Poisonville

by Massimo Carlotto

  “Let it go, Zan,” my father interrupted him. “The theory you’re setting forth wouldn’t convince a grand jury, much less a criminal court.”

  “I request that my client be released and the case against him dropped,” the court-appointed defense counsel timidly ventured in a timid voice.

  “Present an official request,” snarled the prosecutor. “And I won’t even give it my consideration until we receive the test results.”

  My father cleared his throat to attract attention. “Zan, I’d like you to ask the witness about his movements the night of the murder.”

  “Do you think I killed her?” Alvise demanded furiously.

  “I don’t think anything,” my father replied with chilly formality. “All I know is that you came back to town after fifteen years, at the very moment when your daughter was being murdered. It strikes me that the circumstance deserves some exploration.”

  “Well?” the prosecutor prompted Alvise.

  Barovier gave me a worried look. He had had some ugly experiences that had begun in a similar setting, and he was afraid of saying the wrong thing.

  I decided to intervene. “I would like to point out, and I shouldn’t have to remind those present, that Giovanna had sexual intercourse before being murdered . . .”

  “Before,” Zan pointed out. “He could certainly have arrived at his daughter’s house after her lover left.”

  “And do we think Giovanna would welcome the father she hadn’t seen in fifteen years, nude, in a bathtub?”

  The prosecutor didn’t know how to respond to that point. He looked at my father, in hope of a suggestion.

  “I wonder if you could ask the witness where and why he remained hidden until this evening,” said Papa. “I don’t remember seeing him anywhere around his daughter’s coffin during the funeral, nor as far as I am aware did he make himself available to the investigating authorities.”

  “Why and where are my own business,” Alvise replied with exasperation. “If you want to accuse me of a crime, be my guests. Otherwise, I’ve said what I have to say, and you’ve taken careful note.”

  “You are a witness,” Zan shot back. “You are required to answer.”

  Barovier shook his head and lapsed into an obstinate silence.

  I was obliged to intervene to help him out. “Signore Barovier came back to Italy to attend his daughter Giovanna’s wedding, and she was planning to offer him a place to stay,” I lied confidently. “The news of the murder threw him into a serious fit of depression, and he took shelter in a ruined country house near town. Then he turned to me, as Giovanna’s former fiancé, and I immediately contacted Inspector Mele.”

  My father rose to his feet. “The civil plaintiff acknowledges the witness’s testimony.”

  Zan did the same. Alvise signed his statement and left the room without another word. Lucio was now in no danger of being tried for Giovanna’s murder, but Alvise had been subjected to a humiliating interrogation.

  “Bastards,” he hissed once we were back in the car. “And your father is the worst of the lot. He had the gall to accuse me of killing Giovanna.”

  “He was pretty tough, but the lawyer for the civil plaintiff has no alternative. I’m the one who owes you an apology. I should have known that the questioning would be ugly. I could have spared you that hail of questions.”

  A bitter smile creased his face like a wound. “You’re a rank beginner,” he declared. But he added immediately: “Still, I’d choose you as a defense lawyer over your father.”

  I drove him to a motel out on the provincial highway. “I can’t afford it,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve already talked to the proprietor. Tomorrow I’ll go pick up your belongings from Carla’s apartment.”

  Alvise stepped out of the car and started walking toward the reception desk. He was staggering like a punchdrunk boxer who’s just lost yet another match.

  I wanted to go back home, turn on the computer, and watch that video over and over again. I hadn’t shot up my daily dose of that beautiful woman in a negligée saying, “Come on, cut it out.” Instead, I had to face my father. Giovanna would have to wait for me a little longer.

  He was wearing an English-style dressing gown and he had a scarf wrapped around his neck. The scarf matched his slippers. He didn’t say a word to me when I walked into the living room. He had a book in his hands, but I felt certain that he hadn’t been able to read a single line while he was waiting for me to arrive.

  He rose from the armchair and pointed his index finger at me. “You made me look like a fool. You should have told me it was Alvise.”

  “Is that why you savaged him the way you did?”

  “He was capable of burning a whole family in their sleep to cash in on an insurance policy. Forgive me if I have a few suspicions about him.”

  “Well, now everything’s all cleared up.”

  “You can’t think that I believed his fairytale about being invited to the wedding. Prunella would never have allowed that to happen, as she just confirmed over the phone.”

  “Get over it. There’s nothing more to it.”

  “No. There’s still one thing: I want to know why he came back.”

  “Then why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Whose side are you on, Papa?! If it’s true that the night the furniture factory burned down Alvise was with Paola, then it means he’s innocent. That possibility doesn’t seem to bother you in the slightest.”

  “He’s guilty as sin. And Paola is a hopeless alcoholic. For a drop of whiskey, she’d say anything you tell her to say.”

  “How do you know that? Do you know the Zuglio family?”

  “I gathered a little information about them in connection with that matter of the toxic waste dump. By the way, have you spoken with Carla Pisani?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?” he insisted.

