But the more obscure, more repulsive member of this second couple was the man, Turiddu Sompani. The obscurities started with his name, especially his Christian name, Turiddu, because Turiddu is a Sicilian diminutive, and there was no reason in the world why he should be called Turiddu, having never had anything to do with Sicily. Even the surname wasn’t the correct one. Turiddu Sompani had made his appearance in Italy after September 1943 and all his documents had been issued by Republican Fascist authorities, or by the Germans. In one of the files there were the photocopies of many documents, including the certificate granting of Italian citizenship to Jean Saintpouin, with the name Turiddu Sompani in brackets, born in Vannes, Brittany on July 12, 1905. Why a Frenchman, a Breton, should be called Turiddu, why he had taken Italian citizenship at such an unusual time as September 1943,7 was unclear, but there were other documents that dispersed some of the thick clouds surrounding this Lawrence of Lombardy: photocopies of a Fascist Party membership card, then a photograph of Sompani, taken in the mountains, bearded and with a handkerchief around his neck like a partisan, a small card issued by the SS command in Milan, a universal safe conduct – with that card nobody could stop him, let alone search him – issued, as could be seen from the stamp, by Ober something or other, at the Hotel Regina in Milan in June 1944. There was also – just to cover every eventuality – a letter from the Curia thanking their devout friend Turiddu Sompani for his intervention on behalf of political prisoners.
At this point, Mascaranti muttered through his laughter, ‘All he needed was a card from the synagogue and a letter from Eisenhower, and he would have been protected on all sides.’
But the most touching document was a small receipt from the University of Pavia, which indicated that Jean Saintpouin (Turiddu Sompani) had paid all his university fees and had graduated in law. Then there was the most menacing document: the weapons permit. The photocopies had been made, with great meticulousness, by the men in Morini’s team, and showed all the pages of the little book, which was a kind of historical gallery of stamps and visas. Issued by police headquarters in Milan at the end of 1943, the permit had then been certified by the Fascists, then by the Wehrmacht, on a special sheet stuck to the book, with a large swastika stamped on it, which also bore, in thick ink and Gothic writing, an authorisation by the SS command, signed by the usual Ober whatever. As if that was not enough, there was also another sheet of paper, unstamped, from the Resistance Council, dated November 1944, authorising the person in question to carry arms, which meant that if he’d wanted he could have gone around with a cannon, because he had permission from the partisans. And so it went on: on June 11, 1945, the Allied command in Milan authorised Turiddu Sompani to carry on his person arms such as revolvers, pistols and others, for the purpose of self-defence: this was how it was expressed by the interpreters and translators of the period, chosen from among former dishwashers from Wyoming who claimed to speak Italian and former lemonade vendors from the Via Caracciolo in Naples who said they could speak English.
All these dry, repulsive documents already said quite a lot about the man, but there were others that were more subtly indicative: the police may be empirical but they are also highly analytical and have a fearsome memory. Of this Breton who had been naturalised as an Italian for reasons obscured by the chaos of war, and who had suddenly emerged from that chaos, the police had religiously conserved a number of indelible descriptions. In 1948, just before the elections, a sizeable quantity of arms had been found in his house, notably anti-tank grenades, old-fashioned rifles, and four dozen Lugers. In his defence he stated that these arms had been given to him by the partisans and that he was about to hand them in to the authorities: an impudent excuse, but the authorities were too weak to do anything but accept it. There were notes about his sending girls to North Africa; he had defended two married couples from Chiasso who had been accused of smuggling medicines containing drugs, had got them acquitted, then had himself been denounced for being involved in the same smuggling operation but had got off due to insufficient evidence. There was a bit of everything. In his legal practice, if it could be called that, a fifteen-year-old boy had worked as a messenger, and the boy’s mother had gone to the local police and stated that the lawyer was corrupting her son, with the help of his mistress, Adele Terrini. The accusation was contemptuously rejected, and the local chief inspector was humiliated by the statement of an angelic Emilian prelate who personally vouched for Attorney Turiddu Sompani’s moral rectitude. In addition to pederasty, drugs, and the exporting of prostitutes, there was also violence against women. His own mistress, Adele Terrini, had been admitted to