Traitors to All (6 page)

He lit another cigarette for her. A pity she’d stopped talking about her own affairs, about Silvano and the butcher.

The cigarette glowed in the half-light. ‘Listen, with the job you did, I’m really going to be a virgin tomorrow night?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What a laugh!’

‘Don’t laugh, please.’

‘No, I’m not laughing, but you men are such idiots.’

Anything, provided she started talking again. Yes, idiots, what else could they be?

‘We women are sluts, but you’re just idiots.’

He liked this sweeping verdict: on one side the sluts, on the other the idiots, that’s the world, there you are. But talk,
please, start talking again, tell me about your butcher, about your prince Silvano.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, smoking in the darkness, lying down, the way she liked, ‘you have to be idiots, I can be a virgin and still have been with two hundred men, and when you think about the things my fiancé wanted in the car, as an advance, things you couldn’t imagine, what kind of virginity is that?’

Don’t talk about virginity, talk about your fiancé, he was begging her, sitting on the stool by the window. Talk, talk.

‘You make me laugh, all of you.’ Her voice was getting blurred. ‘As soon as I see a pair of trousers, I get the urge, but I also feel like laughing.’

Duca saw ash fall from her cigarette, and he stared at that point of light, waiting for her to speak again, but there was silence and in the silence he heard heavy breathing. He got up and went to the couch and saw that she was asleep. He angrily stubbed out the cigarette, although it was still alight. He left her alone and went into the kitchen. According to the alarm clock with the pink dial and the second hand in the shape of a hen, it was after ten.

At half-past, after helping Mascaranti to solve almost all the crosswords, he heard a noise in the surgery and went to see.

She was sitting up on the couch. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

‘Twenty to one.’

‘I was in a deep sleep, I feel as if I slept the whole night.’

It was better that way. He went and closed the shutters, then switched on the light, and her red slip burst into flame.

‘Can I go?’

He approached her. ‘Get off the couch, slowly, and try to walk.’ After all, he wasn’t a specialist in certain kinds of work, he might have made a few mistakes.

She got down, slowly, walked up and down the cramped surgery, without suspenders her black stockings slowly slid down her slim legs, and she swayed a bit, but as a joke, because she was smiling at him, and even shaking her head to make her dark, smooth hair fall straight on her neck. ‘So it’s all right?’

‘Do you feel any pain?’

‘It burns but only a little bit.’

‘Any discomfort?’

‘Not really.’

Congratulations, Dr Duca Lamberti, you’re a good hymenologist: after all those years of study, all those years when your father ate almost nothing but mortadella – you’re
from Emilia Romagna, you should like mortadella – and all those books you read, and Esculapius
³
, at last you’ve made it, now you have a future in front of you, as a great restorer. He covered his face with his hands, almost as if he was sleepy. ‘Lift a leg, slowly, as high as you can.’

‘It’s like a gymnastics lesson,’ she said, doing as he said, very smoothly, showing off: she was like a cat on a roof.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No.’

‘Lift the other leg.’

Her black stocking slid down to her calf as she shamelessly lifted her leg, shamelessly raising the short slip and looking him in the face.

‘Do you feel any pain?

‘A bit of discomfort, but not very much.’

He picked up her handbag and took a cigarette from the packet of Parisiennes.

‘What time are you getting married?’ he asked.

‘At eleven, so that everyone can be there, the whole of Romano Banco and the whole of Buccinasco, and the whole of Ca’ Tarino, and they’re even coming from Corsico.’ In the meantime she had put on her knickers and then her suspenders. ‘The little church in Romano Banco is lovely, you should come and see it, you know he arranged for traffic police on motorcycles? They’re going to stop all the traffic, from the Naviglio all the way to Romano Banco, you don’t know what it’s like when someone like my fiancé gets married in a place like that.’ She might have been talking about some tribe in the Mato Grosso. ‘Even the mayor is coming, and tonight there’s actually a lorry full of flowers coming from Sanremo, what do you think of that, all the way from Sanremo! He made me phone Sanremo, to make sure they were coming at the hour he said, at four in the morning, so
that the priest and the people in the oratory will have time to decorate the church. Actually I’d quite like it, if I wasn’t thinking about Silvano.’

