The Cold Summer

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  Ruotolo made to open his mouth; Fenoglio interrupted him before he could begin.

  “Shut up and listen to me. You say we don’t have a damned thing. That isn’t true. We know that up until the kidnapping of the boy, you and Savicchio talked constantly on the phone; after it, for reasons you’ll have to explain, almost never. We know what your standard of living was – mobile phone bills of 400,000 lire a month inclusive. You’ll have to explain that. Just as you’ll have to explain this strange business of the medical certificates. While you try to explain, we’ll continue to investigate you. We’ll question all those you’ve been involved with in the last few years and, as you well know, many of them aren’t exactly good people. Something will come out, you can be sure of that.” He waited about ten seconds, to let the message sink in. Then he resumed:

  “I want to give you an opportunity. I won’t beat about the bush. We both know why you’re here. As I see it, there are three possibilities. The first is this: at the end of our encounter you persist in saying that you don’t know what we’re talking about and therefore have no intention of cooperating. We continue the work we’re already doing and maybe, I say maybe, we manage to find sufficient evidence to arrest you and have you sentenced. I’m sure you already know it, but Article 630 of the Penal Code – kidnapping – is punishable by thirty years in prison if the kidnapping results, for whatever reason, in the death of the person kidnapped. In other words, the sentence applies even if you didn’t deliberately kill the victim. Otherwise, it’s life imprisonment.”

  Ruotolo’s face was a corpse-like grey.

  “Of course, it’s possible we won’t find any evidence and you’ll escape arrest and trial. That’s the second hypothesis. In which case I think Grimaldi’s friends will come after you – both of you – and they’re not too bothered about legal niceties like clues, evidence, trials. Let’s put it this way: as soon as word gets out that it was you who took the boy and killed him, whatever the result of these proceedings, you and your friend are dead men walking.”

  His words hung in the air. The room stank of ink and dusty paper. Silence emphasizes smells, for those able to perceive them.

  “What’s the third?” Ruotolo asked in a very low voice.

  Fenoglio stood up, went and took the code and opened it. “Article 630 of the Penal Code, which I was talking about, also allows for extenuating circumstances. In particular for ‘the perpetrator who, dissociating himself from his accomplices, makes an effort to prevent a criminal activity being taken any further or else in concrete terms helps the law enforcement agencies or the legal authorities in the gathering of evidence crucial to the identification or capture of said accomplices’. The meaning is clear, I don’t have to explain it to you, do I?”

  Ruotolo moved his head slightly: no, there was no need to explain.

  Pellecchia came back in without saying anything. He leaned his back against the wall furthest from Ruotolo and remained there.

  “Without dragging this out and without making precise calculations now: if you cooperate, what with the extenuating circumstances as laid down in Article 630, the general extenuating circumstances and the reduction of sentence if we go for a short-form trial, you could get away with six years. Not to mention the possibility of entering witness protection and all the rest of it. That’s the way things stand, so now think about what suits you.”

  He, too, thought it over. He thought about the unreal silence of the station, to start with. Then about the man he had in front of him and his broken life – broken however things went. He thought about what Tonino Pellecchia had told him, about why he had wanted to be a carabiniere. Had Sergeant Antonio Ruotolo also dreamed of being a carabiniere when he was a boy because he wanted to be on the right side of the fence? The problem, it goes without saying, is that the fence is full of gaps, some so well hidden that you don’t notice them until you’ve gone through them and found yourself somewhere else, doing something else.

  “Could I have some water?” Ruotolo asked, suddenly breaking the silence.

  Fenoglio turned to Pellecchia without a word. Pellecchia nodded, left the room and a few minutes later came back with a bottle of mineral water and some plastic cups.

  “Can I smoke?” Ruotolo asked once he had drunk. He had got a bit of colour back into his cheeks.

  “Of course.” Fenoglio looked around. “There are no ashtrays, throw it in the cup.”

  Ruotolo took out a packet of Multi-filters, took one and lit it with an expensive-looking lighter. He coughed a few times.

  “Maybe it’s better this way.”

  “Yes, it is,” Fenoglio said.

  “How did you do it?”

  Fenoglio shrugged. What did it matter? “Tell us everything, Ruotolo. Then we’ll call a lawyer and decide together what to put in the statement. If you help us, we’ll help you, as far as we possibly can.”

  Ruotolo took a couple of drags on his cigarette and started telling his story.

  13

  They hadn’t met at work, but in a disco where Ruotolo moonlighted as a bouncer.

  One evening, there had been a problem with some drunken youths. Savicchio was there as a customer, with a woman.

  “He helped us sort out the mess and get rid of them. Some of them managed to get away, others we collared and ID’d. I remember we were in the back of the disco, and these guys were on their knees with their faces against the wall and their hands behind their heads. Savicchio went from one to the other, taking their wallets, looking at their documents, writing down their particulars in a notebook and saying to each of them: now I know where you live. I can find you whenever I like. Then he put the documents back, took the money and put it in his pocket.”

  “Did any of them object?”

  “Just one. He got beaten up, and his friends had to carry him out on their backs.”

  “Did Savicchio give you part of the money?”