  “I haven’t come up with a convincing lie to palm off on her yet,” I answered with exasperation.

  As I was leaving, I ran into the cook. She was waiting for me at the door, and she handed me a tray covered with a napkin. “A little something for your sweet tooth,” she whispered in an affectionate tone. I muttered a hasty thank-you and left the house.

  In the car, I unwrapped the napkin and discovered that it was a tray of fried cream squares. A true delicacy of Venetian cuisine. My mother had taught her how to make them. I popped a section into my mouth and put the car in gear. I ate the rest in front of the computer. Giovanna wasn’t crazy about sweets, as I reminded her image under my breath, as I painstakingly enlarged a mirror. In that mirror it was just possible to glimpse a blurry shadow. That was him. Her lover. Her murderer.

  For Beggiolin, losing Lucio as Giovanna’s murderer wasn’t a serious setback. On the contrary. The news of Alvise Barovier’s mysterious arrival in town and the unexpected revelation that he was the boy’s real father only opened the door to a series of gripping reports. He managed to find Alvise’s motel and got an interview with him. The rapid-fire succession of innuendo-laden questions tripped Alvise up repeatedly. And the crowning blow was a piece on the old episode of arson. Man-in-the-street interviews done around town presented a harsh view of Barovier. The relatives of the victims of the fire suggested he ought to go back to Argentina. But Beggiolin’s real victim was Paola. Giacomo Zuglio, once the story became public knowledge, stayed out of sight, even though Beggiolin had portrayed him as a man who had been capable of a gesture of great humanity and generosity, by marrying a woman who was about to bear the child of a convicted felon. The television reporter managed to get inside her house and pepper the poor alcoholic woman with questions. She managed to stammer out insults against her husband, Giacomo, who spent his time flirting and sleeping with those wild women. Then she begged for lenient treatment fo
r Lucio. It broke my heart. Astrid, the town fortuneteller, also made her appearance in the report. Beggiolin hadn’t even had to walk across the street to interview her: she did her broadcast from the same building. Of course, Astrid claimed to have foreseen everything that happened, and even managed to find recordings of a few of Paola’s calls to her show. No one showed the slightest pity for the poor woman. No one in town, certainly, where nobody talked about anything else, and where every television set was tuned to Antenna N/E. Giovanna’s murder had become the setting for a story abounding in savory plot twists, turns, and surprises. There was a steadily diminishing interest in the effort to identify the guilty party.

  Alvise came to see me a couple of days later.

  “I walked from one end of the town to the other,” he said. “With my head held high. And when anyone stopped to stare at me, I stopped and asked them what the fuck they were looking at. Do you think that one person had the courage to answer me?”

  I knew the answer to that question and I did nothing more than look at him in an understanding manner. He was even sadder and more hopeless than before. “I’ve come to ask you for help,” he announced, taking a seat on the sofa.

  “If there’s anything I can do, I’m glad to.”

  “I want to do something to help Paola and Lucio, but I have no money, and I certainly can’t look for a job here in town,” he explained. “I’m going to have to go back to Argentina, but I don’t want to leave without finding out who killed Giovanna. But you could help them.”

  “What can I do for them? And frankly, you know, they’re strangers to me.”

  He seized me by the hand. “You have money and you’re a lawyer. Paola needs to go somewhere far away from that house and dry out. And Lucio needs a real lawyer. You wouldn’t want to leave him in the hands of that idiot . . .”

  I wriggled my hand out of his grip. “How is Lucio?” I asked.

  “He’s pretty beat up, but the doctors say he’ll recover,” he answered. Then he looked at me.

  “I went to see him every day. At first he refused to talk to me. I didn’t push it, until finally today I found the courage to tell him about when I was in prison and couldn’t see Giovanna because Prunella kept her from coming to visit me. He asked me about prison, and I told him that it’s impossible to survive if there’s no one on the outside waiting for you.”

  “What do you expect from me?” I cried, getting to my feet. “For fifteen years, you took no interest in either of them. But now you want someone else to take care of them, in your place, while you head back to Argentina. Pretty easy on you.”

  “Lucio is so young,” he begged me. “He has only lived a tiny part of his life, a miserable part. But he can put that all behind him now. He has a right to a future.”

  “I already said it, that’s not my job.”

  He stood up and put on his heavy jacket. “It’s too bad Giovanna is dead,” he whispered as he slipped the oversized buttons into the buttonholes. “She would have helped them.”

  I was surprised to see how many people attended the requiem mass commemorating the thirtieth day since Giovanna’s death. Alvise was the last to arrive and the first to leave the church, followed by Prunella’s baleful glare. When I walked over to speak to her, she made a big show of avoiding my embrace. “Get away from me!” she hissed at me, loud enough to attract attention. “It’s your fault that everyone is talking about us.”

  I was about to deliver a sharp answer, but Carla took my arm and accompanied me out of the church.

  “Look what I found,” she said. She pulled a handful of paper strips out of her purse and put them in my hand.

  “What are they?”