She took a cigarette from her handbag, lit it, took the red dress coat from the chair on which she had thrown it, put it on, still with the cigarette and her lipstick in one hand, and did her lips, looking at herself in the big mirror from the handbag.

‘Can I make a phone call?’ she said, pursing her lips.

‘In the hall.’ He opened the door for her, switched on the light, and pointed to the phone.

She dialled the number calmly, right there in front of him. She had no secrets from him: only stupid people bother with secrets, with ciphers and codes and special signals. With her eyes shining, as if she really had slept a whole night, she stood there next to him as she spoke into the phone, and smiled at him, wide awake.

‘Ricci’s pastry shop?’ She winked at him. ‘Signor Silvano Solvere, please.’ With the little finger of her right hand she touched the corner of her right eye. ‘That’s the pastry shop that did my wedding cake, they’re delivering it to Romano Banco, it must be taller than I am, it cost two hundred thousand lire, and Silvano has gone there to have a drink and wait for me, it’s where we always meet.’ She stopped the chatter and became serious. ‘Yes, I’ve finished, I’m getting a taxi now.’ And she hung up immediately: Silvano couldn’t have been much of a conversationalist, at least not over the phone.

‘Can I call a taxi?’ she asked, being by the phone. ‘I don’t remember the number anymore, do you have a directory?’

‘86 71 51,’ he said, and watched as she dialled.

‘Imola 4, in two minutes,’ she said, putting the receiver down. Every gesture she made was shameless and vulgar.
‘I’m going straight down, thanks for everything.’ She could have been a guest taking her leave after a tea party.

‘The case,’ he said. That case, whatever it was, that he had seen as soon as she had appeared in the doorway.

She stood by the door, looking quite cheerful: she was the kind of woman who came to life after midnight. The hall was so small that looking at her he could see the specks of gold in her violet eyes. She looked wonderful, she looked so good in that red dress coat and those black stockings, she was very Cinemascope, something from a sensationalised, half-fictional investigation into the world of vice:
the photographic model comes out at midnight to go to the brothel from which they’ve just called her.
It wasn’t true, she was actually on her way to get married, he’d patched her up to be a virgin again so that she could get married, but that was the look she had, and as she did not reply, he repeated, ‘The case,’ and pointed to the surgery, where she had left the case, whatever it was.

‘It stays here,’ she said.

Mascaranti must be writing all this down. There was no point, but it did him good.

‘Really?’ he said.

‘Silvano will come and pick it up tomorrow,’ she said, ‘after the ceremony, because he’s going to be best man.’

Oh, so Silvano was coming to pick it up. That meant it was Silvano’s case. Why was she leaving it here, was it because it had dirty washing in it and she could trust him with it, or else because it contained something compromising? These people didn’t do anything for no reason. When you live like these people, he thought, there was a reason for looking on the ground rather than up in the air, only they’d trusted this woman too much. Or were they trying to frame him?

‘Thank you, doctor, I don’t suppose we’ll see each other again.’ She held out her hand. ‘Oh, Silvano told me to tell you he’ll settle up with you when he comes by.’

He opened the door for her, motioned her through and walked her downstairs to the front door of the building.
Settle up
: another seven hundred thousand lire. Two or three clients like this every month and he’d be fine, his sister would be fine, little Sara would be fine. Everybody would be fine.

‘Again, doctor, don’t wish me good luck because it brings bad luck.’ She went out through the front door, in her red dress coat.

Sergeant Morini saw the girl in the red dress coat come out as he was holding the two-way radio to his ear and Mascaranti was saying, ‘She’s on her way out, she’s wearing a red overcoat, she’s taking a taxi, Imola 4, are you receiving me?’

The taxi hadn’t arrived yet, but now it did, the usual boxlike Fiat Multipla, she got in with her beautiful, long, young legs, she got in harmoniously, and Sergeant Morini sitting beside the driver of the normal, respectable black Alfa Romeo, which did not look like a police car, said to the driver, ‘It’s that piece of stuff there.’

There were two other officers in the back, both in plain clothes, but they looked so timid and weary, you wouldn’t have thought they were police officers.

