Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
For a moment, she was lit by the headlights of a car on the other road beyond the canal, just as if she was on stage, and if they did come up out of the water, she thought, as she stood in that ray of light, she would be able to hold her hand out to them and pull them out, and say she didn’t know what had happened, because of course the two people hadn’t realised that she was the one who had pushed the car – but what if they
had realised
?
She waited, and only when she was sure that five minutes had passed, or perhaps twice five minutes, perhaps three times, when she was sure that the stinking souls and stinking bodies of those two would never again foul the streets of the world, only then did she move away from the edge of the canal and head towards the little iron bridge, opening her handbag as she did so and taking out a few little squares of soft paper and wiping the rest of the canal water, now almost dry, from her face. The front of her overcoat was wet, though she couldn’t do anything about that, and there was water in her shoes, so when she reached the bridge she sat down on one of the steps, took off her low-heeled shoes, shook the water from them, let them dry a little in the air, then put them back on, even though her stockings were also wet, but she couldn’t do anything about that either: how strange, she had never imagined she would get so wet.
She climbed the steps onto the little bridge that crossed the canal – it was like a toy rather than a bridge, but she wasn’t a child and she couldn’t enjoy herself on the bridge – and she was shivering, but not from cold – oh, if only! – but no, she couldn’t turn the clock back, once you’ve killed two people there’s no point wanting to turn the clock back, you can’t bring them to life again, and when she was at the top
of that schizophrenic bridge which was like a mixture of a Venetian bridge and something out of Jules Verne she swallowed several times to fight her impending nausea at the image of the two people trapped in the car, in the water, struggling, and she started to descend the steps on the other side. After all she wasn’t a professional killer, although theoretically she was an expert, she knew everything, the ways to kill are infinite but she knew almost all of them, she knew that a hot knitting needle, inserted into the skin so that it goes through the liver – you only need a basic knowledge of anatomy – causes a slow, agonising death. Tony Paganica, an American citizen whose parents had come from the Abruzzi, and whose surname the Americans found a bit hard to pronounce, abbreviating it to Pani, had died that way, with a knitting needle in his liver. The thought stopped her from vomiting, stiffened her resolve, and she descended the last three steps from the bridge. The second part was beginning.
Now she was on the tarred road, and the cars were passing in a steady stream, although well spaced out because it was getting late. They passed almost within a few centimetres of her, catching her in their headlights, but they did not stop even though she raised her hand to ask for a lift: a female vagrant on her own in the middle of the countryside, what have we come to? They flashed their lights, but did not stop. Eventually, though, a car did stop: good, kind Lombards from good, kind Lombardy, a husband and wife and a little boy, who either had a taste for adventure or a compassionate urge to help a fellow human being, a poor young girl in the middle of the road at this hour, anything might have happened to her, let her get in, Piero, look, her coat’s all wet, let’s hope she’s all right.
And so Piero pulled up and the girl got in, and as she got in she summoned all her years of studying Italian,
because she didn’t want it to appear in any way that she was from San Francisco, Arizona, and said, ‘Thank you, you’re very kind, are you going to Milan?’ And down there, under the water, in that canal beside which the car was travelling, the two of them were still there, and she had put them there.
‘Yes, Signorina, where do you want to go?’ Signor Piero’s wife said, turning to her as she sat in the back seat next to the boy and laughing, she was good-natured, communicative, sociable, charitable in her way.
‘Daddy, she’s American,’ the boy said, as the car neared the tollgate and slowed down. ‘I heard someone talking like that once before. Is it true you’re American?’ the nine-year-old or eight-year-old or even less asked her directly, and there was a risk if anyone found out that they had given a lift to an American girl, picking her up at the exact spot where a car was found in the canal, maybe as the result of an accident or maybe not, she had to disappear, leave not a trace behind. But this eight-year-old, nine-year-old, whichever he was, had recognised her accent, and she couldn’t get out of it now, the whole mechanism she had created could fall apart thanks to the boy’s pedantry and good hearing.
‘Yes, I’m American,’ she said: you can deceive an adult, but not a child.
‘You speak very good Italian, I would never have guessed,’ the extrovert Lombard woman said.
