Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
She had worked for seven years in the criminal records office in Phoenix, she had classified all the crimes committed in Arizona from 1905 to 1934, from the thefts of bottles of milk to matricides, theoretically she was an expert, she knew more than many criminals, so she knew how difficult it was to kill two people simultaneously. In 1929, though, a wife had killed her husband and his mistress by a method she recalled quite vividly. The husband liked taking his mistress to the romantic banks of the Salt River, near Globe, and in the semi-wild setting of the place they committed repeated acts of adultery in his car. Having been informed
of this by a detective agency, the wife had simply borrowed a car from a neighbour, gone to Globe, and from there to the Salt River, and there she had spotted her husband’s car, in the most deserted and scenic area, right on the banks of the river, all she had to do was creep up behind it and push it, without making the slightest scratch on the bodywork, into the freezing blue waters of the Salt River. She was not caught until three years later, only because she had confided in a man who then began to blackmail her, threatening to inform the police if she didn’t pay him off, and when she no longer had any money, he reported her.
This story struck her as very instructive: the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese wasn’t the Salt River, but there was enough water to obtain the desired effect, plus there was the favourable circumstance that Attorney Sompani had a car but was nervous about driving and so was happy to let her drive. In the third week of her stay in Milan Susanna Pani studied every detail meticulously, and even went once, by herself, along the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, beyond the Binaschina, and there she decided that the accident had to happen close to that curious little iron bridge, an astonishing hybrid of the style of a Venetian bridge and the style of the Eiffel Tower, because then she’d be able to go straight to the other side, onto the wider road, State Highway 35, the Strada dei Giovi, where there was a lot of traffic and she’d easily be able to get a lift.
Only once did she hesitate and that was when Attorney Sompani and Signorina Adele Terrini – they had never married, she was still a Signorina – took her to the Charterhouse of Pavia and she saw the statues on the tombs of Beatrice d’Este and Lodovico il Moro. She had never heard of them, even though she had studied a little Italian art history, and suddenly there they were, in all their unbridled beauty
and solemn majesty, she would happily have knelt down in front of the man who had sculpted them, she had read that it was Cristoforo Solari, she did not know that critics considered his work contrived and clumsy, and so she would have knelt and kissed his hand in gratitude for the heartrending emotion that the sight of those statues gave her. This was how life should be, beauty, prayer, solemnity, not murder and hate, and she started to think of going straight back to Phoenix, without doing anything, going back to her friend from work, buying lots of books on Italian art and forgetting, forgetting, forgetting, forgetting, but when she at last took her eyes, still moist with emotion, away from Beatrice d’Este and Ludovico il Moro and back to the repulsive faces of Adele Terrini and Turiddu Sompani, who always wore big dark glasses because the drugs made their eyes sensitive to light, the skin of their cheeks grey and flabby, their gestures, however minimal, that were the gestures of old sadists, she realised she would
never
be able to forget.
Two evenings later they had dinner at the Binaschina: this was the zero hour she had fixed for herself. It was very simple, she had calculated everything exactly, you don’t work in a criminal records office without learning a few things. At the end of the dinner, while the two of them, half drunk on the chicken with mushrooms, the gorgonzola, the baked apples with zabaglione, were trying to digest it all with a little Sambuca, she stood up, put her coat on and said, ‘I’m going outside to smoke.’ By now the two of them knew this habit of hers: she couldn’t smoke indoors, she loved smoking, but had to be out in the open, even if it was only on a balcony. ‘I’ll wait for you by the car.’ She had done this before, after meals: while they were still chatting a little, she would go outside for a cigarette. Anybody watching would think she had gone out and gone home alone, without them.
And when she had smoked two cigarettes, they arrived in the cosy, solitary parking spot in front of the Binaschina, surrounded by tall slender trees, how sleepy they were, they sat down in the back seat already half asleep, and she got in behind the wheel. From the Binaschina to the place she had already chosen was less than five hundred metres, and when she got to the chosen place, she had said, ‘I’m getting out to have a cigarette, I don’t like smoking in the car,’ after which all she had needed was a little push and the car had fallen in the water of the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese.
