Gold, Frankincense and Dust

by Valerio Varesi

  At the entrance to the police station he felt Angela’s silence weigh heavily on him. He thought of calling her, but he was held back by the fear of getting her voicemail. He pushed open the door and made for his office.

  “Commissario, there’ve been calls from …” Juvara attempted to alert him, but the commissario cut him off.

  “I’ve spoken to them already. What I want to know is if anyone has been looking for the girl. Missing person reports, I mean.”

  The inspector shook his head. “No, there are none.”

  “With all these calls …” Soneri said, running his eye over the details on the printout. “When she was alive, there were plenty of them searching for her. Look at all these names.” His thoughts were with those two corpses, the old man and the young woman, lying side by side in the mortuary. Two ghosts whom no-one wanted to claim and who would perhaps be tossed into a pauper’s grave in some cemetery or other on the outskirts.

  He drew himself up short when he realised that his curiosity was being reawakened. The world once again held some interest for him. He picked up the printout and dialled the first number at the top of the page, that of a lawyer, Federico Paglia. The telephone rang a couple of times, and then he heard a bored voice ask who was calling.

  “Commissario Soneri here. I need to talk to you about Nina.”

  “Nina?”

  “Or maybe Ines? Is that what you called her?”

  The lawyer fell silent for a few seconds, then said: “Come in half an hour.”

  Soneri took the printout with him when he went. He was prepared for an evening listening to accounts of the girl, in the hope that this would give him the chance to learn about her from the various men who had desired, possibly even loved, her.

  Paglia’s premises were in the Parmigianino quarter. He saw before him a corpulent man, beginning to go to seed, with prominent, fleshy lips and the face of an ageing guardian angel.

  “Why are you asking me about Ines?” he began immediately, with a slight hint of alarm in his voice.

  “She was killed and her body burned,” Soneri said bluntly.

  For a long time, as he had done on the telephone an hour earlier, Paglia said nothing, and then: “So she was the woman …”

  “The woman in the autostrada incident, yes,” Soneri finished the sentence for him. “You called her …” he paused to look at the printout, “two days before she died. A seventeen minute conversation at two-twenty in the afternoon.”

  “We did speak,” Paglia conceded gloomily. “It is not easy to forget a girl like her.”

  “She was your lover?”

  “For nearly a year.”

  “It was Ines who left you?”

  The man nodded. “It was hard to hold on to her. She was a girl with fire inside her, impossible to forget. I lost my head over her. That girl knew what she was about, like no other. To keep her, you had to lose your head, give your instincts free rein, indulge her desires and to hell with day-to-day living. I could not match her energy.”

  “So it ended?”

  “I must have been mad, but at that time it was exactly what I wanted. Ines gave me everything I had ever desired from a woman.”

  “Did you have the impression she was exploiting you?”

  “No. If she was, she was an extraordinary actress. I always felt loved,” Paglia said.

  The commissario thought for a minute of what exactly it meant to be loved, but this only made Angela’s silence all the harder to bear.

  “I know what you mean,” Paglia said. “Yes, in bed Ines was all raw passion. I never thought it was just an act. At those moments, I always believed she was committed mind and body. Unrestrained, but also attentive. I know precisely what a man of my age is looking for in a lover, but if it lasts more than a year, it can’t be sex alone. I’m not short of cash for that sort of thing. I could have a different one every week.”

  “Did Ines ask for money?”

  “Never. She wanted something different and adventurous. She wanted to travel with me. Or else, she would stand in front of a shop window, enchanted with a ring so that I would end up buying it for her. She never made direct requests.”

  The commissario lingered for a few moments to observe the lawyer as he spoke with great deliberation. Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion, like the clumsy movements of a sea lion. His expression had a flicker of life only when he was recalling his lover. There was something in the man that suggested an undertone of frustration. He must have had an unhappy boyhood, perhaps on account of that unattractive physique which Ines had led him to believe desirable.

  “Do you think she really loved you?” Soneri said as he got up.

  Paglia thought it over. “Yes,” he replied, but with just a hint of uncertainty, as though he was making an effort to force himself to believe it.

  *

  When the commissario left his office, the city seemed more overcast and silent than usual. The peace of those hours when everyone was at dinner helped him recover his liking for the place, but then quite suddenly police cars started speeding by. He passed a couple of officers patrolling the back streets in the city centre, and from their radios he heard an excited exchange of voices indicating a chase. He heard mention of Via Cavestro and of a female student being pursued by a man as far as Via Mazzini. One of the two officers recognised Soneri.

  “How many maniacs are there in this city?” the commissario wanted to know.

  “This is the third alarm since seven o’clock,” the officer said, a pretty young woman with her hair in a ponytail, the radio in her hand. “The first two were false alarms, but in this case it seems there really was an attempted assault.”

  Breathless voices emerged from the radio, followed by the three metallic tones that indicate a break in communication. A police car, lights blazing, raced past at top speed and screeched to a halt in the pedestrian area of Via Cavour. Under the mist, the city seemed to throb, making Soneri think of the bubbling of thermal mud.

