The Salati Case

by Tobias Jones

  Dall’Aglio was frowning. It was just an idea of mine, but it was one of those that seemed to make sense retrospectively. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not for now.

  We stood there like an embittered couple, unable to separate because we couldn’t get by without the other. We knew we had both been stupid and didn’t want to talk for fear of revealing the fact. He thought I was reckless. I thought he was passive.

  For once I thought he might be right. Since Monday, there had been two fresh corpses and I knew it was my interfering which had, in some ways, produced them. That, Dall’Aglio would tell me, was why the police tactic was sometimes to watch instead of act. I had rushed in as usual, and now one of the suspects, Bocchialini, was as much use to us as a sieve in a flood. We stood there continuing the argument in silence, watching the men measuring up the body.

  ‘Come on,’ he said eventually, ‘let’s go and find the Tonin woman.’

  We went into the main house. The door was open but everything was in darkness. She must have known we were coming because she was standing halfway down the stairs.

  ‘You heard about Bocchialini?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ She looked up sharply.

  ‘He just swallowed a bullet. Put his grey matter all over your garden tools.’

  She had her mouth wide open and was holding both hands over it. Her fingers eventually went on to her lower teeth as if trying to open her mouth still wider. I figured, given that reaction, he had been more than her gardener and chauffeur.

  ‘That’s one trigger you didn’t pull,’ I said, wanting to kick her whilst she was down. ‘My carabinieri colleagues are getting very impatient.’

  I smiled at her. She was staring at us, but she was rubbing her hair into a mess.

  We started walking up the stairs towards her. ‘It’s all over now,’ Dall’Aglio said. ‘It’s finished.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Let me tell you how it happened,’ I said, ‘and you tell me when I go wrong.’ She was looking beyond us at the armed officers who were standing at the bottom of the stairs a few metres below us. ‘Back in ’95 your husband told you about his fling with the Salati woman. Told you about Riccardo. That was a hard hit to take, but there was worse. Young Ricky was bleeding your husband dry and you didn’t like the look of it. Call it blackmail, or guilt money, or whatever, that boy was costing your family millions. The last straw was when your unfaithful husband gave his bastard son a brick of cash on San Giovanni.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘You told Bocchialini to go and pick Riccardo Salati up from the station. Someone carrying eighty-five million lire or whatever it was doesn’t want to hang around a station. His train was late and the cost of a ride to Rimini would have seemed like peanuts.’ I stopped and looked at her. She was shaking her head. ‘Bocchialini picked him up and you sat in the back of the car and strung his windpipe. You took him some place and buried him. An unmarked grave for the bastard. What was it? The river Po?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  I looked at her. ‘You and Bocchialini had something going on. It wouldn’t surprise me if Sandro was his son.’

  ‘That’s your fantasy, is it?’

  I watched her close and she looked like she was waking up from a fantasy of her own. You could see it in the smug way she smiled, the way she pulled her clothes around her as if becoming aware for the first time that she was a performer, acting out a role she had written herself.

  ‘So you dumped him somewhere and thought nothing more of it. Life went on. No one suspected you. No one even suspected your family. But then last Friday Silvia Salati dies and leaves a will. She hires me. She wants the whole case reopened. You hear about it on the grapevine, because your son heard about it in his office on Saturday. He told you that a private dick was on the case. So you panicked and placed a mourning notice in La Gazzetta. Only you pay with your husband’s card and not in cash. That’s not the kind of mistake a lawyer would ever make.’

  She was trying to force a smile, but it had melted on her face and she looked strained, like smiling was the last thing she could do. ‘You haven’t got any evidence for any of this.’ She wasn’t denying it any more, just challenging me to prove it.

  ‘On Wednesday,’ I went on, ‘when Umberto finds out his brother Riccardo was from your side of the fence, he works something out. His little brother wasn’t the sort to get all emotional about a long-lost father. Riccardo was the sort who would ask for a loan before asking for a hug. Umberto realised that Ricky would have been round to yours asking for cash pretty quickly. And he was right, wasn’t he? On Wednesday Umberto worked out what Riccardo must have been doing. He knew who would have wanted him out the way, and started leaning on you. There was only one thing to do. Send him the same place as his brother Riccardo.’

  Her eyes were closed now, like she was concentrating. She was shaking her head vigorously in denial.

  ‘You rang his bell, got him to come down into the courtyard, and you hit him hard with something from Bocchialini’s shed. Or maybe he was down there anyway, standing outside in the courtyard having a cigarette. Once you’ve rearranged his skull, you decide to go upstairs to open the window to make it look like suicide, only then you have his keys in your pocket. I thought it was your son Sandro when I woke up this morning, but I realised it couldn’t be him. Not just because he’s a no- hoper junkie who only thinks about scoring Colombian sherbet. It couldn’t have been him because he wears expensive shoes which make a noise when he walks. The woman below Salati’s flat didn’t hear a thing. It must have been a short, slim person, probably a woman.’

  I had wound her up so much she was wagging her finger at me. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’ Her face looked much older when not made up. There were vertical wrinkles on her upper lip.

