Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence (7 page)

Caught up in these thoughts, he started looking around at the land again, really wishing he could smoke a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something move, then turned round and managed just in time to see a head disappear over the top of the hill. Who the hell could it be? He quickened his pace and reached the top, heart thumping in his ears. He spotted a hunchbacked man moving hurriedly away through the trees, and started running after him, yelling at him to stop. At first the man sped up, as though trying to flee, but when the inspector yelled again, he stopped and turned round. When Bordelli caught up to him, he found an old man with a basket full of mushrooms, looking at him warily.

‘Police …’ the inspector mumbled, panting, hand on his chest. The man kept staring at him. He had a long, cavernous face, lined with deep wrinkles of toil, and towy hair.

‘Why didn’t you stop?’ Bordelli asked, knowing it was a stupid question. The old man shrugged feebly.

‘When hunting the mushroom, too much talking spells doom,’ the old man said in utter seriousness.
⁵

‘I just wanted to ask if you have a cigarette.’

‘I don’t smoke. Can I go now?’

‘Of course, I’m sorry …’ Bordelli muttered. The old man turned and went on his way, disappearing through the trunks of the chestnut trees. A moment later it was as if he’d never existed.

The inspector returned to the trail, demoralised. In his mind he asked God or chance to let him find something, and he even made a vow: if he found something, even so much as a clothespin or button, he would smoke less. He precluded stopping altogether, lest he prove unable to keep his promise. But merely smoking less was a great challenge: the first week he would get down to ten, the following week down to five … He tossed these thoughts around in his head like a child, even if he felt a little ashamed of it …

He passed under the powerful branches of an enormous oak, whose trunk would have taken at least three men with arms extended to encircle. At its feet someone had built a tiny chapel of stone and brick, and he wondered,
Why ever?
Glancing inside, he spied a picture of the Virgin with seven swords thrust into her heart, painted by an unskilled hand. He continued down the path, and a short while later the Beetle suddenly appeared round a bend. His stroll through the woods was over. A useless stroll. Now he could smoke as much as he wished. He’d already slipped the key into the door, preparing to leave, when he suddenly changed his mind. Spurred on by one last illusion, he continued walking towards La Panca, like a castaway searching his desert island for signs of life for the hundredth time. In reality it was merely an excuse not to return just yet to the office, where he would have felt like a caged animal.

He strayed repeatedly off the track, penetrating the forest through the trees, scanning the sea of leaves carefully. Cartridges, nothing but cartridges. Here and there an indistinct bootprint, or confused tyre tracks in the dirt. Signs that were, in any case, totally useless. There certainly was no lack of people trudging through these woods.

After a gentle uphill climb, he came out on to a broad plateau with very tall pines. He stayed for a few minutes to look around, charmed by the stillness, then decided that it was time to return. He was heading back to the car with his tail between his legs when he heard a sort of peeping sound. He stopped and tried to figure out where it was coming from. It must have been behind the brambles that lined the path. When he tried to look behind them, his clothes got all tangled in the thorns, but he managed to see a very small black and white animal toddling unsteadily through the ferns, sounding like a little bird. For a second he thought it was a baby magpie that had fallen from the nest, though it wasn’t the right season … A moment later he saw that it was a tiny kitten, all wet and spattered with mud. It was mewing desperately. Perhaps it had woken up too soon after the last suckling and had strayed from its refuge before Mamma had returned. He stood there looking at the little ball of fur, which kept peeping, staggering on its tiny legs. He wondered what to do. In the end he circled round the brambles and went towards the kitten, after checking to make sure the mother wasn’t somewhere nearby. He almost ended up trampling on the carcasses of three other kittens of about the same size as their surviving sibling. They were whole, as if they’d starved to death. And it hadn’t been long, at first glance. A day at the most.

As he was about to bend down and pick up the kitten, he spotted a piece of paper a little farther away, folded in two, sticking out from under the leaves. He went excitedly to get it, as if it were a gold nugget. It was a telephone bill, half faded and sodden with rain. Though it wasn’t easy, he could make out the address:
Panerai Butcher Shop / Livio Panerai / Viale dei Mille 11r / Florence
. The payment deadline dated from seven days earlier. Bordelli bit his lip. Viale dei Mille was very close to the area where the little boy was last seen. Was it only a coincidence? He had to remain calm. That piece of paper didn’t mean anything. It was only a bill that had been lost in the wood; he shouldn’t give it too much importance … But hope had already seized hold of him. He felt like a lovelorn youth, consumed by desire, who mistakes a simple glance for a promise of love.

