Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence (12 page)

The rain had started falling hard again during the night and still showed no sign of letting up. When Bordelli pulled into the station courtyard it was past nine. He’d been stuck in traffic for a good half-hour. He got out of the car with his overcoat pulled up over his head and ran to the main entrance, dripping wet. Rinaldi came up to him with dark circles under his eyes and a pale face, to bring him up to speed on things. Panerai had gone out at ten minutes to eight that morning and taken his Lancia Flavia. He hadn’t gone to the butcher’s shop, but had stopped in Via Lungo l’Affrico near Via d’Annunzio to pick up three men who’d been waiting for him under their umbrellas. The Flavia had left the city and gone south, past Pontassieve, Rufina and San Godenzo, and had just taken the road to Muraglione.

‘Who’s in the unmarked car?’ Bordelli asked, heading for the radio room with Rinaldi at his side.

‘Piras and Tapinassi, sir,’ said Rinaldi, suppressing a big yawn.

‘Go and get some sleep,’ Bordelli advised him, patting him on the back.

‘I’m not tired, sir …’ the policeman said, shrugging. When they entered the radio room, the inspector immediately got in touch with Piras. The connection was bad, and Piras had to repeat himself several times in order to be understood. It was raining where he was, too. The butcher and his friends were proceeding at moderate speed. They’d stopped only once, to have breakfast and get petrol, just before San Godenzo.

‘Try not to lose him,’ said Bordelli. He got a long crackle by way of reply, faintly modulated by a metallic-sounding voice. A few seconds later they lost the connection, thanks to the Apennine mountains.

‘Call me as soon as you hear something,’ Bordelli said to the men in the radio room.

He went up to his office, took off his wet raincoat and opened the window to air the place out. It was raining cats and dogs and seemed as if it would never stop. He lit a cigarette and smoked it with his elbows on the windowsill. The passing cars raised great bow waves.

Piras wasn’t able to re-establish contact until another hour later, and Bordelli dashed at once to the radio room. Now the Sardinian’s voice came in loud and clear. He named the towns they passed through along the trunk road: Il Poggio, Il Bagno, Bocconi, San Benedetto, Rocca San Casciano, Dovadola, Pieve Salutare … Panerai’s Flavia forged on without hesitation, as though the butcher or one of the passengers knew the route well.

‘Where the hell are they going in this rain?’ the inspector asked under his breath, running a hand over his face.

‘They’ve turned right,’ said Piras. When the unmarked police car reached the intersection, the Sardinian read the names on the road sign: Fiumana, Trivella and … Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace. So that was where they were headed.

‘Today’s the twenty-eighth of October, Inspector,’ Piras croaked over the radio waves.

‘A leopard can’t change its spots …’ said Bordelli, disappointed. Panerai’s and his comrades’ nostalgia was pathetic, but it certainly didn’t make them guilty of the murder of Giacomo Pellissari.

‘What should I do, Inspector?’ asked Piras, equally chagrined.

‘Stay on his tail.’

Bordelli leaned back in his chair and lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day, as Piras continued chronicling his journey. After a series of gut-wrenching bends, the road became straighter, and at San Lorenzo in Nocento the butcher turned right again. Fiumana, Trivella … and, at last, Predappio.
Duce, Duce, eja eja alalà!
¹³

The inspector pressed his eyes hard with his fingertips and heaved a desolate sigh. He was well aware that many of the functionaries whose paths he crossed daily were nostalgic for the old regime, including the commissioner. He thought sadly that Carlino, the former partisan fighter who owned the bar near Rosa’s place, was right: deep down, the Italians were incurably Fascist. Children in need of an authoritarian father so they could feel protected, so they could hear somebody tell them:
Sleep easy, I’ll take care of everything
. The important thing was to sleep, eat, have an easy job, a quick tongue, and money to go to the beach. A nation of poor bastards seeking redemption in dreams of power. This wasn’t the sort of Italy for which Franco Bordelli had shot all those Nazis …

Piras got back to the station late that afternoon, having followed Panerai’s car all the way back to his house and been relieved by another unmarked car. He limped up to Bordelli’s office, collapsed in a chair, and began recounting their pleasant outing to Predappio in the driving rain. In some of the shop windows they saw busts of ‘Bighead’,
¹⁴
lictor’s fasces, the symbol of the regime, death’s heads of the 10th Assault Vehicle Flotilla,
¹⁵
black T-shirts with the words
Me ne frego!
written on the front.
¹⁶

A few hundred people, mostly men, had gathered in the monumental piazzetta Mussolini had built in front of the modest house he was born in. They included not only people who had lived under the regime, but also youths who had only heard tell of that period. Piras and Tapinassi had mixed in with the crowd, always keeping an eye on the butcher and his friends.