  “No, he kept it all for himself.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “After finishing with these guys, we went back into the disco and had a drink in the private room – one of the owners offered Savicchio a bottle of champagne to thank him. We stayed there chatting and drinking until late, and after a while Guglielmo asked me how much I earned as a bouncer. I was getting 300,000 an evening, and he said that was loose change. He asked me if I wanted to make real money, if I considered myself a man of action. I said yes, and he told me he’d be in touch. A few days later he called me and said that if I wanted I could help him.”

  “Help him with what?”

  “Debt collecting.”

  “For loan sharks?”

  “We did sometimes work for loan sharks later, but that time it was for a regular businessman, someone who sold building materials. There was a customer who hadn’t paid for a large supply of concrete or bricks, I can’t remember which. I don’t know for what reason, but this guy, the creditor, instead of going to his lawyer, had called in Savicchio. I think it was a habit.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We went to the guy, Savicchio talked to him, told him that if he didn’t pay he might be in serious trouble and in the end, to cut a long story short, the guy paid the debt.”

  “Why did Savicchio involve you in this?”

  “He said he needed an assistant, because of all the work he was doing. He wasn’t satisfied with the ones he’d had before. I’d made a good impression on him, he thought I was reliable.”

  Fenoglio felt a sense of unease. For a few seconds he lost contact with his surroundings. He had the sensation he had already heard these replies and couldn’t understand why. Then he realized. A similar story, almost word for word, had been told by Lopez two months earlier, talking about how he’d met Grimaldi.

  “We provided an escort for transporting things of value. Sometimes they were jewels, stolen jewels. Once, even a valuable painting.”

  Ruotolo went back over three years of criminal activity in uniform. Fenoglio let him talk almost wit
hout interrupting him or asking him any questions. At last, they got to the kidnappings.

  “One day, Mino – Savicchio – came to me and said we should get involved in something new, a way to really make a lot of easy money. I asked him what he was talking about and he asked me if I’d ever heard of lightning kidnappings. I didn’t know anything about them, so he explained. They were something that had started in Cerignola, but now people were doing it around here, too. He said it could be a goldmine and we had to figure out a way to get in on it. I didn’t agree. It was one thing providing an escort for transporting stolen goods, collecting debts or robbing prostitutes. This was something else entirely, a really serious thing that would involve people who had nothing to do with the underworld.”

  Here it was, that self-absolving tone that crops up, to a greater or lesser degree, in all confessions. I want to make it clear that I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I may have failed in my duty, but I have principles. It’s one thing to rob whores, quite another to kidnap respectable people.

  “Anyway, I told him that I didn’t feel up to it, that it sounded like a bad idea, but he told me to let him finish. He wasn’t planning to kidnap respectable people; his brilliant idea was to kidnap the relatives of underworld figures. He said: think of a drug trafficker who’s just sold a consignment; he has hundreds of millions in cash. We grab his wife, we call half an hour later and we ask him for a hundred million if he doesn’t want to get her back dead. The guy pays immediately, nobody gets hurt, and for half a day’s work we pick up two years’ salary.”

  “Did he say how you would choose the victims?”

  “Simple: they had to have easy access to dirty money. To select the people, we’d use both information we had in records and our contacts in the underworld.”

  “How many did you do?”

  “Three in all.”

  “The Grimaldi boy, Angiuli, and who was the third?”

  “How do you know about Angiuli?”

  Fenoglio again had the impulse to slap him. “Listen to me, Ruotolo, don’t concern yourself about what we know and how we found out. Just concentrate on telling us everything, from start to finish. The benefits I mentioned before are cancelled if you tell us any lies or leave anything out. Got that?”

  Ruotolo nodded. He told them about the third kidnapping, which had actually been the first chronologically: they’d abducted the wife of a big loan shark and had come away with forty million.

  They’d used cars – in one case a van – borrowed from dealers who were friends of Savicchio’s; the number plates had been replaced with others stolen recently and were later put back.

  “Tell me one thing, Tony,” Pellecchia said. “Is it true you told Angiuli you were police?”

  “The woman, too. It was an idea of Mino’s. He said that if it came out that the kidnappers had disguised themselves as police officers, it would be even more unlikely that anybody would think it was true. But you know something?”

  “What?”

  “I think he liked committing a crime and saying he was police. He thought it was … funny.”

  “Very funny. Now let’s talk about the boy. Before anything else: how did the plan come about?”

  “One day, at the beginning of May, he told me that the war going on in the city was internal to the Grimaldi clan: a small group had rebelled against the boss. Savicchio thought it was the perfect moment to kidnap Grimaldi’s son. Everyone would think it was the rebel group. Grimaldi, who obviously had lots of cash, would immediately pay up to save the boy. Then he would launch a manhunt for the others and make sure they were killed, one way or another. We would be like bullfighters.”

  “Like bullfighters?”

  “Yes, that’s the kind of bullshit he comes out with. He meant we’d get into a dangerous position, the way a bullfighter does with the bull, and then get out of it unscathed, with our pockets full of money.”

  “But the bullfighter can also get the bull’s horns up his arse,” Pellecchia cut in.

