The Cold Summer

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  D’Angelo lived in a 1970s apartment building behind the main railway station. Fenoglio walked her to the front entrance, looking around to make sure there were no unusual presences. He didn’t think there was likely to be any attempt on her life just yet – Grimaldi was too busy with other things – but being careful wouldn’t come amiss.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome, as they say.”

  “I’m not referring to your walking me home.”

  “I know.”

  “Is there any point in going on with our work, with what’s happened?”

  “Yes.”

  For a long time she stood there thinking, her head slightly bowed, as if Fenoglio had given her a long, complicated, well-thought-out answer that required careful consideration. But probably it did. At last she raised her head and looked Fenoglio straight in the eyes.

  “All right. Let’s meet on Monday at the station, at nine, and resume with Lopez. I want to speed things up.”

  15

  And speed things up they did.

  The initial phase of interviews with Lopez lasted until 28 May.

  Then, for ten days, Fenoglio and his team worked without a break. They made a large number of on-the-spot inspections, accompanied by Lopez. They reopened files, looked through duty reports, recovered phone-tap transcripts, statements, old arrest and seizure reports.

  From the photographs, Lopez had identified sixty-eight individuals as members of Società Nostra. The Carabinieri found significant corroborating evidence for forty-one of them and submitted a report of more than five hundred pages to the Prosecutor’s Department, requesting their detention.

  D’Angelo shut herself up in her office, and after four days the detention orders were ready. The charges went from criminal association to homicide; from robbery to extortion; from drug trafficking to the possession and carrying of arms and explosives. Plus many other minor offences.

  The first phase of the operation excluded the whole network of street-level drug dealers. Lopez had explained that they were not affiliates of the organization; they were much less dangerous than the others, and establishing their individual positions would require rather more time. Another thing that was postponed until a later stage was the corroboration of Lopez’s statements concerning politicians, municipal employees, police officers and carabinieri who – for a payment – would pass on confidential information to the men of the clan. All of this would take a lot more investigation – delicate investigation, at that – and was incompatible with the urgent need to make arrests.

  And so on the evening of 12 June 1992, Captain Valente and Marshal Fenoglio went to the Prosecutor’s Department to collect the warrants to be served that night. They were accompanied by four carabinieri: given the number of suspects on whom the warrants were to be served, they were needed to carry all the large boxes containing the copies of these warrants. It was raining, and the thermometer indicated the unbelievable temperature of eleven degrees.

  Weather metaphors are among the most effective and powerful. Fenoglio had read that somewhere, he couldn’t remember where.

  “Our superiors want to give a name to the operation,” the captain said, with a hint of embarrassment. “It’s something we always do, as you know. The people in Rome need it for the press release, for the newspapers and the TV channels.”

  D’Angelo looked at him without saying anything. Fenoglio felt sure she was going to light a cigarette, but she didn’t.

  “Maybe you have a name we can give the operation, dottoressa?”

  It was dark outside, and the rain was falling with an autumnal rhythm.

  “Cold summer.”

  “Yes, it is, it’s incredibly cold,” the captain replied. “Although to be exact, it’s still a few days to 21 June.”

  “I meant: Cold Summer. The name you were asking me for. It’ll be really difficult to forget.”

  It was true. That summer would be very difficult to forget.

  Nobody went to bed. The assembly of forces in the battalion barracks, where the patrol groups would be formed – one for each individual to be placed under arrest – and instructions given as to how to proceed, was scheduled for two in the morning. One hundred and fifty men were involved. The colonel gave his contribution, stipulating that, once the warrants had been delivered, a helicopter should be sent up; he was told that a helicopter wasn’t necessary, because there was no risk of anyone going to ground in countryside inaccessible to normal wheeled vehicles. He replied that a helicopter was indispensable for the TV channels. As he was the colonel, the argument appeared unassailable, nobody felt up to objecting and the matter was settled.

  At three on the dot dozens of cars left the courtyard, each with an address and a name. Fenoglio, the captain and Montemurro, accompanied by a second car in support, went straight to the house of Nicola Grimaldi, also known as Blondie, also known as Three Cylinders.

  It had stopped raining. The streets were deserted, black and shiny. Nobody spoke. You may have done this kind of work for many years, but when you’re about to enter the house of a multiple murderer at night, in order to arrest him and take him to prison, nothing is certain. Career criminals don’t usually cause any trouble when you go to arrest them. They know it isn’t a good idea, for many reasons, and so they let themselves be handcuffed, in the hope that their expensive lawyers will find a way to unlock those handcuffs. But you never know: it’s impossible to predict every reaction.

  They got to Santo Spirito after leaving the ring road. As they entered the built-up area, they found Marshal Fornaro’s car waiting for them, greeting them with a flash of headlights: yet more support. The three vehicles glided silently past anonymous apartment blocks, houses and shabby gardens, with the occasional brief glimpse of the sea, sensed rather than seen.

  They passed a bakery with its shutter half open and its door ajar. Fenoglio could imagine the smell of the loaves, the focaccias, the sweet buns.