Fascist songs, battle cries, tears, banners, signal flags,
eja eja
and choruses of
alalà
… It was all there. Round about noon the butcher and his mates had gone to the San Cassiano cemetery to visit the sacred tomb of Il Duce in the Mussolini family chapel.

‘People younger than me were kneeling down with tears in their eyes, like they were thanking the Madonna for miraculously curing them,’ Piras commented, a half-smile playing on his lips.

‘Mussolini made Italians dream far more than the Madonna ever has,’ said Bordelli, getting up and thrusting his hands in his pockets, waiting to hear the rest.

‘At lunchtime … hunger won out over devotion,’ said Piras, who just couldn’t take that pathetic gathering seriously. A convoy of cars had come down from Forlì and the restaurants had been taken by storm. He and Tapinassi managed to find a free table in the same trattoria as Panerai and his comrades, which was mobbed with ‘pilgrims’. Gnocchi, tortelli, lasagna, tagliatelle,
strozzapreti
, pork, stews, rivers of Lambrusco, laughter and songs from the good old days. To avoid attracting attention, he and Tapinassi had joined the chorus, pretending to know all the words. The restaurant owner smiled at the thought of all the money he was making. For the occasion he’d put a bronze bust of Il Duce, with a fez on his fat head, on the bar in full view. When the time came for grappa, a little man of about fifty and half-drunk stood up and made a speech, a garbled panegyric of the Duce and his noble deeds. He concluded with a rousing shout of
Boia chi molla!
¹⁷
To deafening applause, followed by more songs …

‘An unforgettable day,’ said the Sardinian. Around four o’clock the butcher and his confrères got back on the road in the driving rain and returned to Florence. Panerai stopped in Via Lungo l’Affrico to drop his friends off and then went home. The shop had remained closed all day. On the rolling metal shutter was a sign with the words:
Closed for family reasons
.

‘Devotion works miracles,’ said Bordelli, realising that the butcher had sacrificed a whole day’s earnings just to go and pay homage to Papa Mussolini. He obviously hadn’t felt confident leaving the shop in his old assistant’s hands.

‘While he was at it, he could have written:
Closed for national holiday
,’ said Piras, standing up. Tomorrow he would have to get up at dawn to continue the surveillance of Panerai. He said goodbye to Bordelli and went home to bed.

Bordelli finally lit a cigarette, still walking round the room, looking at the walls. Every so often he glanced out of the window and saw only rain. So the butcher was nostalgic for Il Duce … So what? There were a lot of Italians just like him, and they frightened him less than some dark souls who called themselves anti-Fascists. But most importantly, that sentimental journey to Predappio had no objective relation to the little boy’s murder. Another dead end. He was wasting his time chasing ghosts. Perhaps he should resign himself to the likelihood that the butcher had nothing to do with the murder. He would wait another week and then call off the surveillance …

He flopped into his chair, feeling exhausted. He wished he were somewhere else, maybe even some
one
else. In his twenty years with the police it was the first time he didn’t know which way to turn, and the idea of failure obsessed him. But there was no point in tormenting himself. All he could do was wait and hope.

