Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence (22 page)

Over the radio the reporter Marcello Giannini, trapped inside the RAI offices in Via Cerretani, lowered a microphone out of the window so that listeners could hear, live, the sounds of the river of mud coursing towards the railway station. It was announced that Mayor Bargellini would speak, and everyone brought their portable radio closer to their ears. A hollow-voiced Bargellini asked people to remain calm and wait for the rescue teams. Whoever owned any kind of floating craft was requested to bring it as soon as possible to Palazzo Vecchio. The news programme continued with lists of other areas of Italy hit hard by the bad weather. Everywhere landslides, floods, isolated towns. There was also mention, of course, of the Victory Day celebrations. Government politicians were busy with the ceremonies all across the country. Bordelli turned off the radio so as not to use up the batteries. He stuck a cigarette between his lips but didn’t light it. He had only five left.

Long hours of waiting and cigarettes passed, and around two o’clock it finally stopped raining. The water had risen halfway up the first floor of the buildings, but the current had slowed. Everything imaginable had floated by, including a coffin lid with a large crucifix on it.

The radio said that an emergency rescue centre was being set up in Campo di Marte, which the flood waters hadn’t reached and couldn’t reach owing to the high wall of the railway. Emergency rations, mineral water and medical supplies were being collected. Amphibious vehicles and tankers were soon to arrive from nearby cities unaffected by the flooding. All the doctors in the province were requested to go to Careggi hospital, the only serviceable facility in town. It was announced that Aldo Moro and Minister Taviani were out of Rome to celebrate Armed Forces Day, the former in Gorizia and the latter in Bari. They were informed at once of the disaster and were already busy coordinating a massive relief effort. It was also reported that over eighty inmates had escaped from the Murate prison and were moving across the rooftops and through dormers and windows opened for them by the inhabitants of the quarter. Some were dangerous criminals, and citizens were advised to use extreme caution.

And so the hours, minutes and seconds went by. People were powerless to do anything except watch the putrid water flow down the street. A nauseating smell festered in the air, and many had covered their faces up to the eyes with handkerchiefs and scarves.

Round about five o’clock the sky started to darken, and the people at their windows gazed upwards in dread. Others crouching on rooftops looked like huge frightened birds. In the gloomy glow of sunset, the river of mud assumed a terrifying aspect, and one could not help but think of the rivers of Hell mentioned by Dante …
They course from rock to rock in this valley, / form the Acheron, the Styx, and the Phlegethon
³⁹
…

Then night fell. Dozens of candle flames appeared on the windowsills, and the perspective of buildings became the columbarium of an enormous cemetery. The river of mud slowed down further, lapping softly against the walls of the buildings. Then suddenly it stopped altogether, and a tomblike silence descended on the neighbourhood. It was the same oppressive silence Bordelli used to hear during the war on certain winter nights.

He stuck a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it until he couldn’t hold out any longer. It was the last but one. The smell of heating oil and sewage was by now familiar to him. He couldn’t stand looking out of the window any more. One could only imagine the chaos at the police station, the traffic police command, the
carabinieri
headquarters, the fire station, the Comiliter, the Prefecture and Palazzo Vecchio … and there he was, stuck at home doing nothing, with no water, electricity or telephone line.

He dropped the cigarette butt, following it with his eyes until it was swallowed up by the water. He closed the window and went out on the landing, torch in hand. He shone its light down the stairwell, illuminating the motionless surface of mud below. It would be impossible to go out. He felt trapped. He went down to the floor below and knocked on the Macciantis’ door. The husband came and opened up, candle in hand, wrapped in a red jacket. His eyes were ringed with dark circles and he was unshaven. His little workshop in Via dell’Orto had surely been destroyed.

‘Have you got an extra candle, by any chance?’ Bordelli asked.

‘Come in …’ Maccianti said gloomily. He was a small man with little hair on his pear-shaped head and always gave off a faint smell of machine oil. Bordelli followed him into a dining room with dark furniture. A number of candles burned in the room, their flames long and motionless. Maccianti’s wife and two children were standing at the window huddled tightly together. Seated around the table were the first-floor tenants, a retired labourer with his wife and mother-in-law. Bordelli made a gesture of greeting, which was returned in silence. Faintly visible in one shadowy corner were two large suitcases, bulging like those of refugees. Maccianti rummaged through a drawer.

