“Did you hear anything in the meantime?”
“Not precisely.”
“Does that mean you did hear something?”
“We didn’t know what he was doing. He seemed to be talking to someone on the telephone.”
“You can tell from your desk if the line is engaged.”
“It wasn’t. He must have been using his mobile.”
“Have you informed Signor Avanzini? What did he say?”
The woman shook her head vigorously. “Nothing. He didn’t say a word.”
“We’ll need to find out who he was talking to before he shot himself,” Soneri said to Nanetti as he came out of Avanzini’s office.
“It really does look like suicide. I’ve seen so many.”
The commissario was about to call Juvara when he appeared in person. “Dig into the background of these two and find out all you can about any connections between them – property, business, work, that sort of thing.”
The inspector turned on his heels and disappeared down the stairs. Nanetti looked quizzically at Soneri to work out what he really thought about the whole affair, but before he asked him he took him into a room off the secretarial office. It was furnished luxuriously, and had a glass table in the centre of the room. “It’s better in private,” Nanetti said.
The commissario lit a cigar. “It seems obvious to me that it was an act of desperate revenge.”
“No question about it. Why else would he have gone to his partner’s office? He did it to attract attention.”
“Maybe Avanzini had ruined him. He’s always been a real wheeler-dealer and there’s more to him than meets the eye. I’ve told Juvara to look into the connections between the two of them.”
“It won’t take us long to establish who Cornetti was talking to before he pulled the trigger,” Nanetti said.
“As soon as we’ve done a preliminary search here, one of my men will have a look at his mobile.”
Minutes later, the commissario was handed a sheet of paper. The last number dialled corresponded to Avanzini’s mobile. “Just as I expected,” he said to Nanetti.
“So it was him he was after. It’s a kind of accusation.”
“Yes, but accusing him of what?”
“At the end of the day, you’ll see it’s all to do with money. It’s always a question of money or sex,” Nanetti asserted with a confidence born of long experience.
With a jerk of his chin, Soneri indicated his agreement before turning away abruptly and leaving Nanetti in charge of the crime scene. He told the secretaries to keep themselves available, then ran down the stairs and out onto Borgo Felino. The mobile started ringing again.
“Commissario, there’s no problem, I can search on the internet . . .” Juvara began.
“Alright, alright, you can update me in the office,” Soneri said, cutting him off. He had no time for internet searches.
When he got to the questura, Juvara said nothing, but the commissario found on his desk a thick sheaf of papers detailing the history of Amintore Cornetti and his company. He began reading in the light of the desk lamp given to him by Juvara. Cornetti was a self-made man, an ex-partisan who had started life as a bricklayer before beginning a steady ascent to the position of construction manager. In 1951 he set up a cooperative of housebuilders, which split up a few years later. He then formed the Cornetti firm, with the man the press called “the red builder” as chairman. In the Sixties he employed around sixty construction workers, and fifteen years later, during the first crisis, instead of laying off about half of them to keep the company afloat, he chose not to for idealistic reasons. He remained a communist, and so sank a large part of his own capital into the business until Avanzini came on the scene to offer him commissions for work for the State, the Region and the city councils. No two men could have been less alike. Cornetti was cheery, strong and extrovert, while Avanzini was gaunt, pale and untrustworthy, but it had worked, until now.
“Any relatives?” Soneri asked Juvara, breaking the silence.
“One son. I sent round a patrol car to break the news, then I called him.”
“What did he say?”
The inspector shrugged. “He was polite, distant, even stand-offish. It was as if we were talking about the suicide of someone he didn’t know.”
“Did he have any idea why he might have done it?”
“If he did, he wasn’t saying. If you want my opinion, I think he was afraid. He hasn’t got his father’s backbone. He’s afraid they’ll make him pay for it.”
“In what way?”
“He runs a prefab business. If they take away the public-sector business, he’s done for.”
Soneri signalled his approval with a wave, and the inspector gave an embarrassed smile.
