The Salati Case

by Tobias Jones

  I nodded at the man and walked back outside to the main gate. I found the Veronesi name on the buzzer. I pressed the button and an elderly voice came on.

  I explained that I needed to ask him a couple of questions. The gate clicked open. By the time I was back at the inner door there was a short, bald man in slippers opening it for me.

  ‘Come in. You’ll want to know about the night Salati died? There’s nothing I haven’t already said to the police and the press. We came home early, ate, watched television and went to bed. Salati is five floors up. We very rarely saw him.’

  ‘On good terms?’

  ‘Formal niceties, nothing else.’

  He had led me into a dark flat. It was in the shade of trees and balconies and felt claustrophobic. But its doors opened on to the small garden outside where Salati had been found dead. The man’s wife was sitting on one of the armchairs.

  ‘Anything else about that night?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But you heard him hit the ground?’

  The man looked at his wife and shook his head.

  ‘You’re deep sleepers?’

  ‘No, we’re not. But we didn’t hear him …’ The woman trailed off, not wanting to describe what had happened.

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Nothing. The rain was so loud you could barely hear anything anyway.’

  The woman interrupted him. ‘We heard the cat tinkling around outside.’

  ‘How can you hear a cat?’

  The man thumbed at his wife. ‘She’s a bird-lover and doesn’t like old Jemima killing the birds. So she put a small bell on her collar to warn them off.’

  ‘And that’s all you heard? The rain and the cat?’

  They both nodded.

  I thanked them and walked back towards the porter’s cabin at the entrance of the condominium. I don’t know much about cats, because I don’t like them. They’re too feline for my liking, which is kind of the point of cats, I guess. But I know they don’t tend to go for a stroll in the rain. I don’t suppose the old couple were lying about what they heard. They were just interpreting it wrong.

  The porter wasn’t around, so I walked to the top of the building. Salati’s flat was the last one at the end of the staircase. The door was locked and there was still police tape across the entrance.

  I walked down a floor. There were four doors leading into separate flats. Presumably they all had Salati above them. I rang one bell after another but the first three didn’t answer. Only the last one gave me any joy.

  I introduced myself. The old woman wrapped her cardigan around herself more tightly when she heard I was investigating the death of Salati. She didn’t want to talk, she said, she knew nothing about it.

  I tried to talk quietly, to see how her hearing was, but she picked up on everything I said, so she seemed safe enough. I couldn’t see a hearing aid wrapped around her ear at all.

  ‘What did you hear that night?’ I asked her.

  ‘I heard him go out,’ she said curtly. ‘I heard his intercom sound, and out he went.’

  ‘What sort of time?’

  ‘I have no idea. It was late though. I was going to bed.’

  ‘What time’s that?’

  ‘Nine-thirty.’

  ‘How long was he out for?’

  ‘Five minutes or so.’

  ‘So he came back five minutes later?’

  ‘I heard the door open again.’

  ‘And you heard him?’

  She looked like she was unsure. ‘No, I didn’t. But I heard the door open.’

  ‘Don’t you usually hear his footsteps above you?’

  ‘Always, every one. He wore expensive shoes and liked to hear the heels.’

  ‘But you didn’t hear him walking around?’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘Wasn’t that unusual?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She looked at me with a frown. ‘The other thing I heard was him pulling up his shutters.’

  ‘Opening a window?’

  ‘I didn’t hear that, just the shutters.’

  I thanked her and walked down the stairs.

  It was beginning to fit together slowly. If someone had whacked Umberto Salati outside, they had come up and opened the shutters. I assumed they had opened the windows as well, though they wouldn’t have made any noise. What the old woman had heard wasn’t her neighbour upstairs – she didn’t hear the usual heavy footsteps of an overweight man in his expensive shoes – it was his murderer.

  *

  My phone was going again. I put it to my ear and heard that superior tone again. ‘Castagnetti? It’s Crespi.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’m awaiting your report.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. It wasn’t due until Monday and even then I doubted I would have anything to say. As far as I’m concerned, deadlines are like hurdles. There to be avoided, nothing else.

  ‘The heirs of Silvia Salati’s estate are anxious that you …’

  ‘Which heirs are left?’ I interrupted. I felt impatient and Crespi was the best person to take it out on. ‘This case has proved crooked from the start.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I was under-briefed by you. Nothing you gave me last week prepared me for this.’

  ‘I thought that was your job.’

  ‘I’m an investigator, not a shit-stirrer. This was all shit and someone’s been using me as a spoon.’

  ‘I see it every day. The report?’

  ‘Monday morning,’ I sighed. I would have to write something. ‘Though it may take longer.’

  ‘I need it for Monday.’

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘I surely don’t need to remind you of economic realities. It takes months to disinvest a deceased person’s …’

  ‘I get it. People want money. Who’s been pushing?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Who wants everything wrapped up so quick?’

  ‘I’m employed to get things done. I don’t need people to press me, I press myself.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. Let me ask you something else, Crespi. Have you got a way in to title deeds to houses, real estate records, that sort of stuff?’

  ‘I can commission searches, certainly.’

  ‘At this time of day?’

