“I’m happy to see you here, Signor Berguet. I’d sent my men to get you at school.”
“You and I need to talk.”
“I know. And in fact, I’d sent two of my officers to pick you up at the high school.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Let’s just say . . . kidnapping, Signor Berguet. Kidnapping and murder!” Rocco Schiavone picked up a sheet of paper.
“Kidnapping? Murder? What the hell do you think you’re talking about?”
“Do you see this piece of paper? I just received it from an auto dealership. We found a fragment of a broken headlight downstairs in Cerruti’s garage. Too bad for you, it happened to be a shard with the serial number on it. They traced it back to the manufacturer, and guess what they found out? These headlights are made for the Suzuki Jimny. Unless I’m mistaken, your sister-in-law Giuliana has a Suzuki Jimny, and again if I’m not misinformed, you’re the one who uses that car. That’s what she told us when we paid a call at the house, the same day we found it abandoned on the road with its headlights broken. Did you use the car to go see Cristiano?”
“Listen, let me just say one thing. . . .”
“No, let me talk. What possible reason could there be for Viorelo Midea, who is one of the men who kidnapped your niece, to have called your number on his cell phone?”
Berguet looked at Rocco. “My number?”
“That’s right. The night of the kidnapping. Did he call you? Was he asking for instructions? Did he want to tell you that they’d taken the girl? Is that it?”
“I don’t even know who this Viorelo Midea is!” Marcello yelled.
“Where did they put your niece? That’s something you know!”
“If I knew, I’d go get her, for fuck’s sake!” Marcello’s nerves were starting to give.
“Calm down, Signor Berguet. You’re the only one who spoke to Chiara.”
“Certainly. I did talk to her.”
“And are we supposed to take you at your word?”
“Of course. I heard Chiara saying: I’m fine. But that’s all I heard.”
“And you’re certain that it was Chiara? After all, she only said: I’m fine. That’s not much of a basis to be certain.”
Marcello thought it over for a few seconds. “Well, you might be right. I don’t know. I said: Chiara, it’s me, your uncle. And she replied: I’m fine, Uncle Marcello. And that was it. Maybe she was upset, she was clearly very scared. But I’m sure of one thing. And it only occurs to me now. She’s never called me Uncle Marcello in her life. To Chiara, I’ve always been Uncle Ninni. Never Uncle Marcello. Never. Why is that only occurring to me now?”
Rocco took a deep breath. “Can I have your cell phone?”
Marcello stuck his hand in his pocket. He handed his cell phone to Rocco, who immediately checked the incoming calls. “Look right here. At three fifteen Monday morning. You received a call from Viorelo Midea’s cell phone. And we have that call listed in the records. The call lasted for . . . three seconds?” Rocco narrowed his eyes. “Wait, what, three seconds?”
“At that time of the night, I’m asleep, usually, Dottor Schiavone,” said Marcello, “I certainly don’t have phone conversations.” And he ran his hand over his face.
“This cell phone, the number’s only six digits long. Why is that?”
“It’s an arrangement Pietro made with the cell phone provider. He wanted sequential phone numbers for everyone in the company, even though I’m only nominally an employee. My number ends in 04, Pietro’s in 01, and I think Giuliana’s ends in 03, Cerruti’s was 07, and so on for other employees. With different last numbers, of course.”
Rocco fell silent. He could feel the earth shake beneath his feet, about to open up in a yawning abyss and swallow him like a piece of candy. He turned around and stared into Marcello’s face. Who in turn felt extremely awkward. “What . . . what’s wrong? Why are you staring at me?”
“Did you shave this morning?”
Marcello seriously started to wonder whether the deputy chief was suffering from some mental illness. “I shave every morning. I can’t stand not to.”
“Fucking hell!” the deputy chief blurted out loudly, and the math teacher lost his composure and practically jumped out of his chair. “I’m an idiot!” He picked up the phone, as Marcello Berguet looked on in astonishment. “Hello, Farinelli? Are you still in Aosta?”
