Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ he said to Mascaranti.
At the moment, there wasn’t much to see. It was only twelve, and despite the sun and the clear sky and the tender, resplendent expanse of green and the acute sense of spring, so rare in Lombardy, the place, seen from the outside, had the discreet air common once upon a time to high-class brothels. From the road you couldn’t see anything at all, then, once past the curtain of trees, the road led to an open space, with a sign saying
car park,
but even here you couldn’t see the brothel itself, you had to go further, on foot, past another little barrier of trees, and then there it was, apparently innocuous, a bit of folklore, architecturally horrendous, its style a mixture of a lower Lombard farmhouse and a Swedish Protestant church.
It was midday, exactly midday. They went in. At that hour nobody came to greet them, it was too early, everyone was in the kitchen preparing the food. They had to go through two doors, very heavy ones, and the opulence of the doors with their decorated bronze handles half a metre long were already clear evidence that whoever owned these doors earned a comfortable income.
‘I don’t think there’s any point trying to pass ourselves off as customers,’ Duca said, ‘they won’t believe us.’ He was starting to feel very much a policeman.
The main room could – if you were trying to be funny – be called pretty. It was done up like a stable or cowshed, there were saddles, cartwheels, heaps of straw on the ground and hay in the mangers lined up against the walls. But, tactfully, neither the saddles nor the spades nor the cartwheels
took anything away from the spotless white tablecloths, the trolleys filled with hors d’oeuvre and fruit, and the little mustard-yellow velvet chairs. The place had the look of a stable without any of the disadvantages, rustic lamps hung from the ceiling, a little barrow stood in a corner crammed with sorghum broomsticks, but everything was very clean, well hoovered, and the few copper pans displayed here and there testified, in their bright sheen, to the general cleanliness (hygiene is so important, after all, especially where you eat).
‘Really despicable,’ Duca said.
Nobody had come to greet them and there was nobody to be seen. Through the three large open windows birdsong came in along with the light, but from somewhere close by that must have been the kitchen, you could hear banging: they must have been beating a piece of meat, or chopping something with a knife. Then an old man came out, short and thin and pink, wearing black trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no hat of any kind. He looked as if he had a lot of experience and an uneasy conscience, because he did not approach them as if they were likely customers, but with the uncertain look of someone who doesn’t know what the doctor is about to tell him: hay fever or neoplasia?
‘Your ID, Mascaranti,’ Duca ordered. And as Mascaranti showed the old man his ID, a number of white-clad waiters, slender but rather well-built, appeared behind the old man, and even two female cooks with white caps like ice bags on their heads, they looked very nineteenth-century, Duca was reminded of Toulouse-Lautrec for a moment, was Toulouse-Lautrec also a Breton, like Turiddu Sompani? He tried to remember, no, he wasn’t a Breton, he was probably a Gascon.
With all those waiters standing behind him in long white aprons, as if they were at the Moulin Rouge, the old man looked at Mascaranti’s ID and said ‘Yes,’ he was probably quite familiar with the police, he did not smile, he was not servile, that
yes
was even a little cold and stiff.
But Duca shook him, warmed him. ‘We need to talk to you. Let’s go upstairs, to one of those rooms you rent by the hour.’
The old man liked his clarity, he liked it in a bad way, even his skull turned pink. ‘Everything’s above board here,’ he said and then repeated, ‘Everything’s above board. The rooms upstairs are for my daughter and my son-in-law, and apart from that there are two more for the cook and the waitresses. We close at one in the morning and the girls can’t go home alone at that hour.’
No, of course they couldn’t. Not in such virginal surroundings. ‘Yes,’ Duca said, ‘let’s go upstairs to talk,’ and he took him by the arm and pushed him, physical contact is more effective than any words could be, it’s like a kick. ‘Mascaranti, you stay here and keep an eye on these people, and on the phone.’
Reluctantly, the old man led him upstairs. To do so you had to go out in the garden, so that a couple would look as if they were leaving, instead of which you turned right and went through a small, very ordinary wooden door, so ordinary that no one would have thought of opening it, and behind the little door there was an ordinary little staircase, just one flight, but on the walls hung – who would ever have thought it? – fox hunting prints.