‘I learnt it in six months, from records,’ she said: it was a rule taught in all the schools – the schools of crime, that is – to draw people’s attention to some harmless subject in order to step them concentrating on another, more dangerous subject.
Signor Piero, who up until a moment earlier had been suspicious – he didn’t like having a stranger in his car, her overcoat was wet, God alone knew from what, she was
getting his car dirty, and with all the riffraff you saw these days, only a baby like his wife would have let her get in – all at once became interested. ‘In six months? Really? Did you hear that, Ester? So what they say about learning languages from records is true.’
‘Oh, yes, it’s true,’ the girl said: suddenly she was a saleswoman for language records. ‘Six months ago, all I could say in Italian was
O sole mio.
’
‘You know, Ester, we should find out about these records, for Roberto, Malsughi could get me a discount,’ Signor Piero said – they had passed the tollgate and now were driving along the Conca Fallata, where the Lambro Meridionale splits into two then joins together again beyond the Naviglio Pavese – and as he spoke the girl looked at her watch: it wasn’t even five to eleven, she had followed her timetable precisely. For a few more minutes, as they drove along the almost deserted avenues, purplish in the purple light of the fluorescent street lamps, the couple giving her a lift conversed among themselves about language records, until she said, ‘Here, please, I’d like to get out here, in this square.’
‘It’s up to you,’ Signor Piero said: he could have joined a theatre company as an actor, so well did he pretend to be sorry that she was going and that he wouldn’t have the pleasure of driving her wherever she wanted, for as long as she wanted.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said, opening the door as the car pulled up and immediately getting out, before they could see her face properly, ‘thank you, thank you.’ She waved her hand and immediately plunged into the shadows of the big tree, hiding from the cadaverous light of the streetlamp beneath which the Lombard had parked.
It had been a dangerous ride to take, but she couldn’t do
anything about that now. Alone in the huge square on the very edge of Milan, in the mild but slightly cool late April wind, she was afraid, but fear serves no purpose and she dismissed it. She knew there was a taxi stand in this square, she had studied the place carefully, and now she headed straight for it, having already seen the two green taxis drowsing under the big trees.
‘Palace Hotel.’
The taxi driver nodded: he was pleased, this was a decent run, the kind he liked, all the way across the city to the area near the station, where it was easy to get another fare at any hour, and the girl too must be a decent sort if she was going to the Palace. In the darkness of the cab, she again looked at her watch by the light of a street lamp: seven minutes past eleven, she was seven minutes ahead of schedule.
‘Could you please stop at that bar?’
They were in the Via Torino, calm in this slack hour when people haven’t yet come out of the cinema, there was almost nobody around, and no cars, but even at this hour you couldn’t park in the Via Torino, except that the driver acted as if he was in the driveway of his own house, driving his cab up onto the pavement and stopping just in front of the bar.
‘A gin,’ she ordered: it was an odd bar, long and narrow, like a corridor, into which a miniaturist rather than an interior decorator had somehow fitted everything, from a juke-box to a telephone and even a pinball machine. Even ordering a gin had been a mistake – a girl alone at that hour drinking such an exotic liquor – and the four men who were in the place, apart from the owner, looked at her more closely, it was obvious she was the Anglo-Saxon type, and with her stockings and shoes still damp, she was leaving quite a trail behind her, or maybe not: the city was full of
foreigners because of the Fair, and by the evening most of them had been drinking and were rather eccentric. Back in the taxi, she lit a cigarette, which, coming on top of the gin, gave her strength. It was over, she had done it. She did not even spend three minutes in her room in the Palace Hotel, it only took her two to change her shoes and stockings and put on her raincoat, and one to close the suitcases, which she had prepared earlier. The bill was ready, and she had her money ready, she spent another minute distributing tips and waiting for the taxi she had called. Two minutes later, the taxi had dropped her at the station.
She was already familiar with that Babylonian temple, and she knew everything. ‘To the Settebello,’ she said to the porter who picked up her two suitcases and leather shoulder bag. As she followed the porter, a Southerner offered her his company, smiling at her with a frighteningly horse-like set of teeth, his upper lip adorned with a moustache he must have thought irresistible to women, but two Carabinieri were coming along the platform where the Settebello stood waiting and just the sight of them must have put this ladies’ man off because he abruptly left her alone.
