Gold, Frankincense and Dust (28 page)

“Cocaine?”

“I thought of that,” the commissario said. “But in that case, what are we to make of the bomb at Golden?”

“Maybe it was directed at Soncini.”

“If you’re in business with somebody, you know nearly all about them. Anybody doing business with Soncini must have known that he and his wife wielded quite different levels of economic power,” Soneri said.

“And who’s to say, in spite of that, that they were not united when it came to business?”

He was about to reply, but he stopped himself. Marcotti’s hypothesis suddenly shed a new light on the case.

“Who knows? You might be right.”

When he emerged from the magistrate’s office, night was falling and he had still not seen Medioli. He was grateful for the fact that this man who had lived in exile from the world had been caught up in the whirlwind of events. “Our infiltrator”, Soneri had called him as he took his leave from Marcotti.

“I’d put my money on him,” she had replied, winking at him once more.

AS HE DROVE
along Via Mantova in the direction of the prison, he felt like Fabrizio del Dongo fleeing towards the Po, on the same road and perhaps in the same state of mind. His instinct was that this was the final round and there would be no second chance, whatever Sbarazza might think. Capuozzo had made him a lengthy speech, in his customary woolly style, strewn with vague suggestions. The murderer was behind bars, the motive was clear enough, Nina’s relatives would soon forget and public opinion was pacified. Why waste more time? There was no shortage of work in the questura, and anyway digging too deep often resulted in bringing to the surface questions no-one really wanted spend even more time confronting.

Nonetheless, Soneri pressed on. He was aghast at the prospect of dealing with bureaucratic matters, signing papers or pursuing half-witted drug addicts who had held up tobacconists with a dirty syringe. And of contemplating life without Angela. The reasons for deciding to persevere with Medioli were professional pride and curiosity, but also vanity with regard to Angela. For some days, his name had been on the front pages of the papers she read. It was his way of keeping his profile up, even if there was only one reader who interested him.

*

He was escorted through a dozen doors and gates before he got to the interview room. Nothing had changed – same rattling locks, same low ceiling, same stifling atmosphere, same off-white paint. However, Medioli appeared in better shape, more healthy and more at peace with himself than when they had last met.

“I’ve been expecting you,” was his promising opening. “But I was beginning to think that you didn’t care anymore to hear what I had to say. As the days went by, I was more and more convinced that the law wasn’t interested in probing too far beneath the surface. I presumed that extended to me. I thought of sending a message to the magistrate saying that I was ready to cooperate, but I never got round to it. I’m fine here. I’ve a good relationship with everybody and I’ve been teaching these unfortunate lads in here how to fix engines. I gave them hope and I’ve found a purpose in life. That helps, doesn’t it?”

Soneri nodded gravely, but he preferred to get away from this subject. “I should have come sooner. I had the explanation to so many things within reach.”

“I don’t know about ‘so many’, but some, yes. From what I read in the papers, you’re already very well informed.”

“No, not ‘very’. For instance, I don’t know what kind of deal the Romas and Soncini had with each other.”

“Soncini?” Medioli started to snigger, but immediately pulled himself together. “You know that in a camp there are all kinds, honest and dishonest, the same as anywhere else. But you must also know that the Romas have a weakness for gold.”

Several different thoughts coalesced in Soneri’s mind to form one unbroken thread – Golden, Soncini’s deals, the
Romas’ gold and Marcotti’s idea that Nina’s murderer and Soncini’s wife were partners in business and not only to keep up appearances.

“Are you saying that Golden used gold stolen by the Romas and that Soncini was the go-between?”

“You’re missing one item: Nina Iliescu.”

“She was an intermediary?”

“What I reckon is that at the beginning she was put under pressure by her fellow countrymen, used as a means of recycling all that gold. With the Romas as with everybody else, nothing is like it used to be. They’re as greedy for money as the next man. There was a gang in the camp who could never get enough to keep them satisfied. They even started robbing churches, and that’s when the friction broke out. There are some things you just don’t touch, and in their world tradition still counts. That’s why the Romanians moved out, because the feuding was turning into an ethnic war.”