“No, Schiavone, but my men are there. If you want, I can put you in contact with them.”
“Listen. Maybe you’ll remember. On the site of the Cerruti murder. . . .”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember at the exit of the apartment building? There’s a common area, a garden.”
“Right, covered with snow. Spider flower and firethorn bushes. Why?”
“Did you check there?”
“Certainly. Next to a shrub we found some footprints. Someone walked up to it, rummaged around, and then left.”
“And what do you think they were looking for?”
“At first I thought it might have been someone with a dog. But there were no traces of animals on the snow. If it had been summertime, I would have guessed that some tenant who lived directly upstairs dropped an article of clothing from the clothesline and had come down to get it. But it’s not summer.”
“I’d certainly say it’s not. Thanks, Ernesto.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Ah, thanks for reporting to Baldi. You certainly made me look like a complete asshole.”
“This certainly wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last.”
“I’m going to have to agree with you on that point,” he said, and glanced in Marcello Berguet’s direction. Then the deputy chief braced both elbows on the desk and hid his face in his hands for a period of time that seemed to Marcello to stretch out endlessly. He rubbed his weary eyes and finally looked up at the math teacher. “Do you know why certain things happen? Because you take your eye off the ball.”
“I know, Dottore. The slightest distraction, a tiny error in calculation, and you can no longer solve for X.”
“Right. I didn’t think about the razor. The razor with the shaving foam in Cerruti’s bathroom. He didn’t shave.”
Marcello lowered his eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me right away that you were Cristiano’s lover?”
“You never asked me. And most important of all, in the time I’ve been in this office, you never once let me speak. If you’d listened to me instead of attacking me, we could have avoided wasting valuable time.”
Rocco shook his head. “In that case, go right ahead. Have your say.”
“My relationship with Cristiano was—and I hope it can continue to be—a secret matter. You understand, I’m a teacher, Aosta is a town of 40,000, and you can suddenly find yourself ostracized and mocked in the blink of an eye. We’re not in Rome, you know!”
“I owe you an apology.”
“Forget about it. Things weren’t going at all well between me and Cristiano. He was a wreck, on edge, I don’t know why, but I got the feeling he was hiding something. We’re talking about the morning of the murder. I left early, it couldn’t have been eight o’clock yet. I had to get over to school early. Cristiano was expecting someone at eight fifteen.”
“Who?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Like I said. He was on edge, he’d snap at nothing, we’d been fighting for days.”
“Maybe your brother or Giuliana had already told him. But Cristiano was somehow involved in the kidnapping of your niece.”
“I know that. That’s why you won’t see me shed a single tear over his death. We saw each other, we talked to each other, but who Cristiano Cerruti really was, I had no idea. I thought he was . . . how could he?” Marcello looked Rocco right in the eyes. “How could he have gotten involved in such a thing?”
“Does three million euros sound like an acceptable answer?”
Marcello rubbed his hands together. “Do you hav
e a cigarette?”
Rocco’s mind shot straight to the drawer with the marijuana, but it struck him as a reckless move. “Italo!” he called out loudly. “You understand, I’ve finished my usual brand. Just a moment, the officer is coming. His cigarettes are disgusting, but still better than nothing.”
Italo walked in. He looked at Marcello Berguet, and then at the deputy chief. “Yes sir. . . .”
“Spot us a couple of cigarettes, and smoke one yourself. . . .”
Italo threw his arms wide in surrender, offered the first cigarettes to Marcello, put one in his mouth, and then tossed the pack to Rocco. “That gives you two, sir. So you’ll be all set for later,” he said with feigned courtesy. “Well, did he sing?” asked the officer, who had no idea of the latest developments.
“What do you think this is, the Sanremo music festival, Pierron? Who did you think was going to sing? Sit down, listen, and be well aware that with this gentleman we’ve got a vast amount of mud on our face for the umpteenth time.”
