The Salati Case

by Tobias Jones

  ‘So what’s this all about?’

  ‘The opposite of a murder, I expect. Someone’s impersonating a poor guy who’s died.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  Mazzuli seemed satisfied with my confusion and smiled. As I walked out I saw Suzi passing a chip-and-pin machine to a mourner.

  For some reason I decided not to go on the motorway to Rimini, but to drive the Via Emilia. It’s a strange road, so straight you could drive it with your knees. All along it are rectangular warehouses, depots and shops: furniture outlets, wholesale food suppliers, regional offices of some important acronym. They look like they’re all made of thin metal. Very few of them seem to have windows but they have huge forecourts for cars. It looks strangely soulless, all cuboid compared to the stone and marble extravagance of the centro storico.

  The city has such a bizarre contrast between its historical centre and its modern suburbs. It goes from the sublime to the functional, from narrow to wide, from cobbles to asphalt, in the space of a couple of traffic lights. I suppose every old city is like that. It’s just that not many have as much history as this one, or seem so impatient to get away from it.

  Fed up of traffic lights and pedestrians, I pulled on to the motorway after twenty miles. It was just as straight and boring. It ran between the Via Emilia and the new, high-speed train line between Paris and Rome. East and west, the road was the same: flat fields and crumbling villas, the occasional yard selling cranes or pallets. As the motorway cut through the outskirts of cities, I could see the tents and chickens of the gypsies and drop-outs.

  I was thinking about the Anna di Pietro woman. If Riccardo was dead, she was his common-law widow. She must have given up on him long ago. She had married, Franchini had said. Their girl would be a teenager by now.

  I came into Rimini on the ring road. It’s a place of wasted beauty in the low season. Long beaches to yourself and the litter. It used to be the place where the stars hung out in the 1950s, but they had left as soon as it had become popular in the 60s and 70s.

  By now it looks like any other seaside town that has tried to make money as quickly as possible. It looks like Miami with less beach and more concrete. The grand old hotels have been turned into seedy nightclubs or knocked down to make way for car parks.

  I found her road, Via dei Caduti, and parked outside the building. I found her surname and rang the buzzer.

  ‘Who is it?’ a female voice said.

  ‘I’m a private investigator …’ I trailed off. It always unnerves people and I let it sink in. ‘I’m looking into Riccardo Salati’s disappearance.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No one told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’

  The surprise sounded genuine.

  ‘I would rather talk face to face.’

  The line went dead and I took a step back from the citofono. Judging by the plush block it looked like Anna had gone up in the world. It was a long way from the caravan I had heard about. I wasn’t sure she would want to think about Riccardo, let alone talk about him to a stranger.

  A minute later a petite woman came out of the front door. She looked overdone: the eyelashes had thick mascara and her lacquered hair looked like it could survive a gale. I guessed there must have been a fair amount of inner turmoil for her to want such solid hair, as if it could offer a bit of stability in a fickle world. As she walked towards the gate, she glanced left and right, at the balconies of the villas next door.

  ‘We can’t talk here,’ she said. ‘Let’s walk.’

  ‘What’s wrong with here?’

  She looked irritated and lit a cigarette.

  ‘So no one told you?’ I asked.

  ‘Told me what?’ She was walking me away from her house.

  ‘Silvia Salati died on Friday.’

  She stopped walking and looked straight at me. ‘I heard. Umberto called on Saturday morning. And I’m sorry,’ she said formally, as if she had to prove it. ‘I’m sorry to hear of anyone’s death. But she never liked me, and I didn’t exactly take a shine to her. She was a severe woman. Is that why you’re here, because she died?’

  ‘I’m here to find out what happened to Riccardo.’

  ‘Who hired you?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Posthumously?’

  ‘Right. I’ve got to satisfy the conditions of her will and ascertain,’ I paused, realising I was already sounding like Crespi, ‘what happened to Riccardo.’

  ‘You want to find out about Ricky?’ She gave a snort of derision. ‘I’ve heard that before. Ever since he went missing I’ve had the police, the press, the privates. None of it has made any difference.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, like it was a condolence. That’s what it was because I didn’t believe Riccardo was alive. I’ve seen enough of these cases to know that Riccardo had died within hours or days of his disappearance. The body might be lying around, but the soul was long gone.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, giving her the ‘tu’, ‘I doubt we’ll find Riccardo. And if we do, I doubt he’ll be living. But there’s an inheritance involved. I need to satisfy myself of certain facts before making recommendations to the executors of Silvia Salati’s will. You with me?’

  She was looking at me now as she dropped her cigarette on to the pavement and scuffed it with her shoe. ‘So that’s why you’re here?’

  ‘I need to ascertain his legal status,’ I said.

  ‘It’s “missing”. Been that way for years.’

  ‘And why didn’t you ever apply for it to be changed? An absence that long is more than justification to initiate a “presumed dead” application.’

