by Tobias Jones
It was Mauro. He wanted to tell me a woodpecker had had a go at one of the hives and had almost made a hole. ‘It looks like the thing’s made of balsa once the pecker’s been at it two minutes.’
Mauro was my only schoolfriend who had had less luck than me. He had gone into the army, got shot up in countries he had never heard of. Had a marriage as messy as a nightclub at dawn, only now it was a divorce, so he didn’t even have that.
I kept my hives in his back garden for all sorts of reasons. Mauro didn’t have neighbours, for one. And because having my stuff out there gave me an excuse to go and see him often.
‘It was making an almighty noise,’ Mauro said, ‘almost knocking the thing over. I’ve shooed him away twice.’
I said I would come round. If I knew Mauro, the real reason he wanted company was to get his elbow to work.
It was only a ten-minute drive to the north of the city, and Mauro was there in his garage when I pulled in. We took a torch and went to look at the hives. He showed me the damage: a long, vertical scar. The bird hadn’t quite made a hole, but he had been halfway there.
We looked at the other hives. I’ve only got eleven, so it didn’t take long. They seemed all right. I said I would come back later in the week and fix up the cracked one.
‘Drink?’ Mauro said.
Mauro was like a lot of drinkers. His struggle against the poison made him into a pessimist and he ridiculed anyone who made a show of being rigorous or upright. And yet at the same time he was more idealistic than any of us, and could be brutal when he saw hypocrisy or deceit. With a glass inside him he started talking about a recent case of a well-known mafioso from down south who had been let out of prison because he had hiccups. That wasn’t quite the story, but that’s how Mauro told it. And from there he was quickly on to the subject of our wonderful, sad country.
‘It’s all screwed up, Casta,’ he was saying. ‘I mean, why don’t people do something about organised crime? Everyone complains about the system here, but the majority has never stood up to it. A few thousand go to the piazza, but millions don’t bother.’
‘Mauro,’ I said, ‘crime is like religion: it’s no good unless it’s organised.’
He laughed at that, and refilled our glasses. I told him I was on a new case, and he started ridiculing me as if I had said I was taking holy orders.
‘What have you got that needs redeeming?’ he said, swigging his second.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, what is it you’re feeling so guilty about?’
‘Maybe not doing the washing-up.’ I tried to laugh. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, why do you have to save everyone?’
‘I don’t.’
‘It’s like you’re always trying to prove yourself.’
‘I’m always trying to prove something. That’s my job.’
‘But all you’re really doing is trying to prove yourself.’
‘Who said that?’
‘I did.’
‘You’re talking in riddles, Mauro. I go after real people and real crimes. Things happen, I try to uncover clues, events,
motives.’ I pushed away my empty glass. ‘I’d better head off, I’m going to a funeral tomorrow,’ I said.
Mauro slipped in his watery way from spiteful to solicitous. That’s why I still liked him. He would challenge you constantly, but in the end he always cared, though he hated to show it. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘No. It’s work.’
‘Let’s raise a drink to him.’
‘Her. I’ve raised enough for today. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
I glanced at old Mauro. His face looked desperate, like he couldn’t stop what he was doing, which was filling up our glasses. If I didn’t keep him company he would sink both, so I picked up mine and threw it back.
Tuesday
I woke up with a headache the next day. It was another morning of dense white fog and as I walked to my car I could just see the vague outlines of people shuffling along the pavement, their collars tight around their throats.
I drove back to Sissa. It was a short drive and I was there two hours before the funeral was due. I parked in the piazza and looked at the church. The wooden door was open so I walked up the steps and shuffled inside.
It was dark and still. The walls were so thick that the silence seemed to echo. The roof was supported by a row of wooden triangles that rested on thick walls where the old mortar had dried mid-drip between the bricks, forming cracks which spiders had tried to conceal with their white lace.
There was something about this blank hole of a building that seemed to echo emptiness. Perhaps that’s all church was about. A hollow, meaningless building where hollow meaningless people could feel they belonged. It certainly made me feel at home.
I heard the sound of someone coughing. I listened more carefully and heard muffled footsteps from inside the vestry, to the right of the altar.
The footsteps came closer. A tall man in an ill-fitting jacket and a dog collar marched down the little church’s only aisle.
He walked past me without looking. Either he hadn’t seen me or he assumed I had come in to be on my own. I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had sat down on a bench in a recess at the back of the church.
I got up and walked over. ‘Is this your church?’
‘One of them. They spread us thinly nowadays.’
I introduced myself but the priest didn’t say anything other than ‘piacere’, so I didn’t get his name.
‘Did you ever know a man called Riccardo Salati?’ I asked. It sounded abrupt in the quiet of that building, and he looked at me sideways.
‘Chi?’
‘Riccardo Salati.’
The priest sighed and put his head on one side.
‘I’ve known a lot of Riccardos,’ he said.
‘Ever a Riccardo Salati? He grew up here in the 1970s and 80s.’
‘I only arrived in 2001.’
‘So you never knew a Riccardo Salati?’
