Black August Page 7

  Trotti shook hands without enthusiasm.

  “You would like something to drink, perhaps?” As an afterthought, he added, nodding briskly, “The Finanza was here several months ago. We reached a very satisfactory agreement.” More nodding. “A very satisfactory agreement. I am sure that along the corridors of power there can no longer be dissatisfaction with my humble establishment.”

  “It’s about one of your patients,” Trotti said.

  Carnecine looked down, then up again, his face blank. “One of our guests?” The eyes were intelligent and dark.

  “A purely personal enquiry.”

  Carnecine nodded. “Gentlemen, please be seated. You’re most welcome. Please be seated.” He nodded his small head repeatedly, like a plastic puppy at the rear window of a car, while the deep-set eyes remained on Trotti, assessing him. “A vermouth perhaps? I know that the officers from the Finanza have no longer any cause to be unhappy about the Casa Patrizia.”

  Trotti took the second armchair. Pisanelli remained standing.

  “Not always very easy to run a home for . . .”

  “For what, Signor Direttore?”

  “A personal enquiry, you say?” Carnecine went to a cupboard and took out a sticky, half-empty bottle of Cynar. Like a bottle in a bar, it had a doser fixed within the cork. Even with his back towards Trotti, Carnecine continued to nod. He placed three glasses on a tray, took ice cubes from a refrigerator that was recessed into a bookcase, and served the drinks.

  Pisanelli drank fast, the ice cubes rattling against his teeth.

  “This is a home for old people?”

  “You know, Commissario . . .” A perplexed smile.

  “Commissario Trotti.”

  “You know, Commissario, that here in Italy, there is no such thing as a mental asylum.” He raised his narrow shoulders, and Trotti noticed that the white shirt was grubby at the collar and sleeves. The fingernails were bitten and the knuckles were not very clean. “We live in a backward country. A backward country which nonetheless has all the pretensions of the West and of advanced western thinking. Italy.” He clicked his tongue. “Here in the north, we don’t have enough beds in our hospitals for the sick and the lame. So you can just imagine what things are like in Naples or Reggio Calabria. And yet knowing that, our legislators—whom we have voted into power, Commissario—our legislators think they can abolish the very concept of the mental asylum.” He shrugged. “You can’t abolish the weak and the feeble. Absurd. You can leave them to fend for themselves, you can turn them out into the street. You can say there is no problem. But they won’t disappear. There is no magic wand, the problem isn’t going to go away.”

  Pisanelli asked, “You vote Lega Lombarda?”

  The man raised his eyebrows before continuing. “We’re richer than the English, we export more than the French—and we are totally incapable of looking after our own people.” He drank. “To compare Italy with the third world is merely to insult the third world.” He hastily finished his drink. “We are in Colombia or Uruguay. A banana republic that doesn’t grow bananas and isn’t a republic. And all we can worry about is the World Cup. We don’t need new football stadiums—we need hospitals.”

  “And private clinics,” Pisanelli said.

  “Our city is special.” Carnecine gestured vaguely towards the west. “Everybody tells us so. We are the Austrians of the north—low unemployment, schools and competent teachers for our children. We like to compare our ancient university with Cambridge in England.” He snorted. “Yet in our proud, hard-working and wonderful city, the Torre Civica was standing for a millennium. And it fell over. Bang. It fell over, just like that, killing four people including two young girls.”

  “Nobody could know it was going to fall.”

  “Commissario.” Carnecine held up a hand. “We let it collapse. Believe me. You think the new stadiums are going to collapse?” He shook his head. “Too much Mafia money has been invested in them. But a historic monument, a priceless, irreplaceable element of our patrimony. What sort of investment is that for the politicians and the developers? We just don’t care. Will Inter win the Scudo? Why didn’t Italy win the Mondiali? We don’t care about the past, about our history. There is no money in history, there is no profit. The Torre Civica—who cares about the Torre Civica? Perhaps they’re going to build a shopping mall in its place. After all, in our city, the priests and the Communists are now in charge together. Strange bedfellows.” He slapped his thigh. “At first sight, you wouldn’t think the Communists and the Christian Democrats had anything in common. But the reason of profit, of patronage, of power brokering is more powerful than morals, than human values.” He glanced at Pisanelli. “Your young friend asks me if I vote Lega Lombarda. The answer is yes. I am not a racist. I have nothing against the southerners. But I have a lot against the south. The southern way of doing things—the Mafia way, the Camorra way. The way that all the other parties, the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, even the Communists have learned to adopt—to their advantage. They have brought Calabria and Sicily to Lombardy, they have turned Milan into Palermo.”

  Trotti nodded absentmindedly. “This is a private establishment, Signor Carnecine?”

  Carnecine raised his shoulders. “Unfortunately we don’t get any help, either from the Ministry or from the Region.”

  “Unfortunately,” Trotti repeated.

  Carnecine’s pink tongue licked the edge of his glass. With his eyes on Trotti he then placed the glass back on the tray. “But that doesn’t stop people from growing old. It is no crime when age begins to play tricks with the mind. We’re all fragile in one way or another. Some people are unfortunately more fragile than others. They need attention, they need care, they need help. Above all, they need love.”

