The Past is a Foreign Country

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  He thought carefully and said yes, he had seen him, he knew him.

  From that moment on, things moved fast. Very fast.

  Within a couple of days they had identified him. According to the local register, he lived with his widowed mother. But he was never home. There was no answer when they tried his entryphone.

  They questioned people coming out of the building. Signora Carducci? She’d died about three weeks earlier. Which meant that the death certificate hadn’t been registered yet, Chiti thought. The son? Did they mean Francesco? No one had seen him since his mother’s death. No one knew anything. Maybe he’d gone to stay with relatives in another town. No, they didn’t know that for certain, it was just a guess, they didn’t even know if he had any relatives in another town. To tell the truth, they didn’t know anything at all. Neither he nor his mother had ever been what you’d call talkative. In other words, they were completely in the dark.

  It was at this point that Cardinale, once again, had an idea.

  ‘Lieutenant, let’s try to get in.’

  ‘And how do you suggest we do that, Cardinale? No prosecutor’s going to give us a search warrant. We don’t have anything. Anything at all. Just conjecture piled on conjecture. It’s quite possible this man had nothing to do with the assaults. What do we tell the prosecutor?’

  ‘I wasn’t actually thinking of a search warrant…’

  ‘So what were you thinking of? What do we do, go along there with a crowbar and break into the apartment, and maybe some neighbour sees us and calls 113 and the police come and arrest us?’

  Cardinale said nothing. Pellegrini seemed fascinated by the tops of his own shoes. Martinelli stood stock still, gazing into the distance. Chiti looked at each of them in turn, an expression of dawning awareness on his face.

  ‘So that’s it. You want to bend the rules. You want to break the door down and…’

  ‘There’s no need to break the door down,’ Cardinale said. ‘I have a set of keys we took off a burglar.’ Then, as to justify himself, ‘We arrested him for at least ten jobs. Before you came to Bari. I think he’s still inside.’

  ‘Are you telling me you took a bunch of picklocks, obviously without recording them – in other words, you stole them – and you’re keeping them for your personal use?’

  Cardinale pursed his lips, and said nothing.

  Chiti was about to say something else, but then thought better of it. He took out a cigarette, lit it, and smoked the whole of it. The three men waited. Nothing stirred in the office. At last he put out the cigarette, took a deep, weary breath, propped his right cheek on his clenched fist and his elbow on the desk. Again he looked at each of them in turn.

  ‘Tell me exactly what you want to do.

  5

  ONE DAY I met my sister.

  I was wandering as usual through the centre of town, looking in the windows of the expensive clothes shops I’d spent money in over the past few months.

  I was vaguely thinking I ought to buy a few things for autumn and winter, but the whole business of going into shops, calling the assistants, trying on clothes, choosing, seemed altogether too complicated and tiresome.

  When I bumped into Alessandra I didn’t recognise her, or perhaps I should say I just didn’t see her. She was the one who stopped right in front of me, practically barring my way.

  ‘Giorgio?’ There was a curious tone in her voice that must have been due to more than the fact that I hadn’t seen her or recognised her. Maybe it was something she saw – or didn’t see – in my eyes.

  ‘Alessandra.’ As I said her name, it struck me I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d last spoken it. Whenever it had been was lost somewhere in the mysterious depths of childhood.

  She was twenty-seven, but looked a lot older. Her face was prematurely lined: she had little wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, around her eyes and on her forehead. Looking closer at her face, I noticed she even had a few thin white hairs, near the temples.

  ‘Giorgio, why the hell are you walking like that? You look like a junkie.’

  How long was it since I’d last seen her? I couldn’t remember. I had no idea when both of us had last been in our parents’ apartment at the same time. I wondered if it had been after my new life had already started. Probably not, I thought. It must have been before I’d begun spending time with Francesco. In other words, at least ten months earlier. That was it, she had come home at Christmas, and I hadn’t seen her since. How strange, I thought. She’s part of my past. She’s part of the life I used to lead, before I got to know Francesco. That life seemed – was – so far away. I couldn’t have said if I felt nostalgia for it, or anything else. It was just…far away.

  ‘How are you…?’ I was about to say her name again, but I felt strangely embarrassed and left the sentence hanging.

  ‘I’m fine. And you?’

  It was so weird, meeting like this, like two casual acquaintances. Because that was what we were, nothing more. How are you? Fine, and you? Oh, fine, and how about the family? Which family, mine or yours?

  What was weird was that I really wanted to talk to her. It had never happened before. But I was so alone. Drifting. Just having a sister seemed strange. So I asked her if she felt like a coffee. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t categorise. It wasn’t exactly surprise: it was something like surprise, but a little different. And a little sad. Then she said yes, she’d like a coffee.

  We walked in silence for a couple of blocks until we came to a famous old pastry shop, full of wooden fittings and wonderful bygone smells. It was almost always empty these days, and the tea room seemed suspended in some indeterminate past.

  ‘Is it true you’ve given up studying, Giorgio?’

  I was stunned. How did she know I’d given up studying? Obviously, my parents had told her. But that meant that my parents and my sister were on speaking terms. And that they talked about me. I found both of these things hard to believe.

