Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence (6 page)

‘Couldn’t that have happened at his house?’

‘Certainly … if his father’s a werewolf …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Only tremendous fear can explain something like that. The fingernails are shattered.’

‘Like in the gas chambers …’ Bordelli muttered. He could still remember the films he’d seen of Auschwitz in which one could see the fingernail marks the dying Jews had made on the walls.

‘Now comes the best part.’ Diotivede sighed.

‘Let’s hear it …’

‘He has large traces of morphine in his blood.’

‘They drugged him …’

‘That’s what I just said.’

‘Sorry, I was talking to Piras.’

‘There’s nothing else,’ the doctor said.

‘It would be a big help if we knew what house to look in for scratches on the walls …’

‘I’ll send you the report before the end of the day.’

‘Better not say anything to the press, or anyone else, for that matter.’

‘Not a word will leave this room, unless the dead start talking,’ said the doctor.

They said goodbye with a sort of grunt, and Bordelli dropped the phone on to its cradle.

‘Jesus fucking Christ …’ he muttered, pressing his fingertips into his eyelids. He repeated to Piras everything the doctor had just told him, including the part about the seminal fluid and blood types.

‘A bunch of perverts,’ the Sardinian said between clenched teeth, brooding. Was it easier to catch a lone maniac or a group of sadists? He didn’t know.

Disappointed, the inspector crushed his cigarette butt in the ashtray.

‘These things are totally useless if we don’t have a suspect.’

‘Maybe we’ll find one,’ Piras said by way of encouragement.

‘Please close the window,’ said Bordelli. He couldn’t stand feeling the humid air penetrating under his clothes any longer. Piras got up to close the window, and at that moment the telephone rang again. The inspector picked up the receiver with a sigh.

‘Yes?’

‘Your phone was always busy,’ said Rosa.

‘Did you reach Amelia?’

‘She absolutely refuses to see you, but I managed to persuade her to talk to you over the phone.’

Rosa gave him the number. To judge by the first two digits, she must have lived in the San Gervasio area. Bordelli thanked Rosa and hung up. Though he no longer really felt like it, he rang Amelia at once. He told her the little boy had been found dead and heard her sigh.

‘Is that what you saw in the cards?’

‘Yes …’ Amelia said warily.

Feeling embarrassed, Bordelli asked her whether she was willing to consult the tarot again about the matter, to see whether she could find out anything of use to the investigation.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector, but perhaps you haven’t really understood what the tarot is,’ said the fortune-teller in a faint, hoarse voice.

‘Well, I thought I’d try …’

‘The cards can’t reveal a killer’s name; they can only tell what will happen to the person in front of me.’

‘Perhaps you could find out if I’ll succeed in capturing the culprit,’ said Bordelli, feeling sheepish with Piras looking on.

‘What must happen, will happen,’ the psychic murmured.

‘Exactly. So maybe—’

‘Please, Inspector,’ Amelia interrupted him in a weak voice.

‘As you wish, then. Sorry to disturb you.’

‘I can’t help you, believe me.’

‘Thanks just the same.’

Bordelli put the receiver down and leaned back in his chair. He briefly told Piras what Amelia had said. He felt relieved. Though he had yielded for a moment to the temptation, he really couldn’t see himself paying heed to the tarot’s prophecies.

‘Let’s hope something turns up at La Panca,’ he said, without believing it for a second. At that moment somebody knocked at the door. It was Rinaldi with the first results. The paths through the woods had been carefully checked. To get to Monte Scalari by car one had no choice but to go by way of La Panca. The other trails had large stones, deep holes and impassable, tortuous bends that even a jeep in wartime would have had trouble negotiating.

‘Anything else?’

‘Nothing else, Inspector,’ Rinaldi said dejectedly, as if it were his fault.

‘All right, you can go, thanks,’ the inspector said, even more disappointed than him. Rinaldi vaguely gestured a military salute and left in a hurry. Evening was falling, and the sound of torrential rain rose up from the street below.

‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ Bordelli asked, worrying an earlobe.

The following morning he left home before eight o’clock and headed for La Panca. He felt the need to go back there, although he was convinced there was no point in it. He couldn’t bear sitting behind his desk, staring at the wall, crushed by a feeling of powerlessness that had been weighing on him for days like a sense of guilt.

