Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
‘And what did she tell you she came to me for?’ He continued to stare at her, hardly taking his eyes off her even for a moment.
‘But, doctor, you know.’
‘I want you to tell me what Signorina Marelli told you.’
She was uneasy now. ‘She told me she was supposed to be getting married to the owner of the butcher’s shop, this was something she’d told me before, and she also told me she didn’t like the idea because she was in love with someone else, the man who died with her, but that the butcher was an opportunity for her, and that he wanted her to be a virgin, otherwise he wouldn’t marry her, she wasn’t a virgin and so she’d found a good doctor who would see to everything.’
So he was a good doctor who saw to everything. He
stopped staring at the poor woman and everything inside him smiled. These crooks can do whatever they like, there’s always some crazy woman who blabs, who goes around telling tales. ‘And what can I do for you?’
‘Listen, doctor, if you don’t want to do it, tell me, you know. I already told you, this is quite a delicate matter, even for a woman.’
He broke off listening to her and called, ‘Mascaranti!’ From the hall, where he had been listening religiously, Mascaranti came into the surgery almost softly. ‘Mascaranti, please, show the young lady your ID.’
This was unexpected, it wasn’t logical to let them know that they were with the police, but he obeyed all the same.
‘Have a good look,’ Duca said, ‘we’re with the police. Don’t be afraid.’ But the woman
was
afraid, he had the impression she might even faint.
‘But aren’t you a doctor?’ She was breathing in little gasps, as if the air was lead. ‘The caretaker told me you’re a doctor.’
‘Calm down,’ he yelled to stop her fainting. ‘I am a doctor, or I was a doctor. But right now you have to help the police.’
Alone, between those two men suddenly revealed as policemen, she turned into a child. ‘I have to go back to the shop, it’s late, I’ve left my mother alone, she’s elderly, she can’t cope.’ She got up, holding her handbag clumsily in both hands, her face was green, but it was only the reflection of the spring light coming in through the window.
‘Sit down,’ he ordered.
Perhaps his voice had been louder and harsher than was strictly necessary, but she gave a start, actually jumped. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said like a child, ‘yes,’ and she sat down, and at the same time started crying.
The best way to calm someone who is crying is to give them orders. ‘Show me your papers,’ Duca said.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said, crying, and started looking in her handbag. ‘All I have is my driving license, but I have my passport at home.’
Duca looked at the licence for a moment (twenty-nine years old, though she looked older: like many Milanese women who work, she overworked and ended up looking like that) then passed it to Mascaranti. As you have to be gentle with women who are expecting, he gave her a little speech: ‘You mustn’t be afraid, we only want to know something about that girl, you know a lot more than you’ve told us, and you have to tell the police. For example, go on with that story about the nail polish, it interests me, you said she even painted each nail a different colour, but she didn’t go out in the street like that, did she?’
‘No, can you imagine?’ She had stopped crying. ‘It was only for her man.’
‘Her fiancé, the owner of the butcher’s shop?’
‘That’s right,’ she said, starting to become really involved in the subject. ‘She told me about all the things he wanted her to do, except give up her virginity, you know, I realised she wasn’t exactly a virgin, from some of the things she said, anyway he liked her to stroke him with her nails painted different colours, that made an impression on me, and other things I really can’t repeat, but you know, you can’t choose your customers, but I didn’t think she was really a bad girl.’
No, whoever said she’d been a bad girl? An instrument is neither good nor bad, it depends on how you use it, you can even choke someone with a rosebud if you push it far enough down his throat. So the butcher, among other things, was a fetishist, a kind of chromatic fetishist: nothing bad about that, we all have our little quirks. But
this twenty-nine-year-old woman who looked thirty-five through overwork must know other things. ‘And did you ever meet the other man, the one who died with Signorina Marelli?’
She glanced at Mascaranti, who was sitting next to the window, looking like a pensioner writing his memoirs, the story of his life, with that little book in his hand and that horrible pink plastic ballpoint pen between his fingers. She couldn’t have imagined that he was taking down everything she said: she didn’t have much of an imagination about police matters. ‘Signor Silvano?’ she said. ‘Yes, once.’
‘At Frontini’s, perhaps?’ he suggested.
