by Marco Vichi
‘She’s over there, Inspector,’ he said with the voice of a child, lighting the woods with a torch. Two bare little feet were sticking out from behind a tree trunk. Bordelli and Piras approached the body, followed by the child cop. The sun still hadn’t fully come up, and hardly any light penetrated through the trees.
‘Pass me the torch,’ Bordelli said to the kid, taking it out of his hand. He shone it on the little girl.
‘That was the gentleman who called us, Inspector,’ the boy said under his breath, gesturing towards the man in the hat.
‘Did he touch anything?’ asked Bordelli.
‘He didn’t, but his dog may have when he found the body.’
‘Go ahead and send him home.’
Piras had knelt down and was leaning forward to have a closer look at the little girl. The spectacle was more or less the same as in the other cases. Susanna was lying face up, beautiful, dark green eyes open. Her blonde, slightly undone braid stood out against the moss, and her yellow sweater was all soiled with dirt. Bordelli lifted it with one finger, knowing what he would find underneath. The teeth had sunk deep into the flesh, leaving a bluish imprint.
The wind was blowing, and great sinewy clouds passed overhead. An evil light filtered into the dense wood. A car was heard pulling up along the road, then a door slammed. A moment later Diotivede appeared on the path, black bag in hand. In the darkness of the wood, his bright white hair looked almost luminous. He made the faintest of gestures and without saying a word knelt beside the little girl and studied her for a few minutes. He checked the marks on her neck, the bite on her belly, the consistency of her flesh. It took him less time than the others. Then he stood up and, as always, started jotting down his first notes in his notebook.
‘How long has she been dead?’ Bordelli asked, without taking his eyes off the child.
‘At a glance I’d say about twelve hours … and don’t ask me if I’m sure,’ the pathologist said under his breath, staring at him from behind his glasses with a look of disgust. He put his notebook in his pocket and headed back down the path without another word. Bordelli followed him with his eyes, rather stunned. All at once Diotivede stopped and turned round. He gestured to Bordelli to approach. Apparently he wanted to talk to him alone.
‘Wait for me here,’ the inspector said to Piras. He’d never seen Diotivede behave this way. Sticking a cigarette between his lips, he walked towards the doctor, wondering what he might have to say. When he was a few steps away from him, Diotivede resumed walking, but more slowly. Bordelli drew level with him, and they continued down the path side by side, without looking at each other. Waiting for Diotivede to talk, the inspector lit the cigarette. The wind was gusting through the trees, raising the hair on their heads, as it had the previous evening with Milena. The smoke he blew out of his mouth swirled in the air and vanished in a second. He suddenly realised the doctor was no longer beside him. Turning round, he saw that Diotivede had stopped a few steps behind him. They were standing face to face, in the darkness of that narrow path in the woods. Bordelli tried to glean something from Diotivede’s eyes, but saw only his dark silhouette and white hair shining in the darkness.
The wind, the dawn, the twittering birds … Had the situation been different, it could have been a beautiful moment.
‘Have I ever spoken to you about Aurora?’ the doctor suddenly asked, his voice breaking.
‘No,’ said Bordelli, feeling a shudder down his spine.
‘She was a niece of mine. Died in ‘39. Aged six.’
‘What happened?’
‘Crushed by a lorry.’
‘You’ve never mentioned that to me.’
‘When I saw her dead body, I felt in a way as if I myself had died. I shut myself up at home for many days. It was as if the world had stopped. I wanted it to stop. That seemed like the right thing to me. Then one morning I went out and saw people all around me, getting on with their lives as usual. I saw people walking, talking, queuing up for bread … Some were even laughing. Nothing at all had stopped. Only me. Then, slowly, I started to feel alive again, perhaps even more alive than before, as if Aurora’s life had entered me …’
‘Maybe these things really do happen,’ said Bordelli.
‘I don’t know … But when I find myself looking at these dead little girls I feel just as powerfully as before that the world should stop.’
The doctor advanced a few steps and stopped in front of Bordelli. His eyes were now quite visible behind the lenses: two big eyes full of disgust.
