‘Insurance investigator, eh?’ he said cheerily when his secretary introduced us.
I told him about the fire at Bragantini’s and he smiled. ‘And he thinks I did it?’
‘I’m talking to everyone in the same line as him,’ I said curtly.
‘Then you’ve got a long day. There are hundreds of us in this line.’
‘All bottling?’
‘Bottling, canning, tinning. That sort of thing. “Culinary engineering”.’ He smiled at the grandiose sound of the term.
I spoke to him for a quarter of an hour. He told me where he was the previous night and gave me the addresses of the friends he had been with. He seemed amused rather than disconcerted by the whole thing, and I crossed him off the list as well. One by one I eliminated the other rivals, the unlikely arsonists who had decent alibis and no motive.
I went back home to get my car. It was late afternoon by then and I parked outside the receptionist’s address on a small street which ran off the Via Emilia. I walked up to the intercom and saw the usual panel of two dozen names. I found Nunzia Di Michele’s name and, next to hers, what I assumed was her husband’s: Michelotti. I sat in the car for an hour, waiting for someone to come out. Eventually a young man emerged who looked dark, with a thin face and a thin mouth like the photo on the receptionist’s desk. I fired up the car and followed him. He drove for a mile out of town, stopping at a roadside bar. I waited for him to walk in before getting out and following him inside.
The bar was the usual dark hole, most of the light coming from a small TV sitting on a black metal plate in the corner. There were a few posters of B movies from twenty years ago and a pennant of the city’s football team. I saw a pine tree of Chupa lollies by the cash till and a large Gaggia coffee machine. There were folded newspapers on wobbly, circular tables and old chairs with faded floral seats complete with cigarette burns and yellowing chewing gum in the corners. There was a ridgeback dog in there, too energetic for the claustrophobic bar. It came round panting and licking, knocking tables with its chest and chin and spilling drinks onto people’s laps which it then tried to lick. It was the kind of place that was never closed and never cleaned, one of those unfashionable holes in the suburbs where people went just because it was there.
The husband was sitting on a barstool drinking a beer. I sat next to him and ordered the usual malvasia. The barman looked like his dog and had the same breath. He was talking away, telling anyone who would listen why the Caprazucca bridge, the ‘goat-pumpkin’ bridge, had such a daft name.
‘It was built by a man called Capri Succhi and over the years it became, in the popular imagination, Caprazucca.’
‘That’s bull,’ said another man at the bar. ‘Everyone thinks that but it’s not true.’ The barman was offended, but stood there listening to the new expert. ‘It used to be called the bridge of Donna Egidia, but it was wooden and rotting. So they built a new one. This was some time in the thirteenth century.’
‘Allora?’ the barman said impatiently, wanting to put his rival back in his place.
‘In the fifteenth century some constable called Antonio da Godano was the officer on the bridge and you know what his nickname was?’
‘Goat-pumpkin?’ the barman said.
The man looked at us seriously. ‘You got it. Capra-zucca.’
‘What kind of nickname is that?’ I asked. Goat-pumpkin sounded like a daft nickname to me.
‘It’s an old way to say piggy-back. “Cravasu’cca”. Sounds like “capra-zucca” you see? The constable’s nickname was piggy-back, and since piggy-back was there, guarding the bridge and doubtless charging people to use it, the bridge got his nickname too.’
‘Why would a constable get such an idiotic nickname?’ asked the husband, wanting to point out the old man’s ignorance.
‘That’s lost in the mists of time,’ said the man, narrowing his eyes and focusing on the wall behind the bar as if he had said something very profound. ‘But I have a few theories …’
He was waiting for us to beg him to spill, so I threw my chin in the air, which was the only cue he needed.
‘He was a soldier. He probably saw action, since back then every town and village was at war with its neighbour. It may be that he earned his nickname by rescuing his comrades and carrying them piggy-back.’
‘Maybe he was just a hunchback,’ the barman said.
