Gold, Frankincense and Dust

by Valerio Varesi

  Soneri found this speech tragic. Unlike Sbarazza, he could not find anything exhilarating in the frivolity of life.

  “There’s no easy way out,” Sbarazza went on. “You’re either a believer, and in that case this world and all that’s in it is short-term and of little importance, or else you’re a non-believer and you’ll arrive at the same conclusion, because nothing has any sense. Know what I’ve decided? To be a non-believing, good Christian. If there is someone up there, I’ll take my chance on grace being doled out. It’s better than being a hypocrite.”

  “You’re not short of practical sense. You’ve been given a thorough grounding in prudence by poor people.”

  “That’s not all. Finding a purpose in other people is the only way to have a role in life and to feel yourself loved. When all’s said and done, is that not what we all want, to feel loved, ever since we were babies and screamed for our mother’s breast and the soothing consolations of her embrace? It doesn’t really matter if there are people out there who dispense love out of self-interest: all that’s needed is one person who’s sincere.”

  The commissario’s instinct told him that Sbarazza was right. All he wanted was to have Angela near him. He looked at his watch and saw it was a quarter to two. He got up feeling reassured. Each time he spoke to Sbarazza was like a breath of fresh air. All in all, it was good to know there was someone who kept the lamp of hope burning, and he hoped the light was not the flicker of a funeral candle.

  “Tomorrow I go to see the Chair of the Committee for Social Services,” the old man said as Soneri was leaving. “I’ve convinced him to open another dormitory and a refectory. I’m a great actor!” And he executed a tango step and a half-pirouette.

  *

  Soneri too did a kind of pirouette when Angela seized him by the arm and pulled him to her as soon as he set foot in her office, and when they were face to face, he was thankful to see that her expression was not hostile.

  “You were a complete shit,” she said, but in a gentle voice.

  “What was I supposed to do? Express approval?”

  “It was only a coffee.”

  “And the rest.”

  She kissed him to cut off further discussion, but he was waiting for a denial which did not come. There were no more words. They eased effortlessly towards that communication by gesture, touch and expression which characterises the boundless, soundless, shapeless world of the emotions. It was like a canal cutting through that chaos of fear and joy that bubbles inside each one of us, and is nearly always betrayed by words. In that way, it was possible for them to cling closely to each other even without having dispelled the rancour of betrayal, like two tigers making love while still biting at each other.

  “Where are you with the case of the Romanian girl?” Angela asked him later when they had dressed

  Soneri said only: “I had lunch with Sbarazza.”

  “Ah, the missionary,” she commented.

  “And an optimist, one who holds on to belief. I like his freedom of outlook in this world of rigid mindsets.”

  “And I like you when you get hot under the collar,” she replied, taking him again in her arms.

  The commissario remained passive. “Is that all you like me for?”

  “I’ve been at work on your behalf these last few days,” Angela said, pulling away from him. “I have a certain number of Romanian women among my clients, mainly young women assigned to me when I’m on duty in court. Some of them knew Nina and they all speak highly of her. They say she was a good person and that many men fell passionately in love with her because she was so beautiful, but she never took advantage of this to run off with their money. She wanted to marry an Italian and settle here, have children … in other words a normal life after all she’d suffered. She worked as a cleaner in several houses to put aside some money. A really nice girl.”

  The commissario heard her out and grew increasingly frustrated over his inability to make headway in the case. He owed it to that Romanian girl, all the more so because she reminded him of his wife. “Maybe she was even sending some money home …”

  “A nice girl undoubtedly, but don’t go making a heroine out of her,” Angela said quietly. “Your desire to rise above the vileness you deal with on a daily basis makes you idealise some things and some people too much.”

  “Criminals are sometimes better than a lot of the phoney people with their noses in the air that go about this city. The poor people Sbarazza meets show more solidarity. The Romanians who meet at the sports ground still have a sense of community, they help each other …”

  “They help each other and they knife each other,” Angela reminded him. “Because they’re poor they need the protection of the clan. As soon as they become rich, they’ll forget all that, even as many of us have. Affluence corrupts and there are not many who resist. Just a few, like Sbarazza, and they’ve had too much of everything so they can afford the luxury of living a grim life with perfect tranquility.”

  “Now it’s your turn to overdo it with your dose of realism.”

  “Let me bring you back to earth. I told you I like you because you can still get indignant and angry. Affluence has done you no harm. You’re still the wild thing you were when I first met you. There’s something solid inside you, in spite of all your insecurities, something everybody always notices.”

  “O.K., you’ve brought me down to earth. In fact you’ve floored me.”

  She shook her head in good-humoured reproach. “There you go exaggerating again. It’s not like that,” she said, but she did not go on, leaving him once more without a full explanation. “See you tomorrow?” she said a moment later, another rapid change of mood.

  The commissario gave a nod, but inside himself he felt disappointed. He was finding life trivial, elusive, anchored to the most fragile of intentions. A nothingness, as Sbarazza had put it.

