Death in Sardinia (32 page)

‘I left him this summer, and today he reappeared.’

‘Sounds like the opening of an interesting film,’ said Bordelli.

‘Not with me.’

‘You never know.’

‘He flirts too much with other girls, and I don’t like it.’

‘Does this Marco know anything about the photographs?’

‘This is the first I’ve seen of him since August,’ she said under her breath.

‘So only your brother knows about them?’

‘He’s the only one … And I know you talked to him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Lele wouldn’t hurt a fly, I know him too well,’ Marisa said softly.

‘Most killers have mothers and sisters.’

‘Lele is not a killer.’

‘I didn’t say he was,’ said Bordelli. At moments he fell under the spell of the girl’s face, noticing the tiniest movements of her eyebrows and lips … And he felt like a drooling old goat. That black pearl wasn’t even eighteen years old. He had to keep repeating it to himself: she’s a child, she’s only a child …

‘Inspector?’

‘Eh?’

‘I asked you why you came looking for me … I’d like to go home,’ the girl said, a bit coquettishly.

‘Of course … I wanted to ask you if … perhaps you’d forgotten to tell me anything important.’

‘I’ve told you everything I know.’

‘Are you sure? Think it over carefully.’

‘I’m pretty sure,’ she said.

‘One final thing. That boy, Marco … Do you swear he knows nothing?’

‘I swear it,’ Marisa said without batting an eye.

‘What’s his surname?’

‘Bandinelli.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘On the Lungarno Torrigiani … Why do you ask?’

‘No specific reason,’ the inspector said. At that moment he suspected he’d gone to talk to Marisa simply because he wanted to see her again, and was worried he might blush.

‘Can I go?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course, sorry to have bothered you.’ Marisa shook his hand to say goodbye and started walking home without turning round to look back at Marco. Bordelli approached the youth’s sports car and bent down at the window.

‘How long has it been since you last saw Marisa?’ he asked.

‘Not since the summer, more or less. Why? Would somebody please tell me what’s going on?’ the youth said.

‘A fly ate a cypress,’ the inspector said, and walked away. His mother used to answer him that way when he was a child, and it always made him angry. The 850 started up, and he heard the tyres screech on the asphalt. Apparently the lad didn’t like that answer any more than he had. He’d decided to let him go because he was certain that Marisa had told him the truth. Marco knew nothing of the whole affair and didn’t even know who Badalamenti was. Bordelli turned round. Marisa was gone. Shivering in his trench coat, he kept on walking along the Mugnone, pleased that he felt quite hungry. The touch of Marisa’s handshake was still palpable in his hand, and he thought again of Milena, dark Milena, over whom he’d lost his head the year before …

Bordelli was in Totò’s kitchen, having managed to erase the image of Milena’s face from his mind by dint of
pasta al forno
and
spezzatino di cinghiale
.
²³
In his hand he held a little glass full of illegal grappa. It was cold outside, and the alcohol gave him hope. Totò had earned a minute of rest and filled two demitasses with black coffee, but only
after
having put the sugar in, as the inspector had asked him to do. It was only right to share knowledge that made life better. The cook sat down beside him. Bordelli finally lit his third cigarette of the day, holding it far from the grappa.

‘So, Inspector, what are the police up to these days? Any difficult murders?’

‘I’m trying to find out who killed a loan shark,’ Bordelli said.

‘How was he killed?’

‘Stabbed in the neck with a pair of scissors.’

‘Ah, yes, I read about it in
La Nazione
, but they didn’t say the guy was a loan shark.’

‘Proof of his “profession” was found later.’

‘Well, I can see why you people have it in for us Southerners, when you’ve got pricks like that coming up here …’ the cook said scornfully.

‘You win some, you lose some, Totò. But if all the Southerners who came here were like you, we’d all be fat.’

‘And what are you gonna do when you find the killer, Inspector? Kiss him on the forehead and slip him a few ten-thousand-lira notes?’

‘I see it the same way as you, Totò, but we can’t always do as we please. There’s the law.’

‘Oh, don’t give me the law, Inspector! When I was a wee lad this big, there were a couple of those gentlemen in town and an uncle of mine ended up shooting himself. I remember it like it was yesterday …’

‘Drink with me, Totò,’ Bordelli interrupted him. The cook filled the two little glasses with grappa and made a sad face.

