“Ghitta really did have a lot of money. Around here alone she had something like ten apartments, or so Aref tells me. She helped women when . . . these are things nobody else does and that’s why they cost so much. But the older women were afraid of her. They called her a witch and she threatened to lay a curse on them. Elvira treated them very badly. She was tough, that one.”
“What about the man?” Soneri said, alluding to Pitti. “Did he do the same job?”
“No, he’s not tough at all. He carried messages.”
“What kind of messages?”
“Once he came here and told us that some person with money wanted to buy the bar. He was very insistent, and even went so far as to offer me three times what I had paid. But what would I do with all these people? Where would they go?”
Mohammed looked around and his glance invited Soneri to observe the number of people inside the bar.
“Did you understand why he was so keen on the purchase?”
“No. I’d never have paid so much for a place like this, but obviously he had his reasons.”
By the time Soneri left the bar half the morning had gone. As he walked he called Juvara. He needed a report on Ghitta’s estate. “I’m telling you she was stinking rich.”
“It looked like she was on the verge of starvation.”
“It’s people like that who always hide the biggest surprises.”
It was not Ghitta’s estate that upset Soneri. The rooms in the pensione lined up in the order he had seen them on the day of the murder came back to mind, and in that image, making brief appearances, he once more found Ada. These images were no more than flashes, but they brought such great pain as to induce him to entrust to the inspector the task of tracing some of the student nurses who had been lodgers in the Pensione Tagliavini. He deluded himself that he would be able to stand back from the aspects of the investigation he found too painful.
In the meantime he reached Via Dalmazia, and picked out Aref behind a barrier of cardboard boxes. He spent ten minutes trying to get from him at least one of the addresses of the old women Mohammed had mentioned, but it was impossible to pin him down or penetrate his faltering, bizarre Italian. Finally, reluctantly, the commissario pulled rank and produced his identity card. Aref seemed terrified and dived behind his counter as though afraid of being assaulted.
“I only want one name and one address,” Soneri said, trying to calm the man with the offer of a cigar.
Aref appeared reassured, though his worried, wary expression hardly changed.
“One name: Teresa,” he finally said. “She live Via Corso Corsi, number fifteen, second floor. I bring her shopping.”
The commissario made a vague sign of thanks and set off, now sinking into one of his ill-humoured moods. There was a pale sun overhead and the Trebbiano-tinted light indicated to Soneri that it must be near midday. In a short while the sky would cloud over, trapping the dullness among the houses.
*
He stood with his finger on the bell for some time before the door was opened. He read on the intercom the name TERESA RODOLFI, with a two in Roman numerals followed by the letter P.
The woman was stooped and appeared to be in pain. When Soneri explained the reason for his visit, the little warmth in her expression evaporated.
“Don’t be afraid. She’s dead.”
“I know, but when anyone dies that way it’s as if they’d left an order for a vendetta to be carried out against someone, and I’ve had enough of that sort of thing.”
The woman sat down and appeared deeply troubled.
“Were you so afraid of her?”
“She was not like other women. There must have been a devil inside her. If you only knew how she would look at you while she was uttering those incomprehensible words.”
“You mean while she was performing her rites?” Soneri suggested, recalling the faith healers he had known in country villages.
“Exactly. While she was muttering away, she would look up and you could see a demon in her eyes.”
“What did she treat you for?”
“I had St Anthony’s fire, and no doctor was able to get rid of it for me, so I went to Ghitta. She was known to everybody around here.”
“And did she heal you?”
“In one week. From that point on I began to be afraid of her.”
“Because she threatened you? Or because you were afraid of her powers?”
“She never openly threatened me. She was too clever for that. She would tell you about things that would make you afraid, or else talk about specific cases. By the end, I found I was dependent on her and her practices even after my problem with St Anthony’s fire had been cleared up. That was the only way I could feel alright. When you are old and on your own you need to be reassured and she had that power, but at the same time she made it clear that just as she had freed you of your fears, she could as easily toss you back into an inferno of torments. That’s why no-one had the courage to take her on.”
“Why did you sell your house to her?”
“Do you imagine she didn’t have her price?” The woman spoke with real feeling. “Oh yes, she made you pay alright. In the early stages, she would mark everything down as though they were small debts at a corner shop, but it gradually started to add up and she began to say it was time . . . But by then you were done for. Where could I ever have got all that money? Then she would say not to worry, that she would find a solution, but all the time the debt was rising. Then she started saying that if the money wasn’t found, all the pain she had driven away would come back at once, and that anyone who didn’t come up with the money would suffer the torments of hell. Can you imagine? So I decided to sell, but the man who did the valuation put a low price on it as a favour to her. She knew everyone. The result was I had to sell at a knockdown price, and she was the one who bought it. I went from being owner to tenant, and month after month that rabid bitch Elvira would come round . . .”
