Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
‘It’s his girlfriend, Giovanna Marelli.’ He should have said
it was
: you had to make a bit of a distinction between the living and the dead.
‘So Silvano Solvere and a girlfriend of his, Giovanna Marelli, came here,’ Duca said, calming down. ‘What did they come here to do?’ It was a curious question, but with crooks you had to ask unusual questions.
‘They came to eat.’
Of course, you go to a restaurant like the Binaschina to eat. ‘And then?’
The old man hesitated, but finally admitted the sin. ‘They came upstairs.’
‘And then?’ Duca said. He saw him move. ‘Don’t get up, you’ll only feel sick. And think carefully before you answer.’
‘Then what?’ the old man moaned. ‘I don’t know what you mean. Then they went away, that’s all I know.’
He seemed genuine, but with some people you can’t trust
seems
and
appears.
‘Try and tell me everything, at your age the heart is fragile.’ He went to the wash basin and
turned on the tap. ‘And don’t scream, that’ll only make it worse, everything will be worse as long as you trust your protectors more than you trust the police.’
He did not scream. He watched, with eyes that had grown round, as Duca soaked the towel, and his breathing became agitated again, and his words were agitated too, when he spoke: ‘He’d come here with the girl every now and again, like everyone else, most often by day, like everyone else, but sometimes also in the evening, that’s all I know, really, I know the name because he had a lot of phone calls, as you said, they called him on the phone, and that was how I found out his name was Silvano Solvere, but that’s all I know.’
Abruptly, Duca turned off the tap, and without a word approached the bed with the blue towel, which was soaking wet now and dripping water.
Wisely, the old man shook his head, and wisely he opened the last secret cabinet of his complex soul: ‘They recommended him to me.’ He must know all about people who intend to kill, at his age and with the kind of company he had kept, and maybe he had seen a determination to kill in this policeman’s eyes, he hadn’t expected to come across a policeman like this one.
‘What do you mean, they “recommended” him to you?’
‘Some friends phoned me and said to treat him well.’ He even smiled, in his terror, because now it was no longer a question of fear, but of terror: a wet towel can be more terrifying than a revolver.
‘And who are these “friends”?’ he asked the old man. Then he did three things: he dropped the towel on the floor, took the false owner of the Binaschina by one arm and gently raised him to a sitting position on the bed, and finally took from the pockets of his jacket a ballpoint pen and the
only piece of paper he had in his possession at the moment, a coupon from the previous week’s football pools, in which he had scored four. ‘Write down the names and addresses of the people who give you these recommendations.’
‘I don’t know anything, I only saw them three times in three years, I only know the telephone number, when I need them I phone them.’
‘Write down the telephone number.’
The old man wrote the number on the coupon.
‘Try to remember it correctly and don’t make a mistake, if you tell me later that you made a mistake I won’t believe you.’
The old man shook his head sadly. ‘I know when I can cheat and when I can’t,’ he said, wearily, and lay back down on the bed, really worn out, morally too. ‘I’m a cook, not a criminal, I’ve never gone looking for trouble, I’ve always been a good cook, I keep the sauce for the lasagne on the stove for almost a week, night and day, I used to get up three times a night to look at it, that was how I made my fortune. This thing about the rooms just kind of happened, it’s the most I’ve ever done, and it isn’t even my fault, it’s the customers, after eating they say they’ve eaten so well, and drunk so well, they don’t feel like driving, could I provide a room, just so they can lie down for a moment, if I said no, they’d declare war on me, they’d tell all their friends and acquaintances that the food here was lousy and the prices ridiculous, once I started with all that I had to continue, I couldn’t help it, I’m old, I want to be left to work in peace, you don’t know what it’s like, how could you, the customers are wild animals.’
Duca let him pour it all out. The man, he thought, wasn’t basically wicked, he was actually quite interesting: he had character, he liked money, like everyone, but also
philosophy, he was a bit despicable, a bit of a pimp, a bit of a criminal, but also a bit Socratic. But Duca needed concrete information, not digressions.
