The Cold Summer

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  “Actually, he looks like one.”

  “I think he did in fact qualify as an accountant. While we’re about it, let’s question him and see if he knows something. Cavallo, come here.”

  The Accountant approached, a contrite expression on his face.

  “I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have expected nonsense like this from you. Thinking you could just hold up traffic like this.”

  “You’re right, marshal, it was stupid. We were talking about something important and I got distracted. You know me, I don’t usually do dumb things like this.”

  Fenoglio didn’t reply. He glanced over at the BMW. “Who’s that fellow without a neck?”

  “A good man, only not very bright. He’s a porter at Villa Bianca.”

  “And who got him the job at Villa Bianca?”

  “You know, marshal, I have contacts, so whenever I can help out …”

  “Yes, why not? What’s all this about Grimaldi’s son?”

  Cavallo seemed to involuntarily swallow a morsel of food he hadn’t yet finished chewing. “What … What do you mean?”

  “I was right. You aren’t as smart as I thought. I think we should all go to the station.”

  “Why to the station, marshal?”

  “Because you were deliberately holding up the traffic, which counts as coercion. You might like to know that coercion is punishable by up to four years in prison. What we have to decide is whether or not to arrest you. With your record, I’m afraid we may have to.”

  “Marshal, please don’t joke.”

  “Do I look like the kind of person who jokes?”

  With a mechanical gesture, Cavallo adjusted the knot of his tie, even though it was perfectly straight. He took out a packet of Dunhill and a gold cigarette lighter that looked for all the world like a Dupont. He smoked, holding the cigarette right in the middle of his lips and not so much breathing it in as sucking on it.

  “What’s going on, Cavallo?”

  Cavallo looked around, as if to make sure nobody was watching them. “Marshal, don’t make things difficult for me. The orders are not to say a word.”

  “Just tell me what’s going on, and nobody will have to know.”

  “Marshal …” Cavallo’s voice was almost a moan now.

  “How long has the boy been gone?”

  Cavallo threw down the half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out with the tip of his shoe: he was wearing shiny new moccasins with tassels. “Since the day before yesterday. He left for school in the morning but never got there.”

  “Is it true there’s been a ransom demand?”

  Cavallo nodded.

  “And has the ransom been paid?”

  “I don’t know. I know they were getting the money together. Now please let me go. We’re in the middle of the street, everyone can see us. If Grimaldi finds out I told you these things, he’ll break my legs.”

  “Go,” Fenoglio said.

  Cavallo hesitated for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure he had quite understood. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

  6

  “So it’s true,” the captain said when they were back in the car.

  “We have a huge problem,” Fenoglio said. “Let’s go and hear what Fornaro has to tell us.”

  Fornaro was standing waiting for them at the front door of the station. He looked like a character actor playing a marshal of the Carabinieri in a 1950s comedy: thick salt-and-pepper moustache, uniform made rounder by a prominent paunch, a stern expression but with a good-natured undercurrent. He saluted the captain, shook hands with Fenoglio and nodded in Montemurro’s direction.

  There was an unpleasant smell in the office, a mixture of mustiness, dust and rotting food, as if poor-quality dishes were frequently consumed there, the barred windows were never opened and a change of air only ever came from the corridor.

  “Can I get you anything, captain? A coffee, a drink?”

  “No, thanks, marshal. We’ve just had something. Could you repeat what you told me on the phone?”

  “Yes, sir. A source who has proved reliable in the past, close to the circles around Nicola Grimaldi alias Blondie, informed me this morning that Grimaldi’s younger son has been kidnapped by persons unknown and that in order to restore him a considerable sum has been demanded.”

  There were a few moments’ silence. Fornaro had spoken as if reading a report.

  “When is this kidnapping supposed to have taken place?” Fenoglio asked.

  Fornaro hesitated for a few seconds, perhaps made uncomfortable by the fact that the question had been asked, not by the captain, but by someone of the same rank as himself. When he replied, the tone was less bureaucratic.

  “The day before yesterday, but I didn’t speak to the source until today.”

  “Did he tell you if the ransom has been paid?”

  Fornaro shook his head. “He didn’t know. All he knew was that the kidnappers had asked for a very large sum and that the family was getting the money together.”

  “Did you do anything to corroborate the tip-off after you’d received it?” the captain asked.

  “Yes, sir. Immediately after obtaining the information, my subordinates and myself proceeded to the school attended by the child, where, having been received by the principal, we were informed that the child had not attended yesterday. That same morning, the child’s mother had come to the school and requested to see him and had also been told that the child had not come to class.”

  “Have you talked to the boy’s family?”

  “No, sir. Having first verified the reliability of the information I judged it wise to inform you without carrying out any further investigative actions.”

  Fenoglio reflected. The kidnapping had taken place, there was no doubt about it. Two converging sources and the statements from the principal couldn’t be a coincidence. It was unprecedented, something far from the usual patterns of criminal behaviour.

  “Does your informant have any idea who it might have been? Are there any hypotheses, anyone suspected?”