He put the bill in his pocket and returned to the kitten, which wouldn’t stop squealing. The moment he picked it up, it stopped, and then nearly fell asleep in his warm hand.

Going back to the car, he wiped the kitten with a handkerchief. He crumpled up
La Nazione
, turning it into a sort of bed, then laid the tiny animal in it. He hadn’t yet started the car up when the cat started mewling again, but not as desperately as before. It sounded much calmer. It was he, Bordelli, who felt restless. Turning the car around, he headed back towards La Panca, checking every second to make sure the kitten hadn’t fallen on to the floor.

‘Briciola!’ Rosa cried out as soon as she saw the kitten.

‘You’ve already found a name?’ asked Bordelli, handing her the tiny animal.

‘Can’t you see she’s got a little face just like Briciola?’
⁶

‘Maybe it’s a boy.’

‘You know even less about cats than you do about women … You’re a girlie kitten, aren’t you, Briciola?’ Rosa said to it, holding it in her hands and rubbing her nose on its little head.

‘It’s women who don’t understand men,’ Bordelli grumbled, following Rosa into the kitchen.

‘Poor thing, it has a bad eye.’

‘It may have been a thorn; I found her in the middle of some brambles.’

‘Look who’s here, Gideon!’ said Rosa, putting the kitten down in front of the big white tomcat. Gideon sniffed the intruder for a few seconds, looking perplexed. He walked around the little thing, which could barely stand up, then with a fairly benign blow of the paw made it roll on the floor.

‘Gideon, what are you doing! That’s naughty!’ Rosa shouted, picking up the kitten.

‘He realises he won’t be Mummy’s little darling any more.’

‘Poor Briciolina, who knows how long it’s been since she’s eaten … I must call the vet at once. When they’re this small they sometimes have trouble surviving,’ said Rosa, heading for the entrance hall.

‘I’m leaving her in good hands,’ said the inspector, following behind her. Rosa found the number in the telephone book … Before the vet picked up, Bordelli blew her a kiss by way of goodbye and left.

As he was descending the stairs he pulled out of his pocket the telephone bill he’d found in the woods. If not for the mewling kitten, he would never have found it, and he hoped it was a sign from destiny. He read the name of the subscriber:
Panerai Butcher Shop
. Three thousand two hundred and thirty-five lire’s worth of phone calls. He put the bill back in his pocket with a shudder, even though the butcher might well have dropped it while hunting or looking for mushrooms. The discovery proved nothing concrete, but it was still a tiny flame in what had been total darkness.

He went back to the station, knowing he had next to nothing in his hands, but at the same time he had trouble controlling his excitement. He told Mugnai to send for Piras at once, then went up to his office. Flopping into his chair, he lit a cigarette and tried to calm down. He started studying the telephone bill, as if seeing it for the first time. It had been paid seven days before, but who knew when it had been lost? It was hard to tell. Anyway, there was no guarantee that Livio Panerai had paid it in person. Maybe his brother-in-law, or a friend, or an errand boy had gone to the post office to pay it in his stead. But what if in fact it was he who had buried the little boy? Maybe he’d dropped the bill when he pulled out a handkerchief to mop his brow, and the wind had carried it away …

He heard a police car drive off with tyres screeching and siren blaring, but didn’t care to know what had happened. His mind was on the telephone bill. He continued to study it carefully, as if somewhere it might contain, in code, the killer’s name.

At last he looked up and started gazing at the sky through the window. Lacking any real clues, he had three options before him: the frontal attack, the spider’s web, and the keyhole. Which was the right one? Frontal attack had one advantage: surprise. You batter the presumed culprit with firm accusations, hoping he’ll collapse. In short, a bluff by the book, but if you didn’t bring home the goods, it was the same as in poker: you lost everything. The spider’s web was a work of embroidery that aimed at exhausting the suspect with vague but incessant insinuations, like Porfyry Petrovich with Raskolnikov. Obviously, it didn’t always work. Everything depended on the suspect’s nerves. And anyway, to put it into practice you needed a lot of time and, most importantly, you had to be a good actor. The keyhole approach was a long operation, one which required patience and skill. Stakeouts, tailing, endless searches. And if you had the right person on your hands, sooner or later something would come out. It was the most demanding approach, but also the least risky. You just waited in the shadows for someone to make a wrong move …

There was a knock at the door, and he gave a start. It was Piras, with dark circles under his eyes. He limped to a chair and wrinkled his nose, smelling the stale cigarette smoke in the room. Bordelli noticed but pretended not to. He showed Piras the telephone bill he’d found and told him about his walk in the woods, the kitten, and all the rest. Lastly he laid out the three options for him.