‘How did you meet these “friends”?’ he asked. One thing was for sure: the wet towel had persuaded the owner of the Binaschina to tell the truth. It might not be a particularly praiseworthy system of education, but it got results.
‘They came here once, three years ago. I’d only just opened, and the Carabinieri had already closed me down because they’d found a couple upstairs. The place was closed, but they knocked at the door and asked to come in.’
‘And then?’
The old man’s breathing was irregular and his lips even more lilac, and Duca didn’t want him to die before he’d told him everything.
‘Ask them to bring up a coffee, a strong one.’
‘I haven’t drunk coffee in twenty years, because of my heart.’
‘You’ll drink it now.’ There was a little intercom between the two beds, a nice touch, it was there so that the owner could warn the couple, if the police came, at least to get dressed, or so that the couple could order a stirrup cup before the sin started. ‘A ristretto, right away,’ he ordered the thin, false little female voice that answered him.
And then those three men had come in, even though the restaurant was closed, and they had looked surprised and said, ‘This is such a lovely restaurant, we’ve heard a lot of good things about it, we came here to have a nice meal, and yet we find it closed, how come?’ He had explained that, unfortunately, the Carabinieri had found a couple in one of the rooms, and not only had the restaurant been closed down, he was also about to go to prison. ‘No, what are you saying?’ one of the three men had said. ‘If they had to close
all the places that give lovers a helping hand, they’d have to close everything, they’d have to close the whole of the Po Valley, but don’t worry, we have friends, we’ll see to it.’
‘And then?’ Duca asked with childish insistence.
And then the three had been as good as their word: two days later he had been issued a provisional licence to reopen the restaurant.
‘After just two days?’ Duca said, politely incredulous.
‘Just two days.’
Just two days. There were poor but honest people who had to wait six months for a licence to sell fifty kilos of rotten apples from a cart, and in two days, despite the Carabinieri, the police, the local authorities, these people managed to get a place that was publicly a restaurant, but actually a brothel with a restaurant car and sleeping car attached, reopened. Duca gritted his teeth and tried to stay calm. ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ he said, ‘that the pimps who came along to save you were the same people who’d previously informed on you?’
The word
pimps
pleased the old man: he probably didn’t like them very much himself either, these protectors of his. ‘Yes, I realised that almost immediately, nobody does anything for nothing, but they were so good to me, all they said was that every now and again they’d recommend somebody to me, and that I should treat that person well, even if he didn’t have any money, and that they’d pay me later.’
And indeed, they had phoned him every now and again, to inform him that a brown-haired man, in a grey suit and a small mourning button in the buttonhole of his jacket, would arrive with a girl, also brown-haired, dressed in such and such a way, and that they needed to stay for a couple of days, but without being too conspicuous, and it hadn’t taken him long to realise that they were using his restaurant
as a base, but he had also realised that he couldn’t say no, unless he had wanted, if not to die, to have all his bones broken, one by one. They had even told him once, at table, about someone who hadn’t been a friend, according to them, and so one of them, who was a bit highly strung, had broken all his bones, one by one, and as they were telling him about this person who hadn’t been a friend and whose bones they had broken, they had stared at him without batting an eyelid, so that even if he had been a cretin he would have understood.
And then the old man told him everything, because he was old and desperate, afraid of death but exhausted with the burden of living, he told him that every now and again people came there and left a case, and then other people came and took the case away.
‘And what did these cases look like? Were they always the same? Were they green, not made of leather, with metal corners?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘yes, yes, twice they were exactly like that.’
There was a knock at the door. Outside stood a waiter, almost two metres tall, bearing a small tray with a little cup of coffee and a bowl of sugar on it. Duca took the tray. ‘Thank you,’ he said and almost slammed the door in the giant’s face. ‘Is he one of the waiters who were forced on you by your friends?’ He helped him to sit up on the bed, put a single spoonful of sugar in the coffee. ‘The coffee takes effect quicker if you don’t put in too much sugar.’
‘But what about my heart?’ He was almost as afraid of the coffee as he was of the wet towel.