  ‘Makes no difference to me. Either way he’s not here, is he?’ She was looking at me, defying me to contradict her. ‘We weren’t married so it’s not as if I had something to gain from him being presumed dead, or presumed alive, or presumed anything.’

  ‘It makes a difference now,’ I said, holding her stare. ‘There’s money at stake and Elisabetta is Silvia’s granddaughter.’

  She was shaking her head. ‘We don’t need her money.’ It didn’t seem like the years had chilled her anger.

  ‘Why didn’t you ever marry Riccardo?’ I asked, wanting to know the gripe between her and the old Salati woman.

  She pulled out another cigarette and lit up. ‘You don’t waste time, do you?’

  ‘I’m coming to the party fourteen years late, I’m in a rush.’

  She inhaled deeply and turned her face to blow away the smoke.

  ‘What is it exactly that you’re after?’ she asked. ‘Because I doubt you’ll ask me anything I haven’t already been asked, and I doubt I’ll be able to tell you anything more than what I told everyone else every time they came round here.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Every time this story comes up, it throws my whole family into embarrassment. My husband, my daughter, myself. Ricky’s dead. If you can prove that I’ll thank you for it, I really will. Not because I didn’t love him, but because you’ll allow me to mourn him, and allow me to start a new life at last. Because Giovanni and I feel …’

  ‘He’s your new man?’

  ‘Sure.’ She took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Our lives are put on pause every time Ricky is mentioned. If he were dead and buried, it would be different. I’m sorry if that sounds callous, but that’s how it is.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Maybe you do,’ she said, ‘maybe you don’t. Maybe you just know the jargon. Closure, they call it.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question. Why didn’t you marry Riccardo?’

  She stared at me, looking like she was weighing me up. ‘Why didn’t I marry Ricky?’ She laughed. ‘Because his mother was opposed to it. She didn’t want him to waste himself on a girl who lived in a caravan by the beach.’

  ‘Silvia Salati was against it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You were both adults.’

  ‘I
n age we were, though you wouldn’t have known it. He was her little boy. She was protective in ways that confused him. She manipulated him. Going against her will had consequences. She was helping him out financially. There were all sorts of threats about what she would do if he tied himself to me.’

  ‘She was lending him money?’

  ‘Lend was an elastic term to Ricky. She was giving him money, sure. I didn’t even want to get married, but she had made it pretty clear I was to exclude the idea anyway. I stopped going up there altogether. I hadn’t seen her for two years when Ricky went missing.’

  ‘You seem to have moved up in the world since then,’ I said, casting an eye around her salubrious suburb.

  ‘It’s called middle age,’ she said.

  We had walked towards a small park where a grey-haired woman was pushing a young child on a swing.

  ‘And what was he like?’ I said softly when she seemed calmed.

  She laughed with a wheeze.

  ‘Ricky? He was all show, just like Umberto. Only he didn’t have his luck. He was a real charmer. He could talk and talk, and make you laugh. But when he went out the room you couldn’t remember a word he had said.’

  ‘When did you meet him?’

  ‘When I was a barmaid at the Hotel Palace.’

  ‘The one on the waterfront?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘He was working there for the summer as a lifeguard and poolside assistant. By the end of the second week Ricky was asking if he could fix drinks for the guests. Sometimes he came in wearing only flip-flops and a beach gown, like he owned the place. The manager hated him, but the guests thought he was a hoot. I think it was because he was seventeen and full of dreams. People loved his infectious confidence. We ended up visiting each other’s rooms off duty and you can imagine. By the end of the summer I was pregnant. We were only together properly for a couple of years. At the Palace in the summers, at my caravan in the winters.’

  ‘How was he earning his dough?’

  ‘Same as before: working poolside, opening deck-chairs, fixing drinks, making friends.’

  ‘And in winter?’

  She shrugged. ‘I suppose you would call him a hustler. Only he got blown around because people had more bluster than him. He was never successful in business because they always pulled something on him.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Oh, everything.’ She sighed heavily. ‘He tried to make fitness videos.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He spent millions of lire hiring the equipment and the girls and never made a single video. I can’t remember why. He invested in a company that built swimming pools that couldn’t hold water. He imported sandals from an Austrian he had met in a bar. He paid two million up front and received seven of them. It wasn’t even an even number. He got three pairs and an odd one.’ She laughed bitterly.

  ‘Did he have debts?’

  ‘He didn’t, the rest of us did.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me, his mother, Umberto. He called himself a professional gambler, as if it were something to be proud of. He borrowed from his mother constantly. That was why he had gone round there that weekend, to ask for money. He borrowed from me. Usually he would tell me about some sure project that would make us wonderfully rich, if only we could get in there first and invest before anyone else. And each time he got burnt it only made him more keen to keep trying, to prove them all wrong.’

  ‘And he borrowed from you?’

  ‘Sure. Only he knew I was drying up. I didn’t have anything left to give him, not if I wanted our child to eat. So he went after anyone who would listen to him.’

  ‘Umberto?’

  ‘Sure. It was the same with all of us.’

