That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (10 page)

A good-looking boy, the Signorino Giuliana, in there: rather lucky with women. Rather. Yes. They pursued him in swarms, buzzing around him; they fell on him, all together, nose-diving like so many flies on a honeycomb. And he was plenty smart too: he had a line, a hypnotizing mirror, a way all his own, so natural and, at the same time, so strange . . . that he charmed you with the greatest of ease. He pretended that he neglected his women, or even that he was bored with them: too many, too easy! and he had something much better in his grasp. He played the smart male, the you-bore-me role, at times, or the haughty; or the young man of high-class family in Via dei Banchi Vecchi, or the clever businessman who didn't have time to waste on chat. Depending. A matter of chance. According to his mood. Matching the suit he happened to have on. Following the inspiration of the moment. Depending on whether he had gold-tipped cigarettes or whether he was out of cigarettes altogether, or whether he had just bought some, but a pack of smelly Nazionali. He played the spoiled child. Sometimes he was as fickle as a weather vane. So he neglected them then, sure, the flirty ones. And that was what made them lose their minds. He granted his favors after much reluctance on his part, after infinite longing and swooning on the part of the victim, drawing out the mad abandon or exhausting any evasive indocility through an erogation of pseudo-symptoms (in reality, suggestions) alternating and contrasting, yesses and nos. He loves me, he loves me not. I want you, I don't want you. And, in any case, to the rare, predestined, and with mysterious deliberation, selected women, he conceded himself: like Divine Grace, the Eternal Health of Jansenius. At times, by contrast, with sudden violence: and to the total confusion of all plausibility. There! Just when everyone had turned the horoscope in a different direction. Boom! He plunged hawk-like on the most resistant hen of the whole coop: as if to punish her (or reward her) with this dazzling deviltry: to rescue her from some recondite weakness in her being, from some ignominy . . . existing prior to this magnifying election. In such case, the gratitude of the magnified could swell to the stars: like her fear, or even perhaps hope, of an encore.

Ingravallo, as you might have expected, even before the arrival of the coroner, in view of the way the events stood, had decided to take Valdarena in. Only later, the morning after in fact, the district attorney's office transformed his state of custody into temporary arrest and arranged for the respective warrant, after the arrest had in effect taken place, and with the subject of the warrant already in Regina Coeli Prison. Until late in the evening the chief and the two experts of the criminological bureau did not desist from their investigations, nor from photographing the deceased. They had brought everything they needed with them. There was no question of telegraphing Balducci, since his return was imminent, nor alerting the various police stations to have him traced: Milan, Padua, even Bologna, because he had to go also to Padua. Cristoforo, the widow Menegazzi, who couldn't stop cooing over the disaster, Bottafavi, Signora Manuela and her hubby, the one from the milk company, offered to go and meet him in a body at the station; he must be spared a shock, prepared in some way. The relatives? A telephone call at noon . . .

The relatives were officially "advised of the event" late in the evening, but Ingravallo, already that morning, had forbidden the men to let them in. Renewed investigation and precise autoptic observation both by the head man Don Ciccio and by Sergeant Valiani . . . well, to tell you the truth, they didn't amount to much. Oh, of course, some signs of theft. But no weapon was found. Still various drawers and such, when you looked in them, told you that there was something up. They apparently weren't so innocent, as they looked from outside. Weapons, no. And no clues to any, except for the red drops on the floor, and that blood . . . tracked by heels. Near the sink, in the kitchen, the tiled floor was wet, with water. A "very sharp" and completely missing knife was probably the instrument most capable of operating in that way. The drops, rather than from any murdering hand, seemed to have dropped from the knife itself. Black they were, now. The unexpected flash, the cutting edge, the brief sharpness of a blade. In her: alarm. Certainly he had first struck all of a sudden, then worked on the throat, insisting, and on the trachea, with ferocious confidence. The "struggle," if one had taken place, can have been no more than a wretched jerk, on the part of the victim, a glance, terrified and immediately imploring, the hint of a movement: a hand barely raised, white, to avert the horror, to clasp at the hairy wrist, the black, implacable hand of the homicide, his left, which already dug its nails into her face and threw back her head to free the throat further, to bare it entirely, helpless against the gleam of the blade, which the right hand had now produced, to wound, to kill.

