Traitors to All (17 page)

‘Please phone the house and tell them to come and get this lady. Warn them that she spits and resists.’
The house
meant Headquarters.

‘Yes, doctor.’ Mascaranti went out into the hall to phone.

‘Filthy bastards,’ the woman said.

‘All right,’ Duca said, ‘you’ve gambled away your freedom. If you’d listened to me, in half an hour I’d have let you go free, we have no real interest in arresting a nonentity
like you. I only wanted to know two things from you: the whereabouts of the friend who sent you here to pick up the case, and the whereabouts of Ulrico Brambilla. You just had to tell me those two things and I’d have let you go, we don’t have room in prison for nobodies like you.’

She repeated her one phrase, arrogantly lighting a cigarette with an eye-catching gold Dunhill lighter.

‘Very well,’ Duca said. ‘In a quarter of an hour you’ll be in a cell and I assure you that you won’t get out again for four or five years. There’s criminal conspiracy, there’s arms trafficking, and whatever else we find, and even though you aren’t the head of the gang, you won’t get out until 1971 or ’72.’

Mascaranti came back to the kitchen and said, ‘I’ve phoned, they’re on their way.’

She looked at the two of them, drank, took a drag on her cigarette then repeated her phrase.

‘Dr Lamberti,’ Mascaranti said, ‘I can’t resist.’

‘Then go downstairs and wait for the car,’ Duca said in a low voice. ‘When it comes, come back up with the officers and take the girl away.’

‘All right, doctor,’ Mascaranti said, and as he went out, the girl said her phrase after him and he stoically refused to turn round.

Duca stood up, took a glass and filled it with water from the tap: it wasn’t exactly water from a mountain spring, but the effort to control yourself makes you thirsty. ‘It hurts to sacrifice yourself like this for a cretin like your friend. And I’ll tell you why he’s a cretin: because he lets you walk around dressed like that, disguised as a gangster’s moll or a chorus girl on a TV variety show.’

‘Filthy bastard,’ she said. She drank the whisky, lit another cigarette, and touched her swollen cheek every now and again.

‘We’re talking about arms trafficking,’ Duca said, ‘betrayal, complicity with terrorists, multiple killings. Turiddu Sompani throws a couple in the Lambro, Michela Vasorelli and Gianpietro Ghislesi, then someone, maybe Silvano Solvere, throws Turiddu Sompani in the Naviglio, then someone else, maybe your friend, throws Silvano in the Naviglio, and we could let you all carry on, and in a few days they’ll kill your friend. As you see, I know something about you people.’

Strangely, she said nothing, just finished drinking the whisky remaining in the glass.

‘And your friend sends you here, in a white Opel, dressed like a gangster’s moll. I’m surprised the police didn’t stop you, just seeing you at the wheel of that car. When we saw it from the window, we thought, here comes the secretary of Murder Inc.’

She did not repeat her phrase, she looked at him with hate, but remained silent. Mechanically, she picked up the glass but it was empty. ‘Isn’t there any more?’ she asked.

‘I’ll send for a bottle immediately. What kind do you prefer?’

She looked at him with hate, but also with uncertainty, she didn’t like to be mocked, but looking at him she realised he wasn’t mocking her. ‘I’d prefer a Sambuca,’ she said.

The entryphone was right there in the kitchen, he asked the caretaker to send Mascaranti to buy a bottle of Sambuca and fifty grams of unground coffee. ‘Emphasise that: unground.’ The girl might want to chew a few coffee beans with the Sambuca. He lit a cigarette. ‘But the stupidity of sending you here, to pick up a case with a submachine gun, as if it was a tin of biscuits! No way is that an operation for a woman. To crown it all, we’re with the police, and so you’ve fallen into a trap, but even if I’d been “straight” and not a
filthy bastard of a policeman, do you think I’d have given the case, just like that, to the first woman who comes and says she’s a friend of Silvano? At least two men should have come to pick up a case with something like that in it, two armed men, not a girl.’

‘He couldn’t come himself,’ she said, ‘not now.’

‘Then he should have waited until he could, unless he’s an idiot.’

For the first time she lowered her eyes.