“I get the impression they were turning the screws on his father as well. I also think that the surveyor, Avanzini, was two-faced and was chewing him up bit by bit,” the commissario said.
Juvara put down on Soneri’s desk the outcome of the enquiries into Ghitta’s lodgers, with the rents and charges each one had to pay. The commissario did no more than glance at them before getting up and going out again, but not before he had moved the lamp to the centre of his desk.
The afternoon light cut feebly into the thick veil of mist which kept the temperature down. He saw no point in going back to Borgo Felino, since he knew that once Nanetti had completed the search of the office and taken possession of all the material which might assist the inquiry, he would have sealed the area off. He headed for Via Petrarca, one of the stops on Pitti’s nightly pilgrimage, but Avanzini was not there. A secretary told him he was unlikely to call into the office. “He is devastated,” she said, picking out each syllable like a T.V. newsreader.
He continued on his way towards Borgo del Correggio and Via Saffi, pushing past the crowds heading in the direction of the city centre. When he arrived at No. 35 he saw that the shutters on the shisha bar were down, so he moved on to Bettati’s barbershop, where an elderly gentleman was ensconced in the chair with lather over his cheeks and his body swathed in a large blue gown tucked in at the neck.
“So they’ve closed down another one?” Soneri said.
Bettati turned to him with a worried expression. “You mean the Pakistani? They made him shut down for a week because he wasn’t keeping to the regulations but that’s not the real reason. Nobody in the city centre bothers about regulations.”
“I do know they upset some people,” Soneri said.
“Yes, sure, but there’s no way of knowing if it’s because they get in the way of business, or for some other reason.”
The commissario gave the barber a questioning look, indicating the man in the chair being shaved.
“You can speak freely. Zoni’s from the party’s old school. He’d sooner eat a live cat than breathe a word to them,” Bettati said.
The man turned laboriously and nodded, shaking some of the lather off his face.
“Did you know that Cornetti killed himself?”
The razor slipped from the barber’s hand onto the tray beside him. Zoni spun round once again, but this time more sharply.
“Just before three o’clock, in his partner’s office.”
The two men continued staring at him with expressions of childlike amazement.
“It means there’s something rotten in this city and it’s all going to hell more quickly than anyone expected,” the barber said. The elderly gentleman turned his face back towards the mirror and did not move again.
“How did he get on with his partner?”
“He despised him. How could a man like Amintore Cornetti get on with a shit like Avanzini? At a certain point he was forced into an alliance with him, because this city has no time for people who actually make things. It’s become the land of form-fillers, swindlers, and financiers who jumble up money and debts and then make them rise up like the white of a beaten egg. Cornetti knew how to work, while Avanzini had been to college. Cornetti built houses for peop
le to live in, and his partner built houses to make money. You see the difference?”
Soneri nodded. Bettati was highly agitated and stopped running his razor over the cheeks of the old man in the chair, who now sat motionless, waiting patiently, with shaving foam dripping down his neck.
“When did they go into partnership?”
“In the early Eighties. At first Amintore was O.K. with his own firm because he knew the trade. You could even call him an artist, judging by the way he sculpted stone with his hammer and chisel, but he couldn’t get any contracts or make any headway with the tendering system. He set up with that slug only because otherwise he was faced with sacking more than half his workforce.”
These were matters Soneri was already familiar with from Juvara’s papers, but hearing them directly from someone who had known the victim well made a deeper impact.
“Was Avanzini well connected with the political world?”
“He had contacts everywhere. And now that that right-wing mob is in power . . .”
The old man came back to life and made vigorous signs of approval, but Bettati got in before he could speak. “It’s not that certain ex-comrades are any better. They got screwed at the elections and now they run the cooperatives and call themselves managers. They’re in it up to their necks, and that’s even worse.” As he spoke he placed his hand on Zoni’s shoulder and with one swift, almost enraged, stroke pulled the razor down his cheek.
