Traitors to All (8 page)

‘That’s possible,’ Mascaranti said, ‘but she could also have left the shop without the case and gone to pick it up from somewhere where it had been left.’

No, he thought, we have to use Occam’s razor,
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we have to be economical with our hypotheses, and the right hypothesis was the most economical. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely. First of all, this other place where she may have left the case would have to have been somewhere between the shop and here. Then it would have had to be a place she could trust, you don’t leave a case like this in a bar or in the apartment of some casual acquaintance. And it’d be odd if she found a place like that halfway between the butcher’s shop and here.’

Mascaranti nodded, his eyes still on the percolator. ‘But if she had the case with her in the shop, then her fiancé, the butcher, must know what it is, because it’s unlikely she’d be able to keep a case like that hidden from her fiancé.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Duca said. ‘It isn’t certain but it’s very likely. A woman is quite capable of hiding her lover’s photograph in her husband’s wallet if she has to, but if she can she’d rather avoid it. So let’s assume she has the case with her in the shop, and that her fiancé knows it’s there.’ He opened the window because the storm was over, it was only raining now. He breathed in the damp air of concrete and rubbish from the courtyard, then sat down again. ‘And let’s also assume that her fiancé, the butcher, knows what’s in the case.’ He looked at the gas flame, half closed his eyes, thinking of the sparks rising, long ago, through the hoods of fireplaces, and imagining that those sparks were rising now from the little gas flame. ‘In fact, let’s assume that he was the one who gave the girl the case, in other words, that the butcher gave his fiancée a submachine gun to bring here. Nobody would ever think a girl like that was carrying a submachine gun. Then the case is deposited here, in the apartment of an honest if censured professional, and at a suitable time someone comes to pick it up.’

Mascaranti continued to nod, then stopped in order to flip over the percolator. Then he started nodding again as he went to fetch the cups and the sugar bowl.

Then Duca said, ‘Mascaranti, you heard what the girl said before?’

‘Yes, I heard, but I didn’t see,’ Mascaranti said, smiling ambiguously.

‘The girl said her fiancé made lots of money, hundreds of millions even, with the meat he brought in to his shop in Milan without paying duty.’ Sadly, the gas had been switched off, and the flame was gone. ‘I don’t think you can make hundreds of millions cheating on duty,’ he continued patiently. ‘Do you?’

‘Not really,’ Mascaranti said, pouring the coffee.

‘But do you think you could make that much money by importing guns like the one in that case?’

Mascaranti nodded and handed him the cup of coffee and then the sugar bowl.

‘And do you think these are weapons of war?’ He put in the sugar, stirred it, and waited for the reply.

Mascaranti put in the sugar and stirred it, and as he was stirring it, sitting there beside him, with the alarm clock ticking in the rainy night and the second hand in the shape of a hen swaying with every tick, he pondered unhurriedly. ‘No,’ he said. He sipped a little of the coffee and nodded to indicate that it was good. ‘I mean, even a rolling pin for making pasta could be a weapon of war, but you couldn’t mount a real attack with that kind of gun, at most some kind of commando action.’

‘Or something similar, like a robbery,’ Duca said. He tasted the coffee. ‘It’s good like this, it shouldn’t be too strong at night.’ He stood up and went and opened all the other windows in the apartment. In Lorenza’s bedroom, the lid of the steriliser in which Sara’s dummies were left to soak was off. Every night he saw the lid was off and every night he forgot to put it on, and Lorenza had been away for now ten days now. How embarrassing! He took the lid and put it on the steriliser, then looked for the cigarettes he had in the pocket of his jacket which was hanging in the hall, the plain national brand, not for export, and went back into the kitchen. Mascaranti was carefully washing the cups.

‘Or else it could be a sample,’ Duca said, sitting down behind him. ‘If someone’s looking to buy wholesale, you open the case and show him the sample, explain that it’s the latest model, and sell it at a reasonable price.’

Mascaranti dried his hands on the tea towel hanging next to the sink. ‘So we’re dealing with middle men in the arms trade.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, simultaneously shaking his head, ‘maybe, but that’s not the heart of the matter.’

Then the telephone rang. He stood up and went into the hall. It was Sergeant Morini. He listened to his story, and it didn’t even take long to listen to, because Morini was as laconic as Tacitus and the couple’s terrible death – blinded by headlights, riddled with machine gun fire, driven so mad that they threw themselves in the canal – became, in Morini’s description, terse, formal, official, which made the story even more chilling. When the call was over, Duca stood there looking at the telephone, and at the wall, and gave a shudder of disgust.