‘Find the killer, Bordelli,’ he said. And then he went on his way down the little path without another word, medical bag dangling at his side. He looked like an old sorcerer returning exhausted to his underground burrow after a lost battle against the forces of Evil. Bordelli tossed his fag-end to the ground and squashed it with his shoe until it broke apart.
Midday. The strong wind made the antennae on the rooftops sway, even managing to knock a few of them down. Bordelli sat in his office, staring at the wall in front of him, in part because, aside from the yellowed plaster, there was nothing on it to look at. He thought distractedly that his office needed a good whitewash and started to feel dizzy. For neither of the past two nights had he managed to sleep more than three hours. Having forgotten an almost whole cigarette in the ashtray, he lit another. He smoked and stared at the wall; he stared at the wall and smoked. Every so often he ran a hand over his unshaven face, as if to wipe his soul clean of the mixture of horror and impotence wearing him down. He would have given anything to be truly floating in space through the Milky Way and other galaxies. He put out his cigarette, noticed the abandoned one, and smoked it as well. He took deep drags, angrily savouring the fist of smoke punching his throat. Then nausea came over him and he violently crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. He picked up the report on Susanna Zanetti again. Nine years old, blonde hair, found dead at dawn by a retiree’s hunting dog in the countryside at Bagno a Ripoli. And nobody had seen anything.
Susanna’s mother had been accompanied by the inevitable Scarpelli to Forensic Medicine to identify the body. When they raised the sheet she had bent over her daughter with a demented smile on her face. That child wasn’t Susanna. She couldn’t be Susanna. She might look like her, but she wasn’t Susanna, she couldn’t be. Susanna never kept her mouth open like that, Susanna never let her braid come undone, Susanna didn’t have dead eyes like that, Susanna was alive, Susanna was at school, this little girl wasn’t Susanna, Susanna didn’t have dead eyes like that, this couldn’t be her, Susanna never let her braid come undone …
Diotivede had already done the first tests and determined with certainty that Susanna Zanetti had been killed between seven and eight o’clock the previous evening. The means were the same, except for the traces of chloroform found in the child’s respiratory tract. The murderer had put her to sleep so he could abduct and kill her at his convenience. She probably passed from sleep to death without even noticing.
Bordelli had nothing to sink his teeth into, and it was driving him crazy. Davide Rivalta’s house had been closely watched, the surveillance reports were quite detailed. He reread them yet again, just so as not to be sitting there twiddling his thumbs. On the previous day Rivalta had left his house at 8.35 in the morning in his car. He had stopped at Porta Romana to buy the newspaper, then crossed the centre of town to go and eat breakfast at Castaldini’s, one of the best pastry shops in Florence, in Via dei Mille. Around 9.30 he had gone for a walk in the Parco delle Cascine, and returned home at 11.00. He went out again at 4.30 p.m., on foot. He did a little shopping in the Due Strade and was back home at ten to five, after which time he remained at home for the rest of the day. At a quarter past seven the light on the first floor went out, and Rivalta went downstairs to the ground floor, almost certainly to have dinner. He went back up to the first floor at about ten o’clock. All the lights in the villa went out around one o’clock in the morning. He received no telephone calls all day.
This w
as more or less how it went every day, even if the hours weren’t always the same. Rivalta never saw anyone, never got any phone calls, seldom went out, and almost always spent the afternoon on the first floor, probably in his study. He went to bed between 1 and 2 a.m.
Bordelli pressed his eyeballs hard with his fingertips. He was dead tired. He couldn’t stop thinking about Rivalta, but didn’t quite know why. Perhaps he was clinging to him because he had nothing else to hold on to, so that he could tell himself he wasn’t running round in circles like a moron. He had to be very careful. If he let the strange Rivalta distract him too much, he risked missing important clues that might put him on the right track.
He opened a beer bottle and guzzled half of it. Then he picked up the phone and dialled Mugnai’s internal number.
‘Do me a favour, Mugnai, and call Piras for me at once.’
