“It’s a particularly complex case, Dottore. Initially the identity of the victim was unknown, and then we established we were dealing with an illegal immigrant who was using her sister’s passport, and then there was the case of the old man whose body was found on the bus.”
“All that is understood, but we’re going from bad to worse. Now we’ve got bombs going off. What are we going to tell the city?”
Soneri struggled to stop himself letting out a roar. He assumed that following the uproar created by the disruption of the wedding, some local grandees had been in touch to complain. These were the people to whom his superior was accountable, certainly not the city as a whole.
“We’re working on it.” Soneri said. “Neither Dottoressa Marcotti nor I will rest until …”
“I’ve called a meeting with the Prefect, the Mayor and the President of the Province for this afternoon. We must send out a bulletin.”
The usual comedy with a cast of bureaucrats, Soneri thought to himself. He saw cameras and notebooks clustered around two dozen authority figures, reporting the “tireless work of the security committees”. Perfect for a world which thrived on appearances.
“I hope to have good news for you soon.” Soneri made an effort to be diplomatic. “Sooner or later we’ll draw the right card,” he said, realising as he spoke how deeply that expression had lodged in his mind. As he replaced the telephone, he felt his anger and unease return. Calls from Capuozzo were utterly vacuous, but, like an alarm clock about to go off, they always induced a state of anxiety.
“Did he tell you about the meeting?” Juvara said, as he got up to go out.
“You knew about it?”
“His secretary called this morning as soon as I got to the office, but she told me there was no need to pass on a message because she’d call back. I thought it better to spare you a half hour’s bad mood,” the inspector explained, before hurriedly adding, “I’m on my way to see Sauro now.”
Soneri signalled his approval with a wave, but without looking up. He was thinking about the meeting. He had no wish to waste time on prattle, the only purpose of which was to command some column inches in the newspapers and give the impression of what the politicians would call “putting all arms of government on an emergency footing”. He decided he would absent himself once again, even if that would do nothing for his relations with Capuozzo. If he was not going to the meeting, what would he do with his afternoon? He attempted to find a motive to justify his absence, but all of a sudden he found his head empty, as though he were about to faint. The only thought that troubled him related to Angela.
He considered telephoning her, but pride and self-respect held him back. It was up to her to make the next move, although he was aware that there might well be no move at all. Everything might be frozen in the final checkmate.
And then, without knocking, Musumeci burst in, providentially bringing Soneri’s mind back to the investigation. “I’ve got a report here from the Romanian police which arrived a couple of hours ago. Our translator has just finished working on it.”
“Report on what?”
“They’ve found Iliescu’s sister. She works in a lap-dancing club in Bucharest, and finally we know the identity of the old man who died on the coach.”
“And who was he?”
“The grandfather, but there are gaps in the report. He had something to do with the Romas. In fact it seems he was one himself.”
“What made him risk his life coming to Italy?”
“The sister was very worried about what might happen to Nina, because she had heard from various sources that the Roma community here were out to get her.”
“Soncini explained the reasons why they were after her, but I’ve no way of knowing if he told me everything.”
“The fact is her sister claims she spent a long time begging their grandfather to come to Italy and try to make peace and stop anything worse happening. According to what she says, she gave him a lot of cash and paid for his journey.”
“He must have drunk the cash or else someone cheated him out of it. The old man was down to his last penny when he died.”
“It’s likely it went down his gullet. The guy was a notorious drunk. Anyway, he didn’t succeed in his mission.”
“Leave this report with me. I’ll read it later.”
“I’ve given you the substance of it,” Musumeci said.
There was a knock at the door and a good-looking policewoman, who drew Musumeci’s appreciative attention, came in.
“Today’s papers, commissario,” she said, placing the bundle on his desk.
“We’ve made great strides in the quality of our staff,” Musumeci observed, but the commissario ignored him. He was already flicking through the pages to find the local news.
The reporters had gone overboard. There were four pages devoted to the wedding and how it had been disrupted by the bomb planted at the Golden factory, followed by an array of dramatic photographs and a rosary of indignant interviews with the well-heeled of Parma society, each one “dismayed by the escalation of violence”, and some requesting “whoever is in charge” to take all steps necessary to prevent “the decline of civic standards”. The heads of the Dall’Argine and Martini families had declined to make any comment. They restricted themselves to showing expressions of outrage to the photographers who captured some images of them as they emerged from the Duomo. Soneri imagined they would have used their influence behind the scenes, putting pressure on senior officials and perhaps stirring up a storm in the press by telephoning the newspaper proprietors directly. Soncini alone had given an interview overflowing with righteous indignation, thereby exposing his inferior status and putting himself on the same level as councillors, chairs of committees and the city’s resident intellectuals. There was also a piece devoted to the investigation in which details were given of the various leads being followed by the investigators, but making it plain between the lines that the police had no idea where next to turn.
