“Precisely, that’s the second reason. He’s a suspect himself, we can’t force him to do anything outside the framework of another statement made in the presence of his defence lawyer. What do we do, send him to talk to Savicchio in the presence of a lawyer?”
“But what if he goes to him of his own free will? He’s been released, he decides to go and talk to his accomplice to clear his conscience, manages to record some useful admissions and brings them to us. We don’t find out about it until that moment, and we arrest the son of a bitch. Pardon my language.”
“Oh, ‘son of a bitch’ seems the least we could say. How long do you think Ruotolo would last under cross-examination by a good lawyer? Who would buy the story that this was his own idea? And, above all, do you think that Savicchio would fall for it? Do you think that if Ruotolo shows up suddenly after two months of silence, he wouldn’t suspect anything and would start to confess his sins word for word, blow by blow, into a microphone?”
We could shoot him.
Or rather, we could have him shot. We could spread the rumour in criminal circles so that everybody found out about it. They would deal with it, people from Grimaldi’s organization who were still at large, or members of another clan. Someone. They would compete with each other. No wasting time on evidence and legal proceedings. You killed a child, this is your payment. Bang bang.
These thoughts crossed Fenoglio’s brain as complete sentences, almost as if written down. Statements that dissolved his frustration into an idea of perfect, elementary justice. To hell with corroboration, legal guarantees, all the various taboos. To hell with them.
“Let’s go and search his place,” Fenoglio said, reemerging with difficulty from that poisonous flurry of thoughts.
“You mean it’s worth a try?”
“I don’t know. Of course, he may have put the money anywhere, but I don’t think he’ll have spent it all. Obviously, he’ll be very careful about what he keeps at home. But yes, it’s worth a try. Maybe we’ll come across something, a document that leads us to his bank accounts or a figurehead. Or maybe something that leads us to a place where he keeps something else. All right, yes, it’s worth a try,” he concluded with a gesture of annoyance. As sometimes happened to him in such situations, he heard his voice from a point outside him, as if it was someone else’s, someone speaking nothing but bullshit. The search was pointless.
“All right,” D’Angelo said.
“All right what?” Fenoglio asked, shaking his head like someone who has been woken abruptly.
“The search. Let’s try it. Given that we have no other options right now. Only the financial investigations are still pending, but in that case there’s no risk he’ll get rid of the evidence. So let’s go and see what he has at home. I’ll go with you.”
17
Article 247 of the Code of Penal Procedure is entitled “Cases and rules of searches” and provides, down to the last comma, for “legal authorities to proceed personally or arrange for the act to be carried out by law enforcement officers delegated with the same warrant”.
The expression “legal authorities” indicates the totality of those who hold judicial office – not a person, therefore unable to do anything personally, Fenoglio had thought when he had studied the new code. Whoever had written that article had a somewhat weak knowledge of grammar and concepts. The badly written rule means that the public prosecutor or the judge – who are physical people – can proceed personally or can delegate the procedure to the law enforcement bodies.
In fact, magistrates almost never carry out searches personally. For many reasons, the usual practice is that these are delegated to the relevant law enforcement body, and prosecutors decide to intervene only in rare and exceptional cases. When they don’t trust the law enforcement body, for example: or else, on the contrary, when they want to assume direct responsibility for a delicate operation.
The search of Savicchio’s apartment and office, they all knew, had little probability of success. It was very unlikely that someone like him would keep compromising material at home or in his office. Going there personally, as D’Angelo proposed to do, meant one specific thing: if something goes wrong, if we don’t find anything and the investigation leads to a dead end, as is very likely, then I’m the one responsible, not the carabinieri who are working with me.
The truth about people can be seen in the nuances of their actions. It struck Fenoglio that he had never before respected a magistrate as much.
18
The previous evening Pellecchia had asked Fenoglio if he could participate in the search.
“Let me come, Pietro, please.”
Fenoglio shook his head.
“Please,” Pellecchia repeated. “I have a score to settle with that son of a bitch. You know that, you’re the only one who does.”
Fenoglio shook his head again. “You can’t, Tonino. Precisely because you have that score to settle. We can’t allow it. It’s unlikely, but what if he were to say something about … about what you did together, in the presence of the captain and the assistant prosecutor. Leave it to us.”
Pellecchia had cleared his throat, as if to reply, but had remained silent. After a while, he had simply nodded quietly, pursing his lips, as if with painful but unavoidable awareness. “All right. Will you call me if you find anything? Have you got my mobile number?”
Fenoglio had said yes, he had put the number in his pocket diary and would call him immediately.
If he found anything.
A hypothesis in which, if anyone had asked him, he would have replied that he had very little belief.
*
They decided to carry out the search starting with the office and continuing with the apartment, getting Savicchio to come with them. That seemed the most effective strategy when dealing with someone like him. Hearing a knock at the door early in the morning, he would guess what was happening and, if there was anything compromising in the apartment, he would try to get rid of it. If it was drugs he could throw them in the toilet, if it was documents he could tear them up and burn them. At least there was no risk of this if they went into the apartment with him.