“I agree the other guy cheated him,” Soneri said.
“Around here nowadays it’s only characters like that who get on – the most vile of human beings, hypocrites with no ideals except money, people who couldn’t shovel snow in a backyard.”
“I really believe the Battioni area has got something to do with it too.”
“There’s a good example. Cornetti lost a brother there in ’44, but to set foot in the place now he has to plead for the good offices of that swine. I wonder if it was worth risking his skin. For what?”
They fell silent and Soneri, who had nothing to add, said goodbye and walked towards Piazzale San Francesco, where an enormous grey gate that slammed shut behind prisoners had once stood. It was the time of day when the streets changed character. The last offices were closing and well-dressed gents were returning to their out-of-town homes, while troops of immigrants were heading in the opposite direction, making for their modest lodgings in the city centre. People were spilling out of Arab shops onto the pavement, and chants from the desert rang out among houses where once the mazurka would have been heard. The shops which offered international telephone services bubbled with a noisy babel of voices as people communicated in their own dialects from one side of the sea to the other. The commissario’s mobile struck up with “La donna è mobile”. At the sound of that unfamiliar music a group of immigrants turned round sharply, as though they had heard the howl of a pack of hyenas.
“Commissario, it’s just as we thought,” Juvara said. “Cornetti was stitched up. His partner was cutting him out of everything. I’ve checked on the bids for the Battioni area. Avanzini put himself forward under his own name, with his own company, not with Maison – which included Cornetti.”
“Gobbled up and thrown out like a fig skin.”
“What did you say?”
“Avanzini treated him like a used tissue.”
He heard a murmur of assent. “And another thing: for the Battioni area there was only one bid? Avanzini and his lot.”
“What did you expect? They’re all in it together.”
As he hung up, he heard the creak of Fadiga’s trolley in the distance and decided to go to his refuge to see if he had secreted any interesting clippings. As it happened there was one, and a surprising one at that. He found himself looking at the round, jovial face of Amintore Cornetti. Was he another of Ghitta’s clients? The fact that he was something of a womaniser fitted in well enough with his exuberant nature, but his use of the facilities in the Tagliavini establishment made less sense. Juvara had told Soneri that Cornetti had been divorced for years, so it seemed absurd that he had to hide away in a pensione and pay by the hour. It was yet another mystery associated with that boarding house where so many young people had once lived. He remembered the immigrant woman telling Mohammed’s wife about violent quarrels, and the shouting and bitter reproaches Elvira had directed at Pitti the previous evening, and he had the feeling that something was going to happen that very night. He walked around aimlessly, waiting for the city to empty. He passed in front of a Muslim butcher’s where they guaranteed that the meat was slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law, and then a Turkish bar where they served Coca-Cola and kebabs, as well as chips with various sauces whose scent floated into nearby doorways.
He paced around like an animal on the prowl. He had hoped to intercept Pitti or Elvira in that maze of abandoned streets and immigrant dwellings, but after a while he decided it made more sense to stop and wait. He took up his position in an alleyway which led to an inner courtyard, lit his cigar and kept his eye on the doorway where he had seen Pitti disappear through two nights in a row. Via Petrarca was shaken by successive gusts of wind, while the dark, thick mist floated past.
He stayed there for about half an hour, but saw only a few couples hurrying along. Perhaps the order to lie low had gone out after Cornetti’s death. Or possibly Pitti, Elvira and their confederates were meeting somewhere away from their usual haunts. Maybe even in the pensione? As time passed Soneri began to doubt his certainties, which were further eroded by the chill of the mist and the emptiness of a street where nothing seemed to be happening. He was tempted to start walking and leave it to chance to arrange the time and place of an encounter, but he discarded that idea too. The pride of his convictions kept him fixed to the spot. He tried to light his cigar again but only ended up singeing the tips of his moustache. He stamped on the stub and leaned back against the wall. An old woman in the house across the road stretched out to close the shutters and paused a moment to stare at him. About ten minutes later, a squad car drew up alongside him but he waved it away. The driver recognised him, gave a salute and drove on.