  ‘Yes, it’s true.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Did Mum tell you?’

  ‘Both of them told me.’

  We sat down at a table. They were all free, apart from one on the other side of the room, where two seventy-year-old ladies with blue rinsed hair sat smoking filter cigarettes, surrounded by bags from clothing shops.

  ‘When did they tell you?’

  ‘What difference does it make? What’s happening to you? Are you fucking up your life?’

  Was I fucking up my life?

  Yes, I’d say this was an economical, maybe slightly simplistic, but basically accurate definition of the past few months.

  I didn’t say that, but it’s what I was thinking, word for word.

  ‘Oh, no. It’s just that I’ve been going through…’ Then I thought, no, I didn’t want to talk bullshit. I’d have liked to tell her everything, but that was impossible, so I fell silent.

  ‘In a way, I’m not surprised you stopped studying that stuff. I never thought you were cut out for law. When I was small you said you wanted to be a writer. You used to write those stories in your exercise books when you were in elementary school. I never read them, but everyone said they were very good.’

  In other words, my sister had noticed that I used to write when I was a child. Those stories in my exercise books when I was in elementary school. I’d always thought I was completely invisible to her, and now I’d discovered that she knew a few things about me. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like crying and so I passed my hand over my face, like someone who’s worried but is trying to keep things under control. I signalled to the waiter. He came to our table and we ordered two coffees.

  ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ I said taking out my packet.

  ‘No. I quit.’

  ‘How many did you use to smoke? A lot, right?’

  ‘Two packets a day. Sometimes more. Apart from the other crap I used to put inside me from time to time.’

  I looked at her without asking the question out lo
ud. What had she put inside her? Had I understood her correctly?

  Yes, I’d understood her correctly. I’d understood her perfectly well. My sister had been a heroin addict – with occasional forays into other mind-altering substances – for five years. I’d never known anything about it.

  ‘When…when did you quit?’

  ‘The cigarettes or the crap?’ Her lips were slightly pursed. There was a hint of a smile, partly bitter, partly mocking. Obviously I wanted to know when she’d quit shooting up. Actually, what I wanted to know more than anything was how, when and why she had started.

  She told me a story I’d only known a part of until then. It was a common enough story. The time in London, then in Bologna and other places. The abortion, the thefts, a bit of dealing to get hold of drugs, her life with that man – she never said his name, and I couldn’t remember it and didn’t ask her – the community, and her life since. Which wasn’t exactly paradise on earth. Far from it. She told me about the dull, difficult life she was leading now. She told me about her sense of failure and emptiness. About how, when things get really bad, you think how good it would be to shoot up. Just once, to get past the bad times. But of course you know it won’t be just once, so, one way or another, you keep going. She told me about how you keep going, the tricks you use to keep going, her friends – she didn’t have many – her work. About things that were all – or almost all – so different from the way I’d imagined them.

  Now, she said, she would like to have a baby. If only she could meet a man who was worth the bother.

  She did almost all the talking. I listened to her, feeling a kind of dazed tenderness.

  ‘You’re not fucking up your life the way I did, are you, Giorgio?’ She stretched her left hand across the table and for a moment touched my hand.

  ‘Giorgio?’

  I was sitting there, looking down at the hand she had touched. As if a trace of her hand was still there. It was so strange.

  Then I pulled myself together. ‘No, no. Don’t worry. I’ve been going through a bit of a rough time. I’ve been kind of mixed up. It happens, I suppose. In fact, if you get a chance to talk to Mum and Dad, please tell them. I mean, tell them you talked to me – but don’t tell them I told you to talk to them – and that everything’s fine. We don’t communicate much at the moment, but I don’t like seeing them like that. Will you do that, as a favour to me?’

  She nodded, and smiled, too. She seemed relieved. Then she looked at her watch and made a face, as if to say, Damn, it’s really late, when you’re talking you lose track of time, I really have to go now. She didn’t use those words, but that was the sense of it.

  She walked around the table and before I had time to stand up she bent down and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Bye, Giorgio. I’m glad I spoke to you.’

  Then she turned and walked out quickly. I was alone now in the tea room. The two ladies with the blue hair and the filter cigarettes had long gone.

  The place was silent and unnaturally still.

  6

  THEY RANG THE bell by the entryphone. Once. Twice. Then a third, longer ring.

  No answer.

  Cardinale started trying the keys in the lock. In less than a minute, the front door opened. Martinelli and Pellegrini had stayed in the car. Chiti had said he should be the one to go in. They hadn’t objected.

  They climbed the stairs to the third floor, read the name on the name plate, and rang the bell.

  Once. Twice. Then a third, longer ring.

  No answer.

  Cardinale put on latex gloves and starting working on the lock. There was a hum of machinery from somewhere. Chiti could also hear his own heartbeat and his own breathing. He tried to think what he would say if the other door on the landing opened suddenly and someone put his head out. He couldn’t think of anything, so he stopped thinking. He concentrated on the hum, on his heartbeat, his breathing.