‘There’s a Salati, a Silvia Salati, here. Or there was. She died on Friday.’
‘She was Riccardo’s mother.’
‘I see.’
Priests were always like this. You started trying to get information from them, but ended up getting the feeling that they had got it from you.
I looked at him. He had an unusual face and jokey, sad eyes like a puffin. And he was younger than most. If he hadn’t been wearing the dog collar he would have seemed completely normal. He was completely normal, I reminded myself, as much as any of us ever are.
‘Do you have records?’ I asked.
‘Records?’
‘Births, marriages, deaths.’
‘We have records for everything,’ he said cheerfully. ‘All services, meetings, baptisms, first communions, marriages and funerals.’
‘Which are kept?’
‘In the church office.’
‘Can I have a look?’
‘Of course.’
We stood up. The representative of Rome is always the surest way into the Italian countryside. I should have thought of it when I was here yesterday.
We went through to the vestry. Along the far wall was a low, plastic cupboard with sliding doors that didn’t move smoothly.
‘Each register covers a twelve-month period,’ the priest said. The years were written in thick pen on the spine of each binder.
I took a handful and laid them on the table. I went through them hastily, skipping past irrelevant things like collection amounts and congregation size. There were fewer baptisms or marriages as I went on. The only thing on the increase was the funerals.
An hour later I had everything I needed. Silvia had married Paolo Salati in 1958. Umberto had been baptised in 1960. He had had his first communion with six other villagers in 1969. Riccardo was baptised in 1975 but had never had a first communion. I kept going until he got to 1980 and decided Riccardo either didn’t like church, or church didn’t like him.
> ‘What are you looking for?’ the young priest asked.
‘Everything and nothing.’
I walked over to the plastic cupboard and pulled out two more volumes: 1994 and 1995. I leafed through everything quickly. In spring 1995 I found an entry for Paolo Salati’s funeral. I wrote it down alongside the other names and dates and put the volumes back.
The priest was sitting down in a corner with a large, leather book.
‘Isn’t it Silvia’s funeral this morning?’ I said.
The priest looked up. ‘Could be. But not here. I never saw her in church and she’s not one of those who only come feet first, if you see what I mean. She’ll probably go straight to the cemetery.’
The priest went back to his book.
‘I’ll see you around,’ I said.
He didn’t say anything but nodded with a smile.
I went back to the car and drove beyond the cemetery and turned it around so I was facing the road that the mourners would be coming up. It was still half an hour before the ceremony was due to start, so I opened La Gazzetta and pretended to be reading. I skimmed through the headlines. It was mostly reports about viabilità: how new roundabouts were replacing traffic lights and making the city move more smoothly.
It doesn’t need to move more smoothly, I thought. It already has a velveteen smoothness that is thrown like a blanket over any dust or dirt. There’s an official civility that makes the city blissfully polite and considerate. But it also means that people see no evil, or pretend they don’t.
I put the paper on the dashboard and looked down the road. The fog was lifting slightly but the colours still looked boringly uniform: wet and white. A few minutes later the first two mourners appeared.
I picked up the camera from the passenger seat and moved the lens anticlockwise to bring them into focus. It was an old couple. Soon others were coming and I zoomed in on them, letting the shutter rattle as I took repeated snaps of their slow walk to the burial site.
I recognised Umberto Salati and Lucentini, the old woman I had spoken to yesterday. Salati was with a woman and two young boys. Some other younger children were there. But in all there were only thirty or so mourners, mostly elderly.
Once they were inside the cemetery, I checked all the photos on the screen. They were all good, clear shots. Another index to add to the list of mourners from La Gazzetta.
I stared out through the windscreen. Funerals always make me think of the accident, of when my parents cart-wheeled their car on the A1. It was three days before my eighth birthday. Theirs was the first funeral I had ever been to. I can’t remember them any more, just their faces from the photographs. But I remember the funeral and what happened afterwards. I went off the rails like their car went off the road. I lost not just my parents but also the idea that life was worth living. I was passed from relative to foster parent to priest. Every few months I was checked in and chucked out. None of them could handle me. I didn’t want them to though plenty tried, quite literally. I spent the next half of my childhood in institutions. When you live like that you learn pretty fast who’s coming to hurt you or help you. You work out pretty quickly who’s telling the truth and who’s bluffing. And you realise that if you’re in any doubt it pays to fear the worst.
I shut my eyes and tried not to think about it.
When they came out half an hour later, they were walking differently. Umberto and his ex-wife, the woman I assumed was his ex, were holding each other’s arms. Lucentini seemed stiffer. The children had stopped running and were holding on to their parents. It must have been the effect of that first fistful of earth, that thud of mud on wood. They had buried Silvia Salati.
I started the car and drove back to the city. I pulled up in Viale Mentana and looked at the familiar logo of the masthead written in slanting, metre-high letters. It was illuminated for the passing traffic: LA GAZZETTA.
There was a girl at the front desk reading something hidden on her knees.
‘Where’s the necrologi department?’ I asked.
‘Fourth,’ said the girl, not looking up.
