Gold, Frankincense and Dust (16 page)

Soneri looked at him with a smile. Sbarazza seemed to him sincere as only those who have attained a high level of indifference to convention can be. “I imagine you feel extremely free – much more than previously, I mean.”

“I am afraid of nothing. I am a true revolutionary. I try to live the life the priests preach, and since they avoid
practising themselves, I do it for them. If you think about it, Christ was the greatest revolutionary who has ever appeared on this earth. A scandalous, unbearable creature, much more so than the communists, don’t you think?”

“Do you suppose that’s why they put him on a cross?”

“If we set theology aside, that’s exactly why, no question about it. Just imagine what they’d do with him today. They’d call him an extremist, a fanatic, a troublemaker, and they’d use crueller means than nails to crucify him. They’d treat him like a madman, sneer at his preaching and ignore him. And that’s what they’d do to me too if I didn’t have this veneer of nobility to fool them. If I were a poor man I wouldn’t be granted a permit to live in this town, but I am the ‘Marchese’. It’s like the label on certain products. They are valueless, deplorable, but they have the brand name and so they cost a lot. Or rather, they do have a value. That’s the whole difference – in other words, nothing.”

He spoke with no rancour and with an offhand casualness which revealed an enviable serenity.

“They all struggle for this nothing,” Soneri said, looking around him at the tables of office-workers, lawyers and accountants, all in jacket and tie, all as indistinguishable from each other as pieces of macaroni churned out from the same processor.

“This is what we’ve become. You could be a stinking cesspit of a person, but the important thing is to keep up appearances.” Sbarazza chuckled, making the commissario wonder whether appearances, the paradoxical appearances of life, amused him as much as any operetta. “And then this city, full of unreconstructed vermin strolling about bedecked in clothes worth a king’s ransom, all to cover up their own vulgarity.”

Soneri entertained the malicious thought that his rival
belonged to that caste. “You’ve got to make allowances. Their fathers shovelled shit in stables and they look on this past with shame. They do all they can to live it down.”

“A big 4×4 with leather interior is the best remedy against the nightmares of the past, preferably with a bull bar, presumably to ensure defence against cows and their shit. I who had a father who was never short of money or women have been less fortunate,” Sbarazza added, in another of his paradoxes. “I have discovered that what others envied in us was in reality the sentence we were serving. It is bad not to have wishes. The poor people I work with have many very human wishes: food, shelter, protection from the cold, surviving the slings and arrows. Everything ties them to the things which are of real importance, and sweeps away all that is superfluous. In this context, it does not take long to rediscover what is real in life. It has happened to me and each time I seem to be reborn. I look at all these people and laugh,” he declared with a sweeping gesture, “because I behave like a mask and live on what they throw away. Then I turn up at the clubs with my aristocratic manners and enchant them as much as the pied piper. Believe me, that is real enjoyment – a fancy-dress ball, nothingness.”

Soneri found this speech tragic. Unlike Sbarazza, he could not find anything exhilarating in the frivolity of life.

“There’s no easy way out,” Sbarazza went on. “You’re either a believer, and in that case this world and all that’s in it is short-term and of little importance, or else you’re a non-believer and you’ll arrive at the same conclusion, because nothing has any sense. Know what I’ve decided? To be a non-believing, good Christian. If there is someone up there, I’ll take my chance on grace being doled out. It’s better than being a hypocrite.”

“You’re not short of practical sense. You’ve been given a thorough grounding in prudence by poor people.”

“That’s not all. Finding a purpose in other people is the only way to have a role in life and to feel yourself loved. When all’s said and done, is that not what we all want, to feel loved, ever since we were babies and screamed for our mother’s breast and the soothing consolations of her embrace? It doesn’t really matter if there are people out there who dispense love out of self-interest: all that’s needed is one person who’s sincere.”

