For All the Gold in the World (3 page)

Spezzafumo waved his hand in the air irritably. “She loved Gastone; she never would have betrayed him.”

“The housekeeper?”

Denis shrugged. “She was half an idiot, and she didn't know a thing anyway.”

Nick the Goldsmith pulled an envelope out of his jacket and tossed it onto the coffee table, cluttered with glasses and ashtrays. “These are the last thirty thousand euros. If you get the loot back for us, we'll give you ten percent.”

A nice pile of cash that would come in handy. “How would the rest be split?”

“Half to us and half to Gigliola, Gastone's widow.”

I blew out my cheeks. “I'm not taking the case.”

“What the fuck are you saying?” Giacomo blurted out, jumping to his feet. “You should have made that clear before you let us tell you all our fucking private business.”

His boss put a hand on his shoulder and made him sit back down. “Why not?” Spezzafumo asked.

I poured myself another glass of liquor. “If I were to track down the culprits you'd do everything within your power to make them pay, and I don't want to risk spending the rest of my life in prison thanks to a vendetta that has nothing to do with me. These stories always end badly. Funerals, cops, and the smart guy who sells the others down the river before they get a chance to do the same to him.”

Denis clenched his fists and Giacomo glared at me. Nicola, on the other hand, spoke carefully. “Our operations would be secure, you know that's how we work: It's no accident no one's ever caught us.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “That's no guarantee and anyway, there's another aspect to this story that I don't like . . . ”

Denis interrupted me and turned to Nick the Goldsmith. “Afterwards, do me a favor and explain why the fuck you insisted on bringing this asshole into it in the first place.”

I ignored the insult and went on explaining my reasoning. “If you get the money, by rights it ought to be split three ways. The housekeeper was an innocent victim, she had nothing to do with your work; she was in that house working for a salary and she was tortured to death.”

Denis and Giacomo snickered. Their chief shook his head. “If you don't mind, that's our business.”

“Exactly,” I agreed as I stood up.

Nick the Goldsmith shook my hand. He knew his manners. The other two glared at me menacingly. They were too young to know that the roads criminals tread are paved with stupid hotheads.

I left them to Siro Ballan and his idle chitchat. He always livened up the moment of payment with a barrage of pointless gossip that you had to pretend you were interested in hearing. The luthier was quick to take offense.

I started up my Å koda Felicia and out of the speakers I'd recently had installed came the voice of Susan Tedeschi singing
It Hurt So Bad
. Just then, I was listening to her a lot. I liked her, both as a singer and as a woman. I'd fallen in love with her more or less in the year 2000, watching one of her videos. She was accompanying Bob Dylan on a version of
Highway 61
that sent shivers down my back. She wore a good-little-girl dress and a pair of black flats. Nothing like the short red skirt worn by Ana Popovic´, another great love of mine. I couldn't believe that a young woman born in Belgrade would be capable of taking on the blues and, purely out of curiosity, I went to see her in concert in Munich in 2011. At the end of her solo rendition of
Navajo Moon
I was certain I wanted to marry her, but the infatuation ended quickly. My blues fiancée remained Susan Tedeschi, with whom I dreamed of spending the rest of my days. But now there was room in my heart only for the jazz woman who, unlike the American singer, lived in the same city as me and was far more attainable. I turned up the volume and shifted gears, thinking all the while about the story I'd just heard.

I'd turned down the job the Spezzafumo gang had offered me because, as clients go, they were dangerous, unpleasant assholes. The housekeeper, more than anyone else, deserved justice, but they didn't care. I would have liked to take on the case: Robbing private residences, staging violent home invasions that shattered lives, torturing people, murdering them—these were all odious crimes. The problem was finding the right client. Without someone hiring me, I couldn't justify my interest. The rules needed to be respected.

Max was snoring on the sofa with a book balanced on his gut. I woke him up and brought him up-to-date. He listened, paying close attention, before starting to reason through each element.

