He was distracted by Greci who moved uncomfortably in his seat. His worried expression showed that he urgently wanted to be on his way. As he got up, he betrayed signs of embarrassment, as though he were struggling to find the right way to take his leave.
“If you’ve no more questions,” he murmured uncertainly.
Soneri remained sitting and shook his head. Greci turned and walked slowly off. At the same moment, Soneri saw that his rival too was on his feet. He stood at his table, took out a wallet and extracted a few notes, laid one beside the plate and without so much as deigning to turn to the waiter, made for the exit with studied hauteur. Soneri too got up and reverted to the role of investigator. He was tempted to follow his man, but did no more than observe him from the door of the wine bar. The exercise would have been futile in any case, since the man climbed into a Mercedes and drove away.
Back in the bar, he tried once more to contact Angela, but there was no reply. The suspicion that she had a date with that man sharpened until it became an acute pain, at which point he decided to take refuge at home, a wounded beast.
11
THE MOMENT HE woke up, he felt a sense of unease weigh heavily on him as though it were a mask on his face. He had slept very badly, tormented by nightmares. One in particular recurred: he was in hospital, stretched out on a bed in a corridor, wearing nothing but a pair of underpants and the green jacket surgeons wear, with half the city drawn by curiosity to stare at him. This dream made him restless and woke him up time after time, but when he succeeded in getting back to sleep, the dream returned and the cycle began again. After several nightmares of this type, he found himself wide awake, lying in the feeble light filtered through the shutters. He was aroused to daily life by the first ring of the telephone.
“I was looking for you yesterday evening,” Angela said, materialising directly from his thoughts. “You had your mobile switched off.”
“It was quite late when I switched it off, whereas yours is never on.”
“I was very busy.”
“With what?” he heard himself saying before he realised this was an inappropriate question.
“Shall we meet today?” she said.
“When?”
“Two o’clock? It’s a quiet time.”
Soneri wanted to ask why not in the evening, but this time he managed to restrain himself.
“Alright,” he limited himself to saying, and it was only when he had hung up that he realised how accommodating he was being.
A few seconds later, Juvara came on the line. “Commissario, Dottoressa Marcotti’s search warrant for the apartment in Via Cavallotti was delivered, but she said you hadn’t given her the precise address.”
It was true. He was not sure of it, since pure intuition had led him to that renovated block of flats and the board with the residents’ names had only the internal numbers.
“She said she trusted you and that you could add the number later. In any case, she said, there’ll be no-one in the flat so there would be no problem breaking the rule this once.”
That woman was a marvel. She worked twelve hours a day and was always on top of her job. She had even managed to dispel Soneri’s foul mood, so much so that now he felt himself providentially delivered from the nightmares.
“Get a joiner who can open doors to come along to 12 Via Cavallotti in an hour’s time,” the commissario said, happy to get into the flow of the day’s work.
He trusted his instincts, as he always did. When he arrived at the appointed place, he found a police car already there. Esposito got out, plainly unamused by the inconvenience he had been put to.
“They’ve got me working as a taxi driver now. Next thing I’ll have to stick a brush up my arse and sweep the streets when I go out on patrol,” he grumbled.
Meanwhile a squat little man, toolbox in hand, climbed out of the back seat. “Unless it’s one of those reinforced doors, this shouldn’t take too long,” he reassured the policemen.
Esposito leaned against the open roadside door and put on a mock expression of patience. “Meantime, I’ll direct the traffic.”
“Which apartment are we talking about?” the joiner said.
“I don’t know,” Soneri replied, to the man’s puzzlement.
But it was not hard to find. They rang the first bell on the ground floor and an elderly, slightly intimidated, women came out.
“We’re looking for a Romanian girl who lives here and …” Soneri began to explain, while the incredulous joiner waited two steps behind him.
The lady did not even give him time to finish the question. She pointed upwards, not vaguely but to the flat immediately above hers. They climbed the stairs and Soneri told the man to get on with it.
“Are you sure?” he said uncertainly.
