Angellini staggered and put a hand behind him, seeking the support of the pillar.
“You’ve been lying,” Trotti said.
The eyes had seemed to lose their focus.
“Where were you last Thursday? Damn you, you’ve been lying.” He breathed in. “I want the truth.”
Angellini looked up at him with foolish innocence from behind the glasses; already the red weal was beginning to form at the side of his unhealthy face—four thin red lines pointing towards the wet, loose mouth.
He blinked. “Last Thursday?”
“Last Thursday when Anna Ermagni was kidnapped from via Darsena and your car—” Trotti prodded at the soft chest beneath the cotton shirt. He could smell the man’s sweat of fear. “Your car was there—at the gardens. A red Citroën. You were there, you were seen.”
The eyes blinked. “I work in via Darsena.”
“Don’t lie, damn you.” Trotti pulled his arm back. It was as though his hand had a mind of its own and wanted to hit the fat man. Angellini was fat, and even in his pain he had a kind of complacency that was enervating. The hand wanted to hit him, to wake him up, to shake him violently. But Trotti controlled himself and suddenly, without warning, his anger seeped away. It was an almost physical sensation; his hand seemed to lose its autonomy.
“Where do you work?” Trotti let his arm drop.
“Via Darsena, of course.”
“You’re a journalist with the Provincia, aren’t you?”
“The main printing press is in via Darsena.”
Trotti turned away and it was then that he noticed the priest. He was still standing on the far side of the cloister, a frown on his face. He was staring at Trotti.
Trotti turned back to Angellini. “You’re a journalist, not a printer.”
“I sometimes read the proofs.” He was now truculent. “You don’t object?”
Of course he had been stupid. Trotti was angry with himself; he had jumped to conclusions. He had let himself be influenced by a coincidence. But now he was caught in his own trap and he knew he could not back down.
“Your car is registered in Milan.” Trotti’s voice was hard, impersonal. “You don’t live there.”
“I’ve always lived in Milan, with my parents. My father is the city surveyor.” He raised his shoulders. “I prefer to stay here with my aunt. I was an undergraduate here at Sant’Antonio, this is where my friends are, this is where I work. But my residence is in Milan.”
“If you’re permanently resident here, you should have changed the plates.”
“I’ve told you, I’m not permanently resident here. I live in Milan and anyway, they were Milan plates when I bought the car.”
“When was that?”
“When was what?”
Trotti could not be sure whether Angellini was deliberately trying to annoy him; his manner was becoming increasingly truculent.
“When did you buy the Citroën?”
“I can’t remember. About a year …” The rounded features paled; Angellini seemed to sway slightly. “About a year ago—perhaps a bit more. You can check. I bought it from Sandro Mariani—the mayor’s son.”
“A friend of yours?”
The heavy lids blinked. “We were in college here together.” He smiled slightly, recalling perhaps happier times spent in Sant’Antonio. He swayed again and the hands against the pillar blenched with effort. Angellini swallowed. “We used to be friends.”
“Used to be?”
Without intonation, Angellini replied, “I haven’t seen him for some time.”
“Can you prove that you were at the printing works on Thursday?”
Angellini laughed. “Ask the printers. Unless of course you don’t trust them, either.” He nodded. “Perhaps they helped me kidnap the little girl.”
“Don’t worry, I”ll check,” Trotti replied coldly and then Angellini fell, collapsing like a paper bag that lost its air. The large body fell slowly, sliding against the marble surface of the column until the legs—the blue cotton trousers riding up to reveal white, hairless ankles—stretched across the pitted tiles. The eyes rolled, showing the bloodshot whites; then the head rolled forward, and was blocked by the chin caught against the heaving chest.
“Christ.”
The priest had disappeared; nobody was in sight. Trotti bent down and slapped at the loose, hanging flesh of the cheeks. Without any effect; behind the thick glasses, now propped at an improbable angle on Angellini’s nose, the eyes were sightless. A slight trickle of viscous saliva formed at the corner of the large lips.
