The Second Day of the Renaissance

by Timothy Williams

  “I was your friend, Spadano—whatever you say. Twenty, twenty-five years we’ve known each other, twenty-five years I was your friend. And then you tell this bastard from Naples, you tell this piece of shit from the FBI or the CIA or from Disneyland, you tell him to beat the shit out of your old friend?”

  “It seemed the best thing to do at the time.”

  91: Arma

  “What do you really want?”

  “You’d bite any hand that feeds you, Piero.”

  “Use me as a decoy? That’s feeding me?”

  “Enzo Beltoni had to be stopped and you stopped him, Piero.”

  “It was your idea to get the Gracchi woman thrown in jail, wasn’t it? Without her, Enzo Beltoni’d never have returned to Italy.”

  “The sostituto procuratore has sufficient reason for arresting Chiara Gracchi.”

  “You know she’s innocent.”

  “Of course Chiara’s innocent.”

  “You and your American friends need to get your hands on Enzo Beltoni. So you put the Gracchi woman in prison. And then you expect the real killer to come out of the woodwork because Enzo Beltoni thinks he’s off the hook, no longer the suspect.”

  “Enzo Beltoni’s been in Italy for a couple of months, but I’m flattered you think I can control the Italian justice system.”

  “You control the Carabinieri. You told me you were a general. You told me you worked for Tutela del Patrimonio Artistico. You even had your own little office with Byzantine frescoes.”

  “I am a general.”

  “You don’t work for our cultural heritage.”

  Spadano was silent.

  “After all these years, you couldn’t trust me with the truth, Spadano?”

  “What truth?”

  “What you were after?”

  Spadano tipped his head, “You would have said no.”

  “Damned right I’d’ve said no.”

  “In your surly, self-satisfied way, you always do what suits you, Piero. You could never understand there are things more important than Piero Trotti.”

  “More important than General Egidio Spadano?”

  “More important than both you and me.”

  Trotti had begun to perspire. “Your need to get Craxi back from Tunisia—that’s more important than me and you? More important than our friendship—the friendship and collaboration and trust, built up over the years?”

  “Craxi?” Spadano laughed as he took a packet of American Toscanelli from his pocket.

  “You’ve got Enzo Beltoni—and through Enzo Beltoni, you now hope to get hold of Giovanni Verga and Craxi.”

  “I know nothing about Craxi.”

  “Lying again, Egidio?”

  Spadano said nothing.

  Trotti made a gesture in the direction of Portano. “Your Americans want Enzo Beltoni? A blackmailer and cheap murderer? They fly in their best operatives from Eurodisney because Enzo Beltoni’s public enemy number one? No, Spadano, I won’t buy that.”

  Portano moved his cigarette in his mouth and with a tense smile, leaned forward. “Commissario Trotti, perhaps I should . . .”

  “Best if your American friend shuts his ugly mouth before this old man rips his balls out—what’s left of them.” Trotti did not pause. “Spadano, what was so important?”

  “Piero, Piero, Piero.”

  There was an untouched glass of wine on the table before him and sitting back, Trotti took a long draught.

  “I wanted to save your life, Piero.”

  “You wanted to get Enzo Beltoni and all you risked losing was your nice Carabinieri coat.”

  Spadano sighed. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  Trotti clicked his tongue contemptuously.

  “The Socialists and the Christian Democrats are gone. It’s no longer 1988—and the country’s changed in eight years, Piero. When in Trapani, they allowed Enzo Beltoni to escape to America, it was because that’s what the politicians wanted—the Third Level.”

  “Don’t talk to me about your Third Level.”

  “Those same Socialists are now a spent power and our ex-prime minister’s a common criminal in hiding in Hammamet.”

  “You want Craxi?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What the hell do you want? What’s so important that you leave me to die like a dog?”

  “You were never left to die,” Spadano said evenly. “You never saw the Volkswagen, Piero? You never saw the car that’s now standing out there in the road?”

  “I was lying handcuffed in the trunk—I wasn’t looking at the countryside. I was breathing the carbon monoxide.”