‘To my uncle Nicola whom I loved like a father, Inspector, maybe even more. He used to take me with him night-fishing and poaching in the game reserves, and I would practically pee my pants for happiness. And then, one day … boom! He shot himself. Back home they show little kids the dead, you know, to teach them about life. Zio Nicola’d shot himself in the throat with his boar rifle, and they’d stitched him up as best they could …’

‘How old was he?’ Bordelli asked.

‘Same as me now … an overgrown kid. They’d laid him out on the bed, all dressed up, with black socks on his feet and a white rose in his hands. I just looked at him and wondered why he wouldn’t talk. I was just a nipper and didn’t know a bloody thing, but I could tell it wasn’t a happy occasion. At one point I heard a buzz of voices and in comes Don Vito, the loan shark who’d ruined him. He was a guy who owned a lot of land, and cows and pigs, but it was like he never had enough money, and so he would lend out money at really high rates of interest. He was wearing a fancy black suit with a gold clasp as big as a smith’s pliers. He’d brought a couple of his lads with him, and everybody knew they were armed to the teeth. Everybody was too scared to breathe a word. Nobody’d ever heard it so quiet. You could hear the flies shitting. I can still see the brute now, in his big black overcoat, with his big fat face that shook when he walked. Little kids remember those kinds of things. Don Vito didn’t have to push anyone aside to make his way through the crowd. Everybody’d already stepped aside ‘cause they didn’t want him to touch them, and that was fine with him. When he got to the coffin, he took off his hat, prayed for a few seconds, made the sign of the cross, and even kissed my dead uncle’s face. Before leaving, he also kissed my auntie, Zio Nicola’s wife. Said some nice things about the deceased, and she thanked him. That’s how they do it, down in our parts, Inspector. First they kill you, then they come to pay their respects. But everyone knew Don Vito had come to make sure my uncle was good and dead and hadn’t just pretended to die to screw him. Afterwards, it was down to my family to pay the rest, all of it … I swear, Inspector, if I ever found your killer, I’d give him free lunch and dinner for a whole year, wine included, without asking him for a single lira …’

‘What a sad story, Totò.’

‘I’ve got many more just like it, Inspector, each more disgusting than the next. Down south people don’t joke around. The worst you’ve got here up north is sissy stuff compared to us.’

To Totò, anything above Rome was the ‘north’, and he talked about his native Apulia as some sort of mythical Far West.

‘To the Milanese, my dear Totò, Florence is already the south.’

‘And the rest of us are Africans, I know, but they’re just envious. All the beautiful things we’ve got down there, they can take ‘em and stick ‘em straight up their arses, those polenta fiends. Eh, Inspector … Boy, would I love to see olive and orange groves right now. And the peppers! Up here you haven’t got the kind of peppers I need, the long, green kind … And the sausages? You ever tasted a ginger sausage with sun-dried tomatoes?’

Having just eaten, Bordelli wasn’t exactly in the mood to hear talk of sausages and peppers, but there was no stopping Totò.

‘You take the peppers, punch some holes in them with a fork, then roast them over hot coals …’

‘They’re calling for you, Totò,’ Bordelli said. A waiter had stuck his head inside the serving hatch but said nothing, out of respect for the inspector. Totò gestured for him to wait. In the kitchen, he was the boss.

‘To cut it short, Inspector, if my relatives ever bring me any peppers, I’ll put one aside for you, and hopefully they’ll even bring some sausages … Now there’s some flavour with balls!’ he said, clenching his fist and walking away, grieving for the lost beauty of the south. He exchanged a word with the waiter, then sent him away with a wave of his hand. Opening the refrigerator, he took out a piece of dark, quivering meat that seemed to be still bleeding. It must have been liver. The cook cut two slices with a very sharp knife, then put the meat back into the fridge. Yuck, thought Bordelli. Liver was one of the few foods that disgusted him. Olives were another. The mere thought of them could make him vomit. Once, when he was a boy, four of his friends had decided to stick an olive in his mouth as a joke. When they tried to restrain him, he ended up unintentionally breaking three or four of their ribs and two noses. The struggle had left blood on the ground, but the five of them just kept on laughing like bollock-brains. One of the noses belonged to Binazzi, a great big lad full of energy and socialistic ideas who was a couple of years younger than him. He died in Spain fighting the Falangists in ’39. It all seemed like centuries ago. Things had changed more than in the previous hundred years … Look where a disgusting piece of liver has led, thought Bordelli. As he watched the liver slices being covered in flour and lowered into the skillet, he still had Binazzi’s face before him. Totò began to fry the meat in boiling oil; he let it brown, then turned it over, then lowered the flame and covered the pan. Tearing a clump of sage from a fresh plant in a carafe, he chopped the leaves very fine and left them on the cutting board. When he turned towards Bordelli, he saw a grimace of disgust on his face.