  ‘It’s Friday evening.’

  ‘Let me give you some addresses and you could call one of your powerful friends.’

  ‘I don’t have powerful friends.’

  ‘And I don’t have toes. Come on, Crespi.’

  ‘The only channels for that kind of thing at this time of day are the forces of order. They could find out with the click of a mouse.’

  ‘And you can’t?’

  ‘I couldn’t do anything until Monday.’

  I gave him every address I had been to in the previous few days: the Tonin household, Sandro’s flat, the di Pietro place out in Rimini, Roberta’s joint in Traversetolo, Umberto’s loft apartment. It was another long shot, but it needed doing. Whoever had got to Riccardo had almost certainly got to his money too. I wanted to know who was spending big in the months after his disappearance.

  ‘I’ll be round your office on Monday morning,’ I said. ‘You’ll have everything by then?’

  He grunted.

  I started walking home. My whole body was aching. My ribs and right hand still hurt from the beating at the Hotel Palace. Every time I raised my voice above a whisper my ribcage seemed to protest.

  I was in a foul mood. I wasn’t getting anywhere and I felt like smashing something.

  I’ve changed the way I deal with moods. When I was younger I used to walk in a straight line on busy pavements, bumping people off it. I didn’t even notice I was doing it until I was older. That’s when I started dealing with my little furies by attempting to drown them in nocino and mirto and any other digestif that would rot me from the inside. All that happened was that I got drunk and the furies got bigger, so I gave it up.

  Nowadays
I like to think I don’t get black moods, but it’s not true. I’m more serene on the outside, but inside I still get steamed up. The cost of serenity is deep bouts of lethargy when I can’t even see the point of getting off the sofa.

  I can’t see the point because I know that cases like this are never conclusive. There are hints which a jury can accept or reject, but even when hints approach certainty, the courts can still be perverse. But at the moment I didn’t even have many hints.

  I walked home feeling exhausted. Sometimes I overdo it, go in hard on people, start punishing them because I want to punish myself. Don’t ask me what for.

  I suppose that’s why I like my bees. I prefer their company to that of humans. They’re more productive and more precise. They might sting you but they never sting each other. And I like the fact that they sting you. It means that when you start out you have to confront fear. And when you’re used to it all, you still know they could get under your skin, literally. When they don’t sting you’re grateful for the peace, or at least the pact of non-aggression. That’s all civilisation is anyway. A pact of non-aggression.

  I sometimes think murder should be like a bee sting. If you do it, you die. You strike and you’re out. We don’t do that round here any more. Not because we don’t want to, but because we want to pretend we’re at peace. If you start killing people back, everything escalates. Everyone knows there’s a war on then. There always is, only now everyone’s got it, and they’ll start tooling up, or hiding behind someone who is. So instead we pretend everything is civilised, and because we’re civilised we don’t kill. Not at home, anyway. We watch them, wait, eavesdrop, try to anticipate, try to read the warning signs.

  I was beginning to form an idea of what had happened to Riccardo Salati. Ricky hadn’t been the sentimental type. When an ageing lawyer turned up claiming to be his true father, he saw an opening. He knew that something was secret and Tonin would probably pay to keep it that way. He didn’t see a father but a pot of cash.

  Ricky decided it would be an easy shake-down. He threatened to tell all to Tonin’s family. He started asking for money on the quiet. Never calling it a blackmail, just a bit of help to get him through hard times. But he didn’t go away. He kept coming back for more.

  Ricky’s train that night had been almost an hour late. And I knew enough about Ferrovie dello Stato to know that a late train always gets later. If a train is an hour late now, in half an hour it will probably be two hours late. That’s the way with Ferrovie dello Stato. Ricky would have been looking around for some way to kill time. A restless type like him didn’t sit in the waiting room helping old ladies with the crossword.

  So he had wandered around the station looking for something to do. By chance or design, someone saw him at the station and it went from there. Someone had seen to him. Someone decided to do them all a favour.

  It was pretty vague, but it seemed to fit the facts. Once Riccardo had disappeared Tonin kept his paternity hidden because he feared his family was involved. He had lost one son and didn’t want to lose another. He must have guessed years ago that Sandro was involved, and that to tell the world that he, Tonin, was Riccardo’s father, would lead everyone to the boy who, until then, had been his only son: Sandro.

  It added up but I’m not so keen on guesses. For a ‘scomparso’ to become a ‘presunto morto’ you need more than guesses. I turned my keys and let myself into the flat. It was freezing. The boiler must have broken again.

  I took an ingot of beeswax out of a cupboard. It was thick and heavy, so I shredded it with a cheese grater into a pan. I warmed it gently, adjusting the flame so that the deep yellow lump slowly melted.

  The old Salati woman’s death had been a spanner in the works. She had made sure that when she died there would be one last investigation into the disappearance of her son, Ricky. Sandro had overheard about it in the office when the two receptionists had been talking about their work one Saturday morning. So Sandro decided to make the most public declaration of mourning possible and make it look like Riccardo had just been playing hide-and-seek for more than a decade. It was an amateur attempt to put us off the scent. But it was clear that old Massimo Tonin hadn’t made the payment. A lawyer knows all about the documents he leaves in his wake and wouldn’t be that inept. The only explanation was that the son was using the father’s credit card. Nothing new about that in this city.