The commissario’s instinct told him that Sbarazza was right. All he wanted was to have Angela near him. He looked at his watch and saw it was a quarter to two. He got up feeling reassured. Each time he spoke to Sbarazza was like a breath of fresh air. All in all, it was good to know there was someone who kept the lamp of hope burning, and he hoped the light was not the flicker of a funeral candle.

“Tomorrow I go to see the Chair of the Committee for Social Services,” the old man said as Soneri was leaving. “I’ve convinced him to open another dormitory and a refectory. I’m a great actor!” And he executed a tango step and a half-pirouette.

*

Soneri too did a kind of pirouette when Angela seized him by the arm and pulled him to her as soon as he set foot in her office, and when they were face to face, he was thankful to see that her expression was not hostile.

“You were a complete shit,” she said, but in a gentle voice.

“What was I supposed to do? Express approval?”

“It was only a coffee.”

“And the rest.”

She kissed him to cut off further discussion, but he was
waiting for a denial which did not come. There were no more words. They eased effortlessly towards that communication by gesture, touch and expression which characterises the boundless, soundless, shapeless world of the emotions. It was like a canal cutting through that chaos of fear and joy that bubbles inside each one of us, and is nearly always betrayed by words. In that way, it was possible for them to cling closely to each other even without having dispelled the rancour of betrayal, like two tigers making love while still biting at each other.

“Where are you with the case of the Romanian girl?” Angela asked him later when they had dressed

Soneri said only: “I had lunch with Sbarazza.”

“Ah, the missionary,” she commented.

“And an optimist, one who holds on to belief. I like his freedom of outlook in this world of rigid mindsets.”

“And I like you when you get hot under the collar,” she replied, taking him again in her arms.

The commissario remained passive. “Is that all you like me for?”

“I’ve been at work on your behalf these last few days,” Angela said, pulling away from him. “I have a certain number of Romanian women among my clients, mainly young women assigned to me when I’m on duty in court. Some of them knew Nina and they all speak highly of her. They say she was a good person and that many men fell passionately in love with her because she was so beautiful, but she never took advantage of this to run off with their money. She wanted to marry an Italian and settle here, have children … in other words a normal life after all she’d suffered. She worked as a cleaner in several houses to put aside some money. A really nice girl.”

The commissario heard her out and grew increasingly
frustrated over his inability to make headway in the case. He owed it to that Romanian girl, all the more so because she reminded him of his wife. “Maybe she was even sending some money home …”

“A nice girl undoubtedly, but don’t go making a heroine out of her,” Angela said quietly. “Your desire to rise above the vileness you deal with on a daily basis makes you idealise some things and some people too much.”

“Criminals are sometimes better than a lot of the phoney people with their noses in the air that go about this city. The poor people Sbarazza meets show more solidarity. The Romanians who meet at the sports ground still have a sense of community, they help each other …”

“They help each other and they knife each other,” Angela reminded him. “Because they’re poor they need the protection of the clan. As soon as they become rich, they’ll forget all that, even as many of us have. Affluence corrupts and there are not many who resist. Just a few, like Sbarazza, and they’ve had too much of everything so they can afford the luxury of living a grim life with perfect tranquility.”

“Now it’s your turn to overdo it with your dose of realism.”

“Let me bring you back to earth. I told you I like you because you can still get indignant and angry. Affluence has done you no harm. You’re still the wild thing you were when I first met you. There’s something solid inside you, in spite of all your insecurities, something everybody always notices.”

“O.K., you’ve brought me down to earth. In fact you’ve floored me.”

She shook her head in good-humoured reproach. “There you go exaggerating again. It’s not like that,” she said, but she did not go on, leaving him once more without a full explanation. “See you tomorrow?” she said a moment later, another rapid change of mood.

The commissario gave a nod, but inside himself he felt disappointed. He was finding life trivial, elusive, anchored to the most fragile of intentions. A nothingness, as Sbarazza had put it.

