“Still, it was worth trying.”
“The carabinieri went one stage further. They searched the camp. Maybe that’s why the Romas were so pissed off.”
“What did they come up with?”
“Gold. They’re specialists in thefts of gold.”
“That’s hardly news.”
“Not true. Thieves today go in for copper. The price has gone through the roof, and it’s not hard to find – building sites, warehouses and even electrical wires. I saw some statistics on the internet …”
The commissario silenced him with a wave of his hand. “Find anything else?”
“That they hated Iliescu.”
“Hated her?”
“The moment we mentioned her name, they went berserk and started spitting on the ground. ‘Whore’ was the mildest epithet they used.”
It all fitted in with Soncini’s story. Nina must indeed have been lonely and desperate in her effort to defend herself, fought over by her various lovers and by a ruthless community, but for precisely that reason the girl seemed to him all the more admirable. For him the investigation was breaking down more and more barriers and becoming more than a simple act of duty.
“Listen, Juvara,” Soneri said, changing the subject. “What’s this Sauro like, the guy with the computer shop? I know you’re one of his clients.”
“I’ve only been there a couple of times,” the inspector said.
“Juvara! You’re a policeman! You’ve no need to be so defensive. If anything, it’s your job to put the questions other people have to answer.”
“I thought for a moment he’d been up to some funny business.”
“Not at all. One of his other customers is Soncini, who’s been to him a few times with some problem with his laptop and with something else I couldn’t understand. Anyway, he never went back for the laptop. He told the guy that a female friend would be along for it, but she never turned up. It might be Nina, but you can’t be sure with a man like Soncini.”
“You see now that computers can be excellent leads?”
“Don’t kid yourself. If there’d been anything compromising on that laptop, do you really think they’d have left it with your friend?”
“He’s not a friend, but he’s good at his job. And I believe he’s honest into the bargain.”
“O.K., could you work on him a bit? You know, one expert to another? By the way, I liked him too.”
Just then the telephone on his desk rang.
“Commissario, at long last.” It was Dottoressa Marcotti.
He was about to defend himself but the investigating magistrate came straight to the point. She was a woman with no time for small talk and invariably in a hurry, another reason why she and Soneri got on so well.
“I have requested authorisation to tap the phones of all of Iliescu’s lovers. I hope the judge will agree in all cases. Meanwhile, your colleagues have sent me an account of the C.C.T.V. footage shot near where our car thieves were operating. Not much help, I have to admit. The only worthwhile thing is that the older one turns to the younger and says they’d been set up. It’s a sentence that could mean everything or nothing.”
The commissario gave a groan and nodded, but before he could say anything, she put him on the spot: “Tell me, have you by now come up with a theory about what’s been going on here?”
He did not know what to say. Each time he began to develop a hypothesis it was overturned a moment later, and he had failed to translate that complex of impressions continually whirling about in his head into anything coherent. “Not yet,” was all he said.
He heard a laugh at the other end of the line. “We’re doing a great job! Neither one of us has a clue!”
“It won’t be like this for long,” he said.
“I do hope not,” Marcotti said. “With every case, you have to go through a period of darkness when you don’t know which way to turn, but we’ve cast so many nets that sooner or later some fish will get tangled up in them, you’ll see.” The prosecutor was an incurable optimist.
At that very moment, Soneri would have happily asked her to marry him. Having a woman like that at your side was the equivalent of a transfusion of ginseng. Angela was made of the same stuff, and that was one of the things he liked about her – always assuming she chose not to leave him.
He lit a cigar and decided to go out. It was rush hour, the time when employees left their offices, the admin staff and managers all dressed in the standard, starched-and-scented uniforms. He felt a pang of nostalgia for the sight of housewives carrying shopping and shouting in dialect to each other from opposite sides of the road, or workmen with cloth coats thrown over their overalls as they cycled home from factories still located inside the city and not ten kilometres into the hinterland, like Golden.
His mind was still on the squalor of those lots out at Lemignano, where the asphalt and the factory buildings had devastated fields and vineyards, when he came across a noisy procession of cars decked out in white ribbons. He watched the parade as it turned into Via Cavour, opened specially. He was going in the same direction, as far as the junction with Strada al Duomo. Just ahead, he saw the square overflowing with vintage cars and the cathedral precint crowded with people done up in all their finery. Security guards manning the barriers prevented onlookers from drawing too close to the festivities. Official cars and company limousines swarmed busily about, as though the Duomo were the Grand Hotel.
The mystery was solved when a woman’s voice squealed out: “It’s the wedding of the eldest of the Dall’Argine family.”
That name clarified everything. The eldest of the Dall’Argine line was marrying Soncini’s daughter. The wily, emerging dynasty was forming a union with a scion of the patriciate, thereby ennobling their line. Soneri moved off, in search of fresher air he could breathe in solitude. Never till that moment had he felt himself so proudly anarchist, with a will for freedom and the purity of a young wolf.
He wandered about aimlessly until hunger and curiosity brought him back to the wine bar. He went into the dining room and looked from table to table, simultaneously fearful and hopeful of spying his rival, but Sbarazza was already seated at the table where he had last seen him. He got up and with an elegant gesture invited Soneri to sit beside him.
