. He let a few seconds pass before he swung the door fully open, but all that came in from Via Saffi was a misty darkness. A car started up and was quickly lost in the thick clouds of fog.

  Had some suspicion caused the person who had pressed the buzzer to make off, or had there been a warning signal from the Albanian? Or perhaps from the Pakistanis? Perhaps it was the same person who had come to Ghitta’s door the previous night and, having heard the news of the murder, had come to talk to Fernanda.

  He went back up the stairs and decided to go in without waiting for Nanetti. The forensic squad had given him a set of keys they had come across inside the pensione and one of them was most likely to be the key to the neighbour’s apartment. He found the right one after a couple of attempts, but he had the impression the Slav was listening behind his door.

  Schianchi’s apartment had a very different feel from Ghitta’s. Nothing was out of place, everything was neat and tidy as though the owner had just finished doing her housework. The heaters were all switched off, and the electricity and gas had been turned off at the mains. There were all the signs of a planned departure, as though Fernanda, like many other people all over the city, had set off for her Christmas holidays. On the surface there was nothing strange. Fernanda had gone to the questura to report her friend missing, and then taken a train or taxi and gone on her way. Everything surrounding the death of Ghitta Tagliavini seemed normal. Only Ghitta’s shredded heart betrayed the brutal deviation from what would otherwise have looked like a routine case of a natural death.

  The furniture here was almost identical to the furniture in Ghitta’s pensione – poorly designed but somehow pretentious. The dark wallpaper, the cloudy mirrors, the faded glaze on the majolica ornaments and the greying curtains all seemed to have aged at the same pace as Fernanda. He was walking around the apartment, trying to work out the sequences of her meticulously prepared departure, when he came across on a series of photographs lying on a desk in the bedroom, one of which showed Fernanda and Ghitta in the company of a gentleman fitted out in the ostentatious finery of a dandy. He took the photograph out of the frame. On the back was written: GHITTA, PITTI AND ME AT THE ASTRA CINEMA.

  He had already found the name Pitti in Ghitta’s notebook, but only now did he realise that he must have been the foppishly dressed figure he had spotted in Via Saffi on the evening after the murder. He could also have been the man Friar Fiorenzo had seen lighting two candles to Sant’Uldarico. Pitti, a name redolent of elegance, recalling the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, with its grand fashion parades. The agitation which overwhelmed him almost stopped him from hearing the ringing of the telephone in the hall on the other side of the wall, but the caller would not have been Pitti, because he was already aware of the old woman’s death.

  4

  THE FORENSIC SQUAD found Soneri bent over the kitchen table rummaging through a pile of photographs, but they managed to get on with their own painstaking work without him saying a word or having to move from the table. When they left, he gave them a vague wave. It took the aria “La donna è mobile” from his mobile to distract him. For some time he had been fiddling with the Options window on the screen in an effort to find a simpler, more anonymous ringtone, but he doubted whether a more routine sound would attract his attention, so he left Verdi’s aria where it was, doing nothing more than changing the image from time to time.

  “Commissario, I’m ready to teach you a lesson you won’t forget,” Angela said, teasing him with the possible meanings of her words.

  “Now?” he grumbled, in an expressionless voice.

  “It’s nearly nine o’clock. You must be really snowed under if you’ve even forgotten dinner.”

  “I’m looking at some photographs.”

  “You’ve got your wedding album out?”

  By way of a reply, the commissario gave a deep sigh, which Angela took as a sign of some profound affliction.

  “Commissario, what’s happening to you? This investigation is poisoning you.”

  “It’s stirring up all manner of memories, and making me wonder who I am.”

  “What a brilliant investigator,” Angela said, trying to bring this line of thought to a close.

  “What we do from a certain point in life onwards is just an attempt to fill the void opening before us. That’s why we draw up plans, set targets and rush about trying to achieve them, but from time to time the idea that none of this matters returns to torment us. Relentlessly. Even murderers, with their manic need to assert themselves, seem to me slightly absurd. If only they knew . . .”

  “What have you seen in those photographs?” Angela said, deducing that they were the cause of his malaise.

  “Ada in the arms of another man.”

  “Retrospective jealousy?”

  “Not in the slightest! It’s just that I knew nothing about it. I don’t care if she had other lovers, but I do care that she kept it hidden from me and that I’ve been under a misapprehension all this time. Can you understand that? Even the memory of what we once were to each other is crumbling. The memory of Ada and the memory of this city that I thought was still the way it used to be.”

  They w
ere silent for a few moments and that silence conveyed to the commissario that he and Angela shared everything. It was in such moments that they felt closest, but soon their different temperaments quickly reasserted themselves.

  “You’re allowing yourself to sink too deeply into a state of melancholy,” Angela said at last. “I don’t like men with no character. It’s always easier to let yourself go than to raise yourself up – and after all you like a challenge, don’t you?”

  Soneri sighed. “Everything about this inquiry draws me more deeply into my past, and I don’t need to tell you that getting the better of time is impossible.”

  “So get on with finding the person who killed the old lady as quickly as possible, and that way you’ll keep nostalgia at bay.”

  “No, I’ve got to proceed cautiously, little by little. It’s the best way.”

  “Meet you outside the pensione?” Angela said.

  The commissario looked out the window which gave on to Via Saffi. “Alright. I think there’s enough mist about.”

  Shortly afterwards they were walking side by side, unrecognisable in the darkness of the narrow streets. The few people who passed by were all wrapped up in heavy coats covered with damp frost. Theirs was a journey very similar to awakening from sleep, a walk in a graveyard of memories.

  “Do you know who the man in the photograph was?” Angela asked.

  “No. Maybe another guest in the house.”

  They walked on to where the Red Club had once been, but the site was now occupied by a car park.

  “You used to get the best Malvasia in the old city of Parma there,” Soneri said, in the tones of someone recalling a dead friend.

  “And their tripe? And what about your other favourite, the busecca?”

  The streets were now enveloped with mist, with one doorway after another emerging from it, somehow reminding Soneri of loose eggs sticking out of the old grey newspaper that was used to wrap them. Further on, Tirelli’s bicycle-repair shop, whose owner had once been an avid supporter of the cyclist Gianni Motta, had been converted to a Chinese takeaway. Students used to stand outside his door taunting him with their chant: “Tirelli, Tirelli, stinky and smelly.”