Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
And the night ride continued, after the Piazza Cinque Giornate the Giulietta came down off the ramparts for some reason, drove down the Viale Montenero, Viale Sabotino, which looked like a stage set thanks to the late hour, the emptiness, the flashing yellow lights at the crossroads, the last cheap bar open – its neon sign
Crota Piemunteisa
seemed to tremble, deprived as it was of the letters
r, u
and
a
– then the Viale Bligny and the Viale Col di Lana, in other words the whole ring of old Milan, pieces of which still remained, architecturally preserved or occasionally rebuilt for the tourists, those ramparts on the terraces of which valiant men at arms had once apparently stood watch. Sergeant Morini didn’t like any of this, and as soon as the Giulietta, which was still ahead of them, had crossed the Piazza 24 Maggio, and turned onto the Ripa Ticinese and the old road, the one to the right of the canal, he contacted the S. office at Headquarters.
‘I know it’s late, but that’s no reason to fall asleep. This is Morini, in case you’re still awake and it’s of any interest to you. Don’t fall asleep again and take this down: I’m on the Ripa Ticinese, I’m following a Giulietta, license number MI 836752, inform all cars in the vicinity, I’ll keep calling back with my position.’ He hung up and looked again at the red lights of the Giulietta, which was still running ahead of them, although not exactly running, it fact it was going
very slowly, along the narrow road to the right of the Alzaia Naviglio Grande.
Morini was middle-aged. When he had first come to Milan the Navigli were not yet covered and in the Via Senato there were still painters painting the dark, dense waters of the Naviglio. He was only a boy in those days, so small and bony that they called him the little hunchback, and he swallowed it because in Milan you had to swallow it if you wanted to earn your living, working as a delivery boy in a tavern in the Via Spiga, spending all day carrying flagons and bottles of wine, and he also did many other jobs until he joined the police, that was his world and he made a career of it, because he liked order and clarity, you’re either a cop or a robber, and so he got to know all of Milan, all the streets, all the different neighbourhoods and the kinds of people who lived there, and was quite familiar, maybe house by house, field by field, with the roads to the left and right of the Naviglio Grande.
‘Here it comes,’ he said to the driver, blinded by the lightning and stunned by the thunder as the storm was unleashed, apparently right over their heads. He started the windscreen wipers under the sudden torrent and, without switching on the headlights, continued to follow the Giulietta.
‘This is Morini,’ Morini said into the radio. ‘I’m on the Alzaia Naviglio Grande, on the way to Corsico and Vigevano, I’m still following the Giulietta license number 836752, I just need to know where the nearest car is.’
‘It’s in the Via Famagusta, the driver says he’s right behind you.’
‘Tell him to do his work, I’ll call him if I need him,’ he shouted to drown out, if possible, the roar of the thunder.
The Giulietta had not stopped, but in the driving rain
it had put on its headlights now and slowed down, it was probably not even doing thirty, and it was going quite carefully, because on that narrow road, with the canal so close without any protection, and in that weather, it would have been stupid to go any faster.
‘It’s a hurricane,’ one of the men in the back sneered, and Morini laughed softly and sharply. Where were those two going, on this road, and in this weather? They had almost reached Ronchetto sul Naviglio, in a real hurricane of rain and wind and thunder and lightning, and a solitary tram passed, improbable and empty, on the road on the other side of the canal, almost wrapped in lightning, and at that moment the driver said, ‘There’s another car coming towards them.’
‘Stop,’ Sergeant Morini said. It was as if he knew the exact measurements of the road they were going down. There were two roads with the canal in the middle, neither of them was much of a road, but the one on the left where the tram was passing was at least wide and between it and the canal there was a little rail which might not hold much back, but it was better than nothing. The road on which they were, on the other hand, could hold two cars, at least in theory, one in one direction, one in another, and by the canal there was no protection, and every now and again a drunk walking along it fell in: that was the disadvantage of the Venetian style.
The Alfa Romeo stopped, overwhelmed by all the flashes of lightning, not that it could have done otherwise anyway because the Giulietta was slowing down, as if about to stop.