  “Of course,” Pisanelli said.

  Carnecine gave Pisanelli a smile. The eyes remained lucid and questioning. “Somebody must look after them. Ours has fast become an urban society. The family no longer exists as it used to, twenty, thirty years ago. Children leave their parents and go to work in the cities—and there’s no room for the unproductive in modern society. The old, the feeble. We’re like the Eskimos, we put our old and weak out to die.” He paused. “A personal enquiry?”

  “This isn’t a religious foundation?”

  “Some of the aides are nuns.” Carnecine shook his head sadly. “But the Church—once the backbone of our society—can no longer find young men and women willing to sacrifice themselves in the service of a greater good.” He placed his hands on the desk—short fingers and irregular, bitten nails. He continued to nod. “We live in a society where there’s no alternative to Mammon. Money, Commissario—money is the only sure form of intercourse at this end of the twentieth century.”

  There were two photographs on the wall, one of the Pope, the other of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

  “Understaffed and overworked.” He nodded, his eyes on his ungainly hands. “You come, however, at a time when many of our guests are away; in a few days it will be Ferragosto—August is a time of the year when families can break out of the infernal routine of work and for a few precious weeks, look after their dear ones. Be with them, cherish them, give them the love that they need.”

  (The man’s tone and manner reminded Trotti of Buonarese’s uncle, a priest at the Cremona oratory in the early years of the war. For reasons that were never made clear, the priest was later defrocked and went on to make a fortune in the years of reconstruction, running a fleet of trucks between Cremona and Bologna. As for Buonarese, he went into politics and married a Swedish cover girl half his age.)

  “Signorina Belloni,” Trotti said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Maria Cristina Belloni. I’d like to have a few words with her.”

  The director sat back in his armchair. He looked at Trotti for a few moments. Then he lifted the receiver from its cradle and
spoke in a soft but imperative voice.

  Through the windows, evening was coming to the countryside.

  Somewhere a train hooted, one of the slow commuter trains along a rural branch line. The type of brown, ageless commuter train from Milan that was stuffy and rancid with tobacco smoke in winter, hot and almost empty in August. On the horizon, in a sea of rice fields, a distant church pointed its spire towards the unchanging Lombardy sky.

  Swallows darted low and fast beyond the window; perhaps it was at last going to rain.

  A long row of plane trees, like immobile soldiers, stood on the banks of the Po.

  Carnecine put down the phone and looked at Trotti. “If you can wait a few moments.” He smiled, nodding. “I believe Signorina Belloni is one of our guests who goes out to work during the week. Little jobs in Garlasco—it gives them a sense of responsibility—and it gives them some pocket money. But we have to be careful, of course. Many—indeed too many—of the residents here are taking treatment.”

  “You don’t like the drugs?” It was Pisanelli who spoke.

  Carnecine shrugged. “Most of our guests are on some form of medication—and, of course, it often blunts the sharpness of their minds. But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “If a partial sedation can give to some of our residents a semblance of a normal existence, who am I to complain? The problem is”—Carnecine smiled—“that you can never be sure of the long-term effects of the medication.”

  “You are a doctor?” Pisanelli asked.

  A slight hesitation before Carnecine shook his head. “There’s always a doctor on the premises during the day. I have two doctors on a rota basis. It’s they who prescribe the medicines to be given.”

  “And at night?”

  “At night, we use the local emergency number.”

  Pisanelli took a second glass of Cynar which Carnecine served him, the obsequious smile on his nodding head.

  A knock on the door.

  The girl with the smudged lipstick entered, her shoulders hunched. She held a green register in her hand, a finger between the pages. She opened the register on the desk in front of the director. She whispered in his ear while her dark eyes peeped up surreptitiously at Pisanelli.

  Pisanelli, holding the glass to his chest, grinned back.

  Carnecine stood up. “I see.”

  Trotti said, “We will be able to speak to Signorina Belloni?”

  The small man nodded rapidly. “I don’t think I can help you, Signor Commissario. Signorina Belloni left here on July nineteenth for a month’s holiday. She’ll be with her sister in the city until the second week in September. With her sister, Signorina Belloni, Rosanna.”

  18: Leonardo Da Vinci

  Trotti, unlike Pisanelli, was wearing his seat belt.

  “We could go for a pizza.”

  Trotti replied, “I had a big lunch.”

  “I was intending to go to the cinema.”

  “Do as you please, Pisanelli.”

  “To go to the cinema with my girlfriend.”

  “Whatever happened to the psychiatrist you were engaged to, Pisanelli?”

  By the time they got back to the city, it was late evening. The street lamps had come on and the car ran softly along the broad avenues.

  “Psychiatrist? I don’t remember any psychiatrist.”

  In viale Alessandro Brambilla, Trotti told Pisanelli to stop. He unbuckled the belt and got out of the car.