A waxen hand relaxed, fell back . . . when the knife was already in Liliana's breath, tearing, ripping her trachea; and the blood, when she inhaled, flowed down into her lungs: and her breath gurgled out, coughing, in that torture, and it looked like so many bubbles of red soap: and the carotid, the jugular, spurted like two pumps from a well, plop, plop, half a yard away. Her breath, her last, sideways, in bubbles, in that horrid purple of her life: and she felt the blood in her mouth, and she saw those eyes, no longer human, on the wound: there was still work to be done: another blow: the eyes! of the endless beast. The unsuspected ferocity of the world ... was revealed to her all of a sudden . . . brief years! But a spasm was depriving her of sensation, annihilating memory, life. A sweetish, tepid savor of night.

The hands, stark white, with their delicate nails, periwinkle color now, revealed no cuts: she hadn't been able, hadn't dared grasp the cutter, arrest the slaughterer's determination. She had submitted to the slaughterer. The face and the nose seemed scratched, here and there, in the weariness and pallor of death, as if the hatred had surpassed death itself. The fingers were stripped of rings; the wedding ring had vanished. Nor did it occur to anyone, then, to impute its disappearance to the Fatherland.
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The knife had done its job. Liliana! Liliana! To Don Ciccio it was as if the world's every aspect were darkened, all the world's gentility.

The man from the criminological bureau said a razor was out of the question, because it makes a neater cut, more superficial, he opined, and in general, in such cases multiple cuts are required; since it has no sharp tip, and it can't be used with such violence. Violence? Yes, the wound was deep, all right, a horrible thing: it had hacked away half the neck, just about. In the dining room, no, no clue ... except for the blood. And, after looking around the other rooms: nothing. Only more blood: clear traces in the kitchen sink: diluted, until it looked like frog's blood: and many scarlet, or now black, drops on the floor, round and radiated, as blood characteristically behaves when you let it drip on the ground: like sections of asteroids. Those horrible drops indicated an obvious itinerary: from the abandoned encumbrance of the body, the still-tepid evidence of the deceased . . . Liliana! to the kitchen sink, to the chill, the ablutions: the chill which absolves us of all memory. Many drops in the dining room, there, of which five or perhaps more were contiguous to that other blood, to that mess, the stains and the largest pool, from which they tracked it all around with their shoes, those stupid louts. Many drops in the hall, a little smaller, and many in the kitchen: and some rubbed off, as if to erase them with the sole to keep them from being seen on the white, hexagonal tiles. The men had a go at the furniture: eleven drawers and cupboards, closets and sideboards they couldn't open. Giuliano, in the living room, was guarded by two policemen. Cristo-foro had brought some sandwiches and a couple of oranges. All these big men kept wandering and tramping around the house. It jangled the nerves. Don Ciccio sat down, brokenhearted, in the vestibule, waiting for the magistrate. Then he went back in there again: he looked, as if in farewell, at the poor creature over whom the photographers were arguing in whispers, taking care not to stain themselves or their traps, their bulbs, screens, wires, tripods, their big box cameras. They had already discovered two light plugs behind two armchairs, and had already blown a fuse two or three times, one of the three fuses of the apartment. They decided to use magnesium. They fiddled around like two sinister angels, full of a desire not to attract attention, above that terrifying weariness: a cold, poor derelict, now, of the world's evil. They buzzed around like flies, maneuvering those wires, snapping the shutters, agreeing in a whisper on steps, trying to keep from setting the whole kit and kaboodle on fire—these were the first hum of eternity over her opaque senses, that body of a woman which no longer possessed modesty or memory. They operated on the "victim" with no regard for her suffering, and unable to spare her ignominy. The beauty, the clothing, the spent flesh of Liliana were there: the sweet body, still clothed from their gaze. In the obscenity of that involuntary pose—whose motives, beyond doubt, were the skirt lifted back for the outrage, the parted legs, and above them, and the swell and furrow of voluptuousness to inflame the weak (and those sunken eyes, horribly open on to the void, fixed on an inane object, the sideboard)—death seemed to Don Ciccio an extreme decompounding of possibles, an unfocusing of interdependent ideas, formerly harmonized in one person. Like the dissolving of a unity which cannot hold out any longer, the sudden collapse of relationships, of all ties with organizing reality.