‘I can give you these,’ he said in a whisper, handing Bordelli two candles.

‘Thank you so much, it’s more than I could have hoped for,’ the inspector said in relief. A few hours earlier a couple of candles meant nothing, but the Arno’s fury had inverted the order of meaning.

‘My wife buys them by the box, for the little statue of the Blessed Virgin we have in our bedroom.’

‘I’ve got an extra bedroom and a sofa, if anyone needs a place,’ said Bordelli, saying goodbye to the people gathered and going back upstairs.

He had a hole in the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t eaten for almost a day. He went into the kitchen to see what there was. All he found was a small piece of pecorino cheese, some old bread and half a box of biscuits. He also had a bottle of water on his nightstand. He couldn’t sleep unless there was a bottle of water on the nightstand. He ate standing up, having laid the torch down on the table. He thought of the poor wretches who had lost everything, and he felt lucky. Until yesterday, living on the upper floors of a building without an elevator had always been a nuisance.

He went back into the bedroom, lit both candles and lay down in bed with all his clothes on. The flames flickered ever so gently, casting tremulous shadows. A thought resurfaced in his mind. Giacomo Pellissari. Whoever killed him could only benefit from this disaster. The flooding would occupy the authorities’ attentions for a long time, and everything else would fade into the background. He thought of Via Luna, wondering how high the waters had risen in that neighbourhood. The mud might have even destroyed the apartment, wiping out all traces of evidence and washing away the only hope there was of making any progress in the investigation. The case of the boy’s murder was in serious danger of being shelved.

There was only one cigarette left. He preferred holding out to being left without, but he would have to distract himself in some way to avoid smoking it. He picked up the torch and went into the dining room and cast the light on the spines of his books. He saw several volumes of Herodotus’s
Histories
. They were a present from a woman some years ago, but he’d never read them. He took the first volume back to the bedroom, set the torch down on the bedside table, stuck two pillows behind his head and started reading …

The book was quite engrossing and almost made him forget about the flood. He kept reading for a good while, suppressing the desire to smoke. Particularly amusing to him was learning about the customs of certain ancient peoples. The Babylonians, for example, had to pay a tax before they could marry a beautiful woman, so that only the rich could afford to do so. The money was then allocated for dowries for ugly or disfigured women, who obviously were married off to commoners … Who knew how much he would have had to pay, in Babylon, to wed the beautiful salesgirl of Via Pacinotti?

Around ten o’clock he went and looked out of the window again. Candles flickered gloomily on many windowsills. In the half-light he saw ghostly spectres leaning on their elbows, the incandescent tips of cigarettes glowing bright as they took deep drags. He turned the torch beam downwards and couldn’t help but smile a little. About a foot and a half above the waterline on the building façades was a thick line of black oil dripping down. The waters had begun to recede, flowing slowly back towards the river. If they kept up this pace, in a few hours he would be able to go out. He had no desire to remain there counting the minutes and inches. He shut the window and went back to bed. Pulling up a few blankets, he rearranged the pillows and resumed reading.

He woke up with the book on his chest. When he exhaled he could see his breath. It was very cold, and the room was flooded with daylight. It was almost 8 a.m. He’d read late into the night and then nodded off. The candles were guttered, their dried wax running down the side of the nightstand. He went and opened the window. Under clear skies the spectacle was even more dismaying. The mud was almost all gone, leaving behind shattered cars, broken doors and gutted shutters, all manner of debris brought there by the fury of the current. A thick, still-damp ring of oil marked the walls at a height of over ten feet. In the distance he heard the melancholy wail of numerous sirens and the even whirr of helicopters. The ghosts of the night were beginning to come out of their homes, pale, exhausted, incredulous. They swashed around in the muck in boots or shoes wrapped in plastic bags fastened around their ankles, looking around with sleep-deprived eyes. Every so often a siren would rise above the chorus and seem to draw near before continuing on in another direction and blending in again with the rest.