By now she was almost spitting her words, and Soneri was taken aback by how a little scratching, no more effort than hens do in the dirt, was sufficient to uncover the dung beetles. It was his job to claw away at the surface and come up with new theories, however provisional or incomplete they might prove to be.
“And she had you by the neck when it came to the rent too?”
“No, I can’t say her demands were exorbitant. She specialised in keeping people dangling, not choking them. She didn’t charge me over the odds, but she had a way of making you aware that at any moment she could raise the price or throw you out altogether.”
“Was she like that with other people as well?”
“Of course! In some cases, she would stoop to outright blackmail.”
“Who did she blackmail?”
“I couldn’t exactly say, but I do know the victims included some important women she had carried out abortions for. She didn’t threaten them as such, but she would drop hints, let various things be understood, suggest that she knew such-and-such a person in the city. The result was they would do her favours, offer her little gifts. They kept her sweet and her every wish became a command.”
“She used Elvira as her enforcer in these cases?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I believe these were matters she attended to herself. I do know that in the past she used the girls in her establishment as nurses, and they all kept their mouths shut because Ghitta knew their little secrets. Some of them had abortions thanks to her.”
Soneri’s concentration wandered as he pursued spectres from his own past. Who knows what Ada might have done that was unknown to him? He had tried to fight off his anxiety, but now it was embedded in his being and snapped at him everywhere he turned in this investigation that he so longed to be relieved of.
When he recovered himself, he could see that Teresa was studying him. He rose smartly to his feet. “Well, now you’re free of all these ghosts from the past and you can relax,” he said, taking his leave.
He, on the
other hand, was now surrounded by them. His mood was so low that he felt the need of a lunch at the Milord. Alceste’s joviality, so typical of Parma, and the scents and tastes of the restaurant, would, he was sure, have the same effect on him as Ghitta’s practices had on the old ladies. Everyone relied on their own superstitious rites, and his were Bonarda wine, tortelli di erbetta and a few slices of culatello. As he was taking his place he had a call from Juvara who had found a former nursing student who had boarded at the Pensione Tagliavini. She was from the mountains, like Ghitta, but from a village lower down the valley than Rigoso. Soneri was about to tell him to go and interview her, but how could he explain to him all he wanted him to find out? Once more, personal issues mingled with the investigation. Once more there were tasks he could not delegate.
Perhaps in view of that, he sank a bottle of Gutturnio, lingering over it and delaying getting to his feet. He sought that slight tipsiness advocated by Socrates as a lubricant of dialogue, but once he had left the Milord and was out on the dull and misty streets, he felt fearfully sober and cowed. He would have to listen once more to things about Ada he had never known, and another layer of inner certainty would be torn away.
*
He entered a neat and tidy house which reminded him of a dentist’s waiting room. One glance at Marta Bernazzoli was sufficient to make him realise that he was dealing with a woman who never set aside her role as a nurse, not even outside the hospital. She was straitlaced and gaunt, and her very words seemed to cut with the precision of a scalpel.
Soneri sat down on a low sofa with chrome arms, and he pictured the woman in front of him standing in a long green gown with a mask over her face. He immediately understood that she lived on her own, and his thoughts raced to the abortions carried out by Ghitta. Her expression was half curious, half inquisitive.
“Have you formed any theories?” she said.
He shook his head. “Not so far. But I’ve seen various hypotheses dissolve in front of my eyes.”
“That’s a start. It might help clarify certain things,” she said, as she took a seat facing him. There was a touch of irony in her voice.
“How long were you a lodger with Ghitta?”
“Four years.”
“The nursing course only lasts three years.”
“I stayed on a bit after the diploma. I needed time to fix things up, find somewhere to live.”
“Of course, you’re from outside the city.”
The woman smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I come from a place not too far from Rigoso.”
She sounded somewhat piqued, and Soneri read in her tone that rancour towards the world which lonely people sometimes feel.
“How did you get on with Ghitta?”
“We were young and she held us in check. She was like a mother to us.”
“Did she get you out of trouble if anything went wrong?”
“If it was necessary. I know what you’re getting at, and I suppose that’s what we have to expect from a police officer,” she said bitterly, almost contemptuously.
“It’s my job. I have to scrape about in the mud, but I didn’t spread the mud in the first place.”
“Quite so,” Marta replied severely, as though she were dealing with a clinical report. “Ghitta carried out abortions. That freedom was not granted to women at that time. Now it can even be done in a hospital.”
“But she carried on afterwards, when an abortion could be obtained legally.”
“Some women required absolute discretion. This is a small city, and Ghitta had an excellent reputation. I mean, there were never any accidents.”
Each time she answered a question, Marta would peer at him with a cold look which did not conceal a certain impatience. Soneri could not work out if the look was meant to signal the end of the conversation, or had another purpose.
“She didn’t teach you anything, did she? You’re in obstetrics now.”
Marta’s expression hardened. “Do you think she didn’t know what I was studying? There were girls who got into bother and she got them out of it. As she did with all the other women. Obviously she asked for something in return, especially from those who were training to be nurses.”