The colonel remembered an outside engagement that day. He would never have admitted it, but the idea that his officer – the command unit was his office – should be searched by a magistrate made him very uncomfortable, as if it were a kind of personal affront.
“Good morning, Savicchio,” Fenoglio said, walking into the room.
Savicchio turned and was about to reply when he saw D’Angelo and Captain Valente come in immediately after Fenoglio. He almost leapt to his feet.
“Good morning, dottoressa. Sir.”
“We need to conduct a search, Marshal Savicchio,” D’Angelo said, handing him a copy of the warrant. He took it and looked at it for a few minutes, calmly and attentively.
“You’re entitled to have a lawyer present,” said D’Angelo. “Do you want to call one?”
“No, thank you, dottoressa. I’m fine, I have the greatest trust in your conduct. Besides, I’ve read what this warrant is based on …” He said these last words with a contrite expression and a calculated hint of indulgence.
“What do you mean?”
“Ruotolo. He was a good man, but unfortunately, because of various personal problems of his, he’s been gradually losing it. He’s seriously unbalanced. I’m sorry to say it, but he shouldn’t be a carabiniere. We were friends, I tried to help him for years, but his situation just kept getting worse every day. He was being treated by a neurologist, did you know that? After a while, I had to break off relations with him, he kept saying stranger and stranger things, he said he’d committed sins he had to atone for, he had some kind of hallucinations. I don’t like saying these things, but unfortunately it’s all true. You can put it on record if you like.”
D’Angelo looked him in the eyes for a long time. He returned her gaze. “All right, if you don’t need a lawyer, let’s start. After this, we’ll move to your hom
e.”
It didn’t take them long to search the office. As was to be expected, they found nothing, apart from two .38 calibre bullets at the back of a desk drawer.
“What are these?” Fenoglio asked, picking up the bullets.
“Two .38 wad-cutters. I go shooting with friends at the rifle range, we do target practice.”
“Do you have any guns other than your service pistol?”
“No. I use my friends’ guns. Just at the range, of course.”
“And how come you have these?”
Savicchio shrugged and gave a slightly mocking smile. “You know how it is, Fenoglio. When you finish shooting you always end up with something in your jacket pockets. Rather than throw them away on the street you take them to the office and leave them there, to use the next time.”
“Obviously they haven’t been reported.” As he uttered these words, Fenoglio felt pathetic. The unreported possession of ammunition for common firearms is a minor offence, and may at most lead to a small fine. Savicchio’s smile became more openly mocking. It would take a lot more than this to worry him. It was at that moment that Fenoglio had a distinct and unpleasant sensation of futility. Savicchio was too calm. They wouldn’t find anything, the investigation would grind to a halt and he would get away scot-free.
“All right, let’s go to the apartment,” D’Angelo said after a few minutes, when it was clear that there was nothing to look for in the office and nothing to find.
Savicchio lived in Poggiofranco. It was a neighbourhood that had been the dream of the upwardly mobile middle classes of Bari in the 1970s. A place you moved to when you were comfortably off but still insecure and needing confirmation of your social status.
The block was in a complex of four buildings around a shared garden. There was a children’s playground with a slide and a small roundabout. A pretty little blonde girl was playing on the slide, gliding down, climbing back up and going down again. Gravely, methodically, almost as if performing a task she had been assigned.
Apart from the captain and Fenoglio, D’Angelo was accompanied by Grandolfo and Montemurro.
The apartment was a penthouse with a view over much of the city. It consisted of a living room, a kitchen-diner and a bedroom. Well furnished, tidy, with an expensive television, an expensive stereo (the one from which the heavy metal music had come, Fenoglio thought) and good-quality furniture. On the walls of the living room, framed posters of action movies, westerns, thrillers. There was a bookcase with an encyclopaedia, a few legal codes, and a few Book Club volumes. The overall impression was a cut above the normal lifestyle of a marshal of the Carabinieri, but not in a startling way, not enough to constitute evidence of unspecified offences.
“Is there a safe?” Fenoglio asked.
“Yes, of course,” Savicchio replied.
“Can we see it?”
Savicchio went up to one of the posters: The French Connection, Gene Hackman aiming his .38 at someone, looking very pissed off. He took it off the nail, revealing a safe embedded in the wall. He fiddled with the knobs to dial the combination; there was the typical click of gears falling into place, and the door opened.
Inside were a million lire in 50,000 lire notes; jewels and some gold sterling coins – they were his mother’s, he said; a savings account book with a few million and a couple of cheque books. Nothing significant, nothing incompatible with the normal life of a bachelor with a decent salary and no particular family expenses.
“Would you mind taking down the other posters?” Fenoglio asked, having closed the safe.
“No problem,” Savicchio replied.
He took down the posters one by one: GoodFellas, The Wild Bunch, Magnum Force, The Godfather, Escape from New York, A Fistful of Dollars. By the end, the walls were bare and white, the outlines of the frames just visible. Behind these posters there was nothing.
