‘It’s up to you,’ Signor Piero said: he could have joined a theatre company as an actor, so well did he pretend to be sorry that she was going and that he wouldn’t have the pleasure of driving her wherever she wanted, for as long as she wanted.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said, opening the door as the car pulled up and immediately getting out, before they could see her face properly, ‘thank you, thank you.’ She waved her hand and immediately plunged into the shadows of the big tree, hiding from the cadaverous light of the streetlamp beneath which the Lombard had parked.
It had been a dangerous ride to take, but she couldn’t do anything about that now. Alone in the huge square on the very edge of Milan, in the mild but slightly cool late April wind, she was afraid, but fear serves no purpose and she dismissed it. She knew there was a taxi stand in this square, she had studied the place carefully, and now she headed straight for it, having already seen the two green taxis drowsing under the big trees.
‘Palace Hotel.’
The taxi driver nodded: he was pleased, this was a decent run, the kind he liked, all the way across the city to the area near the station, where it was easy to get another fare at any hour, and the girl too must be a decent sort if she was going to the Palace. In the darkness of the cab, she again looked at her watch by the light of a street lamp: seven minutes past eleven, she was seven minutes ahead of schedule.
‘Could you please stop at that bar?’
They were in the Via Torino, calm in this slack hour when people haven’t yet come out of the cinema, there was almost nobody around, and no cars, but even at this hour you couldn’t park in the Via Torino, except that the driver acted as if he was in the driveway of his own house, driving his cab up onto the pavement and stopping just in front of the bar.
‘A gin,’ she ordered: it was an odd bar, long and narrow, like a corridor, into which a miniaturist rather than an interior decorator had somehow fitted everything, from a juke-box to a telephone and even a pinball machine. Even ordering a gin had been a mistake – a girl alone at that hour drinking such an exotic liquor – and the four men who were in the place, apart from the owner, looked at her more closely, it was obvious she was the Anglo-Saxon type, and with her stockings and shoes still damp, she was leaving quite a trail behind her, or maybe not: the city was full of foreigners because of the Fair, and by the evening most of them had been drinking and were rather eccentric. Back in the taxi, she lit a cigarette, which, coming on top of the gin, gave her strength. It was over, she had done it. She did not even spend three minutes in her room in the Palace Hotel, it only took her two to change her shoes and stockings and put on her raincoat, and one to close the suitcases, which she had prepared earlier. The bill was ready, and she had her money ready, she spent another minute distributing tips and waiting for the taxi she had called. Two minutes later, the taxi had dropped her at the station.
She was already familiar with that Babylonian temple, and she knew everything. ‘To the Settebello,’ she said to the porter who picked up her two suitcases and leather shoulder bag. As she followed the porter, a Southerner offered her his company, smiling at her with a frighteningly horse-like set of teeth, his upper lip adorned with a moustache he must have thought irresistible to women, but two Carabinieri were coming along the platform where the Settebello stood waiting and just the sight of them must have put this ladies’ man off because he abruptly left her alone.
She already had her ticket, and a reserved seat. Four minutes after she got on, the Settebello set off. At eight in the morning, she would take a plane for New York from Fiumicino. She had studied the schedules, they were engraved in her memory: at three in the afternoon, local time, she would land in Phoenix, one among the hundred and ninety-five million American citizens, a very, very long way from the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese.
2
The doorbell rang, too politely, but however a bell rings, there are times when it isn’t a good thing for it to ring, when it’s better for nobody to turn up, because everyone is obnoxious. But the man to whom he was forced to open the door, given how politely the bell had rung, was even more obnoxious than predicted.
‘Dr Duca Lamberti?’
Even his voice was loathsome, in its perfect Italian, its perfect courtesy, its perfect clarity, he could have taught an elocution course, and Duca hated anything that was too perfect.
