‘He’s not that stupid that he’d come here,’ she said scornfully.
‘Oh, yes, he would,’ he yelled angrily, ‘because he needs to know what happened to his pretty girlfriend, not because he’s all that interested in you, but because he’ll suspect you’ve been arrested by the police, and he knows you’ll talk in the end, in fact, we won’t even have to lay a finger on you, but we’ll make you talk, it’s only a matter of time, it might take a week, or two, or three, but you’ll tell everything, and so he’ll come here to find out what happened to you. He’ll be careful, but he’ll come here, we’ll get him and we’ll make him talk.’
Vulgar and ignorant as she was, this argument got through to her. ‘So I’m supposed to believe that if I talk, you’ll let me go? With the money?’ She took a coffee bean, crunched into it and laboriously chewed it with her good jaw, and then took a large swig of the Sambuca.
‘Don’t believe it if you don’t want to,’ he said in a low but exasperated voice. Then he had to get up because there was someone at the door. It was Mascaranti with two uniformed officers.
‘They’ve brought the bandage,’ Mascaranti said. One of the two officers was holding a big whitish roll, probably hemp, almost like a baby’s swaddling clothes in the old days, only much longer. They had heard that they were coming to get a dangerous person, and a dangerous person, bound like a child with that bandage, wasn’t dangerous any more, couldn’t do anything any more, not even spit, because the bandaging began from the mouth, leaving the nose free for breathing.
The girl was smoking when Duca came back into the kitchen followed by Mascaranti and the two uniformed officers, and a kind of mushroom cloud of smoke was rising over her face and above her head, lit at a certain height by the ray of sunlight. She took a good look at Duca, then at Mascaranti, looked at the two officers then, with the cigarette in her mouth, took the bundle of ten-thousand-lire notes she had spat at a little while earlier, put it in her handbag and said to Duca, ‘Send those filthy bastards away.’
Duca had to leap to his feet to stop Mascaranti, who had leapt forward. ‘I don’t care if I lose my job,’ Mascaranti said, ‘but I’m going to make the other side of that face swell up too.’
‘Please,’ Duca said, holding him back, and holding back the two angry officers with his eyes. ‘Send the officers back to the house. You stay downstairs outside the front door and keep watch, especially on the Opel.’
Controlling himself heroically, Mascaranti said, ‘Yes.’ He turned to the officers and said, ‘Come on,’ and they left the kitchen with their bandage, and with anger seething in their bodies, because it’s hard to earn so little, a few measly thousand-lire notes per month, and then hear a lowdown whore like her say words like that to them.
She waited until she heard the front door close, then said, ‘You’ll really let me go if I talk?’ She poured herself some more Sambuca and put a coffee bean in her mouth and started laboriously chewing it.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
With the coffee bean in her mouth, the lioness said, ‘Then fire away.’
They would betray anybody, their dying mothers, their pregnant daughters, they would sell their husbands and wives, their friends and lovers, their brothers and sisters, they would kill anyone for a thousand lire, betray anyone for an ice cream cone, you didn’t even have to hit them, you just had to dig down into the muddy depths of their personalities, and what emerged was cowardice, corruption, betrayal.
He stood up and put the glasses, the Sambuca bottle and the coffee in the sink. ‘You just have to take me to where your friend is now.’ He took her arm and helped her up. ‘You can’t tell me much, but your friend can tell me a lot more, and your friend’s friends even more. Where is he?’
The quarter litre and more of alcohol that she had drunk, at only 10.30 in the morning, had not had any effect on her, she must be armour-plated, she was steady on her feet and spoke clearly. ‘He’s in Ca’ Tarino,’ she said, ‘in Ulrico’s butcher’s shop.’
8
He was indeed in Ca’ Tarino, shut inside Ulrico’s butcher’s shop. Ca’ Tarino is part of Romano Banco, which is a hamlet attached to Buccinasco, which is a municipality next to Corsico, which is so close to Milan, it practically is Milan. Originally, Ca’ Tarino was a cluster of four farmhouses, arranged in a rectangle in the Basso Corsinese, between Pontirolo and Assago, but after the war they had lost the appearance of farmhouses, although not entirely, there were still fields around, although barely cultivated and then only in expectation of selling them as building land, there were muddy roads leading to the farmhouses, but there was also the tarred road that led to Romano Banco, and at the corners of the rectangle of farmhouses there were shops: the wine shop, which had once been called a tavern and today had a jukebox, the drugstore, the bakery that functioned as a small supermarket, and Ulrico Brambilla’s butcher’s shop.
