by Piero Chiara
Esengrini sat down on the spot and recited to him the charge from the official form:
‘The undersigned, etc., etc., having reason to believe that she, his wife, etc., etc., is in Rome, where she is cohabiting with a Luciano Barsanti in via Agamer, n. 15, lodges complaint against Giulia Zaccagni-Lamberti, married name Esengrini, and against her correspondent Luciano Barsanti, requesting all investigations and such verifications as may bring the crime to light in flagrante, etc, etc.’
He made it without hesitation. He wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, move towards a separation and sort out all his dealings with his wife. They’d have to go through the arrest of the guilty and then the withdrawal of the charge (already planned) in order to procure the separation order with her as the guilty party. It was the necessary route, as well as the only possible one. As for pardoning his wife or letting her back in the house, Esengrini wouldn’t even think of it, something Sciancalepre noticed.
With the charge in his pocket, the Commissario travelled to Rome, looking around at the Etruscan hills as he passed through Chiusi. Who knows how many cuckolds there were, even in Etruscan times! he thought. He tried to follow the history of adultery from the time of Adam forward, and came to a single conclusion: that horns had always been the real cause of all evil. In fact, they are at one and the same time the devil’s distinguishing feature and the symbol of conjugal infidelity! Could it be any clearer?!
Sciancalepre considered himself a psychologist manqué, and among the various states of the human mind and their multiple reflections in the psyche he claimed to have studied those of unlucky husbands in particular.
‘If you think about it, being betrayed is a desirable situation, one that’s peaceful, even restful,’ he’d say to his closest friends. ‘The trouble lies in uncertainty or doubt – when one fears the worst but isn’t sure. When you’re sure, your fear is at an end. The anxiety fades away and a certain calm takes its place.’
Thinking along these lines, he turned back to Esengrini’s problem and asked himself what he, Sciancalepre, would have done in his shoes. I’d have poisoned her, he mused, or shot her on the spot, at the right moment. No one could have argued that it wasn’t a crime of passion, and I could get off with a few years. But he had to reject the idea that the lawyer could kill his wife: he wasn’t a passionate man, Esengrini, and he had too great a horror of violence. Killing his wife and getting rid of the body wasn’t something he’d do. A doctor could have done it, but not a man who’d always lived by the book.
Upon his arrival in Rome, Sciancalepre went to police headquarters to enlist the aid of a couple of officers, and then made a visit to the area around via Agamer. The road itself started from one of the main piazzas in the suburbs and meandered out towards the countryside. Number 15 was halfway down: a five-storey building full of office workers but without a concierge. Across the road, a space had been cleared for the construction of another apartment building. It hardly seemed like Rome at all. Where was the Colosseum? The Lateran Palace? The Forum? Not having had time to stop in the centre, Sciancalepre felt like he was in a city with no name or history. A wretched, swarming anthill, the place for runaways, wanted men and vagrants.
He looked at number 15’s pigeonholes. There it was, the name Luciano Barsanti, on the third one. I’ve got him, he thought. He ran up the stairs to find Barsanti’s apartment – third floor on the right – and then looked over the plan for that night.
He was already on the spot by seven that evening, opposite number 15, in an old Fiat 1500 borrowed from headquarters in Rome. Officer Rotundo dozed at the wheel, his driver’s cap tilted over his eyes. Behind him, Sciancalepre and Officer Muscariello sank back in their seats, smoking. To pass the time, the Commissario made Muscariello tell him a bit about life in Rome.
Every now and then someone went into or came out of number 15, ordinary people of no particular interest. When it got dark around nine, Sciancalepre had them move the car in front of the building’s entrance so he could see who was coming and going.
