Big Italy (18 page)

“See what I mean, commissario?”

“Perhaps I’m curious, perhaps I just want to know about other people’s lives.”

Negri sat back and swilled noisily at the can of beer. Then he spoke. “Gennaro Maluccio wrote several articles last year. The beginning of 1992, just before the Chiesa affair and the start of Tangentopoli. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but a few weeks later di Pietro and his pool of judges started making their arrests. Arresting the same people that Gennaro Maluccio had been talking to.”

“The articles were published?”

Negri slowly nodded his head and Trotti wondered whether the man was wearing a wig.

“Maluccio was looking into racketeering. He was very Lega Lombarda at the time—it was before the Lega went the way of all political parties. He wanted to show the effects of l’Infiltrazione mafiosa in the North.”

“And Turellini?”

“That was nearly two years ago. Before Craxi and Andreotti and all our other politicians became our public whipping boys.” An amused shrug. “Now people are just getting sick of Tangentopoli. Sick because nobody’s innocent. The difference between the politicians and the rest of us is a difference of quantity, not quality. A year ago l’Infiltrazione mafiosa would sell copies. Not any longer. Nobody’s safe, everybody’s got a skeleton in some cupboard. You, me, the cleaning woman, the pizzaiolo. Tangentopoli doesn’t sell copies anymore.”

“What sells copies now?”

“Murder. Murder and violence within the family. Murder that leaves the police stumped. Murder that can keep new copy coming in, week in, week out.” Negri began to scratch his head and Trotti had the impression the scalp moved. “Remember last summer? Ten, twelve unrelated murders of women. The papers for a couple of weeks in August would scarcely talk about anything else. Nearly four thousand murders a year in Italy—and ten women are an infinitesimal percentage. Yet when people are fed up with Somalia and Bosnia, with Tangentopoli and more taxes, with the apparatchiks in the RAI, the corpse of some mutilated Czech whore in Torre del Lago’s strangely reassuring.
Plus ça change.
”

“You think there’s any connection between Turellini and Gennaro Maluccio’s arrest?”

“I’m not paid to think.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You’re the policeman, Trotti. If you want to know why Gennaro Maluccio’s in jail, why don’t you and your literary acolyte in the classy checkered shirt go to Alessandria and ask your friends in the Questura? Perhaps they’ll want to tell you why they’ve thrown an innocent husband and father in jail.”

I
T WAS VERY
warm in the lounge. Young people were arriving for their five o’clock lessons. A majority were girls, many of whom wore fur coats over Benetton sweaters and jeans. Others wore waxed jackets like Trotti’s.

“Signora Coddrington is still teaching. She’ll be with you in ten minutes. Why don’t you wait for her? Perhaps you’d like some tea?”

They had sat down on the sofa. On the coffee table there were several magazines in English. The titles meant nothing to Trotti.

“Perhaps we ought to go home now, commissario.”

“I need to see the Englishwoman.”

Pisanelli sat forward, propping his arms on his knees. “Why do you think Bassi’s death’s connected with Turellini?”

“I’ve got no idea.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“I never said I knew what I was doing,” Trotti said.

“I need to sleep.”

“Then sleep.”

“I prefer sleeping in my own bed.”

“You’ve got a wife to go back to?” Trotti asked harshly and Pisanelli fell into an angry silence. He sat back and let his head loll. He loosely clasped a black volume that he had taken from the pocket of the suede jacket. He closed his eyes but it took time for the angry blush to disappear from beneath his stubble.

“Some tea and cake, gentlemen?” The woman spoke perfect Italian but Trotti knew she was foreign. Her skin was pale and she had large hips. She placed the tray on the coffee table. Trotti smiled and
took a mug of tea. The woman nodded happily and went back to her desk, her typewriter and the telephone that never ceased ringing.

Above her, on the wall, was a color photograph of a woman in a long white robe and a tiara.

“Who’s Elisabeth R.?” Trotti asked.

Pisanelli was sulking.

Trotti sipped the tea. It was the color of water—of the water he had once seen in the Po delta when a car was being craned out of the estuary. “Tea and milk?” He pulled a grimace. “This stuff tastes like the Po.”

“Add ten spoonfuls of sugar.” Pisanelli had opened his eyes. With his head propped against the coarse weave of the backrest, he was looking at the students from behind drooping lids.