‘And the stupidity of all of you killing each other! Turiddu Sompani was an important man for you people, and so was Silvano Solvere, so why did you kill them? And who’s going to kill you now? I never give advice, but as long as you hang out with idiots, things are going to go badly for you, just as they are now, falling into the hands of the police because of an idiot, and with the certainty of years and years in prison. And prison’s not a good place to be. But I can still give you a choice: you have a valid passport, here we are, let’s see’ – and from the back pocket of his trousers he took the ten-thousand-lire notes that Silvano Solvere had given him before that delicate operation – ‘twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, this is two hundred and fifty thousand lire’ – he had spent the rest – ‘it’s all I have, if I had more I’d give you more, if you answer a few of my questions and if you take me to where your friend is, I promise you I’ll let you go free, you can go to France, maybe you’ve already been there and have a few friends there. I promise you solemnly.’ He looked at the money: it was the devil’s money, let it go back to the devil.

Her face pitifully distorted by the swollen cheek, she smiled and said, vulgarly, ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’

‘I wasn’t born yesterday either, to think I could deceive someone like you with a trap like that,’ Duca said, and then
he began to seethe because he too, when you came down to it, had a nervous system, just like Mascaranti, and he threw the twenty-five ten-thousand-lire notes down on the table and raised his voice: ‘If I made you that offer it’s because it isn’t a trap. But go on, try and be clever, the prisons are always as full as Viareggio in high season, because you people are so stupid and ignorant. I’m telling you I’ll let you go free, I’m giving you two hundred and fifty thousand lire and you can drive away in your white Opel, because we aren’t interested in whores like you, but you won’t believe me, you think it’s a trap. If I wanted to lay a trap I’d lay a more intelligent one than that, wouldn’t I?’

She spat on the ten-thousand-lire notes, making a grimace of pain as she did so because with her mouth swollen it hurt to spit.

‘All right,’ Duca said. He stood up and went and opened the door to Mascaranti, then came back into the kitchen with the bottle of Sambuca and the unground coffee. He poured the Sambuca into a clean glass and put a few coffee beans into the liquid. For himself, he poured some more water from the tap. ‘I don’t even need you. When you don’t come back your friend will say, “Where’s my baby, where’s my white Opel?” And he’ll come looking for it, I just have to stay here and wait, with that case there in the hall, for him to come here, for the case, for the Opel, and also for you, and I’ll leave his Opel outside the front door, with a colleague posted next to it, he’ll arrive and we’ll grab him, you’ll go straight to Police Headquarters, if that’s how you want it, everybody has the right to reside where they like.’ Keeping his patience was starting to tire him out: if he hadn’t had ancestors who had won lots of chivalry tournaments, he would have got her to talk in next to no time.

‘He’s not that stupid that he’d come here,’ she said scornfully.

‘Oh, yes, he would,’ he yelled angrily, ‘because he needs to know what happened to his pretty girlfriend, not because he’s all that interested in you, but because he’ll suspect you’ve been arrested by the police, and he knows you’ll talk in the end, in fact, we won’t even have to lay a finger on you, but we’ll make you talk, it’s only a matter of time, it might take a week, or two, or three, but you’ll tell everything, and so he’ll come here to find out what happened to you. He’ll be careful, but he’ll come here, we’ll get him and we’ll make him talk.’

Vulgar and ignorant as she was, this argument got through to her. ‘So I’m supposed to believe that if I talk, you’ll let me go? With the money?’ She took a coffee bean, crunched into it and laboriously chewed it with her good jaw, and then took a large swig of the Sambuca.

‘Don’t believe it if you don’t want to,’ he said in a low but exasperated voice. Then he had to get up because there was someone at the door. It was Mascaranti with two uniformed officers.

‘They’ve brought the bandage,’ Mascaranti said. One of the two officers was holding a big whitish roll, probably hemp, almost like a baby’s swaddling clothes in the old days, only much longer. They had heard that they were coming to get a dangerous person, and a dangerous person, bound like a child with that bandage, wasn’t dangerous any more, couldn’t do anything any more, not even spit, because the bandaging began from the mouth, leaving the nose free for breathing.

The girl was smoking when Duca came back into the kitchen followed by Mascaranti and the two uniformed
officers, and a kind of mushroom cloud of smoke was rising over her face and above her head, lit at a certain height by the ray of sunlight. She took a good look at Duca, then at Mascaranti, looked at the two officers then, with the cigarette in her mouth, took the bundle of ten-thousand-lire notes she had spat at a little while earlier, put it in her handbag and said to Duca, ‘Send those filthy bastards away.’