hospital with an unusual wound: the bone in her right leg, commonly called the shinbone, and more officially the tibia, had been broken almost in half, not to say shattered. Signora Terrini had refused to say what had happened, but the police, being naturally suspicious people, thought she had been kicked by her friend Turiddu Sompani. On another occasion, in a café, screaming drunkenly, he had undressed a humble prostitute who had not greeted him with the due respect, and the only reason he hadn’t stripped her completely naked was that the waiters and the other customers had stopped him. Having been taken to the police station, he had switched from accused to accuser and claimed that the poor, innocent prostitute had stolen a cigarette lighter he had left for a moment on one of the tables in the café. Once, on a train, he had been found in the toilet with a fourteen-year-old girl who was on her way to Milan to study with the Northern Railways. He had saved his skin this time too: the girl’s father, to avoid scandal in the newspapers, pretended to believe Attorney Sompani, who declared that he had gone to the toilet, had found the door left open, and as soon as he had seen the girl had turned to walk away, only it was at that exact moment that a soldier had appeared and stupidly started shouting at him: You dirty pig!
According to one small but in its way significant document, Attorney Turiddu Sompani claimed only a million lire in taxable income and, apart from that, it was not clear what he lived on, clearly not on the income from his work, since a search in his office had established that he had last handled an actual case in 1962. And this was the man who, together with his companion Adele Terrini, had at last left the world stage by drowning in the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese.
And then there was the other drowned couple, a couple Duca knew personally, having had the honour of a visit from Silvano Solvere, then another from the woman he loved, Giovanna Marelli. There were some interesting things in the files about both of them. Silvano Solvere had no criminal record, but police informers had several times suggested that he was involved, as some kind of organiser, in various robberies: he had even been picked up at the time of the robbery in the Via Montenapoleone, and then released for lack of evidence. He was a salesman for one of the biggest detergent companies and, apart from these hints from the police informers – including his being a pimp, according to the notes – there was nothing against him.
There wasn’t much about his lady friend, either, although what little there was in the file was fairly significant. Born in Ca’ Tarino, when she was twelve her parents had been requested by the Carabinieri to keep a closer watch on their daughter, who seemed to be excessively friendly, in a not disinterested way, with a number of elderly gentlemen in the area. Subsequent to this appeal by the Carabinieri, the father of the twelve-year-old Giovanna Marelli had apparently beaten his daughter so badly that she had run away, it was believed that she had worked clandestinely as a maid in Milan, although that was doubtful, but in any case she hadn’t put in another appearance in Ca’ Tarino until she was twenty, for her mother’s funeral. Picked up in Milan one evening and subjected to a medical examination, she had been found to be suffering from gonorrhoea. Later, the Carabinieri in Buccinasco recorded that she had been hired by Signor Ulrico Brambilla for his butcher’s shop in Milan. But what did the authorities, what did the law know about her sinister links with the sinister Silvano Solvere?
It was all so nasty as to be quite nauseat
ing. ‘The usual settling of accounts,’ Carrua had said, almost throwing the files at him. ‘Take this stuff and study it, and you’ll see what it amounts to, some kind of stupid feud. Turiddu receives orders to execute that couple, Vasorelli and Ghislesi, for something or other that they’ve done, and he drowns them in the Lambro, but the couple must have had friends, they can’t do anything to Turiddu while he’s in prison, but after he’s been out for a while they throw him in the water as well, along with his lady friend. Ah, say the others, Turiddu’s friends, you killed our Turiddu. In that case, we’ll kill your Silvano and his lady friend. And what do you think will happen now? I’ll tell you. Someone will say: Oh, so you killed our Silvano and his lady friend? Then we’re going to kill somebody or other. And you know what I say? I say, let them carry on. Why should I go to the bother of tracking them down and arresting them when all they’ll get, thanks to their powerful masters, is a six-month suspended sentence, whereas if I let them carry on they’ll kill each other? Let them get on with it, the Naviglios, the Lambros, the ditches, the Conca Fallatas are all theirs, in other words, long live the feud!’ He hadn’t laughed, that would have been vulgar and he hated vulgarity, he had simply smiled at his scurrilous witticisms. ‘Are they rival gangs?’ Duca had asked.