The sweet pallor of her face, so white in the opaline dreams of the evening, had given way through funereal modulations to a cyanosed tone, a faded periwinkle: as if hate and outrage had been too harsh, when encountered, for the tender flower of the being, of the soul. Shudders ran down his spine. He tried to reflect. He was sweating again.

From his pocket, mechanically, he took the tram ticket: from the right pocket of his jacket, where he had placed it that morning, and where it still rested, after all the day's grief: with half a cigarette and with a few crumbs: the elongated greenish-blue ticket of the Tranvie dei Castelli, with the hole at the 13th, and another hole, or tear, at Torraccio. He turned it over, then turned it back again. He went into the vestibule, into the master bedroom. He flung himself down in a chair, worn out.

He pondered, trying to put together the pieces of the evidence—disconnected as they were—to set in order the moments, the worn moments of the sequence, of the time that had been lacerated, dead. First of all: the two messes were to be connected, weren't they? The incredible burglary of that poor old parrot, la Menegazzi, that woman . . . that collection of spinach stains: and this horror, here. Same building, same floor. And yet . . . It seemed impossible. Three days apart?

His reason . . . told him that the two crimes had nothing in common. The first, well, a "daring" burglary, performed by a criminal very well-informed, if not personally acquainted with the customs and ways of number two hundred and nineteen, stairway A. "Stairway A, stairway A," he grumbled to himself, swaying his head imperceptibly, curly and black: staring at a point on the floor, his hands clasped, his elbows on his knees: "a burglary, all right, homemade."

With that unfindable grocer's boy as informer: hah, or as lookout. More likely lookout, since la Menegazzi, the old fool, hadn't the slightest idea: which means, when you come right down to it, still an accomplice. And with that flat toy trumpet, the Commendatore of the Economy, who had truffles delivered to him. "Commendatore Angeloni!" he sighed, with a certain emphasis. "He has a little weakness for artichokes. We'll have to look into that. And the country ham from Via Panisperna is another weakness. Down at the corner of Via dei Serpenti."

And the ring at the Balducci door? A mistake, surely. Or an alternative? Or a precaution? Rewarded with silence? In any case—this much was clear—a thief. Armed robbery, breaking and entering . . .

This other mess, for God's sake, was enough to drive you crazy! Who ever saw such a thing? Still, the robbery motive couldn't be overlooked here, either, not at all, not till Balducci got back. And then . . . then what? The drawers would tell their story. Yes, but . . . this was a different thing. The manner of the crime, that poor encumbrance in there, those eyes, the horrible wound: a motive, perhaps, a murkier one. That skirt . . . thrown back like that, as if by a gust of wind: a hot, greedy gust, blowing from Hell. Summoned by a rage, by such contempt, only the gates of Hell could have granted it passage. The murder "seemed, at this stage of the investigations, a crime of passion." Rape? Desire? Vengeance?

His reason told him to study the two cases separately, to get the feel of them, each on its own. The double number doesn't come up so rarely on the Naples or Bari lottery, and also in Rome it's frequent enough, so even here in the merulanian street, in this stingy phalanstery of two hundred and nineteen stuffed with gold, another fine double combination could turn up. The unwanted double of a pair of crimes. Bang. Bang. Without any connection other than the topical, that is the external, cause: the great fame of the sharks, and their evil gold. A fame omnipresent in the San Giovanni neighborhood, from Porta Maggiore to the Celian, to the ancient cloaca-swamp, the Suburra: where, however, the wine is icy, in summer. He looked at the ticket, again. He turned it over, twice. He scratched his nose lightly (extending his mouth like a tuber) with the thumbnail of his right hand, the back of the nail: a gesture habitual with him, and one of remarkable refinement.

