Big Italy (3 page)

“You’re not divorced.”

Trotti replied simply, “I want a place of my own.”

“I thought you loved Garda.”

“I’ve spent some glorious times on the lake.” Trotti ran a hand across his chin. The wine had tinted the corners of his lips. “When she was a little girl, Pioppi always loved the Villa Ondina. Still does. Last summer she brought Francesca. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pioppi quite so happy.”

“Why on earth go off into the hills of the OltrePò? Stay with your daughter—and with your granddaughter.”

“I need a place to myself.”

“Your daughter needs you.”

“She has a husband and a family of her own. Why does Pioppi need me? I’d only get in the way.” The rigidity in his face softened. “Pioppi’s taken to being a mother like a duck to water. She doesn’t need an old man getting between her feet. She has her own life to lead. She’s radiant now.”

“Pioppi always was lovely.”

“Radiant—but that’s why women are luckier than us, Magagna. What satisfaction do we men have? We have to work for it—power, wealth, fame, success. And once we’ve got what we want—the cheese in the mousetrap—it seems to crumble through our fingers.” He added, his eyes on Magagna, “Pioppi’s even overweight.”

“You’ve always worried too much about your daughter.”

“Perhaps.”

“You don’t have confidence in other people.”

“I still worry about her.”

“You worry about everything.”

“Pioppi is a lovely girl.” Trotti nodded proudly. “She has a good job in Bologna—but her real interest in life is her family. Her husband and her little girl. And soon there will be a new one.”

“If I didn’t know you, commissario, I’d think you were beginning to doubt your own immortality.”

“You sound like my wife.” Trotti raised the glass of Sangue di Giuda to a picture frame on top of the refrigerator, beside the small parcel.

The photograph was of a middle-aged woman holding a little girl and smiling with unrestrained delight into the camera.

“The woman I married—and now she’s a grandmother.”

“Self-doubt, Trotti?”

He turned fast. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t think self-doubt can be very good for you. It makes you human.”

“Scarcely.”

“Tell me about your granddaughter.”

“Francesca?” Trotti put his glass down, stood up and took the photograph. “The reason I’m happy every morning as I prepare my coffee.”

“Happy?” Magagna shook his head doubtfully. “Wait another ten months.”

Trotti raised his hand and stroked the photograph with the tips of his fingers. Then he set it back on top of the refrigerator.

“Still see your wife?” Magagna asked.

“Sandro says he’ll stay on in the clinic in Brescia for two more years. Then he’ll come to Santa Maria.”

“With his family?”

“Sandro never married.”

“Why not?”

Trotti shook his head. “We were like brothers, Sandro and I. Slept in the same bed. He always accused me of farting but he never stopped. With the diet of those war years, it’s no real wonder.”

“I can see why he never married.”

“Sandro’s a couple of years older than me. In 1944 he went off to fight with the partisans. Nearly got hanged by the Fascists.”

“Didn’t you once tell me Sandro gave you his bicycle?”

Trotti dipped his head in admiration. “You’ve got a good memory, Magagna.”

“Or perhaps you like to repeat the same things over and again.” Magagna added, “And your cousin Anna Maria went and married a Dutchman, just to get away from pedaling in the hills.”

“When on earth did I tell you that?”

“Many, many years ago.” Magagna sighed.

“Sandro’s done well for himself. Went back to study after the war and got his high school diploma. Goodness knows where he got the money from, but he went on to study medicine. Probably from Piet, the Dutch brother-in-law.” He added, “Must be fifteen years since I last saw Piet.”

“You could always go to Holland when you retire.”

“In ’56, my cousin Sandro set up his little clinic in Brescia.”

“But he never got married?”

“Have some more wine, Magagna.”

“I’m driving home in this fog.”

“Some grappa, then?”

“Why did your cousin never marry, commissario?”

“Who knows?” Trotti sipped some more wine, running his tongue along his teeth. “It was Sandro who told me my brother Italo had been killed.”

Magagna looked at his hands in silence. It was warm in the kitchen in via Milano and Magagna had undone his collar and tie. He lolled back on the upright chair, an arm looped over the back rest.

