Big Italy (8 page)

“Eva Beatrix Camargo Mendez,” Trotti said to himself as he turned the manila envelope over, looking for a sign of its place of origin. Just a smudge above the sealed rear flap.

“Where is she?”

“Trieste.” Trotti smiled sadly. “She seems to think I can help her.”

“You know what we women are like?” Bianca Poveri raised her shoulders. It was warm in her bureau. She wore an unbuttoned cashmere cardigan. A white blouse and a thin gold necklace at the pale, freckled skin of her neck. Matching earrings. A gold brooch with a cabalistic motif on the lapel of her blouse. “Acts of genuine kindness are so rare in men. When we meet them, we think we can go on asking for favors indefinitely.”

“Eva cost me a fortune in new locks.”

An amused laugh. “Locks were the only precaution you took?”

“After Eva had gone, I had to get everything changed in my house. I had no desire to see her friends come looking for her in via Milano.”

She searched his face. “You enjoyed her company.”

“A whore—with a son in Uruguay she hadn’t seen in years. She talked about him incessantly.”

“Prostitute with a golden heart?” Signora Poveri laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one. And in my line of business I meet enough whores. Whores, murderers, addicts, thieves. I’ve long
believed the Merlin Act should be revoked, that prostitution should be legalized—if only to control the spread of AIDS. But I’m forgetting, you’re a devout Catholic.” She added, “And a married man.”

“A black girl. Eva was only nineteen when she came to Italy—thought she was getting a dancing job. Instead she ended up in Milan, along with the transvestites and the addicts, trying to keep warm over an open fire, near the Stazione Garibaldi.”

“Somehow those golden hearts don’t go out to me,” Bianca continued. “Perhaps it’s something to do with my age and my gender. And I’m not a devout Catholic.”

“A husband and a daughter who adore you, Bianca. What more do you want?” Trotti smiled. “Devout Catholic? Last time I went to church was when my daughter was here to visit me.”

Bianca Poveri made an irritated movement of her hand. “You get involved with prostitutes, Piero?”

“They’re human beings, too.”

Bianca nodded wisely, “You’d be tempted to think otherwise if you worked here.”

“Human beings.”

“If you insist.”

“The Questore’s given me a directive from the European Community on prostitution. Sixty percent or more of the women who go into the trade are the victims of incest. This woman,” Trotti tapped the letter, almost illegible in its blend of Italian and Milanese, “went back to Uruguay, courtesy of Alitalia and the Ministry of the Interior. Took her money with her. What’s she doing back in Trieste?”

“What was she going to do in Uruguay?”

“She was returning to her son.”

“After years of absence, you think her son remembered her?”

“Eva talked about nothing else.”

“That’s what women do. I see it all the time. It’s a way of reassuring themselves they’re normal, that they have feelings, that they aren’t animals.” She sighed. “Your Eva—she was in Milan, a foreign environment she couldn’t understand. Her son was the one thing she could cling to, something belonging to a better past, and the promise of a better future.”

“She could’ve gotten a job in Uruguay.”

“A job—but not much money.”

“A job, her son—and her dignity.”

“You sound like the telenovelas, Piero. You watch too much Berlusconi.”

“Because I think a mother should stay with her child?”

“These women carry their prison with them—they’re like snails. Occasionally there’s a whore who breaks out. Who finds her Prince Charming or who manages to buy herself a restaurant near Amalfi. But for most, the only exit is disease and death.” Bianca shrugged. “Life isn’t like
Dynasty.
”

“I can see what you watch, Bianca.”

“Eva got back to South America—and in all probability found a son who was nothing like her dreams.” Bianca Poveri leaned forward and Trotti could smell her perfume—slightly musky, catching at the nostrils. “A bit like dying. You go through all the rigmarole, the pain and the fear.”

“What’s like dying?”

“Hope,” Bianca said simply. “You tell yourself the worst’ll soon be over. You hang on grimly to your rosary and you convince yourself you’re leaving this world for something better and more beautiful. And …”

“And?”

Bianca Poveri clicked her fingers. “No pearly gates, no Saint Peter.” She gestured to a vase of flowers on a filing cabinet. “No Saint Teresa waiting for you with white roses. No celestial
Dynasty
. Nothing. Death. You discover pretty fast you’ve been sold short.”

