Death and the Olive Grove (15 page)

‘You are so beautiful,' he said.

Rosa blushed and couldn't suppress a giggle. She loved this sort of thing, perhaps because for most of her life she had been treated quite differently. She saw her monkey to the door, her arm looped through his, and after their last kisses she slipped into his pocket a small, blue silk sack full of something and tied with a blue ribbon.

‘Put this in your underwear drawer, it'll make everything smell nice.'

‘What is it?'

‘Lavender and rosemary.'

The inspector thanked her by kissing her hand again. Then he descended the stairs, fingers squeezing the scented little sack that made his pocket bulge. He couldn't remember whether he actually had a drawer just for underwear.

He was dreaming … Before him stood Mereu, the most illiterate member of the San Marco Battalion, looking at him and smiling, and the next second flying through the air after stepping on a mine. The scene kept on repeating itself, and each time Bordelli failed to warn him in time … He would run over to him and then find his head in a bush, still smiling … Then he'd see him stepping on the mine again, he would run over to him and find his head in the bush again … And it would start all over again … Mereu would smile, step on the bloody mine and … All at once Bordelli heard an infernal ringing, boring through his brain. It took him a moment to realise it was the telephone. Groping wildly in the dark, he seized the receiver.

‘Yeah … Who is it?'

‘Marshal, did I wake you?' asked a woman's voice in an excited whisper. Bordelli was thick tongued, still seeing Mereu's face in the dark … but he realised at once that he needed to do something decisive.

‘The marshal is in Spain on an investigation and won't be back for three or four months,' he said, faking a Neapolitan accent.

‘And who, may I ask, are you?'

‘A relative.'

‘Another
carabiniere
?'

‘Plumber.'

‘Oh, what a shame! Strange things are happening in my building, very strange things … Had the marshal mentioned them to you?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Please do me a favour. If you hear from the marshal, tell him to phone me at once. I am Signora Capecchi, he'll understand.'

‘I'll pass it on,' said Bordelli, hanging up before the old woman could say anything else. He turned on to his side, hoping to fall back asleep at once, but in the haze of his forced awakening, the image of the loutish young Nocentini, who chewed gum like an American and spat in the stairwell, kept coming into his mind. He was unable to fall asleep again. In the end he turned on the light and started staring at the ceiling. He felt dead tired, but his brain was as busy as ever. There was no point in trying to sleep any more. He got up out of bed and started rummaging through the pockets of his jacket. He'd remembered Simone Fantini's short story, which he'd snatched from the young man's desk.
The Tower
. Good title. He went back to bed and started reading. He already knew what would happen, but kept on reading with the same curiosity as the first time. The story had something at once horrifying and sweet about it, something he had difficulty fully understanding. When he had finished reading it, he let it slide off the bed. It really was quite a coincidence that Fantini had written a story in which the protagonist was suspected of raping and killing a little girl. But it was a good story and, still thinking of Fantini, he fell back asleep with the light on.

He woke up past eight, heavy headed. He shaved in a hurry and went out. The sky was still full of clouds, but it wasn't raining. He went on foot to buy matches, as usual passing through the streets where he had played as a child. He remembered that period well. The games they played were never peaceful; they were harsh tests of courage, wild, dangerous challenges, slingshot battles, and often one of them ended up at the Misericordia to get stitched up. Nothing had changed in those streets since then; the atmosphere was the same as when he used to set out on his bicycle from the distant Cure to come to these narrow streets full of mystery and misery. Walking through Piazza Piattellina, he turned to look at the wall where four little pricks from Ponte di Mezzo had once smashed Natalino's face. It was as if he could still see the stain on the stones. They left him on the ground half dead, blood pouring out of his nose. Natalino had ended up spending several weeks in hospital. The doctors had put his face back together as best they could, but his features were never quite the same after that. After he recovered, he went to take revenge, and somebody nearly got killed. All this over a girl …

The inspector passed in front of a closed metal shutter covered with rust and slowed his pace, head full of memories. This used to be the shop of the Captain's Wife, the tobacco lady who in the early days of Fascism had lived in Africa. He remembered her well. She had rotten teeth, and when she laughed it was a horrific sight. Her shop was always filled with the fog of a thousand cigarettes. She sold everything imaginable, and very rarely sent a customer away unsatisfied. She was the only person who ever went into the back room, and she always returned with the right thing. She died before the war. The shop was shut down and had never reopened. The Captain's Wife had no relatives. Her only companion was Gertrude, a furious little monkey that used to run about the shop with its teeth bared, terrifying customers. When the old woman died, it was given to a circus passing through.