‘I never said anything about rival gangs,’ Carrua had said, irritably. ‘You’re an intelligent man, you should have realised we’re not dealing with rival gangs, but deviant individuals. In a big gang, people do all right, they make a lot of money, but some are tempted to set up for themselves, to do a bit of work outside the syndicate. It’s a suicidal temptation, because a boss can’t allow any kind of deviation, and when it comes to punishment he has no truck with half measures, his penal code has only one article in it: Kill them. It’s the shortest code in the world and its only article doesn’t allow for objections. So why should I bother about them? You deal with it, you can be a one-man crime squad if you like. If you succeed, I’ll get you a job here, that’s what you want, isn’t it? But if you do succeed, what will the gang do to you? Which canal would you prefer to drown in? Well, you’ve chosen your path, you’re a visionary like your father and I can’t change you, bring me some of the gentlemen and ladies who make up this fine community and I’ll reward you well.’
He needed a good, solid, concrete reward, so he would bring Carrua all the gentlemen and ladies he could. It shouldn’t even be too much of an effort, all he had to do was stay here and wait. Of course, waiting could sometimes be more of a bother than running around, yelling, doing things, but he was capable of anything, even of waiting. He got up from the kitchen table, nauseated by all those documents, and went into the hall. The only thing he was happy about was that the green case was still there in the hall, he had put it where it could be seen by anyone, even if they were just standing in the doorway, they wouldn’t even need to come in. Beautiful case from far away and which would like to go further still, stay here and we’ll see who comes looking for you, I really need to know who’s looking for you.
2
On 8 May, Mother’s Day, a very serious-looking young lady appeared, obviously honest, obviously very Milanese, even though she spoke standard Italian, dressed in rather good taste, in a dark green tailored suit, with brown hair which went well with the suit, and a dark brown handbag just like her hair. She immediately told him, with admirable Milanese honesty, that she was pregnant, she had had a urine test and unfortunately there was no doubt, and she also told him that she was unmarried, and that she did not want the baby. Then, to encourage him, she told him that she was the owner of a perfume shop, right here, in the Via Plinio area and that a girl, Signorina Marelli – did he know her? – had told her that he was a good doctor who could help a woman in difficulty.
Good. She might, Duca thought, have had the delicacy to come to him on a day other than Mother’s Day. But these were subtleties. ‘Do you mean Signorina Marelli, the assistant from the butcher’s shop?’
‘Yes,’ she said, happily. She must have been close to thirty-five, she wasn’t alluring in any way, but someone, perhaps out of politeness, had made her pregnant.
‘Did you know that Signorina Marelli is dead?’ he said, but only out of idle curiosity, without even looking at her, looking rather at the beautiful green light that came from the window, like the light reflected off a pine grove high in the mountains – and yet, incredibly, they were in Milan.
‘Oh, yes, I do know, poor thing, they’ve even closed the butcher’s shop, that’s why it came into my mind,’ she said, unaware of her own immorality. ‘As soon as I read the newspaper I thought: if only I could find that doctor.’
‘Why, did Signorina Marelli give you my name?’
‘No, all she said was, my doctor in the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, and you’re the only doctor here. I was lucky to find you so quickly.’
Yes, very lucky. He remained silent, looking at her every now and again, but only briefly, he preferred to look at Mascaranti who was listening out in the hall. In the end, she could hold back no longer.