She already had her ticket, and a reserved seat. Four minutes after she got on, the Settebello set off. At eight in the morning, she would take a plane for New York from Fiumicino. She had studied the schedules, they were engraved in her memory: at three in the afternoon, local time, she would land in Phoenix, one among the hundred and ninety-five million American citizens, a very, very long way from the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese.
The doorbell rang, too politely, but however a bell rings, there are times when it isn’t a good thing for it to ring, when it’s better for nobody to turn up, because everyone is obnoxious. But the man to whom he was forced to open the door, given how politely the bell had rung, was even more obnoxious than predicted.
‘Dr Duca Lamberti?’
Even his voice was loathsome, in its perfect Italian, its perfect courtesy, its perfect clarity, he could have taught an elocution course, and Duca hated anything that was too perfect.
‘Yes, that’s me.’ He stood there in the doorway, without letting him in. Even the way he was dressed was obnoxious: it was spring, certainly, but this man was already going around in a cardigan, without a jacket, a light grey cardigan, with dark grey suede at the wrists, and so that nobody should think that he didn’t have the money to buy himself a jacket, he was wearing a pair of light grey driving gloves – not those vulgar ones that left the back of the hand uncovered, but whole gloves, with the back and fingers complete and the palms interlaced – and they were clearly visible, because he displayed them ostentatiously, in order to make it clear from the start that he owned a car appropriate to these gloves.
‘May I come in?’ He was full of cordiality and false spontaneity.
Duca wasn’t pleased, and made no attempt to conceal it, but let him in anyway, because the ways of life are infinite and mysterious. He opened the door to his defunct surgery, or rather his abortive surgery, and let him in. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, not even inviting him to sit down, he even turned his back on him and went and sat down on the window sill: when you have a window that looks out on the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, with the trees all newly green for spring, you have everything you need.
‘May I sit down?’ Ignoring the way he was being treated, the man – he couldn’t have been more than thirty – continued to give off an obnoxious air of sociability and cordiality.
Duca did not reply. At eleven in the morning, the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci is a placid desert on the edge of town, which even prams with innocent children in them can cross easily and where the occasional almost empty tram passes, and at that hour, in that season, on that mild, cloudy April day, you could still love Milan.
‘Maybe I should have phoned first,’ the unknown man said, completely impervious to any show of hostility, ‘but there are things that can’t be said by phone.’ He was still smiling, still trying to establish some kind of complicity with him.
‘Why?’ Duca said, from the window sill, watching an honest housewife on her way home with a shopping bag on wheels.
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. You don’t know me, I’m Silvano Solvere, but you certainly know a friend of mine, in fact, he’s the one who sent me.’
‘And who is this friend?’ He wasn’t at all curious, except, perhaps, about one thing: what filthy genie this man was about to let out of the bottle. With his elegance, his good manners, the cleanliness of his body – but only his body – he
really did seem a merchant of filth, and it was only a matter of knowing exactly what kind of filth he was going to try and sell him.
‘Attorney Sompani, you remember him, don’t you?’ He did not wink, he was too well brought up to wink, but in a subtle way he made his voice wink, if a voice can wink, still with the intention of creating between him and Duca a current of familiarity, almost of complicity. In cunning people, obtuseness is congenital and incurable.
‘Yes, I remember him.’ Oh, yes, he certainly did. The worst punishment had not been to spend three years in prison, but to be in prison with Turiddu Sompani. His other cellmates were bearable, they were just ordinary villains, thieves, would-be murderers, but not Turiddu Sompani, no, he was repellent, partly because he was so fat and flabby, and partly because he was really a lawyer and there’s something both ridiculous and frightening about a lawyer in prison. He had got two years, instead of the twenty he probably deserved, because he had let a friend of his, who couldn’t drive and was also blind drunk, get into his car and drive it, and this friend had driven with his girlfriend straight into the Lambro, near the Conca Fallata, while he, Turiddu, stood on the bank and called for help: a story so murky that not even the meanest public prosecutor could do anything with it, even though everyone – judges, jurors, the public – was of the opinion that Turiddu Sompani’s friend could not have driven into the Lambro by chance.