He went into the kitchen to load up the coffee pot, blessing the gas cylinder and the half-bottle of water he had left. He felt decidedly better. Perhaps the emergency itself was the cause. He changed his clothes but still smelled bad. Searching around in a storage cupboard he found a pair of rubber boots in good condition. The coffee tasted better than ever before.

Putting his torch and transistor radio in his coat pockets, he ventured down the stairs. As he descended, the stench got stronger and stronger. The last two flights were quite slippery, and he very nearly fell. One wing of the double front door hung from a single hinge, while the other had come off and was floating in the entrance hall. He pushed it aside and went out into the street, where the water came almost up to his knees. The air was unbreathable. The human figures moving about amid the piles of debris looked like the damned. At the bottom of the street, towards Borgo San Frediano, a tree had got stuck in the entrance of a building. It all felt like a city after a bombing raid. The modulating sounds of sirens merged together into a single distressing wail.

He headed towards Piazza Tasso, paying close attention to where he stepped. There might be all manner of things hidden under the muck, and one could get hurt. He turned to look at the shrine at the corner of Piazza Piattellina; the black mark of the oil ran just below the Baby Jesus’s head. He continued on, taking small steps, circling round a Fiat 600 on its side that blocked half a lane. Looking out from a first-floor window was a woman wrapped in a blanket, shivering.

‘I’ve lost everything … everything …’ she muttered, head swaying back and forth. Men were hoisting old and young on to their backs to carry them to the dry areas. Here and there a few transistor radios could be heard croaking. A man was telling everyone to be extremely careful; there was an open manhole in the middle of the street, hidden by the mud, and a woman had fallen in and broken her leg.

In Piazza Tasso the oily line on the walls was barely a yard above the ground, and the remaining muck was much shallower. Just off the pavement the carcass of a large dog surfaced, black with oil. Along the Viale two or three cars rolled along at a walking pace. In the public gardens a number of ruined cars lay piled up between the flower beds. There were even two Volkswagen Beetles, caked with mud only halfway up the doors. One was his. He went up to it and walked around it. It was dented on every side, and the headlights were broken. He looked inside. The interior was intact. On the back seat he saw the blouse he needed to return, spared by the flood, and it forced him to think of the pretty salesgirl. Not even in that hell could he manage to get her out of his head.

He started walking towards Botta’s place, sloshing through the stinking mud. The blue sky promised a beautiful sunny day. He still had that last cigarette, all crumpled up, but wanted to resist a little longer. He would light it before entering the first open tobacconist. In Via del Campuccio all that remained was about an inch of black slime, and the mark left by the oil was very low. Men and women were sweeping the mud towards the manholes with brooms and mops, emptying out basement flats with buckets, rummaging through ruined shops.

Drawing near, Bordelli saw Botta come out of the front door of his building with a bucket in hand, covered in mud, and made a gesture of greeting. Ennio poured the putrid water into the street.

‘Good morning, Inspector. I’m afraid I can’t invite you inside for a cup of coffee today,’ he said, forcing a smile.

‘Another time, then,’ Bordelli replied, patting him on the back. Poor Ennio. He never had any luck. The flood hadn’t reached much farther than his place, stopping only a few yards up the street.

‘If they hadn’t woken me up in time I would have drowned like a rat, Inspector. With all the mud pouring down, climbing the stairs wasn’t easy.’

‘Did you manage to save anything?’

‘I brought a bundle of clothes up to the first floor, to Signora Maria’s flat. But I didn’t have much more than that.’

‘So it could’ve been worse …’

‘My grandfather always used to say that sometimes it’s better to have nothing, and now I know what he meant.’

‘So where were you hiding all this time, Ennio? I’ve been looking for you for the past two days.’

‘I was away on business,’ said Botta, smiling only with his eyes. The inspector didn’t bother to ask what kind of business.

‘When did you get back?’

‘Thursday night. I got your note, but it was raining so hard, and I didn’t feel like going out to look for a telephone … What did you need?’