‘I don’t know where he is, Inspector.’
‘Then go and look for him!’
‘I’m already out the door, Inspector.’
A few minutes later Piras knocked, came in and sat down without saying a word. He looked even gloomier than usual.
‘Piras, for Christ’s sake! What the hell are we waiting for to catch this maniac?’ said Bordelli, slamming his hand against the photos of the little girls. He had never felt so upset during an investigation. Normally he tried to keep from getting too emotionally involved, and he usually succeeded. But the three little girls weighed upon his stomach like a block of marble. The thought that the killer was still at large stirred an oppressive sense of restlessness in him that squashed him right there in his chair. He looked again at the photographs spread across the table: Valentina, Sara, Susanna …
‘Say something to me, Piras, let’s come up with an idea … I don’t want to see another child murdered.’
The Sardinian stared at him with his coal-black eyes, which glistened as if he had a fever.
‘I’d been hoping it was Rivalta, Inspector,’ he said between clenched teeth.
‘Me, too, damn it all, but it looks like we were wrong,’ said Bordelli, stuffing another cigarette between his lips. By this point he’d decided to wait until the maniac was locked up in an asylum before kicking the idiotic habit.
‘Why is he killing them, Piras? And why in that way?’ he asked bitterly, blowing smoke into the Sardinian’s face.
‘We’ll catch him, Inspector, I can feel it,’ Piras said stiffly, waving the smoke away with his hand.
‘I wish I knew when …’
‘Soon.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I can feel it.’
‘Ah, you can feel it … blimey, what good news!’ said the inspector. He put a hand on his forehead. It was hot. He’d woken up at dawn and still hadn’t eaten anything.
‘I’m sorry, Piras,’ he said, holding up one hand and trying to calm down. The young man merely looked at him without a word. Bordelli got up from his chair and started pacing about the room, blowing smoke through his nostrils.
‘I’m a little on edge, Piras. That son of a bitch is making fools of us all,’ he said, forcefully crushing his cigarette butt in the already full ashtray. The internal phone rang, and the inspector picked up.
‘Yes?’
‘How many more little girls is that maniac going to kill, Bordelli? Why can’t we manage to find him?’
It was Commissioner Inzipone again, and he sounded mightily pissed off. He was speaking, as always, in the plural.
‘We’ll catch him soon, Commissioner,’ said Bordelli, not knowing what else to say.
‘The minister of the interior just rang me, and asked me what the hell we were doing …’
‘We’ll catch him.’
‘When?’
‘Very soon.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Let’s say I can feel it … We’ll catch him soon.’
‘Ah, you can feel it … Brilliant!’ said Inzipone, who then uncerimoniously hung up. Bordelli spat a few curses at the phone, finished his beer and hurled the bottle into the waste basket.
‘Let’s get a move on, Piras. Ring Signora Zanetti and find out when we can go and see her … Maybe something will come of it.’
‘Shall I call her right now, Inspector?’
‘Why the hell would you want to wait?’
‘All right,’ said Piras, as he jumped to his feet and dashed out of the office, looking offended.
Bordelli went and opened the window wide. He stood there looking outside: clear sky, courtyard full of cars, Mugnai outside the guardhouse, chatting with a colleague. He tried to think of other things. The night he’d just spent with Milena came back to him. It felt as if he’d dreamt the whole thing. She’d left just before dawn, kissing him between the eyes by way of goodbye. They hadn’t said anything to each other in parting. There was no need. Bordelli had a clear sense of what was happening to him, and had the impression she felt the same way. But neither had the desire to put it into words. They knew where to find each other, but realised that it was a difficult time for both of them. She was hunting down a Nazi, he a killer of little girls.
Piras returned fifteen minutes later and said that Susanna’s mother had agreed to see them straight away.
‘What took so long?’ Bordelli asked gruffly.
‘She wouldn’t stop talking, Inspector. She started telling me about her daughter and I felt like I couldn’t …’
‘All right, let’s go.’