‘Yes, that’s me.’ He stood there in the doorway, without letting him in. Even the way he was dressed was obnoxious: it was spring, certainly, but this man was already going around in a cardigan, without a jacket, a light grey cardigan, with dark grey suede at the wrists, and so that nobody should think that he didn’t have the money to buy himself a jacket, he was wearing a pair of light grey driving gloves – not those vulgar ones that left the back of the hand uncovered, but whole gloves, with the back and fingers complete and the palms interlaced – and they were clearly visible, because he displayed them ostentatiously, in order to make it clear from the start that he owned a car appropriate to these gloves.
‘May I come in?’ He was full of cordiality and false spontaneity.
Duca wasn’t pleased, and made no attempt to conceal it, but let him in anyway, because the ways of life are infinite and mysterious. He opened the door to his defunct surgery, or rather his abortive surgery, and let him in. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, not even inviting him to sit down, he even turned his back on him and went and sat down on the window sill: when you have a window that looks out on the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, with the trees all newly green for spring, you have everything you need.
‘May I sit down?’ Ignoring the way he was being treated, the man – he couldn’t have been more than thirty – continued to give off an obnoxious air of sociability and cordiality.
Duca did not reply. At eleven in the morning, the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci is a placid desert on the edge of town, which even prams with innocent children in them can cross easily and where the occasional almost empty tram passes, and at that hour, in that season, on that mild, cloudy April day, you could still love Milan.
‘Maybe I should have phoned first,’ the unknown man said, completely impervious to any show of hostility, ‘but there are things that can’t be said by phone.’ He was still smiling, still trying to establish some kind of complicity with him.
‘Why?’ Duca said, from the window sill, watching an honest housewife on her way home with a shopping bag on wheels.
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. You don’t know me, I’m Silvano Solvere, but you certainly know a friend of mine, in fact, he’s the one who sent me.’
‘And who is this friend?’ He wasn’t at all curious, except, perhaps, about one thing: what filthy genie this man was about to let out of the bottle. With his elegance, his good manners, the cleanliness of his body – but only his body – he really did seem a merchant of filth, and it was only a matter of knowing exactly what kind of filth he was going to try and sell him.
‘Attorney Sompani, you remember him, don’t you?’ He did not wink, he was too well brought up to wink, but in a subtle way he made his voice wink, if a voice can wink, still with the intention of creating between him and Duca a current of familiarity, almost of complicity. In cunning people, obtuseness is congenital and incurable.
‘Yes, I remember him.’ Oh, yes, he certainly did. The worst punishment had not been to spend three years in prison, but to be in prison with Turiddu Sompani. His other cellmates were bearable, they were just ordinary villains, thieves, would-be murderers, but not Turiddu Sompani, no, he was repellent, partly because he was so fat and flabby, and partly because he was really a lawyer and there’s something both ridiculous and frightening about a lawyer in prison. He had got two years, instead of the twenty he probably deserved, because he had let a friend of his, who couldn’t drive and was also blind drunk, get into his car and drive it, and this friend had driven with his girlfriend straight into the Lambro, near the Conca Fallata, while he, Turiddu, stood on the bank and called f
or help: a story so murky that not even the meanest public prosecutor could do anything with it, even though everyone – judges, jurors, the public – was of the opinion that Turiddu Sompani’s friend could not have driven into the Lambro by chance.
‘Well, Attorney Sompani told me that you could do me a favour,’ said the perfect Silvano. He pretended to be embarrassed, but it was only pretence, he seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t be embarrassed sitting naked astride Garibaldi’s horse in the Largo Cairoli at the aperitif hour.