‘Roger, Signor Mascaranti,’ he said into the radio, tongue in cheek.

Then the Fiat with the girl in the red dress coat inside it left the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci and immediately turned into the Via Pascoli. At that hour it was almost impossible to follow a car in another car without being noticed, because there was hardly any traffic, apart from the usual Vespa roaring like a jet or the usual overbearing lorry. The best thing to do was keep behind the Fiat without worrying about being noticed, it didn’t matter if they suspected they were being followed or not, the fact was, they had to follow them and they would.

And after the Via Pascoli, buried in the velvet of the
night and the brownish green of the large old trees swollen with spring foliage, the Fiat turned into the Via Plinio, nervously drove the whole length of the street, with dozens of closed shops on either side, shot across the Corso Buenos Aires, zoomed into the Piazza Duca d’Aosta: she couldn’t be going to the station, could she, she couldn’t be catching a train? That would make pursuit difficult, but no, the Fiat rushed down the Via Vittor Pisani, again all the shops closed, a feeling of night, only towards the Piazza della Repubblica were there a few lights, a bit of life.

‘He’s put his indicator light on,’ Morini said to the driver. ‘He’s stopping in front of the pastry shop, pull over.’

And the girl in the red overcoat, as Mascaranti had called it, because he couldn’t have known it was actually called a dress coat, got out of the taxi and walked straight into the Ricci pastry shop.

‘Get out, Giovanni, there’s an exit in the Via Ferdinando di Savoia, she may be trying to give us the slip.’

One of the two timid, weary officers in the back dashed out of the Alfa Romeo, but quietly, and entered the pastry shop almost immediately behind the girl, but with an absent-minded air, a bit like a drug addict who has just got up and is now hoping for a dissolute night.

She had just entered when a tall, almost aristocratic man dressed in a light grey suit, a white and pink shirt and a greyish pink – in other words, salmon-coloured – tie came up to her, took her gently, almost tenderly, yes, that was the word, tenderly, by the arm, and walked back outside, under the arcades. The waiters were clearing the tables, the tablecloths were trembling in the stormy wind, and at the traffic lights, which were green, a dark Simca was parked, even though the lights were green, and in the car were two prostitutes, the older one at the wheel, the younger one in
the seat next to her, close to the window, and this one was smiling, though discreetly, at the few single men coming out of Ricci’s. If they had known they had a police car behind them they would have moved on even if the lights had been red, but Sergeant Morini was in the S. squad, not the vice squad, although he had been in the vice squad and had been involved in quite a few roundups, which had made him a hate figure to all the ladies of easy virtue from Rogoredo to Rho and from Crescenzago to Muggiano, from the arcades in the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza Oberdan. And there, in the Piazza della Repubblica, you could actually see the sky, the black sky, swollen with wind and crossed by lightning flashes, and soon they would hear the rolls of thunder, which Sergeant Morini always told his two-year-old daughter were big horses in the sky hurrying to their mothers, which was why they were making all that noise.

‘Look, driver, look, they’re getting into that Giulietta.’ An olive green Giulietta that went really well with the red of the girl’s dress coat and the dove grey of the man’s suit. ‘If they put on speed I don’t know if you could keep up with them.’ Nobody could ever keep up with a Giulietta, not even an old, worn-looking one like that.

But the Giulietta didn’t put on speed, on the contrary, it went like an ambling horse, frisky but holding back, the driver and the girl in the red dress coat could be seen talking inside, and they crossed the whole of the Piazza della Repubblica, climbed onto the ramparts of Porta Venezia, and after Viale Maino, and the Viale Bianca Maria, and the Piazza Cinque Giornate, Morini started to get irritated. Despite the skill of the driver it was almost impossible for the people in the Giulietta not to have realised that there was an Alfa Romeo following them, unless, he thought, they were hand in hand, her head on his shoulder, letting Providence
do the driving. But they weren’t such mystical people, he thought: they knew they were being followed, but for the moment they were pretending they weren’t and weren’t putting on speed. They might lurch forward suddenly when the moment came and disappear.

So he said to the driver, ‘Don’t keep too far from them, or they’ll get away at the first turning. I don’t care if they realise we’re following them.’