He bought matches in Piazza Tasso and went back to get his Beetle. He was in a bad mood. He drove along looking at people's faces, trying to imagine who they were and what sort of lives they led, to keep his head uncluttered for a bit. But the same ugly stories kept coming back to him.

He crossed the Arno and in Piazza Santa Trinita saw a man who made him start. He slowed down to have a better look. It was indeed him, the stranger who had punched him in the liver in the olive grove at Fiesole. He had come out of a side street and turned down Via Tornabuoni. He looked to be in a big hurry and was taller than Bordelli remembered. Well dressed, but not wearing a tie. If he had seen him only from behind he might not have recognised him, but the face was unmistakable. A face with heavy features, covered with wrinkles and as though marked by an ineradicable horror that emanated mostly from the eyes.

Bordelli accelerated, turned on to Via della Vigna Nova and parked the car with two wheels on the pavement. He got out in a hurry and walked back to the corner of Via Tornabuoni. He waited for the guy to pass and then fell in behind him. The man was walking serenely, without turning round. He seemed not to have noticed anything. He turned onto Via de' Giacomini, walked its entire length, then turned right on to Via delle Belle Donne and, after another thirty yards, slipped into a doorway, having opened the great door with a key. As soon as he saw him disappear inside, Bordelli sprinted for the door, but got there too late, finding it locked again. There were five buzzers outside the door. He rang one at random, pressing several times, but nobody answered. He then tried another, at the bottom, and a few seconds later heard the door click open. Climbing the stairs in a rush, on the first-floor landing he found a very old woman waiting for him in her doorway.

‘I'm sorry, signora … Did a man enter your home just a few moments ago?' asked Bordelli, approaching her.

‘And who are you, may I ask?'

‘Police.'

‘Oh my God, what's happening?' she cried, taking a step back.

‘Please remain calm, nothing is happening.'

‘Is there a criminal in the building?'

‘Lock yourself inside and don't worry,' said Bordelli, leaving her to chew on her fear and heading upstairs. There was only one apartment per landing. The second-floor flat had no name on the door. He rang the bell and heard footsteps approach. The peephole darkened for a couple of seconds, and then the door opened and Bordelli found the person he would least have expected to see standing before him.

‘Hello, Inspector … You're still an inspector, aren't you?' said the man, smiling tensely.

‘Dr Levi! What are you doing in Italy?' On top of his surprise, Bordelli felt delighted to see this intelligent man after fifteen years. He hadn't changed in the least … He had the same skin tightly pulled over the bones, the same hard eyes, even when laughing. He was rather short, but his gaze added another six inches to his stature.

‘Please come in, Inspector, I'll get you something to drink,' the doctor said, standing aside. Bordelli entered, and Levi led him down a corridor of closed doors.

‘To what do I owe your lack of surprise, Dr Levi?' Bordelli asked.

‘After my holiday in Poland, I don't think there's much left that can surprise me, Inspector.'

Levi had spent over a year in a concentration camp, and a painful smile remained forever etched on his face as a sort of suspension of judgement of humanity.

They entered a rather large room. There were two sofas with a small, low table between them, a desk covered with closed portfolios, a filing cabinet with many identical drawers, and a glass-fronted cupboard full of bottles. Bordelli rifled through all his pockets in search of cigarettes, but couldn't find any.

‘Are you sure you weren't expecting me, Dr Levi?' he said.

‘You are always welcome here.'