‘Be careful,’ Morini said, his face suddenly illuminated by the headlights of the car coming from the opposite
direction, and these were his last words before the frenzied
rat-a-tat,
made somehow even more explosive by the scouring rain: the green Giulietta, in front of them, instead of stopping, seemed to tremble, pitilessly illuminated by the headlights of the other car, swaying as if drunk.
‘They’re shooting a whole machine gun volley at them,’ Morini said, and he could clearly see every bullet from the submachine gun hitting the Giulietta and bouncing off it like spray in the deluge of rain illuminated by the headlights.
‘Turn off all the lights and let’s jump out,’ Morini said, but it was pointless: the Giulietta, maddened by the discharge of bullets, gave a great roar and jerked forward, trying to get out of the ray of light, but there were only two ways for it to go, on the right was the wall of a house, and on the left the canal, and the car first smashed against the wall, then bounced, headed for the canal, and fell in. The lights of the car in front, the car from which the volley had come, now lit up the Alfa Romeo, but the Alfa Romeo was empty and the men, despite the deluge, were sheltering it. Suddenly the other car came straight towards them, as if intending to ram them, and Morini fired, but there was nothing they could do: the other car came within a centimetre of the Alfa Romeo, passed it, accelerated with a roar that seemed louder than the thunder and disappeared before they could do anything but fire a few futile shots into the storm-swept darkness.
Now soaking and dripping, unafraid of the rain, Morini ran towards the canal where the Giulietta had fallen. ‘Bring the car closer and put on the headlights,’ he ordered the driver.
But it was pointless. For several minutes the headlights illumined the rain-swept waters of the Naviglio Grande at
this point close to Ronchetto sul Naviglio, but there was nothing to be done, the girl in the red dress coat with the long, youthful legs and her elegant companion in the grey suit had been ferried into another universe, a universe of unknown and mysterious dimensions.
As soon as the wind came up, Duca Lamberti went and closed all the windows in the apartment, then came back to the study and together with Mascaranti took another look at the suitcase the girl had left. It wasn’t really a case, it was more like a crate or a small trunk, it wasn’t leather and the metal corners looked very solid, too solid for such a small trunk.
‘I’d like to open it,’ he said to Mascaranti.
‘It won’t be easy,’ Mascaranti said.
Duca stood up and fished in the glass bowl containing the instruments he had used on the girl, took two of them and tried them in the small lock of the case. ‘I thought it’d be harder,’ he said, standing up again and looking for another instrument in the bowl. ‘This should do it.’ He inserted it in the lock and slowly pushed.
‘But those are surgical instruments,’ Mascaranti said, regretfully.
Not Duca: he wasn’t regretful as he pushed the thin little instrument that looked like a bradawl into the lock, because he had already decided that all this – the instruments, the bottle of coloured or colourless Citrosil, the whole pharmacological Tower of Babel from which to choose the right medicine – just wasn’t his world any more. He didn’t hate it, but he was leaving it, saying farewell to it, and these instruments could just as well be used to force a lock, or even to open a tin of sardines.
And while the thunder rolled terribly and the rain beat against the shutters, he forced that lock and lifted the lid and they saw a layer of dark wood shavings.
‘How did you do it?’ Mascaranti said, admiringly.
He didn’t reply. He threw the shavings onto the floor. Beneath it was greaseproof paper, the colour of iodine, folded the way it was in big boxes of chocolates. He unfolded it, beneath it were more shavings. Then he stopped and lit a cigarette. He was making a mistake again, he couldn’t afford to make a mistake, and yet he was still making them. Why didn’t he keep out of things like this, why didn’t he become a pharmaceuticals salesman? Why didn’t he go and see his sister and Livia
4
and his niece in Inverigo?
‘What do you think is inside?’ he said to Mascaranti.
‘Something fragile, I suppose, with all these shavings.’
Why not crystal glasses for pink champagne? But he didn’t say anything and took away the shavings and threw them on the floor again. Beneath, there was a dark cloth, as he had expected. It looked like the kind of cloth used to wash floors, but it was sticky to the touch, because it was soaked in grease.
‘It can’t be,’ Mascaranti said, starting to understand.
‘It is,’ he replied, lifting the cloth the way a stripper throws off her last undergarment.
Mascaranti stood up from his chair and knelt on the floor by the case, looking without touching. ‘It looks like a dismantled submachine gun.’