“Caution,” he said, before going back to sleep. “The one sensible word to repeat like a mantra is: caution.”

Knowing him, that meant that the story hadn't made much of an impression on him. I, on the other hand, thought about nothing else until I finally collapsed into sleep in front of the television.

 

* * *

 

A small workshop, five workers, a “storefront” carved out of small room next to an office that must once have been a broom closet.
Maglificio Gigliola
, clothing in genuine cashmere. Gigiola Knitwear. The idea for the name must have been the late Gastone's. His framed photograph stuck out on a desk cluttered with paper.

“Whatever it is you're selling, I'm not interested,” the widow said clearly in a weary voice.

Gigliola Pescarotto had no doubt once been an attractive woman. Now her features were drawn taut, almost to their breaking point, with heartache, and she'd stopped taking care of her appearance the moment she'd found her husband's corpse. She'd become a portrait of the tragedy she was living.

“My name is Marco Buratti. I specialize in somewhat unusual investigations.”

“What you mean by unusual?”

“The kinds of cases no licensed investigator would dream of taking,” I explained. “Yesterday evening Nick Spezzafumo asked me to look into the armed robbery and double homicide. I turned him down.”

The woman paled. “Nicola? What did he tell you?” she demanded suspiciously.

“Everything. Or almost,” I replied, just to make sure she understood she could trust me.

She shook her head bitterly. “All he cares about is the gold and getting revenge. He doesn't understand that if he keeps trying to find the bastards who murdered Gastone and Signora Luigina, we'll all wind up in prison,” she said, all in a rush. “And I don't want to lose my daughter. Lara is all I have left. She's the reason I find the strength to get up every morning and come down here to break my back.”

“In other words, you don't care about catching the murderers.”

“I wish I could care, but I can't afford to.”

“The housekeeper was an innocent victim, she suffered more than anyone. She, at least, deserves some justice, don't you think?”

A sob shook her chest. “Poor Luigina. She was so good, and so good at her job. A little strange, sure. She came to work for us because she needed some time on her own, time to recover and figure out what to do with her life after a string of disapointments.

“Her man had knocked her up and then dumped her for some foreign woman he followed to Slovenia. She'd left her son, Sergio, with her brother when the boy was eight or nine, and she showed up at our house with an old suitcase.

“That night I'd asked her to come with us. I'd insisted, in fact, because it was the recital for the parish dance class, and for Lara it was a big deal. Gastone wasn't interested in that kind of thing, and it hurt the girl's feelings. But Luigina said that she still needed to get the kitchen straightened up and that the next morning she had to wash the curtains.

“It was the girl who found her. Naked, covered in blood. She screamed so loud it still makes my blood run cold. Then, when I found Gastone's body, it was my turn to scream.”

She put her hands to her ears, touching them delicately with her fingertips. “I'm sorry about what happened to her,” she continued. “I wish I could have died in her place. Luigina's murder was our fault. You can't imagine the remorse I feel. It eats away at me. But things have to stay the way they are.”

“You said ‘our' fault. Were you involved in your husband's criminal activities, too?”

She nodded. “From the very beginning,” she replied. “And not because I loved Gastone and had sworn at the altar to share everything with him. Gold is a disease and it entered my blood. I enjoyed it when Nick and my husband melted down the jewelry and turned the metal into tiny ingots that I then had to weigh. That was my job. Every gram meant money. We would have had to be patient for a few more years, and keep a low profile, do our best to make ends meet with the knitwear business, but then we would have left the country and that gold would have given us the good life. The kind of life that small businessmen being worked over by these government bloodsuckers can only dream of.

“It had never crossed my mind that things could go sideways. We were the best, the smartest, the most careful.

“We were wrong. It was all wrong. You should never get mixed up with this stuff, not even for all the gold in the world, because if you do, fate steps in and punishes you.

“You understand? Not even for all the gold in the world.”

