White Death (2011)

by Jones, Tobias

  I got out of the car and walked up to the site. Facing the road was a large white sign detailing the construction firm, the engineer, the architect and the timescale for the building. The official rubbish. I took the phone out of my pocket and snapped a shot. I looked at the result and checked I could read the names. The main one was easy. It was written in large letters at the top: Masi Costruzioni.

  I walked towards a portakabin a few metres from the pavement. It had Masi flags flying from each corner. I knocked on the door.

  ‘Avanti,’ someone shouted from inside.

  I opened the door and saw a man at a desk. ‘You’re the first person who has ever knocked on that door.’ He laughed, his earlobes wobbling as he bounced. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I was just passing,’ I said, faking timidity, ‘and wondered … are there still flats for sale?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Not my role.’

  ‘Isn’t this the ufficio vendite?’

  ‘No, I’m just the foreman. Trying to make sure work gets done on time.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get done on time?’

  ‘Depends how often I’m distracted.’ He looked at me over his half-moon glasses. His face was all ears and nose. It was a sad face, the face of someone who was downtrodden but loyal and strangely shrewd. The face of someone who had been bullied, but who had cut a deal with the bullies.

  ‘It says on the board the flats will be ready for consegna at the end of the summer.’

  ‘It will have to be a very long summer,’ he laughed.

  ‘How long you been on it?’

  ‘Since last autumn.’

  ‘Wasn’t this where the old prosciuttificio used to be? What was it called? Lombardozzi or something?’

  He shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t know.’

  ‘So where’s the ufficio vendite?’

  ‘In the centro. Sales are being handled by some agency.’

  ‘Any idea who?’

  He grunted, growing bored of the disturbance. He stood up and went over to a board and tilted his head backwards so he was looking through his glasses. ‘Casa dei Sogni it’s called.’

  The phone started ringing. ‘Scusi,’ he said and picked it up.

  I held up a palm by way of goodbye and walked out. I drove a few blocks and parked outside a bar. Bar staff are the next best thing to parish priests when it comes to street-level intelligence. No one knows the territory like them. They hear all the gossip and complaints and grievances.

  There was a petite woman serving. ‘What can I get you?’ she asked.

  ‘Malvasia.’

  She poured it like she was watering a plant, sloshing it out so fast that the glass moved towards me as it filled up. Fizzing drops fell onto the counter.

  I raised the glass to no one in particular and took a deep gulp. She pushed a bowl of crisps towards me. I took one, but crisp it wasn’t. It tasted like salted paper.

  She was staring out of the window as she wiped a cloth across the bar where she had spilt the drink. ‘If it rains much more today we’ll need a boat to get home.’ She spoke Italian with a southern accent. It sounded Neapolitan to me, with the usual sawn-off consonants. No point finishing a word if you knew what was coming.

  I looked over my shoulder at the damp street. You could only see umbrellas walking past. I nodded and took another gulp. ‘I prefer my liquids on the inside.’

  ‘Want another?’ She was pouring it before I had even replied.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I sat there for a few minutes, watching the rain. I didn’t want to rush it. Go in too quick and people know you’re pumping them for information rather than making idle conversation.

  ‘What happened to that prosciuttificio?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Lombardi?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘He sold up about a year ago.’

  ‘I was looking for it just now, couldn’t see it anywhere. Thought I had lost my head.’

  ‘The only thing they’re selling there now are flats.’

  ‘I saw all that building work and thought I must have been on the wrong road.’

  ‘Right place,’ she said, ‘just a year or so too late.’

  I took another gulp of the malvasia. ‘He still in business?’

  ‘Who? Lombardi?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She put her chin in the air. ‘Boh. I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You got a phone book?’

  She turned around and reached under the table where the till was. ‘Ecco.’ She put it in front of me, turning it round so it was the right way up. ‘Another?’

  I heard her pouring the wine as I leafed through the phone book. There were two or three pages of Lombardis. More than half a column of Carlo Lombardis. I turned to the front of the book where the commercial section was and looked for prosciuttifici. Quite a few of those too, but there he was: Carlo Lombardi. He had moved out of town, towards Colorno. I wrote down the address and passed the phone book back to her. I left a note on the bar and walked back to the car, my legs feeling a little frizzanti.

  I drove to the address of the new prosciuttificio. It was easy enough to see: this time there were all the usual yellow posters with prices and weights. I went in and smelt the musty, peppery smell of seasoned meat. There were hundreds of tear-shaped legs hanging from the ceiling. Eventually a man in a white overcoat came towards me. He had thinning white hair swept back and glasses hanging around his neck. I noticed his chin was slightly skew, so that when he smiled a greeting his lips made a thin figure of eight. It had the effect of making him look cheerful or boyish.

  ‘You Lombardi?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly am,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t you use to have the place over on Via Pordenone?’

  ‘Used to. Not any more.’ He put his glasses on and looked at me as if he were trying to recognise an old customer. ‘We’ve been here almost nine months now.’