  The neon sign of a closed pub flashed in the darkness in sporadic bursts, as if sobbing.

  Five minutes later, they were outside Grimaldi’s house. For at least ten yards on either side of the gate, there were no cars at the kerb, as if this were a no-parking zone. But there was no traffic sign. Clearly the local people knew better than to leave their vehicles here. There was no need for signs.

  Fenoglio pressed the entryphone button. After a minute spent waiting for an answer, he pressed it again for a longer time. A woman’s voice replied.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Carabinieri. Open up.”

  “What do you want at this hour?” There was hatred in that voice, and anger, and a touch of hysteria. It was Grimaldi’s wife, and she knew perfectly well what the Carabinieri want when they come to your house at 3.30 in the morning.

  “Open up. We have to speak to your husband.”

  The woman didn’t open, didn’t say anything more. All that could be heard was the discordant crackle of the old entryphone.

  “Signora, if you don’t open up we’ll have to knock down the gate, and then the front door.”

  Another ten minutes or so went by and then the gate emitted a rapid, muted buzz, followed by a click. Fenoglio, the captain, Montemurro and Fornaro walked up the two flights of steps. The other carabinieri stayed at the bottom, keeping an eye on the cars and the situation in general. Soon, when they started to serve the arrest warrants, the neighbourhood would become a lot more agitated.

  They found Grimaldi waiting for them at the door in his vest and pyjama trousers. His light brown hair, too long for a man pushing fifty, was dishevelled.

  He looked with a calculated expression of scorn at the guns that Valente, Montemurro and Fornaro were holding in their hands, their arms down by their sides, the barrels pointed at the ground.

  Fenoglio’s hands were free. “Get dressed, Grimaldi,” he said. “You’re coming with us.”

  “What have I done?” Grimaldi said, without moving away from the door. />
  “Quite a lot of things, apparently,” Fenoglio replied, handing him the warrant. “Move aside, we have to search the house.”

  The search was a formality – nobody imagined that Nicola Grimaldi would keep arms, drugs or other illegal material in his own home – but still took half an hour. In that time, Grimaldi got his lawyer out of bed, dressed, had his wife prepare a large bag of clothes for prison and started looking through the warrant. Fenoglio noticed that he handled it with the expert gestures of someone who, although never having studied law, was nevertheless extremely familiar with legal documents.

  “That lousy snitch, that piece of shit,” he growled at a certain point in thick dialect, loudly enough for everybody to hear him. You didn’t need an interpreter to know he was talking about Lopez. “I’m going to tear his heart out and eat it. Even if I die five minutes later, I’m going to eat his heart.”

  The captain seemed on the verge of saying something in reply, but Fenoglio gave him a nod, as if advising him that it was better to leave the man alone to let off steam.

  They put the handcuffs on Grimaldi.

  “Did that lousy piece of shit at least tell you how he killed my son? What are you going to do now, give him a medal for being a fucking snitch?”

  There was a brief silence.

  “He says it wasn’t him,” Fenoglio replied. Slowly, in a low voice.

  Grimaldi looked at all of them, one by one, his eyes full of incredulous rage. “Bastards, you and that bitch of a female judge.”

  And he spat on the warrant, just where the heading was: Prosecutor’s Department of the Court of Bari, Regional Anti-Mafia Section.

  ACT THREE

  The Wild Bunch

  1

  Leaving his solitary apartment to go to work, Fenoglio found himself thinking again about Grimaldi’s son and wondering what he had been like before he became a victim of circumstance.

  Because everyone is a victim of circumstance, even in premeditated murders.

  The previous evening he had reread an extract from Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana: “Unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence … of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed.”

  That digression into philosophical speculation was the most obvious sign of his frustration as a detective. You never start speculating – in excellent company, for heaven’s sake – about chance, fate and the concept of converging causes if your brain has something concrete to work on. What was the child like? What had he been like? That was the one thing missing from the mountain of paperwork in the file – statements, reports, postmortems. Had he been a normal child born into the wrong family? Had he been a little fool who would have become a criminal like his father? Or did he have some skill, some talent, some special, hidden gift?

  The boy had been on his way to school. Cheerful, calm, bored, angry, whatever, but unaware of everything. Unaware, too, of the defect in his heart – that fatal inheritance from his father. All at once, everything had changed. And then everything had ended.

  God alone knew what he had thought when they grabbed him. God alone knew what he had thought – but do you think at moments like that? – when he had felt his heart give out. What was it, a spasm? An excruciating pain? Something exploding inside you? Fenoglio had once heard in a documentary that people attacked by wild animals lose consciousness even before they are aware of the physical pain. It appears that the body releases an analgesic substance, a kind of anaesthetic that ensures a peaceful death, without pain and without fear. Was that true? Was there even such a thing as a peaceful death? He had always thought of death as bitter and nasty: he had seen lots of dead bodies and almost none of them had looked serene or dignified. What had always disturbed him, like a symbol of obscenity, were the rigid, half-open mouths of people who had been murdered, their teeth fully exposed, almost as if the killing had restored them to a feral condition and deprived them of all decency.