The man was there, he was tall and well-built, in fact very tall and very well-built, with a handsome, feral face, very handsome and really feral, he looked as if he would easily win a beauty contest for bison, he was clean-shaven, but where the razor had passed the skin was dark purple, a kind of mask that covered his cheeks and chin between his long, thick sideburns.
He was very well dressed, and he was sitting on the marble cash desk. His grey trousers had turn-ups, and his embroidered red shoes, almost size 15, were English in style, might even have been English, his very springlike sky-blue jacket was of good cloth, also probably English, and his shirt, the one thing out of place, was of silk, probably the softest, heaviest silk on the market, a deep yellowish colour, too deep for the sky blue of the jacket.
The bison was smoking a cigarette, and in his hand the cigarette, even though it was king-size, looked miniature, a kind of little cigarette for gnomes. He must be a big smoker because the place was full of cigarette ends, not so much thrown on the ground, but strewn everywhere, above all on the counter, where various things lay in disorder: a metal hammer for beating chops, a wooden one with a handle, two or three knives of various sizes, a hook taken off the rack where the meat was displayed and the little chopper for breaking the bones of big Florentine-style steaks. Many other cigarette ends had finished up on the work bench, near the counter where the butchers cut the big quarters of beef to a commercial size, and there were cigarette ends on the wooden board, on the long marble table, between the big axes, the skewers for holding large pieces of lean meat, the electric bone saw and the mincing machine.
Even though it was half past ten on an exceptionally beautiful May morning all the lights were on in the butcher’s shop, because the shutter was down over the main entrance and the back door was also closed. The lighting in butcher’s shops is always very strong to bring out the red glow of the meat and all six lights were on, giving out a pitiless light like that of an operating theatre.
The huge man looked at the watch on his wrist – it was a solid gold Vacheron, almost as big as an alarm clock, but very flat – the watch said 10.37 and after seeing the time he passed a hand through his hair, or rather, through that black helmet, at least four centimetres high, that natural helmet that constituted his main claim to beauty, or so he thought, even though the expression did not match his little eyes bordered on the north by his heavy eyebrows and on the south by his vast, mountainous cheekbones. However, something must have happened inside him, as a result of looking at the time, because he jumped down from the cash desk, the cigarette now only half visible, as if it had vanished between his thumb and index finger, and went and looked through the pane of glass into the cold room.
He saw the usual quarter of beef poleaxed by the cold, the only piece of meat left there since, as a sign of mourning – or something else? – Ulrico Brambilla had closed up the shop and sent the butcher’s boy on holiday, and then, as usual, he saw Ulrico Brambilla’s bare feet, and then all the rest of his naked body, lying on the floor, all the way up to his face, or what had once been his face. The only way you could deduce
now that it was a face was because it was above the neck, and still attached to the neck, but you had the impression the bison’s fists had modified even its geometrical configuration, the bloodstained ears had been attached to the temples, the nose was only a huge swelling and the mouth like a clown’s, going from one cheek to the other. One of Ulrico Brambilla’s arms was lying on the floor in an inverted position, in fact it was broken, it had been broken almost an hour earlier, by a simple pressure of the bison’s hands, it doesn’t take much force, when you come down to it, to break an arm, even one as strong and robust as Ulrico Brambilla’s, you just know have to know where to apply that force, and that was something he knew well.
Ulrico Brambilla was breathing and quivering: that gave the man a certain sense of pleasure, and his face with its purple beard relaxed a little with the pleasure, then he stopped looking through the pane of glass, went to the end of the workbench, where there were hooks, from one of which hung a white jacket, the kind that butchers use for their work, and on another hook was hanging a white apron, or what had once been white, now it was all stained, and he put on the jacket and the apron that reached down to his calves, carefully placing his sky-blue jacket over the handle of the glass door, beyond which was the lowered shutter, then retraced his steps, and abruptly opened the door to the cold room.