  12

  AS HE TRAVELLED along the Cisa road, the bulls at Cortile San Martino came back into his mind. He wondered if they were still wandering loose in the Po Valley or if someone had managed to round them up. He hoped that instinct had driven them towards the woods on the Apennines and that they were living there in the company of the wild boars. He was still thinking of his own sun-baked mountains as he turned into the artisan district of Lemignano, with its workshops, warehouses and little villas. Suddenly, he caught sight of an oval bronze nameplate with the word GOLDEN in elegant italics. The atmosphere was typical of areas reserved for the prosperous. He rang and saw a light go on in the intercom. A woman’s voice asked, “Who is it?” but she was drowned out by a chorus of dogs barking in a yard nearby. The C.C.T.V. cameras, the guard dogs and the reinforced doors all added to a sense of tension in the atmosphere, which would have been like that in the trenches in time of war, had it not been for the workers in overalls inside the workshops and the coming and going of vans.

  The interior was welcoming: rugs, heavy wooden furniture and a pleasing scent of rosehip perfume. Soneri introduced himself to a secretary with a serious and sad demeanour.

  Giulia Martini, who must have been in her mid-forties, had the ascetic look of a mother superior. She was thin, short and sharp-featured.

  “May I know why you are here?” she demanded.

  “A Romanian girl has been murdered. You may have read in the newspapers …”

  “What of it?”

  Before replying, the commissario ran his eyes along the wall behind the woman, dominated by a portrait of the Pope. “Her mobile phone shows that there were some calls made from another mobile registered in the name of this company.”

  If the woman were at all disconcerted, she had no difficulty in dissembling. She paused only a few seconds for reflection.

  “We did have a Romanian employee some while ago. She used to come in after six o’clock in the evening to clean the offices.”

  “Was her name Ines Iliescu?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her real name was Nina. She was murdered and her body b
urned.”

  The woman did not betray the least sign of discomposure. She kept her thoughts to herself and said nothing.

  “Don’t you think you have some explaining to do? When did she come here?”

  “She came until a few weeks ago.”

  “And then?”

  “We neither saw nor heard anything further from her. She simply disappeared.”

  “The telephone calls continued until a week ago,” Soneri said.

  “We carried on trying to reach her. She was very good and it’s not easy to find reliable people nowadays.”

  Soneri gave a smile which was more of a smirk as he looked at the samples of sacred vessels arrayed inside display cabinets.

  “Whoever was trying to reach her did find her,” he snapped. “Twenty-one minutes of doing their best to convince her.”

  The woman was growing impatient. She adjusted a plait behind her ear and glowered at the commissario.

  “When I dialled that number, a Roberto Soncini replied,” Soneri said calmly. “Is your husband responsible for personnel matters?”

  “My husband takes no part in running the business. He’s good at selling, and that’s his field,” Giulia Martini said.

  “You mean he does the round of the curias, the bishop’s palaces …”

  “We don’t sell only sacred objects. We deal in jewellery as well. Look, commissario,” she cut him short, “I can tell you for a fact that we have nothing to do with the death of this girl. You ask me for explanations, and I accept that that is your job, but I assure you that any explanations relate exclusively to the personal sphere. Do you understand me?”

  “Perfectly. This girl was, or used to be at one time, your husband’s lover,” the commissario said.

  Signora Martini looked at him coldly, leaving Soneri unable to decide if that look was meant to convey hatred or merely expressed the need to work out a strategy.

  “You are well versed in the ways of the world,” she began again, by way of resuming control of the conversation. “My husband often conducts himself with great superficiality,” she said, never taking her eyes off him.

  The commissario got the impression that she had already written him off. He looked hard at the woman and thought that Soncini was not entirely to be blamed for turning his attention elsewhere. Apart from anything else, she must have limited interest in the emotional sphere of life, but at that moment declaring herself a woman betrayed got her out of a tight corner. She seemed to be challenging him: yes, my husband has a lover, and so what? Should that bother me?

  “Did you know about this affair?”

  “She wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last,” she replied, with conspicuous irony and detachment.

  “With the cleaning lady … a bit vulgar, don’t you think?”

  “Men are pigs,” she stated in a fatalistic tone, gazing at the commissario as if to make it clear that she included him in that judgment.

  “Did you sack her? In such cases, that’s generally the outcome …”

  “Not at all!” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve told you. She disappeared. Anyway, as far as work went, she always performed well. Her defect was to be very pretty and I believe that if she stopped turning up, it was to avoid distressing consequences.”

  “Your husband has no hand in running this business, do I understand correctly?

  “No. He’s one of our employees,” she stated firmly. Just then, with remarkable timing, a door opened behind her and there appeared a slender girl with long chestnut hair and a dark dress reaching below the knees. She too had a severe appearance. She approached Soneri, holding out her hand coldly. “Micaela Soncini.”

