Gold, Frankincense and Dust (7 page)

When the commissario sat down facing Medioli, he realised the magistrate was right. His face seemed even more
haggard and his body shrunken. One day in jail had been sufficient to age him ten years.

“You know Mariotto well, don’t you?”

Medioli shrugged. “Is there anyone in the camp who doesn’t know him?”

“Is it true he goes around at night, drunk and singing?”

“Sounds like him.”

“He says that the night before the accident on the autostrada he saw a B.M.W. convertible pull up on the hard shoulder, empty out a bag with something that looked like a burned-out body, and drive off. Did he by any chance talk to you about this?”

“No, he didn’t say a thing to me. But you can be sure of one thing. If Mariotto said it was a B.M.W. convertible, that’s what it was. He knows everything there is to know about sports cars.”

“Did he talk much about engines?”

“That was all he ever spoke about. He could recite by heart the technical details of a whole range of cars.”

“Do you think he’d recognise the car again if he saw it?”

Medioli nodded. He looked embarrassed. “Of course he’d recognise it. Now that you mention it, he did once tell me, months ago, that he’d seen a black B.M.W. in the vicinity of the camp.”

“The same model?”

“Who can say? The one he was talking about had alloy wheels, was low-slung, and had a picture of a small galloping horse on the left side.”

Medioli seemed to have run out of energy, or else was faking so as not to have to go on. He sat hunched in the seat like a bundle of rags. “Will I get some remission of sentence?” he asked as Soneri got up to leave.

The commissario stretched out his arms. “Just maybe, if you cooperate.”

“I don’t know what I can do to help,” he muttered, before changing the subject. “Maybe I’ll get to meet my daughters again, see my grandchildren. Do you know the worst thing? Seeing things or people who belong to you change without being part of the transformation. Feeling excluded from things which should be familiar. And knowing there is no way back.”

The commissario thought of the girl whose body had been burned and of Medioli’s wife. At least they had been spared that painful knowledge. But these were considerations which embarrassed him and made him depressed.

“Think over what I said to you.”

“What?”

“The reduced sentence for cooperating.”

“I’ll think about it,” Medioli promised.

The commissario said goodbye abruptly and turned his attention once more to the enigma of that crime discovered by chance one misty night.

ANGELA WAS PLAINLY
nervous. She was performing even routine tasks listlessly, as though her thoughts were elsewhere and she was going unwillingly through the motions.

“You look as though you’re still in court,” Soneri reproached her.

She said nothing, but surprised him with an awkward, cold embrace. The commissario drew back. “O.K., forget I said it.”

They faced each other in silence, then Angela got up from the sofa and went over to take a chair from behind the table, as though to put some distance between them.

“I’m seeing another man,” she announced.

Soneri felt a cold shiver inside, and for a moment it seemed as though all the mechanisms of his brain had closed down one by one. He made an effort to control himself, but he was aware he was shaking. The revelation had left him stunned.

“I take it you’re fond of him,” he said, with a tremble in his voice.

She gave a deep sigh. She seemed embarrassed as she looked for the words which would cause the least pain. “I haven’t done it.” She spoke quietly as though to mitigate the blow, but her tone was not at all reassuring.

“Are you saying you might?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps not. Maybe I’m only on a journey … It’s just that when I’m with him, I notice I get excited.”

“Do I not … excite you anymore?”

“It’s not the same.” Angela was stuttering, but in those words Soneri detected only pity and concern for him. He felt everything spinning away from him, as had happened to him on the day when Ada and their son died, or on many other occasions over issues of lesser importance when he had undergone the same surgical operation, the same amputation of something he regarded as part of him. His whole life was a process of letting go, an exercise in the provisional. With Angela he had deluded himself that everything was definitive, but it was precisely this delusion which was behind their break-up. The provisional nature of the early days was the agent which had held them together and pushed them towards each other, but without fear, curiosity and desire their relationship had grown stale.