  Portano remarked, “You’d never be safe while Enzo Beltoni’s a free man.”

  “Have I got to rip his American balls off once and for good?”

  “Harry’s right, Trotti. The carbon monoxide was a risk worth taking.”

  “Harry can go and sodomize himself.”

  Spadano shook his head. “Harry wanted you out of that car. He wanted to arrest Beltoni in Bologna, but I was against it.”

  “You needed to see me trussed up? See me poisoned?” Trotti asked incredulously.

  “Look at the long term. By the time you reached Bologna, Beltoni’d been holding your daughter for nearly twelve hours.”

  “So?”

  “Beltoni wouldn’t have hesitated a moment to hurt your daughter or the girls if it suited him. He doesn’t have feelings. Once you fell into Enzo Beltoni’s trap, there was no longer any need for him to hurt the children. Or rape your daughter, for that matter. I knew you were in the trunk—as did half the Arma between Bologna and Milan.”

  “For all the good it did me.”

  “You could’ve died from poisoning—I won’t deny that, Piero. But you’re alive and your family’s safe. Pioppi’s safe. The children are safe—now and for the foreseeable future. You wouldn’t have done the same as me?”

  “I didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “I should have arrested Enzo Beltoni for attempting kidnapping?” Spadano studied the tip of the unlit cigar. “He’d be out of custody in less than a month—six months at most.” Spadano moved away from the table. “Instead Enzo Beltoni’s facing attempted murder, Piero. While you’re alive and safe. A bit of discomfort in the back of the car’s a small price to pay for Piera and Francesca’s safety—don’t you think?”

  Trotti did not reply.

  “Enzo Beltoni will get at least eight years.” Spadano produced his lighter and held it to the tip of the Toscanelli; acrid clouds of smoke rose into the air. “That’ll give you and your daughter some breathing space.”

  “Your motives are noble, Egidio.”

  “Your sarcasm’s not funny.”

  Trotti tapped his chest. “Let’s forget for a moment Donald Duck here slapped me around. Let’s forget I’ve been accused of murdering an American girl. Let’s forget my best friends Magagna and Pisanelli lied to me.”

  “Pisanelli never lied to you, Trotti.”

  “Let’s forget you manipulated my friends. Let’s forget I’ve been lied to and used, let’s forget my life was put at risk, let’s forget that the girl was stabbed to death.” A dismissive gesture of Trotti’s hand. “What’s in it for you? What are you after? What can justify your playing at God? Justify your risking my neck while you’re sitting in your nice, safe little Volkswagen?”

  “I told you—I wanted to protect you.”

  “Don’t give me that shit.” Trotti’s voice had risen, and he had turned pale. His finger was pointing accusingly at Spadano, and Trotti had started to tremble. “Tell me what you really want, Spadano?”

  There was silence in the room.

  Beyond the window, the dark silhouette of a cherry tree was tipped with the first green buds of spring. The clouds were moving sout
h and the sky was blue, not the misty blue of summer when humidity hung like a damp towel over the plane of Lombardy, but the clear blue of a beautiful spring afternoon.

  Winter was coming to an end and Trotti was still alive. He was stiff, he had difficulty in staying upright, but he would get better. The headaches and the giddiness would go, the pain in his temples would go. In a few weeks, he would be well again.

  Spring was returning to the Po valley and instead of relief, Trotti was trembling with rage.

  “What the hell do you want, Spadano?”

  Spadano looked at Trotti before softly saying, “For years, I never thought one day I’d have a wife and a child of my own.”

  Trotti held up his hand. “Spare me.”

  “I never gave marriage or a family of my own a second thought. The insignia of the Carabinieri were tattooed into my flesh—into my soul. That’s what you used to say. Into my soul.”

  “You fooled me, Spadano.”

  “Ever since he and I first met thirty years ago, Valerio Gracchi was like a son to me. A son and a good friend.”

  “So bloody what?”

  “Before I retire, I’m bringing Valerio Gracchi’s killer to justice.”