At this point, to give the search some kind of order, they moved the mirrors and fittings in all the rooms. There were no other safes, no hiding places. So they started searching in the furniture, starting with the living room, where the most interesting discoveries were a collection of video cassettes of thrillers, westerns and action movies and another of imported porn films. Judging from the titles of the porn films and the images on the cassette boxes Savicchio seemed to have a certain predilection for games with whips, handcuffs and rubber masks.
The kitchen was typical of a bachelor who doesn’t eat in very much. The refrigerator contained beer, wine, champagne, mineral water, Coca-Cola, a few yogurts, cheese and cured ham. In the pantry were boxes of crackers, packets of crisps, cartons of juice, jars of tomato sauce. In the kitchen cupboard, pots and plates that gave every indication of not being used much. Savicchio was at his ease, and it was clear that he wasn’t in the least worried by this search. Nobody spoke. Fenoglio felt an unbearable sense of growing frustration and could already imagine the moment when they would leave, having filled in a pointless negative search report.
The bedroom had black, lacquered fittings, halfway between the tacky and the louche, and a large mirror on the ceiling. That and the collection of porn films told them something of the tastes of Savicchio the man, but unfortunately nothing useful about Savicchio the suspect.
They rummaged through shirts, Tshirts, underwear, socks, ties, towels, sheets and designer suits, only to discover that there was nothing hidden in them. They shifted the bed in a pointless search for trapdoors or other devices. They searched everywhere in the bathroom, where they discovered Savicchio’s predilection for expensive scents, anti-wrinkle creams, body oils – generally, for the kinds of cosmetics you wouldn’t expect to find in a carabiniere’s bathroom. Once again, useful pointers to the man’s character, but of no use at all for the investigation.
There’s nothing, Fenoglio thought as Montemurro and Grandolfo flung medicines, cosmetics, scents and after-shaves back into the bathroom cabinets. There’s nothing in the whole damned place. Or in the remote likelihood that there is something, it’s too well hidden to find. We’ve screwed up with this search, and now the investigation is over. He remembered Pellecchia, who must be waiting on tenterhooks. He thought it only right to tell him immediately how things were going.
“Can I use your phone, Savicchio?”
“Of course,” Savicchio said with a politeness that was excessive and tinged with sarcasm, pointing to a cordless phone on the bedside table.
Fenoglio took it, moved out onto the shadowy balcony and called. Pellecchia replied after a single ring.
“Yes?”
“Pietro here.”
“What have you found?”
“Nothing.”
“Shit. What’s the apartment like?”
“Haven’t you ever been here?”
“I’ve never been to his place and he’s never been to mine. It may seem odd to you, but we weren’t friends.”
“The apartment is quite normal, all things considered. He has a collection of S&M porn films, money and jewellery in a safe, but nothing significant.”
“No trapdoors, no secret drawers?”
“If he has them, we haven’t found them.”
“Cellars, letter boxes, parking spaces?”
“We’re checking now, but I have to tell you something. Even if he has them, I don’t think we’re going to find anything. He’s too calm, too sure of himself. It’s almost as if he’s enjoying himself.”
From the other end came a long sigh of frustration. Fenoglio imagined Pellecchia half closing his eyes and trying to keep his anger at bay.
“Let me come there and have a look. Just a quick look. I might get a few ideas. If I don’t, I’ll leave immediately without saying a word, without causing a fuss.”
Fenoglio was about to say no again, that it wasn’t appropriate and that there was nothing he could do that they hadn’t already done. Then something held him back. When it came down to it, Pellecchia could drop in while they were writing up the report. At that point, the risk of accidents was almost ni
l.
“All right, come, but promise me you won’t touch anything. Have a look around and then we’ll leave together. How long will it take you to get here?”
“Five minutes.”
“Five minutes? Where are you?”
“At the Bar Moderno, just round the corner.”
19
The two men greeted each other with a nod. For the first time since the search had started, Savicchio seemed uncertain as to how to behave. Up until that moment, he’d had everything under control: he had a clear sense of what was happening and didn’t perceive any danger. The arrival of Pellecchia, almost at the end of everything, didn’t fit into the pattern.
“Did you ask if there are cellars or parking spaces?” Pellecchia asked Fenoglio as he came into the living room.
“He says there aren’t. But as soon as we’re finished here we’ll take a look downstairs, just to be on the safe side.”
Grandolfo and Montemurro were putting the posters back. The captain had left a little while earlier. D’Angelo had told him it wasn’t necessary for him to stay any longer. It was an investigative activity supervised directly by her; three carabinieri were more than enough to assist her, given that it was just a matter of drawing up and signing a report that the search had yielded nothing.
“Good morning, dottoressa,” Pellecchia said.
She looked up from her paper. “Good morning, corporal. I’d been wondering how come you weren’t here, too.”
“I had a little problem, I came as soon as I could.”
“A bit late, I fear. We’re just finishing.”
Pellecchia looked around, as if to get his bearings. Suddenly he froze, and stood there for a few very long moments, with his head turned to his right: he was staring at one of the posters on the wall. Then he abruptly turned away.
“Can we talk?” he said to Fenoglio, a sudden frenzy in his eyes.
“Let’s go on the balcony.”
“Did you look behind that poster, the one for The Wild Bunch?”
The Cold Summer Page 26