Soneri nodded.
“As long as I have your authorisation …” The joiner pulled out an iron implement with tiny notches on the sides, stuck it into the keyhole and began manoeuvring it around in a series of slow, seemingly repetitive movements. After a few minutes of patient work, the door sprang open and Soneri went in, but only after informing Nanetti. He and his squad would do the real search.
The decor was somewhat cold and the apartment seemed not to have been much lived in. It looked more like a photograph in an architecture magazine. Glass and steel predominated. Soneri felt he was in a hotel suite, and wandered about looking for the personal touch. In the bedroom he found a wardrobe with mirrored doors, a chest of drawers and a bedside cabinet, all in an aluminium colour. He took out a handkerchief, pulled open one of the wardrobe doors and found the kind of clothes a normal young woman would wear: trousers, skirts and casual tops in bright colours. In the next compartment, he found more elegant clothes and even an evening dress alongside trouser suits, coquettish lace outfits, miniskirts and below-the-knee pleated skirts, T-shirts that must have been tight-fitting and sober jerseys. It was as if four different women lived in the same apartment. He opened the chest of drawers and found the array of lingerie the boutique owner in Via Garibaldi had described to him. She was indeed a doll, as Goretti had defined her: she put on and took off costumes, like a doll.
Nanetti arrived while he was in the bedroom, trying to come to terms with the ambiguous, impenetrable atmosphere which hung around the house. As he came in, Nanetti gave a whistle: “What luxury!”
“I get the impression of utter misery,” Soneri said.
“Don’t start off on one of your bouts of moralising. Take a look around! You can’t deny that girl had style.”
“I don’t deny it, but I can’t see a single sign of real life,” Soneri said, running his finger along the sideboard, leaving his prints in the dust.
“Don’t touch, or else you might pollute the evidence,” Nanetti said jokingly.
Soneri, lost in his own thoughts, made no reply.
“What a night it was last night,” Nanetti went on. “There were at least ten rapists scampering about in the dark. A complete shambles.”
“I wonder who’s really attacking all those women,” Soneri muttered, thinking to himself that this phantomatic personage who appeared and disappeared in the mist had taken the place of the bulls.
“He’s no fool, seeing as he always manages to get away.”
“Not surprising if for the most part people report seeing ghosts.”
“How many ghosts do we see, eh?”
“A lot. Or maybe the same one in different disguises,” the commissario said, thinking of Nina.
Nanetti handed him an envelope from the top drawer in the chest. Soneri accepted it unthinkingly and took out a white sheet of paper folded in four. There was one sentence, in capital letters scrawled in black ink by a broad nib. SHITTY ROMANIAN, COW, BLOODY WHORE. BREAK OFF WITH HIM OR YOU WILL COME TO A NASTY END.
“Whoever wrote this was not a particularly nice human being,” Soneri said, showing the page to Nanetti.
“Especially not with foreigners.”
Soneri put the paper in
his pocket and stood in silence as officers from the forensic squad passed him on both sides as though he were an island in a dual carriageway. Nanetti moved off to organise the search, and Soneri realised that he had no more business in a house which made him feel like he was in a pharmacy.
“Can I go then?” the joiner said.
The commissario nodded and went out with the man following him. Esposito was on his telephone in front of the block of flats. “I’m on duty in Via Cavallotti. I can’t go chasing after the maniac with this man in my car.” Pasquariello had probably asked him to check a report but had forgotten about the joiner.
“Commissario, they’ve all gone mad here. People are calling the emergency number every time they see a man peeing against a wall. They’re all scared stiff.”
He helped the man into the car and set off with tyres screeching. Soneri walked off in the direction of the questura, along Via Garibaldi as far as Piazza della Pace, then past the Glauco Lombardi museum, the Regio, the Steccata, the Parmigianino, before turning into the portico in Via Mazzini, a monstrosity of post-war reconstruction in stern, geometric cementwork. As he was wondering how he could accustom himself to such ugliness, he ran into Angela with the other man. She seemed decidedly nervous, but she stopped to say hello. The man, however, drew aside to look in a shop window.