The commissario threw the papers on the desk in a rage. He found the hypocrisy of Parma more and more nauseating. All those people preaching respect for the law and then going about their business as though they were above all reproach. He regretted the loss of the city’s democratic soul, which had always shown itself ready to scoff in public at local bigwigs and bien pensants, perhaps with a biting, satirical scrawl on walls near the houses where such people lived or with a salacious slogan on the porch of the Regio theatre. In those days, Parma could kill with a jibe.
The telephone rang on a couple of occasions and each time the commissario dashed to pick it up. He was burning inside during that impotent wait. He had already put in a request to interrogate Medioli, but it would take some time before the final authorisation came through. He had no idea how to fill his time.
Mercifully Juvara came back and took his mind off the various pieces of bad news.
“It was the hard disk,” the inspector told him.
“Whatever that may be,” Soneri said.
“It’s the core of the computer, where all the data end up. It’s a bit like our mind and memory.”
“Soncini had broken its brain?”
“Not quite. It wasn’t broken. In fact it was working, and perfectly.”
“So?”
“Sauro told me Soncini had asked him how to go about deleting all trace of the operations executed by that machine.”
“And Sauro replied that he had to change the … what’s it called?”
“It’s the only way. Everything is stored on the hard disk, and any technician worth his salt would have no problem reconstructing the life of the computer and all the operations carried out on it.”
“At last, something interesting.”
“You see what you can do with technology?” Juvara said enthusiastically. “You can set up whole lines of enquiry with the help of computer technology.”
“Did he change the … whatever it’s called … for him?” Soneri interrupted Juv
ara, but he was beginning to feel guilty for having underestimated his colleague’s skill.
“Yes, but he told me he only changed the hard disk after a couple of days. Soncini came back to say it didn’t have enough memory and he needed a more powerful computer. In other words, he now had different requirements, and that was another reason why Sauro didn’t bother too much about it.”
“Did he hang onto the old dish?”
“Disk. He’s afraid he threw it out. He doesn’t have a lot of space, but he’ll have a look and let us know.”
“If he has thrown it out, we’ve wasted a lot of time.”
“We’ll know this afternoon.”
“Listen, if that thing turns up and is of any use to us, I swear I’ll buy myself a laptop.”
The inspector smiled. “I’m sure you’ll fall in love with it.”
“Meantime, let me buy you lunch. I haven’t eaten properly in days.”
“I’m sorry, I’m on a diet,” Juvara said, pulling out a plastic box containing an assortment of lettuce leaves, diced carrot, sweetcorn and slices of tomato. On the top there was a sachet of oil which had to be squeezed to produce a dressing for the whole concoction.
“That stuff would disgust even a bunny rabbit,” Soneri said, staring at the transparent packet with an expression of sheer nausea.
Juvara apologised, patting his stomach to indicate force majeure.
*
When he was on Via Repubblica, the commissario felt the need of someone to talk to. It was a new sensation for him and gave him the measure of his depressed state of mind. Loneliness had never held any fear for him: in this regard, he was like a cat. Perhaps this was one of the effects of his crisis with Angela. He asked Alceste to prepare him a bit of space in the kitchen, so he could chat to him while he was doing the cooking. He enjoyed watching pots boil, waiters running about and steam forming the same shapes under the ceiling as the mist outside. It was the kind of day that called for a plate of anolini accompanied by a good Bonarda. He counted on the calories to set him up for an afternoon which threatened to be grim.
The warmth of the wine and the pasta, the aromas of the prosciutto and salame had the desired effect, and when he was on his way back to the police station he already felt better. The good humour lasted until he reached the piazza and saw from the clock that the time was two-thirty. He felt a lump in his throat. Angela had not called, and between her hostile silence and his proud indifference their post-lunch appointment had passed. By the time he got to the office, his foul mood had returned. Juvara avoided speaking first.
“Any news?” the commissario said.
“Nothing yet.”
“Have you requested printouts for the mobile phones of Soncini and his friend Razzini?”
“I have, but you know what these companies are like. They go at their own pace. I called back this morning to ask them to get a move on. Dottoressa Marcotti called as well but …”
The telephone rang. Soneri feared the worst, and in fact it was Capuozzo’s secretary. “The questore would like to know if you intend to be present at the meeting,” she said. She had the perfect voice for cajolery.
“Tell him I’m very sorry, but no. I’m waiting for the results of a crucial line of enquiry. I can’t leave the office. I have to be here just in case.”
The secretary said she would pass on the message. Fortunately she made no effort to put Capuozzo on the line.
“And what will you do if Sauro doesn’t come up with anything?”
“It means Capuozzo will remove me from my post, and when all’s said and done, it wouldn’t really upset me. But let’s hope we pull out the right card. So far, we’ve only been dealt the occasional face card, but you can’t really believe, can you, that we could go through the whole game without getting one ace?”
“I don’t know much about cards. What game are you talking about?”
“You don’t even know how to play briscola? Every time I talk to you, you make me feel Neanderthal.”