‘You didn't answer my previous question … how is it you're in Italy?'

‘I live here, didn't you know?'

‘I have to confess I didn't.'

‘You didn't answer me, either. Are you still an inspector?'

‘More or less.' Bordelli at last found the cigarettes, but the packet was empty. He crumpled it up and put it back in his pocket.

‘Would you like one of these?' said Levi, holding out a cigarette box for him.

‘Thank you.'

Levi also took one, and they lit up. Bordelli looked around. He couldn't tell whether the room was an office or a drawing room.

‘Are you still involved with that stuff, Levi?'

‘Water under the bridge. I'm retired now.'

Levi had worn the white-and-blue striped pyjamas from January 1944 until the fall of the Third Reich. When the Russians found him, he weighed less than five stone. It had taken him more than six months to get back on his feet, but he had recovered rather nicely. In '47 he became a member of the White Dove, an organisation founded after the war, secretly financed by Zionists and headed by the tenacious Simon Wiesenthal. The task of the Dove was to hunt down to the far corners of the world those Nazis who had escaped trial at Nuremberg. They had headquarters on every continent, the fugitives having spread across the globe with the help of ODESSA, an organisation financed by German industrialists to help Nazi chiefs hide while they waited for the utopian recapture of power by survivors of the NSDAP.

Every detachment of the White Dove had the authorisation to involve, in their area of operation, anyone they deemed necessary to their ends, obviously taking maximum care to vet the persons in question as thoroughly as possible. In ‘48 Bordelli had caught the eye of the organisation's Italian chapter, owing primarily to his anti-Nazi past, and it had been Levi's job to contact him. He had explained to Bordelli what they were about, and the inspector had agreed to work with the Dove without a second thought, happy to keep on fighting Hitler's followers. At the time the organisation was working on the case of Dr Christopher Mong and his wife Elfi, who had disappeared from Berlin one month before the Führer committed suicide. Möng, like his counterpart Mengele, had worked on human guinea pigs in a variety of Polish camps, and Elfi, like a good wife, had stayed by his side, preparing cotton wads, passing him surgical instruments, compiling dossiers, numbering corpses, washing the blood away from the laboratory. They conducted every conceivable kind of experiment, all as useless as they were cruel, and their notes were a catalogue of monstrosities. Reliable intelligence had located them in Italy as of late 1946. All that remained was to discover their new identities and perhaps their new faces. Bordelli had studied secret archives and documents, looked at never-released photographs and films. The research was slow and arduous, but the eventual satisfaction was great. Bordelli was fifteen years younger back then and felt that he was working for the good of humanity. A few months later, Möng and his wife were tracked down in a farmhouse in the Po Valley and executed by the White Dove. Bordelli received a word of thanks, and Levi left for Uruguay, where it seemed there was a veritable colony of Nazis.

‘Have you found any other bigwigs since Eichmann?' Bordelli asked.

‘What would you like to drink, Inspector?'

‘Do you have any news of Mengele?'

‘What can I get for you?'

‘A cognac'

‘At this hour?'

‘There are people who do even stranger things,' said Bordelli.

‘I don't doubt it … Have any preferences?'

‘Yes, I'd like some de Maricourt.'

Levi's face tensed for a fraction of a second, as if from a jolt of electricity. Then he smiled.

‘I don't know it. Would you be content with a Hennessy?'

‘We all have to suffer.'

Levi went and got a bottle and two beautiful glasses from the cupboard, sat down in the armchair, and poured the cognac.

‘So, Inspector, what do you have to tell me?' Levi asked with a friendly smile. Bordelli took a sip of Hennessy and felt a wave of warmth over his whole body. Levi wasn't drinking. He had left his full glass on the table, looking over at it from time to time.

‘The man I saw enter this building was coming to your place, wasn't he?' Bordelli asked.

‘Why were you following him?'

‘Tell me first who he is.'

‘Aaron Goldberg, a dear friend of mine.'

‘Well, a few nights ago your dear friend put my liver to the test,' said Bordelli, miming a punch.