“So now you’re laying on receptions,” the commissario said.
“It’s getting harder and harder at the Milord. Too busy. I have to adapt. This evening I had no appetite for tinned tuna,” he whispered confidentially.
“No problems here?” Soneri said, pointing to the bar.
“Bruno knows me. A good man, like Alceste.”
“But they’re nearly all men here.”
“Not so. There were several couples.”
“Was there a couple sitting here?”
“Yes, having a light meal.”
“Do you mind if I ask what they looked like?”
Sbarazza stared at him, clearly taken aback. “You want a description? He was tall, distinguished-looking, well turned out. She seemed very lively, not exactly beautiful but with character, if you get my meaning.”
Soneri hesitated for a moment, and as he was about to answer he became aware of Sbarazza’s baffled expression fixed on him.
“What is it? Does that correspond to the identikit of two suspects?”
“No, not at all. I was just thinking how vulnerable we all are.”
“Ah,” Sbarazza smiled. “We are eggs with fragile shells, or better, we are fragile, full stop. We don’t even have a shell.”
“Rather than having no shell, right now I feel as if I have no gravity,” Soneri said.
“That might be an advantage.”
“Like being in water without fins or in the air without wings.”
“Don’t be such a pessimist. The mistake we make is to be always engaged in a search for certainties. We need certainties, we demand them, we never resign ourselves to being what we are. If we were to face up to our condition we’d be more serene and mi
ght even see opportunities rather than frustrations.”
“Facing up to what we are is itself a certainty, is it not?”
“Alright, I grant you that, but it’s the only one: the certainty of not having certainties. That has to be our starting point.”
“That’s very much the reasoning of a police officer, you know. They teach exactly that to beginners: given a case, never start out with a preconceived idea. But in fact a commissario has the facts in front of him.”
“You know better than me that facts are never objective! Take history. What we are convinced of today will have no value tomorrow, and the day after that something different will come along. We die each evening and wake up afresh the following morning, and so the world renews itself minute by minute. The essence of our being is changeability, not stability, and every man who aims at coherence is nothing but a self-deluding fool. The point is to accept what we are and open ourselves to the great flourishing of possibilities which time continually offers us. The acceptance of the world, that’s the secret. Do you remember Nietzsche?”
Fortunately Bruno came over to the table at that moment. “What can I get you, Commissario?”
“I’ll have some culaccia and Parmesan shavings.”
“Marchese, would you like something else?” the waiter asked with absolute seriousness.
“I’ll borrow something from the commissario. He’s the only man with whom I would share a plate.”
“And bring us some red Lambrusco,” Soneri said. He needed a drop of strong wine to wash away his thoughts. As he was being served, he raised a slice of culaccia to his mouth as though officiating at some rite. “These are my certainties,” he announced, his tone doleful.
“I see you’ve understood. Life is like a game of cards: you must always wait for something good to emerge from the pack. Look at me. I once had a mansion and a family endowed with coats of arms and emblems evoking battles won and honours received. The most absurd thing is to imagine you can actually leave something behind you. They drummed this into me ever since I was a boy by showing me portraits of my forefathers in the corridors of our ancestral home. The genealogical tree is a load of bollocks.”
Sbarazza seemed to be on the edge of delirium, but Soneri could not dispute the force of his logic. His thoughts went back to Angela and those passionate lunchtime rendezvous, but for the moment he had drawn from the pack the card he had, and to ask for anything else for the future was futile.
He poured himself a glass of Lambrusco the colour of black pudding. “That couple, the one that was here …” he began hesitantly, with the unpleasant feeling of possibly occupying the seat recently occupied by his rival.
“You haven’t got it, have you?” Sbarazza interrupted him with good-natured authority. “You’re still after the confirmation I do not wish to give you. What does it matter to you if you know or don’t know? All it would do is poison your evening. Have you any idea how many things are happening at this moment in your favour or to your disadvantage? Dozens, but you don’t know. We live in a constant state of unawareness, and this is both our salvation and our damnation. It leaves open the doors of our emotions but makes us as volatile as an alcoholic scent.”
The mention of alcohol made Soneri throw back a glass of Lambrusco in one gulp, looking for that mild euphoria which would keep him afloat. “It may be destiny that I have some very unforthcoming witnesses,” he said.
“I think I understand your situation. It’s one I’ve been in many times myself.” Sbarazza had assumed a more serious tone. “If the person you’re fond of has already decided to leave you, there’s nothing you can do to convince her otherwise. If on the other hand she is unsure, the only thing you can do is be gracious. The only salvation lies in graciousness towards your neighbour because what all humans, even the most atrocious criminals, seek is to be loved. We are all orphans, after all, are we not?”
Soneri nodded thoughtfully, going over in his mind the criminals it had been his lot to encounter in his work as commissario. Yet again, Sbarazza was not wide of the mark.
“It may seem not worth much to you that all we can do is exchange feelings of unhappiness. I’m aware it’s a bad deal, but that’s all there is. Unless …” Sbarazza broke off abruptly.