The television droned on, ignored.

“It’s all so long ago.”

“Sangue di Giuda makes you maudlin, commissario.”

Trotti clicked his tongue in irritation. “Sandro’s always had money. A nice car and a villa near Rimini. There was a time, twenty—twenty-five years ago, when he would take a different girlfriend there every week. He had a red Alfa-Romeo Spider coupé and for some reason, he was always with a blonde. He liked the Nordic type.” Trotti made a gesture of impatience. “Sandro’s so stubborn.”

“At least you’ll have someone to quarrel with in the hills.”

“If you think I’m irascible, you haven’t met Sandro. Stubborn—we’re all stubborn in the hills. It was a hard life and without that stubbornness we’d never have survived. Sandro was always a lot more ambitious than me. I sometimes wonder if it’s because of his pride he never found the right girl. Was looking for perfection—but I suppose it’s not too late.”

“They say if a man’s not married by the time he’s forty he’s not going to marry at all.”

“Sandro has a lot of qualities—qualities that are common to us mountain folk.” Trotti glanced at the television. “He’d have made a good father.”

After a short silence, Magagna asked, “You really think you can leave this city?”

“Why not?”

“You only pretend to dislike people.”

“I dislike people?”

Magagna coughed politely.

The kitchen windows were misted. Occasionally there was the distant rumble of a bus along via Milano. The clock on the
refrigerator ticked noisily. The parish news sheet had been tucked behind the alarm clock, forgotten there since Pioppi had visited her father in August and had persuaded him to take her to church.

“You know, I saw a private detective this evening. Like everybody else, he wants me to stay on in the city.”

“Private detective?” Magagna raised an eyebrow.

“Fabrizio Bassi. Used to work in the Questura.”

“After my time.”

“And now he’s set up his own agency here in the city—Fabrizio Bassi Investigations. He wants me to work on the Turellini affair.”

“And you’re going to?”

“I’m not paid to moonlight, Magagna.”

“I hope you made your deontological position quite clear.” Magagna paused. “Bassi—why did he leave the police?”

“He was thrown out and now he hopes I’m going to help him.”

“Thrown out?”

Trotti raised his glass. “He thinks he and I could go into partnership once I’ve retired.”

“Bassi? Wasn’t Bassi the fellow who was having an affair with a politician’s wife?”

“The only partnership I’m interested in is with my goats and hens in Santa Maria.”

“You came out in support of this Bassi. I heard how you almost came to blows with some of your colleagues in the Questura. He’d been sleeping with the mayor’s wife.” Magagna smiled. “Good luck to him.”

“You’ve got a good memory.” Trotti shrugged.

“Why don’t you want to work with him?”

“Magagna, I don’t want to work with anybody.”

T
HERE WERE ALREADY
several copies of
Vissuto
by the telephone, left there by the cleaning lady who believed Trotti might find solutions to his own inquiries.

(The cleaning woman had been Pioppi’s idea. The first time Trotti’s daughter came with the baby, Francesca, she was horrified by what she called the squalor. “You need a woman, Papa.” Trotti said nothing, but he acquiesced when Pioppi found a home help for him, an old, kind woman who methodically went through the house twice a week. The woman rarely spoke and when she did, she grunted unintelligibly in a Veneto accent. She wore black and she was probably a lot younger than Trotti. She had cooked for him once or twice, but her cooking was unsatisfactory. A predilection for polenta that reminded him too much of his diet during the war years.)

When Magagna had left, Trotti bolted the door, stacked the plates in the sink and then heated some water in a saucepan as he washed the dishes.

(Pioppi had told him to buy a dishwasher.)

He made an herbal infusion of chamomile and waited for the water to cool.

It was nearly ten o’clock.

The television still flickered softly. Trotti glanced briefly at a Gina Lollobrigida film with Enrico Maria Salerno that he had seen thirty years ago at the cinema, then pulled the plug from the wall. The image vanished and Trotti sighed.

He got ready for bed. It was as he was hanging up his jacket,
still damp with fog, that he remembered the magazine. It protruded from the side pocket.