He tried to distract himself with other concerns … There were four years left before retirement. He had no children, no wife. He ate too much, drank too much, smoked too much. He had to change his lifestyle, buy a house in the country, stop smoking, marry a beautiful woman and tend a vegetable garden. His curmudgeonly cousin Rodrigo hadn’t wasted any time. In February he’d sold his flat in Viale Gramsci for several million lire and for a song had bought an old peasant house with two hectares of land up from Bagno a Ripoli. After restoring it he still had plenty of money left over. He lived there with a woman he was crazy about, and at the tender age of fifty-four he was planning to have at least three children. Bordelli had learned all this from his Zia Camilla, Rodrigo’s mum. It had been a long time since he’d heard from Rodrigo, and so he picked up the phone to give him a ring. A little chat with his cousin was just what he needed to distract himself. He and Rodrigo were so different that the best way for them to understand each other was to avoid each other. But this was exactly why he wanted to talk to him, to smile at the continuous misunderstandings that arose from their surreal conversations. He dialled the number, but after some ten rings, he hung up. Too bad, he had been primed for it.

It was raining harder and harder, the sound like an enormous frying pan sizzling. He lit another cigarette and went out of the office. Just to be sure, he dropped by the radio room to hear the very latest on the butcher. Nothing unusual, no news.

He went home, cursing the bloody autumn weather, blaming it for all the tension that was biting at his heels. In the hope of calming down, he stayed a long time under the hot rain of the shower, singing old songs from back in his day …
Mamma son tanto felice, perchè ritorno da te
… He had to stop thinking all the time about the murdered boy …
La mia canzone ti dice, ch
’
è il più bel sogno per me
… But he would find the killers, he had to
… Mamma son tanto felice, viver lontano perchè?
…
¹⁸

Still humming, he slipped on his bathrobe and went into the kitchen to look for something to eat. There wasn’t much choice. He prepared himself a plate of pasta with tomato sauce, following Botta’s instructions. He sat down to eat it in front of the telly, which was already on, keeping the wine within reach. The National channel was showing a science programme that he couldn’t manage to follow. His brain kept worrying fruitlessly, turning round in circles like a stripped screw.

He finished the pasta, with compliments to the chef. In spite of everything, he’d managed to enjoy his
penne al pomodoro
. He emptied his glass and lit a cigarette. Blowing the smoke up towards the ceiling, he sighed like a soul in purgatory. Now that his hunger was slaked, a subtle anxiety clouded his every thought. He felt old. A poor old wretch defeated on all fronts. He imagined himself already retired, senile and spending his nights counting the change in his purse as he’d seen his grandfather do. Broth, hot-water bottles and a great deal of rest … Then, one day, death and amen.

It was barely ten o’clock. He didn’t feel like spending the whole evening staring at the telly, entertained by delightful thoughts about the meaning of life. He needed to go outside and change his mood, have a little conversation with somebody … He thought of Dante, the half-mad scientist who lived in Mezzomonte in an old villa with its doors always open, a giant full of energy with long white hair flying in all directions. He’d met him in the summer of ’63, when investigating the death of Dante’s sister Rebecca. They’d become friends, even though they saw each other rarely and still used the formal address with each other. Dante was a night-owl and at that hour had probably just gone down to his underground laboratory.

He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and went into the entrance hall to phone him. He let it ring for a long time, and finally he heard someone pick up.

‘Dante here … Who is it?’ asked the scientist in his deep ogre-like voice.

‘Good evening, Dr Pedretti. Am I disturbing you?’

‘Ah, Bordelli … How are you?’

‘That’s what I’d like to know. And you?’

‘I am still curious about the world.’

‘I wish I were too …’

‘But you are, otherwise you wouldn’t be a policeman.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’

‘Why don’t you come and see me, Inspector?’

‘That’s exactly why I called.’

‘I’ll be waiting.’

‘I’ll be there in half an hour …’

He covered his head with an umbrella as he got out of the car, then entered Dante’s big house through the front door. Lighting his path with a match, he groped his way down the stairs to the large underground laboratory, which was as big as the entire floor plan of the house. It had been created by knocking down the old basement walls in the name of science.

He entered the great, silent room, which was shrouded in darkness, a pair of candlesticks spreading a lunar light that licked at the shadows. At first glance it looked like a dark church lit up with candles, and the old bookcases overflowing with books along the walls were the tabernacles. Dante’s altar was a great big workbench covered, as always, with open books, bottles half filled with coloured liquids, various gadgets and every manner of incomprehensible contraption. The scientist was standing with his elbows propped on the workbench. He was writing something in a red-bordered notebook of the kind children use in primary school.