“That hair came from Giovanna’s head and body,” he announced, removing his wet heavy jacket. “And we found traces of the same bath salts that were found in her lungs. There’s no doubt about it: she was killed in that house.”
“Any information about who owns it?”
“A company headquartered in the Principality of Monaco,” he replied disappointedly.
“And what would a company in Monaco want with a house here in town?”
“The company is nothing more than a front for tax evasion and moving money around without interference. The right question to ask is who, here in town, can make use of such a complex network of shell companies?”
“The Torrefranchi Foundation,” I whispered.
“The house belongs to the Foundation, Francesco. And that points back to the Contessa, once again. I went back to question Lucio again, and I’m convinced that, if nothing else, he really did see her car that night.”
“Do you think she’s involved in the murder?”
“I couldn’t say. But I did wonder how Giovanna’s dead body was moved from the little suburban villa to her house. At first, I assumed that the murderer must have used Giovanna’s Mazda, but the forensic examinations rule that out.”
“He must have used his own car. Or else the Contessa’s Mercedes,” I responded.
“The Contessa’s car was one of the hypotheses, based on Lucio’s testimony. I decided to check it out, and I discovered that after the murder she got a new car. And a new chauffeur.” The inspector stood up, walked over to the liquor tray, and poured himself a shot of vintage marsala. “At that point, I got curious, and I found out that the chauffeur was a Romanian, a certain Toader Tomusa who had been in an Italian prison. The day after he was released from prison, he was hired by the Contessa.”
“Everyone knows that Selvaggia has been underwriting a project to reintegrate ex-convicts into civilian society.”
“What a philanthropist she is,” he commented sarcastically. “And don’t you find it odd that, at every turn in this case, a Romanian pops up? Constantin Deaconescu, his employees at the Club Diana, and the employees of the Eco T.D.W. were all Romanians.”
“Mafia?” I guessed.
He nodded. “Like all the other organizations, it has operations here in the Northeast. This is the perfect place to launder money, by investing in legal activities. Go into any bar and you’ll find plenty of entrepreneurs ready to do a little business, without worrying about their partners’ criminal records.”
I nodded back. Things were becoming very clear. “The Torrefranchi Group is about to move its operations to Romania,” I confided. “They’ve built a new industrial site on the outskirts of Timisoara.”
From the surprised expression on his face, I understood that the inspector knew nothing about the Foundation’s plans. He gulped down his marsala and pulled on his heavy jacket.
“What do you plan to do now?”
“Without some new piece of evidence, my investigation ends here.”
“Are you joking? If you don’t trust Zan, go to the chief prosecutor: he’ll listen to you.”
“It would mean flushing what little we’ve uncovered down the toilet,” he answered brusquely. “Zan and the district attorney are both respectable people, it’s just that . . .” He broke and tried to find the right words. “They both have a natural inclination to be both benevolent and secretive when it comes to the Foundation. I can’t go to them and say that I suspect the Contessa of being an accomplice to murder. They’d take me for a madman and she’d know all about it two minutes later.”
“Then let’s unleash a scandal. We’ll contact the national press.”
“The Foundation is the most important industrial group in the area. The various member companies spend a fortune on newspaper advertising. I’m afraid the business considerations involved will outweigh Giovanna’s death.”
“I’m not going to just stand by and watch,” I announced in a bellicose tone of voice.
“I couldn’t agree with you more. But you have more of a chance of finding the truth than I do.”
“But how?”
“Your father. I have no doubt that he is deeply involved in Foundation business, but I remember him coming into Giovanna’s house after her body was found. He was overwhelmed with grief; I can’t believe he’s willing to look the other way.”
Mele slipped out the door soundlessly. He had a point. Papa would never allow Giovanna’s murderer to go unpunished, but at the same time he would never willingly lift a finger against his own class. We had to put his back to the wall so that he’d be forced to act. There could be only one explanation for the presence of the Contessa at the little house: the killer was Filippo. I had never mentioned it to the inspector because of the reciprocal alibi that Filippo and I had provided for one another. That was a mistake, and I would have to rectify it at my earliest opportunity. I had eliminated Filippo from the list of suspects because I didn’t want to believe that Giovanna had resumed making love with him. But now that I thought about it, the phrase “I became the slut of the man who ruined my life” could still make sense with reference to Filippo. He had nearly killed himself after she left him to be with me. Giovanna had been wracked by guilt over the car crash, and he had never tired of tormenting her and fanning the flames of that guilt. When he came to the Club Diana to talk to me, he must already have murdered her. He had made sure people saw him so that he could construct an alibi while his mother and the chauffeur moved the body and set up the false murder scene.