‘Can I go to the window?’ she asked. Dawn was coming up, it was already quite bright, she thought she had heard birds singing. They were indeed singing, hidden in the trees in the Via dei Giardini.
‘No,’ Mascaranti said: it was true that they were only on the second floor, but if she threw herself out in despair, she could still kill herself, it depends on the way you fall, even a half-metre drop can kill you.
‘Yes,’ Duca said: a moralist like her does not commit suicide.
She hesitated. Carrua said, ‘Yes,’ he said it paternally, and with a paternal gesture motioned to her to go to the window, and she went to the window, which was pearly white with the light of dawn. ‘I won’t try to escape,’ she said, smiling shyly, then leaned her head out a little and, yes, she heard the birdsong, she heard it because the silence was absolute, the streets completely empty, at the corner of the Via dei Giardini the four traffic lights were flashing yellow into the void, because there was nothing there, it was as if Milan had been totally abandoned by everybody, apart from those few birds singing in the trees swollen with pollen in the Via dei Giardini.
Duca let her listen for a while, then said, ‘Are you declaring that you killed Turiddu Sompani and Adele Terrini?
‘Yes, she declared it to me too,’ Carrua said, sleepily covering his face with his hands.
She nodded and sadly left the window and that improbable spring dawn in Milan and returned to her chair.
‘And you came here to Milan, from Arizona, to hand yourself in?’ Faced with this young woman, a foreigner to boot – foreigners have their eye on us – he mustn’t get angry.
She looked at Duca, hearing that hint of anger in his voice. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Controlling himself, he said, ‘Why?’ He already knew why, it was stupid to even ask, but it needed official confirmation.
‘Because I realised I’d made a mistake,’ she replied in a clear but muted voice, her voice was increasingly muted. ‘I shouldn’t have killed them.’
Not being able to slap her, not being able to shout, not being able to fire a gun, he said sadistically, ‘Why?’
She batted her eyelids, it was an unusual interrogation. ‘Because we shouldn’t kill, nobody should take the law into their own hands.’
Oh yes, that was what he had wanted to make her say: you shouldn’t take the law into your own hands, or we’d end up all killing each other – which might not be a bad idea, he thought. But he wouldn’t let go. ‘Didn’t you know that before you killed them?’
She replied promptly but vaguely, ‘Yes, I did, but I was driven by a thirst for revenge.’
Duca got to his feet, went to the door of the office, with his back turned to the girl and Carrua and Mascaranti, lit a cigarette and inhaled a mouthful of smoke, then took a deep breath: maybe he could manage to control himself, he hoped he could, he was in an important office in Milan Police Headquarters, with an important officer like Carrua, he couldn’t let himself go, but he found it hard to hold back. ‘You couldn’t sleep, is that it?’ he said, with his back still turned, and his voice was gentle, the anger was only in the question.
She seemed very pleased that someone understood her and when he turned to hear her answer he saw a serene smile of pleasure in her eyes. ‘Yes, when you make a mistake, you don’t have any peace until you can put it right.’ Duca sat down again and looked at her: yes, she had said exactly what was required of a totally honest woman, and even more, she was the essence of clarity and had answered his ‘Why?’ with complete moral clarity, not even a convent schoolgirl would have answered like that.
He was about to ask her another question when an officer came in with a copy of the
Corriere,
hot off the press and still smelling of ink.
‘The Americans did it,’ Carrua said. ‘They made a soft landing on the moon.
Also in the
Corriere della Sera,
in the local pages, was the trial of the robbers from the Via Montenapoleone: the Burgamelli brothers, accused of the famous robbery, and all the other members of the gang, photographed together in the dock, all claimed they were innocent, they made a scene, they raised their fists at the prosecutor and yelled at him, ‘How can this be allowed?’ All the defendants talked nonsense, made sarcastic remarks, answered back to the judge, and they might even be acquitted because of insufficient evidence, Duca thought.
This girl in front of him, on the other hand, wouldn’t be acquitted because of insufficient evidence, they couldn’t give her less than ten years for premeditated double homicide, it was so premeditated that she had come all the way from Phoenix to kill them, and at her trial she wouldn’t raise her fists at the prosecutor, she’d say, ‘Yes, I killed them, it was premeditated, I worked it all out in advance.’ When you have defendants like that, the jury might as well be doing the crossword.