  Then Umberto found out about his late mother’s love life; he wanted it out with the Tonins. He stormed round there, to the domestic nest rather than the chilly offices of the lawyer. Salati stammered his disgust, and the Tonin woman panicked. She thought Salati knew more than he said and she called her son.

  Sandro assumed his time was almost up. The only way to make sure his disposal of Ricky stayed secret was to dump Umberto. He hangs around outside the block of flats and gets impatient. He buzzes Umberto and tells him to come down, says there’s a delivery, or an emergency, anything to get the man in his sights. When Umberto goes outside Sandro’s on to him. He smacks Salati on the side of the head with anything he has to hand.

  I put on another pan and heated up some oil I had bought in that African shop just off Viale Imbriani. The kitchen began to smell good, like suncream or something, and it made me feel better. It smelt like a childhood summer from long ago. I mixed the oil and the wax and stirred in a few spoonfuls of honey and some vanilla drops. The liquid was transparent but thick. I took it off the heat and poured it into tiny glass pots. I filled about sixty all told.

  Sandro must have gone upstairs. He had seen Salati there with his body broken and had decided to go upstairs and open a door on to Salati’s terrace. Make it look like a suicide and whilst he’s there, check Salati hasn’t done anything foolish like write a confessional. That’s what the old woman heard in the flat below: Sandro pulling up shutters.

  And then he makes his only mistake. He forgets to put Salati’s keys somewhere. He walks out with them for some reason. Maybe his mind was elsewhere, or else he thought Salati really had written it all down and that the keys would be useful. It all came back to the keys.

  Whilst the mixture was cooling it turned white, and I wrote small labels that I stuck on the lids one by one. It was satisfying work, making something beautiful and useful, doing something slowly and methodically. It was the opposite of detection, the hurried discovery of something terrible, a discovery that was useless except for the purposes of punishment or revenge.

  I sat down in the armchair once I was done and tried to think about nothing. It’s harder than it sounds. I tried for half an hour to think of nothing, but I kept seeing keys and Visa slips and Umberto Salati’s bushy moustache caked with dry blood.

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  Saturday

  I woke up a few hours later feeling brittle, like I could snap for lack of sleep. I looked at the clock and it was only just four in the morning. I tried to get up quietly, but every movement seemed loud and clumsy. As I walked towards the kitchen, the tendons in my left ankle clicked as I went.

  The entire city was asleep. In that cold silence every thought seemed powerful and unopposed and fantasies took possession of my mind.

  I sat in the armchair. I could hear traffic in the distance, hear someone’s boiler firing up.

  It was surprisingly noisy once you were used to the quiet. And each sound could have been any number of things.

  I was thinking about what the old Veronesi couple had heard. The cat’s bell, they said.

  I couldn’t tell if it was a dream or something real that I was remembering. Time seemed to pull apart for an instant, allowing that instant to pass in slow motion, to become something more than what it was.

  I stood up and went over to the phone table where I drop my keys each night. I picked them up as silently as possible, but there was still the rattle of kissing metal. They hadn’t heard the cat, I realised, but someone lifting the keys from Umberto Salati’s pocket.

  I slipped the keys into my jacket and counte
d out the eight specimen keys from Sandro Tonin’s bag. I zipped them into my inside pocket and pulled the door shut.

  The fog was thick but the green neon of a chemist’s cross was bright. As the lines came on one by one the air seemed to turn into algae.

  It was still early. I had been outside Sandro Tonin’s flat since before five and there had been no movement. I was yawning every few minutes and wondering whether I should go back to bed.

  At a few minutes past eight Sandro came out dressed for work. He was headed for the office by the look of his pressed trousers. I could hear the sound of his heels clicking as he walked.

  Once he was out of sight I walked up to Sandro’s block and quickly tried one key after another. The gate gave way. I did the same for the door on the inner courtyard and got into the building.

  Inside I slipped the keys back into my pocket and started walking up the stairs. A young boy was heading out in running gear and I stopped him.

  ‘You know which floor Sandro Tonin is on?’

  ‘Third,’ the boy said enthusiastically.

  He ran off and I went up another two floors.

  There were two doors on that floor. I tried the one to the right because there was an umbrella bucket outside the door with an expensive walnut wood handle poking out. That would be Sandro, I thought.

  I rang the bell expecting nothing but I heard the sound of someone inside and eventually the door opened.

  It was a girl. Her face was on and she had a cup of coffee in her hand.

  ‘Sandro in?’ I smiled.

  ‘Just left,’ she said sleepily.

  ‘Who are you?’ I put my good foot inside the door.

  ‘Marzia Colombi. Who are you?’

  ‘Renzo,’ I said. I use the name so often it comes out natural by now. ‘I’m a mate of Sandro’s. Mind if I come in?’

  I walked in without waiting for a reply and shut the door behind me. She looked at me with a mixture of scorn and terror.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said. I pulled out my ID.