Vissuto
.

Trotti leafed through the copy of
Vissuto
. It was, Trotti realized, an updated version of
Domenica del Corriere
, which had been so popular in the fifties before the advent of television, in the years before Berlusconi. Now there were photographs instead of the old penciled sketches, but otherwise the articles were all very similar and had scarcely changed over the intervening years. Mothers in Naples, Genoa, Rome and Trieste complaining about the Camorra, the Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, complaining about the drugs circulating in the schools, about the inadequacy of the hospitals. Mothers with cancer, dying so that their unborn babies could come healthy into the world. A mother committing suicide because her son had died in a car crash. Other mothers arrested for selling their daughters into slavery, for trading in human organs, for usury.

Then there were articles on mediums and clairvoyants and stigmata—after two thousand years, Trotti told himself, the Catholic church had been replaced by a new, secular obscurantism.

The only difference between the magazine and the
Domenica del Corriere
of Trotti’s memory was the advertising for sexy phone calls, ribald jokes and soft-core titillation.

“Bassi,” Trotti said under his breath.

The chamomile was still hot as he did the True or False quiz. Turning to page ninety-four for the answers, he discovered with glum satisfaction that all his answers were wrong. Did he really need to know if the Doges’ boat was called
bucefalo
?

Trotti took honey from the cupboard and ladled two spoonfuls into the hot chamomile. Then he drank noisily.

(Agnese had always complained that he was a noisy eater.)

Trotti was smiling to himself when he saw the article. It was the main article and flipping through the pages with his left hand, he came to it last.

MISTER FBI SAYS
, ‘
CHERCHEZ LA FEMME
.’

F
ROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
in Milan:

Carlo Turellini, fifty-four, a university professor and one of the most renowned obstetricians in Northern Italy, was murdered on Friday, 23 October 1992, while leaving his villa in Segrate on the edge of the metropolis. More than a year has passed since that morning, yet the death of Turellini remains a mystery. Official inquiries have so far failed to find an answer to the two questions the people of Milan continue to ask: Who murdered Carlo Turellini and why?

There is, however, somebody who has never ceased to trouble the turbid waters, to break through the thick curtain of silence surrounding the murder. Fabrizio Bassi is thirty-five years old. After a successful career in the Polizia di Stato, he left to become a private investigator (
see photograph, center
). His agency is named Fabrizio Bassi Investigations—or FBI
.

A name that speaks for itself
.

For over a year, Bassi has been following his line of investigation into the Turellini case. Yet several days ago he was forced to break off his inquiries because of an injunction from the Milan State magistrate. Fabrizio Bassi does not want his valuable work to be lost—and that is why he decided to speak to our journalist (
see photograph, top right
) about the mystery surrounding Turellini’s untimely death
.

Let us consider that fateful day at the end of October, 1992
.

At 7:52 in the morning, Dr. Turellini was leaving for work at the university and was going through the automatic gates of his villa,
sitting at the wheel of his grey BMW, when the murderer burst out from behind a bush and, with a trembling hand, pulled three times at the trigger of an antiquated gun. Surprisingly, the assassin fired only two rounds from the 7.65-caliber pistol. The second round went into the door of the car—into the bottom of the door, proof indeed that the assassin was far from expert in his calling. The third and fatal bullet struck the doctor in the left temple
.

Dr. Turellini was found a few minutes later, in the throes of death, his bleeding head propped against the seat headrest, his left foot on the ground, the car door open
.

The details permit several interpretations
.

The first is that Turellini opened the door to the car only after he had been shot in the head. The doctor had been sitting behind the wheel and did not notice anything amiss until it was too late
.

Another possibility is that Turellini knew the man who appeared before the gate. Not suspecting anything, Turellini was in the act of getting out of the car to confer with him. The murderer did not give Turellini any time but took out his weapon and fired immediately
.

A third possibility is that Turellini realized the danger he was in and tried to escape from the car but the clumsy killer managed to carry out his treacherous act. Turellini did not have time to react. Fatally wounded, his strength deserted him once he put his foot on the ground
.