  Dall’Aglio had been watching the whole scene and now stepped forward to read her her rights. One of his men clicked the bracelets on her.

  ‘You’ll have to come to the Questura too,’ Dall’Aglio said to me. ‘We’ll need a statement.’

  I drove there in a daze. It was well beyond midnight, but the streets of the city were busy with kids out on the town, revving their mopeds and showing off their new clothes.

  Dall’Aglio took me down into the basement where they had the interview rooms. It was cold and damp and a bare light bulb hung from the ceiling on a frayed wire. He and another officer listened to everything I said like I was under suspicion myself. They took me through the whole week, asking me to repeat everything time and again.

  Dall’Aglio didn’t seem in the mood to take advice from me, but when the statement was all printed up and signed, I told him to follow the money.

  ‘When Riccardo went missing,’ I told him, ‘he was carrying a large sum in cash.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Whoever clocked Riccardo Salati had a tidy sum to invest. Look into Teresa Tonin and Giulio Bocchialini’s finances from back then. You’ll find something. Something will come up.’

  He looked at me like there was no trust left. There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Sir?’ A young man came in. ‘Lieutenant Bollani wanted you to see this. That man we arrested this afternoon, Sandro Tonin … he had this inside his wallet.’

  He passed Dall’Aglio a transparent plastic bag. Inside was a credit card. Dall’Aglio held the top of the bag and twisted it so that he could see the name of the card. ‘Massimo Tonin,’ he read.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ I said. ‘Sandro was using his father’s credit card. He phoned in the mourning notice on Sunday. Check his phone records and I’ll lay a bet with you that he called our dear Gazzetta.’

  ‘OK.’ Dall’Aglio flicked the boy out of the room with his fingers.

  ‘He was using his father’s card,’ I said, staring at Dall’Aglio. ‘He paid for the mourning notice. It wasn’t anything to do with Massimo Tonin. Only having already lost one son, Tonin didn’t want t
o lead the police to another, so he didn’t say anything about it.’

  Dall’Aglio looked across at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t make Sandro a murderer.’

  ‘You were pretty keen to charge old Tonin when you thought he had done it.’

  ‘He was keeping secrets, that made me suspicious.’

  ‘Well, that mourning notice has been a distraction from the start.’

  ‘That’s why it was placed, I suppose,’ said Dall’Aglio. ‘Time for a little interrogation,’ he said, standing up. It was his way of dismissing me.

  I walked out into the corridor. Even at this time of night there were dozens of officers walking briskly from one room to the next.

  There was a coffee machine at one end of the corridor. I dropped a coin in the slot and listened to the strange whirring as a white, plastic thimble dropped into metallic fists and filled with the steaming black liquid they were passing off as coffee.

  I could feel disappointment come over me like mud. I felt suddenly heavy. I liked conclusions and this was only the pretence of one. I seemed to have resolved a case that was incidental to Riccardo’s disappearance. Everything pointed to Teresa Tonin and yet there seemed nothing that could connect her to Riccardo’s vanishing act. I hadn’t even resolved what I had been commissioned to do in the first place: to certify whether Riccardo was dead or alive.

  I had hoped that all the loose ends of the case could be resolved, everything wrapped up by a culprit’s proud confession. Instead, I was left to speculate about everything that we didn’t know. We still had no murder weapon for Umberto and no body for Riccardo. Kind of made a conviction difficult, if not impossible. All we had was a pile-up of probabilities. The evidence was about as hard as butter on a beach.

  That meant that soon enough the press would start to listen to Teresa Tonin’s side of the story. The pendulum of public opinion would swing behind the poor mother. She would hire a lawyer, maybe even her husband, to insabbiare. It happened all the time around these parts. Contradictory evidence would turn up in unexpected places. Investigating magistrates were dropped from a case because of some stitch-up. Whispering campaigns cast enough doubts to make even a hot gun unreliable. The obvious got silted up with the decoy, until the decoy became the story and the obvious walked free. That’s what Italian justice is all about.

  It was the middle of the night and I was just about to walk out the back door when I caught a glimpse of the gardener’s widow. She was sitting in a chair with a female officer next to her. She was still shaking and staring into space.

  I walked up to them. The widow looked at me like she still believed I had pulled the trigger.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. The female officer straightened up. ‘Could I ask something?’

  They both just looked at me.

  ‘How long had your husband worked for the Tonins?’

  ‘Thirty years.’

  ‘That right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Did you resent the time your husband spent at Tonin’s house?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Do you think he went beyond the call of duty?’

  She held my stare. ‘He was always on duty. That’s what it’s like when you’re domestics. You live on the job. We’ve lived in their grounds all our married life. And now, when they find themselves in trouble, it’s Giulio who dies.’

  I nodded slowly, trying to show her that I shared her indignation. ‘Where was your husband from?’ I asked.

  ‘His family were all from near Borgotaro.’

  ‘Up in the hills?’

  ‘Sure. His mother owned a small farm up there.’

  ‘What about his father?’

  ‘Died in the war.’

  ‘Where’s the farm exactly?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ She said it without malice.

  ‘Where is it?’ I repeated.