‘Too bad you don’t eat liver, Inspector, you’re missing a bit of heaven,’ he said with compassion.

Bordelli threw his hands up. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever go to heaven, Totò.’

‘Another grappa, Inspector?’

‘Thanks, Totò, but I have to go,’ Bordelli said, standing up. His head was full of old memories, and they weighed on him more heavily than Totò’s wild boar.

‘One of these days I’ll take you for a spin in my Six hundred, Inspector. I’ve had the engine souped up by a friend who makes Abarths …
²⁴
On the motorway to the shore I can get it up to ninety miles an hour! Damn!’

‘Be careful, Totò.’

‘Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.’

‘Happy Christmas, if I don’t see you before.’

‘You too, Inspector, take care of yourself.’

When he got to the office he could still smell the grappa on his breath. Flopping down in his chair, he set a cigarette down on his desk. He swore not to light it before an hour had passed. Above the blazing radiators one could actually see the dust dancing. He picked up the phone and rang his home number.

‘Ciao, Ennio, how are things going?’

‘Your kitchen is a disaster, Inspector,’ Botta said gravely.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s nothing here … I had to go home and get pots and pans from my place.’ It was as if someone had asked him to build a bridge out of playdough, and he had to explain why that wasn’t appropriate.

‘All taken care of now?’ asked Bordelli, to move on to positive matters.

‘Of course … But now I have to go, or else I’m going to burn the onions.’

Ennio hung up without another word, and the inspector was left there holding the phone. He glanced at his watch and thought he would ring Dante Pedretti to invite him to Christmas dinner. It had been a while since he’d last talked to him. He’d liked the old giant since the first time he’d met him a couple of years before. Dante lived at Mezzomonte in an old turreted house and spent his days in the basement, inventing complicated and mostly useless gadgets.

The telephone rang for a long time, but there was no reply. While he was at it, Bordelli decided to phone some relatives to wish them a happy holiday: aunts, great-aunts, first cousins and second cousins. All of them people he never saw. He saved for last his cousin Rodrigo, a chemistry teacher at the
liceo
and a pedant by nature. They had never spent much time together, and in the last two years had entirely lost track of one another – ever since, in fact, Rodrigo had found a woman who had changed him completely, a woman Bordelli had never met. Perhaps the poor thing had even managed to make Rodrigo less boring, though this was hard to believe. He’d talked to her only once, over the telephone, and had liked the sound of her voice. Maybe she would answer the phone this time, too, he thought. But no.

‘Hello, Rodrigo, I thought I’d call to wish you a happy Christmas.’

‘All right, then do so.’

‘I thought I just did.’

‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘How are your students doing?’ Bordelli asked, to drop the subject as quickly as possible.

‘I’m sorry to let you go, but I have a lot of things to do,’ said Rodrigo.

‘Homework to correct?’

‘If I say I have a lot to do, it probably also means I don’t have time to say what it is I have to do, wouldn’t you say?’

‘If you’d answered
yes
or
no
, you would have saved time,’ Bordelli said playfully.

‘I’m going to hang up …’ Rodrigo said gloomily.

‘All right, then. See you soon.’

‘I really don’t see why.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘About why we should see each other soon.’

‘It’s just an expression, Rodrigo.’

‘People who use “expressions” like that have nothing to express.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far …’

‘I would. Sorry, but now I must go.’ Rodrigo hung up without adding anything else, not even a burp. He had never been an easy person to talk to. But deep down Bordelli found it all rather amusing, a bit like going to the theatre. Apparently the mysterious woman had not succeeded in completing the transformation. She had either already dumped him, or Rodrigo had become even more of a bollock-brain than before. Bordelli tried ringing Dante again. He waited a long time, and in the end he heard someone pick up.