I took the lift up. On the fourth floor it opened on to another front desk.
‘Necrologi?’
‘Yes.’ The girl said it quietly as if she was offering condolences. I figured she must be doing that all day.
‘My name’s Castagnetti, I’m an investigator.’ It came out formally, and the girl looked up at me. I flashed my badge. ‘Who is the editor of the pages of the dead? It’s in connection with a murder.’
The girl stared at me like I had blood on my face. She didn’t say anything but walked briskly around the open-ended wall towards the office behind. I heard phones ringing and the rattle of computer keys. Dictations to the departed, I thought. I noticed I was already talking about the disappearance as a murder. Partly because it made people sit up and listen, but mainly because that was what I felt sure it was.
A man came round and introduced himself. I didn’t catch his name, but clocked his face: he looked in his thirties but his head was shaved completely, the sort of skinhead that baldies go for. There was something about him that made him look slick. Maybe it was just his shiny tie and his polished shoes, but I figured he liked a fast buck and fast women.
‘Somewhere quiet we can go to talk?’ I asked.
‘The canteen is about as quiet as it gets.’
‘Show me.’
We went down a long, narrow corridor into a small room. We sat down by a window overlooking the main road.
‘How can I help?’ He looked eager and curious at once.
‘Say I place a notice of mourning with you, how am I charged?’
‘Per word.’
‘And so if I know how many lines there are in a mourning notice, you know how much I pay, right?’
‘Exactly. A word costs two euros fifteen, plus VAT. A photo is forty-two fifty extra, and a cross will cost you fourteen.’
‘All plus VAT?’
‘Everything plus VAT.’
‘Even the cross?’
He nodded.
I pulled out the photocopy of the mourning notice from Riccardo. Or rather, from the person pretending to be Riccardo. I threw it across to him and he pulled out his mobile phone and thumbed in a few numbers.
‘Then I reckon you paid thirty-six euros, twelve cents.’
‘Exactly?’
‘I’ll have to check.’
‘Would there be any record that I paid that amount?’
The man stared at me. It looked as if he were readying his defence against any accusation of evasion. ‘Of course there is. In our accounts we enter every transaction.’
‘I’m checking up on a confidence trickster.’
The man nodded. ‘I heard it was a murder.’
‘Might be both.’
The man shrugged.
‘This necrologio was published in Monday’s edition. I’m looking for any payment for thirty-six euros and twelve cents made on Sunday. Is there any chance you could find a payment of that quantity in the transactions from the weekend?’
The man raised both his palms to me. ‘There are confidentiality issues here. We don’t give out those sort of details.’
I hear it every day. Everyone always says that, until I can offer them something more interesting than confidentiality.
‘I didn’t catch your name,’ I said.
‘Marco. Marco Mazzuli.’
‘All right, Marco. This is what I do for a living. I look into your favourite stuff: black chronicles as you call them. You would be surprised the stuff I see. I’ve never really had a contact here at La Gazzetta …’
‘And?’ He was negotiating already.
‘I’m just saying that if you help me I could help you. All I need is to see that transaction. They would never know my source. As your readers would never know yours, if you’re with me.’ I looked at him. Mazzuli was already imagining the scoops he could get from me, his man on the street.
‘What was your name?’ M
azzuli asked in a whisper.
I passed him a card.
The man was already nodding. He could see an easy bargain. He stood up. ‘Stay here. This will take a while. We run hundreds every day and thirty-six euros and twelve cents isn’t that uncommon.’
‘So I’ve seen.’
The man got up to leave and I looked around the canteen. It was clean and cold. An elderly woman was shouting something out back. From the window where I was sitting I could see the traffic outside. It was almost lunchtime already and the cars were static and noisy as they crawled home. The canteen began to fill up with one or two customers.
The man came back with a thick roll of narrow paper. ‘This is the cashier roll for the Saturday and Sunday.’
He gave one end of the paper ribbon to me but kept hold of the centre of the roll with his thumb and forefinger. It unwound as he took a step back.
I looked at all the numbers. Every few centimetres there were transactions: the amount, method of payment, the date and the time. I scanned about a metre of the paper and saw only one transaction of thirty-six euros and twelve cents.
‘How many people worked the register that day?’
‘Just Suzi.’
‘The girl who’s on there now?’
‘Right.’
‘And is there any way of knowing how these were paid?’
‘It says here,’ the man whispered. ‘Debit card.’ He passed me another slip of paper. ‘This is our Visa record.’
I looked at it. The slip reproduced the date, time and amount of the transaction. The card details were hidden by asterisks bar the last six numbers. There were two numbers, then a space, then another four. I wrote down all the digits.
‘And do people have to come in to make a payment or can they do it over the phone?’
‘They don’t have to come in, just as long as the money does,’ Mazzuli smiled sweetly.
‘All right, thanks.’ I got up to go, but Mazzuli stood up and blocked my way.
‘Hey, hey. We had a deal. I pass you information, you pass me. What is this you’re working on? I haven’t heard of any murder.’
‘Me neither. But the minute I do, you have my word, you’ll be the first person I call.’