Persona Non Grata (24 page)

“Galandra was the doctor?”

“I am impressed, Trotti. You couldn’t have been feeling too well after all you’d been through. They’d been pumping you with drugs for nearly thirty-six hours. Yet you managed to see through the disguise.”

Trotti was silent.

“How did you know it was Galandra?”

“It wasn’t the Policlinico.” Another silence before Trotti continued, “The Policlinico may not be a wonderful hospital—no Italian hospital is, with beds in the corridors and doctors who can’t read—but San Matteo’s one of the best in the country. And I know how doctors act, how they work. And anyway there was no reason for taking me to San Matteo.”

“And that’s why you fought?” Spadano laughed. “You fractured the poor woman’s jaw.”

“One vase of flowers. When I was at San Matteo, there were flowers everywhere. And chocolates. And a few remaining friends.”

“Some people must like you.”

“Signora Galandra doesn’t. I fractured her jaw?”

“At least something remains of your training from Padua.”

“She’ll recover?”

“I wouldn’t worry about her. On a kidnapping charge, she and Galandra face at least five years. And by the time she comes out, her jaw’ll have healed. She should’ve forgiven you by then.”

“W
E WERE WORRIED
, Commissario.”

The warm afternoon air had turned chill. Now it was evening, and Como was like any northern town, preparing for the September night.

A light wind from Switzerland blew across the lake. Clouds were moving southwards, carrying the threat of a rainy night. The vast surface of water was dark and ruffled. There were not many people along the lakeside. A few late and isolated fishermen, dark silhouettes, stared out at their long, immobile rods.

“I beg your pardon.”

A smell of roasting coffee in the evening air, and the neon lights of the bars looked inviting. Trotti felt tired. He knew that it would be some time before the chemicals worked their way out of his system. He resented the pain in his ribs.

“I am not alone in having missed you in the Questura. You disappear for several days.” Pisanelli shrugged self-consciously. “We were worried about you.”

Trotti noticed the blush as Pisanelli glanced at Spadano. Spadano kept his eyes on the road. The tip of his Toscani cigar glinted.

“Several of us were afraid that you might be dead.”

Trotti took a packet of sweets from his pocket. “After all these years with the PS paying towards my pension?”

“You must be careful, Commissario.”

“Why the concern, Pisanelli?” Trotti frowned. “It’s all very sudden.”

The young policeman shook his head slowly. They were sitting together in the back seat of the car.

Spadano seemed to take no notice of their whispered conversation.

“Your disappearance coming as it did so soon after the girl’s death.”

“Don’t tell me you’re feeling guilty about Ciuffi. If anybody is responsible for what happened to her, it’s me.” Trotti unwrapped the sweet.

“Not easy coming to terms with the loss of Ciuffi.” Although Pisanelli looked tired and was in need of a shave, he had the fresh smell of soap. He coughed. “The way she was killed has been hard on us all.”

Spadano turned left at the end of Corso Argentina; the green of the traffic lights stood out against the failing light. The smell of petrol fumes and the angry noise of accelerating Vespas.

Trotti placed the lemon-flavored sweet in his mouth. “She is dead, Pisanelli. She was murdered and now she is dead and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“But she was special.”

“Ciuffi was special for us all.”

“Special for me in particular.”

The Carabinieri barracks were in the center of the town. Concrete slabs had been set up as a protection against possible terrorist attacks. Spotlights lit up the barbed wire along the high walls.

“You didn’t always treat her very well, Pisanelli.”

“We teased her—we all did. But we were proud of her. Really proud. We liked to joke at her—telling her that she was only a woman and giving her all the niggling jobs where she would be out on her feet or taking tedious notes in her notebook.”

“Not much of a joke.”

There was something sheepish about Pisanelli’s smile. “It was just teasing—like school children.”

“You were hard on her.”

“You’re hard with us, Commissario.”

“You’re a man, Pisanelli. And you’re going to spend all your life in the PS. You’re not going to go off after several years to have a family.”

“It was Schipisi and Cardano who were hard on her.”

“You were unkind, Pisanelli.”

The car entered the courtyard.

“You left her to get on with the Vardin dossier while you were hanging out in the hospital.”

“I was helping Merenda.”