“So Iliescu was caught in a web?” Soneri said. He still clung to the belief that Nina was a victim of the clan.

“In my opinion, yes. Don’t forget that her family was related to the Romas.”

“In the end they hated her. Maybe she had managed to crawl out of the dunghill?”

“Maybe that’s what happened, maybe she was already condemned, but from the night of the accident, when you arrested me, I don’t know anything more.”

“What about Mariotto? Why did they beat him up?”

“Because in spite of the alcohol, he’d seen what really happened. The B.M.W., I mean. Without that information, you’d have had a hard job of it, wouldn’t you?”

“Razzini’s B.M.W., the same model as Soncini’s,” the commissario said, as though talking to himself.

“I don’t know who this Razzini is,” Medioli said. “What
I do know is that Soncini dumped the body there that night because it was the safest place. Nobody ever climbs down the slope beside an autostrada, and the Romas were there to guard it. But with all he’d been up to beforehand, it all back-fired on him.”

“But Nina really was one of them … ?”

“You said it yourself. In the final stages they hated her. There were nasty rumours circulating about her.”

“Why?”

“I think she’d breached some code. Or as you were implying, probably she wanted to get out, which in the eyes of the community came to the same thing. I believe the Romas had agreed to eliminate her, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of them was there on the night of the murder. Business was going well with Soncini, if you see what I mean. Nina was a loose cannon and knew too much.”

“So it wasn’t just about the baby?”

“That was a matter for her lover’s wife, but Signora Martini herself didn’t do too badly out of the arrangement: access to cheap gold, you understand? And if Soncini hadn’t been such a brainless cocaine addict, it’d all have gone smoothly. Mariotto was beaten up because he blurted everything out and that was no good to anybody, but it was really meant as a warning to Manservisi. He hates the Romanians like poison and told you what Mariotto had seen. He wanted to give you a tip-off, but he couldn’t say too much because he was afraid.”

“But then Soncini, when he reported the theft of his car, tried to double-cross the Romanians …”

“No, not at all! As I just said, Soncini is a moron who fucked up even his own swindles. His wife used to pass him the cash to pay off the Romas for the gold, but he pocketed it to feed his cocaine habit. When they came looking for their
money, he had to hand over his car to keep them quiet. Then his wife found out, and I suppose she went crazy. She ordered him to report the theft to the police. Just imagine what would’ve happened if a B.M.W., property of Golden, had turned up in a Roma camp with no report submitted! That car was hot! So a deal was struck with the Romas. The vehicle would be theirs, but they would make it disappear when the time was right, perhaps by taking it apart. And that’s not all. Soncini, to keep up appearances, got hold of another car of the same kind from some friend he’d made while they were snorting together. So you see, Soncini was the weak link in the whole chain.”

“In other words, Soncini had no wish to put the blame on the Romanians. He did use that car for the murder, but he’d been driving about in it for a while, and he was doing so so as not to arouse suspicions about his gold deals,” the commissario reflected, thinking that once again the coincidences were multiplying.

“Apart from anything else, it’s a very fashionable car in their world. He would never have had the guts to dupe the Romanians. He’s too much of a coward. You’re attributing to him a bigger brain than he has. He simply got himself entangled in his own lies, in the games a prick like him gets up to and in his craving for cocaine. When you act like that, you’re on a slippery slide and there’s no way back.”

When Medioli fell silent, he and the commissario sat staring at each other.“You don’t look convinced,” Medioli said.

“I see everything from a new perspective. I’d better get used to that.”

“Reality has many faces. We get accustomed to one and think that’s all there is to it. Maybe it’s just laziness, but the others seem unbelievable. It happened to me when I entered
the Roma world, and my previous life just melted away.”

“Now I too …” the commissario began, but he stopped because he was beginning to think about Angela again.

“What a shit heap!” Medioli said. “Get out while you can, or you’ll end up stinking as well.”

“I’m more likely to go mad,” Soneri corrected him as he was about to leave.

“Commissario, do you think what I’ve told you will be enough to get me some time off my sentence?”

