A Woman Much Missed

by Valerio Varesi

  “Alright, she was no saint,” Soneri repeated to himself. “But that’s no reason to rip her heart to shreds.”

  Fadiga seemed moved by this revelation, perhaps thinking for a moment that this could be his end too. “They must have really had it in for her,” he muttered.

  “But who could have had it in for her?” the commissario said.

  “I don’t know,” Fadiga said, shaking his head. “What can we know about people who come from far away, or people in houses with iron bars on their windows and gates as tall as cypresses? Ghitta dealt with the rich and powerful, and she was a mere landlady. The powerful respect only their own, and make use of the rest of us. And once we’ve served our purpose, or start to ask awkward questions . . . Steer clear of the rich. That’s the one lesson I remember well from my days as a communist.”

  The mention of times past caused a fresh upsurge of bitterness in Soneri. He watched Fadiga as he laid out the cardboard on which he would spend the night.

  “She could have closed down and retired. I don’t understand why she was so stubborn in carrying on as a madam,” the commissario said.

  “Some people just won’t give up. They struggle on against all the odds, and won’t admit it’s useless to stand against changing times. The best you can do is keep abreast of the new conditions of life. You become a bit-player, and resign yourself to performing newer and newer roles as dictated by time, the most dictatorial of all directors. Ghitta did her best to keep up. That was her life, but there’s not a student today who would go near a place run by a landlady, and not only because they’ve all got money now. They lack humility. And anyway, there’s nobody left here now. The houses are empty.”

  The commissario drew on his cigar which was almost out and pondered the survivor’s fate as lived by Fadiga. “When you see the photograph in a newspaper of someone who used to go to Ghitta’s, put it to one side. I’ll come round one of these evenings to look you up.”

  “It’d be better if we weren’t seen together. I could end up like Ghitta. It’s not that I care all that much, but I’ve always been scared of knives. I’ll leave the pictures under the cardboard boxes. It’ll look as though they just happened to be there.”

  5

  WITH A VEIL of mist enveloping both, there was little difference between dawn and dusk, and this reinforced Soneri’s impression of not having been to bed. He was waiting in the deserted Via Farini for Friar Fiorenzo to open the side door of the church, but when he entered he found a few elderly ladies already seated in the pews and other shadowy little figures scurrying about. He positioned himself in the dark corner furthest from the altar and settled down to wait. His enquiries consisted of more periods of waiting than action, which was why his colleagues called him “the Chinese policeman”, although no-one had actually said it to his face.

  Even in the faint light, he could make out almost the entire nave with its rows of seats and benches. The comings and goings of the old ladies were astonishingly well synchronised. All that could be heard was the opening and closing of the door of the confessional and the groan of the wood each time one of the ladies sat up or knelt down.

  When he spotted him, he was as elegantly eccentric as ever, moving with suppleness and precision, barely brushing against the seats and benches as he passed. The commissario ducked behind a pillar. Looking rapidly around the church with a wariness which betrayed his apprehension, Pitti sat down and continued peering nervously about him. He took off the bowler hat he had been wearing to reveal an almost bald head covered with a little lifeless fuzz. He was halfway down the nave in the rows facing the entrance, and seemed poised either to get up and leave, or to run up to someone. Chewing on his unlit cigar in the semi-darkness, Soneri kept him under scrutiny.

  Pitti twisted his hat in his hands and looked around in evident disquiet. He tapped his foot against the bench in front a couple of times, attracting disapproving glares from the old ladies. After a bit he got up, went over to the statue of Sant’Uldarico, put a couple of coins in the box and lit a candle. The commissario followed his every move, taking note of his trembling hands as he held the wick over the flame of a lighted candle. When he looked along the benches again, he noticed a middle-aged man in a dark leather jacket in a pew in the centre of the nave. Pitti remained motionless in front of the statue, in the pose of a man lost in prayer. He then walked down the aisle, edged along the bench in front of the man with the leather jacket and disappeared into the gloom of a side chapel to the left of the high altar. The commissario’s eyes moved rapidly from one to the other. He could no longer see Pitti, but he knew he had to be somewhere in the dark recesses of the chapel. After making an awkward genuflection in front of the altar, the man in the leather jacket also headed in that direction. Now that he too was lost to the shadows, everything in the church was calm and settled: the old ladies coughing quietly from time to time, Friar Fiorenzo saying his prayers in the confessional and the statues of the saints turning their ecstatic gazes heavenwards. Soneri considered advancing into the darkness to catch the two men off guard, but that would have meant crossing a part of the nave where the flickering bulbs softened the darkness into a hazy light.

  Some time after Pitti and the man had vanished into the chapel, Soneri noticed a reproduction of it on a floor plan of the church affixed to the pillar opposite him. He read that the chapel was dedicated to Sant’Egidio, and under the notice, for the convenience of tourists, there were headphones with a recording of the history of the church. Fifty centesimi were all it took to light up the treasures on the walls of the nave and dome.