  The normal atmosphere had been shattered and not even night could restore its enchanted stillness, composed of a hissing sound from street lights, the whir of bicycle tyres on the wet roads and the drip-drip of moisture from the branches.

  Soneri took the printout from his pocket and dialled the second mobile number on the list, that of one Sebastiano Goretti. Juvara had scribbled in the margin: “craftsman, manufactures domestic fittings”. There was a tone of obvious embarrassment in the voice of the man who answered, perhaps because his wife was nearby. They agreed to meet in Piazza Garibaldi, at the foot of Garibaldi’s statue.

  Goretti was very different from Paglia. Squat and muscular, he had a somewhat aggressive expression.

  “As I said on the phone, I’d like to talk about the Romanian girl, Ines,” the commissario began.

  He found himself facing the same bemused expression the commissario had seen on Paglia. “I’ve no idea who that might be.”

  “Nina? Anyway, the girl you used to telephone a lot,” Soneri said curtly.

  “Doina? Did she have other names,” the man asked suspiciously

  The commissario avoided the question. “We’ve had trouble identifying her. But you and she had a relationship, did you not?”

  “A few months,” the man said warily.

  “And then? You split up? It’s clear you carried on looking for her.”

  Goretti seemed embarrassed, but then his expression softened and he became more amenable. “I completely lost my head over that woman,” he said, as though he were ashamed of himself.

  “And you can’t get her out of your mind?”

  The man nodded in agreement. “Precisely because I was head over heels in love, I allowed myself to become obsessively jealous, and so she wanted to end it.”

  It crossed Soneri’s mind that he was running the same risk. But how could he be other than jealous?

  “I understand,” he said, in a tone so sympathetic that Goretti was surprised.

  “I have a wi
fe and two children, as well as a business. I just couldn’t keep up with her. Every time she went off, I had the suspicion that she was seeing some other man, and so I kept on calling her. I couldn’t cope with …”

  Goretti stopped, but the commissario grasped everything with a clarity he found irksome. The account given by Goretti reawakened his own anxieties, and made him think that perhaps every man’s life followed the same pattern.

  “So what did you do?”

  Goretti raised his head and gave him a puzzled look. The question appeared to include an accusation, and yet the tone revealed a curiosity that was far removed from the inquisitorial.

  “It was she who did everything. She disappeared for a week. When we met up again, she told me she was sorry but she couldn’t carry on that way.”

  “Did you believe she already had another man? After all, she was a hot-blooded woman and judging by what little I’ve picked up …”

  “I simply don’t know. She never gave me the impression of being a woman who went looking for men, and that was one of the things I liked about her. I’m the jealous type, and I could feel when the red mist was about to descend on me. I could never have a relationship with someone who made a display of herself. Doina had everything I wanted: good-looking but discreet, passive, always full of apprehensions …”

  “With someone who was so beautiful, however …” the commissario objected.

  “She never took the initiative, not even when we were alone, understand? I adore women who let you get on with things and who are maybe just a touch reserved. I like the idea of dominating them. No perversions, eh?” Goretti hastened to add. “Just the natural things between a man and a woman. She was my baby doll … my naïve baby doll.”

  “Did you meet her only recently? I mean, not long before they murdered her.”

  “Don’t tell me she was the girl …” Goretti murmured. He was silent for a few moments, before adding, “I can’t imagine who could have … I was furious because she’d left me, but I hadn’t lost all hope.”

  Nor had Soneri lost all hope with Angela, but her silence seemed to suggest that the end was at hand, and that was one of the reasons why, shortly after leaving Goretti, he made another attempt to call her. Her mobile was still switched off. He tried her office but got only the voicemail, and the same with her landline at home. By now feeling highly agitated, he felt he should do something, but he had no idea what exactly, so he made for the wine bar in Via Farini. When he got there, the first thing he saw was his rival seated in the corner, munching a piadina as though he had just finished work and that was his supper. He was by himself, but perhaps he was waiting for someone. Soneri took a seat at a spot where he could keep an eye on him, but the other man seemed to take no interest in what was going on around him, only occasionally looking up at the bar. The commissario took out the list of callers and dialled another number. Resigned to listening to another tale of frustrated passion, he wondered if he was up to it.

  Running down Juvara’s printout, he saw the next name was Ernesto Greci, a company director. For him Nina was Monia, as Greci himself explained when the commissario referred vaguely to the “girl”.

  “It’s Monia I’d like to talk to you about. I could come to your place or we could meet somewhere or other.”

  “No, I’ll come. Where?” the man said, obviously mildly alarmed.

  The commissario hesitated a moment, as long as it took to look around and glance at his rival. “I’m in the wine bar in Via Farini.”

  In the meantime, the smells in the bar reminded him he had not eaten, so he ordered a plate of salame and torta fritta, with some shavings of Parmesan and a half litre of red wine. Since he was moving in a climate of infidelity, he chose a Barbaresco rather than a local wine.

