Converging Parallels Read online

  “I almost killed you.”

  Rain splattered the large face, forming more tears that ran over the fat cheeks and fell to the mud. “I was beside myself. I didn’t know what to do.”

  He rolled heavily over onto his hands and clambered upright. Trotti picked up the red umbrella. “I had to talk to you. You’ve always been good to me.” He smelt of stale perspiration. He was wearing a jacket that was crumpled and now smeared with fresh mud. “You’re her godfather.”

  “Let’s get out of the rain.”

  They stepped beneath the curving roof of the stable as one of the horses neighed.

  “I wanted to go directly to the police but he wouldn’t let me. He said that he wanted to keep things quiet—for the time being at least—in case they contacted us. In case there is a ransom to pay.”

  “Who said this?”

  “Said what?”

  “Not to come to the police?”

  Ermagni smiled vaguely. “Rossi—my father-in-law. If he knows that I’m seeing you, he’ll be furious. He hates the police—and he doesn’t want the bank account to be blocked. You see, that’s why I had to speak to you in private.”

  Trotti pulled the pistol from his pocket. “You nearly got yourself killed.”

  With dull eyes, Ermagni glanced at the pistol, heedless—or perhaps unaware—of its menace.

  “Five minutes.” He held up five stubby fingers. “Five minutes of your time, that’s all I ask. Please, Commissario. You’re her godfather. I wouldn’t ask you unless …”

  Another tear swelled at the corner of his red eyelids. Ermagni turned away and gulped like a man in need of breath. Above them, the rain battered against the iron roof. A puddle had formed in an old tire track. The two horses stood motionless in the open field.

  3

  ANNA ERMAGNI WAS a timid child, six years old, with black, bobbed hair and a serious expression. She had her mother’s grey eyes. On the afternoon of 3 May 1978 she disappeared.

  Ermagni had accompanied her to the public gardens in via Darsena at three o’clock. There she played with her friends. At 4:20, hearing the sound of screeching brakes, of broken glass and of people shouting, Ermagni went out of the gardens and round the block into Corso Garibaldi. A motorbike had run into the back of a car. Nobody was hurt. When he returned to the gardens fifteen minutes later, Anna was not there. The other children did not know where she had gone. They shook their heads at the father’s worried questions. They had seen her, they had been playing with her. Then she had gone away.

  The father ran back to the bar in Corso Garibaldi. His father-in-law was behind the bar, wiping glasses. He threw the dishcloth over his shoulders and bent forward across the counter as Ermagni whispered hoarsely. The old man turned pale.

  They closed the bar, pushing the grumbling clients out onto the dusty street. Signor Rossi sent the two waiters home and pulled down the iron blinds. His wife came clambering down the stairs, her freckled hands trembling as she repeatedly crossed herself. When she heard that her granddaughter had been kidnapped she fainted.

  The two men took the small Fiat and drove through the town, stopping in the parks, going into private courtyards and driving along the cobbled streets. They went out into the suburbs; they went back to the fairground several times. They drove along the river and questioned the dark-skinned gypsies in their camp. They went to the far side of the river where children were still swimming in water tinted red by the setting sun. They spoke to the children. Nobody had seen a little girl with black, bobbed hair and grey eyes.

  “You should have contacted the police immediately.”

  Ermagni looked at him, squinting, “No.”

  “We know where to look.”

  “My father-in-law wants to have nothing to do with the police.”

  “We’ve got the experience—and the manpower.”

  “You haven’t found Moro.”

  Trotti was about to reply, but Ermagni interrupted, “Commissario, my daughter has been kidnapped. And we will pay the ransom.”

  “You’ve got the money?”

  “I’m a taxi driver. Money …” He raised his shoulders. “I’ve been able to put some aside.” He counted his fingers. “Two million, three million perhaps. Things are going well—they’ve been going well since the mayor closed the city center to traffic.”

  “Three million is no fortune. Has your wife got something?”

  “My wife is dead, Dottore.”