AS HE TRAVELLED
along the Cisa road, the bulls at Cortile San Martino came back into his mind. He wondered if they were still wandering loose in the Po Valley or if someone had managed to round them up. He hoped that instinct had driven them towards the woods on the Apennines and that they were living there in the company of the wild boars. He was still thinking of his own sun-baked mountains as he turned into the artisan district of Lemignano, with its workshops, warehouses and little villas. Suddenly, he caught sight of an oval bronze nameplate with the word
GOLDEN
in elegant italics. The atmosphere was typical of areas reserved for the prosperous. He rang and saw a light go on in the intercom. A woman’s voice asked, “Who is it?” but she was drowned out by a chorus of dogs barking in a yard nearby. The C.C.T.V. cameras, the guard dogs and the reinforced doors all added to a sense of tension in the atmosphere, which would have been like that in the trenches in time of war, had it not been for the workers in overalls inside the workshops and the coming and going of vans.

The interior was welcoming: rugs, heavy wooden furniture and a pleasing scent of rosehip perfume. Soneri introduced himself to a secretary with a serious and sad demeanour.

Giulia Martini, who must have been in her mid-forties,
had the ascetic look of a mother superior. She was thin, short and sharp-featured.

“May I know why you are here?” she demanded.

“A Romanian girl has been murdered. You may have read in the newspapers …”

“What of it?”

Before replying, the commissario ran his eyes along the wall behind the woman, dominated by a portrait of the Pope. “Her mobile phone shows that there were some calls made from another mobile registered in the name of this company.”

If the woman were at all disconcerted, she had no difficulty in dissembling. She paused only a few seconds for reflection.

“We did have a Romanian employee some while ago. She used to come in after six o’clock in the evening to clean the offices.”

“Was her name Ines Iliescu?”

“Yes.”

“Her real name was Nina. She was murdered and her body burned.”

The woman did not betray the least sign of discomposure. She kept her thoughts to herself and said nothing.

“Don’t you think you have some explaining to do? When did she come here?”

“She came until a few weeks ago.”

“And then?”

“We neither saw nor heard anything further from her. She simply disappeared.”

“The telephone calls continued until a week ago,” Soneri said.

“We carried on trying to reach her. She was very good and it’s not easy to find reliable people nowadays.”

Soneri gave a smile which was more of a smirk as he looked at the samples of sacred vessels arrayed inside display cabinets.

“Whoever was trying to reach her did find her,” he snapped. “Twenty-one minutes of doing their best to convince her.”

The woman was growing impatient. She adjusted a plait behind her ear and glowered at the commissario.

“When I dialled that number, a Roberto Soncini replied,” Soneri said calmly. “Is your husband responsible for personnel matters?”

“My husband takes no part in running the business. He’s good at selling, and that’s his field,” Giulia Martini said.

“You mean he does the round of the curias, the bishop’s palaces …”

“We don’t sell only sacred objects. We deal in jewellery as well. Look, commissario,” she cut him short, “I can tell you for a fact that we have nothing to do with the death of this girl. You ask me for explanations, and I accept that that is your job, but I assure you that any explanations relate exclusively to the personal sphere. Do you understand me?”

“Perfectly. This girl was, or used to be at one time, your husband’s lover,” the commissario said.

Signora Martini looked at him coldly, leaving Soneri unable to decide if that look was meant to convey hatred or merely expressed the need to work out a strategy.

“You are well versed in the ways of the world,” she began again, by way of resuming control of the conversation. “My husband often conducts himself with great superficiality,” she said, never taking her eyes off him.

The commissario got the impression that she had already written him off. He looked hard at the woman and thought that Soncini was not entirely to be blamed for turning his
attention elsewhere. Apart from anything else, she must have limited interest in the emotional sphere of life, but at that moment declaring herself a woman betrayed got her out of a tight corner. She seemed to be challenging him: yes, my husband has a lover, and so what? Should that bother me?

“Did you know about this affair?”

“She wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last,” she replied, with conspicuous irony and detachment.

“With the cleaning lady … a bit vulgar, don’t you think?”

“Men are pigs,” she stated in a fatalistic tone, gazing at the commissario as if to make it clear that she included him in that judgment.