He stopped at Porta Romana to buy the Florentine daily,
La Nazione
:

LITTLE GIACOMO FOUND DEAD

RAPED AND STRANGLED

He tossed the newspaper on to the front seat and drove off, reviewing in his mind the reports of the policemen who had questioned the inhabitants of La Panca, Cintoia Alta and Monte Scalari. They were all more or less the same: nobody had seen anything unusual. There were, moreover, a number of inhabited houses on the hill, as well as an abbey, and the wooded area was often frequented by hunters and people foraging for mushrooms. It was normal to hear cars driving by at all hours; nobody paid any attention.

In short, they were getting nowhere. The only new information was from Diotivede, and for the moment it was useless.

He arrived at La Panca with his morale in tatters. As he went up the path in the car, he realised he’d finished all his cigarettes and half-cursed between clenched teeth. Crumpling the empty packet, he hurled it out of the window. After a few bends, he parked the Beetle in the same clearing as the day before. He opened the glove compartment, to check whether there wasn’t perhaps a spare cigarette in there, but all he found was a little box of Tabù-brand liquorice drops. Tapping the box with one finger, he let a few of the bitter drops roll into his mouth.

He put on his hiking boots and set out slowly towards the spot where the body had been found, knowing he was wasting his time. From the ground, still wet with rain, rose a sharp smell of putrefaction, as a breath of damp wind caressed his face. The silence of the woods was broken only by birdsong, the rustling of his footsteps and, now and then, a distant gunshot. The upper boughs of the trees stood out against a colourless sky, as the sun formed spots of light on the carpet of rotten leaves.

He trudged on, breathing heavily, expecting at any moment to see a German pop out from behind a tree and start shooting at him. That had actually happened to him in the forests of the Abruzzi, as he made his way up the Italian peninsula, biting the tails of the retreating Nazis. Luckily he had not figured among the dead, and when he returned to camp he’d marked the eleventh notch on the butt of his machine gun. He didn’t yet know that in the coming months he would add another sixteen. He had never felt guilty about having killed; there wasn’t anything else he could have done in those moments. But they weren’t good memories. He remembered the distress of a comrade of his in the San Marco battalion who couldn’t forgive himself for pointlessly killing a Nazi. During a rather tempestuous firefight, he’d seen this hulking German running towards him and instinctively cut him down with a burst of fire. A moment later he realised he’d riddled with bullets a wounded man who was collapsing to the ground. He never gave himself a moment’s rest, as if he’d killed an innocent …

Bordelli recognised from a distance the hole in which the boy had been buried, and he gritted his teeth. Reaching the spot, he stopped in front of the loose earth, hands dangling at his sides. In his mind’s eye he could still see the small naked foot sticking out of the ground, the mud-smeared body, the worms writhing in the empty eye sockets. Not far away he heard a tree trunk creak in the wind, and at that moment it seemed the saddest sound on earth. He started walking around, looking at the ground, moving the leaves with his feet in the absurd hope of finding something. All he saw were the usual cartridges and a few shabby mushrooms. He was pointlessly wasting time, but what else could he do? Sit in his office warming his chair?

He moved away from the makeshift grave, walking in a spiral motion, in ever broader circles, examining every inch of earth carefully. In spite of everything, he still had hope. It was a senseless illusion, but it was all he had. He wasn’t asking for much, for Christ’s sake. Just a button would have been enough, or a cigarette butt, a spent match …

After half an hour of this, he stopped circling the grave and headed deeper into the woods. His hope had run out, and his search turned into a solitary walk. He wanted only to enjoy some silence undisturbed. He ambled along slowly, letting the beauty of the place fill his eyes. He didn’t even feel much like smoking. He felt good, there in the woods. It had taken Botta’s mushrooms to make him realise this. He had to come back to these hills more often. The best thing was letting his thoughts travel up unknown paths, or remain suspended in the air. Through the trees’ black trunks he saw a large hare race breathlessly away and disappear into a thicket. It was safe for now, but sooner or later a hunter would gun it down and it would end up as sauce for a pot of
pappardelle
.