They lit their cigarettes and immediately a blanket of smoke filled the office. Rocco picked up a sheet of paper. “Cristiano’s phone number ends in 07. Signor Berguet’s, here, ends in 04. Take a look at a keypad and you can see how easy it would be for Viorelo to have misdialed. In the middle of the night, for someone nodding off in a moving van, it could certainly happen.”
“What’s more,” Italo added, “we’ve cross-referenced it. The phone call to Signor Berguet went out two minutes before the cargo van slammed into the trees. We know that because the dashboard clock stopped at that exact time.”
“Outstanding work, Italo. So Viorelo wanted to call Cristiano to tell him that everything was set. The girl had been taken, etc., etc. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Rocco got to his feet and went over to the window. “Now you, Marcello, left Cerruti’s apartment a little before eight.”
“Exactly.”
Italo’s jaw dropped. He had just realized the reason that the math teacher was in Cerruti’s apartment.
“Tell me all about it.”
“Certainly. I shaved, got dressed, took the elevator, and got off in the basement garage. I got in my car and left. You see?” and he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys. A key ring with a silver M. “This plug opens the metal garage gate.”
“That’s right,” said Rocco, “a bunch of keys that I saw on the first day I went to the Berguet home. I should have remembered. . . .”
“And that’s all. I went to school. . . .”
“While someone else entered the apartment and murdered Cristiano Cerruti,” Rocco concluded. “Presumably whoever it was that the concierge saw leaving the building.” The deputy chief turned to look at Marcello. “Tell me, seeing that you knew Cristiano so well. Did he own any property here in Aosta? A house in the mountain, a garage, even a barn?”
Marcello thought it over for a moment. “No. Cristiano wasn’t even from here. He was from the Marche. He’d been living in Aosta for three years . . . the only thing he owned was the car and the apartment where he lived.”
“And we didn’t find anything interesting in his car, did we, Italo?”
“No. Nothing to speak of. . . .”
“Thanks, Signor Berguet. You’re free to go about your business.”
“What about Chiara?”
“We’ll find her, you can count on that. And if you happen to remember anything that might be of use to us. . . .”
“Believe me, Deputy Chief Schiavone, I’ve been racking my brains for days.”
He had the sensation he was standing in a train station where all the tracks are unused sidings. In silence, both elbows braced against the desk, both eyes shut, Rocco Schiavone was reviewing all the things he’d seen and heard in the past few days. His mind sailed along untethered, ranging from the face of Cristiano Cerruti to the faces of his friends in Rome. Furio, skinny and bald, with those Greek eyes that always seemed to be wearing dark makeup. Sebastiano, the bear, who instead had too much hair and looked as if he’d combed it with strings of firecrackers. Brizio, the handsome one, who they all called Tom Selleck, with chestnut hair and a handlebar mustache. Then he glimpsed the face of Pietro Berguet, Giuliana’s face turning into his own mother’s face and then transforming into Adele who might already be aboard a train on her way north to come hide in his apartment, as part of a little game between two people in love, as hopeless as it was anachronistic. No, this isn’t working, he told himself. He opened his eyes. Italo had been sitting there the whole time, still and silent.
“I thought you’d fallen asleep.”
“No. I was just thinking,” Rocco replied. “But I keep smacking up against the panes of glass and I can’t seem to get out of the room.”
“Can I help?”
“What did I miss? What am I overlooking? Whose voice was the Calabrian on the phone? When are Viorelo’s other numbers going to come in?”
“Later. They say, sometime this evening.”
“For now all we know is that he was calling Cristiano Cerruti.”
“Then he made some international call, and the country code was for Romania. . . .”
“Some relative.”
“And the Posillipo Pizzeria.”
“Where he worked three days a week. The place belonged to that guy, Domenico Cuntrera. . . .”
“Known to his friends as Mimmo.”
How do hunches hit you? Most of the time, all at once. Often, they’re things we know already but that suddenly pop up before our eyes, like lightning bugs in June. Sometimes, they might seem to be lightbulbs that you thought were burned out but which instead, thanks to some ghost in the wiring, flicker on without warning.
