Game for Five (11 page)

“Well, of course, I'm happy to do that. The two PR guys are called Dennis and Davide, they shouldn't be hard to find. As for the statement, here I am.”

“Perfect. You could even make it right now, if the doctor doesn't mind leaving. I'll type it personally.”

The doctor intercepted Massimo's questioning look. “Officer Pardini somehow managed to break his wrist falling off his chair, and Officer Tonfoni has gone with him to the Santa Chiara hospital in Pisa to have it treated. Why are you smiling?”

“Oh, no reason, just the way I am. All right, let's start.”

 

“‘ . . . As the vehicle was being removed from the location where it had been discovered, I noticed that the driver's seat was positioned quite far back, so as to render driving impossible for anyone other than those of above average height, to such an extent that even the officer charged with the removal, Enrico Pardini (whose is about six feet tall) found himself obliged to move the said seat forward in such a way as to allow himself to maneuver the vehicle easily. Being . . . ' Blah, blah, blah. OK, that seems fine,” Fusco said.

“Of course,” Massimo said, admiring Fusco's ability to translate his plain, linear statement into that magnificent baroque tangle that satisfied all the age-old canons of legal language. Obviously, Fusco, with the speed and dexterity of a champion skier, had skirted any trace of the things he'd done to make a fool of himself on the morning in question, but what mattered was that what Massimo had seen was now down in black and white.

“Good, now just read and sign.”

Massimo read it, nodded approvingly, as he did when he didn't understand a damned thing or when he wasn't paying much attention to what he was reading or listening to, and signed with the signature he had learned in elementary school, the signature he hated so much, with the M made up of three perfect little arches looking down on the remaining letters, all written with pedantic precision and all clearly distinguishable.

“We may still need you, so please remain available. Can you give me your cell phone number?”

“No.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I don't have a cell phone. If you don't find me at home you'll find me in the bar. If I'm not in either of those two places, I'll be there some time during the day. And there's always someone in the bar.”

“All right, I've made a note of that. And tell your grandfather to be less of a smart ass, or the next time I really will arrest him.”

 

When Massimo got back to the bar, he was greeted by a cheerful ovation from the old-timers.

“Three cheers for Sherlock Holmes!”

“So how did it go? Did you pass?”

“I did, yes. So did Aldo. Someone else didn't do so well. Isn't that so, grandpa?”

Ampelio smiled. “What's it got to do with me?”

“What did you tell Fusco?”

“I told him what he deserved to hear. I said, ‘Have you been transferred to the traffic police, because I'm always seeing you here in the bar instead of where you ought to be?'”

Massimo laughed. “You're really something. How about a game of
briscola
? I have to go out again later.”

Chairs under the table, a glass to mark the place, and away we go. We're not here for anybody. I did my duty, Massimo told himself, now it's up to those who get paid for it. From now on, I'm just a barman again.

Anyway, what I wanted to say to you is simply that this business may ruin my client completely. And when I say completely, I mean completely. Both as a professional and as a man. I don't think there's any need to explain why. Nobody would trust him, after . . . after what's happened.”

Understandably, Massimo thought. Right now, he was starting to wonder why he had accepted an invitation from P.G.'s lawyer to have dinner at the Boccaccio.

 

It wasn't that he hadn't expected to hear from P.G., mind you. After all that had happened, the absence of any reaction from the man himself would have implied:

(a) that P.G. did not know that Massimo had played a major role in orienting the investigation, and therefore in screwing things up for him, or:

(b) that P.G. intended simply to stay calm, think things through, and await further developments.

The fact that they were both in Pineta made possibility (a) simply unthinkable, and even a slight knowledge of the person in question
de facto
ruled out possibility (b).

So Massimo had expected to hear from P.G., one way or another. From what he knew of the guy, however, he would have expected him to come into the bar, the veins of his neck artfully swollen, with a couple of eager helpers pretending to hold him back while he tried to beat Massimo up, or something like that. With Fusco's arrest of P.G., however, this eventuality had become highly unlikely, and so Massimo had stopped expecting any direct reaction on the part of P.G.