  A tobacconist’s was open, throwing its white neon light on to the dusty pavement. Trotti entered, nodded to the buxom woman behind the counter and asked for four packets of boiled sweets. The woman sat beside a fan whose grill was clogged with filaments of dust. She had small, bright eyes; a deep line separated the two freckled breasts that were only partly hidden behind the plunging neck of a cardigan. Trotti took two packets of aniseed-flavored sweets and another two packets of cherry from the plastic stand beside the rack of old postcards—Piazza Duomo with the civic tower still intact.

  The woman tried to refuse the five thousand lire note, pushing the money away with a pale, pudgy hand—Trotti had helped her husband get a job after a hunting accident in 1979—but Trotti insisted, allowing a harshness into his voice. “You’re very kind, Signora Belcredi, but I must pay.”

  “Ah, Commissario Trotti, you are too proud.”

  “You’d better give me a receipt—just in case the Finanza is outside, waiting to pounce.”

  She laughed and rang up three thousand lire on the cash register. She gave him his change and the receipt.

  “Buona sera, signora,” Trotti said, stepping out into the street. He unwrapped a cherry sweet and popped it into his mouth. Like an addict getting a fix, Trotti seemed to relax. He smiled at Pisanelli as he climbed back into the car. “You can drop me off in via Mantova. And then you can take your psychiatrist to the cinema. Or to her couch.”

  “Number six via Mantova, Commissario?”

  The center of the city had been closed to through traffic for over ten years. At the time of its inauguration, people had talked proudly about the biggest pedestrian zone in Europe. Now they were more realistic; they knew that there were times of the day when the Vigili Urbani turned a blind eye to cars in the restricted zone. And since most people had a friend in the city hall, there were more parking permits issued for the city center than there were inhabitants.

  In a recent referendum, people had voted for an extension to the pedestrian zone. As yet the Christian Democrat and Communist city fathers had done nothing.

  Theoretically there were no restrictions of movement for a police vehicle. However, Pisanelli had to take a detour.

  “Nice to be back in the pedestrian zone,” Pisanelli said.

  Since the destruction of the Torre Civica, both the City and the Ministry of the Environment had rushed to protect the remaining medieval towers. The three towers behind the university in Piazza Leonardo da Vinci had been hurriedly inspected and even more hurriedly bolstered with scaffolding. Similar intervention had occurred elsewhere. Many citizens, much to their surprise, discovered that humdrum houses and even some shops were in fact part of other, unnoticed towers that had been transformed over the centuries into something more practical.

  “When Mariani introduced pedestrianization,” Trotti said, almost to himself, “I thought that I would be getting fit, cycling everywhere on my Ganna.”

  “We Italians are victims of our own rhetoric.”

  “You’ve already said that. Like an old man, Pisa, you’re beginning to repeat everything.”

  “Fortunately, it doesn’t take us too long to see through the myths of our own creation.”

  Trotti crunched the sweet between his teeth. “I liked Rosanna—I liked her a lot.”

  Pisanelli glanced at him. “And now you’re going to find her murderer?”

  “That’s what Boatti wants.”

  “You’re going to look for her murderer tonight and I’m going to have to go without supper, miss my date and spend another exciting evening having to put up with the synthetic smell of your cherry cough sweets.”

  “There’ll always be another psychiatrist, Pisanelli.”

  Pisanelli turned into via Mantova—a small, cobbled street with high walls on either side, closed shutters in the tall, narrow buildings and dark bats fluttering about the rooftops.

  “Another psychiatrist. But there won’t always be another Commissario Trotti.” Pisanelli laughed to himself, as he peered through the car window, looking at the house numbers.

  “You enjoy being a cop, tenente. And what better excuse than to say you’re working late with your obsessive boss, the infamous Commissario Trotti?”

  Pisanelli braked and cut the motor. “Number six via Mantova.”

  They got out of the car; the evening air smelled of lime trees and petrol fumes. The mosquitoes h
ad returned to the city after a long, hot day in the rice fields. Pisanelli said, “Commissario, there never was any psychiatrist—she was a psychiatric nurse and she was from Mortara. A happily married woman for the last three years. Her husband sells shoes in Vigevano.”

  There were no lights on in number six.

  “She got fed up with waiting for me.”

  The small switch in the wall was grubby with the passage of dirty fingers.

  “A wise girl, Pisanelli.” Trotti pressed the bell. They could hear a distant ringing. Nobody came to the brown, wooden door.

  Putting another cherry sweet in his mouth, Trotti glanced at Pisanelli.

  Pisanelli nodded sadly. “I think I’m going to miss my date.”

  19: Bugs

  There were steps leading up to the narrow door and the key had been slipped over the coarse concrete, behind a row of neglected potted plants. The lock turned noisily and Trotti let himself into the corridor. There was a light. He turned the rotary switch. Overhead, a single bulb glowed dully beneath its enamel shade.

  Out of the street, the air was cool. The thick-walled houses of Lombardy had been built to resist both the cold winter and the oppressive, windless heat of summer of the Po valley.

  Pisanelli and Trotti found themselves at the foot of the stairs.

  There was a brown wooden door to their right, with a small iron handle and long, rusted hinges.

  “Rosanna’s place. She used to live here with her mother. Maria Cristina lives upstairs,” Trotti whispered.