“You’re always on the move. We see each other at most a couple of hours in the evening when we’re both exhausted,” she said.
The commissario said nothing. He could not get up from the sofa. He felt paralysed. A deep, atavistic fear, like that experienced probably only by babies on coming into the world, took hold of him. At that moment he was a baby facing a world without Angela.
She got up from her chair to go over and give him a hug. To Soneri, that seemed like the dutiful gesture of a nurse bending over a body rigid with pain, and as he looked at her he was assailed by a previously unknown mixture of attraction and rancour, a magnetic storm of emotions which cancelled every cardinal point. The face he loved was also the face of his executioner. The anguish which gripped him left him unable to move. He had never understood as he did at that moment certain acts of men, the passions that overwhelm them, the follies they commit and which he had been so often called to investigate. For a moment he understood Medioli and the mental short circuit which must have overwhelmed him.
He remained passive as Angela gave him a kiss. He was desperate to enquire about the other man, but it seemed to him puerile to drag out the usual mass of trite questions on the subject. And he was afraid of the comparison.
She took him by the hand, raised him to his feet and led him through to the bedroom. “Don’t think I’m going to ditch you. It’s you I want.”
Soneri allowed her to proceed in her own way, but his anxiety was in no way lessened. He found himself excited but in an unhealthy way, like the hanged man’s erection. It was fear which pushed him to make love, to suggest it as the only way out of that cul-de-sac, so he put his arms around Angela, clinging to her like a drowning man.
*
The following day he was overcome by the convalescent’s weariness, and as he made his way towards the questura he had the strange feeling of being in mourning. He had asked Angela when she would see the other man, but she had merely given a shrug and said with a smile: “Don’t think about it anymore.” Her tone had been anything but reassuring and now that he had a long day ahead of him, he knew that doubt and anxiety would gnaw at him. As he stepped into his office, he felt such deep exhaustion come over him that he was tempted to turn and run away, but he managed to control himself.
From the moment he saw him, Juvara was conscious of the tension etched in every line of the commissario’s face. “We’ve had confirmation from the Bulgarian police that the dead man on the coach was from Bucharest,” he informed him.
“Do we know anything else about him?”
“Nothing yet, but they’ve started to look for members of his family. They’ve haven’t come up with anyone yet.”
“It all went to the dogs when the regime fell,” Soneri muttered to himself, but he was moved by pity for that poor unfortunate and realised that he himself had become more fragile after the blow from Angela.
“There are so many gypsy travellers there that they’ve reached the suburbs of Bucharest, did you know that?” Juvara said. “They move in from the countryside and take up residence on the outskirts of the city. Maybe that’s why they can’t find anyone.”
That old man with no relatives and no-one who remembered his name moved him, and at that moment Soneri felt so close to him as almost to identify the man’s destiny with his own, both of them alone in the world.
“We’ll need to round up the Romanian travelling people who had set up camp near the dump at Cortile San Martino. Make some enquiries. Ask Pasquariello if he can help,” Soneri said.
Before Juvara could lift the telephone, the commissario was himself in conversation with Pasquariello. “Do you by any chance know what became of those Romanians who were at Cortile San Martino?”
“They vanished into the mist, like the bulls.”
“Is that possible?”
“Moving about is not a problem for them. They’re not called travelling people for nothing.”
“I need to find them.”
“If they’ve crossed the provincial border, maybe our cousins in the carabinieri could help. But if I were you, I’d call in one evening at the car park at the sports ground. The Romanians gather there a couple of times a week. We get a lot of calls from local people who say they’re worried about the commotion, but they don’t cause any trouble. They get together to speak their own language, do a bit of trading and send things home. These people have maintained a strong sense of community,” Pasquariello said, with a hint of nostalgia in his voice.
Soneri knew what his colleague was referring to, but he did not want to go into it, preferring to focus on the place he had indicated. “Is that not the hypermarket car park?” he asked as soon as he had located it in his mind.
“It’s shared. It’s really big.”
“I knew the Poles and the Ukrainians went there.”
“Every evening it becomes an Eastern square. A Samarkand in the land of mists.”
When he hung up, still pondering that image, he heard Juvara speaking English. Obviously the person on the telephone had a limited command of the language because the inspector had to repeat himself frequently, raising his voice and spelling out the words. As he put down the receiver, he said: “I asked for someone who could speak English.”
“Who was it?”
“An administrator with the Bucharest police,” Juvara replied, glancing at the notes he had taken.
“What did he have to say?”
“Good question. Listen to this. As far as I could understand, Dondescu has previous convictions for begging and petty theft. They also told me he was a known alcoholic. No fixed abode … relatives …” the inspector continued flicking through his notes, “… no, seemingly he had no relatives.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I could understand. I’ll try again later and hope I get someone with a broader vocabulary.”
The commissario was rising to his feet when Angela came back into his mind. The sudden thought drained him of energy and made him flop back down on his chair. The telephone rang again, relentlessly.
