“Look, there’s no two ways about it, his mother is wasting her time going around trying to make the teachers feel sorry for her. You know what? That’s Chiara’s uncle.”
“Of course, I know that.”
“Luckily, he teaches in the A Section, and I’m in the B Section.”
“Why luckily?”
“Because he’s super-strict and he flunks everybody.”
“But you’re good at math, aren’t you? Your Papà can help you!”
“I’m a disaster. But my teacher is nice. He takes pity on me.”
Of course he does, Rocco thought to himself, how could he be cruel to a statuesque beauty like that one?
“He always lets me off easy.”
“The day he tries to put his hands where they don’t belong, give me a call, Giovanna. I have a sideline in beating down guys who don’t know how to stay in their place.”
The girl laughed. “Don’t worry. I know how to take care of myself.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second. All right, let’s get back to us, Giovanna. Try to focus. Sunday evening. You were at Sphere.”
“Yes.”
“I’d have to guess there were a lot of people.”
“Really a lot.”
“You said that at a certain point Max started talking to a couple of tamarri. Which down in Rome we would call coatti. In any case, hicks.”
“Yes, those guys were ridiculous. And they were probably in their thirties.”
“I’m going to show you a picture now. I want you to concentrate and see if you recognize them.”
“I don’t know, Dottore. It was dark. Still, let me take a look.”
Rocco pulled out the sheet of paper with the photocopies of the IDs of Viorelo Midea and Carlo Figus. “Here they are. What do you think?”
Giovanna studied the pictures attentively. “This guy with the earring, I’m not quite sure. The photocopy is too dark. But this one . . .” and she pointed to Carlo Figus “. . . definitely.”
“Are you certain?”
“One hundred percent.”
Rocco nodded. “You can go back to your class. We’re done here.”
“No, take me to police headquarters!”
Rocco looked at her, baffled.
“In first period, there’s an exam in philosophy. I haven’t even opened the book! If he tests me, I’m done for!”
Rocco thought it over. “Come with me!”
Giovanna grabbed her bag and followed Schiavone. Together, they encountered Bianchini, who was waiting for them on the stairs. “Everything worked out, Dottor Schiavone?”
“Things are much more complicated than I thought. I need Giovanna to come with me to police headquarters.”
“But. . . .”
“No ifs, ands, or buts, Dottor Bianchini. I’ve already told you the way matters stand. Try to cooperate.”
“Certainly, certainly,” said the principal as he looked at Giovanna. The girl was playing her part quite well. If she played her cards right, with her figure and those eyes, she probably could count on a bright future in the most prestigious Italian television series.
He’d left Giovanna in the passport office with a book and orders not to say a word to any of the officers, except for him and Inspector Caterina Rispoli. Giovanna started reading and asked if she was allowed to smoke. “Only if you go over to the window. And with the window open, just to be clear.”
Scipioni, Italo, and Inspector Rispoli were all in Rocco’s office. “So, we have a new twist,” said Rocco, slamming the box of Stilnox he’d found in the cargo van down on the desk. “Stilnox. It’s a benzodiazepine. It’s used to treat insomnia. It was in the cargo van. Benzodiazepines are also known as rape drugs. They’re tasteless, they put the person into a trance, and they create a blank slate of amnesia. Often the victim doesn’t even remember what happened the night before. They might just think they were drunk, but actually. . . .”
Antonio grabbed the box: “Fuck. . . .”
“What’s more, we also found these in the cargo van,” and he pulled the plastic strip fasteners out of his pocket. “There were dozens of them. All right, I know that construction workers use them too, but . . . Giovanna recognized Carlo Figus. He was at the discotheque the night of the kidnapping.”
“So you think they were the ones who kidnapped the girl?”
“I believe so. And then there’s the question of the vaginal infection. Figus had Gardnerella, Fumagalli found it on his penis, and someone is suffering from the same ailment at the Berguet home.”
“You’re saying that those bastards raped Chiara Berguet?”
“Very likely, Caterina. Now that I think about it. . . .”
“The burglary!” said Scipioni. “The faked burglary at Viorelo’s place.”
“Good job! It wasn’t a burglary at all. They were looking for something in particular.”
“What?” asked Italo.
Rocco went to his desk. He pulled open the left-hand drawer. “I say they were looking for this!” and he pulled out Viorelo’s cell phone. “Italo, where are the numbers he called?”
“I put them on your desk the other day, but only the first three. It looks like the Romanian deleted them and it’s taking the technician a while to put together the whole list. Then there are the numbers in the directory, but those are all Romanian numbers,” and he started rummaging through Rocco’s notes and documents.
“Fuck, we had the solution right in front of us for days! Who gives a damn about the Romanian numbers? I want the last three numbers he called!” the deputy chief swore.
“Certainly, if you kept things a little tidier in here, Rocco.”
Antonio’s eyes opened wide. “Did you just call him Rocco?”
Italo bit his lip.
“That’s right, Antonio, Italo calls me by my first name. And has for a long time. Starting today, both you and Caterina are authorized to do the same.”
“I don’t think I could,” said Caterina.
“Give it a try.”