Ulrico Brambilla looked at him, he couldn’t see him well because of all the congealed blood around his eyes, but he saw him, and fainted: he had once been a young stud, the Scarlet Pimpernel, he had been strong too, and killed oxen with a single blow of his big knife, during the war, when he had had to do his butchering clandestinely, but now he had met not so much a man as a stone breaking machine, and the mere sight of him at that moment was worse than a hammer blow.
The man took Ulrico Brambilla by one calf, and dragged him out of the cold room, dragged him over the white tiled floor, which was usually so clean but was now stained with Brambilla’s blood. Then he took the little stool from behind the cash desk, moved it closer to that stiff, quivering body, sat down and said, ‘Have you changed your mind? Are you going to tell me the truth?’ Talking to a man who has fainted, you can’t really except an answer, but he was suspicious, he did not believe he had fainted, let alone that he was dying, a man might pretend to have fainted or to be dying in order to trick you, but he wouldn’t let anyone trick him and he gave him a slap on the stomach. Given the weight of the hand and the force of the blow, the only result he obtained was a spurt of blood from the mouth.
At this point he realised he was making a mistake, if he killed him he wouldn’t get what he wanted. He lit a cigarette, and the smoke flew up towards the lights, the six small ones in the shop. He smoked almost half the cigarette, then threw it away, flicking it through the air with his thumb and index finger as he had been taught at whatever school of good manners he had attended, took Ulrico Brambilla by the armpits, lifted him into a sitting position and propped him against the wall.
He waited, but nothing happened. ‘Don’t play dead, you’re not fooling me.’
No reply.
‘I know you’re not dead, you’re only taking a breather, and then you’re going to pull some trick, but you won’t catch me.’ He spoke with a strong accent from the countryside around Brescia. ‘Open your eyes and talk. Tell me how you killed Turiddu.’
No reply: the hairy body of this man who had once been a young stud was perfectly still, with what the Nazi doctors had established in their experiments on the Jews as the stiffness of environmental thermal collapse. In the cold room it was only seven or eight degrees below zero, because that was enough for the normal preservation of meat, and a physique like Ulrico Brambilla’s had withstood that modest degree of cold very well, but the bison had not reckoned with the fact that all the blows he had taken had affected Ulrico Brambilla’s sensitivity, causing thermal collapse. The only method of re-establishing thermal balance and reviving sensitivity, or at least the quickest, most efficient method, as had been demonstrated by the experiments carried out by Nazi doctors in the extermination camps, was that of animal warmth through sex with a woman: the Jew who had been exposed, naked, for four hours to a temperature of fifteen degrees below zero, was revived, if he was not already dead, by the warmth of a girl, also Jewish to avoid any undesirable mixing of the races, and once he had regained enough strength to feel desire and had achieved an orgasm his thermal balance was re-established and if his heart was strong he recovered. This was why, during the war, when a German pilot fell into icy waters and remained immersed for a few hours before being rescued, the Luftwaffe were recommended to perform this so-called animal thermal therapy.
But the bison did not know these things. This man was playing dead, and he would show him that nobody had ever fooled him. ‘Now let’s see if you’re dead,’ he said. He lifted him again by the armpits and dragged him to the end of the workbench, keeping him more or less on his feet, until they reached the slim, geometrically harmonious machine that was used to saw bones.
The principle of the bone saw is very simple: it is a serrated steel band wound around two spools, almost like a film projector. Part of the band remains exposed for a length of thirty or forty centimetres, and when a bone is pushed against the serrated edge of the band as it rotates at high speed, the bone is neatly severed. It is also used to carve the bones of large Florentine chops, which are then cut further with a little hatchet, or in any situation where a butcher needs to divide a bone into two or three pieces.
‘Now we’ll see if you’re dead.’ He put the plug in the socket and moved the thumb of Ulrico Brambilla’s right hand closer to the sawing band, which had started moving very quickly. ‘If you don’t tell me where you put the two hundred sachets of M6 and how you killed Turiddu, you’re going to lose this thumb.’
No reply. Ulrico Brambilla had opened his eyes a little, but could not see, could not hear, and gave only an imperceptible start – only his body, not his soul – when his thumb was neatly severed.