‘I said drink.’ He put a hand on the old man’s shoulder and moved the cup closer to his lips. ‘So, was that waiter a friend of your friends? Drink first and then answer.’
Under duress, the old man drank the coffee, then said, ‘There’s another one as well. There are two of them. They don’t even know how to wash the dishes, in fact they don’t wash them, they don’t do anything, they just keep an eye on me.’ He gave a weary, colourless smile. ‘Can I lie down?’
Duca helped him to lie down. ‘So,’ he said, ‘about those cases.’
Yes, those cases, he told him all about them, docile now, sincere. Silvano Solvere had come several times, yes, four or five times, with cases, and yes, twice they were green with metal corners, like small trunks, but the other times they were old leather cases, or ugly-looking canvas cases.
‘It’s possible, then,’ Duca said, ‘that inside these big cases were those other cases with metal corners that look like small trunks.’
The old man gave a polite, contented smile. ‘You know that’s what I thought too.’ It was an easy thing to think, because the craftier they are, the stupider they are. Craftiness is one of the forms of mental deficiency: lacking in intelligence, cretins try to compensate by playing little games. And then the old man told him that Silvano Solvere would leave his case there and say, ‘A friend of mine will come and pick it up,’ and he didn’t even tell him what this friend of his was called, or what he looked like.
‘And then?’ Duca said. The doors of truth were opening.
And then Attorney Turiddu Sompani – the Breton naturalised as an Italian with the Sicilian Christian name of Salvatore, which then became Salvaturiddu and eventually Turiddu – would come and pick up the case left by Silvano Solvere. He never came alone, but always with a woman, either very young women, so young that they looked like his granddaughters, because he must have been around sixty, only they were the kind of granddaughters who went
upstairs with him to the rooms, or sometimes – this was how the owner of the Binaschina put it, sternly – his old whore.
‘Maybe,’ Duca said, ‘that was the woman who died with him in the accident in the canal, very near here.’
‘Yes, that was the one.’ On the evening of the accident, he said, they had been there having dinner, Attorney Turiddu Sompani, his old lady friend, and a young guest, also a woman. He did not smile when he said
accident,
he repeated the word Duca had used,
accident,
as if he hadn’t noticed the hint of irony: in fact he had noticed it, but didn’t want to get involved.
‘Was it always Silvano Solvere who came here to leave a case, and was it always Attorney Sompani who came to pick it up?’
‘Yes, that’s what always happened,’ the old man confirmed and, having revived a little thanks to the coffee, sat up again on the bed. ‘But they also came without leaving cases, or without picking them up, and they never paid.’
Those cases certainly went on quite a tour, starting at the butcher’s shop, from where a girl, now deceased, poor thing, would take them to a perfume shop, and from the perfume shop a certain Silvano Solvere would take them to the Binaschina, where a certain Turiddu Sompani would come and pick them up and nothing more was heard of them. One evening the tour had been extended, the girl had taken the case from the butcher’s shop to his apartment, the apartment of the doctor who was supposed to put her back together again for her wedding, and from there Silvano Solvere should have come to collect it and take it to the Binaschina. But he had not been able to collect anything, because that same night death had collected him from the
Alzaia Naviglio Grande, along with the girl. So the case had stayed with him, Duca.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Better.’ The coffee had given the old man a little bit more energy.
‘Now tell me what the other waiter who works for your friends looks like.’
‘He’s as tall as the one who came here with the coffee, and he’s fair-haired, those two are the tallest people here.’
‘All right, we’re going to leave those two free.’
‘Oh, no, you have to get them off my back or they’ll kill me as soon as they find out I’ve talked.’
‘But they have to know that you’ve talked,’ Duca explained, gently. ‘You have to phone those people, your friends, as soon as possible and tell them everything that happened, tell them the police came, tell them they threatened to choke you with a wet towel if you didn’t talk, and that you had to tell them everything, apart from the two foot soldiers who are pretending to be waiters. Letting those two go free and informing your friends immediately of the police visit will be the proof that you’re on their side.’
He was starting to understand, but he was not convinced. ‘But if I phone them, they’ll get away.’
And what’s the point of that?
his eyes added.