Black August

by Timothy Williams

  Trotti took a pineapple sweet from his pocket.

  Beyond the window, the national flag hung limp over Strada Nuova.

  “This is a small city—and we now have our own Reparto Omicidi. Merenda’s in charge, and I won’t have you interfering, Piero.” Hearing the vexed tone in his voice, the questore paused. He smiled placatingly. “Honesty is not enough. Between you and me, I’m not sure it is even necessary. Not in this country. Honesty is not a quality that Italians admire.” The questore sat back in his armchair and folded his arms.

  “You don’t consider yourself Italian?” Looking at the questore, Trotti realized that he had never really scrutinized the man’s face before. The regular features were as they had always been—the thin mustache, the cold grey eyes, the arched eyebrows, the closely shaved skin—but now they seemed to form a different total.

  “Honest, Piero, and efficient in an almost Teutonic way—but you tread on too many toes.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “A fact. You know that on several occasions, people—important people in this town—have asked for your transfer.”

  “So I’m informed.”

  “You are efficient—and that’s why I’ve always followed my own counsel. I want you here, Piero—because you’re reliable and efficient. You’re a northerner, you understand this place, you grew up in this city. And also, quite frankly, I want you because you’re a friend.”

  Trotti did not speak.

  “But to be honest . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure you’ve gotten over the Ciuffi woman’s death.”

  “I’d rather not discuss that.”

  “You were in no way responsible for Brigadiere Ciuffi’s death. Yet you still feel you have a score to settle, Piero.”

  Trotti started to get up.

  The questore gestured to him to remain seated. “You and I have one thing in common.”

  Trotti lowered himself back into the leather of the armchair.

  “One thing in common. We’re both outsiders. You’re an outsider because your honesty has always ostracized you. I’m an outsider because I come from a different world. I am from the Friuli. You ask me if I consider myself Italian. Sure, with the years, I have learned to play the Italian game, to be cunning and to know when to compromise. I’ve read The Prince and I’ve studied my colleagues. I’ve learned that it’s wise to join a powerful political party and I’m now a card-carrying member. But here,” he tapped the chest of his French jacket, “here I’m still a little boy from the Friuli. Not Italian, not devious. Innocent. And,” again he tapped his chest, “still very naive about my compatriots from south of the Alps.”

  “I would very much like to work on the San Teodoro case.”

  The questore was about to answer when there was a knock on the door and a woman entered carrying a silver tray with two cups of steaming coffee. The woman’s sweet perfume battled with the aroma of the coffee.

  “Signorina Belloni was a friend.”

  The questore raised an eyebrow.

  “Signor Questore, she was a friend. That’s why I want to be part of this case.”

  The younger man waited until the woman had left. “Out of the question, Piero. I’m sorry but that must be out of the question.”

  “I can ask why?”

  “You know you can’t work with Merenda—you’re not a man to collaborate. Reparto Omicidi functions as a team. You like to do things in your own way—and whatever you say, everybody knows you despise Merenda. With your methods, Piero, you’d be able to work twice as fast as Merenda—I know that. But you alienate people. You brush them up the wrong way. And you give us all a bad reputation. In the normal run of things, that doesn’t matter. But murder is different—it attracts attention. You can’t work in a team, unless it’s your team. You’re honest—but that’s no help. Your methods are out of the dark ages. And you certainly don’t know how to deal with the media.”

  “It’s not often I ask for a favor.”

  “That, I’m afraid, is neither here nor there.” The questore held the porcelain saucer in one hand and raised the cup to his lips with the other. “We’re in modem Italy, Piero. The fifth richest nation in the world. Richer even than England. No longer the Pubblica Sicurezza—we’ve been demilitarized, because that’s what our modern democracy requires of us. We have our union, we can now go on strike—unlike the Carabinieri. Modern, Piero. The Polizia di Stato must show itself to be modern. Your methods—no matter how effective—belong to the past. To a past when there was no press and no television. In those days, you worked alone—and you did wonders. In those days, you could get away with it.” Instead of drinking, the questore lowered his cup. “I’m sure you understand.”

  “Low profile?”

  “Precisely, Piero. You take the words from my lips. You have many virtues—but if I let you loose on this Belloni thing, even in the middle of the summer, even when the city is empty, you’re not the man to keep a low profile.”

  8: Vices

  Trotti did not have many pleasures in life.

  He told himself that he was an old man and that, with the passage of time, he had achieved a certain peace of mind. He had few friends and fewer vices. Peace of the senses. He would admit he liked the company of women, but maintained he had learned to live without them. He did not think about his wife anymore, and anyway, she no longer interested him. The woman he had once loved had gone to America, and as far as he was concerned, that was that. She no longer existed, just as the past no longer existed.

  Just as Brigadiere Ciuffi no longer existed.

  Trotti liked living alone. He enjoyed having the big bed to himself.

  Trotti believed that he did not miss his daughter, which did not now stop him from regularly looking at the calendar and counting the days until the arrival of his first grandchild. Somehow he knew it was going to be a boy. He wondered if Pioppi and Nando would call him Piero.

  No vices?

  There were of course the boiled sweets—rhubarb, barley sugar and aniseed his favorite flavors.