  I nodded, looking around quickly to check we were still on our own.

  ‘What can I get you?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not here to buy. I wanted to ask you a few questions.’

  He looked confused. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Your car got torched a while back.’

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ he said slowly. ‘How do you know about that?’

  I passed him my card. I watched him read it and then look up at me with a frown.

  ‘A client of mine had his car torched the night before last. I was wondering if there’s a connection.’

  ‘A client?’

  ‘Yeah, a client. Someone who doesn’t take kindly to intimidation.’

  We looked at each other with suspicion.

  ‘Dozens of people get their cars burnt each year,’ he said. ‘Why come to me?’

  ‘Because you sold up soon after. Made me wonder what went on. Made me wonder whether anyone suggested you move on. Whether you got any threatening phone calls, saying it was a good time to sell, that your family would be safer someplace else.’

  His eyes narrowed and he was nodding slightly. ‘Wait here,’ he said. He walked through a side door behind the counter and a little while later came back with a woman. ‘My wife will watch the shop,’ he said. He had taken off his white coat. He beckoned me round the side of the counter and led me through the side door into a little office, crowded with files and papers.

  We both sat down. The place was so small that we had to dovetail our knees.

  ‘What’s this about?’ he said, staring at me.

  ‘I told you. My client’s car was torched a couple of days ago. I came across your name in the records …’

  ‘Which records?’

  ‘Fire department.’

  We stared at each other some more. He took out a cigarette and started turning it from a solid into a gas.

  ‘I’m trying to work out a pattern.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  The guy was clearly nervous
. He had something he wanted to share, but wasn’t sure he should be sharing it with me. I told him who I was, gave him the names of a couple of reputable Carabinieri who could vouch for me. He nodded, nothing more.

  ‘I saw the building site where you used to be. Looks like they’re going to make a killing.’ I watched him drag on his cigarette. ‘How many flats are they building there? Twenty-five, thirty probably. Six floors, one on each corner. A couple up top. Something like that. Each one eighty metres square. Say six or seven thousand euros a metre.’ I whistled. My maths wasn’t good enough to work it out, but it was millions. ‘How much did you sell out for? Two, three hundred thousand?’

  He blew smoke towards the ceiling, shaking his head. He stared at me as if trying to decide whether to talk or not. ‘You know,’ he started quietly, ‘sometimes I hate this country. We were blessed with the most beautiful landscape in Europe. Mountains, sea, rivers. Everywhere you look it’s stunning. But we’re slowly ruining it.’ He crushed his cigarette into a green glass ashtray. ‘There’s barely a beach left that’s public, hardly anywhere you can sit down on a bit of sand without someone hassling you for five or ten euros. They’re building huge marinas in every tiny fishing village. The mountainsides are dotted with illegal villas. The traffic jams just to get there make you want to turn round.’

  ‘It’s the same everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘No. No, it’s not. There’s something different in this country. Rules here are like breadsticks. As soon as you get them out of the packaging, you realise someone else has already broken them. You see that they’re in pieces and if they’re going to serve their purpose, they’ve got to be broken some more.’

  ‘It’s the same everywhere,’ I said again.

  ‘Bullshit. Here the rules don’t mean anything. Everything in this country is a façade, a mask, a pretence. If you ever get behind the façade, if you ever get through all the flowery phrases about “re-evaluation of the territory”, you’ll see the usual thieves and gangsters after a quick buck.’

  I gave a tired nod of my head, not wanting to contradict a man in pain. I let him keep talking for a while and listened to his bitterness.

  ‘This city’, he lowered his voice slightly, ‘is like my wife’s waistline. It spreads out every year. Every year it grows. It’s relentless, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Just a year ago that spot out there’, he thumbed over his shoulder through a tiny window, ‘was agricultural land. Now look.’

  I leant left and right and could see the familiar triangular arm of a gyrating crane. It looked like a transparent Toblerone.

  ‘More flats and cars and kitchens and consumption and pollution and …’

  ‘People have got to have somewhere to live,’ I said.

  ‘Ha!’ He looked at the ceiling again. ‘That old defence. The oldest in the book. “People have got to have somewhere to live.” Of course they do. You would have thought I was denying them bread. Of course they’ve got to have somewhere to live. But they don’t need two places to live. Or three or four. We’ve got a declining population but we’re still building at breakneck speeds. Almost everyone in this country has two homes, some have three or four. It’s not about having homes, it’s about greed.’

  I nodded as he drew breath.

  ‘The politicians have all sorts of euphemisms. They call it recupero. Valorizzazione del territorio. Ripristino. Riqualificazione. They make it sound like they’re transforming ugly wastelands into green parks where children will play happily on swings and slides until sunset. But it’s just old-fashioned sviluppo, frenetic development. It’s all about building, pouring cement onto greenfield sites, spreading the city outwards until there’s no countryside left.’

  When he had finished I asked him what any of it had to do with his car.

  ‘Someone was trying to persuade me to sell,’ he said. ‘Someone wanted me out.’