“We’re going for a coffee. Want to join us?” she said.
“I’m busy,” Soneri said, shaking his head and stepping back. “But I see you are too.”
“You’re wrong,” Angela said, sounding disappointed. “Anyway, we’ve got to talk.”
“As soon as we can find the time,” Soneri said, turning away. He did not know what had come over him at that moment – a mixture of anger, frustration, regret and that sense of emptiness which he had felt obliged to placate with a flourish of ill-tempered pride. As he crossed the piazza, listening to the clock on the Palazzo del Governatore strike eleven, he had to admit to himself that there was more to it than mere jealousy. The truth was that compared to that man he felt inferior in every way – less imposing, less well-off, less good-looking and even ridiculous in his duffel coat as against the other’s designer suit. Why would Angela choose him?
When he got to the office, Juvara noticed the foul mood etched on his face and avoided attempting to engage him in conversation.
“Any news?” Soneri asked after a while.
“Dottoressa Marcotti wants to know the precise address of the apartment you searched. And she has also decided to have genetic tests carried out on the foetus.”
“Do we know the sex?” the commissario said. His discomfort had once again brought back unwelcome memories.
“No, but perhaps the police doctor …”
Soneri made a shrug and said it did not matter. He was already floundering with various thoughts in his mind when his mobile vibrated. You were a shit just now. Come at two. The text read like an order, and the commissario wondered whether to put his pride first and turn down the invitation, or to accept and show how reasonable he was being. Eventually he settled for the second option.
To take his mind off the encounter, he set to work. He wrote down the names of Nina’s ex-lovers he had spoken to the night before and handed the paper to the inspector. “See if you can find out anything more about these three,” he told him. “You could maybe work on it with Musumeci. They’ve all got an alibi for the night of the murder, but you never know.”
He remembered there was another number he should check, one belonging to a firm of goldsmiths. “What’s the company name?” he asked Juvara.
“Golden,” came the reply. “They’re at Lemignano di Collecchio.”
“Is there anything more about them?”
“The owner is called Giulia Martini, and her daughter, Micaela, is a partner.”
“What do they do? Make jewellery?”
“Commissario, this might surprise you, but they do a lot of work for some diocesan curias. They make sacred objects in gold and silver. There are samples of their work in a catalogue. If you want, you can see it online. Just type in www—”
Soneri interrupted him at once. Nothing seemed to him more absurd than hours spent glued to a screen which substituted imitations for reality. He was convinced it was one of the many forms of hypocrisy which were becoming more and more widespread in the world: the incapacity to look at things as they really were, even when they were disconcerting. The commissario found the whole phenomenon stomach-churning.
“I’ll drop by tomorrow. This Martini, is she married or divorced?”
“I told you, she works for the priests. She has a lawfully wedded husband, name of Roberto Soncini, the father of Micaela, but he’s not on the board. He travels and is in charge of the sales.”
The conversation was disturbed by a commotion in the courtyard. Half a dozen police cars came in one after another, followed by other unmarked vehicles. They all parked under the fir trees. Two officers, one on either side of a foreign-looking figure whose arms they were holding tightly, emerged from the mêlée of slammed doors, shouts and curses. Only when the first flashbulb lit up the grey of the courtyard did Soneri realise that with remarkable perfection of timing the press had also arrived.
“So they’ve finally got him,” Juvara said.
The rapist who had been terrifying the city for two days had ended up in a police trap, meaning that Parma could go back to considering itself the best of all possible worlds.
“That’s one case solved,” the inspector said.
“We’ve still a long way to go with ours, and it seems to me even more serious.”
“Commissario, people care most about the immediate threat. Do you expect them to care about one murdered Romanian girl? There are many who would like to see all foreigners burned alive. Did you find anything of interest in the apartment?”
“A death threat, not much else. This Nina is an elusive figure, everything about her is mysterious. I can’t make head nor tail of it all.”