  “He hasn’t said anything. But the rumour that’s going around is that it’s connected with a rift between Grimaldi and Vito Lopez.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that if there’s a war between those loyal to Grimaldi and a group of rebels linked to Lopez, it’s possible the boy was taken by Lopez’s people. But that’s only a theory of mine.”

  Once again Fenoglio noticed the different ways Fornaro spoke, depending on whether he was addressing him or the captain.

  “Do you think your source can give us any other information?”

  “I don’t think so, he doesn’t play an important role in the group. He reported to me the things that everyone in those circles knows, but Grimaldi certainly won’t confide in him.”

  The captain took out his cigarette case, asked permission to smoke, lit a cigarette and seemed to reflect. “What do we do now?”

  “We summon the boys’ parents here to the station,” Fenoglio suggested. “Obviously, they won’t want to cooperate, but they’ll have to tell us something to justify their son’s absence.”

  “All right. Marshal Fornaro, send a car to pick up Grimaldi and his wife. We’ll wait here.”

  A strange expression appeared on Fornaro’s face: something like embarrassment, as if he wanted to object but couldn’t find the right words to make the nature of the problem clear to the others. When you’re the commanding officer of a station on the outskirts of town, you have to find a balance between asserting your own authority and showing cautious respect for people who are prepared to do anything. When you live and work round the corner from the homes and territories of highly dangerous criminals, you have to find a modus vivendi, accept boundaries and limitations that it’s hard for those who come in from outside to grasp. Theoretical authority is one thing; the real world, where different rules apply, is another. Grimaldi wasn’t the kind of man you could just drag to the station with his wife, like any common bag snatcher. Yo
u had to find a way. Fornaro didn’t say any of this, but for Fenoglio it was as if he had recited these considerations out loud. He was about to say, “Montemurro and I will go and fetch Grimaldi and his wife, maybe with a couple of carabinieri from the station but only as backup, just so he sees who’s involved and that the orders came from higher up,” when a uniformed sergeant came into the room. He was breathless, and had the excited expression of someone with an urgent announcement to make.

  “Begging your pardon, but a call has just come in. There’s a shootout in the street in Enziteto between the occupants of two cars.”

  “How far is that from here?” the captain asked, with unexpected promptness and determination.

  “Five minutes if we’re quick,” Fornaro replied.

  “Let’s take the M12s and the bulletproof vests and go straight there.”

  7

  The two cars set off with sirens blaring, lights flashing and tyres screeching. Fenoglio checked the time and cocked his pistol. The captain had a sub-machine gun in his hand, already loaded, while Montemurro drove with a Beretta 92 between his legs. Nobody spoke. Ahead of them, the car from the station, with Marshal Fornaro and two corporals in it, sped on, jumping intersections and angrily running red lights. They drove through Santo Spirito, heading south, and turned onto the main road.

  As they covered the mile or so separating them from the turnoff for Enziteto at a speed of over ninety miles an hour, Fenoglio found himself inevitably thinking of a very similar situation many years earlier, in Milan. He and two colleagues had been in a patrol car when they’d received a report of an armed robbery in progress, just a few hundred yards from where they were. They got there just as the robbers, still holding their guns, were coming out of the post office. There was a furious exchange of fire, at the end of which one of the robbers – a twenty-one-year-old – was dead and one of the carabinieri seriously wounded. A few weeks later, it emerged from the ballistics examination that the fatal shots hadn’t come from Fenoglio’s gun. Technically, he hadn’t been the one who’d caused the young man’s death, and the news had given him a sense of liberation. That had been short-lived. He had begun wondering if there was really any difference between himself and the colleague from whose gun the fatal bullet had been fired. If that other carabiniere had been the only one there, would things have ended up the same way? Dozens of bullets – in the end, they had counted thirty-two cartridges on the ground – had been fired almost simultaneously at the robbers, like a hard-edged mass of lethal metal. A web in which you couldn’t help but become entangled. The question wasn’t who had fired the shot that had reached its target; the question was who had participated in weaving that web. This had nothing to do with the legitimacy of the carabinieri’s conduct on that occasion. Shooting at those robbers had been legitimate and inevitable, the young man’s death the legitimate and inevitable result of a collective act. Fenoglio had wondered what he would reply if he was asked if he had ever killed anyone.

  He would reply yes.

  When they got to the scene of the shootout at Enziteto, there was nobody there. Fenoglio looked at his watch before getting out of the car: five minutes and a few seconds had passed. In emergencies, establishing the time is vital. It helps to counter the inevitable distortion of memories, their lack of consistency, the way they can be contaminated by imagination.

  They turned off the sirens and the lights. The street was deserted, the windows barred as if the neighbourhood were uninhabited. There were many cartridges, concentrated in two spots, some twenty yards apart. Two groups had opened fire on each other with rifles and pistols, and if anyone had been hit, he hadn’t left any immediately visible bloodstains.

  The silence was unsettling. This, too, gave the impression that the place had been abandoned. Which in a way was true, Fenoglio thought. Enziteto was a part of the city abandoned by everyone, although less than two miles from the sea, the restaurants, the bathing beaches, the airport. You take the little turnoff that leads to the neighbourhood from the highway, and from one moment to the next you find yourself somewhere unknowable. Somewhere abstract.