  Trotti frowned. “Flavia?” He could remember a small, narrow-shouldered girl. Young, with beautiful grey eyes.

  “Her name was Fulvia.” The shoulders of the muddied jacket—coarse weave and badly cut—fell dejectedly. “Anna’s all I’ve got left—that’s why I had to talk with you, I knew you’d help me. Without her …” His voice trailed away.

  “You never told me your wife was dead.”

  “There was nothing the doctors could do. It was a kind of cancer. She died last February.” He paused. “It was in the paper.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I didn’t know you were back; you never informed me. I thought you were still in Bari—until I caught sight of you a couple of months ago in the street.” He added, hope in his voice, “You will help me, won’t you?”

  “I don’t work for a private detective agency.”

  “Commissario Trotti, my father-in-law owns the San Siro bar. He will sell. If it is necessary, he will sell everything. Ninety, a hundred million, perhaps more. But if the police are involved, they will block his account. That’s the official procedure, you know that. Things have got worse since Moro was taken.” He lowered his voice. “I could never allow that, Dottore. Never.”

  He started to sob again.

  “Has there been any contact?”

  Ermagni brushed aside the tears with a large, clumsy hand. “My mother-in-law has not left the phone—not even to sleep. She just waits for it to ring.”

  “She’s taking it badly?”

  “She feels guilty. We all feel guilty. I should never have left Anna alone in the park. But it’s a small place and not many people know it. Local children go there. And lately, I’ve been trying to get my afternoons free—to be with my daughter. Normally I work nights but lately I’ve been able to make arrangements with my colleagues. I want to be with her—now that her mother …”

  Trotti turned away.

  “The gardens have always been safe.”

  “Until yesterday.”

  “Until yesterday,” he repeated lamely. He took the woman’s umbrella from Trotti.

  “It doesn’t sound like a kidnapping—not without a contact.”

  “A game, a psychological game.” Ermagni had difficulty with the word. “The uncertainty, the waiting. It’s done to soften us up.”

  “You have enemies?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There is another possibility.”

  Ermagni raised his large head. “What’s that?”

  “It could be a maniac.”

  4

  THE SCUOLA ELEMENTARE Gerolamo Cardano was on the west side of the city, beyond the railway station, in one of the newly built suburban roads. It was wedged between two blocks of flats. The pavement was littered with parked cars that suffocated the sparse young trees. Trotti entered the school gates and walked along a modern portico—square columns with marble tiling that was beginning to fall away, leaving irregular checkers of rough plaster.

  He went through a door and found himself in a long corridor; it was somber and the air was heavy with the smell of chalk and floor wax.

  “Signore?”

  The porter came out of his glass cubicle, buttoning a blue jacket and looking with disapproval at Trotti’s wet shoes. He was smoking. He had a round face with a protuberant, aggressive jaw beneath the peaked cap. The enamel arms of the city gleamed importantly from the rim of the cap.

  “Pubblica Sicurezza.”

  The man stiffened and made an awkward bow as he threw away t
he cigarette.

  “I should like to speak to the headmistress.”

  “Of course.” Another slight bow. “This way please.” He produced an umbrella and opened it. They went along the corridor and entered a colonnaded courtyard. A low fountain flowed into a fishpond. The lethargic shadows of fish. The steel tips on the porter’s shoes echoed along the cloisters. From somewhere there came the sound of children singing and Trotti was reminded of his own school years—the patriotic songs, the uniform, the wooden guns.

  They climbed a wide stairway, the deep red slabs pocked like bad skin. The porter wheezed unhealthily. “I retire at the end of the year.” He laughed uncertainly.

  The headmistress was in her office.

  On the door, there was a nameplate of transparent plastic with red lettering: DIRETTRICE, SIG.RA BELLONI.