‘We get the idea,’ I said more impatiently than I intended. I wanted to wrap things up and get the husband alone. ‘Another malvasia.’
‘Right away.’
The barman turned his back to go to the fridge. The husband and I caught each other’s eyes and smiled.
‘Fucking Goat-pumpkin,’ he said under his breath.
We sat there for a while, watching the barman uncork a new bottle. The conversation reminded me what a strange country this was. Everywhere the past seems to dwarf the present. The first lesson you learn in this city is that you can never match the majesty of our ancestors: those proud palazzi and gold-plated libraries and frescoed churches will never be bettered. The most you can hope for is to be allowed inside them or, failing that, become an erudite drunk. For fifteen hundred years this peninsula has lived in the shadow of the greatest empire known to man. And to have your glory behind you is a sure way to become fatalistic and decadent. It means that all learning faces backwards rather than forwards. We feel like we’re living in the ruins and debris of a glorious history and can only sit and wonder why we arrived too late. It’s the same as my line of work. I’m only ever called when something’s already happened, when all the action is in the past … and I limp along pessimistically, trying to understand what went on by looking at the ruins and the ruined lives.
I looked over at the TV. As usual there were girls in bikinis doing provocative dances in front of old male presenters with unnaturally black hair.
‘Look at them,’ I said, staring at the TV.
‘I’m looking, I’m looking,’ the husband laughed.
‘What do you think they have to do to get on television?’ I asked.
‘Eh beh!’ He laughed again. ‘I’m sure there are quite a few casting sessions.’
We watched the girls for a couple of minutes. They were smiling stupidly at the camera, cavorting around in their red, sequined outfits.
‘You married?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I’m married.’
‘Lucky man.’
He turned round to look at me and smiled, nodding his head towards the TV screen. ‘She doesn’t look much like them though.’
I was waiting for the first hint of misogyny, a revelation of hatred for his wife and for his marriage. But he surprised me. He told me how they had met and married, where they lived and what they wanted to do with their lives. They didn’t have any children yet, he said, but they would once they had saved enough money to buy a small flat. He seemed like a devoted husband, entirely ignorant about what his wife was up to. No man who knew he had been cuckolded would have spoken about their dreams like that. I wished him luck, downed the rest of my drink and walked out. Another potential arsonist in the clear.
I got back to my little monolocale and sat in darkness. I could hear the roar of mopeds going past outside and from the flat below I got the incessant stupidity of some TV quiz show. The audience laughter and applause sounded even more canned when coming up through the floor. I sat there, on the one chair in the one-room flat, feeling defeated. I had wasted a day. I had lied to everyone I had met, pretending to be from social services, or from an insurance company. I had pretended to be a barfly. I felt like a fraud without a lead. Everything seemed pointless.
I was falling asleep in the chair when the phone went. I picked it up and put it to my ear. Before I could say anything I heard that same impatient voice. ‘Castagnetti?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Bragantini.’
‘Nothing to report yet,’ I said quickly, defensively.
‘Yeah, well I have. I just got a call
. The kind of caller who doesn’t leave a name.’
‘And?’
‘They said it was time for me to think about the safety of my workers and my family. He mentioned the names of my children. Said there was too much criminality in the city for a factory like mine to be safe. Said it would be better for my peace of mind to move out to the sticks, that it wasn’t safe around this area any more.’
‘Not much veil to that threat. What did you say?’
‘I told him to go back to his whoring mother.’
‘Nice. When was this?’
‘Just now.’ The guy sounded like he was still shaking with rage. ‘They called me at home.’
I sat up and tried to concentrate.
‘I’m ex-directory,’ he said.
‘Makes the threat more threatening.’
‘But no one knows my home number. Everyone uses my mobile.’
I asked him for both numbers and wrote them down. ‘I’ll come round,’ I said.
He hung up without saying anything.