At around ten, a couple came from behind the car and entered the hallway of number 15. Sciancalepre hardly had time to see the shape of a handsome young man and that of a woman who could have been Signora Giulia. He waited for his heartbeat to settle before leaving the car and going to the opposite side of the road, pretending to look for the best place to take a leak. All the while, his head half turned towards the building, he watched the third floor from the corner of his eye. He saw the lights go on. They were trapped now! He only had to let a quarter of an hour pass by while they got comfortable. And sure enough, ten minutes later in one of the third-floor rooms: a pink light. It had to be an abat-jour, a little alcove light.
Sciancalepre felt in the pocket of his jacket for the paper with the official charge and made a move towards the car. He left Rotundo at the entrance and went up to the third floor with Muscariello.
He pressed the doorbell. After what seemed like an eternity, a peephole opened almost imperceptibly, and a man’s voice asked, ‘Who is it?’
‘Police!’ said the Commissario, his mouth at the jamb. ‘Open up now or we’ll break down the door.’
The door opened immediately, and a young man of about twenty-five stood in the opening looking serious and worried.
‘Let us in!’ Sciancalepre shoved the young man aside. Muscariello followed behind him, his hands in his jacket pockets. Sciancalepre moved the youth between them and pushed the door to. Then, standing in the hallway right under the young man’s nose, he said rapidly and quietly: ‘Luciano Barsanti, you’re under arrest. Come with me to the bedroom.’
His head down, Barsanti led the Commissario towards an internal room. As they got closer a woman stuck her head defiantly through the doorway. Sciancalepre stopped in his tracks and stared at her.
He couldn’t stop looking at her, so anxious was he to make up for all the time that had elapsed since Signora Giulia’s disappearance, and to come to grips with the changes she must have undergone.
But nothing could have explained such a radical transformation.
Sciancalepre didn’t want to admit it even to himself, but this woman wasn’t, and never had been Esengrini’s wife.
He turned to Barsanti. ‘Who is she?’
The woman answered, ‘I’m the wife of Fasullo, the MP. What do you want with me?’
Sciancalepre had pulled the charge from his pocket but it occurred to him that as far as this situation was concerned it was just a piece of paper. Sure, it mentioned Barsanti, but it certainly couldn’t be applied to this specific case. ‘In that case…’ he murmured to himself, ‘in that case…’
He knew he was in a pickle. He’d rushed into things, albeit with an accusation in his pocket and a watertight warrant. But he found himself to have surprised only one of the accused in a crime not covered by the official charge. This crime was being committed with someone else; so it was another crime, and not the one specified by the current accusation. And now he had the wife of an MP in front of him! He wasn’t sure what to do.
Noting his embarrassment, the woman began to breathe more easily. ‘So where are we?’ she asked. ‘What’s Italy come to if you can’t pay someone a visit without informing the police?’
‘Pardon me, madam,’ the Commissario humbly offered. ‘I’ve acted in accordance with a standard warrant. It’s just that there’s been an error. A partial error, since Signor Barsanti is under arrest and must accompany me to police headquarters. As for you, madam, I can only offer my apologies. Report to your husband, the MP, that there’s been a misunderstanding, a mix-up of persons, and that I’m sorry and beg his pardon. As far as I’m concerned, you can go now. Where may I take you?’
‘I don’t need any help!’ the woman screeched, heading towards the door.
Sciancalepre sent Officer Muscariello behind her to tell Rotundo, still guarding the front door, to let her go undisturbed. Then he turned to Barsanti.
‘You and I are going to have a few word
s now at headquarters.’
In an office at the station, Sciancalepre began the interrogation. First of all, identity: Luciano Barsanti, twenty-six years old, born in C—— near Livorno, company rep for colours and finishes, etc., etc.
Then he asked, ‘So, you were living in viale Premuda in Milan?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were seeing women there as well!’
‘From time to time. I’m young…’
‘Were you seeing married women too?’
‘It might have happened.’
‘You’re right it happened, young man! You were seeing Signora Giulia Esengrini, and every now and then you wrote her a letter and sent it to M—— in an envelope addressed to Teresa Foletti. I have those letters right here in my hand. Go on, keep talking…
‘What’s to tell, if you already know everything? It’s true. I met this woman one afternoon on the train between M—— and Milan. Then – you know how it goes… we met a few times in a café, struck up a friendship…’
‘Go on, tell me about this “friendship”!’