“I’ll do my best,” he assured him.

*

It was only when he was walking to his car, in the centre of a square covered with a mist which made the lamplights seem to quiver slightly, that he realised how utterly he had lost his bearings. Reality kept losing its outlines in spite of all his efforts to impose some shape on it. Soncini was unquestionably a killer, but he was also a victim – his wife appeared to be in charge, but she was overwhelmed by unhappiness. The Romas suffered a life of exploitation while searching for prosperity; Nina’s lovers seemed to be winners but ended up losers; and Nina? She was the only one who had lost everything, dead in her early twenties while pursuing the dream of a normal life.

As he drove, he gripped the steering wheel tightly and trembled with rage. To calm himself down, he took out his mobile and dialled Marcotti’s number.

“That Martini woman is in it up to her neck,” he said. “She was turning out jewellery and sacred vessels with gold stolen, even from churches, by a gang of Romas.”

For a few moments the investigating magistrate made no reply, and the commissario imagined her shaking her blonde mane in indignation.

“We’ll have to pay a visit to the Signora,” she said finally.

“It won’t be easy to find anything at this late stage, but it’s worth a try.”

His next call was to Juvara. “Get in touch with Musumeci. Organise a search at Golden. Maybe Martini will move from being a plaster-cast saint to a she-devil.”

“What are we looking for there?”

“They’ll have got rid of anything compromising. Get hold of balance sheets, order forms, movements into and out of the warehouse, and pay special attention to deliveries to the various curias.”

Juvara tried to say something, but Soneri cut him off. “See if you can find a member of staff who’s willing to speak. There might be an employee who’s got a grudge against Martini, somebody who got sacked. Talk to the trade union. With a temperament like hers, she must have made a fair number of enemies.”

All of a sudden he felt tired and a little afraid. He would have liked to stop and end the investigation there because he feared he had not yet got to the bottom of it. Every probe took him one more step further down.

He drove aimlessly around the city streets without knowing where he wanted to go, but when he was advised that the search was already under way he made for Lemignano. He avoided Signora Martini, fuming with rage inside Musumeci’s car together with her daughter, who was just back from her honeymoon and was in all probability, after the clamour of recent days, facing an early divorce. It was unlikely in the extreme that the Dall’Argine dynasty would tolerate their new daughter-in-law figuring so prominently in such a scandal.

He went into the now familiar office and found Juvara
standing under the portrait of the Pope. The inspector was examining the sacred vessels one by one. Soneri joined him, and when he saw him pick up a chalice, he smiled contentedly.

“Commissario, I noticed this one because it seemed so out of place. When I took a closer look, it reminded me of something.”

“You’re improving all the time,” the commissario told him, still smiling. “I’d have started from there myself. Very often clues are so obvious that it’s easy to overlook them.”

“No, I’m being serious. This chalice reminds me of an object I saw in the office on a website featuring reproductions of stolen goods. You see the engraved image of Christ? It’s strange because it’s a clean-shaven Christ, whereas normally he has long hair and a beard.”

Soneri turned serious. “Where was it stolen from?”

“From the parish church at Pedrignano.”

“Is there a parish priest there still?”

“No, but an aunt of mine who lives nearby says that the priest from Sorbolo goes there to say mass.”

“Bring the chalice. We’ll go now.”

They drove again through the mist, with Juvara clutching his seat belt, scared out of his wits by Soneri’s carefree driving and by all the plane trees looming suddenly and menacingly out of the mist.

The parish priest, Don Mario Baldini, was having dinner, and the housekeeper was taken aback when the two men told her they were police officers. The priest himself, a napkin still tucked into his collar, came to the kitchen door.

“We’ve got something for you,” Soneri said, handing him the chalice.

Don Mario took it in his hand with respectful delicacy, walked over to a sideboard and put on his glasses to examine
the object. After a very few moments examining it, he said: “It’s the one that was stolen.”

The commissario and Juvara let out a sigh of relief. A priest had just handed down a sentence on the Martinis, mother and daughter. Perhaps the prison chaplain would give them absolution.