The Cold Summer

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  The woman seemed to concentrate. “It definitely wasn’t high. It was like when someone smokes a lot …”

  “Husky?”

  “Yes, husky.”

  “Is there any other reason you referred to smoking?”

  “Now that I come to think of it, he stank of cigarettes. You know when someone smokes a lot and has that smell …”

  “Of course, the kind that stays on their clothes. Do you remember anything else?”

  She shook her head. She seemed surprised to have remembered that detail.

  “Let’s go back to how he spoke. Dialect or Italian?”

  “A mixture, but more dialect.”

  “So, to sum up: he had a low, husky voice, he was a heavy smoker and he spoke mainly in dialect. What about his physical appearance? His build, his height?”

  She shook her head again. “It’s hard to say. He was … average. He didn’t seem particularly tall or short. He definitely wasn’t fat.”

  “If you had to guess, just guess, without giving any reason: how old would you say he was?”

  “About thirty, maybe more. He wasn’t a boy.”

  “Did you by any chance, in the months that followed, ever have the impression you encountered this person? Even if it was just an impression. Maybe you passed someone in the street and heard that voice, or else smelled the same smell of cigarettes.”

  “No.”

  Fenoglio was silent for a minute or two to see if any further memories emerged. But nothing came.

  “All right, Signorina Fiorella, if you remember anything else, please call me. I’m writing down my office number. I’m Marshal Fenoglio. If you don’t find me, leave a message and I’ll call you back.”

  “My father and I just want to forget all about this business.”

  5

  The man was about forty, he was wearing a well-cut grey suit, and there was something evasive in his manner.

  They were sitting around a table in an anonymously furnished reception room. The apartment was on the top floor of a modern building on Corso Vittorio Emanuele: from the windows there was a spectacular view of the old city.

  “How did you find out?”

  Fenoglio made the same speech he’d given a few hours earlier, with the necessary variations. He wasn’t to worry, the information was only needed for an investigation into another kidnapping, they wouldn’t take a statement and the conversation would remain confidential. The important thing was that he tell them everything that had happened on the occasion of his kidnapping.

  “But it wasn’t me they kidnapped.”

  “Who was it?”

  The man contracted his jaw and there was a suspicious gleam in his eyes. “My father.”

  “Ah. And what does your father do?”

  “He was the owner of this building company. But he’s dead now.”

  “I’m sorry, Signor Angiuli. Did his death have anything to do with the kidnapping?”

  “Who knows? Six months after it happened, they discovered he had cancer, and six months after that he was dead. They say cancer is sometimes caused by stress.”

  “When did it happen, Signor Angiuli?”

  “February of last year.”

  The man recounted what his father had told him. He had just left home when a fellow with a beard, moustache and long hair had approached him, introduced himself as a police officer and told him to follow him in order to check something. He had asked the reason and the man had punched him twice in the face, knocking him out. He had come to a few minutes later, in a van. He was blindfolded and handcuffed. Soon afterwards they had phoned the son, demanding eighty million in cash. They had been told that it was impossible to get hold of a sum like that in such a short time, and in the end they had agreed to fifty. The money was left under a dustbin in Valenzano. The father had been freed in Bari, near the cemetery. From there, he had called and the son had gone to pick him up. From the kidnapping to the release, it had all taken five hours.

  “The man with the beard said he was a police officer?”

  “Apparently, yes. It must have been to trick him.”

  “And were those your father’s exact words: blindfolded and handcuffed?”

  “Yes, I think so …”

  “Blindfolded or with a hood over his head?”

  “Blindfolded. He never said anything about a hood.”

  “All right. And he did say ‘handcuffs’, like the things we use?”

  “I’m really not sure now. He said something like: they handcuffed me, but —”

  “Try to make an effort. It may be important. Try to hear your father’s voice in your head, his voice more than his words.”

  “He said … they handcuffed me … and then that when they let him go they used shears …”

  “So they’d tied him up?”

  “He didn’t say ‘tied’. I remember that very well. He said ‘handcuffed’.”

  Pellecchia intervened in a strangely low voice and a grim tone that was unlike him. “Single-use plastic handcuffs.”

  “Yes. Is there anything else you remember from your father’s account?” Fenoglio asked.

  “He said they’d struck him as … bad people. I know that sounds like a childish thing to say, but it’s the expression he used. He came back terrified. It’s obvious that anyone would be frightened after something like that, but he was more frightened. I don’t know if I’m making sense.”

  “You’re making perfect sense. He’d been aware of a very intense threat that went beyond the situation he was in, serious as that was. Have I understood correctly?”

  “I think so.”

  “Did he tell you anything about the way the two men spoke? In Italian or in dialect?”

  Angiuli thought this over. He put his elbow on the table and his chin on his closed fist. “I don’t remember.”

  “But you talked to them on the phone.”

  “Yes, although the first two calls were taken by the secretary we had then.”

  “Doesn’t she work here any more?”

  “No, she lives in Milan.”

  “How was the voice of the person you spoke to? If it was the same.”

  “Yes, it was always the same. It was a normal voice.”

  “Italian or dialect?”

  “Italian.”

  “Calm or agitated?”