The next morning I couldn’t shave. My hands were shaking too badly. I had spent the night trying to figure out the best way to approach my father about this, but I had only been able to string together an endless series of tangled ideas. For my entire life, I had considered Papa to be the finest man alive. I had always considered myself lucky to have him as a mentor, in life and in my profession. After Giovanna’s death, day by day, that image had been shattered into smithereens. Once justice had been served and Filippo and Selvaggia were indicted for Giovanna’s murder, I would make a clean and lasting break from him and from his corrupt world. The thing that made me especially sad was my awareness that it would be a relief for him as well. I wasn’t the son he wanted. He wanted a son who was willing to sacrifice himself and his ideals on the altar of success and business interests without turning a hair. I was all too familiar with Papa’s moral justifications. Antonio Visentin, the great lawyer, the finest of them all, only advised his clients in their own best interests. If, after that, his clients chose to break the law, it was none of his concern. His objective was only to safeguard the interests of his client. But a client like the Foundation had ties to the Romanian Mafia, was polluting the environment, and had committed who could say how many other crimes—and he couldn’t ignore that. That was why I was breaking off my relationship with Papa. He had always shown me the clean and rigorous aspect of the profession; he must have assumed that, with the passage of time and the disenchantment that comes with experience, I would accept the dirty side of the law as well. But that’s not what happened. We had disappointed one another, we had judged one another badly. I left my house determined to outdo the great lawyer, to outsmart him and force him to the bargaining table. Words like “father” and “son” no longer had any meaning.
For the first time, when I walked into the law office, I felt like a stranger, despite the fondness and sympathy of the secretaries. My father gave me a chilly greeting. I was grateful to him for that. An affectionate gesture would have undermined my determination.
I was brief and to the point. I told him about the suburban house, the evidence, Filippo, and the Contessa, and I waited for him to react. At first, he turned ashen, but then he recovered, and at the end he sneered, a hostile lawyer ready to demolish a witness.
“So you’re suggesting that Filippo is the murderer, and Selvaggia is actually his a
ccomplice,” he began, sarcastically. “I never realized you had such a lively imagination and such a faulty memory. Allow me to remind you that Filippo is your alibi . . .”
The time had come to administer the fatal blow. “There is an eyewitness who saw the Contessa’s Mercedes leave the little suburban house at four-thirty in the morning.” Of course, I neglected to tell him that the eyewitness was Lucio, or he’d have simply enjoyed a hearty laugh at my expense and then asked me to leave his office.
He was speechless. Only for an instant, the time it took to turn the news over in his mind. “And all this witness saw was Selvaggia’s car?” he asked in an icy voice.
“That’s right.”
“Has he already made a statement?”
“Not yet. First I wanted to come to terms with you.”
“What do you want?”
“Filippo’s confession.”
He ran a hand over his face and then stared me right in the eye, thinking. “As we speak, Filippo is in court,” he said after a while, in a neutral tone of voice. “He is being interviewed by the magistrate, who is deliberating whether or not to accept Selvaggia’s request to have him declared incompetent. There is no doubt that the request will be accepted.”
“Well, well, what a remarkable coincidence,” I interrupted.
He ignored my words. “Even if he really is guilty, which I do not believe, you need to keep in mind that, once he has been declared incompetent, Filippo will never be sent to prison. It will be a walk in the park to have him declared temporarily insane at the time of the commission of the murder.”
“I know that very well. And I am not interested in having an unfortunate lunatic sent to prison. I just want justice.”
“That would mean dragging Selvaggia into criminal court as well.”
“Along with her former chauffeur,” I added. “As accomplices to murder.”
He bared his teeth in a grimace. “Even as inexperienced and naïve a lawyer as you would manage to win an acquittal,” he shot back, with an edge. “You would have to give up your alibi, and testimony provided nearly two months after the fact is certainly questionable. And that’s not counting the fact that you would have to find some way of proving that Giovanna’s corpse was inside the Mercedes. Do you think that you could find a prosecutor willing to base an indictment on such a flimsy accusation?”
“Filippo killed her,” I snarled. “Do you want him to get away with it?”
“No. The problem is that, no matter what, Selvaggia cannot be dragged into this.”
“What would you suggest?”
“If he’s guilty, and I repeat, that remains to be seen, we will have him committed to a clinic where he will remain as long as it takes for him to be cured, no longer capable of harming others or himself.”
I stood up. “I’m disgusted,” I said flatly. “All you care about is making sure that Selvaggia is safe.”
“I want to make sure that a respectable individual is not publicly defamed.”
I refrained from commenting on his positive characterization of Selvaggia. I was too demoralized. My father had knocked me down, and I lacked the strength to get back on my feet. Everything he had said was true. Once again, I had misjudged the evidence in my possession. He had offered me the possibility of an out-of-court settlement between families, but I still preferred the kind of justice you get from a court. I didn’t waste my breath telling him so. He would just have laughed in my face.
I took refuge at Carla’s house, and told her everything that had happened. She lit a cigarette and went to the window to smoke, with her back to me.
“Have you looked at the newspaper?” she asked after a while.
“No. I was thinking about other things.”
She picked up the day’s paper from the table and handed it to me. “Threat to the Generational Change of the Guard in Local Corporate Leadership,” was the headline at the top of page one of the business section. Industrial and trade associations in the Northeast were all expressing their concern at the inability of the scions of the leading families to take over the companies their fathers had founded. A noted psychiatrist had been invited to lecture on the topic. According to the psychiatrist, these young people had grown up certain that they would be successful, and now they were unable to deal with the economic downturn.