  ‘Did they say so explicitly?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘What you said just now. Late-night calls, saying the area was dangerous, that now would be a good time to sell and so on.’

  ‘Male?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Remember much about the voice?’

  ‘Nothing. Just menace.’ He stared at me. He took out another cigarette but simply held it between his fingers with the lighter in his other hand. He pointed the unlit cigarette at me. ‘You know what a “piano regolatore” is?’

  I shook my head, but it sounded familiar, like one of those many plans politicians come up with. Piano urbanistico, piano turismo, piano regolatore.

  ‘It’s the development document for the city,’ he said. ‘It tells you where the city is going to sprawl next. Tells you what area of agricultural land is going to be buried in cement, which greenfield sites are going to be gone for ever.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you approve.’

  He shook his head fast. ‘Someone knew my place was going to come inside the boundaries of the new development belt. That’s why they were desperate to get hold of it. It was suddenly, as they say, appetibile. It was going to be more lucrative than an oil well. If you’re inside the belt you can apply for a cambio di destinazione d’uso, which means you can convert anything to residential use. If I had known that, I would have held on to it. The value of the place would have tripled or more. Instead I sold out for next to nothing.’

  ‘To Masi Costruzione?’

  He shook his head and looked at me as if I had offended him. ‘I’m not that stupid.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If a constructor comes to you wanting to buy land you know something’s up. You know he thinks he’ll be able to build and you know you can ask for a fortune. I’ve never met Masi. I just had a guy approach me who said he wanted to take over the business.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A few weeks after the car went. This guy wanted to run a prosciuttificio. I didn’t connect the car and the calls with him. He just seemed to come at the right time and he was offering good money for a quick sale. I only realised later why he was in such a rush.’

  ‘Because the new piano regolatore was about to be made public?’

  ‘Exactly. Like I said, if I had known my place was inside the development belt I would have held out for double or treble what he was offering.’

  ‘What was he called?’

  ‘Luciano something.’ He was shaking his head again. ‘The minute I sold it to him, the whole thing was passed on to Masi, the planning permits went through, and almost before I had moved my stuff out, the cranes were there, ready to rumble.’

  ‘This Luciano,’ I said, ‘you remember his surname?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’ll be in the Ufficio del Catasto.’

  I nodded. ‘One other thing. What was the insurance company?’

  ‘For the car?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Gruppo Sicurezza.’

  ‘And they provided a replacement?’

  He threw his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Eventually.’

  We disentangled our knees and he led me back out to the shop. He told his wife to slice me a few etti of culatello. She started up the machine and moved the circular blade backwards and forwards, catching the thin wafers in something that looked like a crocodile clip. She wrapped it up in aluminium foil and gave it to me with a warm smile. I asked them what I owed, but they both tutted to say it was on the house.

  Lombardi walked me to the door. ‘If you find the people who did this,’ he looked at me anxiously, ‘what happens to my car?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If the insurance company find out there’s someone else who should have footed the bill, you can be sure they’ll ask for their money back.’

  I reassured him that I would make sure his car didn’t get taken away. He started telling me why he needed it, how his grandchildren lived forty kilometres away and the only way to get there was in a car. His wife didn’t have one, and if the insurance comp
any was intending to stop him seeing his grandchildren, he would hold me responsible. I held up a hand and told him to trust me.

  Amedeo Masi’s office wasn’t far away. It was the next exit on the ring road. Outside it there was a sign with the Masi logo, big white letters on an oval, blue background. The office was on the ground floor of a block of flats. I assumed he had built the whole block and kept the ground floor for himself.

  I got buzzed in and saw that there was nothing more than a couple of rooms with a couple of desks. It all looked fairly drab for the control centre of a construction empire. I guessed Masi was the kind of man who liked to keep costs down.

  The young girl on the front desk was sturdy with short black hair and a chunky kind of face. She frowned at me when I said I didn’t have an appointment. I gave her my card and she disappeared into another office. As she opened the door I could hear the booming tones of a man who was losing his temper. She came out again, shutting the door. ‘You’ll have to wait a while, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Was that Masi I heard shouting?’

  ‘That was him.’ She nodded.

  ‘Does he often raise his voice?’

  ‘Never lowers it,’ she said, smiling naturally, like she almost admired him for it.

  ‘Must be hard to work with.’

  ‘And live with.’

  I looked at her sideways.

  ‘I’m his daughter,’ she explained. ‘I don’t even notice it any more.’

  I nodded at her and went to sit down. I listened to the phones. They were ringing constantly. No sooner had someone hung up than one rang again. It was so frenetic it was almost tiring to listen to. The receptionist and another girl were ordering materials, phoning banks, talking to contractors and employees.

  Eventually, a short man came out of the closed office. He was stocky with a flat nose and a round stomach. As he got closer I could see his face looked like a crushed beer can: a strange combination of the sharp and the smooth. His hair was slightly ginger and the freckles on his face had joined forces a decade ago, leaving him with an orangey-brown complexion.