      
III

T
HE next morning the newspapers reported the event more fully. It was Friday. The reporters and the telephone had been a nuisance all evening: both in Via Merulana and over at Santo Stefano. So, the next morning, the pack was in full cry: "Ghastly Crime in Via Merulana," shouted the newsboys, with their bundles knocking against people's knees: until quarter to twelve. In the local news, inside the paper, a bold headline over two columns: but then, sober and quite detached, the report itself: a terse little column, and ten lines in the continued column, "the investigation is being relentlessly pursued"; and a few other words, filler of purest New-Order style. The good old days were past.. . when for pinching a maid's bottom in Piazza Vittorio there was half a page of slobbering. The moralization of the Urbs and of all Italy, the concept of greater civil austerity, was then making its way. You might have said, in fact, that it was making great strides. Crimes and suggestive stories had abandoned forever the Ausonian land, like a bad dream dissolving. Robberies, stabbings, whorings, pimpings, burglary, cocaine, vitriol, arsenic bought for poisoning rats, abortions
manu armata,
feats of pimps and cardsharps, youngsters who make a woman pay for their drinks—why, what are you thinking of?—the Ausonian land didn't even remember the meaning of such things.

Relics of an age dissolved into the void, with its frivolities, and its cliches, and its condoms, and its Masonic screwing around. The knife, in those years—the dear old knife beloved of every cowardly killer and every smalltime gangster, the criminals and the traitors, the weapon of the tortuous alleyways, the pissed-on back streets—seemed truly to have vanished from the scene, never to return: except on the paunches of the new, funereal heroes, where it was now displayed, gloriously drawn out, a nickel-plated, or even silver-plated, spare genital. Now the new vigor was in power, of Lantern Jaw, the bowler-hatted Death's Head, the Emir with black fez, and with plume, and the new chastity of Baroness Malacianca-Fasulli, the new law of the rods tied in a
fascio.
Who would ever believe there were thieves, now, in Rome? With that humorless turkey cock in Palazzo Chigi? With Federzoni, who wanted to clap in jail all the neckers from the Lungotevere? Or everybody who did some kissing in the movies? All the randy dogs of the Lungara? With a Milanese Pope, and a Holy Year just two years before? And with the fresh brides and grooms? With the fresh chickens crowing all over Rome?
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Long files of black-dressed women, having rented the ritual black veil in Borgo Pio, in Piazza Rusticucci, or Borgo Vecchio, trooped under the colonnade, swooned at Porta Angelica, and then through the gates of Sant'Anna, to go and receive the apostolic benediction from Pope Ratti, a Milanese of good background, from Saronno, a tough sort, the kind who get buildings built. As they waited to be formed into lines and led, after forty flights of steps, into the throne room, into the presence of the great Pope and mountain climber. All this to give you the idea that the Capital now incarnated, absolutely beyond any doubt, the city of the seven candelabra of the seven virtues: the city that had been invoked, through long millennia, by all Rome's poets, inquisitors, moralists and utopists, Cola not excepted (though hanged). Fat, he was.
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In the streets of Rome not a whore was to be seen, at least not the kind with licenses. With the sweet thought of the Holy Year, Federzoni had confiscated the whole lot of them. The Marchesa Licker was off at Capri, or in Cortina, or had gone to Japan for a little trip.

                                  *** *** ***

"Sonovabitch . . ." grumbled Don Ciccio, clenching his teeth: they were the teeth of a bulldog, and a cuisine in which garlic was prominent kept them a gleaming white. His smartest men were being taken from him, one by one, sent to swell the ranks of that other squad, the political. And meanwhile he sat there snorting through papers.

Now it was time to think of Mister Good-Looking, seriously, too. Good-looking. Yes, he was that, all right. And hard up for cash.