“Excuse me if I’m bothering you, commissario …” Esposito began. Soneri forced himself not to grumble about that ill-timed call, but in any case Esposito went on regardless. “You know that madman? The guy that got gored or buggered or whatever.”
“The singing gypsy,” the commissario suggested, thinking of Mariotto.
“That’s him. He’s in intensive care.”
“They told me it wasn’t all that serious.”
“Did I not tell you that lot tell fairy stories, sir? Those people are as false as Judas. That one was never gored.”
“Did the doctors say that?”
“A colleague in the police office there spoke to the consultant a while ago. He had a head injury. It could have been a bull, but it’s not easy to see how.”
“You’re right. It’s not easy.”
“O.K., sir. I’ve passed on the information. I’ve got my own suspicions, but it’s over to you now.”
This time he managed to get to his feet, put on his overcoat and leave the room without a word. He lit a cigar as he walked along the street. The city, looking as it always did, slipped past him like scenery seen through the window of a train. His distracted, slow and apathetic observations were a mark of his inability to focus on anything. Finally he arrived at the hospital, where he discovered again that the investigation acted as an anaesthetic which made him incapable of any other thought. He read the folder in the police files: wound to the head with probable internal haematoma. He made his way to the ward, where the nurse made him wait a few minutes while she tracked down the doctor. Before long a man in a green jacket with a mask hanging over his chest turned up.
“You want to know about the gypsy?” he said abruptly.
“Mariotto …”
“You’ll get the name from the ward sister,” the doctor interrupted him, without even troubling to introduce himself.
“How is he doing?”
�
��We got him in the nick of time. Any later and he’d have had it. They brought him in ten hours after the incident.”
“In your view, what happened?”
“Surgery’s my business, not policing,” he said impatiently. “I don’t know anymore.”
“I only ask because we were told he’d been gored.”
“The only bullfighting he’s done is while propping up a bar.” The reply was delivered with venom. “He was three times over the drink drive limit.”
It registered with Soneri that he would have to put up with the man’s aggression and deal with it as best he could. He felt drained. “Could you tell me if you think a bull’s horn could have left him in the state he’s in?” he asked calmly.
“He could only have been running for his life with the bull in hot pursuit, seeing as he got it in the neck. Not very honourable for a matador,” the doctor said sarcastically.
“So it’s unlikely?”
“Make up your own mind,” the doctor said and turned away.
Two nurses pushing a trolley nearly bumped into Soneri. He felt like a piece of flotsam tossed about on the current. He needed to hear Angela’s voice and listen to reassuring words from her, but her mobile was switched off. He left the hospital thinking that a relationship ending at the age of fifty might indicate the borderline between a living man and a resigned man, and he had no intention of descending into resignation. He had to be active, but at that moment the only way of nurturing that illusion was work.
In the hospital grounds he saw a group of the gypsy travellers, no doubt on their way to visit Mariotto, but Manservisi was not among them. He was on the point of going over to them when his telephone rang.
“You know those photographs of the girls? The ones the old man who died on the bus had in his bag?” Nanetti blurted out.
“Of course. I have them here.”
“Well, they’re of the same person.”
“They look similar, but I assumed they were only related, sisters or something.”
“I’m telling you they’re the same. These are the results of the analysis carried out by the forensic squad when they scanned the faces. The only difference is the age at which the photos were taken. The first is a teenager, the second a young woman, but they are one and the same.”
The commissario studied the photographs he had pulled out of his duffel coat, and gave a grunt.
“If you look closely, the younger one has no make-up and her hair hasn’t been done, while the other has taken some care over her appearance. That’s what’s misled us.”
“This could mean a lot,” Soneri said, even if he was not sure exactly what.
“What it does mean is that the old man had not seen the girl for some time. If she was related to him, either she’d been in Italy for quite a while or else they had not seen a great deal of each other in Romania.”
“Quite right,” the commissario said, his mind elsewhere. “Is the name of the photographer on the back?”
“Dimitriescu. We found it while we were examining the photos.”
“Where’s he from?”
“Do you think I wouldn’t have told you if it’d been written somewhere?”
The commissario made no reply. At that point, he felt like the old man who, with no more than a few coins in his pocket and the feeble clue of a couple of photographs, had been searching for the girl. The turn of events with Angela had made him hypersensitive, as though his skin had been peeled off.
“Anyway,” Nanetti continued, “these are only the preliminary results. We’ll do the autopsy on the roast today and we’ll see if anything else emerges.”
As soon as he hung up, Soneri made another attempt to call Angela, but once again she failed to reply. He felt rising inside him an anguished frustration which produced a tightening sensation, but at the same time he was aware of a renewed flow of life. He rebelled against the idea of surrender and against submitting to any sense of finality which might result from the passing years. He had no wish to give up, because that would have been similar to encountering one of the many faces of death.