  ‘Just beyond the bridge on the left. He sold it when his mother died.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A few years ago.’

  ‘What was it called?’

  ‘Il Mulino.’

  I looked at her. She replied so absent-mindedly that she must have thought I was just passing the time of night. She hadn’t put anything together yet, had no idea quite who her husband had been.

  Dall’Aglio was still at his desk at 4 a.m. That’s what I liked about him. He worked my hours. I knew what I needed but he wouldn’t like it.

  ‘Listen,’ I said to him as he finally put down the receiver, ‘there’s been a lot of blood spilt. Two lives lost, maybe three. I still need to resolve the Riccardo Salati case and I’m going to ask you something unusual. I need a dozen men.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Your chance to be a hero,’ I said.

  ‘Why do I get the impression that’s a role you want for yourself?’

  ‘That’s bull. Nothing I want less, I assure you. I’m not the one with medals.’

  He patted his chest and looked at me with a smile. He liked the idea of being a hero. There aren’t many people who don’t. He wanted to walk halfway down those front steps and tell the doubting media that he had an incredible story from fourteen years ago that all his predecessors had failed to crack.

  ‘When?’ He looked at me with resignation.

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  ‘It’s morning already.’

  He agreed in the end. He took more convincing than a nun in a nightclub, but eventually he sighed and said OK. He said the order would go out as soon as the new shift came on at 8 a.m.

  I walked home exhausted. I sat in the flat trying to think things through, but I was too tired. The flat was a mess and I couldn’t even cook something to eat because the pans were full of dried beeswax and oil. A week’s worth of washing-up was balanced in the sink like a cartoon, two columns rising to shoulder height.

  I must have been thinking about my bees, because I suddenly realised that families in Italy are just like hives. It’s where the woman rules. She rules because she’s a mother, and she never retires. She fights for her children until the death, and – in Silvia Salati’s case – beyond it.

  Sunday

  I slept until mid-morning. When I finally got out of bed I saw something I hadn’t seen for weeks. The sun was out and the sky was a dark blue. It was as if the thick, cloying fog of winter had opened up and decided to allow us one blissful reminder of what it would be like when the spring really arrived. Out of my window I could see the cupolas of the city skyline looking plump and august. It felt like I had rediscovered old friends.

  After breakfast I got in the car and drove through the city. It was unrecognisable. People were sitting out and taking their coffees in the bright cold. Instead of selling umbrellas to damp pedestrians, immigrants were now selling sunglasses and pirate CDs on flat cardboard. Cigarette smoke spiralled in the sun. The trattorie, which had been eerily quiet all week, now sounded their atonal percussion of cutlery and cork-screws as they got ready for the Sunday trade. The bellowing joviality was back in full swing.

  I drove out to Borgotaro. It didn’t take long.

  The day seemed even more magnificent up there. People were walking around the bars. Most were wearing dark glasses. You could see the mountains, their peaks only a little higher than where you were standing, their snow glistening like fior di latte.

  The pasticcerie were doing a roaring trade, piling dozens of bite-size puffs on to rectangular trays. I looked around the place and saw fur and ribbons and the glint of wine glasses being refilled. It felt like the typical, affluent Sunday morning in the sun. People were even buying ice-cream. Polystyrene baths were being filled with seedy crimson sorbets and pale, shiny creams.

  I found Il Mulino easily enough. The farmer and his wife were standing around. They looked horrified at the number of uniforms crawling all over their land. I watched the cadets with their trowels. They were lined up like toy soldiers and worked north to south, then east to west, micro-ploughing the soil.


  The mess, the farmer must have known, would be nothing compared to the publicity. He might already have an idea what they were looking for. The carabinieri don’t normally plough your field to sow corn, he knew that. He could see the value of his land collapsing before his eyes. Human remains don’t normally add much to the value of your pasture.

  I spoke to the commanding officer, one of the uniforms who used to make Dall’Aglio’s coffee only a year ago. He was so young I couldn’t help being condescending.

  ‘Ask the locals about any caves, ravines, rivers, wells, woods.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said, defensively.

  ‘Ask about any place old Bocchialini might have known, places he used to go to. Clubs he used to belong to.’

  He shouted something to one of his men to make sure that I knew he wasn’t listening any more.

  ‘Who have you interviewed?’ I asked.

  He didn’t say anything, which I took to mean he hadn’t spoken to anyone. I walked away, heading towards the farmhouse where I could see the farmer with his hands on his hips.

  The officer called me back. ‘This is being treated as a crime scene,’ he shouted.

  ‘No entry?’

  ‘None.’

  I walked back towards him and tried to keep calm. ‘I’m practically in charge of this investigation. I wouldn’t say Dall’Aglio’s taking orders from me, but he’s taking advice, you with me?’

  The man looked at me like I had urinated on his shoes.

  I set off towards the farmer again and the officer ignored me.

  ‘You know anything about this?’ I said to the farmer.

  He shook his head.

  ‘They haven’t told you what they’re looking for?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘You don’t know what this is about?’

  He didn’t like that many questions, and spat something out of his mouth on to the path.