After the storm, the sky over Milan, because Milan does have a sky, became even bluer than the sky over the Plateau Rosa,
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and beyond the buildings, from the roof terraces, the snow-covered mountains were clearly visible. The man at the petrol station in the Piazza della Repubblica, where Mascaranti had stopped, was wearing sky blue overalls. He was keen, he didn’t read the newspapers and didn’t know anything, every night in Milan a number of people die, more than during the day, and for the most diverse reasons, from bronchial pneumonia to a machine gun slaying in the Ripa Ticinese, and he couldn’t mourn them all, and besides, not all of them were worth mourning. Nobody had ever tried to rob his petrol station, and so his world had a normal, liveable, even happy dimension. Duca Lamberti looked at the meter on the petrol pump, the triumphant sun, the vivid spring green of the geometrical little lawns in the Piazza. At this very moment, the girl in the red dress coat was in the morgue, without her coat, and in another cold chamber was her unfortunate companion, and these images had no meaning in a normal, liveable world like that of the man in the petrol station.

‘I’m just popping over to Ricci’s pastry shop,’ he said to Mascaranti, and he crossed the Via Ferdinando di Savoia, obeying the traffic lights, went in under the arcades of the skyscraper and then into the pastry shop.

The image of the girl lying in the frozen chamber was wiped out by the counters of that venerable temple to confectionery and tea and ice-cream, where half – or all? – of Milan came whenever it could for the ritual of the aperitif, the boxes of pastries that husbands took home to their wives and children on Sundays, and the bottles of French, Greek, German and Spanish wine displayed, slightly tilted, in a window, liquid delights that were hard to fathom if your palate was accustomed to table wines.

‘Police.’ He flashed an ID, which was actually Mascaranti’s.

The polite, well-built man looked at him uncertainly through his glasses, held his arm out, made a kind of bow and led him towards the back of the shop.

‘Are you the owner?’ Duca asked him. He was being excessively meticulous: after all, even he came here every now and again, and he recognised the man.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I need some information. I’d like to know if a wedding cake was ordered here.’

‘We get lots of orders for wedding cakes.’ Through his glasses the man was looking at Duca without either fear or curiosity, but with refinement, a gentleman looking at another gentleman.

‘This is a wedding cake that was supposed to be sent to a little village near Milan.’

‘I’d have to look at the order slips,’ the gentleman said, his expression indicating that he was starting to get a little irritated. ‘Do you know who ordered it?’

‘No, the cake was supposed to be sent to Romano Banco, in the municipality of Buccinasco, near Corsico. It could have been ordered by anybody.’

These geographical indications were a bit excessive,
and the owner of the pastry shop continued to look at him coolly through his glasses, without saying anything.

‘I’m told it was a cake that cost two hundred thousand lire.’

The expression behind the glasses was now one of incredulity. ‘Well, they might make a cake like that for the Queen of England.’

Duca smiled: he liked this man, whose behaviour could not be faulted. ‘Maybe they were exaggerating. Let’s say a hundred thousand.’

‘As I said, we have to look at the order slips.’

They looked, and they found the slip for the cake, which was in fact a cake for thirty-five thousand lire, because the girl who was now in a cold chamber in the morgue had had, when she was alive, a childlike tendency to exaggerate, which was how thirty-five had become two hundred, and the cake, which didn’t even weigh ten kilos, had been taken, three days earlier, in a Ricci’s delivery van, to Trattoria dei Gigli in the Via dei Gigli in Romano Banco, in the municipality of Buccinasco, and the cake had been paid for in advance by cheque, as was shown on the slip, a Bank of America and Italy cheque, number 1180 398, and it had been ordered by someone genuinely Milanese, at least to judge by the name, Ulrico Brambilla, who would have been the bridegroom if there had actually been a wedding, and who owned butcher’s shops in Milan, Romano Banco and Ca’ Tarino.

Duca went back to his car and sat down next to Mascaranti, who was at the wheel. ‘The cake was ordered and sent.’ He would have liked to know what had happened to the cake, however modest, only thirty-five thousand instead of two hundred, it must have been a good solid cake of about ten kilos, only one one-hectogram slice per guest,
with a hundred guests to eat it. But the wedding had not taken place.

‘Let’s go to Romano Banco,’ he said to Mascaranti. ‘We can go by way of Inverigo.’ It was a poor attempt at humour, but Mascaranti understood: to get to Romano Banco you don’t go by way of Inverigo because it’s in the opposite direction, but it was ten days since Duca had last seen his sister, ten days since he had last seen little Sara, ten days since he had last seen Livia with the M-shaped and W-shaped scars all over her face.