Holding Angellini by the collar of his shirt, Trotti slapped him again, forward and backhand until the skin of his palm began to sting.
The eyelids fluttered.
Trotti struck him again. The lips began to move like the mouth of a fish.
“My jacket—quickly.”
Trotti let the body fall back against the pillar and ran back to the library. A look of surprise from the students who watched him as he went to where the chair had tipped over—an unreal corpse in a strange rigor mortis. He pulled the jacket—lightweight, linen—from the chair and hurried back to where Angellini lay.
The porter followed him.
A hoarse whisper, “In the pocket.” A whisper that Trotti could remember from his childhood, a whisper he associated with death. He found the small tube in the pocket, wrapped up in a handkerchief. He unscrewed the top and several pills, like pink insects, tumbled into his hand.
“How many?”
The slow arm lifted and Angellini fumbled, taking the pills that Trotti gave him and putting them in quick succession into his mouth. The lips moved, the jaws moved and then a few seconds later, the porter was kneeling beside them and putting a glass—a bulging glass with Coca-Cola in flowing white script—to the salivating lips. Angellini opened his mouth—the glimpse of a yellowish tongue—and the water disappeared. Several large drops hurried down the grey chin.
The effect was immediate.
Angellini began to recover and took on a more natural color. He propped himself, shifting his weight onto his backside. He then sat up and wiped his mouth; Trotti handed him the handkerchief.
“I’m sorry,” Angellini said while the porter placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” The eyes, now in focus and the glasses squarely sitting on his nose. “I’m very sorry. All my fault.” He looked at Trotti, then at the porter and a small crowd of students who had gathered in the doorway.
“Go away,” Trotti told them; then to Angellini, “How do you feel?” His voice was soft. “Are you all right? Shall I call an ambulance?”
Angellini nodded and tried to smile. A small, foolish smile. “I”ll walk home.”
Trotti felt suddenly very relieved.
29
ANGELLINI’S LARGE HAND still trembled as he unlocked the door and as they stepped into the dark corridor, the old woman appeared, wringing her hands.
“A man was looking for …” She stopped, looked at Trotti with disapproval, her eyes glinting coldly, and returned to the kitchen.
Trotti recognized the smell—pasta, potatoes and olive oil—of cooking gnocchi.
“A good woman.” Angellini’s smile was pale. “My mother’s sister. She never married,” he whispered, “so that she could look after her father. He owned an ironmonger’s shop here. And now he’s dead, she looks after me.” He smiled. “She likes cooking—but hardly ever eats.”
He pushed open the ground glass door and they went into the small bedroom.
“Sit down.”
Trotti moved a pile of books from the deckchair and let himself slump into the low-slung canvas. His feet ached. He took the packet of sweets from his pocket and offered them to Angellini. Angellini shook his head. “I must control my sugar intake.”
Speaking slowly, while unwrapping the sticky cellophane, Trotti said, “I’m sorry about what happened. I had no right …”
Angellini shrugged as he lowered himself onto the edge of
the bed. “You’ve got your job to do—even on a Sunday.”
“I allowed myself to get angry.” He put the sweet into his mouth and then stared at the rusting nails of the deckchair where they had been hammered into the canvas. “Not very professional, I’m afraid. Ermagni is a friend. I’ve got involved.”
“My fault.” Angellini grinned. “I should have taken my tablets earlier.” He laughed, a wet gurgle in the throat and his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, while his eyes continued to look at Trotti. “It really doesn’t matter.”
“It’s serious?”
“What?”
Trotti did not answer.
“My disease, you mean?”
Trotti nodded.
Angellini turned away and looked through the gap between the wooden blinds. The sun was hot on the cobbled courtyard and the double line of washing. “I’ve got another six months,” he said softly, “give or take six months. A year at most.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Few people do.” Angellini continued to look out of the window. “I can do without sympathy.”