  “It’s what’s left of papers that were fed through a shredder. It’s all that’s left of the documentation concerning the Eco T.D.W. that was archived at the local health board,” she replied. “They’re cleaning house while we sit on our asses. I’m sick of doing nothing. I’m going to report them before it’s too late.”

  “No. Come to my house. I have to talk to you.”

  I had decided to level with her. She didn’t deserve to be lied to. When I finished telling her about my father’s plan, she smoked in silence for a while.

  “You can’t ask me to become an accomplice to these people,” she said, puffing out a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “That’s not exactly what I’m asking you, and after all, the soil will be cleaned up, and the companies will move to Romania.”

  She shook her head in disappointment. “And then everything will be fine, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Open your eyes, Francesco. They’re going to transform the clean-up into a way of making money. They’ll get funds from the regional government. Trevisan will probably get the contract for the job. And have you really not grasped why all these companies are moving to China or Romania? It’s not just so they can pay their workers lower wages. It’s also because there they can pollute all they want without regulation. In those countries, there are no laws protecting the environment, and they won’t even be obliged to make use of illegal waste management services anymore. People like Zuglio and Constantin will continue dealing in toxic waste for those who remain behind. Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘ecomafia’?”

  “Sure. But that’s not what’s happening here.”

  Carla wrinkled her face in a grimace of disgust. “You’re so afraid that your father might be in trouble with the law that you can’t see the way things really are. When he went into business with Trevisan, he became an accomplice to fraud.”

  “That’s a serious accusation.”

  “Ferrari destroyed the documentation that was in the local health board files because someone had warned him that the jig was up. It was certainly Trevisan, after his conversation with your father.”

  “Papa is legal counsel to the Eco T.D.W.,” I tried to explain, though only half-heartedly. “In this case, he was acting in his own interest and in the interest of his client. And attorney-client privilege prevented him from talking to anyone about it. Now, what Trevisan chooses to do . . .”

  Carla grabbed her purse and her down jacket and headed for the door. “I don’t want to sit here listening to this crap anymore.”

  I grabbed her arm. “Let’s try to work out a solution.”

  “What solution? You’re so eager to make your father happy that you’ve even forgotten that Giovanna may well have been murdered because she uncovered the fraud.”

  I certainly hadn’t forgotten, but I didn’t think that it was plausible. I made a decision. “Come with me, I have something to show you.”

  Carla refused to watch the video for a third time. She turned her back to the screen and lit a cigarette. “Why did you show me that?”

  “So that you can understand that this was a crime of passion. Giovanna was the victim in a complicated sexual relationship. Does she strike you as the slut of the man who ruined her life?”

  She turned and stared at me. “Maybe not. But Giovanna had stumbled on a toxic waste ring, and I want to find out everything there is to know. Murder and fraud may very well be linked here.”

  “If you report this to the Carabinieri, you’ll ruin a good person’s life.”

  “I don’t intend to go to the police immediately.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you: I want to find out everything there is to know,” she replied. “By now Trevisan and his accomplices know that the toxic waste dump has been uncovered, and now they’ll have to move the waste somewhere else. I intend to find out where. Then I’ll turn them in.”

  She opened the door and then turned back to speak: “Don’t tell your father about this,” she warned me. “Those people wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.”

  * * *

  “My mother did her best to toughen me up through a series of educational dinners. When I was
just eleven, she forced me to eat meals while trying to enjoy conversations with middle-aged strangers. What a cruel thing to do. Some of the boys my age, in a bid to escape that sort of torture, allowed themselves to be shipped off to boarding schools, in Switzerland, of course, and then they enlisted in the army, choosing the special forces: the San Marco battalion of the Italian marines or the Folgore brigade of paratroopers. When they were discharged, they had been spiritually strengthened, and then they usually married a second cousin, the kind of woman who plays bridge with the curtains drawn because daylight gives her a migraine headache. Do you play bridge, doctor?”

  Moroncini said nothing. He did no more, as usual, than to scrawl something incomprehensible in his Moleskine.

  This was the twelfth session. Selvaggia had decided to intensify the therapy because so far she had not seen any results. Selvaggia was in a hurry. She was no longer going to tolerate Filippo’s laziness, and she was certainly not happy about all the hours he spent in the wine cellar, where Filippo devoted more and more of his time to perfecting his new Sauvignon, and in his studio, where that horrendous sculpture stood on a table, even though as far as she was concerned it had been finished long ago.

  For his part, Moroncini had canceled his appointments with a couple of patients to make room for Filippo. It was impossible to say no to the Contessa, Filippo was certainly right about that.

  Knowing perfectly well that the doctor would never answer him, Filippo went on:

  “I don’t like closed curtains. They make me think of secrets to be kept, conspiracies to be concealed. They make me think of my mother.”

  “Are you saying that you hate her?”

  “What a ridiculous question. Does a prisoner hate his guards? Of course he does, but at the same time he depends on them. Especially if he hasn’t figured out an escape plan yet.”