“You’re always on the move. We see each other at most a couple of hours in the evening when we’re both exhausted,” she said.

The commissario said nothing. He could not get up from the sofa. He felt paralysed. A deep, atavistic fear, like that experienced probably only by babies on coming into the world, took hold of him. At that moment he was a baby facing a world without Angela.

She got up from her chair to go over and give him a hug. To Soneri, that seemed like the dutiful gesture of a nurse bending over a body rigid with pain, and as he looked at her he was assailed by a previously unknown mixture of attraction and rancour, a magnetic storm of emotions which cancelled every cardinal point. The face he loved was also the face of his executioner. The anguish which gripped him left
him unable to move. He had never understood as he did at that moment certain acts of men, the passions that overwhelm them, the follies they commit and which he had been so often called to investigate. For a moment he understood Medioli and the mental short circuit which must have overwhelmed him.

He remained passive as Angela gave him a kiss. He was desperate to enquire about the other man, but it seemed to him puerile to drag out the usual mass of trite questions on the subject. And he was afraid of the comparison.

She took him by the hand, raised him to his feet and led him through to the bedroom. “Don’t think I’m going to ditch you. It’s you I want.”

Soneri allowed her to proceed in her own way, but his anxiety was in no way lessened. He found himself excited but in an unhealthy way, like the hanged man’s erection. It was fear which pushed him to make love, to suggest it as the only way out of that cul-de-sac, so he put his arms around Angela, clinging to her like a drowning man.

*

The following day he was overcome by the convalescent’s weariness, and as he made his way towards the questura he had the strange feeling of being in mourning. He had asked Angela when she would see the other man, but she had merely given a shrug and said with a smile: “Don’t think about it anymore.” Her tone had been anything but reassuring and now that he had a long day ahead of him, he knew that doubt and anxiety would gnaw at him. As he stepped into his office, he felt such deep exhaustion come over him that he was tempted to turn and run away, but he managed to control himself.

From the moment he saw him, Juvara was conscious of the
tension etched in every line of the commissario’s face. “We’ve had confirmation from the Bulgarian police that the dead man on the coach was from Bucharest,” he informed him.

“Do we know anything else about him?”

“Nothing yet, but they’ve started to look for members of his family. They’ve haven’t come up with anyone yet.”

“It all went to the dogs when the regime fell,” Soneri muttered to himself, but he was moved by pity for that poor unfortunate and realised that he himself had become more fragile after the blow from Angela.

“There are so many gypsy travellers there that they’ve reached the suburbs of Bucharest, did you know that?” Juvara said. “They move in from the countryside and take up residence on the outskirts of the city. Maybe that’s why they can’t find anyone.”

That old man with no relatives and no-one who remembered his name moved him, and at that moment Soneri felt so close to him as almost to identify the man’s destiny with his own, both of them alone in the world.

“We’ll need to round up the Romanian travelling people who had set up camp near the dump at Cortile San Martino. Make some enquiries. Ask Pasquariello if he can help,” Soneri said.

Before Juvara could lift the telephone, the commissario was himself in conversation with Pasquariello. “Do you by any chance know what became of those Romanians who were at Cortile San Martino?”

“They vanished into the mist, like the bulls.”

“Is that possible?”

“Moving about is not a problem for them. They’re not called travelling people for nothing.”

“I need to find them.”

“If they’ve crossed the provincial border, maybe our
cousins in the carabinieri could help. But if I were you, I’d call in one evening at the car park at the sports ground. The Romanians gather there a couple of times a week. We get a lot of calls from local people who say they’re worried about the commotion, but they don’t cause any trouble. They get together to speak their own language, do a bit of trading and send things home. These people have maintained a strong sense of community,” Pasquariello said, with a hint of nostalgia in his voice.

Soneri knew what his colleague was referring to, but he did not want to go into it, preferring to focus on the place he had indicated. “Is that not the hypermarket car park?” he asked as soon as he had located it in his mind.

“It’s shared. It’s really big.”