  And Trotti liked his coffee. Coffee could be an obsession—creamy with the brown foam of an espresso percolator. Coffee toasted by a local company, Moka Sirs, with two full teaspoons of sugar, in a thick porcelain cup.

  The questore was on the phone as Trotti rose and made his exit. A wave of the hand and a brief, “Leave San Teodoro alone,” before returning his attention to the portable receiver.

  Trotti wondered who had boiled down the mud that the questore had served him—served him in the very best French bone china.

  The gritty taste rasped at the back of his throat.

  The blonde woman at the desk—she had been there a year, and still Trotti did not know her name—looked up as he noisily cleared his throat. Her broad smile met with no response.

  Instead of going into his office, he brushed past the plastic ferns and took the elevator—with the renovation, they had overlooked the hammer and sickle that had been engraved into the aluminum—and went downstairs, accompanied by piped music over the elevator’s speakers.

  He put another sweet in his mouth to take the taste of bitterness away. He stepped out of the lift and was stopped by Toccafondi coming out of the hushed gloom of the Sala Operativa.

  “Commissario Trotti.”

  “Care for a cup of coffee, Tocca?”

  Toccafondi was very young. He was one of the few men in the Questura who Trotti genuinely liked. The Polizia di Stato was full of southerners, and even those policemen who were from somewhere north of Florence had often taken on the manners and mannerisms of the south. Toccafondi was from the other side of the Po valley, where the Apennines started to rise and where the wine was rich and full of flavor. Toccafondi spoke the same dialect as Trotti, sprinkling his Italian with words that smelled of fresh hay, polenta and woodsmoke. He remind
ed Trotti of the young men he had known forty years earlier, young men with red scarves and ready, willing smiles. With ageing rifles and an irrepressible optimism. Forty years earlier when everything had been so simple, long before the anguish of the present. In those days, the problem was survival, where the next meal was coming from, and who the Fascists had killed. Not the forty channels on television to choose from. Or which fluorescent knapsack to match your mountain bike.

  Toccafondi was a born optimist. He smiled a lot. He was still young enough to have illusions about the purpose of being a policeman. He enjoyed his job and felt that he was being useful. He had an ungainly, lopsided head, large eyes and the large hands of a peasant. His stocky body bulged awkwardly in the summer uniform; the canvas of his gun holster was a grubby white. His beret needed adjusting on the top of his large head.

  “You got to San Teodoro last night, Commissario?”

  Trotti nodded. “Come and have some coffee—real coffee.”

  The young policeman shook his head. “Going down to the river. Why not come with us?”

  “Work can wait.” Trotti slipped into dialect. He held up his hand. “Everything can wait. I need some coffee.”

  A shout.

  “Car ready, Tocca?”

  Toccafondi turned, raising a thick eyebrow.

  Pederiali came running down the stairs, taking them two at a time, one shoulder forward. He nodded towards Trotti. He was buttoning his dark blue shirt. Pearls of sweat had formed on his forehead.

  “The Lancia’s out there.”

  “Let’s move, Tocca.”

  Toccafondi turned back, grinning, excited. He caught Trotti’s arm. “A suicide in the river. The Vigili del Fuoco have been alerted and they’re sending divers.”

  “I’ve seen enough dead bodies.”

  “A woman—she left a note.”

  “I need my coffee,” Trotti said, but allowed Toccafondi to direct him to the Lancia standing in the morning sunlight.

  “Your coffee can wait, Commissario.”

  With a screech of rubber and a wailing siren, the police car turned into Strada Nuova. Pederiali drove the white and blue car fast towards the Ponte Coperto bridge and towards the sluggish Po.

  The excitement of the young men was contagious. Trotti found himself smiling, forgetting about his coffee. Forgetting about the questore.

  9: Vigili Del Fuoco

  The women of Borgo Genovese wore black dresses and they used to come down to the river to wash the dirty linen. Now everybody had a washing machine and the women had disappeared. For over thirty years, there was just the memory and the photographs in a nearby patisserie. Then in the early eighties, with nostalgia for a past of poverty and drudgery, the city fathers had unveiled a statue in memory of the washerwomen. Standing behind a barrier, a woman in a long skirt and a broad-brimmed hat, scrubbed away in silence and for eternity at a trestle table.

  Trotti could remember seeing the women—large blistered hands and wisps of hair against their tanned and sweaty foreheads—before the war.

  A long time ago.

  Maiocchi was in charge. He stood on a floating pontoon. With his long hair and baggy trousers, he looked more like a student than a policeman. He acknowledged Trotti’s arrival with a grin. There was an unlit pipe between his teeth.

  A fireman—vaguely resembling Pope Wojtyla—saluted, “Ready when you are, Commissario Maiocchi.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The man turned away and called out to the dinghy.

  The dinghy was three meters long and made of red fiberglass. It had been anchored several meters from the shore and now floated downstream, pulling on a nylon cord. Vigili del Fuoco was stenciled in white letters along the sides of the boat, and rope looped from the taffrail. A man in a T-shirt held the wheel while another helped two divers lower themselves into the water. One of the divers laughed, adjusted his mask and then, alongside his companion, slipped from the low gunwale into the river. The two forms disappeared beneath the murky surface.