He kept on walking, breathing deeply, lost in his memories. Every so often he heard a shot ring out in the valley. He went down a hillside and found himself back on the trail. He was almost certain that if he turned to the right, he would end up back at the car, and so he went in the opposite direction. His mud-caked boots reminded him of the long marches with the San Marco battalion, blisters burning the soles of his feet, sweat saturating his uniform. He could still almost hear the extravagant curses of Mosti, a giant from Massa as big as a wardrobe, who hated walking. Bordelli would remind him that if not for the war, he would still be rotting in jail, and the beast would only sneer.

He arrived in front of a small chapel that stood at the crossing of two trails. It must have been the fork mentioned by the hunter: to the left, Poggio alla Croce, to the right, Pian d’Albero. Bordelli went to the right and proceeded at a slow pace, his mind clouded by old memories. A light wind washed through the branches like an invisible sea, making the leaves fall and dragging a mollifying smell of death through the air. Here and there a secondary path broke off in another direction through the woods, disappearing amid the trees.

On the hillside opposite him he glimpsed an abandoned house through the vegetation, its shutters closed and the roof half caved in. One saw more and more such houses these days, here and there in the Chianti. A horror of the rural life had driven the young people to the cities in search of a less laborious, more entertaining way of life. He couldn’t blame them, really; a peasant’s life was hard, miserable. But they soon discovered that the poor weren’t any better off in the cities. It was just a different sort of poverty, in some ways much more profound.

He found himself looking up at a slope of large, jagged rocks. The hunter was right. If you took the car up there, you would surely drop the oil pan. To the right the view opened up on to a broad valley, and he stopped to look. A bank of dark clouds was rising up over the gloomy horizon of hills, covering the entire vault of sky. He became entranced, watching a falcon flying in broad rings until, at last, it nosedived straight down and vanished.

Who knew how long it would take to get to Pian d’Albero? He knew the story of the Nazis who, one June day in ’44, had massacred partisans and defenceless civilians there, but he’d never seen the site of the slaughter. He followed the path for a little over a mile, then decided to turn back. He would go to Pian d’Albero another time.

He walked along unhurriedly, savouring the moments of solitude. Passing the Cappella dei Boschi again, he continued down the path that led to La Panca. The wood’s animated silence relaxed him. It wasn’t like in wartime, when silence was full of deadly traps.

He trudged up a short incline paved with ancient flagstones, and past the bend, through the vegetation, caught a glimpse of a tall stone building. Almost certainly the abbey of Monte Scalari. As he continued on his way, the abbey disappeared behind the trees, and a hundred yards up the path he saw a shrine in
pietra serena
with an empty niche. With a flutter of wings, blackbirds flew out of some brambles, diving into the underbrush, chirping their alarm amid the shrubs.

He stopped in front of the shrine. To the left, a narrow, rocky trail descended steeply towards the bottom of the valley. How much misery must these woods have witnessed? Sculpted on the grey stone of the shrine, near the top, were the words:
Omne Movet Urna Nomen Orat
. Bordelli attempted to translate them, trying to unearth the Latin he’d learned at school. Every. Move. Urn. Name. Prays. What the devil was that supposed to mean? He gave up trying to understand and resumed walking. Moments later he found himself in front of the abbey, a vast construction suffering from the weight of the centuries. There were loophole windows here and there in the wall of
pietra serena
, and a small sort of tower rose up from the top of the wall, over the main entrance gate. He imagined great rooms peopled with ghosts, monumental fireplaces, frescoes with the stories of saints. In a flat open space to the side was a large Peugeot with its sides spattered with mud. Who knew who lived there, in such an isolated place? Whoever it was, Bordelli envied them. He would love to live in a sort of fortress like that, far from the city and his fellow men. Perhaps together with a beautiful, beloved woman, blonde or brunette, it didn’t matter …

Better to forget about dreams and keep his feet firmly on the ground. How many years had he been tossing about this idea of moving to the country? He need only make up his mind. It wasn’t long before he could start collecting his pension, and he wanted to spend his final years tending a vegetable garden and picking olives. It shouldn’t cost too much, an old abandoned house with a bit of land. If he sold his flat in San Frediano he could easily buy one and fix it up. Still walking, he whispered a promise to himself: after he found Giacomo Pellissari’s killers he would get on with looking for a house in the country.