“There’s nothing you can do?”
“The magic cure?” He laughed. “I’d rather not bother. The end comes sometime.” He turned to face Trotti. “It’s a bit like the Olympic games. Most people think they’re running the ten thousand meters—they’ve got time to catch up. I’m lucky. I know that my race is the eight hundred meters. I’ve got to pace myself if I’m going to give a good performance.” He shrugged. “That’s all I ask for.”
There was an awkward silence while from beyond the closed door there came the metallic rattle of pans on a stove.
“You understand,” Trotti said, “that there are still a few things I want you to explain?”
“You don’t have to whisper.” He grinned. “I’m not dead yet.”
Outside in the hall, a telephone bell rang.
“Ask your questions, Commissario.”
Trotti moved forward in the chair and propped his elbows against the narrow wooden rests; he let his hands hang, the thumbs touching. “I want to know what connection there is between you and the mayor.”
“Connection?”
“You know him.”
“Only indirectly.” Behind the glasses, the eyes blinked.
“How do you know him?”
“Through Sandro.”
“His son?”
“That’s right. We shared a room in our first year at Sant’Antonio.”
“He didn’t live with his parents?”
“We both had scholarships.”
“I thought it was a Catholic establishment. The son of the mayor—a Communist—with a scholarship to an old church foundation? A bit strange, isn’t it?”
Angellini laughed solemnly. “This is Italy, Commissario—the land of compromise.”
Trotti frowned.
“Commissario, for the last ten years, Italian universities have been open to virtually everyone; the number of students has increased tenfold while the number of lecturers has remained the same. Inevitably, the standard has fallen. Our universities have become open to the blackmail of everyday life in Italy. Mark a student down, give him a poor mark and he will accuse you of Fascism. Worse still, he may even take physical revenge upon you. No wonder that the lecturers opt for the famous sei politico, the political six out of ten. Better to give a student a mark to scrape by on than risk a bullet in the knee.” He paused. “But of course, don’t think that the universities were any better before the reform. It was probably exactly the same thing, but in those days, the students came from well-bred, bourgeois families. The modus agendi was probably much the same thing—just more discreet. But the government, faced with increasing numbers of young unemployed, decided to give itself a four-year respite by opening up the universities. Which now explains why we’ve got graduate street cleaners and dustmen.” He smiled. “Excuse me if I’m a snob—an intellectual snob—but I believe in academic excellence. And I believe that against the background of our pauperized universities, the massive number of students and the baronial, all-powerful professors, a place like Sant’Antonio has a useful role to play. A place for academic excellence. Of course it is Catholic—it has been Catholic, violently Catholic since the Counter-Reformation. But it has integrity, it has no time for academic compromise, and it seeks students from all social classes. Sandro Mariani and I were lucky—we were accepted by a private college where we could study in peace, away from the student demonstrations and the provincial demagogies.” He grinned. “For four years, it is not all that hard to pretend to be a good, practicing Catholic.”
“And you studied languages?” Trotti asked flatly.
“History, Commissario.” Angellini looked around him and made a gesture towards the books scattered on the floor, desk and bed. “I still study. I’m preparing a doctorate.”
“On what?”
“The Prefetto Mori.”
“The policeman?”
“That’s right,” Angellini replied, “the policeman. The man that Mussolini sent to wipe out the Mafia—and who no doubt would have done it, if he hadn’t been working for another kind of mafia. And the time came, Commissario, when Mussolini realized he needed the Mafia more than he needed Mori.”
“You’d be better off studying in Sicily. Why do you remain here?”
“A hobby, Commissario. This is my adopted home and this is where I work. If I prepare a doctorate, it is to give myself a sense of continuity. I know I won’t ever finish it—I’ll never have the time.” He tapped one of the books. “Eight hundred meters—but I want to be running at full speed as I go through the tape.”