But there had in fact been a reaction from P.G..

 

It was about three-thirty the previous day, and the bar was blissfully enjoying a well-deserved post-prandial rest. Massimo was sitting behind the counter with his feet soaking in a tub filled with water, reading
The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro (a great book, but one to be read when you're in a good mood, or you're likely to throw yourself under a streetcar). The senate was outside in the shade of the big lime tree, playing canasta and so not kicking up the usual fuss, for once in a while. A not very tall man, with round metal-rimmed glasses and a touch of hair at the sides and in the middle of a shiny cranium, got out of a Z4, entered the bar with a smile on his face, and greeted Massimo in a loud voice, “Good afternoon.”

“It depends.”

“I'm sorry?”

“It depends on your intentions. If you simply want to have a cold drink and enjoy the shade outside, I could continue to read peacefully for a while longer and therefore it would continue to be a good afternoon at least for the time being. If on the other hand it's your intention to talk about the Costa murder, that would force me to close my book, which would fall into the category of things that piss me off. If that were the case, your greeting would strike me as patently hypocritical.”

(In Massimo's defense, it should be said that when he was reading a good book he tended to empathize strongly with the author and his way of writing, and that the book in question is narrated in the first person by an English butler at the end of the Second World War. Leaving aside the concept of something pissing you off, which was somewhat alien to the way a top-grade manservant would express himself, it can't be ruled out that Massimo's reply was heavily influenced by the language that Ishiguro attributes to Stevens the butler).

In the moment of embarrassment that followed, the only sounds were the rustle of a page being turned and, from outside, a weak, apparently senile voice saying to hell with you and your stupid canasta, you idiot, if you used your brain at least once a year it'd do you a lot of good.

Still smiling, the man said, “What makes you think I want to talk about the Costa murder?”

“Because only yesterday I saw a photograph of you in
Il Tirreno
, and underneath it there was a caption saying ‘Attorney Luigi Nicola Valenti, Piergiorgio Neri's defense lawyer,'” Massimo said without taking his eyes off the book. “Right now, Piergiorgio Neri known as P.G. is suspected of the murder of Alina Costa, on the basis of evidence I helped to supply. Given that even in this era when all the rules tend to be broken, two plus two stubbornly continues to make four, it struck me as obvious that you wanted to talk about something that concerns your client.”

The smile never once leaving his face, Attorney Valenti jumped up onto one of the stools at the counter. “They told me you were very observant, and they were right. They also told me you're decidedly unfriendly.”

“Wrong,” Massimo said, continuing to read. “I'm actually very friendly. I simply hate it when people feel they have the right to piss me off, and ever since that girl was murdered, that's something that's been happening rather a lot. Would you like a drink?”

“Why not? Could I have a coffee?”

“No, it's out of reach.”

“I'm sorry?”

“As you can see, right now my movements are somewhat restricted because my feet are in a tub. The coffee machine is too far. You can have everything you see at this end of the counter—iced tea, beer, water and cold drinks, Sicilian granita made the way it should be, either with genuine lemons from Erice or with coffee. That's quite a choice, I'm sure you'll agree.”

“Er . . . a granita with coffee, please.”

“With cream or without?

“Without, thanks. So—”

“With brioche or without?”

“Granita with brioche? This is the first I've heard of that.”

“Really?” Massimo seemed genuinely upset. “How disappointing. Well?”

“Without, thanks,” Attorney Valenti said, starting to betray a modicum of irritation.

Massimo stood up with his feet still in the water, put a cardboard coaster as a bookmark in the page he had reached, and put the book down. There was no sound anywhere, either inside or out.

“So,” the lawyer said. “At this point it seems to me that the best thing to do is not waste too much time, but tell you why I'm here. In a nutshell, my client has asked me to meet with you.”