Soneri got up and went out. Juvara watched from the window as he made his way through a group of excited officers. His calm stood out in the midst of all the euphoria.
*
He bumped into Sbarazza outside the Milord. “Nothing doing today.” He shook his head and indicated the crowded restaurant. “There’s an exhibition of Parmigianino’s works on, but at this time of day the stomach takes priority over culture.”
“That’s very human,” Soneri smiled. “Can I invite you for some salame and torta fritta at the wine bar down the street?”
As they walked towards it, the commissario was struck by the thought that this bar, a modern imitation of an old-style osteria, was becoming an obsession for him and he was continually on the lookout for excuses to go there. On this occasion there was no sign of the person he feared meeting, so he was able to relax. Sbarazza was a man who exuded good humour.
“You are one of the few who knows I am a tramp,” he said, with the air of a man sharing a confidence. “I am known in this city as the ‘Marchese’. Everyone respects me and they even raise their hats to me. If they knew how I really live, they wouldn’t give me a second glance. They would despise me because here where everything is supposed to sparkle, they’ve no time for losers. But I haven’t lost, on the contrary! They’re the losers. I have won.”
Soneri looked at him with a smile. Sbarazza seemed to him sincere as only those who have attained a high level of indifference to convention can be. “I imagine you feel extremely free – much more than previously, I mean.”
“I am afraid of nothing. I am a true revolutionary. I try to live the life the priests preach, and since they avoid practising themselves, I do it for them. If you think about it, Christ was the greatest revolutionary who has ever appeared on this earth. A scandalous, unbearable creature, much more so than the communists, don’t you think?”
“Do you suppose that’s why they put him on a cross?”
“If we set theology aside, that’s exactly why, no question a
bout it. Just imagine what they’d do with him today. They’d call him an extremist, a fanatic, a troublemaker, and they’d use crueller means than nails to crucify him. They’d treat him like a madman, sneer at his preaching and ignore him. And that’s what they’d do to me too if I didn’t have this veneer of nobility to fool them. If I were a poor man I wouldn’t be granted a permit to live in this town, but I am the ‘Marchese’. It’s like the label on certain products. They are valueless, deplorable, but they have the brand name and so they cost a lot. Or rather, they do have a value. That’s the whole difference – in other words, nothing.”
He spoke with no rancour and with an offhand casualness which revealed an enviable serenity.
“They all struggle for this nothing,” Soneri said, looking around him at the tables of office-workers, lawyers and accountants, all in jacket and tie, all as indistinguishable from each other as pieces of macaroni churned out from the same processor.
“This is what we’ve become. You could be a stinking cesspit of a person, but the important thing is to keep up appearances.” Sbarazza chuckled, making the commissario wonder whether appearances, the paradoxical appearances of life, amused him as much as any operetta. “And then this city, full of unreconstructed vermin strolling about bedecked in clothes worth a king’s ransom, all to cover up their own vulgarity.”
Soneri entertained the malicious thought that his rival belonged to that caste. “You’ve got to make allowances. Their fathers shovelled shit in stables and they look on this past with shame. They do all they can to live it down.”
“A big 4×4 with leather interior is the best remedy against the nightmares of the past, preferably with a bull bar, presumably to ensure defence against cows and their shit. I who had a father who was never short of money or women have been less fortunate,” Sbarazza added, in another of his paradoxes. “I have discovered that what others envied in us was in reality the sentence we were serving. It is bad not to have wishes. The poor people I work with have many very human wishes: food, shelter, protection from the cold, surviving the slings and arrows. Everything ties them to the things which are of real importance, and sweeps away all that is superfluous. In this context, it does not take long to rediscover what is real in life. It has happened to me and each time I seem to be reborn. I look at all these people and laugh,” he declared with a sweeping gesture, “because I behave like a mask and live on what they throw away. Then I turn up at the clubs with my aristocratic manners and enchant them as much as the pied piper. Believe me, that is real enjoyment – a fancy-dress ball, nothingness.”
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