Death and the Olive Grove (26 page)

Bordelli had nothing to sink his teeth into, and it was driving him crazy. Davide Rivalta's house had been closely watched, the surveillance reports were quite detailed. He reread them yet again, just so as not to be sitting there twiddling his thumbs. On the previous day Rivalta had left his house at 8.35 in the morning in his car. He had stopped at Porta Romana to buy the newspaper, then crossed the centre of town to go and eat breakfast at Castaldini's, one of the best pastry shops in Florence, in Via dei Mille. Around 9.30 he had gone for a walk in the Parco delle Cascine, and returned home at 11.00. He went out again at 4.30 p.m., on foot. He did a little shopping in the Due Strade and was back home at ten to five, after which time he remained at home for the rest of the day. At a quarter past seven the light on the first floor went out, and Rivalta went downstairs to the ground floor, almost certainly to have dinner. He went back up to the first floor at about ten o'clock. All the lights in the villa went out around one o'clock in the morning. He received no telephone calls all day.

This was more or less how it went every day, even if the hours weren't always the same. Rivalta never saw anyone, never got any phone calls, seldom went out, and almost always spent the afternoon on the first floor, probably in his study. He went to bed between 1 and 2 a.m.

Bordelli pressed his eyeballs hard with his fingertips. He was dead tired. He couldn't stop thinking about Rivalta, but didn't quite know why. Perhaps he was clinging to him because he had nothing else to hold on to, so that he could tell himself he wasn't running round in circles like a moron. He had to be very careful. If he let the strange Rivalta distract him too much, he risked missing important clues that might put him on the right track.

He opened a beer bottle and guzzled half of it. Then he picked up the phone and dialled Mugnai's internal number.

‘Do me a favour, Mugnai, and call Piras for me at once.'

‘I don't know where he is, Inspector.'

‘Then go and look for him!'

‘I'm already out the door, Inspector.'

A few minutes later Piras knocked, came in and sat down without saying a word. He looked even gloomier than usual.

‘Piras, for Christ's sake! What the hell are we waiting for to catch this maniac?' said Bordelli, slamming his hand against the photos of the little girls. He had never felt so upset during an investigation. Normally he tried to keep from getting too emotionally involved, and he usually succeeded. But the three little girls weighed upon his stomach like a block of marble. The thought that the killer was still at large stirred an oppressive sense of restlessness in him that squashed him right there in his chair. He looked again at the photographs spread across the table: Valentina, Sara, Susanna …

‘Say something to me, Piras, let's come up with an idea … I don't want to see another child murdered.'

The Sardinian stared at him with his coal-black eyes, which glistened as if he had a fever.

‘I'd been hoping it was Rivalta, Inspector,' he said between clenched teeth.

‘Me, too, damn it all, but it looks like we were wrong,' said Bordelli, stuffing another cigarette between his lips. By this point he'd decided to wait until the maniac was locked up in an asylum before kicking the idiotic habit.

‘Why is he killing them, Piras? And why in that way?' he asked bitterly, blowing smoke into the Sardinian's face.

‘We'll catch him, Inspector, I can feel it,' Piras said stiffly, waving the smoke away with his hand.

‘I wish I knew when …'

‘Soon.'

‘How can you be so sure?'

‘I can feel it.'

‘Ah, you can feel it … blimey, what good news!' said the inspector. He put a hand on his forehead. It was hot. He'd woken up at dawn and still hadn't eaten anything.

‘I'm sorry, Piras,' he said, holding up one hand and trying to calm down. The young man merely looked at him without a word. Bordelli got up from his chair and started pacing about the room, blowing smoke through his nostrils.

‘I'm a little on edge, Piras. That son of a bitch is making fools of us all,' he said, forcefully crushing his cigarette butt in the already full ashtray. The internal phone rang, and the inspector picked up.

‘Yes?'

‘How many more little girls is that maniac going to kill, Bordelli? Why can't we manage to find him?'

It was Commissioner Inzipone again, and he sounded mightily pissed off. He was speaking, as always, in the plural.