  Until he heard the click of the lock. As they went in, it struck him that he had no idea how long they had been standing outside that door. Thirty seconds? Ten minutes?

  Inside, it was dark and silent and smelled stuffy.

  In that pitch blackness, he suddenly, for no reason, saw his mother’s face. Or rather, what he assumed his mother’s face was like, because he didn’t remember it. Not well. Good as he was with images, whenever he made a deliberate effort to remember it, he couldn’t. It was elusive, and sometimes turned into something monstrous that he had to drive out of his mind immediately.

  Cardinale found the light switch.

  The apartment was tidy, in a meticulous, obsessive, lifeless way. Lifeless: that was it. Chiti stopped for a moment to wonder how the apartment must have been when it was full of life.

  If it had ever been full of life.

  Then he roused himself, put on latex gloves and started searching. For something, anything.

  There was a thick layer of dust everywhere, but no visible prints of hands or anything else. The apartment must have been unoccupied for at least a month. In other words, more or less since the mother had died. The son must have left immediately afterwards. Or, Chiti caught himself thinking for no particular reason, immediately before.

  They soon came to his bedroom. In the rest of the place there was nothing interesting. Old objects, old newspapers, old utensils. All neat and tidy in a way that seemed almost ritualistic, unhealthy.

  The first thing he noticed was the Jim Morrison poster. Hanging awry, the face staring out at them.

  Then the Tex Willer comics, hundreds of them. He recognised some of the titles and covers. He had read them as a child.

  They searched through the drawers, under the bed, on the shelves. Nothing strange or suspicious, apart from all the packs of playing cards. He wondered what they meant, and if they had any connection with the investigation, with the assaults. He really hoped this man and his cards had something to do with the crimes, and that the real culprit wasn’t snug and warm somewhere, gloating in anticipation at the thought of his next assault and how he was going to outsmart all the police and carabinieri in the world.

  ‘Look at this, lieutenant.’

  Cardinale was holding a sheet of paper, typewritten on both sides.

  A rental agreement for an apartment.

  There was an address on the sheet.

  Ten minutes later, they were in the car. None of them – Pellegrini driving, Chiti beside him, the other two in the back – said a word all the way back to the barracks. As the car glided along streets made unsightly by all the cars parked with their front wheels on the pavements, Chiti thought for the first time that they were going to get him.

  It wasn’t a clearly articulated thought, let alone a reasoned one.

  He simply thought they were going to get him.

  7

  ABOUT TEN DAYS after the encounter with my sister, Francesco phoned me.

  What had become of me? Why hadn’t I called him in all this time? Damn, we hadn’t seen each other for at least two weeks. It was much longer, but I didn’t tell him that. Just as I didn’t tell him I’d tried to get in touch many times but he’d never been in and had never called me back.

  ‘We really have to meet as soon as possible, my friend.’

  We met about eight for an aperitif. It was November now, and cold. Two or three days earlier, hundreds of thousands of East Germans had demolished the wall and gone over to the other side, while my life had crawled along, devoid of meaning.

  Francesco was euphoric, but there was a dark undertone to his euphoria that I couldn’t figure out.

  He took me to his favourite bar. You could see the sea from there, even when you were sitting inside. He ordered two Negronis without even asking me what I wanted, and we knocked them back as quickly as if they were glasses of orange juice, and munched on crisps, pistachios and cashews. We ordered two more Negronis and lit cigarettes.

  What had I been up to? he asked me again. What had he been up to? I shot back. I’d tried to get hold o
f him many times. I’d talked to his mother. And then even she had stopped answering.

  He was silent for a moment, half closing his eyes. As if he’d suddenly remembered some detail he had to tell me about before he went on.

  ‘My mother died,’ he said. There was no particular intonation in his voice. He was telling me a piece of news, without emotion. I felt my blood run cold. I tried to find something to say, some gesture to make. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. How did it happen? When did it happen? How are you feeling?

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything. I didn’t have time. After only a few seconds, he spoke again.

  ‘I don’t live there any more.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘In an apartment. I rented it a while back.’ It was the same apartment we’d gone to all those months earlier, with the two girls. He didn’t remember taking me there. I was overwhelmed with a sense of anxiety that was very close to fear.

  ‘You must see it. I’ll take you tonight, show you how I’ve fixed the place up. But first let’s have dinner.’

  With the Negronis spreading through our legs and brains, we went to a rather shabby trattoria I’d never been to before. We ate a bit, but did rather more drinking. Wine and then grappa. We should start seeing each other again, Francesco said. We had to play more poker, but in style now. We’d go outside Bari, to different parts of Italy, maybe even farther afield, and make some real money. Not the small change we’d wasted our time and our talent on until now. Our talent, he said. We had to start again from where we’d left off. He repeated this several times. Apparently looking me in the face, but actually looking right through me, his gaze febrile and remote.

  The apartment didn’t look any different from the last time, except that now there were piles of clothes on the sofa and the floor and some still unopened cardboard boxes. The place smelled of cigarette smoke, among other things. It smelled like somewhere where the windows were never opened. In fact, it smelled like his mother’s apartment.