Trotti frowned again, but before he could ask his next question, Angellini said, “To get back to Sandro Mariani—that is what you were asking me about—I can tell you that he sold the car to me about a year ago. When he graduated. I finished before him because he was studying medicine. Seven years. This last year, he’s been in the South somewhere doing his military service.”
“You are still friends?”
Angellini hesitated. “Yes. Yes, we are still friends—but as you grow up, you begin to see things differently. Friends, yes—but not as before.”
“Things such as what?”
There was a light tap on the door and Angellini heaved himself off the bed; he opened the door and Trotti heard him whisper hoarsely with his aunt.
Trotti looked at the books.
“The telephone, Commissario,” Angellini said, coming back into the room. “You’re wanted on the telephone.”
The telephone was in a small cubbyhole; an old plastic machine, the mouthpiece encrusted with damp dirt, screwed into the wall. The wallpaper had been scratched and worn by the movement of hands picking up the receiver.
The aunt watched him from the kitchen door. She wiped her hands slowly on a floral apron. Her eyes glinted.
Trotti turned his back on her and put the phone to his ear. He stared at the wall.
30
TROTTI HAD DRIVEN past the Casa sul Fiume a thousand times, but he had not been through the gates, thick with ivy, for fifteen years.
It was here that he first met his wife. In those days there used to be a wooden dance hall, a creaking, pitted wooden floor that the young people used to dance on. Young men in baggy trousers and v-necked cardigans with colorful patterns; the girls in billowing cotton skirts. And he remembered how the band, four short, bald men with a wheezing accordion, managed to keep the same glazed smile throughout the evening as they bounced their instruments rhythmically to the music.
In the winter, the young people danced; Saturday nights they came to dance to the new rhythms from America, the translated songs of Edith Piaf and the timeless, lilting waltzes. In the summer, they came to bathe. On the verandah, a man would sell ice creams from his trolley, a bright red cart with two chromium lids. Gelati Motta—there was an advertisement on the side of the trolley, a blonde girl with blue eyes and short, waving, Germanic hair. She held an ice cream i
n her hand. Trotti remembered the advertisement and he remembered the taste of the pistachio ice cream.
Agnese had been eating an ice cream. A hot day in June, 1952, and she was already in her first year of medicine at the university; he kissed her. Against the broad elm tree. It was unexpected and then, suddenly, so easy. For some time he had been intimidated by her, by the way she belonged to a different group, smarter and richer than he was and quite out of his reach. She was twenty years old and very sophisticated.
But when he kissed her, she did not resist; she held his head in her hands and her small tongue touched his lips. A milky coolness to her breath.
He remembered the rippling reflection of the river dancing against the bark of the tree. That was twenty-five years ago. The wooden hall had long ago been pulled down and in its place a long, low concrete building had been erected. It stood squatly on the hard earth.
On the new verandah, tables, dark table cloths and parasols advertising Italian liqueurs; a discreet juke box beside a refrigerator, this time white, but still advertising Gelati Motta; the Wagnerian girl had gone—just a blue and white logo. Waiters moved gracefully between the tables, leaning from the waist, and taking the lunchtime orders with professional detachment. Many of the tables were empty, plates of food still untouched.
The elm tree was still there, nor had the river changed. It continued to flow as it always would, slowly in summer, fast in the spring and autumn when the snow melted in the Alps, just visible beyond the far pine trees.
Magagna was leaning against the elm; he stood with one leg against the bark. He was stroking his mustache while he held a notebook before his sunglasses. His face was pale. He did not see Trotti until he was beside him.
“Ciao.”
Trotti said, “I haven’t eaten yet.”
“And you won’t want to.”
Trotti followed Magagna. They went across the hard earth, cut across the edge of the verandah, down four concrete steps and onto the stretch of sand beside the river. There was a crowd of people, many in swimming costumes—Trotti noticed a couple of lithe bikinis and softly tanned backs, blond hair running the length of the spine—that jostled forward against the rope. Magagna pushed through the crowd and a policeman in uniform lowered the rope to let them past.
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