“Unless what?”
“Unless you turn to God.”
“That’s a different matter altogether,” Soneri said. “In any case, He does not seem to take much interest in human affairs.”
“Please! Don’t come out with bar-room arguments. I expect better of you.”
“It’s just that not even by having recourse to God do I find any sense in things.”
“You are an incurable rationalist. You search for meaning in things so as to draw some reassurance, but God is beyond the boundaries of our reason. We dance on the edge of a waterfall, waiting to be finally washed away, ignorant of where we’ll end up. We can’t choose: life overwhelms us. Others have written the script and if it’s a question of God, then it all comes back to what I was saying a moment ago. Listen, pick a card from the pack and resign yourself to your choice. At the end of the day, we’ll all get the same pay-off.”
“I’m playing more than one game,” Soneri said.
“I understand. One is that girl whose body was burned, is it not?”
“I’ve been drawing cards from the pack for some time now, but I never get the right one.”
“Sooner or later you will. You’ll see. My advice is still the same. Let events follow their own course and take every opportunity as it presents itself. All you have to do is recognise the opportunity when it comes.”
The commissario heaved a deep sigh and again sought refuge in wine. It would have been good to end the evening on that note, with the right flavours in his mouth, but he knew that any time now the bar would fill with noise and laughter loud enough to exasperate him. In addition, Sbarazza had not entirely endeared himself to him for the reticence he had shown earlier. He still had a lingering doubt over whether Angela and the other man had really been there, but the descriptions fitted. Here too his policeman’s frame of mind was becoming a burden. Events were getting on top of him in spite of his obstinate determination to put them in order.
“I must go and see my old ladies and gentlemen. It’s dinner time at the hostel, and that will be followed by a bit of socialising,” Sbarazza said, with that light irony which marked his detachment from the world.
“You’re not going to the wedding feast then?” Soneri asked, referring to the Dall’Argine–Soncini ceremony.
“Money provides no remedy against vulgarity,” commented the old man with a smile of kindly commiseration.
16
THERE WAS SOMETHING profoundly vulgar about the profanation of the night which had transformed Piazza Duomo into an haute couture bonanza. In clothes alone, the wedding must have cost thousands of euros, before taking jewellery and limousines and vintage cars into account. The chatter among Benedetto Antelami’s marble sculptures clashed with the notes of the organ as they swelled out through the wide-open doors of the Cathedral. Perhaps the chalice used to give communion to the newly-weds had been manufactured by Golden.
Soneri detested solemn ceremonies. He found them phoney and was always afraid of laughing out loud when faced with such pantomimes, but what he saw unfolding before his eyes outdid anything he had ever previously seen. It verged on being a display of ostentatious marketing, degenerating into a senseless replay of society functions of the sort recorded in glossy magazines in a hairdresser’s salon. In spite of that, he stood there, leaning against the wall of the old Fiaccadori bookshop, staring, glued to the spot, incapable of dragging himself away. He was, as Sbarazza had advised, letting events take their course.
And events did indeed take their course. As the couple emerged to a flurry of rice and flashbulbs, the noise rose in volume, the cheers bounced off the noble stones of the Duomo rising in a crescendo until they deafened the golden angel on the cusp of the belfry somewhere beyon
d the curtain of the mist, and even awoke Correggio’s little putti in the neighbouring church of St John. But then in a sudden diminuendo the piazza fell silent and the commissario was aware of the shudder which precedes movement, as when a train is about to depart. He realised that something must have happened to change the evening’s programme, and he felt no displeasure at seeing that exhibition disrupted.
Pasquariello’s voice on the mobile brought him up to date with what had happened. “A bomb has gone off at Golden.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No, it wasn’t a big bomb, but if it had gone off when the workers were around …”
“Yet another problem!”
“Two idiots. The carabinieri picked them up in the vicinity. They’re Romanian.”
Soneri could not help thinking that this was another point in favour of Soncini’s hypothesis. The Romanians really were out to take revenge on him.
“How did they find them?”
“The idiots didn’t notice the security guards doing their first round. The guards heard the explosion and raised the alarm, and our two lads ran straight into a carabiniere patrol.”
The piazza was emptying. With the occasional explosion of back-firing engines, the vintage cars made a juddering start one after the other. A different sort of explosion ten kilometres away had brought the festivities to a premature end.
Juvara called shortly afterwards. “Do you want me to come and get you, Commissario?”
The thought of returning to Lemignano was dispiriting, but he hoped the mist would have blanked out the ugliest parts of the district. “Alright. I’ll meet you in Via Cavour, but watch out you don’t crash into the Nuvolari car.”
“Commissario, the days of the Mille Miglia are long past.”
A few minutes later, the police Alfa Romeo flashed its lights from Via Pisacane. “These people are mad!” the inspector shouted. “They nearly ran right into me. What’s going on? Is this some costume drama?”
“Nearly,” the commissario laughed. “The party’s been ruined and that’s why they’re going off their heads. Tomorrow they’ll be on to the Chief about law and order and dangers to public safety. And you can be sure that blame will be laid at our door. Again.”
Gold, Frankincense and Dust Page 17