“The Posillipo Pizzeria! Do you remember what that fake Neapolitan cook told us? That he had no idea who Figus was.”
“But instead?”
“But instead Figus’s mother, the old lady with diabetes, had a fistful of coupons in her hand, good for meals at the pizzeria. Which Mimmo, she said, had given to her.”
“Do you think that’s him?”
“The fake Neapolitan? He told us that he was from Soverato, you remember?”
“I don’t know where Soverato is.”
“Well, I do! It’s not all that far from Cosenza.”
“What day is today?”
“Thursday, Rocco.”
“It says here that the place is closed on Wednesday. Then why isn’t anyone here?” and he peered inside the Posillipo Pizzeria. The lights were all off. “I’ll tell you why. Because our fake Neapolitan has left town.”
“So you’re saying it’s him?”
“I’m one hundred percent certain that it is.”
“What now?”
“I’m fucking sick and tired of waiting.” Rocco grabbed a brick from the sidewalk, brushed the snow off it, and then hurled it through the pizzeria’s plate glass window. “Be my guest!” he said to Italo, who was the first to step through the now-gaping window frame.
The tables were set. The lights all switched off. The only light came from a faint blue fluorescent glow above the mirrors. Rocco and Italo walked into the kitchen. They turned on the light. If the front dining room had been a textbook example of good interior decoration, the kitchen was a stomach-turning pigsty. Greasy, dirty, black. Cracked floor tiles were smeared with grease and dark with mold. Aside from the mold, there was no other sign of life in that grimy cavern that the health inspectors ought to have shut down long ago. Aside from the red lights indicating the oversized refrigerator was running, everything else was desolate and dead. On the kitchen work counters, there were balls of pizza dough. An acrid odor of curdled milk tweaked at their nostrils. They opened the door to the office and went through. There, too, everything was neat and orderly, with the exception of a steel cabinet. Doors thrown open, it had been ransacked recklessly and in haste. Two of the six shelves in the cabinet stood empty.
“Someone was in a hurry . . . let’s move on . . .�
�� said Rocco.
They went back through the kitchen and made their way through a metal door that led into the storeroom in the back. The metal roller gate that opened onto a secondary parking spot was wide open. Tire tracks through the snow. Inside the small storeroom were stacks of wooden crates, bottled water, and two enormous tables piled high with mason jars full of whole preserved tomatoes, and a large commercial walk-in refrigerator. The door swung open. Rocco stuck his head in. The pantry shelves were lined with enough foodstuffs to hold out against a months-long siege. Cans and jars, bags of flour, salt, and sugar, enormous cans of tuna. But the thing that immediately caught Rocco’s attention was a metal pail. A mop protruded from the pail, but there was no water in it.
Bank notes. In denominations of 5, 10, 20, and 50 euros. Crumpled, wrinkled, old and worn.
“Fucking . . .” said Italo.
“. . . hell,” Rocco concluded. “You feel like counting it up?”
“What the hell is this? Who owns this place?” Italo bent over and started counting the cash.
“You still haven’t figured it out?”
“No.”
“’Ndrangheta.”
“The ’ndrangheta is in Aosta?”
“And why shouldn’t it be? What’s wrong with Aosta?” the deputy chief retorted ironically. “We need to call Baldi. We need an arrest warrant for Domenico Cuntrera. Known to his friends as Mimmo. And let’s call headquarters while we’re at it. Let’s get some people over here. Costa will have plenty to tell the journalists.”
Rocco started making calls on his cell phone. Italo continued counting the cash.
“Dottor Costa? This is Schiavone. I’m calling the officers over to the Posillipo Pizzeria. It was the headquarters of an ’ndrangheta family. They were responsible for the disappearance of Chiara Berguet. . . .” Rocco watched as Italo stacked up the banknotes, doing his best to smooth them as he went. “Yes, sir. You probably ought to put a call in to Rome. Loansharking, extortion, the usual things.” He covered the receiver and asked Italo: “How much?”
“There’s 37,000 euros here.”
Out of Season Page 23