  Yes, that was the right adjective. Abstract.

  Enziteto, like so many strange marginal areas in the world, was an abstract place. He recalled a phrase by his fellow Piedmontese, the painter Casorati, which had struck him and seemed to him to contain a basic truth: “Painting is always abstract.”

  God knows who had called 112. There really was nobody there: not a single car passed, not a little boy by chance, not a moped, not a bicycle.

  A mangy dog crossed the road, slowly, as if to underline the concept. Then the silence was broken by sirens. More Carabinieri cars arrived, along with police patrol cars, even the head of the flying squad. The world regained a modicum of precarious concreteness.

  They did the rounds of the apartment blocks, in search of anyone who had seen something. Many doors remained closed. Some people opened and said they had seen nothing; others, with the promise of anonymity, recounted a shootout between the occupants of two cars, armed to the teeth with pistols, rifles and light machine guns.

  They left a few hours later. In the meantime, everyone in the unit had been recalled to duty. Some were sent to do the rounds of the hospitals; others busied themselves with a blitz on the homes of the local criminals; three of them were brought into the station to be tested to see if there was any gunshot residue on their bodies.

  Grimaldi and his wife were brought into the station in Bari to be questioned about the disappearance of their son. The report drawn up the following day by the Prosecutor’s Department, in which they were accused of being accessories, described the session in this way: “The two spouses denied the existence of any problem, and in particular that their son had been kidnapped. Asked as to the child’s whereabouts, they claimed that he was staying for a few days with an uncle and an aunt resident in Lombardy. They refused to provide telephone numbers for these relatives and were unable to provide any explanation as to why the child should have gone to stay with said relatives in term time. Grimaldi and his wife were urged to cooperate, and it was pointed out to them that such cooperation could be important in leading to the recovery of the child. But they refused any cooperation, denying the evidence, withdrawing into a hostile silence and refusing to sign the statement.”

  Late that afternoon, in the countryside near San Ferdinando di Puglia, some forty miles north of the scene of the shootout, a burnt-out Peugeot 205 was found. Despite its condition, bullet holes were still visible on it. The car had been stolen in Pescara, so the search was extended to that area.

  More or less at the same time, three hooded men went to the house of Vito Lopez’s sister-in-law, beat up her husband, who had nothing to do with criminal circles, and smashed up the place. They wanted to know where Lopez was. In the end they shot him in the legs and left after telling him that if he was left crippled he could thank that piece of shit, the Butcher.

  Fenoglio went to bed at three in the morning. He didn’t get to sleep until dawn, and by seven he was awake again.

  8

  It was mid-morning when Corporal Pellecchia shuffled into Fenoglio’s office.

  “What’s up, chief, seen a ghost?”

  “No, why?”

  “You’re not looking good.”

  “It was a tough day yesterday.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Where did you go last night?”

  “They sent me on a few pointless searches. Waste of time.”

  “What do you think of this story about Grimaldi’s son?”

  “I always thought Lopez was a smart guy – a son of a bitch, but smart. Clearly I was wrong. Anyone doing a thing like that is crazy.”

  “Are you convinced it was him?”

  “Who else could it have been?”

  Fenoglio didn’t reply. Who else, indeed, could it have been?

  “This morning, before coming here, I talked to a friend,” Pellecchia went on, sniffing. It was a tic, t
he result of having been headbutted during an arrest. “He told me something interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Grimaldi’s wife has an appointment with a medium.”

  “A what?”

  “A medium, a clairvoyant, someone who talks to dead people. To find out where the boy is.”

  “Do you know when she’s going?”

  “This afternoon, at the amusement park on Largo Due Giugno. The medium sees people in her caravan. She says she has the power to leave her body and locate missing persons, bullshit like that. I don’t know if this information is of any use.”

  Fenoglio clicked his fingers, stood up, grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. “Let’s go. We need to get there before Grimaldi’s wife. Call Montemurro, he can take us.”

  The traffic was overwhelming and the car advanced a few feet at a time, with long pauses in between. A journey that would usually have required less than ten minutes took them nearly half an hour. They stopped a couple of blocks from the amusement park and Fenoglio told Montemurro to wait for them in the car.

  The sky was grey, the weather very cool, promising rain. It didn’t feel like May, and not just because of the temperature. There was an unpleasant electricity in the air, like an omen or a threat.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Madame Urania.”

  “Urania?”

  “Urania, yes. These charlatans always have stupid nicknames. What do we say to her?”

  “I don’t know yet. We have to find a way to get her to help us.”

  The place – like all amusement parks by day – felt desolate and sad, with the merry-go-rounds stationary and the shutters of the booths down. Grey, solitary figures moved between the old caravans. Fenoglio remembered reading somewhere that walking in a closed amusement park is a perfect metaphor for senselessness. At the time, he hadn’t quite understood what that meant, but now it struck him as clear and perceptive.

  As they walked, they came across a very thin woman with a feverish look in her eyes.

  “Excuse me, signora,” Fenoglio said, “could you point us in the direction of Madame Urania’s caravan?”