‘It
is
a submachine gun.’
Mascaranti kept staring at it, as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘It isn’t a Browning, a Browning is bigger.’
‘No, it isn’t a Browning, a Browning weighs nearly nine kilos, this one isn’t even seven.’ He took out one part, the barrel. The second part was the central body with the
chamber, the two parts fitting together like the pieces of a children’s game, and the third part was the breech, with a false grip, which also slotted in very smoothly, because of all the grease. And finally, under another layer of wood shavings, the magazines. He inserted one vertically into the chamber. ‘It can do thirty shots per magazine, ten more than a Browning, and two more than a Bren.’ The bottom of the case was full of magazines. The bullet was a calibre 7.8, a higher calibre than other submachine guns. He put the bullet back and looked carefully down the barrel: there seemed to be eight striations, which meant the speed of firing must be at least eight hundred metres a second. ‘This gem is a Skoda,’ he said. ‘Everybody thinks they only make cars these days but they must have kept some of their military sections, here it is, it’s a very small mark:
CSSR,
which means, if I remember correctly,
Ceskoslovenska Socialisticka Republika.
This is the best submachine gun in the world, it can be hidden under a coat, and it has the power of a small cannon. You hold it like a bicycle pump, like this, you pull back the false grip with your right hand and the weapon discharges a hundred shots a minute and more. Remember a Bren, which weighs ten and a half kilos, can’t do more than eighty shots a minute. You let go of the grip and the gun stops. It cools in the air, look.’
‘Don’t shoot, Dr Lamberti.’
He would gladly have fired the gun, very gladly: there was never any lack of targets. Instead of which he carefully dismantled the gun and put it back in place, almost the way he had found it, but without trying to hide the fact that he had handled it, he didn’t see any point in hiding that. He looked at his greasy hands, and went into the little bathroom. ‘Mascaranti, get out the coffee and the percolator and make us a bit of coffee.’ Mascaranti liked coffee and
was good at making it. It took Duca some time to wash his hands clean, he had to use the bathroom tile detergent, and there were still marks on his fingers, then, with the thunder pealing convulsively outside, he went into the kitchen, sat down in the little corner where he had done the crosswords with Mascaranti while the girl had slept, and where Mascaranti was now grinding the coffee in a grinder that was not so much old as historic.
‘Which grocer did you get this coffee from?’ Mascaranti asked as he ground the coffee. ‘I’ll go and shut him down.’
‘From your boss Superintendent Carrua’s grocer.’ Another unpleasant aspect of his situation as a former doctor, currently unemployed: Carrua’s suppliers, from the grocer to the butcher, were also his. Lorenza, when she was in Milan, didn’t have to do anything except make a phone call and place an order. What should he call that? A loan, a gesture of friendship, charity? He and Lorenza were content to place their orders, without calling it anything.
‘Superintendent Carrua knows about police matters, and nothing about anything else,’ Mascaranti said didactically.
For a while the thunder was muffled and distant, the hurricane was subsiding. In the near-silence the grinder rasped domestically, good-naturedly, reminiscent of the kitchens of long ago, the ones with fireplaces. Duca slumped onto the chair and stared at the percolator on the stove, the livid, motionless little flame, a substitute for the brilliant, burning, reddish, dancing flames of a fireplace.
‘Let’s assume a small part of what the girl told us is true,’ he said, still staring at his imaginary fireplace, the silence growing around them, because the storm, the hurricane, was almost over.
Mascaranti stood up with the grinder in his hand. ‘I’ve
gone mad. I put the percolator on without any coffee in it.’ He shook his head, turned off the gas, and waited for the percolator to cool down a bit.
‘Let’s assume a small part of what the girl told us is true,’ Duca repeated.
‘Yes,’ Mascaranti said.
‘She said, if she was telling the truth, that one of her fiancé’s two shops in Milan is near here, in the Via Plinio, and she walked here tonight.’
Mascaranti emptied the percolator, unscrewed it, put the coffee in the filter, screwed it up again, relit the gas and put the percolator over the little flame. ‘That may well be true.’
‘Let’s assume it is. She arrived here with the case. Which means she had the case with her when she finished work, she left the shop with it and came here.’