“The leading families are in crisis. So?” I asked.
“It’s the end of the leading families,” Carla specified. “At least here in town. Neither you nor Filippo will be carrying on the family tradition and your parents are leaving for Romania, taking companies and cash with them.”
“Maybe that’s not such a negative thing,” I commented.
“There’ll be nothing but rubble and garbage left behind.”
I read aloud the last few lines from the interview with the psychiatrist, who announced his optimism—the people of this part of the world were accustomed to rolling up their sleeves and starting over.
“Of course. The legend of the hard-headed, hard-working people of the Northeast,” she said sarcastically. “People like your father and the Contessa did what they wanted to do, and no one is going to ask them to pay.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you shouldn’t be surprised when you find out that Selvaggia isn’t going to be indicted. And that justice will never be done for Giovanna’s murder. Around here, that’s not how things work.”
“Should I just give up?”
She shrugged and didn’t answer.
While I was on my way home, the Contessa’s Mercedes pulled up next to me; she waved to me to stop. I pulled into a store’s parking area and got out of my car. Selvaggia only lowered her window.
“Giovanna was nothing but a little whore and she got what she deserved,” she hissed in a chilly voice.
“Is that why Filippo killed her?” I asked, doing my best to maintain my calm.
“It wasn’t Filippo and I’ve never set foot in that mansion. That night I was at home.”
“I trust you implicitly,” I shot back sarcastically.
“Remember that if I go down, you all come with me. Your father first and foremost.”
The car window slid silently up and the Mercedes moved away.
I was trembling with fury when I got back in my car. I calmed down in a few minutes and tried to think about what had happened. Selvaggia’s furious reaction and her final remark might mean she didn’t feel all that safe after all. Perhaps it was worth trying to find evidence to nail her. After all, I had nothing left to lose.
* * *
At the interdiction hearing, Filippo had answered every question, without hesitation. When he was asked how much he thought Villa Selvaggia might be worth, he had confidently replied, “One euro,” and so on.
His mother could rightly be proud of him. Perhaps she was celebrating in his psychiatrist’s bed.
After leaving the courts building, Filippo went to a hardware store and purchased a length of high-quality rope, the strongest in the store. Then, to make sure he did things right, he went to the only bookshop in town and purchased a handbook on the art of tying knots. And now there he was, sitting in his studio, in the company of his own self-portrait in wax, which seemed to be staring at him indulgently.
While he coiled one end of the rope into an “S,” he saw everything, for the first time, in a different light. His mother, the magistrate, and Professor Moroncini all appeared to him as characters in a farce—each of them playing two roles. At the hearing, they had enacted a sort of macabre ballet. They had overwhelmed him with embarrassed wheedling and coaxing, and he had been reminded of that painting by Edvard Munch in which men and women seem to be moving toward the viewer like so many unsuspecting corpses out for a stroll. They were certainly dead, and yet they continued to strive, contrive, and conspire as if the world had just come into existence, as if noth
ing had existed before them. They were convinced they were unique, indestructible, and immortal. And yet they thought that the crazy one—the one who was incapable of understanding the difference between right and wrong—was him!
“Start with an ‘S’-shaped length of rope, leaving plenty of extra length extending off the bottom. Keep wrapping tight coils spiraling up the outside until you’re satisfied, then tuck the end of the rope through the top eye,” he read from the manual. He followed the directions closely.
Put an end to it. This was the only possible form of liberty.
At first, he had thought of doing it in the bathtub. But that had seemed to be in poor taste, considering how poor Giovanna had died. And then a hanging was more spectacular, it provided a touch of the artistic. And that was why he had been carefully studying the handbook for the past hour. The book was balanced on his music stand.
He enjoyed reading and rereading the straightforward instructions: “This is a very practical, strong, and secure noose, but may become difficult to untie if pulled hard.” Excellent. It was as if the anonymous author of the manual was perfectly aware of the macabre use to which his instructions would be put and was trying to remain detached, to keep from feeling any involvement in a murder or a suicide. Because that was the obvious use of a noose, or a slipknot, or, of course, a hangman’s knot.
He would certainly have given anything to see his mother’s face when she made the discovery. How would she react to the rebellion of her little puppet? Who would she call? The butler? Visentin? Or would she cut the rope herself? He felt pretty sure that she was capable of doing it. No one was as strong as she was. What about Moroncini? If the professor suddenly found himself without clients, Filippo wouldn’t have minded a bit.
He wrapped one more loop to complete the noose. He slid it up and down along the sliding rope. He widened the noose and slipped his head into it. He slid the noose up until he could feel the rope tighten around his neck. He pulled his head out of the noose, checked the length, and pulled on it several times to test its spring. It was a perfect, nine-loop noose. The classical seven loops suggested in the manual struck him as too few. Nine seemed safer somehow. Now he only had to wait for the right day.
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