  The porter knocked and they entered a small, bright room with Piranesi prints on the wall and high-backed chairs encircling a walnut table. Several flowerpots lined the window sill; the air was fragrant with camellia blossom. Like a stuck insect, an immobile fan blade was fixed to the ceiling. The headmistress came forward. She held out her right hand while with her left she tapped at the hair of her bun.

  “Commissario Trotti of the Pubblica Sicurezza.” He bowed and they shook hands. She smiled, and stepping back, folded her arms.

  “How can I help you?”

  Trotti turned slightly towards the door where the porter stood, one hand holding his cap, the other on the doorknob and a look of unconcealed curiosity on his peasant face. “If we could …”

  “Of course.” Her hair was light grey, almost white. “That will be all for the time being, Nino. Grazie.”

  The porter left reluctantly.

  A smile flitted across her face. “A good man.” She glanced at her desk where several books lay open. “Without being discourteous, Dottore, I shall ask you to be brief.” A hand went to the small pearl placed in the lobe of her ear. “Next week we are closing down for the municipal elections. I have to organize the complete disinfection of the establishment—both before and afterwards.”

  “I have to speak with you. In confidence.” He placed a hand on her arm and noted the fleck of worry in her eyes. “About one of your pupils.”

  She looked at his hand on the blue wool of her cardigan. “I am busy.”

  “So am I.” He nodded to the desk. “I wouldn’t take up your precious time …” He let the sentence hang. He himself sat down on one of the high-backed chairs, turning it to face the headmistress. “Please understand.”

  Behind the headmistress, a crucifix had been attached to the wall; the plastic head of the Christ lolled in pain.

  She tapped at the neatness of her bun as she lowered herself into the chair. She crossed her legs and brushed at imaginary dust on the folds of her blue serge dress.

  Trotti waited a few seconds. “This is in confidence and I trust that nothing will be repeated outside this room.”

  “You talk like a priest.”

  “I am a policeman.”

  She smiled; she wore no lipstick.

  “A child has been kidnapped, signorina.”

  A sudden movement of her hand and he had noticed the absence of a ring. The long delicate fingers and the clean nails—no varnish—belonged to the hands of a girl. The skin was white. He wondered how old she was; in her mid-forties, he decided. The grey hair made her appear older; but she still had the living softness that disappears as a woman goes through the change. A few years older, perhaps, than Agnese.

  “You are not joking, Commissario?”

  “A child’s life may be in danger.”

  “One of my children?”

  “Anna Ermagni. The daughter of a friend. He used to work with me in the Mezzogiorno. He left the force to become a taxi driver.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “She disappeared yesterday afternoon—from the gardens in via Darsena. Her father believes she’s been kidnapped.”

  She looked at him, catching his eye and holding it. Her own eyes were hazel. “What do you think?”

  “It’s early yet. But Ermagni is not particularly rich—not the sort of person who has enough money to pay a ransom.”

  “The mother’s dead.”

  “You know Ermagni?”

  “A taxi driver?” She nodded. “He came to see me. He was very upset because his wife had just died. I remember it clearly because it was the day they took Moro—a Thursday. School closed down and I was alone here. He phoned, insisting that he saw me. A strange man. From the hills; he’d married a local girl. The parents have a bar in Corso Garibaldi.”

  “The San Siro.”

  “She died in the hospital. The doctors diagnosed cancer but it wasn’t certain.”

  “You knew her?”

  “The mother? No, I never met her.”

  “Why did Ermagni come to visit you?”

  “He was upset—there was no precise reason for him to see me.” She lifted her shoulders. “He said he was concerned about Anna. I don’t think he really wanted anything; he just wanted to come to the school and speak with me. It was all rather strange. That morning Moro had been kidnapped in Rome—his bodyguards killed in cold blood—and I couldn’t help feeling that something terrible was going to happen. I don’t know, the atmosphere, the complete shock. Nino had heard the news on the radio and had come running in, quite white.” She shook her head. “I was sure there was going to be a coup. Now it sounds rather silly; we’ve grown used to the Red Brigades and their threats, their communiqués. But at the time—just seven weeks ago—it was weird. The horror; those poor men assassinated in daylight.” She gave him another glance of her hazel eyes. “We are both of the same generation, you and I. We’ve been through the war—which for us Italians was a civil war. I felt when Nino came rushing through the door … I felt it was as though everything that Italy’s built up over these last thirty years was just crumbling apart. The end to everything.”