Trotti frowned. “You don’t believe in the afterlife?”

“Uruguay’s a long way away from the bonfires of the Stazione Garibaldi. Home, where your Eva had her son. The one person she loved. And the only person who loved her. Of course, it was a dream, her own. But these women are always dreaming, always running from one failed dream to the next. Your Eva returns to the harrowing poverty of Uruguay. The poverty she’d hoped to escape in the first place.”

“Spending the night in Milan or along the via Aurelia—that’s not poverty?”

“Emotional—but not necessarily economic. That’s the trouble with money, Piero. You know that better than I do. We all like to think we’re above money, that we have values other than those of wealth. But once you’ve gotten used to a comfortable existence—it’s hard to return to the bad old days.”

“You’re very materialistic for a young woman.”

“Realistic.”

“Then why don’t these prostitutes get married?”

“Perhaps because they’re more afraid of family life than of the via Aurelia.”

Trotti bit at his lower lip. “I don’t see what help I can give Eva.”

“If you care to write her a note, I’ll get it sent through the administrative hierarchy.”

“What can I tell her?”

“I always credited you with a better understanding of female psychology than that, commissario.”

“Trying to flatter me?”

“I deal with women every day and, unlike men, I don’t allow my judgment to be influenced by a pretty nose or a pretty silhouette. Or by the sly promise of intimacy. Those bits of our anatomy that get men excited—they’re just the equipment we need for bearing children.”

“Glamorous equipment.”

“The women here—they’re all victims. Five, ten years ago when I was a feminist, Piero, I’d’ve said all women everywhere were victims. That was before I had a daughter of my own. Didn’t take me long to realize a married woman gets a better deal for sex than the best-paid prostitute. These prisoners—they’re in their cells long before ever turning up here. They come into the world as victims and they leave it as victims. Whores are not like you and me, Commissario Trotti. There are things that you and I believe in—things like affection and caring and warmth. We don’t need Berlusconi’s telenovelas to teach us how to feel, because our emotional equipment’s already soundly in place, given to us by our parents, by people who care. At home and at school. You and I, when we were little, we mattered.” She shook her head. “Whoring’s merely the end result of everything that’s gone on before. They’ve never been loved, and so they don’t know how to do it.”

“Eva loves her boy. She loves him as she loves herself. She wouldn’t talk of anything else.”

“Whores don’t know what love is.”

“Then why do they have sex?”

“Whatever love is, for the prostitute it’s got nothing to do with the physical act in the back of a stuffy Fiat or behind the bushes off the highway. Whores can open their legs but not their hearts. What affection they have, they pour into animals or
stuffed dolls or into people they don’t have to live with. People like you, Piero.”

“Like me?”

“You can’t imagine how many dolls and little animals these women have—each cell is a menagerie.” Bianca Poveri pointed to the letter. “That note’s not really for you at all. It’s for hers.”

“What can I do to help her?”

“Your Eva realized long ago her son was beyond her.” Bianca raised the silk shoulders of her blouse. “How old is he now? A grown man? What does her son need from a woman he’s scarcely ever met? But you see, commissario, unlike her son, you’ve been good to her. In Italy, she dreamt of Uruguay. And back in Uruguay she spent her time dreaming of Commissario Trotti.”

“I can’t help her.”

“Your Eva doesn’t want help. She simply needs somebody to remind her she’s a human being.”

He shrugged. “Human being? I gave up being that years ago.”

“Wrong again, commissario.”

He put his head back and laughed.

“You’re a good man—in your way.”

“How on earth does Alcibiade put up with a wife wearing the trousers?”

Unexpectedly the face softened and a gentle grin made its way along her lips. “You think I wear the trousers in the Poveri home? You underestimate our little girl. Anna Giulia has both Alcibiade and me around her chubby finger. In the organization chart of the Casa Poveri, I come just after the tortoise, just before the yucca plant.” The proud smile vanished. “You’re going to take it, aren’t you?”

“The letter?” Trotti frowned. “Of course I’m going to take it—though for the life of me, I don’t see how I can help Eva.”

“You’re going to take the job?”

“Job?”

“Commissario Piero Trotti, it’d be a shame if you were to leave the Questura tomorrow.”