  The effect was like a camera flash. The light exploded from hidden corners, shining out to magnify space and banish darkness. The old ladies’ heads suddenly shot up as though brusquely awakened from sleep while the man in the leather jacket made an immediate dash for the exit. The light had caught him and Pitti standing face-to-face, but only for the one instant before he fled, instinctively sticking something into his pocket, perhaps something he had received only a moment before, something of importance to him and something he wanted to be sure not to lose.

  Pitti headed less hurriedly for the door, retracing the steps he had taken only a few minutes ago. When he came out into the misty dawn, Soneri was waiting for him, half hidden in the doorway of a block of flats. He moved alongside him, causing Pitti initially to feign surprise and then to turn towards him with the haughty look of a grande dame. The commissario kept his eyes firmly on him until he saw the arrogance give way to vague bewilderment.

  “Well, what?” was all Pitti, feeling himself cornered, managed to say.

  Soneri did not make any immediate reply, but continued staring at him. “It’s up to you to make the first move, Pitti,” he said after a short pause, stressing the nickname.

  Pitti seemed to have recovered some composure, but at close quarters his aristocratic attire seemed even more ridiculous.

  “You stop a man in the street for no good reason and then you claim he’s the one who’s got to justify himself?” Pitti spoke with a voice which Soneri had expected to be shrill but which was instead deep bass.

  “You know perfectly well who I am and why I’ve stopped you, otherwise you wouldn’t have run off yesterday evening. What did you give that man?”

  “Some money.”

  “Why?”

  Pitti started laughing. “I gave him some money and that’s all there is to it. What’s it to you?”

  “At five o’clock in the morning in an unlit side chapel in a church?”

  Pitti drew back half a step, and it was clear he was afraid. “He’d been travelling all night and arrived in the city early in the morning. He told me he was having difficulties. What else do you want to know about my private life?”

  The commissario made a gesture of indifference, inviting him not to pursue that line. “You’re an unlucky man. You’ve chosen the very church Ghitta used to attend.” He paused long enough to allow him to evaluate Pitti’s nervousness. “And you w
ere a friend of Ghitta’s, were you not?” he said in a lowered voice and a more friendly tone.

  Pitti drew a deep breath and nodded. “You think I know something about it?” he asked in a pained voice. He seemed afraid and his hands were shaking as they had done in the church shortly before while he was lighting the candle, but Soneri’s persuasive tone seemed to be causing his distrust to fade, at least in part.

  “You know a lot about Ghitta. You were the person she most confided in.”

  Pitti dropped his gaze with a speed which was the equivalent of an admission. “That’s true. She did confide in me, but not everything. There was always a dark side to her, where I, as a matter of delicacy, had no wish to intrude.”

  “For instance?”

  “There was a kind of near-witchcraft she practiced. I was never convinced by it, and I could never understand why so many people came to her.”

  “In the villages in the Apennines, certain traditions have lingered on. The people are all growing old.”

  Pitti looked the commissario in the eye again, but then quickly turned away. “That wasn’t the only place she practised. Here in the city as well, and we’re not talking about poor wretches but professional people, doctors even.”

  Soneri fiddled with his cigar for a moment or two, finding it hard to light it in the damp air. After the first puff, he gestured to Pitti to carry on, but it seemed he was still lost in thought.

  “You think that’s connected with what’s happened?”

  “I’ve no idea. It’s more likely the abortions had some connection.”

  “I was told the opposite – that she did her best to help women who were having problems getting pregnant.”

  “That’s true too. Ghitta could do all sorts of things. She was a diabolical woman,” he added with a sarcastic smile.

  Pitti talked and talked and Soneri saw the image of Ghitta he had fondly entertained for many years dissolve before his eyes. At the same time, a suspicion grew inside him – one which had nothing to do with the inquiry but which he found it hard to suppress.

  “Who did she perform abortions on?” he said, with a trace of anxiety in his voice.

  “In the early stages, on the girls in the house, but then there were married women as well, who couldn’t let anyone know, their husbands above all.”

  Suspicion took root even more firmly in Soneri’s mind, and one memory in particular set off a parallel, personal enquiry. Could the haemorrhage which killed Ada have been associated with the after-effects of a botched abortion? He had always rejected that hypothesis, but could recite by heart the medical report which implied that the cause of death might be linked to some unspecified “prior lesion”. The photograph of Ada in the arms of another man came back to mind, and he found himself trembling on the brink of a void which was gaping open around him. He felt himself choking. He removed the cigar from his mouth and furiously spat out the smoke.

  “Nobody ever really got to know Ghitta, and maybe that’s why they killed her. She was hard to fathom. The most likely thing is that someone was afraid of her independence.”

  A car horn blared out in the mist and shortly afterwards Soneri heard the creak of Fadiga’s trolley as it was trundled along the pavement. He was conscious that too many suspicions were distracting him and causing him to ask too many questions on an impulse, anything to fill up that silence which was swamping his thoughts.

  “Who was that man you gave the money to?”

  Pitti had not expected him to return to that subject and looked at him in surprise. It was only then that the commissario noticed that Pitti had skilfully guided him onto the subject of Ghitta’s life in order to avoid difficult questions.

  “A friend, I told you. I assure you he’s got nothing to do with Ghitta’s death. You’ll know . . .” His voice trailed away for a moment. “I have many friends.”