‘Oh, no,’ she burst out, surprised at such naivety, ‘do you think they wanted to be seen together so close to the butcher’s shop, where the assistants would tell the boss everything? No, it was because of a case.’
Suddenly the spring stopped coming in through the window, at least for him and Mascaranti, even though the word she had used was so simple, so bland, that she could not have imagined the effect it caused.
‘One evening, leaving the butcher’s shop to go home, she came into my shop with a case and asked me if I could keep it until the following morning, when her Silvano would drop by to collect it.’
‘And so the next morning, Signor Silvano came to your shop and picked up the case?’
‘Yes, he was really a handsome young man, I started to understand why she wasn’t so happy about being engaged to the butcher.’
What women understand by
handsome young man
never has anything to do with morality. Not all women, not Livia Ussaro: he needed her, sometimes sharply, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone any more, about anything, not even
about abstract subjects, not even with him, after all she was a woman, and seventy-seven scars on her face can make a woman a bit depressed. ‘And what did he tell you: “I’m Silvano”?’ he said, dismissing Livia Ussaro from his mind.
‘Something like that, yes, first he asked me if Signorina Giovanna had left a case for him, and I said yes, and then he told me he was Silvano, but even if he hadn’t told me, I’d already guessed it was him.’
He was clearly of great interest to women, that fine figure of a man, Silvano Solvere. But it isn’t right to speak ill of the dead. ‘Mascaranti,’ he said, ‘get me the photograph of Signor Silvano from the file.’
It wasn’t a very good photograph, the one Mascaranti brought, and it might not have been a good idea to show it to a pregnant woman, but apart from the fact that there were no amateur photographers at the morgue, just simple functionaries who captured in all their cold nakedness the corpses who had ended up on a marble slab, the discovery of the truth had precedence over such delicacy. ‘Is this Signor Silvano?’ It might not even have been a good idea to show a woman a naked man, but this was the only photograph they had of him.
She took a good look at the photograph, obviously the image she had inside her of the handsome young man was better than the one she was looking at on the glossy 18 × 12 black and white photograph without margins, but it was immediately obvious that she had recognised him, even though it took her a while before she said, ‘Yes, that’s him.’
‘Mascaranti, the case,’ Duca said, giving Mascaranti the photograph, and after a minute Mascaranti came back into the surgery holding the green case, or small trunk, with the beautiful shiny metal corners. ‘Was the case Signorina
Marelli left in your shop, the one Signor Silvano later came to pick up, anything like this, by any chance?’
‘Oh my God, it’s the same one, I’m sure it is.’ She was extremely surprised. ‘That’s Signor Silvano’s sample case, isn’t it?’
So the girl in the red dress coat had led her to think the case contained Signor Silvano’s detergent samples. That was only natural: she certainly couldn’t have told her the truth. Nor did he tell her the truth now. ‘Yes, it’s a case for detergent samples,’ he lied bluntly and gave the case back to Mascaranti.
‘How long ago was the case left with you?’ he asked after a moment.
‘Quite a while ago, at least two months,’ she said confidently, Milanese women are confident when it’s a matter of dates or figures, ‘my mother was still in Nervi because it was too cold here.’
Two months. He looked at the cuffs of his shirt and realised that they were frayed, but you had to use old shirts for as long as you could. The problem of his wardrobe aside, two months earlier Signor Silvano had gone to pick up the case from the shop selling perfumes, cosmetics and so on, but two months earlier the Milanese lawyer Turiddu Sompani, originally from Brittany, was still alive.
‘Did you ever see him again after that?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but the evening before Giovanna died, she left the case with me for a while, yes, for a couple of hours, then came and picked it up again.’
‘Now listen.’ It was true that it was Mother’s Day and she was a mother-to-be, but he had to carry on, at all costs. ‘I get the impression she told you quite a lot about her relationship with Signor Silvano.’
She nodded. She seemed to be taking more of an interest now, in the situation, the drama, the adventure: the Milanese sometimes have an unsuspected taste for strong-arm tactics, police methods, interrogations. She liked it, it took her away a moment from her shop, from her mother, from her situation as an unmarried woman absent-mindedly seduced and not even abandoned,
8
but forgotten, mixed up with someone else: her seducer must have wondered every now and again, ‘Who was she, that night? Was it that one or was it this one?’ And so she stopped crying, she wasn’t even afraid any more, she wanted to help, she was the kind of citizen who helps.