‘What favour?’ Duca asked patiently – you had to be patient or you’d kill yourself – getting off the windowsill and going and sitting down on a little stool in front of the merchant of filth, and it was almost as if he could see him with his bottles of filth in his hand, about to open one. A doctor struck off the register, as Duca was, is an interesting specimen to some people. Since he had left prison, he’d had plenty of opportunities for work. All the pregnant girls in the neighbourhood, all the girls who were afraid they were pregnant, had turned to him, crying, threatening suicide, but in vain, and there had been so many that he had finally taken the nameplate saying Dr Duca Lamberti off the door, all that was left was the two little holes where the screws had been, but it had been no use. And after the pregnant girls, there were the drug addicts, they’d also offered him a lot of work: as far as the addicts were concerned a doctor struck off the register would be more willing to issue the right prescriptions, he still had the prescription books, and as his career was in ruins they could do business together, without any risk, said the drug addicts with their pale nails, the backs of their hands mottled with what looked like pink bruises, making him truly sick of life. And after the drug addicts came the prostitutes who’d got diseases, ‘I daren’t go to my usual doctor, he’d only inform on me to the police, and they’d just lock me up,’ because of course he wasn’t the usual doctor, he was an exceptional doctor, a doctor who had done three years in prison for euthanasia, so obviously he knew how to cure syphilis, he must have been a specialist in that when he was in San Vittore, musn’t he?
At last the visitor took out his bottle and uncorked it. ‘It’s a rather delicate favour, doctor. Attorney Sompani told me you’re very strict and will probably say no, but it’s a special case, a very human case, a girl who is supposed to be getting married and …’ – and at last the revolting filth came out, flowing from the bottle, in the perfect voice of this perfect bearer of filth. What it amounted to was a hymenoplasty: the special case, the very human case, was a girl who was supposed to be getting married, and her bridegroom wanted her to be a virgin, and in fact was convinced that she was. In reality the girl, and this was very human, had not had the courage to confess to her fiancé that she had lost her virginity in a blind fit of passion, long past, because she knew that if he discovered the truth he might even be capable of killing her. A hymenoplasty would resolve the matter in an elegant, undramatic fashion, the fiancé would be happy that his bride was a virgin, the bride would be happy that she had married well, while he, the doctor, Duca Lamberti, would get, for performing the hymenoplasty, one million three hundred thousand lire now and seven hundred thousand once the operation had been performed. In cash, of course.
‘I’m giving you ten seconds to get out of here before I smash your head in,’ Duca said, getting lazily but resolutely to his feet and theatrically picking up the stool on which he had been sitting: he had learned to act, too, and had no intention of forgetting it.
‘Let me say one more thing,’ the other man went on, unfazed, because the more cunning they are, the more obtuse. ‘You might like to get back on the register, I have a contact who …’
3
He walked from his apartment to Police Headquarters. Superintendent Carrua was eating, on the desk there was a plate with a roll, just a roll with nothing in it, plus a few black olives and a glass of white wine. Duca talked to him as he was eating the olives, peeling them carefully with his teeth, then put down on the desk the thirty ten-thousand-lire notes that had been given him by the merchant of filth, and in the darkest corner of the office – because here in Headquarters, as his father had once explained, the sunnier it is outside, the darker inside – in that dark corner sat Mascaranti, who had written everything down: he couldn’t help himself.
‘He told you he could get you put back on the register?’ Carrua said, working conscientiously on an olive.
‘Yes, he even told me how he’d go about it, it was obvious he’s familiar with that world.’
‘Do you think he could do it?’
‘I think he could, if he wanted. He even knows an influential politician, someone we both know well, who could be of great help.’ He told him the name.
‘And do you think he really wants to get you back on the register?’
‘I don’t think so at all.’ It had been a nasty encounter, which smelt to high heaven, but he was in it now, in this kind of work, and he couldn’t hope to go back to the respectable world.
‘Mascaranti, tell the bar not to send me old olives.’
‘I already told them.’
‘They’re shameless, they sell rotten produce even to the police,’ Carrua said. Having finished the olives he started to nibble at the bread, and as he did so looked at the little heap of ten-thousand-lire notes. ‘Are you really determined to go down this road?’
‘I need the money,’ Duca said.