‘We'll catch him soon, Commissioner,' said Bordelli, not knowing what else to say.

‘The minister of the interior just rang me, and asked me what the hell we were doing …'

‘We'll catch him.'

‘When?'

‘Very soon.'

‘What makes you think that?'

‘Let's say I can feel it … We'll catch him soon.'

‘Ah, you can feel it … Brilliant!' said Inzipone, who then uncerimoniously hung up. Bordelli spat a few curses at the phone, finished his beer and hurled the bottle into the waste basket.

‘Let's get a move on, Piras. Ring Signora Zanetti and find out when we can go and see her … Maybe something will come of it.'

‘Shall I call her right now, Inspector?'

‘Why the hell would you want to wait?'

‘All right,' said Piras, as he jumped to his feet and dashed out of the office, looking offended.

Bordelli went and opened the window wide. He stood there looking outside: clear sky, courtyard full of cars, Mugnai outside the guardhouse, chatting with a colleague. He tried to think of other things. The night he'd just spent with Milena came back to him. It felt as if he'd dreamt the whole thing. She'd left just before dawn, kissing him between the eyes by way of goodbye. They hadn't said anything to each other in parting. There was no need. Bordelli had a clear sense of what was happening to him, and had the impression she felt the same way. But neither had the desire to put it into words. They knew where to find each other, but realised that it was a difficult time for both of them. She was hunting down a Nazi, he a killer of little girls.

Piras returned fifteen minutes later and said that Susanna's mother had agreed to see them straight away.

‘What took so long?' Bordelli asked gruffly.

‘She wouldn't stop talking, Inspector. She started telling me about her daughter and I felt like I couldn't …'

‘All right, let's go.'

‘Very nice,' the inspector said, looking at Susanna's drawings on the wall of her small bedroom. Piras nodded in agreement. They were large sheets of paper full of colour, on which people were black spots and animals had five legs to help them stand up straight.

Maria Zanetti was thirty-five years old, slender and rather pretty, with black, curly hair which she had sought to tame with a few hairpins. She smiled as she spoke, like a mother telling two friends how bright and beautiful her daughter is. The most disturbing thing was that she acted as if Susanna were still alive and about to come home from school.

‘She keeps everything in order, all by herself … In this drawer are her stockings, here are her shoes, here are her blouses … And this is her homework table … pens, erasers …'

‘Good girl,' said Piras, giving her rope.

‘Oh, yes … And she helps me cook, wash the dishes, iron, do the shopping … In fact she always wants to go buy the milk herself … And there's no harm in that – the milk shop's just round the corner, after all …'

Bordelli and Piras exchanged a glance. They were waiting for the woman to break down at any moment and start crying.

‘Signora Zanetti, are you married?' the inspector asked.

‘I lost my husband two years ago, but I don't intend to remarry … no, no, I couldn't … I'd never find another man like Walter,' the woman said, shaking her head.

‘Was he Susanna's father?'

‘Yes … Susanna suffered a great deal when he died, but she's recovered nicely … Every evening she recites a little prayer for her father in heaven.'

‘Is this him?' Bordelli asked, pointing at a framed photograph on the wall, in which a blond man held young Susanna in his arms.

‘Yes,' the woman said, stopping in front of the picture, a sad smile on her face.

‘He doesn't look Italian,' said Piras.

‘He was German … from Hamburg,' she said, with admiration in her voice.

‘Why didn't you and your daughter take his surname?' Bordelli asked.

The woman looked at him with mild astonishment.

‘What do you mean? Walter's surname is Zanetti … His great-grandfather was Swiss Italian,' she said, as if this was somehow obvious.

‘I'm sorry,' Bordelli said, not knowing what else to say. Maria Zanetti's eyes turned back to the photo, full of nostalgia.

‘We met during the war, in a field hospital. I was working as a nurse for the Red Cross, and Walter was an officer in the Wehrmacht … He'd been seriously wounded in the shoulder. We fell in love immediately, but with all the confusion there was at the end, we fell out of touch. After the war I tried in every way possible to find him, but didn't have any luck. We finally met up again in ‘54 and got married almost at once. A year later, Susanna was born … Isn't he handsome?'