“What’s that book you’re reading, Pisa?”

Several students had congregated around a service hatch where they ordered tea or coffee. Some people were talking in English and Trotti noticed that they used different gestures and different mannerisms. Keeping people at arm’s length.

(In the last months of the war, there had been a few English pilots in Santa Maria trying to reach the Allied lines. Thin faces and an arrogant manner. One of them—on crashing, he had broken his jaw badly—had later gone on to become a prime minister somewhere in Africa.)

Like the Po, but very sweet with sugar. Trotti made a mental note to look out for tea-flavored sweets.

“You’re an unpleasant man, commissario.”

“Because you haven’t got a wife?”

“I came to your house this morning because I thought I was doing you a favor.”

“Thank you, tenente.”

“I’m tired. I didn’t sleep last night and instead of going home to bed, I called you. I’ve spent the day with you.”

“You didn’t have to bring me here.” Trotti took a bite of the cake. A taste of ginger. “And if you haven’t got a wife to go back to, it’s because you don’t want to.”

“Because you don’t want me to.”

“Ever since I’ve known you, Pisanelli, you’ve been going to get married. How old are you now? Soon you’ll be forty and if you’re not married, it’s because that’s the way you’ve chosen to live your life. You could’ve married Anna Ermagni two years ago.”

Pisanelli raised his head. “Don’t mention her.”

“She was in love with you. Why didn’t you marry her?”

“It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“She wanted to get married.”

“Anna’s in Rome,” Pisanelli said simply and letting his head drop back, closed his eyes. “She’s studying to become an interpreter.”

Trotti felt a twinge of sympathy for the younger man. Like everybody else, Pisanelli was getting old. “It’s not too late, Pisa. Anna always said she wanted to have your children.”

Pisanelli bit his lower lip without looking at Trotti. His hands played nervously with the pages of his book.

“Gentlemen, you’re looking for me?”

S
HE CARRIED A
pile of books.

She was in her mid-thirties. She did not have the strong, fiercely blonde hair of the Scandinavians but the hair of the English, the kind of mousy hair that, like whisky, is left to age beneath the Atlantic rain. She held out a narrow hand. “I’m Signora Coddrington. You’re looking for me?”

They stood up—Trotti briskly, Pisanelli stumbling sleepily to his feet—and turning away she led them down a corridor that smelt of paint, and into a small classroom.

The Englishwoman had an attractive figure, long, strong legs. She wore a blue denim skirt and matching blue high-heeled shoes. She was broad but, strangely, had small hands and feet.

The room was well-lit.

There were posters on the walls showing scenes of England, with thatched cottages and swans on village ponds. There was one photograph that Trotti recognized as the Houses of Parliament in London.

Mary Coddrington gestured them to sit down on the classroom seats. She set down the pile of books that she was carrying and slid on to a desk.

(In the first months of Pioppi’s pregnancy, Nando had suggested their taking a holiday together in England, Trotti had turned the invitation down. He preferred to spend his free time in the OltrePò. Or at the Villa Ondina on the lake.)

“I suppose it’s about Carlo.” Signora Coddrington ran the back of her hand across her forehead. It was a feminine gesture. Sitting less than a meter away from her, Trotti could smell her perfume.

She was pretty, of course, just as Signora Luciana Lucchi must have been pretty twenty years earlier. Turellini had been a powerful doctor and was able to surround himself with all the tangible signs of the good life, including beautiful women.

“I’ve got ten minutes before the next lesson—an Alitalia class of trainee stewards and hostesses.” An amused laugh, engagingly spontaneous. “The beautiful hostesses all look longingly at the stewards and the gorgeous stewards all look longingly at each other.” She giggled and Trotti enjoyed watching the movement of her mouth. “I suppose in this life, we can never get what we really want.”

“You were happy with Dr. Turellini, signora?”

The laughter vanished from her eyes. “He’s dead.”

“You don’t answer my question.”

“Was I happy with Carlo?”

Trotti nodded, curious to know the answer. Pisanelli sat beside him like a dutiful schoolboy. Both men kept their eyes on the pleasant, even features of the teacher.