Scarcely had the purr of the police car died away when another filled the silence. A Mercedes which Soneri had seen before came to a stop in front of the building which housed the headquarters of the Avanzini Company. Soneri watched Pitti get out, and as the car drove off he saw that he had with him one of those little wheeled suitcases he had seen in Elvira’s room. Everything was unfolding as he had expected. All he had to do now was wait.
The visit was brief. Five minutes later Pitti reappeared, but without the case. Instead of turning into Via Saffi he headed for Via Repubblica, walked across Piazza Garibaldi and proceeded under the arcade in Via Mazzini. The commissario kept his distance so as not to be seen, and in this he was aided by the mist. They crossed the Ponte di Mezzo where the bed of the River Parma attracted the wispy mist, water calling to water, water flowing towards an outlet, water drifting aimlessly. At the Rocchetta he saw the monument to Filippo Corridoni depicted as he was struck by a bullet, his back arching in his last living act. Pitti walked round the monument, and then strode out towards Via Bixio. He rang the bell at No. 12 and went in, leaving the commissario wondering about the meaning of this change to the customary routine.
When Pitti re-emerged, he retraced his steps towards the bridge, turned off towards the Mercato della Ghiaia, continued along behind the Teatro Regio, walked diagonally across the Piazzale della Pace and then crossed Via Cavour in the direction of the Duomo. He now seemed to be back on his ordinary circuit. Taking the shortest route, he cut through the narrow streets and came out on Via Saffi. When he arrived at No. 35, he rang once and carried out the same ritual as previously, moving off on the usual diversionary round of the streets. At this point, Soneri made up his mind to give up his waiting game and to take action. He knew the route Pitti would take and followed him in his mind as though he were walking at his side. Viale Mentana, Borgo del Naviglio, Borgo Gazzola w
ith the ladies of the night making eyes at him from the doorways, and at the end of Borgo Gazzola he began to count. He got to thirty-five, the number of the address, and crossed Via Saffi. He pressed the door bell, keeping his eye on the point where Pitti would re emerge, but the click of the lock came first and he went in. He did not switch on the light and climbed the steep stairs as quickly as he could. When he got to the entrance to the pensione, he waited a moment or two before pushing open the door which had been left ajar.
“Wait for me in the kitchen,” Elvira shouted from her bedroom, in the peremptory tone of someone confidently in charge.
Soneri waited near the door for the buzzer to be sounded again, as happened a few seconds later. He had calculated the times perfectly. In an investigation, everything is down to timing and rhythm, and what he was experiencing had the beat and throb of a tango. He heard the shuffle of Elvira’s slippers as she approached, surprised by that second ring of the bell, and when the woman made him out in the half-darkness her self-assurance dissolved into a grimace of baffled alarm. The commissario said nothing and limited himself to a weary gesture, raising his hand and pointing to the kitchen. He waited until Pitti tapped on the door before he pushed it decisively open. He did not give Pitti the time to utter a word to accompany his look of astonishment. “Come in, and go into the kitchen,” he told him.
He waited for Pitti to stumble over the threshold, following immediately behind him. Elvira occupied both the seat and the pose which had been Ghitta’s, from where she could check the lobby down to the main door. Pitti, with his bowler hat in his hand, did not know where to go until Elvira angrily pointed to a seat facing her. The commissario took up his position between them, like a priest or a lawyer dealing with a quarrelsome couple. All three remained silent for a while, with the tension building up until Soneri broke the ice with a simple question. “Aren’t you going to ask if he found him?” he said to Elvira.
She shot back a cold, furious look. “I’d be wasting my time with a man like him.”
“If you’re alluding to the fact that he allowed himself to be shadowed, let me tell you that very few people would’ve been aware of it. You have a very low opinion of the police.”
A Woman Much Missed Page 15