  He made an effort to dismiss from his mind the image of the Grimaldi boy when they had found him. The state he was in, the smell he gave off, after more than four days in that well.

  What had Pietro Fenoglio thought when he was a little boy? When he went to school or came back home, or on certain endless winter afternoons, without a television?

  He didn’t know. He had no idea. The absence of memories of his own thoughts was so total as to instil in him a sense of panic. As if his inner life as a little boy had never existed. He remembered a certain number of events from the outside world, but nothing of what he had thought, nothing of what he had dreamt.

  But then, he told himself, does anyone really remember his thoughts as a child? Or his past thoughts in general? Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to ask a few people. Maybe it would help him to put things in their true perspective, to feel less abnormal, less uprooted from his inner life.

  He went into the Caffè Bohème to have breakfast. Nicola had put on the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s Rinaldo. One of his favourites. Fenoglio thought of the trip he and Serena had taken a few years earlier to Salzburg. A woman had sung “Lascia ch’io pianga” in the street. He suddenly remembered the atmosphere of that holiday, the cool and gently dazed air of the city, with elderly couples in evening dress, even though it was afternoon, coming in and out of the theatres. He felt a pang of nostalgia and of other painful emotions. I love you, Serena, he caught himself saying under his breath.

  He found himself back in his office without realizing it. Without remembering the route he had taken to get there, although he had walked for half an hour. It struck him that in a few years’ time he wouldn’t remember the thoughts of that morning, of any of those days. He wouldn’t remember them. Nobody would remember them. All gone, lost forever.

  He switched on the little stereo he kept in his office, and stood there by the unit for a few seconds, undecided as to what to listen to. He told himself he wanted something lively, something filled with light, and chose Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp. He had heard it an infinite number of times, which is the good thing about music, if you’re looking for a little peace and quiet.

  From a drawer he took the pad with his notes on the case of the Grimaldi boy. A neurotic gesture, to gain time. What was written there he knew by heart, yet he started leafing through it all the same, rereading the brief sentences in their clear, square handwriting.

  At that moment, someone knocked rather energetically at the door.

  “Come in!”

  Pellecchia entered. He was back after a few days’ leave and seemed to be in great shape, tanned and slimmer, with his hair cut short. He wore a well-ironed white shirt, instead of his usual slightly torn-looking Tshirts. He looked as if the sun had cleansed and wiped him.

  “Tonino.”

  “Marshal.” Pellecchia looked him up and down for a moment. “You’re not looking too good, you know that? Haven’t you taken a few days off?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been shut in here all day, as usual?”

  Fenoglio got up and lowered the volume of the music to a minimum. “Actually, yes, more or less.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “She’s chairing the board for the school examinations in Pesaro.”

  Pellecchia appeared to ponder this, as if to interpret the situation and develop a strategy. “Listen, Pietro, my partner has a lot of single girlfriends. Some aren’t bad at all. Attractive forty-somethings, divorced, in good shape. A couple of them are really hot. I’ll tell Agnese to organize something one of these evenings. We can make up a four-some, go out to dinner —”

  “Thanks, but I’m not quite ready to go out with any attractive forty-somethings who are divorced, in good shape …”

  “… and really hot.”

  “… and really hot, yes. As soon as I’m ready, you’ll be the fi
rst to know.”

  Pellecchia sniffed. There was something more genuine in his expression now, as if he were renouncing the role he had played for so long.

  “Have you been away?”

  “Five days on the Tremiti Islands. Do you know them?”

  “It’s beautiful there. But I seem to remember there were jellyfish.”

  “No jellyfish this year. I went diving, sunbathed, ate, drank and all the rest. If you know what I mean.”

  Another pause.

  “You’re still obsessed with the boy, aren’t you?” Pellecchia said, his tone of voice changing.

  Fenoglio nodded.

  “Wasn’t it you who said we need detachment in this job, otherwise we’d go mad?”

  “Yes, that was me. Consistency isn’t one of my qualities.” Pellecchia took a cigar butt from the breast pocket of his shirt and put it in his mouth. “Have you found anything?”

  Fenoglio gave an involuntary grimace and shook his head.

  “It’s like a brainteaser. Whichever way you look at it, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Lopez and his men would certainly have been the perfect guilty parties.”

  “If it was them and we couldn’t figure it out, maybe we should just give up this job and retire to a farm. But if it wasn’t them, who could it have been? Who’d have crazy enough to run that kind of risk?”

  Pellecchia shifted on his chair. It struck Fenoglio that he seemed a little uncomfortable. “Mind if I light up?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Pellecchia lit his cigar with a Swedish match and blew out a dense cloud of grey smoke. If this had been a scene from a novel, Fenoglio thought, the hypothetical author would have written “pale blue smoke”. In the real world, though, he had never seen pale blue smoke, like many things that are talked about in novels.

  “And the idea that it was a pervert?”

  “I thought about it, even looked into it. Though remember, the pathologist did rule out sexual violence, despite the marks where the boy had been beaten. The kid had a heart defect, like his father. Nobody knew it. He had a heart attack, probably at the very moment he was kidnapped, or soon afterwards.”