  92: Bierkeller

  “I was sitting in an Alfetta. It was a cold night, early in February and for some reason the heating wasn’t working properly. I had a rug that I’d thrown over my legs, but I was cursing the job and I was cursing my own folly for ever having volunteered. Thirty years ago, Piero, and in those days I was ambitious. Working in the Political Section seemed the best way of moving up.”

  “Arma burned into your flesh?”

  “Older and wiser, no doubt, but I still believe in serving my country. In Siena, you asked me if I was becoming a communist. I now see I’ve always been a crypto-communist—but that’s not the word I used in 1968.”

  “Thank goodness for that.”

  “Piero, we’re both peasants, you and I. We come from a class of people who’ve been exploited throughout history. You in Lombardy and me in Sicily. But for all its failings—and goodness knows it has enough of them—this Italy is our Italy, this republic is our republic.”

  Trotti raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t jeer. This republic, morally bankrupt and chronically cynical—it’s all we’ve got. At most, we can hope to improve it.” Spadano gave a slow smile, and his grey eyes looked at Trotti from behind a thinning cloud of smoke. “You pretend to be cynical, Piero, but I know you’ve made your sacrifices. We can’t change the big things, but we can try to improve the little things. You and I have shared values. Moral values in a vast moral void.”

  “Shared values?” Trotti gave an unhappy laugh and Spadano held up his hand.

  “Don’t rush to judgement.”

  “Beaten, bruised, humiliated and suffocated—a small price to pay for our shared values?”

  Spadano moved towards the table and stubbed out his cigar into the overflowing ashtray.

  There was a bottle of red wine from the OltrePò and a plate of salami, but the three men had not touched the food that Signora Spadano had set out before them.

  “I was shivering to death in the car and he was there with his friends in the beer cellar, in the warmth. You know Trento, Piero? You know what winter can be like in the Alps. God, I was cold but I had to keep out of sight. And I couldn’t run the engine—we didn’t want Lotta Continua thinking they were being watched. This was in 1968 or 1969, and on both sides we were fairly unsophisticated. The years of lead were to come later. They weren’t expecting surveillance—Lotta Continua was still a student thing and very innocent, despite the revolutionary rhetoric. They all came from middle-class backgrounds and there was no reason to think things would ever spiral out of control. That’s precisely what did happen—everything spiraled out of control into a decade of violence.” Spadano grimaced. “Cocco and his young wife were idealistic, practicing Christians in those days—sweet kids. Who’d’ve thought Cocco’d get life for murder? Who’d’ve ever thought his wife would be gunned down in daylight?”

  “What’s all this got to do with me, Spadano?”

  Spadano was now smiling pensively. “I went to Sicily. I was there at the funeral in 1988, I was there when all his old Lotta Continua companions came down to Trapani for the funeral. And I saw Lakshmi’s face. Not yet an adolescent and her sweet, sweet face swollen with tears. The pallbearers took the coffin from the cathedral and Gracchi was buried at Erice, in a piece of land that overlooks the sea, that overlooks the olive groves at BRAMAN, in a place where the Scirocco brings the warm sands from Africa. I was there, and all I could remember was that night in Trento and how he had come out of the beer cellar and how he had tapped at the window of the car.”

  “And?”

  “He’d bought me a wurst and a beer. A bit embarrassed and said he realized I couldn’t hobnob with the enemy, but that was no reason for my dying of pneumonia.” Spadano smiled fondly. “That was Tino Gracchi—when you least expected it, he was capable of great kindness. He didn’t have the killer instinct and that’s why he could never be a politician—he liked people too much. Not the abstract idea of people, but people he could talk to, joke with. People he could love.” Spadano nodded. “We became friends after that. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on this dangerous, revolutionary element, and instead we became friends. Like father and son.”

  “Well done.”