“Merenda? You were flirting with the nurses.”

“No.” The vehemence with which Pisanelli shook his head took Trotti by surprise. “No, I wasn’t flirting.”

“ ‘A man who understands women’—that’s what the woman doctor in Ostetrica said about you.”

Again Pisanelli shook his head—he was holding his suede jacket on his lap—and the long hair at his ears rose with the centrifugal force. “I don’t understand women.”

“You should. Pisanelli, you’ve been engaged at least three times in the last four years.”

Spadano parked the car and turned off the engine. “We have arrived, gentlemen.”

Pisanelli looked at Trotti. “Ornella—it was Ornella who I liked.”

“Ciuffi?”

“She was special.”

“I didn’t know you were on Christian-name terms.”

“More than just like. It was stronger than that.” Pisanelli sucked his teeth. “I shouldn’t have teased her. And yet, Commissario, at the time I wanted her to notice me. I wanted her to see that I existed. I felt that by creating a bit of distance, by being a bit stand-offish … I thought that perhaps, well, that she would notice. You know what women are like, how they don’t like weak men …”

“They don’t like phallocrats, either.”

Pisanelli sounded hurt. “Phallocrat?” he repeated and then fell silent.

“A woman is a flower, Pisanelli.”

Pisanelli stared at the jacket on his knees. After a while, he shrugged as if talking to himself.

“Pisanelli, are you going to get out of this car?”

“If only Ciuffi were still here.” Pisanelli raised his eyes and gave Trotti another of his smiles. “If only it were possible to tell her that I’m sorry—that I think about her all the time.”

H
E COULD FEEL
Spadano’s irritation at having to wait.

It hurt Trotti to walk. They had bandaged his ribs at the hospital in Monza and now he was grateful to have Pisanelli with him. He walked slowly.

“And the Questura?”

“I beg your pardon, Commissario?”

“What’s the news from the Questura, Pisanelli?”

“No news.”

They stepped into an elevator.

Spadano looked at the two men from the Pubblica Sicurezza. A smile hovered at the corner of his lips.

“How’s Merenda coming along?”

“I told you, Commissario—we’re all missing you.”

“Has Merenda found Ciuffi’s murderer?”

Pisanelli bit his lip. “The dog went.”

“The dog?”

“Gino’s dog. Principessa.”

“She went?”

“Merenda said that it was inadmissible.”

“What was inadmissible?”

Pisanelli gave an apologetic shrug, “The smell—the smell of Principessa.”

“Merenda doesn’t work on the third floor. What the hell’s the dog got to do with him?”

“Schipisi complained.”

“Gino’s retiring at the end of the year.” The elevator halted and Trotti winced. “For God’s sake.”

“He said the dog had to go.”

Trotti clicked his tongue. “And Ciuffi’s murderer?”

“Nothing so far.”

“How’s Gino taken it?”

The doors of the lift slid open.

“Well?”

“He hasn’t been in for a couple of days.”

They stepped out of the elevator and went down a corridor. Clean walls, blue-tinted neon lighting and the occasional sound of machinery from behind the glass doors. More like the headquarters of a big newspaper than Carabinieri barracks.

Yet again, faced with the organization of the Carabinieri, Trotti found himself resentful. And jealous.

An officer saluted.

“What news, Tenente?”

“The Embassy on the phone a couple of times.” A grin. “Very German, very efficient.”

“What did they want?” Spadano asked.

The man had an intelligent face. “If we were going to press charges against Herr Schuhmaker.”

“Taking an unregistered firearm out of the country? You can tell our German friends that their Herr Schuhmaker can count on a minimum of two years in an Italian jail.”

“They want to know why he’s being held incommunicado.”

“Don’t they have their own terrorists, the Germans?” Spadano gestured towards Trotti. “I’m hoping our friend from the PS can help us.”

Trotti said, “I don’t know any Germans.”

Pisanelli ran a nervous hand through the long hair at the side of his head.

Spadano put the stub of a cigar in his mouth and lit it. “Let’s go and see Herr Schuhmaker.”

They returned to the elevator. The Carabiniere accompanied
them. The smell of his aftershave lotion competed with the acrid smell of Spadano’s Toscani cigar.