  ‘Where did he go to lose it?’

  ‘The same place he earned it. The Palace. He would spend more money there in a night than he could earn in a month.’

  ‘Cards?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Scopa? Blackjack?’

  ‘Anything. He would play anything as long as there was money involved.’

  ‘And he ran up big losses?’

  ‘Like I said, we did. Not him.’

  ‘You always paid his debts?’

  ‘I had no choice. What would you have done?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to have made much difference. How much?’

  ‘A few million lire.’

  ‘How often?’

  She moved the top of her head from side to side as if to say that it was a regular occurrence.

  We watched the grandmother lifting the child out of the swing. Ricky sounded like the usual, unreliable rover. He had settled down with a woman only long enough to get her to open her purse. He ran around Romagna trying to spin cash out of get-rich-quick schemes. He had bad debts and worse friends. The most likely scenario was that an angry, impatient creditor had caught up with him and made him pay in the highest currency there is. It might have been his brother. It might have been this woman. It might have been another gamer from the Palace.

  I looked at Anna again. There was something cold and calculating about her. I had noticed it when I had mentioned inheritance.

  ‘Those months before Ricky went missing, anything happen?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Any unusual behaviour? New friendships?’

  ‘Unusual behaviour was all there was in Ricky’s life.’

  ‘You make him sound pretty shallow.’

  ‘No,’ she fixed me. ‘No, he wasn’t. He was unpredictable. He did unexpected things. If he won a lot of money he couldn’t sit on it. He would have to invite everyone around, have a big party, show he wasn’t a loser.’

  ‘And that summer he went missing. 1995. Anyone new in his life?’

  She looked at me with tired eyes. ‘I don’t suppose he was any more faithful than other men. But I didn’t ask and he didn’t say. I would see him getting all dressed up to go out and put two and two together. But there was nothing new about that. He had been doing that ever since I was pregnant.’

  ‘Was he asking for money at the time?’

  She closed her eyes, as if this were the first question she had thought about. ‘No, no he wasn’t.’

  ‘Wasn’t that unusual?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was. I didn’t think much about it because he was always saying that he was turning the corner, that this time it was for real. That he had everything sorted out. I didn’t listen to him because I had heard it all before. I recognised that excitement in his voice. It was all self-deception. We always had more money in the summer anyway. It was the only season we had regular work at the hotel. And he was a master at soliciting tips. He didn’t have time to gamble. He had even given me back some of the stuff I had lent him.’

  ‘How did he manage to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Small change. A few million lire.’

  ‘And that day he went back to the city for San Giovanni. Where were you?’

  ‘I was in the caravan. He left early morning, before I was even awake. I was here all weekend.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘With Elisabetta.’

  ‘Your girl?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Who was how old?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Not much of a witness.’

  She looked at me with a sour look. ‘I’ve been through all this before. He got on a train that Saturday morning and I never saw him again.’

  ‘He never came back?’

  ‘When he wasn’t home that night, I assumed he had stayed with his mother. It happened often enough.’

  ‘He didn’t call?’

  ‘No. And I wasn’t going to call her house.’

  ‘And when did you report him missing?’

  ‘On the Monday night. He missed a shift at the hotel. He didn’t always come home, but
he never missed a shift at the Palace. He was due to do the Monday night, and he didn’t show. They called me and—’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I called his mother.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t do that kind of thing.’

  She stared at me through her thick eyelashes.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked.

  ‘That she had dropped him at the station on the Saturday night.’

  Her eyes had filled up and were about to overflow. As she blinked tears fell on to her cheeks, bringing with them burnt matchsticks of mascara. ‘That’s when it all started. She made all manner of accusations.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘She thought I had failed to look after him. Umberto was coming round here every other night. So was Tonin.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some old guy. Massimo Tonin.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Same as all the others. Wanted to know where Ricky was.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  She laughed. ‘Ricky used to call any new friends investors. He was probably in on some project or other. He was from one of those tiny villages near the Po. He came round here demanding to know where Ricky was.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The first week after he disappeared. Made the same sort of accusations that everyone else has made, said I must have seen him, must know something.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I assume he thought I was to blame.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Towards the end of that week. Once it had been made public that Ricky was missing. He seemed desperate to get hold of him.’

  ‘And where will I find this Massimo Tonin?’

  ‘He lived somewhere near the city. La Bassa I think. They had only met a few months before.’

  ‘Come here,’ I said, taking hold of her upper arm. She tried to shrug off my grip, but I tightened it and she stamped her heels. I walked her towards the car. I opened the door and pushed her into the passenger seat. ‘Don’t move,’ I said, walking round to the boot. I pulled out the camera, switched it on and sat behind the wheel. I held the thing towards her. She looked at the images: mourners in black walking towards the cemetery.

  I flicked through the photographs and she started naming them. ‘There’s Umberto and Roberta. The boys. I haven’t seen them for years.’ She took the camera in both hands and looked at the boys’ faces.