  “Twenty years later, when he was being lowered into the earth, when the dirt was being shoveled onto the flowers, it was then I swore I’d bring Tino’s killer to justice. Not because Gracchi fought the Mafia or because he had set up a commune for addicts. It was something very personal, something I had to do to thank him for what he’d given me—me, the Carabiniere, me the enemy—over all the years. The friendship and the wurst.”

  93: West Bank

  Peering over the wall, Trotti glanced down at the street below. The machine guns of the Carabinieri appeared no more sinister than the glinting cars or the occasional passerby in via del Tempio.

  “The days Israel’s on the front page of the papers, that’s when they send in a couple of extra policemen.”

  “You know them?”

  “The Carabinieri?” Lia Guerra raised her shoulder. “I recognize some of them. They smile their toothy smiles and ogle my legs.”

  “You knew the men who arrested me?”

  Potted plants—cacti and bougainvillea and dates—stood along the low wall and incongruously, there was a line of sheets drying in the breeze.

  The red tiles of the terrace tried to absorb the morning heat. Summer had already arrived in Rome, while five hundred kilometers to the north, the cherry trees were still struggling into blossom along via Milano.

  Trotti returned to where Lia Guerra was sitting under the striped awning. Several wicker chairs and a low table. Beside the table was a wheeled refrigerator, and on a chaise longue, the morning’s newspaper lay face down.

  There was a glass of acqua brillante in her hand, “I didn’t get to see their faces, commissario. I was too scared,” Lia Guerra said gently, more to herself than to Trotti. “Not every day armed men come bursting into your house and drag off a guest at gunpoint.” She added, “Afterwards, they were very apologetic.”

  “That’s reassuring. I was bundled into the car with a bag over my head.”

  “So I saw.”

  “Then I was beaten up.”

  Surprise in her voice. “By the Carabinieri?”

  Trotti found himself scrutinizing the woman in front of him. “By one of Spadano’s friends.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d murdered a black girl.”

  “It was in the paper.” A nod towards the newspaper. “I tried to contact you—I phoned the general. He didn’t seem to know where you were.”

  “It was Spadano who made sure I was on the fr
ont page of every newspaper from Bolzano to Lipari. A retired commissario who’s killed a black girl—it makes good copy. Your friend Spadano knew perfectly well where I was. It was his idea I’d killed her.”

  “Spadano lied to me?”

  “Spadano lies to everybody.”

  “I like him. Why lie?”

  “Because Spadano thought I’d help him find Enzo Beltoni.”

  “Why throw you in jail? Why put you in all the papers?”

  Trotti made a gesture of resignation. “Enzo Beltoni held me responsible for his brother’s death. With Chiara Gracchi’s imminent arrest, Spadano knew Beltoni’d come back to Italy and finish me off.”

  “Finish you off,” the woman repeated. She gave a little shudder.

  “I was Spadano’s bait.”

  “He wanted Enzo Beltoni?”

  Trotti nodded. “Spadano believes Enzo Beltoni murdered your boyfriend, Valerio Gracchi. And thanks to me, Beltoni’s now under arrest.”

  “All a bit dangerous, wasn’t it?”

  “Very dangerous.”

  “I’ve never been as scared as when those men entered this place, but I was sure nothing would happen to you—not at your age.”

  “Not sure that’s a compliment. I was nearly killed by Beltoni. I ended up lying on the wet ground of the Po riverbank, tied up like a stuck pig. By the time Spadano finally got his hands on Enzo Beltoni, the man’d managed to beat the daylights out of an old man. And scare me to death.”

  “You seem alive.”

  “I do my best, signora.”

  “And your friend—the young man who was with you? Where’s Signor Pisanelli?”

  “On his honeymoon in Malindi. In Kenya.”

  Lia Guerra nodded with pleasure. “I saw him being accompanied downstairs by two women officers. The Carabinieri didn’t rough him up or anything.”

  “Might’ve done him some good.”

  “The two had to carry him—the aluminum crutch was snapped. I was a lot more worried for him than for you.”

  “Pisanelli’ll be delighted to hear that.”

  Her voice hardened. “You’ve beaten up enough people in your time, commissario.”