  Soneri understood everything from the tone of voice. Pitti’s sexual tendencies were easy to deduce, but perhaps that was not the real reason for the embarrassment from which he sought to extricate himself. “Are you always so grateful?”

  “Are you always so crass?” Pitti said, in a thin voice.

  A tense silence fell between them. After a few seconds, the commissario said, “Did Ghitta get into any bother over those abortions?”

  “How would I know? It’s more than likely. She was an expert, but after all she was a backstreet practitioner.”

  A doubt flashed into Soneri’s mind with the speed of a bullet. Supposing it were all true? What if the germ of a hypothesis planted by the doctor after Ada’s death really was the correct explanation of a wholly unexpected end? He lost his focus and all interest in Pitti, who was now observing him with deep incredulity. All of a sudden the commissario found he had no more questions to put to him. His mind struggled with images of the dark blood of foetuses ripped out by crude, improvised instruments, amid screams of pain. Slowly, overwhelmingly, he was assailed by that sense of the vanity of things which he had felt when faced with the photograph of his wife with another man, a vanity born from the wreckage of inner certainties he could no longer reconstruct.

  He noticed that Pitti was studying him with an inquisitive expression and struggled to pull himself free of the grip of these violent emotions. He looked for way out of a conversation he could no longer endure.

  “Where can I reach you?” He spoke in a tone that was meant to be friendly but which came out as an odd mixture of threat and supplication.

  “I see you walk about a lot. So do I, so there’ll be plenty of opportunities.”

  “Don’t force me to play the policeman. I could have you followed, or I could have you brought in as a person who could help with our inquiry. That way everybody would know.”

  Pitti was alarmed. “There’s no need. You can telephone me any time. Look in the directory under the name Gina Montali, my mother. She lives in Borgo Marodolo. My name is Giancarlo Gualerzi. My mother always knows where I am and she can get a message to me. Please don’t tell her you’re from the police.”

  He turned to leave, but Soneri held him by the arm to check him. On Pitti’s face there appeared a half excited, half timorous expression.

  “So now I know who Pitti is, but who are Fastlast, Bolshoi and Rasp?”

  “They too belong to Ghitta’s dark side. She was a half moon – half in light, half in shadow.”

  “Somebody must know.”

  “Obviously you didn’t know the woman very well,” Pitti said, unintentionally twisting the blade in Soneri’s wound. “She counted so many important people among her acquaintances, and they trusted her precisely because of her discretion. Only she knew who was concealed behind those code names she invented for each of her clients.”

  He gave every impression of being sincere. An ashen light wrapped itself around them as the street began to come to life. Some workmen in a lorry with a crane were busy putting up bunting and Christmas lights over the road.

  *

  When Soneri got back to the questura later in the day, he found Juvara waiting for him. The more time passed, the more unwilling he was to give up his meanderings around the city and take his seat in the offices of his division, even if his colleagues all left him plenty of freedom. He was the only one permitted to work on his own and turn up only sporadically at meetings. The organisational side of things was attended to by Juvara, who occasionally reproached him, but only hesitatingly, for his absences.

  “What are you moaning about?” Soneri had said to him one day. “You can’t wait to see me off, can you? Are you really not interested in getting ahead?”

  The inspector had stared at him in amazement, and Soneri had realised at that moment what a decent man he was. On this occasion, however, Juvara’s face was darker than usual. He began by showing him the record of the examination of the knife conducted by the forensic squad.

  “Nanetti confirms that there are traces of the old woman’s blood on it.”

  “Never doubted it,” Soneri said, d
ismissing the report as a mere detail. “What else?”

  “The questore tore a strip off me.”

  Through clenched teeth, the commissario uttered a “shit!” without Juvara hearing. He knew that the inspector bore the brunt of blame for faults which were not his, and that the real target was Soneri himself.

  “What for?”

  “There was a smash-and-grab yesterday and the thieves got away. The officers on duty said communication between us and the motorised division left a lot to be desired, and so a trade union official went to see the questore.”

  “Don’t worry. He was getting at you for failings of mine. Did Capuozzo make much of a fuss?”

  Juvara shrugged with a gesture which half implied assent. “Anyway, he’s got it in for you too. He left word that he wants to see you this morning.”

  Soneri’s irritation began to reach boiling point, so he decided it would be as well to reduce the heat by facing the questore without delay. Capuozzo’s personal assistant’s hypocritical smile caused his mood to darken further, and when he sat down opposite his superior, it continued to unsettle him, almost as much as the back of the old chair which jabbed him between the shoulders – like the barrel of a gun.

  “Good to see you, Soneri. So how are we getting on with investigations on the landlady?”

  He relaxed a bit at the question. It meant either that Capuozzo had got over his ill temper or that he too had been using Ghitta’s for his assignations.

  “Going to take time. It’s not shaping up well.”

  “But you’re on the job, working hard,” the questore said acidly. It was not easy to make out whether that meant that he was getting nowhere, or that he was always absent, or perhaps both.

  Soneri hesitated, unsure whether to reply in the same ironic tone or to ignore it. He chose the latter. “I’m doing my best, signor questore.”