‘Show me the rooms,’ Duca said, with delicacy, not boorishly like a policeman, gripping him by the elbow and pushing him up.
The old man showed him the rooms. He explained that
one of them was his and his wife’s, it was very elegant and very clean, nothing exceptional, except for the bathroom: in such a rustic restaurant, with the downstairs room got up like a stable, a Pompeian bath like this jarred somewhat.
‘This is my son’s and daughter-in-law’s,’ the old man said in the next room. It was a copy of the first room, except that the furniture, apart from that in the bathroom, was of lighter wood, and not suitable for a long stay.
The three rooms for the waitresses did not have double beds, only two small beds next to each other, so close that it was hard to see why they were not joined, and there was no bathroom: each room had a wash basin with a bidet beneath it, modestly covered by a pink or sky blue or yellow towel. The blinds on the windows were permanently lowered, creating, even at midday, a languid atmosphere of sin, but in the third of the three waitresses’ rooms – or what the old man had indicated were the waitresses’ rooms – Duca raised the blinds and the sunlight came flooding in.
‘Right, let’s talk here,’ he said to the old man, and closed the door.
‘Everything’s above board,’ the old man said, ‘the Carabinieri have been here and they found everything in order. I have competitors who talk about me, even in Milan, trying to ruin me, but it’s all above board here, I don’t do what those bastards say, I do well enough with the restaurant, I don’t need to rent rooms by the hour.’ He wasn’t pleading, and he wasn’t exaggerating: he was right, he was the owner of a restaurant that had been checked by the authorities, he was small and old and completely bald, but he had his own repulsive form of nobility: it was obvious he was being protected and that was why he wasn’t afraid.
Duca would have to get the truth out of him.
He sat down on one of the two little beds, and even
sitting down he was almost as tall as the old man. ‘I only want some information,’ he said, sounding very calm, very democratic, almost constitutional, not at all the kind of policeman who tortures suspects. ‘You have lots of customers, and you can’t remember all of them, I know, but do you by any chance remember a certain Signor Silvano? Silvano Solvere? Obviously you don’t remember him, with all the customers you have.’
To his great joy, the old man shook his head, no, he didn’t remember. In fact he even got slightly annoyed. ‘How could I? I don’t know the names of my customers, people coming to a restaurant don’t give their names.’
‘I was thinking,’ Duca suggested, ‘that this Silvano Solvere might possibly have been called to the phone, and that way you would have found out that particular customer was called Silvano Solvere.’ He kept repeating the name, with constitutional politeness, respecting the constitution, which guarantees the freedom of the citizen from any abuse of executive or judicial power.
‘That might have happened, but who remembers all the names?’ the old man said, increasingly calm faced with this policeman who was so well-behaved, he didn’t even seem like a policeman.
‘You’re right, of course,’ Duca said, ‘but how about Attorney Sompani, Turiddu Sompani? Maybe you remember him.’
Benignly, the old man pretended to make an effort to remember, he knitted his brows until they were thick with lines like the rails near a terminal. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.’
Duca nodded, understandingly, and stood up, on his feet he was almost twice as tall as the old man, but the old man didn’t seem to be afraid. He really needed to get the
truth out of him now, and fast. The mistake that crooks make is to deny everything, they’re so stupid, if you ask them, ‘How many fingers do you have on your right hand?’ they say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know a thing.’ That’s how they give themselves away.
‘You see,’ he said, going to the wash basin and turning on the cold water tap, Attorney Turiddu Sompani and a lady friend of his, Signora Adele Terrini, are the two people whose car fell into the canal, the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, one kilometre from here, not even that. I thought they might have had dinner here, and besides, I thought maybe you’d read the papers, that you were interested in an accident that happened so close to your restaurant. But maybe you don’t read the papers?’