He seemed to remember a sentence of Balducci's, another evening at the Cantinone in Albano; it had issued forth with benign indulgence from that great ruddy face, while he was talking about a female cousin. "Women, of course, when they're in love . . ." He had pulled out his cigarette case. "... don't bother about petty details; they're generous-minded then." He had lighted Ingravallo's cigarette, then his own. "They're open-handed, not counting the change." Then and there Ingravallo hadn't paid much attention: a typically noble, after-dinner opinion. With him, Ingravallo, Doctor Francesco, to tell the truth, no woman had ever been open-handed, except perhaps, yes the poor signora herself: generous with her kindness, her goodness, a charming ... inspiration. In her honor, once (he blushed) he had ventured to write ... a sonnet. But he couldn't make all the rhymes come out right. The verses, however, even Professor Cammaruta had found perfect. "They're open-handed, oh yes, open-handed." Now, he felt he should convalidate that rather generic insinuation: perhaps, sure, women. "Don Ciccio! What if she had a private fund?" His thoughts were pursuing some anger, some vindictive bitterness. "Do they give money, along with all the rest?" No, no. He wanted to dispel this hypothesis. There were too many indications, no, Liliana Balducci ... no, no, she wasn't in love with her cousin. In love? What're you talking about? Yes, to be sure, she had looked at him, openly pleased, that time, smiling at him, but. . . considering him a fine specimen of the family stock, the way you might smile at a brother. A young man, now he could understand, a young man who was a credit to them all; descended from the same grandfather, or rather, for him, great-grandfather. She, poor Liliana, was a cousin of his father. She had lost father and mother. Her husband was all she had left in the world. Hah! And Giuliano ... a fine chip, struck smartly, from the same old block. Perhaps . . . yes, of course, they had played together as children, as cousins. The genealogy (Don Ciccio consulted a scrap of paper) had been compiled by Pompeo. "Her aunt, Aunt Marietta, wife of Uncle Cesare, was the grandmother of Giuliano. They grew up together, you might say. So with Giuliano, she always spoke like a sister. An older sister."

"How come she was a Valdarena, too, before she got married?"

"How? It's because her father and Giuliano's grandfather, Uncle Cesare, were brothers."

"Well, why drag this Marietta on me then? If they're related, it's through the men of the family, the two fathers . . ."

"Right!"

"Right, my ass! You've got to get this Aunt Marietta off my back now."

"She's the one that brought the signora up, when her mother died."

Ingravallo remembered, in fact, that Balducci had told him this: Liliana, when still a child, had lost her mother. Complications following childbirth, her second. And the baby, too! And so, and so . . . Then, that evening . . . that evening she had spoken to her cousin with that admiring indulgence, that touch of envy women always betray when they look at handsome young men ... too sought-after by their rivals. And that was all there was to it. "Ah! these women!"

It was one o'clock. He collected statements and reports, stacked the dossiers. In despair, he got up and went out.

"And yet," he was thinking, "Valdarena, the cousin . . . he was the one who gave the alarm. Is this a sign ... an unmistakable sign ... of innocence? Or at least, of an easy conscience. Conscience! But what about the cuff of his shirt? No, the whole thing wouldn't come clear. The story of that caress sounded made-up to him. Caress a dead woman! Or else . . . There are murky moments in the slow drip-drip of the hours: the hours of puberty. Evil crops up unexpectedly in sudden, horrible shards from beneath the tegument, from beneath the skin of gossip: a fine accountant's diploma, then a university degree. From beneath the covering of decent appearances, like a stone, it breaks the ground, and you can't even see it: like the dark hardness of the mountain, in a green field.

The handsome Giuliano! Too upset, he had seemed, too nervous, and too depressed, at the same time. He was on the verge of breaking down. He couldn't manage to maintain the proper composure. "How can you be so calm?" Don Ciccio had asked him: it was a trap. Anything but calm. "They're open-handed; they don't count the change. Ah!"

Liliana Balducci was very rich, Liliana Balducci nee Valdarena. She had money of her own and, to some extent, she was mistress of it. An only child. And her father had had a gift for coining money. Even Doctor Fumi, in the vast din of this whole symphony, had picked out the theme, "the motive," the Leitmotif.

"Her old man knew his onions, all right. During the war, and during the post-war, too. He was a real, a no-bones-about-it shark. He had died, too, a couple of years ago, some time after the daughter got married. The apartment in Via Merulana was his property. Business deals, partnerships, investments here, there and everywhere. Owner of this, part-owner of that. Lending money on mortgages, mortgaging to buy up. He must have been a real son of a bitch." He accompanied this sermon with some twirls of his right hand. Liliana had referred vaguely to her father's fortune, on San Francesco's day, during that happy meal.