  “Very calm. And very cold. The voice of someone without any emotion. Strange, I never thought of it before in those terms. He gave orders. He had the tone of someone who gives orders.”

  “In what sense?”

  “I really don’t know. It wasn’t that he was threatening. It was as if the threat was taken for granted, as if there was no need. I had to obey and that was it.”

  Fenoglio looked at Pellecchia, who seemed lost in thought.

  “Maybe I’m imagining things …”

  “On the contrary, you’re providing us with some very useful leads. Do you remember any particular expressions used on the telephone by this man?”

  “In what sense?”

  “He gave you instructions about how to hand over the money and in general about how to behave: was there anything unusual about the way he expressed himself?”

  Angiuli shook his head.

  As they were taking their leave, Fenoglio told him to call him if he remembered anything else. He thought it unlikely he would do so. There was something about the man, even though he had cooperated and provided them with useful information, which didn’t convince him. Something untrustworthy, hidden and somehow dangerous.

  They went back on foot, as they had arrived: the station was a quarter of an hour’s walk from Angiuli’s office.

  “What did you think of him?” Fenoglio asked as they turned onto the seafront. The wind had risen and the sky was an absolute, almost tragic blue.

  “A son of a bitch. I don’t know why, but he’s a son of a bitch.”

  “I had the same impression. Anyway, it wasn’t the same people as with the Patrunos.”

&nbs
p; Pellecchia replied with a kind of grunt which was hard to interpret. It might mean yes; it might mean that he had to think about it.

  “The pathologist said the boy had rope marks on his wrists. That would be one element in common.”

  Another grunt, identical to the previous one.

  “You’re verbose today.”

  “Verbose. That means someone who talks a lot, right?”

  “Right. What can you tell me about the third name the Albino gave us?”

  “That we should ask him to check things better.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that in the register office in Bitonto – the paper said that was where he was from – that name doesn’t exist. I asked my colleagues at the station if, apart from the records, they knew anyone of that name, and they said no. I also tried someone at the police station, a very bright guy, a friend of mine. Zilch.”

  6

  Fenoglio walked the two miles home. As he went in, he had to suppress the usual wave of anguish he felt on seeing the apartment without Serena, although in the last few days the situation seemed to have improved a little: the shock was less violent, the sense of dizziness less intense.

  He took a shower, changed and put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket. If you let yourself go, you’re done for. You start to shave badly, you wear the same shirt for three days, talking to yourself becomes a habit. They say it’s like a disease, when someone leaves you. There’s an acute phase, then there’s the convalescence. He didn’t want to be in a really terrible state by the time he was cured. And to be cured, the last thing he must do was dismiss the thought of Serena. Dismissing it was like taking a painkiller whose effect only lasts a few minutes. Afterwards, the pain returns, stronger than before. When the thought comes, you just have to leave it alone, not try to stop it or control it. The problem is that we like to control everything: a stupid, pointless, unhealthy idea. We need to have the opposite attitude, accept the fact that nobody really has any control over his or her own life: that was what the barman Nicola, from the Caffè Bohème, had said to him once. He had been an alcoholic, and one evening, at closing time, he had told Fenoglio how he had got out of it by going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and following their twelve-step programme. One day at a time. He had also added that it’s a good rule not to take anything personally. We think that everything revolves around us: both what other people do and what they don’t do. It’s almost never true. Things happen and that’s it; most other people are uninterested in us, for good or ill. Right, Fenoglio had replied, standing up and saluting him to the strains of the Intermezzo from Manon Lescaut.

  It was Saturday. The air was warm. The perfect evening for going out, having a nice pizza and seeing a film in an open-air cinema.

  Alone.

  All right, alone. For a few moments, he thought of calling Pellecchia. Hi, Tonino, I decided to accept your offer, can you please ask your girlfriend to bring along a friend?

  He felt like crying, which didn’t happen often. Luckily, he was alone. The last time anyone had seen him cry was when his father had died. He had that strange, stupid conviction that crying wasn’t dignified. A question of vanity, when it came down to it.

  I could call D’Angelo. Maybe she’s also alone, maybe she’ll be pleased. The idea lasted only a few seconds longer.

  Go and have a pizza, catch a film, then home to bed. Tomorrow, you can think. One day at a time, as the barman Nicola says.

  That was what he did. He went to a pizzeria in the centre of town, near the railway station, and had a pizza and a couple of beers. Then he moved a few hundred yards to see what was showing at the Arena. It was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, with Kevin Costner. A film from the previous year, which strangely he’d missed. Strangely, because Robin Hood was one of his favourite characters. He bought the ticket; after a moment’s hesitation – Serena would have disapproved – he bought another cold beer and immersed himself in the unreal, timeless atmosphere of the old arena. The film was good, Kevin Costner was fine, even though nobody would ever be able to play Robin Hood better than Errol Flynn, but the best character was the one played by Morgan Freeman. Great actor, Fenoglio thought, sooner or later he’d win an Oscar.

  By the time he got home, he was almost in a good mood. He cleaned his teeth, carefully folded his trousers on a chair and went to bed. Before falling asleep, he told himself that Serena would have liked that. If she came back, she wouldn’t find him looking like a tramp.