‘She told you lots of things, even quite delicate things,’ Duca said didactically, ‘so it’s quite likely she told you where she met Signor Silvano.’ In an attempt to clarify things he went on, ‘She lived in Ca’ Tarino, near Corsico, and every evening she had to go back home, it was usually her fiancé, the owner of the butcher’s shop, who drove her home. By day she had to be in the butcher’s shop, at the cash desk, so maybe she told you when it was that she saw Signor Silvano?’
But she had already understood. ‘There were days when the owner of the butcher’s shop had to go away,’ she explained, informatively, ‘sometimes he was away five or six days, and that was when they saw each other.’ She paused for breath, engrossed in her role as a collaborator in the discovery of the truth. ‘She’d leave the assistants alone in the shop, and go with him.’
‘And did she tell you where they went?’
‘They didn’t always go to the same place, and besides, she didn’t tell me everything, but two or three times she mentioned a place she liked a lot, the Binaschina.’
‘The Bi – ?’ he echoed, he hadn’t quite caught the word.
‘The Binaschina. Yes, after Binasco, on the road that leads to Pavia, it’s a bit further on, not far from the Charterhouse of Pavia. She told me such good things about it that I went there with my mother one Saturday last summer, it’s a really nice place, and very close to the Charterhouse.’
‘Is it a hotel?’ he interrupted.
‘Oh, no, it’s only a restaurant,’ she said, bowing her head modestly, then continuing with her endless
you knows,
‘you know how it is when they have regular customers, they must have rooms upstairs.’
Pleasant little places, in the middle of all that nature, all that greenery, with bedrooms upstairs, out of the way of the Milan road: you take your friend’s wife there, or an underage girl, you have a nice lunch, because it’s better to go there by day, that way it’s even more innocent, and then you go upstairs, broadly speaking, just like that, and then, broadly speaking, you come down again and nobody can say anything about it. It was the kind of place you chose to go to, not a place you discovered by chance.
‘Did she mention anywhere else?’
She tried hard to remember, then said, ‘No, I really don’t think so, you know, I don’t have a very good memory, but if she’d been with him the day before, the day after she’d tell me so much about the Binaschina, she’d say the food was really good, but to tell the truth, that time I went there with my mother, the food wasn’t so great, in fact the meat was a bit tough.’
He let her talk, it had been a more instructive encounter than it might have seemed, thank you, thank you, young lady of the cosmetics, Mascaranti had written her name down, but Duca didn’t care about names. ‘Thank you,’ he said, quite sincerely, and then, equally sincerely, he started to give her advice, professional advice to start with: if by
chance anyone came asking questions about Signor Silvano and Signorina Giovanna Marelli, she should immediately inform the police, she mustn’t forget that, or the police would be angry. The next advice he gave her was more in the nature of moral advice, or not exactly moral, in practice they were more like threats – when you came down to it the expression ‘I’ll smash your head in’ was more effective than a lot of highly ethical and noble phrases – he told her that if she was expecting a child, she had to keep it, for two very simple reasons: one, that if she had an abortion she could go to prison and then they would even take away her licence for the perfume shop; two, that in many cases – he was a doctor and knew what he was talking about – an abortion could, among other things, cause septicaemia, and septicaemia is a general infection, in case she didn’t know, which not even modern medicine could keep under control. But when they were at the door, and before he opened it, taking advantage of the fact that it was Mother’s Day, he told her, in a low, persuasive voice, that the child might be a boy, but even if it was a girl, in a mere twenty years or so, it could keep the shop going, why work so hard for a business if you don’t have anyone to leave it to?
When he had got rid of the woman, he ran into the kitchen. The loved and hated files were still there, on the shelf of the larger dresser.
‘Mascaranti, show me the map of the spot where Turiddu Sompani’s car fell.’
They both grabbed the Breton’s file and there they were, the maps, along with the photographs of the car being lifted from the water. The spot where Turiddu Sompani’s car had fallen into the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese was almost halfway between Binasco and the Charterhouse of Pavia.