  Toccafondi was standing beside Trotti. “There was an earlier message.”

  “Who alerted the Vigili?”

  “Maiocchi, I suppose.”

  “They got here fast.”

  “There was a first call at four o’clock this morning, Commissario Trotti.”

  “To the Squadra Mobile?”

  Toccafondi nodded his large head. “A woman’s voice.”

  “Saying what?”

  “A woman phoned in on 113 saying she’d seen a pile of clothes abandoned at the river’s edge—beneath Ponte Coperto, on one of the floating pontoons.” The young man gestured upstream to where the bridge straddled the river. Trotti could hear the rumble of the traffic and could see the rising cloud of exhaust fumes that sullied the misty morning sky. “When we got down here, day was just breaking.”

  “You were here?”

  “Nothing,” Toccafondi said. “We found nothing.”

  “A hoax?”

  “That’s what we thought.”

  “The past was hell.” Trotti leaned against the railings surrounding the washerwoman.

  “I beg your pardon, Commissario.”

  Trotti gestured to the bronze statue of the washerwoman. “In those days, things appeared simpler. But there is no virtue in poverty. If you were poor, you tried to find work. And if you found it, you didn’t complain about the long hours and your breaking back.”

  Toccafondi said nothing. He ran a hand across his large mouth.

  Trotti looked out across the river. The last two summers had been dry, and there had been very little snow in the Alps during the winter. The river lay low in its bed, avoiding recently created islands of gravel and grass. Across the brown-blue surface of the Po, there was the irregular reflection of the city. He raised his eyes to the far bank, to the LungoPò, to the concrete hangars built for the Duce’s sea-planes and to the cathedral. Its dome glinted, as if it had already grown accustomed to the gaping emptiness where the Torre Civica had stood for nine hundred years.

  “Only rich women wore nice clothes in those days. Where I come from, young girls were already wearing their black widow’s weeds before they were twenty. No Benetton or Stefanel—no boutiques.” There was bitterness in Trotti’s voice. “Washing other people’s dirty linen—or working thigh deep in the rice fields—you were only too glad to find a job.”

  Toccafondi was embarrassed. “There was another call at nine o’clock,” he said. “The same woman—according to Operativa it was the same voice—claiming there was a bundle of clothes. Maiocchi got here straightaway.” He shrugged. “Operativa alerted the firemen.”

  Trotti’s glance returned to the long dinghy and his eyes came into focus. “I’m getting too old.”

  One of the divers had resurfaced and he held up his rubber-gloved hand in a gesture that Trotti did not understand.

  Toccafondi went off to talk to Pederiali.

  “Body’s probably floated downstream, Maiocchi,” Trotti said, approaching his colleague.

  An unamused grin from behind the pipe. “If there is a body at all, Piero. There’s a farewell letter addressed to a certain Luca.”

  “Who’s Luca?”

  “She signs her letter Snoopy.” Maiocchi took a large box of kitchen matches from his pocket. “Luca is the poor bastard who she’s . . .” He gestured towards the river. “Trying to blackmail into loving her.” He paused, shook his head. “Women.”

  “Women?”

  “They’re all the same.”

  “I can’t remember, Maiocchi.”

  “All the same. Sweet and light and beautiful—but inside, as hard as nails. Harder and more determined than any man.”

  “If that’s the way you feel, it’s time you got divorced, Lezio.”

  “Three lines of attack to get what they want.” He held up three finge
rs. “The first and most powerful way is to use their charm, their bodies. A woman’s charm is more powerful than a hundred oxen.” Maiocchi folded one of the fingers down on to the palm of his hand.

  “Next?”

  “If charm doesn’t work, it’s then they resort to blackmail, moral blackmail.” He folded a second finger.

  “And if blackmail doesn’t work?”

  The index pointed towards the sky. “The poor bastard of a man is in for one hell of a hard time.”

  Maiocchi was smiling but his mirth could not conceal the sadness in his tired eyes. “One hell of a hard time,” he repeated.

  10: Flypaper

  “Nobody knew I was in Borgo Genovese.”

  Boatti slipped another frog leg into his mouth. He wiped his lips with the stiff, pink napkin.

  Trotti asked, “How did you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t.” Boatti shook his head. “Which doesn’t stop me from being pleased to see you.”

  I Pescatori was a new restaurant in Borgo Genovese—or rather it was a very old trattoria that for years had stood at the riverside, weathering the fogs of winter, the floods in spring and the mosquitoes throughout summer. Two years earlier, it had been bought by a consortium from Milan who wanted to exploit the site. The interior had been gutted and renovated. The stuffed fish, the framed paper cuttings, the curling flypapers and the smell of wine and coffee were gone for good. The dark wood was ripped up and replaced with marble, the windows were enlarged to let in the reflected light of the river. The exterior was re-plastered and repainted. Instead of the traditional ocher, the walls were now a pastel pink, as unreal as a photograph in an architectural review. Potted plants had been set out to prevent cars from parking against the walls and entrance. Where the road was once asphalt, there was now neatly laid pavé in small half circles.