  The other man was still eating, and the commissario studied him with a policeman’s trained eye. He was tall, distinguished looking, took care over his appearance and had the refined features of someone whose wealth went back more than one generation. He expected Angela to walk in at any moment, and was curious to see how she would react when she saw him there. Would she greet him like an old friend or would she pretend not to notice him? It was a choice which might mark the end of their relationship, but at that moment the commissario felt nothing but anger.

  Greci arrived first. He was in his fifties, with white hair, round spectacles and a bow tie. At first sight he appeared a strange individual, but when he began speaking Soneri once again found himself dealing with another predictable story of abandonment.

  “Monia and I played at being husband and wife. She grasped the fact that I longed for the ordinary life I’d never had. I’ve travelled a lot and collected a string of short-lived relationships. Now I’d like to have a family, but maybe it’s too late.”

  Soneri gave him a hearing, enduring again the rise of the now customary, perhaps incurable, pain. Inwardly he cursed the investigation he was carrying out, even if the ache it caused was beneficial, like a vaccine.

  “And was Monia a good wife? he asked, throwing a resentful glance in the direction of his rival, two tables away.

  “With her I lived the best months of my life,” the man replied, as though in a dream. “Every evening I came home to find her in the kitchen, wearing an apron, and the table set. I felt happy. Sometimes we would go out to the cinema, or else we just sat on the settee watching television. On Saturday evenings we used to dine out and return home as happy as two young lovers. Monia knew how to conduct herself on all occasions. She looked like a real lady, older than her years. Even in our more intimate moments, she displayed a certain bashfulness. I adored her for that,” Greci concluded, seemingly still in a dream.

  The commissario listened to him and, in spite of his anguished state, he felt somewhat consoled, but when he turned towards his rival, that small dose of medicine lost its force in the face of a virus whose hold was tightening.

  “How did it end?” He put the question to ward off his own troubles.

  “I don’t really know. One day she told me she had to return urgently to Romania because her mother had been in an accident. I phoned her many, many times but something had gone. She was cold, offhand, superficially cordial but very formal. I knew it was all over and I felt my world collapse around me. My dreams had lasted as long as a cat’s leap.”

  Soneri was amused at this typically Parma expression.

  “All dreams last that long,” he declared. He would have preferred to say something like “as long as life”, but he dragged himself back to the subject in hand, sticking relentlessly to the investigation. “What’s your view on what happened?”

  “I have no idea,” Greci said dejectedly. “Maybe she found somebody else, or maybe she was fed up with me. I understand that to a young girl the routine of married life can seem deadly dull, but she did what she liked during the day and I didn’t even enquire into how she passed her time. On the other hand, I knew that sooner or later … thirty years is quite a gulf, but I deluded myself that these girls who were born into poverty would be happy with the life of a wealthy lady. She often said to me: ‘I live like a queen here. You don’t know what it’s like in Romania. In my village there was nothing but hovels and mud.’ I thought that would be enough to keep her tied to me. After all, I denied her nothing.”

  “There was strong competition …” Soneri insinuated cynically, observing the other man closely, who continued eating calmly, with every appearance of serenity.

  “I know. There’s no shortage of beautiful people, all much younger than me and with plenty of money. It’s a market like any other, and there’s always somebody able to make a higher or better bid.”

  “Indeed,” Soneri said, tiring of Greci’s whining tone. What was really preying on his mind was the realisation that in that market he felt he was himself losing out to that distinguished, attractive, probably cultured and unquestionably wealthy individual at the other end of the room.

  “But who could have killed her?”

&nb
sp; “That’s what I’m determined to find out. That’s why I’m talking to everyone I know of who saw her in recent times,” the commissario said, omitting any reference to the different descriptions and the myriad names that Nina went under. She was a different woman with each man. She was so many women. Perhaps that was a female characteristic and maybe Angela too concealed a different face.

  “She was the object of many men’s desire. You were one of many men, did you know that?”

  Greci remained silent for a few minutes and then shook his head gravely. “I never wanted to know anything about her private affairs. I preferred to live happily without prying, because I was always afraid of finding out I wasn’t the only one. But inside myself I had my suspicions. A woman as beautiful and as intelligent as she was …”

  “Did you know she was pregnant?”

  Greci blanched and heaved a deep sigh as he ran his finger round his shirt collar. “Do you think I might have been the father?” he stuttered.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know enough about her life. The D.N.A. test will clear up the matter. Certainly, the dates coincide. You can’t be excluded.”

  Another sigh. When faced with Nina, all these men were reduced to the status of motherless children, and yet in life, were they not combative animals? However, he could not conceive of that Romanian woman as being cynical and calculating. Rather she appeared to him like an impoverished girl who, with the tenacity of a starving cat, clung to life with her fingernails, unlike that man seated not far from him now. Having finished his meal, he wiped his lips with the elegant little movements etiquette demanded, and turned an Olympian glance around the room. Soneri felt a surge of detestation for him, on Nina’s behalf as well as his own. Perhaps she had had her fill of men like him and of having to put up with their haughty ways.