“Incidentally, Trotti, I forgot to tell you.”

“What?”

“I managed to find him.”

“Him?”

“Primula Rosa—the man your mad priest was looking for.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Find in a manner of speaking, that is.” A cloud of cigar smoke.

“Do you have to smoke that thing in an enclosed space?”

Spadano shrugged. “Found him a bit too late.”

“Why?”

“He died in a road accident about seven years ago.”

Trotti fell silent.

The passage of time.

His mind turned back to the months at the end of the war. Bloodshed—there had been a lot of bloodshed; yet, in those days, things had appeared simple. And that simplicity—like Primula Rosa, with his one good hand—belonged to the past. The end of the civil war, Reconstruction—the hopes and the expectations for the future, for himself, for Italy …

Trotti glanced at Spadano, and he was overcome with a sense of bitter nostalgia.

“Primula Rosa won’t be helping your priest.”

Nobody spoke in the elevator.

Three floors. They stepped out on to another corridor, this time slightly cooler. They were beneath ground level. No windows and the air was damp.

“This way please.”

Although Spadano had lived in the north for most of his life, he had not lost his Palermo accent.

Trotti and Pisanelli followed, a step behind the small muscular back and the thick neck. Hair that showed no sign of thinning. For a man well into his late fifties, Spadano had aged well.

Primula Rosa was dead.

“Here.” Spadano hammered at the grey door, the sound feeble
against the thick, riveted steel. A scraping noise of a bolt being pulled back. The door opened outwards and, following Spadano, the two officers from the Pubblica Sicurezza entered into a flood of blinding neon light.

The man sat on a bench.

The room smelled of despair. Elsewhere somebody was shouting and banging a utensil against the bars of a cell. The muffled sound came through the brick wall. It was followed by a brisk shout of command.

Silence and the man raised his head to look at the visitors.

Trotti had turned pale, staring at the German.

“Jesus.”

A tired face, bags under the eyes. A narrow chin and a bald head that caught the reflected light. Thin lips and dark, hurt eyes.

“Trotti—Italo Trotti.”

“W
ELL
?”
THE
B
ARONESSA
said sharply.

They were like an old couple, Trotti thought. Fond of each other, yet continually bickering.

“For all these years you’ve lied to me.”

“How could I expect you to understand the truth?”

“But you lied.” Fra Gianni screwed up his eyes and his voice could not hide that he was hurt.

“You’re an old fool, Gianni. You have never been in love. You don’t know what love means.”

Velvet curtains and dark-red wallpaper.

“A little something to drink, Commissario?” A conspiratorial glance at Trotti. “This awful priest doesn’t like me drinking alcohol. He would have made a terrible husband.” Her repeated jibe about Fra Gianni gave Trotti the impression that she was putting on an act for him. She went to the dark mahogany cabinet and produced a bottle. “Schnapps, perhaps—nothing better to warm an old heart.” She laughed to herself.

“Where did you learn to use a rifle?”

“Let us drink something and then we can talk like civilized people.” She gestured Trotti to one of the deep armchairs. “Nowadays, people are always in such a hurry.”

“What rifle?” Fra Gianni remained standing, a solitary old man caught in the yellow light of the doorway. His eyes watched the Baronessa attentively.

The woman poured two glasses and held one out to Trotti. “I like to tease Gianni—you do understand?”

Trotti refused the proffered glass. “Why do you want to murder me?”

She looked at him with her head tilted. The smile was almost coquettish. She sat down. “Murder you, Commissario?”

“At Borgo Genovese—nobody saw you, because nobody imagined that the little old lady in the Fiat 600 was carrying a gun. And when they heard the detonation, they just thought it was a car backfiring.”

“Why should I want to murder you?”

“Why, indeed?”

“Murderers are hopeful—they think that, by killing people, they are going to make things better.” She turned away to gesture towards the photographs on the piano. “My life is behind me. I have lived long enough.”

“Then you had nothing to be afraid of.”

She nodded.

“You killed a girl … a woman who had all her life before her.”

The Baronessa von Neumann had a bright smile. “Really?”

“Why did you want me out of the way? What harm could I do to you?”

“Not you, Piero Trotti—nor anybody else.”