He was too old and crafty to rise to the bait, he did not go so far as to deny that he read the newspapers, but his denial was more subtle: ‘Every other day there’s some kind of accident on this road, as there are on all the roads, am I supposed to remember all of them, and remember the names of all the people involved?’ He smiled, he was so sure of himself, he
had
to be protected.
‘So you don’t know anything about Silvano Solvere or Turiddu Sompani?’ Duca said without looking at him, because he had bent down to take one of the two towels from the bidet, a portable bidet, there was a blue towel for men and a pink towel for women, and he took the blue one, put it under the jet of cold water and soaked it thoroughly. He didn’t like doing what he was about to do, on such a glorious spring day, with the smell of sun-warmed earth at last entering this chamber of sin, but the old man had not left him any alternative, the old man took other people, and the police in particular, for cretins, for mental retards, he took the law and civil rights as jokes that had nothing to do with
him, because he believed he had protection that was much stronger than the police and the law, and so, advanced in years as he was, he had to be taught to respect the law and the police: even on television they always said it was never too late.
Without losing his temper, he went up to the old man, who was watching, curious and bored, gently grabbed him by the back of the neck with his left hand, while with the right he simultaneously, instantaneously blocked his nose and mouth, his two channels for breathing, with the wet towel.
The old man tried to kick but Duca kept him still and laid him down on the bed, face up and with one knee bent. Four seconds had passed, the old man could hold out for forty seconds, maybe more, there was still time. A wet towel – they were of very fine terry cloth – sticks better and gives better insulation: air can neither leave nor enter the lungs.
‘Now look at me,’ Duca said, all politeness gone, only the threat left, ‘if you don’t answer my questions the way I want, I’ll keep this rag over your mouth. I don’t have any desire to suffocate you, but if you don’t indicate that you’re going to talk, I’ll keep right on. And the worst thing is if you resist, at your age you’ll have a heart attack, even if I take the towel away you’ll breathe but as soon as you start breathing again you’ll have a heart attack. I’ll give you some advice as a doctor, because I’m a doctor as well as a policeman: agree to talk right now. Twenty-five seconds have already passed, it doesn’t bother me if you die of a heart attack, I’ll just say it happened suddenly, and you won’t be able to deny it from the other world, and all your protectors, with all their power, won’t be able to bring you back to life, in fact they’ll be happy: one less accomplice to worry about.’
He lifted the hand with the wet towel, because the old man had nodded. He let him recover, threw the wet towel on the bidet, turned off the tap, went back to the bed and took the old man’s pulse. The old man’s face was no longer pink, but had turned lilac, he was like a dripping lilac. His pulse was agitated but quite regular, his breathing was questionable, his lips were also slightly lilac. Duca had said all that to scare him, but they had indeed been closer to a heart attack than might have been expected. He lit a cigarette and went to the window while the old man recovered. When he turned, his face hot with sun, he saw that the owner of the Binaschina was starting to look almost human again. ‘Lie back and let’s talk a bit,’ he said to him. He had no intention of killing an old man, although he didn’t make any distinction between killing old men or young men or whatever in order to find out the truth, not because he cared a lot about the truth, which was, after all, an abstruse abstraction, but simply because it would take him to the people who could do anything but were never seen, and he wanted those people to go to prison, and he wanted everybody to know and see that they were in prison. ‘So, do you know Silvano Solvere?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the old man said, humble and modest now. ‘He often came here.’
‘Alone or in company?’
‘Almost always in company.’
‘What kind of company?’
‘A girl.’
‘When you say a girl, do you mean always the same one, or different ones?’
‘No, always the same one.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Tall, brown hair, a pretty girl.’
He had tried to avoid raising his voice and getting angry, but people are too stupid. ‘Don’t make me lose my patience,’ he cried, raising his fist over the man’s face, ‘you know perfectly well it’s the same girl who died in the car with Silvano Solvere, machine-gunned by your protectors, the bastards who protect this little business for you, this little knocking shop for idle Milanese.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, really scared – it must be unpleasant to be old and defenceless against a mad policeman – and he blinked and instinctively turned his head away from that threatening fist. ‘I was about to say that, it’s her.’
‘Who?’