I was up there a quarter of an hour later. His wife was fussing around in her dressing gown, trying to calm her husband down. He introduced us and we shook hands. She was a tall, good-looking woman whose face suggested she had spent too many years worrying about life. Either that or she was a heavy smoker: lines were etched across her face, but they made her somehow more attractive, more human.
Bragantini took me into his study and poured two generous slugs of whiskey.
‘Sit down,’ he ordered. He remained standing, still too jittery to sit. He was shaking his head violently, the way people do when they’re trying to get water out of an ear.
‘The caller,’ I said. ‘It was a man, I assume?’
He nodded.
‘Accent?’
He shrugged. ‘Usual. Nothing special about it.’
‘Would you recognise it again?’
He threw his hands in the air in impatience. I brought him up to date with what I had done all day and he seemed as unimpressed as I was.
‘Did you think about security?’ I asked.
‘I’ll get on to it tomorrow.’
‘File a report with the authorities as well. It’s always good to have something like this logged in case it ever comes to court. Most crime is incremental. Domestic violence might end in murder but it usually starts with a flick of the ear, you with me?’
He nodded. ‘You know what this is about? Someone wants to buy me out and setting my car alight is how they open negotiations.’
‘If they call again,’ I said, so he understood, ‘tell them you want to negotiate. Set up a meeting.’
‘I’m not selling,’ he said defiantly.
‘I know,’ I said slowly, ‘but they don’t need to know that.’
He grunted in irritation. He was a determined sort, the kind of man to become more stubborn in the face of thugs and their threats. He wasn’t particularly endearing: he was hard-nosed and probably hard-hearted. He spoke with the caps lock on and cheated on his wife. But there was something about him I admired. He was unflinching, courageous in an aggressive sort of way. And I was secretly pleased at what had happened. What had appeared a dead-end case of vandalism had suddenly got a lot more interesting.
‘We need them out in the open,’ I said. ‘They’ve shown their hand. We just need them to show their face. If they think you’re really going to sell, they’ll come out sooner or later. Or at least, they’ll send someone out.’
He didn’t like the idea of even pretending to sell, but he could see the point.
We held each other’s stares for a second like we were shaking hands. I got up to go, thanking him for the drink.
‘I’m counting on you, Castagnetti,’ he shouted at my back as I walked over the gravel drive towards my car. I waved a hand over my shoulder.
I was too wired when I got home to go to sleep. I sat in the car thinking about the amount of money his factory would be worth if it were converted to flats. They would probably keep the nice, nineteenth-century façade, sand-blast off the ochre lichen and gut the rest. Make it into some kind of luxury living complex, as swanky and soulless as all the others. It would be worth a fortune.
It was past midnight now. I drove out to the city’s main fire station. It was in a large warehouse on the outskirts of town. A line of rectangular, red engines were lined up ready for the next call. To the side was an office shaped like a cube of thin aluminium.
The door was open but there was no one around. I walked in and saw in the light from the street that the walls were covered with posters advising the public to fit smoke alarms and stock up on fire blankets and extinguishers. There was a calendar on the wall with photographs of fire stations around the peninsula. They all looked exactly the same, only the backdrop was different: mountains, seaside, concrete.
‘Hello?’ I shouted. ‘Anyone around?’
There was no reply. I opened a side door and saw a corridor of lockers on one side and doors on the other. Above the corridor was a balcony with more doors.
‘Anyone around?’ I shouted again as I walked upstairs. There had to be someone because they always kept a couple of people at the station on stand-by. I walked down the corridor, knocking on doors, not waiting for a reply but knocking hard and moving on to the next one.
‘What’s going on?’ a voice said behind me.
I turned round and saw a man in a tracksuit. He was taller than me and had a jawline as wide as my shoulders.
I held out a card for him. He took it and looked down at me.
‘You’re an investigator?’
‘You can read then?’
‘Very funny. What are you doing sneaking around here at night?’
‘I’m not sneaking. The door was open.’
‘What do you want?’ he said, losing patience.