The journey to the Villa Auseri was like advancing directly into the sun.

‘Is this it?’ Mascaranti asked.

Yes, this was it: Lorenza was already behind the gate, holding her child by the hand. They were fine, they were lovely, the girl’s cheeks and bottom were firm, and Lorenza’s ponytail looked good against the light green hilly background of the Brianza.

‘Livia’s stayed in her room,’ Lorenza said.

It was the least she could do: someone with seventy-seven scars on her face, at the corners of her eyes, the corners of her lips and on either side of her nose, couldn’t do much else besides stay in her room, even after all the plastic surgery. With Sara in his arms, he crossed the garden of the villa, more aristocratic in style than most in the Brianza, and entered the main room.

‘Where are you taking me, uncle?’

Because he was, after all, an uncle. ‘We’re going to find Signorina Livia.’ He climbed the stairs which led to the upper floor, he knew that Livia had seen him from the window and was waiting for him.

‘I want to play with Signorina Livia,’ Sara said, ‘but she doesn’t want to.’

‘Signorina Livia’s a bit tired,’ he said. The second door on the right along the corridor opened and Livia said, ‘This is all very sudden.’

‘I’ve only got a minute,’ he said, standing there with Sara in his arms, looked closely at Livia: seventy-seven scars don’t disappear in ten days, or even in ten months, or ten years.

‘It’s not good, is it?’ she said. She meant:
my face isn’t good.

He said, kindly but brutally, ‘No.’ Livia Ussaro preferred the truth to a fool’s paradise, even if the truth cut like a guillotine, and she even smiled as if he had told her that she was really beautiful.

‘Leave me the child and go and see your sister,’ she said, smiling: the plastic surgeon had done a good job, Livia could actually smile, you might think she had only had a slight case of smallpox.

‘All right,’ he said. He put the child down. ‘Go and play with the Signorina.’ He took one step forward. ‘I have a job to finish, I hope to finish it soon, then we can go to the sea, the doctors said the sea will do you good.’ Not even the owner of all the oceans of the world, the God of the seas, the creator of the waters, could ever erase those seventy-seven scars, he knew that.

‘I’m fine here too, don’t worry.’ She took the child, led her into her room, and immediately closed the door.

He couldn’t do anything, he couldn’t tear limb from limb the person who had embroidered that monstrous tracery of scars on Livia Ussaro’s face, the law doesn’t allow you to tear anyone limb from limb, it doesn’t permit personal vengeance. He descended the pleasant staircase of the pleasant villa, and put an arm round Lorenza’s shoulders.

‘Why don’t you stay here, what work do you have?’

He looked at her tenderly, he didn’t want her to see all
the hatred seething away inside him. ‘It’s nothing important,’ he lied, ‘but they may put me back on the register, and I have to see some people, you know, I have to explain what happened.’ It was Lorenza’s greatest wish that he should be a doctor again, but he was much less keen on the idea. Pierced by a ray of sunlight falling radiantly over the hollow of Lake Segrino, he got back in the car, and through the window stroked Lorenza’s face. ‘Better go a bit faster,’ he said to Mascaranti, ‘we’re late.’

Midday isn’t the best time to cross Milan by car, there may not even be a best time, and people actually avoid crossing it if they can. Mascaranti started counting the traffic lights in the Viale Fulvio Testi and by the time he got to the Porta Ticinese there had been thirty-two. As in a slow-moving children’s carousel they did a half circle around the Piazzale 24 Maggio in a line of cars four or five deep, and had time to admire the wet dock of the port of Milan. Some said it was the fifth largest port in Europe in terms of the weight of goods that passed through it, which was mostly sand and stones: that might well be so, he thought. ‘Let’s take the right bank,’ he said to Mascaranti, meaning the right bank of the Alzaia Naviglio Grande, the one that couple had taken, the girl and Silvano, the late couple, just three days earlier, in the storm. Now there was sun, and mountain air. They immediately identified the spot where it had happened: the asphalt still showed the tracks of the breakdown lorry that had fished out the car, and Mascaranti, having got out, saw immediately on the wall of the house the chipped plaster from where the bullets had passed close to it. Duca looked at the water of the canal. Why had Silvano and the girl taken this narrow road? If they had taken the left bank, where the road was wider, they would have been able to escape that deadly machine-gun attack. And how on earth did the people who had fired at them know they would be going
along the right bank? Whoever it was must have known the time, too. They seemed to have known a lot of things.