Duca had to leap to his feet to stop Mascaranti, who had leapt forward. ‘I don’t care if I lose my job,’ Mascaranti said, ‘but I’m going to make the other side of that face swell up too.’

‘Please,’ Duca said, holding him back, and holding back the two angry officers with his eyes. ‘Send the officers back to the house. You stay downstairs outside the front door and keep watch, especially on the Opel.’

Controlling himself heroically, Mascaranti said, ‘Yes.’ He turned to the officers and said, ‘Come on,’ and they left the kitchen with their bandage, and with anger seething in their bodies, because it’s hard to earn so little, a few measly thousand-lire notes per month, and then hear a lowdown whore like her say words like that to them.

She waited until she heard the front door close, then said, ‘You’ll really let me go if I talk?’ She poured herself some more Sambuca and put a coffee bean in her mouth and started laboriously chewing it.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

With the coffee bean in her mouth, the lioness said, ‘Then fire away.’

They would betray anybody, their dying mothers, their pregnant daughters, they would sell their husbands and wives, their friends and lovers, their brothers and sisters, they would kill anyone for a thousand lire, betray anyone for an ice cream cone, you didn’t even have to hit them, you just
had to dig down into the muddy depths of their personalities, and what emerged was cowardice, corruption, betrayal.

He stood up and put the glasses, the Sambuca bottle and the coffee in the sink. ‘You just have to take me to where your friend is now.’ He took her arm and helped her up. ‘You can’t tell me much, but your friend can tell me a lot more, and your friend’s friends even more. Where is he?’

The quarter litre and more of alcohol that she had drunk, at only 10.30 in the morning, had not had any effect on her, she must be armour-plated, she was steady on her feet and spoke clearly. ‘He’s in Ca’ Tarino,’ she said, ‘in Ulrico’s butcher’s shop.’

He was indeed in Ca’ Tarino, shut inside Ulrico’s butcher’s shop. Ca’ Tarino is part of Romano Banco, which is a hamlet attached to Buccinasco, which is a municipality next to Corsico, which is so close to Milan, it practically is Milan. Originally, Ca’ Tarino was a cluster of four farmhouses, arranged in a rectangle in the Basso Corsinese, between Pontirolo and Assago, but after the war they had lost the appearance of farmhouses, although not entirely, there were still fields around, although barely cultivated and then only in expectation of selling them as building land, there were muddy roads leading to the farmhouses, but there was also the tarred road that led to Romano Banco, and at the corners of the rectangle of farmhouses there were shops: the wine shop, which had once been called a tavern and today had a jukebox, the drugstore, the bakery that functioned as a small supermarket, and Ulrico Brambilla’s butcher’s shop.

The man was there, he was tall and well-built, in fact very tall and very well-built, with a handsome, feral face, very handsome and really feral, he looked as if he would easily win a beauty contest for bison, he was clean-shaven, but where the razor had passed the skin was dark purple, a kind of mask that covered his cheeks and chin between his long, thick sideburns.

He was very well dressed, and he was sitting on the marble cash desk. His grey trousers had turn-ups, and his
embroidered red shoes, almost size 15, were English in style, might even have been English, his very springlike sky-blue jacket was of good cloth, also probably English, and his shirt, the one thing out of place, was of silk, probably the softest, heaviest silk on the market, a deep yellowish colour, too deep for the sky blue of the jacket.

The bison was smoking a cigarette, and in his hand the cigarette, even though it was king-size, looked miniature, a kind of little cigarette for gnomes. He must be a big smoker because the place was full of cigarette ends, not so much thrown on the ground, but strewn everywhere, above all on the counter, where various things lay in disorder: a metal hammer for beating chops, a wooden one with a handle, two or three knives of various sizes, a hook taken off the rack where the meat was displayed and the little chopper for breaking the bones of big Florentine-style steaks. Many other cigarette ends had finished up on the work bench, near the counter where the butchers cut the big quarters of beef to a commercial size, and there were cigarette ends on the wooden board, on the long marble table, between the big axes, the skewers for holding large pieces of lean meat, the electric bone saw and the mincing machine.

Even though it was half past ten on an exceptionally beautiful May morning all the lights were on in the butcher’s shop, because the shutter was down over the main entrance and the back door was also closed. The lighting in butcher’s shops is always very strong to bring out the red glow of the meat and all six lights were on, giving out a pitiless light like that of an operating theatre.