‘And you think you can make money by playing the policeman? You have some strange ideas.’ He drank a little white wine. ‘Mascaranti, get me the Sompani file.’ Another sip of wine as Mascaranti left the room. ‘You see, there’s something odd about this young man coming and offering you a pre-nuptial patch-up job, which is that he told you he’d been sent by Turiddu Sompani, because Turiddu Sompani died a few days ago, together with a lady friend of his. They were found in a Fiat 1003 in the Naviglio Pavese. Now I find it hard to believe that this young man of yours with the patch-up job didn’t know that Turiddu was dead, and I don’t understand why he introduced himself to you using the name of a dead man, especially as you might also have known that Turiddu was dead.’
‘Actually, I did.’ Duca got up and took the last battered olive that Carrua had left on the plate. He was hungry, he was alone in Milan, nobody was cooking for him, the restaurants were expensive. It didn’t taste too bad after all. ‘And I know something else, even without looking at Sompani’s file, which is that three and a half years ago, Turiddu leaves his car to a friend and this friend’s girlfriend, the friend can’t drive, he’s drunk, and he ends up in the Lambro, at the Conca Fallata. Repetitions bother me. Sompani’s friend and the friend’s girlfriend drown pathetically, if we can put it that way, at the Conca Fallata, inside a car, and a few years later, Sompani and a lady friend of his also drown pathetically inside a car, in the Naviglio Pavese. Don’t they bother you too?’ He meant repetitions.
Carrua took another sip. ‘I think I’m starting to understand,’ he said, putting down his glass. ‘A doctor is the policeman of the body, a disease is almost like a criminal who has to be tracked down, you were a good doctor because you’re a policeman, like your father.’ A final sip of the wine. ‘Yes, repetitions bother me too, but if we’re right, then this could turn out to be something big, maybe even dangerous.’
Then Duca got up. ‘All right, if you don’t want to give me a job, it’s up to you, I’m going.’
At last the true Carrua, who up until now had spoken in an improbably normal voice, revealed himself by shouting, ‘No, I don’t even want to see you! You’re too highly-strung, you do even this kind of job with too much anger, too much hate. You want to eat up the criminals, you don’t want to arrest them, or defer to the authorities, or defend society. You have a sister and your sister has a child and you ought to think about them, instead of which you come here asking to put your hands on these unexploded bombs, “I’m here,” you say, “I’ll defuse the detonator, I don’t mind getting blown up.” ’ Angrily, he picked up the
ten-thousand-lire notes and waved them in front of Duca. ‘Do you think I don’t know why you accepted this money from that piece of dirt? To join in the game. And if I find you in some ditch, with your throat cut, what do I tell your sister? And you know the State won’t pay even ten lire if you die, because all you are is an informer, that’s the highest rank I can give you, and do informers get a choice how they die? Why don’t you travel around Italy as a pharmaceuticals salesman, and earn some decent money?’
Duca wasn’t really listening to him: he liked Carrua when he shouted, but the spring weather was making him impatient with everything. ‘Maybe you’re right, I’m too highly-strung to be a policeman. Not you, you’re calm.’ And he walked towards the door.
‘No, Duca, come here.’ Carrua’s voice was suddenly low, it almost moved him. He went back to the desk.
‘Sit down.’
Duca sat down.
‘I’m sorry if I shouted.’
Duca didn’t say anything.
‘How did things end up with that piece of filth? I don’t remember if you told me what his name was.’
Mascaranti, who had come back in a minute earlier with Turiddu Sompani’s file, had heard this. ‘His name is Silvano Solvere. I already looked for him in records, there’s nothing on him. We could check the fingerprints, because the name’s a bit strange. But I did find the woman’s file, an interesting file: verbal assault on a police officer, verbal assault, verbal assault, verbal assault, drunk and disorderly, drunk, drunk, she was admitted to an asylum that time, then there’s attack, with strikers, on the headquarters of a political party, you remember the time they set fire to that place?’ He paused for breath. ‘Plus prostitution and vagrancy.’
Traitors to All Page 2