The conversation fizzled out under Juvara’s embarrassment and Soneri’s black mood, but the silence which fell in the office was even more oppressive. The two were like castaways on a drifting raft. The telephones remained obstinately silent. Finally impatience got the better of Soneri and he could wait no more. “Give me Sauro’s number.”
The inspector wrote it on a scrap of paper and handed it over.
“Hello? It’s Commissario Soneri here. I was anxious to know if you’d managed to locate that hard disk,” he began, pronouncing the English word impeccably. “Ah, you have? You were just going to bring it over. No need. Inspector Juvara will come and pick it up from you in Borgo Regale.”
He replaced the telephone with a satisfied expression. “We’ll need to play this hand right.”
“I’m on my way,” Juvara said
“I’m coming with you,” Soneri replied, grabbing hold of his duffel coat.
*
While Sauro and Juvara starting combing through the memory of the hard disk, the commissario felt left out. The two communicated in computer-speak, a dialect unknown to him. The words he heard seemed to belong to a language with no verbs and with no connection to anything he understood.
“We’ve struck it lucky,” Soneri cut in. “If you’d thrown it out …”
“I nearly did, you know. In fact I should have. Soncini told me to.”
“What made you hold on to it?”
“A customer came in looking for a computer for his son. The new models were too expensive so he asked me if I had a second-hand one lying about. It was then I thought about recycling the hard disk. It wouldn’t cost me a thing. I know it wasn’t strictly correct, but I’ve only just started up and the debts are mounting.”
Soneri burst out laughing. He thought of Sbarazza and his theory that chance offers us thousands of opportunities every day: the problem was to know how to recognise them.
“If we ever get to the bottom of this story, it’ll be all due to coincidences and chance,” he said with a smile, addressing Juvara.
Sauro looked at both men without understanding. He decided it did not matter and turned back to the computer.
Soneri watched the two of them intently. On the screen, sequences of numbers, questions and windows with lists began to appear. Every so often Sauro and Juvara would exchange phrases which were incomprehensible to him. After half an hour, boredom forced him to start walking up and down the room, but then it began to seem too narrow and he felt himself suffocating. He needed to get out.
“Call me when you come up with something,” he said.
Once outside he lit a cigar and began walking around the borgo between Via Farini and Via Repubblica, already cloaked in the gathering dusk. He realised that for the first time in his career he was reliant on the work of a younger colleague. Until now, Nanetti and his forensic colleagues had always seen to the scientific part of any investigation, but he was a contemporary and he could take that from him. Juvara was of a generation light years younger, and belonged to a world alien to him. He wondered if he should indeed learn a little English, especially now that even Capuozzo was going on a computer course. Never had he felt so completely washed up as at that moment. A hardened peasant, by-passed by time, an old coin forgotten in a piggy bank.
Such was his gloomy frame of mind that when Juvara called from the shop, he did not even react to his good news. “Commissario, we’ve made some very interesting discoveries. I told you computers—”
“I’m being converted,” Soneri said.
“Soncini has done a bit of surfing, using different search engines.”
“What do you mean, engines? Juvara, talk clearly. For me engines are things that drive cars.”
“Search engines are used to find information on particular subjects, and in general you consult them via a key word.”
“Like the one you used to access the terminal?”
“Nearly. With search engines, a key word is used to find texts which contain t
hat word.”
“What words did Soncini use?”
“Oh, he used a lot, but for half a dozen searches the key words were ‘woman’, ‘burned’, ‘autostrada’. Speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”
Soneri shook off his gloom.
“It certainly does. When was he doing these searches?”
“In the days immediately following the murder,” the inspector said, choosing his words with care.
“Juvara, you’ve won your bet. Tell Sauro that one of these days I’ll be over to invest in one of these devices. I trust you’ll give me advice about which one to choose.”
“I’ll be your consultant and I’ll teach you how to use it. Then you’ll be able to reply to Capuozzo when he sends you an e-mail.”
The commissario mumbled something intended as lighthearted. “Pick up the disk and let’s go to the questura.”
As he turned away, he thought again about what had been found in the computer, and his initial enthusiasm waned.
*
“There’s no way Soncini can wriggle out of this, Commissario,” Juvara repeated several times once they were back in the office.
“It’s only a clue,” Soneri cautioned. “Don’t forget that Nina was Soncini’s lover and she was an illegal immigrant. It wouldn’t have been possible to do a search through official channels, so he had to use his internet to find out if a local paper had carried some report.”
“Then there’s the car …”
“Stolen by the Romanians.” The commissario shook his head. “On the basis of the information we have, both the Roma revenge theory and what we’ve just uncovered remain possibilities,” he concluded. Juvara weighed up this verdict with evident disappointment.
“Maybe the printouts will tell us which lead to follow,” Soneri said.
“I’ll be sure to get them tomorrow morning, even if I have to present myself in person at the office of the telephone company,” Juvara said grimly.
“You need to be patient. Reality is extremely complex. Computers are so fast because they deal with numbers, not human beings.”
“This seems to me a really barbaric story. Is anyone going to be saved out of all this?”
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