“Here it is!” Italo pulled out a sheet of paper. “These are the last three phone numbers dialed.”
Antonio grabbed the piece of paper. “I’ll see if I can find out who they belong to. It should just take a minute!” And he vanished from the office.
“Let me see if I understand this, Rocco,” said Caterina. “The two men kidnapped Chiara and now they’re dead?”
“So you see how easy it is to be on a first-name basis with me?”
Caterina blushed.
“Anyway, that’s right, Caterina. Now what we need to figure out is whether they were aware of where she was being kept, or not.”
“No. Given the fact that the parents talked to Chiara. Clearly, there’s someone else.”
“True.” Rocco started to pace the room. “What do we know? That they were driving from the direction of Saint-Vincent. We ought to be able to figure out how many miles they’d driven.”
“Maybe we might have a stroke of luck,” said Italo. “Like, I don’t know. A traffic ticket they got that day.”
“No, we’ve run checks on all the speed-trap cameras. Nothing turns up for that license plate. And we don’t have time to check through all the surveillance camera footage in the area.”
“Well, we have their cell phone. We can trace back the cell tower they were connected to and we’ll know where they were.”
“Well, that’s certainly the first thing we should do.”
“Even though . . .” Italo said, “the cell or the tower doesn’t pin it down that much. It can be a very approximate range. Even thirty miles, you know that? Antonio told me so.”
“But there’s something else you can’t possibly know. Because you didn’t come with me to the judicial tow yard!” The deputy chief rushed away, leaving Rispoli and Italo exchanging glances.
In the hallway, they ran into the two officers. D’Intino had a tray wrapped in paper and Deruta had a thermos. “What is this stuff, D’Intino?”
&nb
sp; “Pastries. I’m taking them to the young lady, your friend in the passport office.”
“What about you, Deruta?”
“Tea. Hot tea. She was thirsty.”
“All right then, listen carefully. At noon on the dot, I want you both to get the squad car and drive Giovanna back to school. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yessir. Who’s driving?” asked Deruta.
“You are. D’Intino is a disaster behind the wheel. And don’t turn on the siren. Even if the girl asks you to. Understood?”
They both nodded their heads in unison and hurried off to the passport office. Giovanna had turned them into two tail-wagging lapdogs.
“But what’s so interesting about this cargo van?” asked the custodian of the tow yard.
Rocco went back to the passenger-side door. He bent over and started reading the oil change stickers. The most recent one was from an Agip station, and it showed Sunday’s date. And the mileage. Rocco clambered over to the driver’s side seat. He wiped the dust off the glass over the speedometer and read the cargo van’s final mileage. They’d only driven eighty-one miles since the oil change.
“What’s your name?”
“Lucianino!”
“Lucianino, do you have a map of Aosta?”
“We have internet in the office.”
Looking at the map, Rocco lit a cigarette.
“Can I smoke, too?”
“Certainly, Lucianino. Now then, follow me on this. What time do gas stations close for the night?”
“Seven o’clock?”
“Excellent. Let’s say that the first thing the two men do is go to Sphere, where they arrive at approximately eleven o’clock. Sphere is on the road to Cervinia.”
“Right, I know that disco, my son goes there, too. It’s in Saint-André. So from Aosta that’s more or less . . . twenty miles. I say more or less because I have no idea of what service station we’re starting from.”
“Agip.”
“And there are lots of those.”
“This one was open on Sunday!”
Lucianino focused. “Then for sure it’s the one on Via Luigi Vaccari! From Via Vaccari . . . to there is twenty miles, that’s correct.”
“Good. So from there, the two of them go back to the Berguet home. That’s where they kidnapped Chiara.”
“Who’s Chiara?”
“Don’t worry about that. Okay, so how far to the Berguet’s place?”
“Okay, but I don’t know where they live.”
“In Porossan. Aosta.”
Lucianino typed into the map. “And that’s another twenty-three miles.”
“Which means we’re talking about . . .” Rocco did a quick mental calculation, “. . . forty-three miles. Now the two of them have to get back to the area around Saint-Vincent, because we’re already running out of mileage.”
“Back to Saint-Vincent is . . . twenty-four miles.”
“And now we’re at sixty-seven miles. Then on the way back to Aosta they have the crash. So for us to get to eighty-one miles, we just need another fourteen miles. Fourteen miles to figure out where the fuck they went. About fourteen miles from Saint-Vincent. Round trip, more or less.”
“But who are they?”
“Don’t worry, Lucianino. I’m just thinking aloud. Where can you go with fourteen miles from Saint-Vincent?”
“Hmmm . . . well, either you head up to Salirod. . . .”
“Or else?”
“Or else here, you see? Toward Promiod . . . or toward Closel and from there you head uphill for another ten miles.”
“Any number of places.”
“I’d say so.”
“But am I going to give up, Lucianì?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to give up?”
“Not on your fucking life. Thanks, Lucianino!”
“You’re quite welcome, Dottore.”