“In what sense?” Massimo asked, as usual playing mentally with the image of a scoreboard announcing “Tonight, major bout for the regional heavyweight and welterweight titles between the champion Piergiorgio Neri, known as P.G., and the loser Massimo Viviani, known as the Barman,” and beneath it photographs of both the contenders in dressing gowns.

“In the sense that two civilized people—you and I, in this case—sit down at a table and talk, in order to understand what has happened and decide on the best strategy to adopt.”

“I don't get it. Why do we need a strategy?”

“To see to it that the truth emerges. To make sure that the heap of coincidences and false assumptions that have somehow been twisted into indications of my client's guilt is untangled. You must be aware that—”

“All I'm aware of is that I really ought to change the sign outside. I have to take away the one that says
Bar
and put up a marble one saying
Police Station
”—here Massimo began to raise his voice—“so that at last people will again start coming in here and asking for a coffee, instead of breaking my balls about the murder! The next time I find a body in a trash can, I'll go to the police and accuse myself of the murder, dammit! At least that way I might get some peace and quiet for a while.”

“All right, but you must agree that—”

“No,
you've
obviously all agreed to come here one at a time, first to make me find a body, then to make me find a murderer, and now even to free him. Hello, Tiziana,” he said to the girl, who had just come in. “Quite frankly, I'm finding it all too much.”

Attorney Valenti did not speak for a moment. He took a spoonful of granita, put it in his mouth, and seemed to like the taste. Then, looking down at the granita, he said, “Will you allow me to say something?”

“Go ahead. It's a free country.”

“Precisely. It's a free country. A country where we all have rights. That implies that we also have duties, and it's thanks to our respecting those duties, in principle anyway, that we're able to maintain our rights. Have I been clear so far?”

“Yes.”

“Good. In life things are the way they are, not the way we'd like them to be. I'm sorry you've been dragged into a murder case that seems to have nothing to do with you, and that you've then been pulled even further into it because of some things you observed and because you know some people connected with it. We agree, you have no intention of continuing to be involved. However, by an unfortunate chance, you know things about the case, you're a witness. It's not so much that you're involved, it's that you have a duty to be involved. It just happened to you, all right, but allow me to point out that there are people in this case that far worse things have happened to. So stop playing the victim and do your duty, after which you can go back to your book. Unless, as you were hoping earlier, someone arrests you first and mistakenly accuses you of the murder. That seems to be happening a lot around here lately.”

The attorney took a business card from his pocket and held it out to Massimo. Massimo took it, looked at it and said, “Tell me when.”

“Dinner tomorrow?”

“All right. I'll call to arrange it. Goodbye.”

As the lawyer was going out, Massimo, simulating feigned indifference, asked in a loud voice, “Tiziana, can you fill in for me at dinner time tomorrow?”

“Of course, boss. Anything to allow you to carry out your duty.”

“Thanks.”

“Nice man, that lawyer, wasn't he?”

“We were just talking about my duties. You want me to remind you what yours are, or were you planning to clean the toilet anyway?”

Tiziana came out from behind the counter with the bucket and the gloves, and stuck her tongue out at Massimo. “You're spiteful, you know.”

Massimo picked up his book and ostentatiously removed the coaster. “I hate being wrong,” he said in a low voice.

“Wow. That's the first time I've heard you admit it.”

“It's the first time you've been here when it happened. Don't say anything to the old-timers or I'll strangle you.”

 

And so Massimo, fully living up to his new role as a Serious Person, had found himself having dinner with the lawyer. They had sat down at a slightly isolated table in the so-called artists' room at the Boccaccio.

The artists' room at the Boccaccio was so called because there were a few posters by Aldo's favorite painters, Hokusai and Jack Vettriano, on the walls, unlike the other rooms, which displayed bloodcurdling daguerreotypes of sailors and field hands from the previous century alternating with big blow-ups of the cook photographed in his hunting jacket with the most beautiful catches of his career.