‘What would you do?’ he asked, though he’d already made up his mind. Piras bit his lip before speaking.

‘The likelihood that this bill was dropped by the killer is very slim, extremely slim, in fact. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and it happens to be the only lead we’ve got. The best thing is to spy through the keyhole and hope we get lucky.’

‘I agree,’ said Bordelli, blowing smoke out of his mouth like Godzilla. Piras fanned the air with his hand and then went and opened the window without asking permission.

‘Didn’t you want to quit smoking, Inspector?’

‘I’ve been wanting to quit ever since I started, Piras.’

‘So for now you want to force me to smoke, too.’

‘I want to go and see what he looks like,’ said Bordelli, standing up.

‘Who?’

‘The butcher.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll go with you,’ said the Sardinian, limping towards the door. Who knew how much longer he’d be walking like that? In the end, however, he’d been lucky. The robbers had shot to kill.

They got into the Beetle and drove off. It was just eleven o’clock, and almost all the people on the streets were women, shopping. After the viaduct of Le Cure, they turned on to Viale dei Mille. The inspector kept an unlit cigarette between his lips, puffing on it as if it were lit. Not far away, in Viale Volta, was the house he’d grown up in. He didn’t know the Panerai butcher shop. Maybe in his day it didn’t exist yet, or he’d simply never noticed it. His mother had always bought meat in Via Passavanti.

They went the entire length of the Viale, keeping their eyes on the numbers of the buildings. They’d gone almost all the way to the municipal stadium when at last they saw number 11/r,
Panerai Butcher Shop – Chicken, Rabbits, Game
. They drove past it and parked in front of Scheggi’s, the most famous grocer in the area.

‘Shall we have a panino, afterwards?’ said Bordelli.

‘Sure, why not?’ said Piras.

‘Wait for me here.’

The inspector got out and walked towards the butcher’s shop. On the pavement he crossed paths with a good-looking chestnut-haired girl in a decidedly short skirt and a face somewhere between cute and haughty. He forced himself not to turn to look at her. It didn’t seem like the right moment. But the call of the forest came anyway, and in the end he turned round … Only for a second, but it was enough to make him suffer. Shaking off the vision, he slipped into the butcher’s. It was a clean, brightly lit shop, with a crucifix hanging on one wall and a lot of beautiful, bleeding meat. The butcher himself looked to be a little over forty. Fat, square face, blue eyes, and a merchant’s smile. His head was bald and shiny but for two tufts of hair at the temples, and he ran his tongue continuously over his lips. The inspector felt an instinctive antipathy for the tubby hulk and his blustery manner, but this certainly wasn’t proof of his guilt. Indeed, over the years he’d met more than a few charming murderers and unbearable innocents.

There were two customers there, a rich lady in a fur coat weighted down with bracelets and a stout man with a huge nose and deep-set eyes. The woman was very demanding and just as indecisive. She took a very long time to choose. The butcher had the patience of a spider and didn’t miss a chance to let drop a couple of double entendres. The lady smiled with bourgeois detachment, visibly amused.

The inspector observed the butcher, trying to figure out who he looked like. At last it came to him: he looked exactly like Goering. If he’d had more hair, he could have been his twin. He continued studying Panerai, his movements, his eyes, his facial expressions … He seemed like the perfect sex maniac, capable of rape and murder. But Bordelli was well familiar with the power of suggestion. To free himself of all prejudice he tried imagining that someone of authority had told him that Panerai was a scientist. And the butcher turned into a scientist. He imagined someone had told him he was mentally ill, and the butcher was transformed into a madman making incomprehensible gestures. He continued the game, transforming him into a do-gooder, a loan shark, an accountant, an orchestra conductor … A useless exercise that could go on for ever.