The deputy chief was on his way back to the office when a police squad car, sirens blaring, cut him off right in the middle of an intersection, blocking traffic in all directions. Italo Pierron got out with Antonio and they rushed straight over to Rocco’s Fiat Croma. The thing that most amazed Schiavone wasn’t his officers’ behavior—they seemed to be in the throes of a bout of schizophrenia, no doubt infected by Rocco himself—but the fact that the cars of the Aostan motorists, blocked by that absurd and unexpected maneuver, were perfectly silent—not even a horn beep of protest. Such a thing in Rome would have prompted a veritable concert, an explosion of sounds and drivers shouting out their car windows. Instead, given the civility of that populace, an almost surreal silence reigned over the street.
“Rocco, we couldn’t wait!” said Italo, breathing heavily.
“So, we checked the three numbers that Viorelo Midea called,” Antonio Scipioni went on. “The last three calls were to the Posillipo Pizzeria, and to a number in Romania, but the last one, the very last one, was to another number.”
“Well, do you want to tell me which number it was or am I supposed to sit here. . . .”
“Marcello Berguet’s phone,” said Italo. At that point, a shy solitary car horn piped up from the line that had formed behind Rocco’s car.
“Marcello Berguet . . .” Rocco repeated.
“Shall we go pick him up?”
“Hold on. We have an advantage. Let’s exploit it . . . What do we know? That Marcello is the one who claims to have spoken to her. But maybe he never did. Or else, maybe he did, actually. Anyway, he knows where his niece is now, that much is clear!”
The solitary horn honked again.
“What should we do?”
“Turn around and follow me to the Agnus Dei Clinic.”
The officers went back to their cars, apologizing with vague gestures to the motorists still waiting patiently, while Rocco took off at top speed toward the center of Aosta.
Enrico Maria Charbonnier was sitting very comfortably on a couch in front of the window, reading the newspaper. He had a piping hot cup of tea on the side table next to him and a panoramic view of the snow-covered Alps spread out before him.
“Wait, let me get this straight. First you send me to the clinic and now you want me to go back to my office?”
“I have to figure out whether Carlo Figus owns any property up in the direction of Saint-Vincent.”
“Why, Dottor Schiavone?”
“Because he and some miserable homeless bum kidnapped Chiara, and I don’t think they took her to any of the properties owned by the Berguet family.”
“But who’s telling you that there’s no one else involved?”
“Because Marcello Berguet is the mastermind behind those two!”
The newspaper fell out of the notary’s hands. “Marcello? The math teacher?”
“Exactly. Now I know that Chiara has been held prisoner since Sunday night, or if you prefer, since early Monday morning. And God only knows if she’s still alive.”
“Why don’t you do this, you and your officers go on over to Piazza della Repubblica, to the land office. I’m going to make a call to a friend of mine who works there. You’ll see, he won’t take a minute.”
“Thanks, Dottor Charbonnier.”
“Do you need me to do anything else?”
“Nothing,” Rocco replied. “Just keep reading your newspaper and take advantage of the opportunity to get some rest and have your tests done. If nothing else, I’ve noticed that some of the nurses here are pretty easy to look at.”
The notary smiled. “At my age, in fact, I can only contemplate them, like the Alps.” And with a theatrical sweep of the arm he indicated the peaks that could be seen in the distance, out the window.
Not even half an hour later, the deputy chief and his officers left the land office, bitterly disappointed. They hadn’t found anything in the name of either Carlo Figus or his mother. Marcello Berguet, on the other hand, had a studio apartment in the center of town and a small villa over near Alagna. Rocco had discarded that. Too far away, at least based on his hunch abou
t the mileage chalked up by the kidnappers’ cargo van.
They were back where they’d started.
“Let’s call the police chief,” suggested Antonio.
“What for?”
“Let’s have him assemble an insane group. Everyone: firemen, Carabinieri, finance police, forest rangers, alpine guides. Everyone. We need to explore an area spanning many square miles and how are we going to do that by ourselves?”
“In order to put together anything of the sort, we’d need time, hours and hours, and we don’t have it. What’s more it would mean making the matter public. And that could play quite a nasty trick on us, too.”
“Such as?” Italo asked.
“Such as it turns out that, besides Marcello Berguet, there’s someone else tangled up in this story. And that someone else could take off. I heard one of the kidnappers on the phone, and he had a Calabrian accent.”
“Maybe it could have been that guy Cutrì who lives in Lugano.”
“Sure, it could have been. But it also could have been someone who lives here in Aosta. We still don’t really know anything about this organization. Only the tip of the iceberg. Or actually, two tips of the iceberg.”
“Which ones? Marcello Berguet and then who else?”
“Chiara’s young boyfriend. Max. He’s involved somehow.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew the kidnappers. At least Carlo Figus. And if he’s involved, then so is his mother. We have nothing left but to go catch the wolf.”
Antonio and Casella, as per instructions issued by the deputy chief, had gone to pick up Marcello Berguet. Rocco had also cautioned them not to make the arrest in a classroom, to do it far from the eyes of the students, and to avoid involving school personnel if at all possible. But those instructions proved unnecessary. When Rocco returned to his office, there was Marcello Berguet in person waiting for him, sitting as stiff as a stick, impeccably dressed in suit and tie, his hair slicked back and his face still wafting the scent of morning aftershave.
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