‘The first time, we went to a pensione I know around via Mario Pagano. Then she began to feel uncomfortable, and I had to find a little apartment.’
‘With money she gave you?’
‘I don’t earn much as a rep. And she was the one who wanted it. I got bored right away, but she was sentimental and said that if I left her she’d throw herself into the lake.’
‘Well, lake or no lake, Signora Esengrini has gone missing, and it’s your job to tell me about it.’
‘Me? But what do I know! After the letter from the lawyer, I gave up the flat and left for Rome. I didn’t want any further trouble.’
‘What letter?’
‘A letter written to me by Signora Esengrini’s husband. He told me he knew all about the affair, everything, that he’d had us followed, and it was better for me to leave the area and forget about his wife. You get the drift! I was out of there in less than eight days. The rental contract had expired, so I sold the furniture and cleared out and came here to Rome. Actually, the day before I got the letter from the lawyer, his wife missed our usual Thursday rendezvous for the first time. It’s obvious that her husband stopped her coming. In his letter he warned me, “Make sure you don’t tell my wife I’ve written to you!” So I wrote to her acting the dunce. I feigned surprise that she hadn’t made the appointment and told her I was leaving for Rome. A few nice lines, to soften the blow…’
‘Where’s the lawyer’s letter!’ shouted the Commissario.
‘The letter? I don’t know. I threw it out. You think I’d carry something like that around with me? What good would it do? I throw all my letters away. Even the ones Signora Giulia wrote to me every week.’
The interrogation went on for several hours, and Sciancalepre was convinced that Barsanti was telling the truth. He warned him, for caution’s sake, to register any future movements with the police and to make sure they could find him in case he was needed. He recorded the deposition with great precision and then, with these few papers, he disappointedly turned back the way he had come earlier with so much hope.
Now, he said to himself as the train crossed the Apennines, Signora Giulia seems almost like a ghost. If she didn’t go after Barsanti, she didn’t go after anyone else. And she definitely didn’t throw herself into the lake. She would have left a letter. And one doesn’t take two suitcases on a suicide mission… At this stage, he thought, I’m going to scratch out the word ‘fled’ and write ‘disappeared’ on her file.
The following morning he went to see Esengrini.
‘Wrong track. No trace of Signora Giulia. Barsanti was there, but with someone else. Get this: the wife of an MP! You can take comfort in that.’
The Commissario recounted for Esengrini every last detail of the expedition, and when he got to the bit about the letter, he asked him, ‘So you never heard his name, this Barsanti, before I spoke of him to you?’
‘Never.’
‘And yet,’ the Commissario continued, ‘you wrote him a letter. He told me himself. Unless he dreamt it!’
‘Impossible! It’s not true!’
After this meeting, which ended a bit frostily, Sciancalepre realized that his investigation into Signora Giulia’s disappearance would have to go down another path – and that Esengrini would not be as cooperative as he had been thus far.
He started by issuing a search warrant in a different tone from the first one. Then he called the gardener, Demetrio Foletti. He ascertained that Foletti knew nothing about the postal services his wife had provided for Signora Giulia and, in an effort to get to grips with the atmosphere in the Esengrini household, he got him to talk at length. But he just had repeated to him things he already knew.
Foletti was a man of about forty, exceedingly loyal to his employers. He’d always been the gardener at the villa, starting when Signora Giulia’s parents were still alive. After their death, around ten years ago, he’d begun to make himself useful, during his free time, in the lawyer’s office. Fascinated as he was by legal matters, he became something of an office employee. He went on various errands, took phone calls when the typist was busy, welcomed clients, and now and then managed to give his legal views to some who, seeing him amongst all the codes and official forms, considered him to have a smattering of legal knowledge or at least the rudiments of its practice. He moved from garden to office, gradually neglecting the grounds with which neither the lawyer nor his wife could be bothered, and applied himself with better results to the more impressive responsibilities of clerk and trusted employee. It was therefore he who knew most about the lawyer’s family relationships, after his wife, Teresa, who’d acted as cook and housekeeper.