On his return to the office, he found Juvara once more on the telephone speaking English, but this time with greater fluency. Soneri sat down, but immediately jumped to his feet when the mobile in his coat pocket began ringing. “I was in court,” Angela said. “I see you’ve called me a couple of times.”
He was astonished that a phrase of such banality could be of importance to him. “I needed to hear your voice,” he confessed.
“You sound like a little boy who’s just been told off.”
“There are people here,” he said by way of excuse, and in an attempt to conceal his state of mind.
“Is that what it is?” she said mischievously.
“No, I also wanted you to know …”
“Don’t say it. There’s no point. I understood everything from your voice and that’s enough for me,” she whispered.
“Yes, maybe it’s as well if I don’t talk. I’ve never been any good at finding the right words for moments like these. I feel ridiculous and I’ll just end up ruining everything.”
“Exactly. Anyway, both of us know what this telephone call is really all about.”
He felt his hopes rising. He looked up to see Juvara staring at him incredulously. He smiled at him and Juvara pulled himself together. “We know a lot more about Dondescu,” he told Soneri. “He worked for years as a peat digger, but he came down with something and the state gave him a sickness pension. When the regime fell, he was evicted and found lodgings for a while in some institute. He then lived without any fixed abode in various camps with travelling people, drinking too much and getting by as best he could. His pension was revoked some months ago, and it seems it was this decision which induced him to seek his fortune in Italy.”
“So we have to feel nostalgic for the communist regime,” Soneri said. “At least everybody had something to live on. Any relatives?”
“They told me he had a sister who was a lot younger. She was a dancer, but they’ve no idea what’s become of her.”
Soneri gave a gesture of impatience, and opened the newspaper to see a reproduction of the photographs the old man had had with him.
“Capuozzo wasted no time getting this news out.”
On the opposite page there was an article about the discovery of the body. “That was a real field day for the journalists and T.V. cameras, wasn’t it?”
“If I may say so, commissario, I still don’t see what connection there could be between a death by natural causes and a woman’s burnt-up body,” Juvara said, with some hesitation.
“I don’t understand either, but I prefer to carry on believing in coincidences.”
6
“THERE IS NO such a thing as coincidence. There is destiny,” Sbarazza corrected Soneri. He was speaking about himself and about the particularly fortunate day he had enjoyed, and was saying it must have been written in some inscrutable horoscope of whose existence he was convinced beyond all question. On this occasion, he was seated in a place which had been occupied shortly before by a woman who emanated sensuality and good health: perhaps a bank manager. She had taken anolini in brodo and a little Parma ham. “It’s rare for me to be able to have a first course,” Sbarazza confessed. “Generally it’s the main course that’s left.”
He was dressed elegantly and yet there was a nonchalance to his appearance, as though his clothes had been chosen carelessly from the recesses of a cupboard.
“What a woman,” Sbarazza said dreamily. “The quintessence of femininity, voluptuous but with no loss of harmony, lovely hair, exquisite breasts, sensual in voice and manner. It was wonderful to make love in my imagination while her perfume floated around.”
“A different one every day,” Soneri smiled.
They were standing facing the church of the Steccata, under the monument to Parmigianino who was peering down on them with marmoreal irony.
“She was even kind enough to leave today’s
paper,” Sbarazza said, showing it to Soneri, who glanced at the page with the two photographs. “Are these the two you’re looking for?”
“By land and sea.”
“That woman knew one of them. I heard her talking about her to the man lunching with her.”
At that moment, the sun made a faint appearance through the mists and a ray of light glimmered in the sky. That too was a coincidence, or a sign of destiny, as Sbarazza would have put it.
“I must find this woman,” the commissario said.
“I’ve no idea who she is, but if I saw her again, I’d recognise her. You can’t get a woman like her out of your mind,” he said, as though lost in a dream.
“Have you ever seen her before?”
“No, never. I trust she will come back here if it is written that we should meet again,” he went on, still carried away by his private ecstasy.
“What happens if on that happy day she’s starving and wolfs the lot?” Soneri wondered.
“Please!” Sbarazza spoke imploringly. “Spare yourself these banal thoughts. Have the courage to dream because therein alone lies our salvation. Take me. What would I be were I not able to play a part each and every day? A good policeman must know how to release the imagination and gain some insight into what might be.”
“If that’s what you mean, there’s no shortage of people intent on making what doesn’t exist appear.”
“There you are mistaken,” Sbarazza said reprovingly. “There’s no lack of those who desire to be what does not exist, and so they prosaically imitate a model. On the other hand, the dream is life. It is a parallel universe, more noble than the world of things and of the multitudes that go about masquerading. Alceste’s restaurant is always filled with such individuals. Trash …” he concluded with a dismissive, irreverent gesture.
“And what is your dream?”
“To be myself. I play the part of the man I was and can no longer be. I feel like a puppet abandoned at the bottom of a basket. I am poor and noble in a world of wealth and vulgarity. A splendid hoax, is it not?”
The commissario’s silence implied agreement.
Gold, Frankincense and Dust Page 6