“We spent two very happy years together. I was twenty-nine when I met him and I was trying to get over … to get over a rather miserable experience. Carlo was gentle and I needed a lot of gentleness. I’d been rather badly bruised. I’m afraid and that’s why I decided to leave London.”

“Where did you meet him?”

She smiled at the walls, at the posters. “I met him here. Carlo was going to America and he needed a quick course in English.” She paused. “I know this sounds silly, but it was love at first sight. He was twenty-four years older than me. And the first time we met—he took me to a Japanese restaurant—I realized he was the man I’d always been looking for.” The white teeth nibbled nervously at the lower lip. “And I wasn’t completely wrong about a man. For once.”

“You moved in with him?”

“That’s got nothing to do with you.”

“He was living in his villa in Segrate and you moved in with him. That’s right, isn’t it?”

The door opened and an Asian man with glasses pushed his head through the gap. She smiled and said something in English. The head nodded and disappeared.

“Like me, Carlo had made a lot of mistakes. He needed female company—but often he went for the wrong sort of woman. In a way,
Carlo lived off conflict and he liked the company of domineering women. But that’s not what he needed.”

“What did Turellini need?”

“Me,” the Englishwoman said simply.

“Why?”

“He needed understanding.” She nodded. “Companionship. Complicity.”

“That’s what you gave him?”

“Carlo always gave me a lot more than I could ever give him.” She added, “In a way, I knew it couldn’t last.”

Trotti wondered fleetingly whether she would cry. Instead she smiled, almost happily. “It was just when I’d persuaded him that we could have children, that he wasn’t too old and that he wouldn’t be making a mistake, that he’d be making me very happy—it was then Carlo had to get killed.”

The door opened and closed again. Pisanelli got up and turned the key, and then stood with his back against the door.

“It was all planned. We were going to spend Christmas at Cortina d’Ampezzo and I was going to get pregnant.” Her hand went to her belly. “It was then she had to kill him.”

“Who?”

“She couldn’t bear to see his happiness. That scheming, aristocratic woman couldn’t bear to see I was able to give Carlo something that she was quite incapable of.”

“Who?”

“She always said he’d married her for her money and perhaps she was right. She and that awful daughter—they hated me. Luciana Lucchi’s a monster, her daughter’s a monster and together they would rather have seen Carlo dead than see him happy with a woman half his age.” Signora Coddrington raised her shoulders and looked Trotti squarely in the face. “The silly English girl and the Italian doctor. May and September, it was like some stupid fotoromanzo and we were happy. Both of us—we thought happiness had passed us by a long time ago. Yet this was the new deal. Better, more intense, more beautiful than anything either of us had ever expected. More beautiful than we deserved.” The romantic Englishwoman momentarily lost her self-control. “That’s why she had him murdered in cold blood. And only in this wretched, medieval country could the bitch still be walking free.”

“P
ERHAPS YOU
’
RE RIGHT
, signora.”

Somebody tapped lightly on the door, but the sound was muffled by Pisanelli, who was still leaning against it.

“Right in what way?”

“Signora Corr …” Trotti could not pronounce the foreign name. “Perhaps this is a medieval country. As you can see for yourself, it’s only now we Italians are learning the meaning of democracy. But, even here, there are rules we have to obey.”

“I never noticed.” Her smile was amused. “What rules?”

“There’d appear to be no reason for Signora Lucchi’s being in prison. Even in this medieval country, the police have to have proof.”

“She murdered him,” the Englishwoman stated.

“Why?”

“She was jealous.”

“Signora Lucchi and her husband divorced more than ten years ago. If she was jealous, it must have been a long time ago. Between the time the Turellinis broke up and the time Carlo Turellini was living with you a lot of water had run under the bridge. You don’t think she’d accepted the inevitable?”

“It was for her daughter. For Carla Turellini.”

“What about her, signora?”

“The old woman was frightened Carla Turellini was going to be left out of the will.”

“You just told me Signora Lucchi had a lot of money.”

“Which didn’t stop her from wanting more. For herself and for her daughter.”

“You know about the will?”

“Carla was generously provided for. She made sure of that. She’d spent enough time buzzing round her father, trying to be his confidante, his secretary and his conscience. She even told him she was delighted to see him happy again.” The Englishwoman nodded her head. “She told her father she’d nothing against our marriage.”