I told him about the burnt-out car. He said he had heard about it. Said it happened every now and again. Said that conviction rates were in single figures, if not fractions.
‘Why do they do it?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I could tell you if we ever caught them. My guess is a combination of the usual. Insurance job. Jealous spouse. Working-class hero with a chip on their shoulder. The anarchist who doesn’t believe in the system. The eco-warrior who doesn’t believe in the internal combustion engine. Or, most likely, some loser who likes to watch flames, to see the chaos they can create just by striking a match. It gives them a sense of power, of manipulating events, of being a creator of sorts.’
‘You got records of all car fires?’
He laughed. ‘We got records for everything. You can’t flush a toilet here without filling in the right piece of paperwork. We got records, all right.’
‘Open to the public?’
He shook his head. ‘The office is locked until tomorrow.’
People are always saying to me that they can’t give out information. Which normally means they’ll happily sell it. I’ve never met anyone who believes more in privacy than in money. Open your wallet and they normally open their mouth. I held out a fifty.
He looked at me with disgust. ‘Put it away,’ he said with authority.
I put the note away and looked at the jawline. ‘I’m just trying to save lives, the same as you,’ I said.
‘That so?’ he said with sarcasm.
‘I’ll make an official request in the morning.’
‘You do that.’
He stood at the door to his room, watching me slink down the stairs like a naughty child. I didn’t like the humiliation, but I was pleased that my jaundiced world view wasn’t entirely correct. There were people who didn’t take cash in the middle of the night. There were people who wouldn’t do anything for a bit of easy money. It didn’t help me, but it cheered me up a little.
I woke up early the next morning and went straight back to the fire station. It took a fair amount of bluster to get what I wanted. The woman on the front desk made a point of being unhelpful and the man with the jawline wasn
’t around. Eventually I got to speak to some public liaison person who gave me a list of car fires in the last two years. There were sixteen in total. I couldn’t take all the documentation with me, so I made a generous donation to the retired firemen’s fund and got the charmer on the front desk to make photocopies.
I went from one address to the next. Most of them were out, or had moved away, so I wasted the morning limping from one place to the next just to ring a doorbell a couple of times. It was raining heavily and within an hour my clothes were stuck to my back and I was bored.
To those who were in, I told the truth: that I was looking into all car fires in the last two years to try and establish some sort of pattern. They came out with their own theories, used my appearance as an excuse to get an old grudge off their chest. Out of politeness I wrote down names they mentioned – former boyfriends, or business partners, or local eccentrics – and promised to follow up the leads. They seemed surprised that anyone would still be interested in their case because no one had seemed particularly interested when it had happened. They told me what new car they had bought as a replacement, told me in detail about how it was better, or worse, than the one they had had before. I took down the names of their insurance companies, just in case.
I had been to about a dozen addresses when something interesting came up. I had been looking for a man called Carlo Lombardi, a prosciutto merchant whose Volvo had been charcoaled a year ago. The address I had for him was a prosciuttificio half a mile to the north. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant area: hemmed in by the railway, the ring road and the motorway. I decided to drive there since it was so out of the way and it was still raining heavily. I went up and down the road twice without seeing the place. Normally a prosciuttificio has its prices on display outside, large numbers describing weights and the length of stagionatura. They normally have a forecourt where customers can park to pick up their ham wholesale, get a whole leg instead of a few wafers of the stuff.
It was supposed to be number 17, but in the hundred-metre stretch between 15 and 19, all I could see was chaos. Steel straws stuck out of square concrete pillars. The building was a shell of thick grey lines. It was entirely hollow but for a concrete staircase which ran from one non-floor to the next. Red and blue flexi tubes protruded from windows. Above, two cranes moved slowly like the arms of a clock which had lost their centre. There was the constant noise of banging, only offset by the booming voices of the workers: parolacce and laughter, random shouts and snatches of famous songs. The place smelt of wet sand.
White Death (2011) Page 2