  “That’s what I told him, the very same words,” Ruotolo said. For a moment a smile escaped him. “He replied that he was starting to get pissed off, that for every idea he came up with I cast doubt on it and that maybe he’d been wrong to think I was the ideal partner for him. If I wasn’t interested, I should tell him and we’d stop working together. If I wasn’t interested in making two hundred million, split fifty–fifty, we could say goodbye there and then. He would find someone else.”

  “And you decided you were interested in two hundred million after all,” Pellecchia said. “Am I right?”

  Ruotolo lit a cigarette. “I was an idiot. I had a feeling it’d go wrong.”

  “How did you go about it?”

  “He had it all planned. He knew what school the boy attended, what route he took, what time he left home and where was the best place to grab him.”

  “Had he found all this out for himself, or had someone else provided him with the information?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. There were some things he was always evasive about. He implied that he was able to find out everything he wanted, both in criminal circles, and in … ours. He used to say that working at the command unit he had access to everything. Nothing ever happened that he didn’t find out about. He’s a megalomaniac. But it’s true, one way or another he manages to find out a whole lot of things.”

  “Did he ever talk about any other carabinieri or police officers who worked with him?”

  “He said he’d worked with others in the past.” Fenoglio avoided looking at Pellecchia. “But right now I was his only partner.”

  “Do you think that was true?”

  Ruotolo shrugged. “Yes, I think so. We were always together. I don’t see where he would have found the time … I mean, to do that kind of thing with other people, too. But then you’re never sure of anything with Mino Savicchio.”

  “Let’s get back to the Grimaldi incident,” Fenoglio said.

  Incident. For a moment, Fenoglio thought about the disciplined way he was respecting the rules of interrogation. The choice of words is vital to obtaining results. You have to choose expressions that are as neutral as possible – event, incident, episode, and so on – and avoid words like rape, murder, death, crime. Expressions like these, laden with emotion, remind the suspect of the seriousness of what he’s done, evoke vague, fearsome consequences, reduce the chances of a confession.

  “We approached the boy a few hundred yards from the school, where it was most unlikely anyone would see us. We had a BMW estate car with blackedout windows, which as usual Savicchio had borrowed from one of his car dealer friends. We’d replaced the number plates with others that we’d stolen from a garage a little while earlier.”

  “Why from a garage?”

  “Savicchio kept his eye on the cars in his garage – the one where he left his own car – which were never used. We’d take the plates from those, because it was more unlikely that the owners would notice the theft.”

  Fenoglio nodded and signalled to Ruotolo to continue.

  “I was driving. Savicchio got out of the car and told the boy we were friends of his father’s and that we had to take him back home because something had happened. The boy asked what it was, and Savicchio said his mother had been shot. I don’t know where he got these ideas from. At that point, anyway, the boy got into the car without making a fuss.”

  “Were your faces uncovered?”

  “We were wearing wigs and false moustaches. Savicchio sat in the back seat with the boy. When the boy realized we weren’t going to his house, he started getting agitated. Savicchio gave him a couple of slaps and told him not to make any fuss, but he didn’t calm down, he started yelling that his father would kill us and things like that, and Savicchio grabbed him, put a hood over his head and tied his hands and feet with plastic straps. Then we stopped and put him in the boot.”

  The account continued, monotonous and banal. Like almost all confessions of terrible deeds.
>
  They went and phoned the family, still with the boy in the boot – it was spacious, there was no problem, they thought. Then they made the second and third phone calls, moving from village to village. No, there was no criterion, no particular reason for the choice of the places from which to call: the idea was just to move around at random to avoid providing any clues in a possible investigation. Once they had obtained the father’s consent to the payment – they had asked for 200 million – they had to wait a few hours for the cash to be collected. So they decided to go to an abandoned quarry near Trani, where they would take the boy out and wait.

  When they opened the boot, the boy didn’t move. They pulled him out, took off his hood, freed his hands and tried to revive him.

  “I said we had to take him to accident and emergency right away, and Savicchio told me I was crazy. He said the boy was dead, and if I wanted to go to the hospital, I might as well go straight to prison. I broke down at this point and started crying, and he slapped me to make me stop. Then he said that we had to get rid of the body immediately, without wasting another minute. We drove to the countryside near Casamassima, where there was a well, and we …”

  He couldn’t find the word. He didn’t want to say: we threw him in, a verb that makes you think of a bag of rubbish.

  “We put him in,” he said at last.

  “Are you sure he was dead?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. There was no pulse; we held the blade of a penknife under his nostrils, but it didn’t steam up even a little. We also tried pinching him to see if there was any reaction. He was dead, I swear it to you. If he hadn’t been dead, I’d have taken him to hospital. But that bastard was right: if we’d gone to hospital, we wouldn’t have saved the boy and we would have signed our own death sentences.”

  “Why the countryside near Casamassima?”

  “There was no why.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s what Savicchio said. Let’s take him to a place that has nothing to do with us, he said. They’ll look for a meaning, they’ll come up with every kind of hypothesis – local perverts, for example – and they’ll be quite wrong because there’s no meaning to discover. Like a puzzle that has no solution.”