I offered her a cigarette. She smoked it, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger, like a longshoreman.

“Do you have any idea how they found out about you?”

She stared for a few seconds at the ash at the tip of her cigarette before crushing it out in the ashtray. “Someone betrayed us. We were sold out,” she said. “But I can't even imagine who it could have been, though I'm sure it was someone very close to us.”

“How many people are we talking about? Three, four, five? I don't think it would be too much trouble to investigate them thoroughly.”

“Nicola's already done that.”

“It's not his profession. He certainly overlooked important clues.”

She sprang to her feet. “This whole story is buried with the dead.”

I sat there and gave her a long, hard look while I tried to come up with the right words to make her understand she was just kidding herself. “Nick Spezzafumo won't be satisfied with my refusal. Sooner or later the lid's going to come off this thing. Some stories you can never shake.”

 

Province of Pordenone. The next day.

Near the main gate, the fence surrounding the well-known appliance factory was covered in dirty, tattered union signs and banners. They were all that remained in the wake of the strike's defeat. At the end of the shift, the few workers left trickled out and got into the cars parked on the other side of the road. Max and I were leaning against the side of a white Fiat Panda, smoking cigarettes. A man in a jumpsuit headed straight for us.

“That's my car!” he said in an aggressive tone.

“Are you Arnaldo Cantarutti?” I asked, extending my hand.

He refused to shake it. “Who are you?” he demanded suspiciously.

I pointed to my partner. “His name is Max, I'm Marco. We're private investigators and we're working on the robbery that resulted in your sister's death.”

“Get out of here,” he ordered. “You're not the first to try and cheat us out of our cash so you can pretend to investigate.”

“We don't want your money,” the fat man broke in. “We just want to talk about Luigina.”

“Are you missionaries, do you work for free?” he mocked us as he pulled his car keys out of his pocket.

I decided to lie. “We were hired by a lawyer. A client of his had his house broken into by a gang of three men. He's convinced it was the same people who invaded Oddo's villa.”

“Identifying the culprits also means obtaining damages,” Max added. “In order to avoid life sentences without parole, these kinds of criminals are always inclined to indemnify their victims.”

“They deserve to die for what they did to Luigina,” the man muttered. “But it's also true that a little extra money wouldn't hurt. Ever since Sergio came to live with us, there's never enough money. At first she helped us out with her salary as a housekeeper, but after the funeral everything changed. I love the boy, but my wife isn't always so patient. He doesn't have any other relatives. His grandparents are too old and they're sick. Taking care of the boy always means depriving our own two kids of something they want. If this keeps up, we'll have to send him to an orphanage.”

“One more reason to accept our help,” I said, looking him straight in the eyes.

“I'm not signing anything,” he retorted promptly.

Max flashed a door-to-door salesman's smile. “There's no need. All we'd need is to chat for a few minutes about your sister.”

The factory worker glanced at his watch. “There's not much to say. She was a good soul, a hard worker, but a little slow. I don't know if you get what I'm saying . . . She was attractive and men tood advantage of her. Sergio's father hit the road right away, he never meant to acknowledge the kid as his son. And Luigina never recovered. She tried to find another man who might really love her, but when Sergio turned eight she took a housekeeping job so she could get out of this town. The Oddo family was fond of her. They treated her respectfully and let her believe she was the governess while she was actually nothing more than a simple housecleaner who also did the cooking.”

“She was a really good cook, you know?” he added after a short pause, lost in some memory. “Her mother taught her.”

Luigina's life could be summarized in just a few words, many of them not especially flattering. Only as a cook was she really up to snuff. And yet, in that whole mess, she was the only one who deserved justice and reparations. I'd finally realized who our client could be.

“Do you think it might be possible for us to meet Sergio?” I asked.

“He never talks about what happened to his mother.”

“Just for the report,” the fat man lied. “Lawyers are always such sticklers.”