“I knew the Poles and the Ukrainians went there.”

“Every evening it becomes an Eastern square. A Samarkand in the land of mists.”

When he hung up, still pondering that image, he heard Juvara speaking English. Obviously the person on the telephone had a limited command of the language because the inspector had to repeat himself frequently, raising his voice and spelling out the words. As he put down the receiver, he said: “I asked for someone who could speak English.”

“Who was it?”

“An administrator with the Bucharest police,” Juvara replied, glancing at the notes he had taken.

“What did he have to say?”

“Good question. Listen to this. As far as I could understand, Dondescu has previous convictions for begging and petty theft. They also told me he was a known alcoholic. No fixed abode … relatives …” the inspector continued flicking through his notes, “… no, seemingly he had no relatives.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all I could understand. I’ll try again later and hope I get someone with a broader vocabulary.”

The commissario was rising to his feet when Angela came back into his mind. The sudden thought drained him of energy and made him flop back down on his chair. The telephone rang again, relentlessly.

“Excuse me if I’m bothering you, commissario …” Esposito began. Soneri forced himself not to grumble about that ill-timed call, but in any case Esposito went on regardless. “You know that madman? The guy that got gored or buggered or whatever.”

“The singing gypsy,” the commissario suggested, thinking of Mariotto.

“That’s him. He’s in intensive care.”

“They told me it wasn’t all that serious.”

“Did I not tell you that lot tell fairy stories, sir? Those people are as false as Judas. That one was never gored.”

“Did the doctors say that?”

“A colleague in the police office there spoke to the consultant a while ago. He had a head injury. It could have been a bull, but it’s not easy to see how.”

“You’re right. It’s not easy.”

“O.K., sir. I’ve passed on the information. I’ve got my own suspicions, but it’s over to you now.”

This time he managed to get to his feet, put on his overcoat and leave the room without a word. He lit a cigar as he walked along the street. The city, looking as it always did, slipped past him like scenery seen through the window of a train. His distracted, slow and apathetic observations were a mark of his inability to focus on anything. Finally he arrived at the hospital, where he discovered again that the investigation acted as an anaesthetic which made him incapable of any other thought. He read the folder in the police files: wound
to the head with probable internal haematoma. He made his way to the ward, where the nurse made him wait a few minutes while she tracked down the doctor. Before long a man in a green jacket with a mask hanging over his chest turned up.

“You want to know about the gypsy?” he said abruptly.

“Mariotto …”

“You’ll get the name from the ward sister,” the doctor interrupted him, without even troubling to introduce himself.

“How is he doing?”

“We got him in the nick of time. Any later and he’d have had it. They brought him in ten hours after the incident.”

“In your view, what happened?”

“Surgery’s my business, not policing,” he said impatiently. “I don’t know anymore.”

“I only ask because we were told he’d been gored.”

“The only bullfighting he’s done is while propping up a bar.” The reply was delivered with venom. “He was three times over the drink drive limit.”

It registered with Soneri that he would have to put up with the man’s aggression and deal with it as best he could. He felt drained. “Could you tell me if you think a bull’s horn could have left him in the state he’s in?” he asked calmly.

“He could only have been running for his life with the bull in hot pursuit, seeing as he got it in the neck. Not very honourable for a matador,” the doctor said sarcastically.

“So it’s unlikely?”

“Make up your own mind,” the doctor said and turned away.

Two nurses pushing a trolley nearly bumped into Soneri. He felt like a piece of flotsam tossed about on the current. He needed to hear Angela’s voice and listen to reassuring words
from her, but her mobile was switched off. He left the hospital thinking that a relationship ending at the age of fifty might indicate the borderline between a living man and a resigned man, and he had no intention of descending into resignation. He had to be active, but at that moment the only way of nurturing that illusion was work.

In the hospital grounds he saw a group of the gypsy travellers, no doubt on their way to visit Mariotto, but Manservisi was not among them. He was on the point of going over to them when his telephone rang.