Duca asked the question he had been about to ask her earlier. ‘What evidence do we have that you killed those two?’ There were lots of crazy people about, people who came into Police Headquarters and said, ‘I killed the poet Carducci.’ You needed evidence.
Clearly, after seven years working in criminal records, she had anticipated the question. ‘It’s there, in the pockets of my coat.’
Carrua opened his eyes a little wider. ‘Yes,’ he said to Duca, ‘that’s what she told me as soon as she got here,’ From the heavy overcoat on his desk he took out two large and rather bulky white envelopes. ‘It’s the mescaline 6,’ he said, holding out the envelopes, and gestured to Mascaranti to give him a cigarette.
Duca opened one of the envelopes: inside it was an opaque plastic bag, one corner was open and peering inside Duca saw that it contained a number of stamp-sized sachets, on which was written, clearly,
Mexcalina 6.
Clarity is what counts, he thought, this was the mescaline that Claudino had spent so much time and effort looking for. ‘How did you get this?’ he asked Susanna (Paganica) Pani, daughter of Tony, Captain Anthony (Paganica) Pani: he was really curious to know.
It was simple, she explained, it had already happened once before: when she was having dinner with Adele and Turiddu at the Binaschina, a man had arrived and handed over two envelopes like that to Turiddu Sompani.
‘What did this man look like?’ Duca asked.
‘Not very tall, but well-built, very well-built,’ Susanna said.
It could only have been Ulrico, Ulrico Brambilla. ‘And then?’
‘Attorney Sompani took the envelopes and put them
in his pocket, Susanna said, ‘but after a while he gave them to me and said, “Please keep them in the pockets of your coat, you have plenty of room, my jacket pockets bulge too much.” ’
‘So that evening this well-built man came,’ Duca said, ‘he handed over the two envelopes and went away, then Sompani gave the two envelopes to you, to keep until you got home, because otherwise the pockets of his jacket would have bulged: is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes, exactly.’
It certainly wasn’t because his jacket bulged that Sompani had given her the envelopes, it was one of the rules of the game: especially in a car, some little accident might happen, you might get into an argument with someone, the traffic police might show up and find some of that stuff on you, it’s better if they find it on someone else, isn’t it? and then you can say, ‘I don’t know anything about it, I’ve never that stuff before.’ It was because of the same rule that Giovanna, when she had come that evening to have that repair job done on her, had left him the case with the submachine gun: if something went wrong, it was better that they find the sub machine gun in Dr Duca Lamberti’s apartment than in Giovanna’s car or at the home of Silvano Solvere.
‘So you mean that after throwing the car into the Naviglio, the two envelopes were still in the pocket of this overcoat and you forgot you had them?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when did you realise you had them?’
‘When I got to Phoenix.’
‘And how did you manage to get them from Phoenix back here to Milan?’
‘I didn’t do anything, I just left them there, in my coat.’
‘But if they’d stopped you and found them, what would you have said?’
‘I was coming to Milan to hand myself in anyway, I would have told the truth, it didn’t really matter who arrested me, all that matters is the truth.’
Keeping a totally serious face, Duca began to laugh mentally, and nervously: this was really wonderful, the International Narcotics Bureau would be pleased to learn that you can cross the Atlantic twice, there and back, with a few hectograms of mescaline 6 on you, you just have to be crafty enough not to hide it, but put it in the pockets of your overcoat and hold your overcoat over your arm.
And then he laughed even more, while still outwardly impassive, over all that had happened because of that mescaline: the goddess of vengeance had come directly from Phoenix, Arizona, killed the couple and gone back to her country, still unwittingly carrying the mescaline, and for those two envelopes, Claudio Valtraga had killed, first, Silvano, believing that he had kept them for himself, then Ulrico Brambilla, convinced that he had them, and finally he had been arrested and his revelations had made it possible to arrest a number of significant figures. In his encounter with Susanna Pani, the devil had been, as sports people said, soundly beaten.