As for the Valdarena relatives, Doctor Fumi had taken care of them. First Pompeo went to call: a long tramp it was, and no results. Then the sergeant: nothing. Finally the relatives themselves came to see Fumi. So he had given them the full treatment; he had handled them, in his way, touching them first here, then there, with great gentleness, swaying his head as if he were reciting a poem: with those eyes, with that voice of his, Fumi, if he had wanted, could have been a five-star criminal lawyer! A real tear-jerker!

Giuliano's mother no longer lived in Rome: a handsome woman, they said. Pompeo had codified the registerial information that had emerged relative to the relatives. A native talent, refined by excellent practice in the art and by the necessity for saving time, for abbreviating the long chains of procedural syllogisms, eye, ear and nose, at the service of the old gray matter, assisted by an occasional roast-beef sandwich, had made him a master of delineating with a few strokes, a couple of hard and fruitful knocks, the most entangled family trees of the whole repertory. And with the most edifying details.

When it came to women, especially, and exploiters of women, love, lovers, true marriages and false ones, cuckoldom and counter-cuckoldom, Pompeo was supreme, you might say. Certain smart-ass bigamists or polygamists, with all their troubles and poly-troubles, and with all the mess of the respective kids whom they sort of wanted sometimes and then maybe didn't want—well, in all that muck, he slipped in and out with the ease of a taxi driver. His necessary association with the underworld, his abbreviated investigation, obtained by his intuition of those "family status" questions, had brought him to such a pass that, on a moment's notice, he could give you all the "cohabitations," let's say, from Via Capo d'Africa to Via Frangipani, and as far as Piazza degli Zingari, at Via dei Capocci and Vicolo Ciancaleoni; and then down, past Piazza Montanara —not even worth mentioning—to Via di Monte Caprino, and Via Bucimazza and Via dei Fienili: the things that man knew! Or the neighborhood of Palazzo Pio, that other pesthole, and in all those alleyways behind Sant'Andrea della Valle, Piazza Grottapinta, Via di Ferro, and the Vicolo delle Grotte del Teatro: and maybe even Piazza Pollarola, even though the people there are classy, they still have some funny additions to the household, or a character or two around who isn't in the police's good graces. In those areas, in fact, he kept his trumps. There, he knew by heart all the couples, all their kith and kin, and all the ramifications that they sprung in the spring, whether the ramifications came in the shape of horns, or whether they appeared farther down on the body: the double couples, and the triple, the royal flushes, in all the possible combinations: birth, life, death, and distinguishing marks. He knew the dumps they rented, and when they moved out of one to go into another, the double rooms with kitchen privileges, the closets, the rooms let by the hour, the sofas and even the couches, with every flea that lives in them, individually.

So for Pompeo the Valdarena tribe was child's play. Giuliano's mother had left Rome to live elsewhere. Having married a second time, a certain accountant named Carlo Ricco of the Moda Italiana, she lived with the latter in Turin. The information on the children was good: they went to school and studied. Her classy relatives—well, it seemed she had "been somewhat cast off by them"; and they had made no effort, from Turin: but on the other hand "she had become estranged from her mother-in-law," or rather her "in-laws," as they were called, en masse: leaving her son to his grandmother. When you came right down to it, everybody was really satisfied, after all the rows and tears: because when she doesn't have cash, the best job a widow can find is to dig herself up another man who'll marry her. Giuliano had maybe been a little depressed and jealous of his mother, for a while he seemed kind of grumpy with everybody: then, as he grew up and developed, little by little, he had come around and seen reason: his mother was young and beautiful. And the depression of a kid like him... He had soon found people who pulled him out of it.

His grandmother spoiled him rotten: this grandmother who was Liliana's Aunt Marietta.

Well, and then what? Things all started going wrong at once. Giuliano's mother, seven or eight months ago, was hospitalized in Bologna, stuck in a bed at San Michele in Bosco: an automobile accident, while she was on her way to Rome to visit the relatives—that's how much she disliked them, poor woman! They'd come by way of Milan. Both legs smashed: it was a miracle that she had saved her skin at all. There, traction and counter-traction, weights attached to one foot and to the other. And machinery of every shape and kind. For this reason, too, the signorino was a little dazed, and had been for some while: he was worried about his mother. And the womenfolk, all over him, sympathizing, poor boy! Going out of their way to see if they couldn't console him.