‘Very,' said the inspector, to make her happy. Piras looked at the picture with suspicion, as if thinking of one of his father's war stories about the Germans.

‘Even though we were separated by the war, I felt that sooner or later I would find him again,' Maria continued.

‘Where did you meet up with him in ‘54? In Italy?' Bordelli asked, seeing that the woman felt like talking. She shook her head gently.

‘No, in Munich. It was the will of God; there's no other way to explain it. He lived in Hamburg and had gone to Munich to visit some relatives, whereas I was there for my job. I worked as a seamstress for a dance company. And one morning, as I was walking down the street, there he was, standing right before me … It was God who decided, I'm sure of it.'

‘Signora Zanetti, forgive me for asking … but do you have any enemies that you know of? Someone who might wish you harm, for any reason at all?' Bordelli asked.

‘Oh, no. Why should I have any enemies?' she said calmly. She was folding Susanna's little clothes before putting them away in the wardrobe.

‘Had you noticed anything unusual in the past few days? I don't know, someone following you …'

‘Why would anyone want to follow me?'

‘Had Susanna mentioned anything unusual to you? A stranger, perhaps, who had spoken to her, or something like that?'

‘Susanna knows very well she's not supposed to talk to strangers. She's a very smart girl, you know … Would you like to read one of her essays? I'm convinced she's going to become a writer,' said the woman, opening a drawer.

‘Yes, of course,' said Bordelli, resigned to the fact that he wasn't going to coax any information out of her. Signora Zanetti already had a notebook in her hand, a large notebook with drawings by Jacovitti on the cover. She started reading.

‘Pinocchio was a wooden marionette and his father was an old man with white hair called Geppetto …'

‘Come on, dear, don't get so discouraged. You're doing your best,' said Rosa, knitting slowly away, as usual. Bordelli was lying on the sofa. He'd been carrying around a headache since the morning, and it had worsened that evening. Even Rosa's massage had failed to make it go away. Maybe a storm was coming. He had the misfortune of being able to feel them coming well in advance.

‘I would like to catch him before he kills anyone else,' Bordelli said bitterly, pressing his temples hard with his fingertips. He could no longer stand feeling so powerless. After his fruitless visit to Signora Zanetti he had phoned Dr Saggini to tell him the woman was not well, and the doctor had assured him he would go and pay a call on her at once. Aside from this, there were no new developments, and it wasn't very encouraging …

The cat came home from his rounds across the rooftops and started miaowing about the room, snapping his tail.

‘Gideon's nervous, too,' said Rosa. At that moment a lightning bolt lit up the sky for a long second, and the lamps in the room started to flicker. Then, at once, a violent clap of thunder chased the cat under the sofa.

‘Finally,' said Bordelli. ‘It's coming.'

Usually his headache would begin to subside after the first flashes of lightning and eventually vanish altogether. There was another, louder burst of thunder, and the lights went off. The first raindrops started to fall, big and sparse, then ever more dense, until they became a downpour. Rosa lived on the top floor, and one could hear the water pounding the roof.

‘What a wonderful storm!' said Rosa, moving in the dark. She lit a few candles and sat down in front of the window to watch the lightning. Bordelli sat up and poured himself more cognac.

‘You know what, Rosa? I've been with a woman.'

‘In what sense?'

‘Well …'

‘Oh, really?' she said, turning round to look at him.

‘You don't seem happy about it.'

‘That depends. I don't want you to end up in the hands of a witch.'

‘Don't worry, she's not a witch,' said Bordelli.

‘How old is she?'

‘What's that got to do with anything?'

‘Why won't you tell me?'

‘About twenty-five, I'd say.'

Rosa burst out laughing.

‘And what are you going to do with a child like that?' she said, hysterical.

‘Rosa, what's got into you? You're acting like a jealous wife.'

‘Jealous? Me? Of what? It'd take a lot of little girls to make a woman like me.'

‘Don't get upset.'

Rosa came over and looked him in the eye as the thunderbolts cracked in quick succession, sounding like a bombing raid.