The commissario felt his heart skip a beat, and his hands tremble. “Were there many?”
“I couldn’t tell you about all of them. There were rumours flying about. Ghitta would say: ‘Come and I’ll teach you the business,’ and they had to run. She didn’t know the first thing about medicine. She relied on instinct.”
“How long did she carry on?”
“How should I know? From the day I left I had no wish to hear any more about her, but I believe she went on as long as she could.” Marta’s words sounded more and more acerbic, as though shards of broken glass were cutting into her resentment.
“I can see you don’t have happy memories of those days,” Soneri said.
“And why should I? Ghitta was not what she seemed. She was a woman who . . .” She stopped there, but what she wanted to say was entirely clear.
“She seems to have made a good impression on many others who passed through the Pensione Tagliavini,” Soneri said tentatively.
Marta’s face grew dark, and a bitter, desolate smile gave a glimpse of what she was feeling inside herself.
“When you think back to your youth, you’re always indulgent,” she said with a forced laugh. “Unconsciously we falsify our recollections, and things that were nasty become pleasing. It’s a consoling need, and it allows us to believe that a part of our life was lived to the full, while today . . . every one of us feels the compulsion to dream up a realm of gold so as to ward off the idea that we suffered without really living. That’s especially the case for people like me, who now . . .” Her voice trailed off and the commissario thought she was on the verge of tears, but a moment later he saw her expression harden once more. He focused on the sense of what she had been saying and once again something seemed to snap inside him.
However regretfully, he shared Marta’s judgments and so summoned up the courage to ask her what he had worked out a short time previously. “So you too had to make use of Ghitta’s services?”
The woman glared at him, perhaps trying in vain to recover that mask of coldness and semi-contempt with which she had first greeted him, but after a moment she seemed to accept that there was no escape. Without saying a word, her expression turned serious and almost imperceptibly she nodded several times
“That’s why you hate Ghitta and those years with her?”
“Yes, but that’s not the only reason.”
The commissario felt a worrying compassion for her, and was even darkly attracted by her pain, to which, like so many of his age, he attributed the value of testimony. For that reason, he forged ahead with a line of questioning which had little to do with the investigation, but the fact of detecting in others an experience similar to his own helped to calm the surge of feelings whirling in his head.
“What else happened to you in those years?”
“You know perfectly well. You’re a police officer, aren’t you?”
“Can we wind back a bit? I’m not all that old.”
“You surely remember the Dallacasa case.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t in the police force then. It happened twenty-five years ago.”
“We’re not so young any more. Mario was my man,” she said, speaking as though she were choking.
“Did the crime take place before or after . . .?”
“The abortion?” Marta burst out, no longer holding back, seeking to cope with her own emotions by recovering her steely reserve. “He was killed three months later. We were both students, and we agreed that we wouldn’t be able to look after the baby. Mario was deeply involved in politics. He was an extra-parliamentary activist, as they were called then. If only I’d known . . . I lost my partner and my son in the one act. For me everything ended then and there.”
“I seem to remember that the murder ended up being filed aw
ay without anyone being charged.”
“The police couldn’t have cared less about the case. Many of your colleagues wanted Mario dead. Have you any idea how often he was beaten up by the riot squad?”
“There were many investigations into the neo-Fascists, but nothing came of them.”
“Even if they had gone after them, there was a cover-up at the highest levels. Nearly all policemen are right-wingers, but in spite of that, there was something strange about Mario’s story. Can I tell you something one of your people told me in the strictest confidence? He said, ‘You lot on the left kill one another. You don’t even respect your comrades.’ In the final analysis, they didn’t want to stick their nose into internal feuds. They were quite happy there was one fewer activist to worry about.”
“Do you have any ideas of your own?”
“I think the policeman was probably right. It wasn’t easy to catch Mario out. He knew each and every one of the neo-Fascists. He was clever and they could never have trapped him in an ambush. And then there was the evidence of one person, the last man who saw him alive. He said he had seen him get into a car, apparently quite willingly. After that there was nothing more until they found the body.”
“Were there political disputes with his comrades?”
“There were lively discussions, even quarrels from time to time, but Mario didn’t talk to me much about his group. He kept his mouth shut on that front. He would disappear for weeks at on end, and wouldn’t tell me what he had been doing. As he left he would say he was going to meet friends in different parts of Italy for conferences, meetings, seminars, but I never got to know what they were discussing.”
Soneri looked around the room and again got the impression of immaculate but ascetic and soulless cleanliness. It looked like a den furnished with geometric rationality but with no trace of anything of sentimental value, perhaps to keep at bay the ceaseless assault of regret. He got to his feet, as did Marta. She walked along the hallway beside him in silent embarrassment. When they got to the front door, the commissario paused a moment with his hand on the door knob. “Did you know a student nurse called Ada Loreti?”
A Woman Much Missed Page 10