‘Very nice,’ the inspector said, looking at Susanna’s drawings on the wall of her small bedroom. Piras nodded in agreement. They were large sheets of paper full of colour, on which people were black spots and animals had five legs to help them stand up straight.
Maria Zanetti was thirty-five years old, slender and rather pretty, with black, curly hair which she had sought to tame with a few hairpins. She smiled as she spoke, like a mother telling two friends how bright and beautiful her daughter is. The most disturbing thing was that she acted as if Susanna were still alive and about to come home from school.
‘She keeps everything in order, all by herself … In this drawer are her stockings, here are her shoes, here are her blouses … And this is her homework table … pens, erasers …’
‘Good girl,’ said Piras, giving her rope.
‘Oh, yes … And she helps me cook, wash the dishes, iron, do the shopping … In fact she always wants to go buy the milk herself … And there’s no harm in that – the milk shop’s just round the corner, after all …’
Bordelli and Piras exchanged a glance. They were waiting for the woman to break down at any moment and start crying.
‘Signora Zanetti, are you married?’ the inspector asked.
‘I lost my husband two years ago, but I don’t intend to remarry … no, no, I couldn’t … I’d never find another man like Walter,’ the woman said, shaking her head.
‘Was he Susanna’s father?’
‘Yes … Susanna suffered a great deal when he died, but she’s recovered nicely … Every evening she recites a little prayer for her father in heaven.’
‘Is this him?’ Bordelli asked, pointing at a framed photograph on the wall, in which a blond man held young Susanna in his arms.
‘Yes,’ the woman said, stopping in front of the picture, a sad smile on her face.
‘He doesn’t look Italian,’ said Piras.
‘He was German … from Hamburg,’ she said, with admiration in her voice.
‘Why didn’t you and your daughter take his surname?’ Bordelli asked.
The woman looked at him with mild astonishment.
‘What do you mean? Walter’s surname is Zanetti … His great-grandfather was Swiss Italian,’ she said, as if this was somehow obvious.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bordelli said, not knowing what else to say. Maria Zanetti’s eyes turned back to the photo, full of nostalgia.
‘We met during the war, in a field hospital. I was working as a nurse for the Red Cross, and Walter was an officer i
n the Wehrmacht … He’d been seriously wounded in the shoulder. We fell in love immediately, but with all the confusion there was at the end, we fell out of touch. After the war I tried in every way possible to find him, but didn’t have any luck. We finally met up again in ‘54 and got married almost at once. A year later, Susanna was born … Isn’t he handsome?’
‘Very,’ said the inspector, to make her happy. Piras looked at the picture with suspicion, as if thinking of one of his father’s war stories about the Germans.
‘Even though we were separated by the war, I felt that sooner or later I would find him again,’ Maria continued.
‘Where did you meet up with him in ‘54? In Italy?’ Bordelli asked, seeing that the woman felt like talking. She shook her head gently.
‘No, in Munich. It was the will of God; there’s no other way to explain it. He lived in Hamburg and had gone to Munich to visit some relatives, whereas I was there for my job. I worked as a seamstress for a dance company. And one morning, as I was walking down the street, there he was, standing right before me … It was God who decided, I’m sure of it.’
‘Signora Zanetti, forgive me for asking … but do you have any enemies that you know of? Someone who might wish you harm, for any reason at all?’ Bordelli asked.
‘Oh, no. Why should I have any enemies?’ she said calmly. She was folding Susanna’s little clothes before putting them away in the wardrobe.
‘Had you noticed anything unusual in the past few days? I don’t know, someone following you …’
‘Why would anyone want to follow me?’
‘Had Susanna mentioned anything unusual to you? A stranger, perhaps, who had spoken to her, or something like that?’
‘Susanna knows very well she’s not supposed to talk to strangers. She’s a very smart girl, you know … Would you like to read one of her essays? I’m convinced she’s going to become a writer,’ said the woman, opening a drawer.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Bordelli, resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to coax any information out of her. Signora Zanetti already had a notebook in her hand, a large notebook with drawings by Jacovitti on the cover. She started reading.