‘My mother is quite elderly, she has a bad heart, if she found out about this, not to mention what people would say … I have means, you know, you mustn’t think I want to take advantage of you, poor Signorina Marelli could tell you if she was alive, the shop is small but I earn enough, otherwise you’d tell the tax people, we women spend without thinking when it comes to creams, lipsticks, nail polish, things you wouldn’t believe, there are maids who spend all their wages in my shop, so just name your price, oh, no offence meant, doctor, I’m sorry.’
Her anxiety, long repressed, seemed quite sincere, but he had long ago decided to ignore sincerity and other similar virtues. ‘How long had you known Signorina Marelli?’ he interrupted her coldly. She had died, had Signorina Marelli, in her red dress coat, and she had died a virgin.
‘You know,’ she said, intimidated by his angry tone, ‘the butcher’s shop is there, my shop is here, and Frontini’s is there.’
‘Frontini’s café?’
‘The café and pastry shop, yes, I love the panettone there, it’s better than all the others, you know. We used to meet there in the morning for a cappuccino and in the afternoon for another cappuccino, and sometimes also for an aperitif, but mostly she came to my shop for nail polish, it was an obsession, she bought nail polish in every colour, though she always left them natural in the end. She once told me she only put on nail polish for the butcher, that the butcher liked painted nails, but only when she was with him, she would paint her nails the oddest colours, sometimes each nail a different colour, but then afterwards she always left them natural. And so we became almost friends, in fact very good friends.’
She was getting confused, because of the way he was looking at her, she didn’t know if she had been almost friends or very good friends with the girl from the butcher’s shop. ‘And did Signorina Marelli tell you why she came to me?’
A few patches of pink appeared on her otherwise wan face. ‘I’ll be honest with you, you know, she did tell me, not to speak badly of the poor girl, because she’s dead, but she also told me a lot of things that took me by surprise.’
‘And what did she tell you she came to me for?’ He continued to stare at her, hardly taking his eyes off her even for a moment.
‘But, doctor, you know.’
‘I want you to tell me what Signorina Marelli told you.’
She was uneasy now. ‘She told me she was supposed to be getting married to the owner of the butcher’s shop, this was something she’d told me before, and she also told me she didn’t like the idea because she was in love with someone else, the man who died with her, but that the butcher was an opportunity for her, and that he wanted her to be a virgin, otherwise he wouldn’t marry her, she wasn’t a virgin and so she’d found a good doctor who would see to everything.’
So he was a good doctor who saw to everything. He stopped staring at the poor woman and everything inside him smiled. These crooks can do whatever they like, ther
e’s always some crazy woman who blabs, who goes around telling tales. ‘And what can I do for you?’
‘Listen, doctor, if you don’t want to do it, tell me, you know. I already told you, this is quite a delicate matter, even for a woman.’
He broke off listening to her and called, ‘Mascaranti!’ From the hall, where he had been listening religiously, Mascaranti came into the surgery almost softly. ‘Mascaranti, please, show the young lady your ID.’
This was unexpected, it wasn’t logical to let them know that they were with the police, but he obeyed all the same.
‘Have a good look,’ Duca said, ‘we’re with the police. Don’t be afraid.’ But the woman was afraid, he had the impression she might even faint.
‘But aren’t you a doctor?’ She was breathing in little gasps, as if the air was lead. ‘The caretaker told me you’re a doctor.’
‘Calm down,’ he yelled to stop her fainting. ‘I am a doctor, or I was a doctor. But right now you have to help the police.’
Alone, between those two men suddenly revealed as policemen, she turned into a child. ‘I have to go back to the shop, it’s late, I’ve left my mother alone, she’s elderly, she can’t cope.’ She got up, holding her handbag clumsily in both hands, her face was green, but it was only the reflection of the spring light coming in through the window.
‘Sit down,’ he ordered.
Perhaps his voice had been louder and harsher than was strictly necessary, but she gave a start, actually jumped. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said like a child, ‘yes,’ and she sat down, and at the same time started crying.
The best way to calm someone who is crying is to give them orders. ‘Show me your papers,’ Duca said.
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