“What job?”

“No point in being coy. There’s been talk of a center for several months and I wasn’t the only one to recommend you to the Questore, if that’s what you think.” Unblinking, she looked him in the eyes.

Perhaps his mouth had fallen open.

“And now you start quoting European Community statistics
to me. You know, you’d be making a lot of people happy, and not least me.”

“You knew about the job?”

“I was asked if I wanted to head the team. I’d much rather work with you, Piero Trotti.”

“My wife escaped to America to get away from me.” There was a long silence. “I don’t know many people who want to work with me. My daughter’s now in Bologna.”

Bianca Poveri asked fondly, “And Tenente Pisanelli?”

“Avoids me.” Trotti shrugged. “Seems to think it’s my fault he’s not married.”

“I’m too young for the job. No experience. Whereas you …”

“Yes?”

“Unlike me, commissario, you never lived through 1968. Or at least, you grew up at a different time, at a time when things were simpler. You have your solid values anchored in a simpler time. I’m a child of the sixties. All that stuff, Lotta Continua, feminism and throwing Molotov cocktails at the Celere—I grew up with it. That’s why I’m still confused.”

“You were too young for the Red Brigades.”

“Perhaps it’s my job—or perhaps it’s having a child of my own. There are things I’m only beginning to understand now. I burned my eschimese with its politically correct cape several years ago. And, like everybody else, I’ve seen the dictatorship of the proletariat replaced by the more insidious dictatorship of Berlusconi.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“My generation—we thought we could put things to rights with bombs and violence and P38s. We were arrogant—because life had always been easy for us. Your generation lived through the war. Your generation had gone hungry trying to survive. We thought our ideals were more important than life itself. But our ideals were bogus and we were arrogant because we didn’t have any experience of the real world. There’d always been three meals a day.”

“I saw my first corpse at the age of sixteen. A couple of partisans no older than me.”

“The sixties generation—it’s only now I’m beginning to understand. But you, Piero Trotti, you have experience. And you have wisdom. You understand other people—and you like women.”

“My daughter nearly died. She stopped eating. And that—or so I’m told—was all my fault.”

“These last few years, Piero, you’ve been marking time. With your experience, you could have done more. With your intelligence …”

“Yes?”

Signora Poveri breathed in. Her pinched nostrils turned white. “I’ve got the statistics here from Telefono Azzurro, the toll-free telephone.” She took a blue brochure from a pile of books on her walnut desk. She ran her tongue along her lips before reading. “Over a hundred and fifty telephone calls a day in Italy from children complaining of abuse or violence in the home. There are probably five thousand cases of sexual exploitation in a year.” She looked up at him. “You could do so much, Piero.”

The phone rang softly, almost smothered beneath a pile of dossiers.

“With your experience and your decency, there’s still so much you can do. For all the other Evas.”

“I think I’ve done enough.”

“Help them before it’s too late. Help them before they’ve turned into snails with a prison on their backs.” The young woman brushed away the hair from her ear with the receiver. “Women’s prison,” she said, speaking softly, her eyes turning downwards. Then she added, “Yes.”

Trotti looked at her profile, almost girlish, softened by the oblique winter sunlight.

Bianca held out the receiver. “For you, commissario. You’re wanted at Linate Airport—your plane’s due in thirty-five minutes.”

“A
MSTERDAM
?”

Two Air France pilots, both looking like Gérard Philippe, walked purposefully across the concourse. One wore a thin beige scarf, the other carried a leather case. Women’s heads turned at their passage.

“I suppose so.”

“Then it looks as if your cousin’s going to be late.” Bianca Poveri pointed to a nearby monitor screen. “And, as much as I’d like to stay, I’ve got to get back to the city.”

“You’ve been very kind, Bianca. I’ll wait here for my cousin.”

“How will you get back?”

“A train. I’m surprised Anna Maria telegrammed me and not Sandro.” Trotti raised his shoulders. “Perhaps Sandro’s here too.”

“What does your cousin look like?”

“Sandro?”

“Sandro’s the doctor at Brescia, isn’t he?”

“Distinguished and very bald.” Trotti glanced around as if expecting his cousin to emerge from the milling crowd of travelers. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll wait for Anna Maria and we’ll get a train into Milan.”