  Perhaps because the walls were lined with sacred objects, Soneri thought that there was something nun-like about the girl.

  “Micaela, the commissario is here about the death of the Romanian girl who worked here for a time,” Signora Martini said, throwing her daughter a look of complicity and then proceeding swiftly to change the subject.

  “I was explaining that my daughter and I are the sole owners of the company.”

  The girl had gone over to the armchair where her mother was seated and had placed her arm on the back of the chair, taking up a fashion magazine photo shoot pose. “I am responsible for the day-to-day running of the business and for customer relations,” Signora Martini explained. “My daughter deals with the economic and financial side of things. She studied at Bocconi University.”

  “And your husband does the sales …” the commissario butted in, attempting to bring the conversation back to where he wanted it to be.

  “Exactly,” the woman confirmed, raising her voice.

  “He gets a fixed salary and commission, I suppose.”

  “He spends money like water.” This time it was the daughter who spoke. “My mother …” she said, glancing at her before going on, “will no doubt have explained to you that if it’d been left to him, the company would have gone bankrupt long ago.”

  “The mobile from which the calls were made to Ines Iliescu is for your husband’s use alone?” the commissario asked, turning back to her mother.

  “Yes, but for that phone we have a pay-as-you-go contract,” she said.

  “Now if there’s nothing more we can do for you …” Micaela interrupted.

  Soneri got up, aware of the full force of their hostility. He had the feeling of being somewhere between the crypt and the sacristy, and this made him uneasy. Even the rows of workshops and villas facing him as he came out seemed more welcoming. He climbed into his car and turned back towards the city. On the way, he tried to contact Angela, but without success. He got her voicemail both at her office and on her mobile.

  “Do a bit of research on these two,” he told Juvara when he got to his office. He handed him a sheet of paper with the names of the mother and daughter, the joint owners of Golden. He then asked: “Has all the fuss over the arrest of the monster died down?”

  “They’re interrogating him. If you ask me, Musumeci will be completely insane by midnight.”

  “And he might end up raping Capuozzo,” Soneri said, riled by Angela’s silence.

  “Listen, commissario, I’d do anything I could to help you, but I can’t make head nor tail of this entire business.”

  Soneri almost felt a surge of tenderness. Every so often, with the impetuous spontaneity of a young hunting dog, Juvara surprised him with one of these generous outbursts.

  “Neither can I,” he replied with a smile. “We need a stroke of luck. In this case, coincidences have been important, and maybe there’ll be one more. When all’s said and done, Parma is a small city, isn’t it? Sooner or later, you bump into everybody.”

  “Well,” Juvara muttered, “I’ve been around for a while, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

  “That too is a matter of coincidence, you know. However hard we try to construct our lives for ourselves, there’s not much we can do against chance. This poor Romanian girl was pursued by men because she was exceedingly pretty. She could have had a good life if she’d given herself to the highest bidder, but she wanted to build her own future, even if that meant breaking her back cleaning toilets and offices. She wanted an ordinary life, a husband, children … and along comes some madman who murders her.”

  “Are you certain that’s how it went?”

  “What else?” Soneri raised his voice. “Do you think a woman takes on work as a servant light-heartedly? Washing underpants, making beds and changing pillowcases?”

  “I meant to say that sometimes … in other words, in certain cases, I’ve had occasion to see things change so quickly that I was left dumbfounded.”

  “I know, but for the moment I see it in those terms, and that’s what makes me so furious with myself for not yet getting my hands on whoever killed her.”

  The inspector stared at him, partly intimidated and partly sympathetic. After a while, he said: “You’re forgetting about the text.”

  “What t
ext?”

  “The one here in the printout. Didn’t you see it?”

  There were several texts, all except one with the numbers of Nina’s ex-partners. He had not read the list thoroughly enough, and had taken too much for granted. He immediately attempted to make a call, but the reply was the usual recorded reply. “Do you know whose phone this is?” he asked.

  “I’ve written it out for you underneath,” Juvara said. “It seems to have been stolen about a fortnight ago from a certain Giorgio Pagni during a burglary at his house. He’d left the mobile in a drawer when he went to the seaside for a couple of days and he only noticed the theft when he got back, so there was a delay in blocking the account. It’s all set out in the statement I got the people in the crime report office to forward to me.”

  “And in those two days, only one text was sent.”

  “Just the one you see.”

  “Yes …”

  “Come, everything’s prepared,” Soneri read aloud. Then he added: “What mast is the phone connected to?”

  “You were talking about coincidences, so here’s the funny thing. The text was sent from a telephone transmitted by the mast at Cortile San Martino.”

  “This really and truly is a step forward,” Soneri exclaimed.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Juvara cautioned. “All the conversations from a good stretch of the autostrada and from a huge swathe of the Po Valley, not to mention the local hypermarket, go via that relay station. And remember the fairground was operating at that period and the text was sent at half past six on a Saturday evening.”