There was someone else at the Esengrini’s house fairly often, a young girl called Anna who did the washing and other heavy work. But Sciancalepre learnt little from her. He got much more from Foletti, in whose opinion Signora Giulia was a saint and the lawyer a great man. All the same, it had seemed to him that their marriage had been cold and distant. The lawyer was gruff and didn’t know how to be affectionate, while Signora Giulia, who’d lost her mother at fifteen, was a romantic who craved affection and understanding. There’d never been any scenes between them, just long silences.
The Commissario learnt from Foletti that the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti, as he called it, was an old property in Signora Giulia’s family, and that at his death ten years earlier her father had left the house and grounds to his young granddaughter, Emilia.
The Esengrini Affair, covered at length by all the papers, had run into the ground. The Commissario was intrigued by the somewhat romanticized version of the story published by an illustrated magazine. The journalist hadn’t neglected to come up with a few theories about Signora Giulia’s disappearance: that she was being held in Milan by someone who’d met her during one of her Thursday rendezvous; that she’d fled abroad with a mysterious lover; or suicide. Sciancalepre hoped that the article, illustrated with several dated photos of the via Lamberti and the park, and a pretty portrait of Signora Giulia and Emilia – who looked extremely like her mother – might fall under the fugitive’s eyes. If her eyes were still open on the world… But he was beginning to doubt it, and every time he received a photo of another unidentified female corpse, he studied the features scrupulously, in fear of making a terrible discovery.
After a month, he renewed the search warrant for Signora Esengrini and decided to wind up the case with a detailed report. He then transferred the file to the public prosecutor’s office, leaving the conclusion to the legal authorities.
Following a review of the investigation, which could do nothing more than repeat the main questions, the public prosecutor authorized the archiving of the papers relating to the disappearance of Giulia Esengrini, née Zaccagni-Lamberti.
FOUR
Emilia had now left her school at the Ursuline Convent in Milan for good and enrolled in the university. In the autumn she’d begun taking course
s there, and she now made the trip to Milan almost every day.
In the well-to-do homes of M——, everyone was still talking about Signora Giulia. She’d become a sort of ghostly presence at the usual gatherings. They talked about her until the spring, when the wound slowly closed over.
Emilia went to all the usual dos at family friends’, occasionally accompanied by her father. Sometimes the lawyer bumped into the Commissario at one or another of the houses. On such occasions they tried to avoid each other, and before long, the guests soon understood that it was better not to invite these encounters. Even if they had not, Esengrini thought it over, and after making a few appearances, he stopped going to the gatherings. Instead, he slowly withdrew, also cutting back considerably on his professional commitments. If he’d been considered somewhat gruff before, he soon became known for being reclusive and misanthropic. No one was able to say that his wife had dishonoured him except the Commissario who, though he knew about Barsanti, had kept his mouth shut, even with his own wife. All the same, the spectre of a crime was perhaps worse; inexplicable, but enough to throw a sort of dreadful suspicion on Esengrini.
Emilia, reserved and seemingly indifferent, got on with doing all the things young people of her age do. Intolerant of older people, she kept to a few friends from university who regularly made the trip with her from M—— to Milan, and there she widened her circle a bit more. She went home with some of them to listen to records, happily drank the odd whisky and loved trying out all the new dances.
The last time she’d travelled from Milan to M——, before the summer holidays, she found herself sitting across from a young man of about twenty-eight who said he knew her. She didn’t remember anything about him, but he reminded her that two years earlier he’d been at her home and had seen her in the best houses in M——. He finally introduced himself as the engineer Carlo Fumagalli – a nice guy, and very different from her usual university crowd. A bit overbearing and somewhat unprincipled, but attractive.