  “A lot of us felt that way.”

  “Ermagni didn’t seem to care. He insisted all he wanted to talk about was his daughter.”

  She stopped and looked out of the window. In the distance, the dome of the cathedral glinted greyly through the rain.

  “He said that he was worried about his daughter. Too timid, he said; too timid towards her own father and too reserved. Reserved—that was the word he used. I tried to tell him he had nothing to worry about, that shyness was quite normal in a girl of her age. He wanted to be reassured but he wouldn’t let himself. Perhaps he felt guilty—I don’t know. He said that she had always been very close to her mother—the marriage was not very successful, I gather. He felt that Anna had become a stranger now that she was living with her grandmother. He said that he couldn’t talk to his own daughter—that she was drawing further and further away from him. And he said that the grandparents were making things worse.”

  “He doesn’t get on well with them.”

  “They had always hoped their daughter would marry a professional person. Apparently she had been to university. Ermagni is not particularly well-educated. It doesn’t require much—excuse me—to be appuntato with the PS.”

  “He is not stupid, either.” A pause. “What did you tell him?”

  “About his daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Commissario, I never had children of my own.” The hint of a sigh as the cardigan lifted slightly. “I did not marry not because I didn’t want to.” She looked at the fingers of her left hand. “There are other reasons that I need not bore you with. However, I have been in this school for twenty years and I have been teaching for twenty-seven. In twenty-seven years, you learn a lot about children—and adults, too. And one of the most important lessons that I have learned is that you cannot change people. You can help them, you can advise them—but you cannot change them if they themselves do not want to change. Change people, force them to be different, to be not what they are but what we want them to be—that is Fascist philosophy,
Fascist thinking. And I hope that you and I have had enough of that.”

  “You told Ermagni that?”

  She smiled, showing brilliant, even teeth. The corners of the hazel eyes wrinkled. “I didn’t talk about Fascism, if that’s what you think. A man who has just lost his wife and who feels that his daughter is drawing away from him—or being drawn away—is not the sort of person who cares about politics. Who comes to visit me on perhaps the blackest day in this country’s history. Fascism was uppermost in my mind. I was convinced that we were about to see the end of the Republic that day, and that the Fascist elements—they call themselves Red Brigades, but of course, they are Fascists, they think and act like Fascists—were bringing about the end of this fragile, lopsided freedom. But what would Ermagni care?”

  “What did you say?”

  “That there were two possibilities. Either Anna would grow out of her shyness in time. That he had to show her affection, show her that he was her father and that he loved her.”

  “He is affectionate by nature.”

  “And that if that didn’t work, quite simply she must be naturally shy and that there was nothing he nor I nor anybody else could do about that. Children are like flowers, Commissario—yes, I would have liked to have children of my own—and you can water them or you can starve them.” She glanced briefly at the potted plants along the sill; rain fell on the large green leaves. “There was no question of Anna being starved. I don’t know her particularly well—unfortunately I get less and less time to teach because of all the administrative work—but I know that she is happy in a happy school. We’ve got our problems, but we are happy here. And I know that she has a father who loves her, grandparents who care for her.”

  “She lives with the grandparents?”

  “Even before the mother’s death she spent a lot of time with her grandmother. The father works long hours—he’s on night work—and he comes home at irregular hours. Towards the end, the mother was in the hospital a lot of the time. She was very ill.” Signorina Belloni looked again at her long hands. “Believe me, there are a lot of children who have both a mother and father and who are not as lucky as Anna. I sometimes catch sight of her in the courtyard. She doesn’t smile a lot but she plays normally with the other children. She is a serious child. And particularly pretty.”