‘Tell me where you put the M6. You killed Turiddu to get it from him, didn’t you? Tell me where it is, because otherwise the second thumb is going.’
No reply. The thermal collapse had taken away all sensitivity, and had left only a small light in the crypt of his personality, a final vestige of memory, wandering amid the wreck that had been made of him, a single memory, as he stood there, worse than dead, supported under the armpits by his pitiless enemy in front of the angrily advancing band, a single memory: Giovanna’s coloured nails, Giovanna’s hand with the silver nails caressing his chest, Giovanna with nails each a different colour, the highly aphrodisiac smell of nail varnish and nail polish remover in the hotel room, those beautiful hands dancing in front of his eyes and then over his body, Giovanna was a virgin, she was a whore, but she was a virgin, and so to the wreck of his memory was added another wreck, in the last moments of his death agony, not a memory, but an image of the future: what would have been, if it had happened, his wedding night with Giovanna, after flooding Romano Banco with carnations and devouring the monumental cake, taking her virginity, hearing her scream, and her nails still painted each a different colour.
‘You think you can make a fool of me, do you? Want to play dead, do you? Well, I’ll make you play dead for real.’
He still didn’t hear him, but he opened his eyes again, and this time, in a final flash, his pupils saw: he saw the band of the machine that he knew so well coming closer to his forehead, to his nose, to the bloodstained rosette of his mouth, to cut his face in two exact halves. He did not close his eyes, even though he was horrorstruck, but the flash in his pupils was gone.
‘Now die for real, let me show you how it’s done.’
The band squealed more loudly, more shrilly. It seemed to hesitate, as if refusing, even though it was an inanimate machine without a soul, to carry out that task, but in the end it did carry it out after all. ‘That’ll teach you.’
9
Duca stood up. ‘So, if your friend is in Ca�
� Tarino, in Ulrico’s butcher’s shop, I want you to take me to where your friend is, and if your friend does turn out to be there, I’ll let you go.’
‘He is there, unfortunately.’
‘Then you’ll be able to go free.’
‘With the Opel?’
‘Of course, we don’t need it. We’re not looking for a car.’
She also stood up and drank a little more Sambuca. ‘I really want to see if those filthy bastards are capable of keeping the truth.’ She should have said keeping their word, but even in the depths of her vulgarity, the romantic word truth had an attraction greater than linguistic accuracy.
He did not pick her up on that vulgar phrase she liked repeating. ‘Make sure you don’t try and trick us,’ he said. ‘My friend will follow us in his car and he’s armed.’
She had clearly understood. She drank some more Sambuca, shrugged, and passed a hand over the swelling on her cheek, but with everything she had drunk she no longer felt any pain. ‘Too late,’ she said, obscurely. Was it a threat? Or did it only mean that at this point deception was pointless?
Outside, Duca made her get in behind the wheel of the Opel. ‘You drive, I don’t like driving.’
She looked at him uncertainly. Was he joking?
Duca signalled to Mascaranti to approach. ‘The young lady is taking us to see a friend of hers,’ he said to him. ‘Please follow us.’
‘Yes, Dr Lamberti,’ said the spirit of obedience.
They left. Never had Milan had such a lyrical, d’Annunzian11 spring as that spring of the year 1966. The wind, a mild but impetuous wind, blew over the flat, industrious metropolis as if over a green, undulating, flower-bedecked Swiss plateau and, unable to bend the tall grass of the meadows at its caress as there wasn’t any tall grass, it enveloped and lifted and caressed the skirts of the women, gently ruffled the sparse hair of the half-bald workers and the long hair of the youngsters, stirred the long tablecloths on the café terraces, obliged the various Rossis and Ghezzis and Ghiringhellis and Bernasconis who were wearing hats to hold them down firmly on their heads with their left hands, and all that was missing were the butterflies, big white and yellow butterflies, but butterflies are not suited to Milan, he thought, they are too frivolous, maybe in the Via Montenapoleone, but not even there, they would be a bit art nouveau, and art nouveau was out of fashion. ‘Go slower,’ he said to the woman at the wheel of the Opel: according to her passport her name was Margherita, but it was jarring to call a woman like that Margherita, ‘I don’t like going too fast.’
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