  The following morning he woke late, which was unusual for him. He liked it. One of the unpleasant aspects of waking early, when it isn’t yet light, is that you’re confronted with your own anguish. Usually, it wins, at least as long as you stay in bed. If you wake up and discover that it’s half past nine, for example, that means you’ve escaped the tentacles of the night, and you can even allow yourself to laze about a bit longer. So he switched on the radio and stayed in bed for another half hour, gliding, with less effort than the past few weeks, over the waves of anxiety that spread from the empty side of the bed.

  At last he got up, had a shower and made himself breakfast. After eating, he tidied everything up and decided not to run away to escape the solitude. First of all, he wouldn’t go to the office, as he had done almost every Sunday in that early part of summer. He would read, listen to music, watch the television news, have lunch and go out for a walk in the afternoon. During the walk, he would try to reorganize his ideas about the Grimaldi kidnapping. Though maybe reorganize wasn’t the right word. There weren’t that many ideas in the first place. It was rather a question of reaching some kind of working hypothesis – something he had failed to do so far.

  He listened twice to Beethoven’s Emperor concerto and read a little of Moravia’s Time of Desecration, finding it very boring. In the end he gave up and switched to a book by Bertrand Russell – Religion and Science – which was a much more pleasant read. He underlined a number of sentences and one passage in particular he marked with an exclamation mark in the margin: “towards the end of the sixteenth century Flade, Rector of the University of Trèves, and Chief Judge of the Electoral Court, after condemning countless witches, began to think that perhaps their confessions were due to the desire to escape from the tortures of the rack, with the result that he showed unwillingness to convict. He was accused of having sold himself to Satan, and was subjected to the same tortures as he had inflicted upon others. Like them, he confessed his guilt, and in 1589 he was strangled and then burnt.”

  At one o’clock, he stopped reading, switched off the stereo and transferred to the kitchen, where he made himself a potato omelette; he ate it, watched the television news, had a coffee and cleaned up, leaving everything in perfect order. For a moment, he thought in all seriousness that if Serena came back without warning she wouldn’t find the sink full of dirty dishes and cutlery. Then he remembered that she was in Pesaro for the school-leaving exams – she had phoned him a few days earlier to tell him, and he hadn’t known what to make of the hesitant tone of her voice, the hint of something unexpressed.

  He went out. The weather was unsettled. It didn’t seem like July; the air had the ambiguous coolness of September. He had never liked the harsh colours, the sharp contrasts, the absence of doubt and the sadness of high summer. But he had always liked September, ever since he was a little boy. It was an elusive, unclassifiable month. In that old game – if you were a train, what kind of train would you be? if you were an animal …? if you were a flower …? – when the question was: if you were a month …? he always replied September.

  September is the month of new responsibilities, someone had said. It seemed an accurate definition, and responsibility was a word he liked. He had often thought about it: he hated the idea of a sense of guilt and loved the idea of a sense of responsibility.

  He passed an apartment building on Via De Ruggiero. One of those beautiful municipal blocks from the 1920s: big apartments with high ceilings, large windows, well-lit staircases. There was a
couple in their sixties who had lived there for thirty-five years. They’d had two daughters who had married and moved away. A normal couple, as far as the neighbours knew, although very reserved – they weren’t on familiar terms with anyone. One morning, the woman had turned up at the Carabinieri station on Viale Unità d’Italia, wearing a bloodstained dressing gown. I’ve killed my husband, she had said, putting down a hammer, also bloodstained, on the desk of an astonished sergeant. At that time, Fenoglio had only just joined the department. It was he, with two colleagues and the woman, who entered the apartment and found the husband sitting in his vest in an armchair in front of the television, which was still on. At first sight, he seemed to be asleep, with a coffee cup and an ashtray full of cigarette butts beside him. Going closer, you could see his smashed skull. There was a look of infinite surprise in his wide-open eyes.

  The woman was calm, didn’t say anything. When they asked her why she had done it she stood up, lifted her blouse and showed them the marks of the lashes. Then the marks of the cigarette burns. And she told them about her life with this man she had hammered to death a few hours earlier. I didn’t want all these things any more, she said. I woke up and I thought I didn’t want him to do these things to me any more. So I took the hammer and when he finished his coffee I did what I did. She was serene. The strangest thing was that she exuded serenity. As if her gesture had cleaned up part of the world.

  They were things that had happened a long time ago. Or maybe not, maybe not so long ago. Time – long or short – depends on how you measure it.

  Whatever, it had been a very easy investigation. In fact, when you got down to it, it wasn’t even an investigation, given that the case had already been solved the moment the woman had turned up at the station.

  In a hypothetical scale of investigative difficulty, that murder was a one, the death of young Grimaldi a ten. Was what they had learned about the Patruno and Angiuli kidnappings going to be of any use? The Japigia episode really seemed like something else. Locals, almost certainly. Individuals who moved about the streets of the neighbourhood like predators in their territory. It was very unlikely – as he had already said to Pellecchia – that people from Japigia would have moved into the northern districts to kidnap the son of the boss who ruled that part of the city.