Traitors to All (22 page)

The telephone. He got up: it was Mascaranti.

‘I couldn’t question Rosa Gavoni. She died of shock.’

So they might never find out where the two packets of mescaline 6 had ended up. A few hectograms of mescaline 6, you could give a whole neighbourhood of Milan hallucinations with that, Porta Vigentina for example, because it was 6, the most concentrated form: they aren’t content with red wine any more, even though that’s also a hallucinogen, now they want explosions.

‘Rosa Gavoni died of shock, I couldn’t question her,’ Mascaranti repeated, thinking, because of Duca’s silence, that he had not heard.

‘Yes, I heard.’ It wasn’t shock she had died of, the poor woman had had to look at her Ulrico on a marble slab and say, ‘Yes, it’s him, it’s Ulrico Brambilla.’ It wasn’t shock, it wasn’t just dying. ‘Search Rosa Gavoni’s house, and the butcher’s shops, question all the assistants, do whatever you like, but I don’t have time to waste on a few hectograms of drugs, I’m not the narcotics squad,’ and he hung up, immediately full of remorse because it really wasn’t poor Mascaranti’s fault. Maybe it’d be better if he took a few tranquillisers, his sister always had some chamomile in the apartment because he didn’t want any of those pills made from methane, propane or butane, he was a man, not a diesel engine. Anyway, he’d only have to wait until the next morning, when his sister would be coming back to Milan with his niece
and Livia Ussaro, and he might be calmer then. It was only four in the afternoon, he just had to wait until after ten the next morning.

He made himself a chamomile tea, but instead of calming him it irritated him, so he tried to kill time having a bath, then a manicure, then a shampoo, then he went to the cinema and saw a film he thought was stupid but that made the audience laugh a lot, ate two toasted sandwiches in two different bars, and, digging into his reserves, bought a few newspapers and magazines, including two crossword magazines. In a news magazine he saw the headline
Final Revelations on Drugs Ring,
but he didn’t read the article because he didn’t believe in final revelations, there were two packets of mescaline 6 in circulation and it was foolish to believe there could be any final revelation about drugs, because drugs would never finish.

But at three in the morning he was still awake, he had read almost all the newspapers and magazines, and solved lots of crosswords, even cryptic ones, and had had to look for something else to read. He had found the Italian Touring Club’s Guide to Italy, dated 1914, a memento of his father, a loyal member of the club, and had read the anthem of the TCI:
O sacred land, o country dear – o mother always by our side – Your beauty always with us here – Your life will always be our guide – Your love is all we need to know – Away, away, let’s go, let’s go!
There was also an application form for the club, more than half a century old, which stated that if the application was made by a married woman, she needed her husband’s signature – a lot of progress has been made since those dark days, now women go around carrying cases that had submachine guns in them – and he was just reading that the price of a block of sheets containing a 1:250,000 scale map of Italy was twenty-nine lire and one hundred
centesimi when the telephone rang, even though it was three in the morning.

Completely devoid of any garment, either nightwear or daywear, he went to the telephone.

‘Were you asleep?’ It was Carrua.

‘No.’

‘Good, then I didn’t wake you.’ How witty! ‘Well,
I
was asleep, but they brought me a girl who says she was the one who pushed Turiddu Sompani and his lady friend into the Naviglio. I can barely stay awake, can you come over?’

Of course he could, because he wasn’t asleep, and anyway there was a girl who said she was the one who had pushed Turiddu in the canal, which didn’t make much sense, but does anything ever make much sense in life?

‘I’m sending Mascaranti over in a car to pick you up,’ Carrua said.

‘Thanks.’ He clearly heard Carrua’s yawn through the receiver.

And after the yawn, Carrua said, ‘She’s American.’

Duca said nothing.

‘American and stupid,’ Carrua said.

That might be the case: America was such a vast, highly populated country, there must be a few stupid people in it, they couldn’t all be George Washington. ‘I’ll be right there,’ Duca said.

He went and put on his underpants and his nice pale blue socks with the hole in the big toe of the right foot. He was already downstairs, waiting by the front door, in the deserted Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, when Mascaranti arrived. It was eleven minutes past three in the morning.

She had flown from Phoenix, Arizona, to New York, in New York she had taken another plane for Rome, Italy, Fiumicino, in Rome she had got on the Settebello, and had arrived in Milan, Italy, Central Station, at nine minutes past midnight, and there she had got straight into a taxi and said, ‘Police Headquarters’, she had light brown hair, almost blonde, the driver didn’t like to go to Police Headquarters, no Italian citizen likes Police Headquarters, maybe this girl with light brown hair had no money for the fare and he would have to get the police to reimburse him, which meant he could forget about it, but he let her in the taxi because of her nice shoulder-length light brown hair and her sweet face, which touched even him, a loutish Lombard taxi driver on night shift, and he would have liked to ask her what the hell she wanted to go to Police Headquarters for but, contrary to appearances, Lombards are shy and he didn’t ask her.

And when they got to Police Headquarters, in the bright, cool May night, she got out, paid her fare, then went in through the vast gateway, and there was nobody there, nor was there anybody in the courtyard, but then a shadowy figure appeared in the dim light, a uniformed officer, and she saw him throw away his cigarette end, so she went up to him, she was fashionably dressed, with her skirt above her knees, and she had long hair, the only unusual thing was that heavy overcoat over her arm, on such a May night.

‘What do you want?’ the officer asked, rather abruptly,
because every now and again a prostitute came in to seek protection from a pimp who wanted to cut her throat.

‘I’ve come to turn myself in,’ she said in her perfect Italian, perfect apart from the way she pronounced the
t,
because a woman from Arizona is almost constitutionally unable to pronounce it the Latin way. ‘I killed two people and pushed the car into the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese.’

She could not have been any clearer, but for that very reason the officer did not understand: the rule is that the clearer you are, the less people understand. All he understood was that he had to shut this girl up in a holding room and go and look for somebody, and in fact he did immediately shut her up in a holding room, together with two prostitutes and a perfectly honest woman who worked for Pirelli but had been caught in her car committing an obscene act with her boyfriend. At that hour, however, there was almost nobody in Headquarters, they were all outside, catching thieves and whores and homosexuals and pimps, but then Sergeant Morini arrived at half-past one, with the car full of long-haired men squawking, or at least trying to, because every time they tried to squawk, Morini would slap them, and the officer told Morini that there was a girl there who had come to give herself in, he hadn’t really understood why, apparently she had killed two people.

Morini freed himself from the long-haired men, who swore that they were singers or artists, and not male prostitutes, had the nice girl brought to him and listened to what she had to say.

‘I’ve come to turn myself in,’ she repeated, in her excellent Italian. ‘I killed two people, and pushed their car into the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese.’

Morini looked at her fleetingly: the almost childlike sweetness of that face bothered him a little, it was as if a
six-year-old girl had come and told him that she had killed her grandmother. This was Carrua’s case, he thought, and he contacted the officer who was on duty outside Carrua’s office and found out that Carrua was asleep, because he had not slept since Monday, and at two o’clock on Wednesday morning you can’t wake up someone who hasn’t slept since Monday. So he was about to send the girl back into the holding room, but that sweet face and light brown hair, the refinement of her demeanour, yes, refinement, made him hesitate. He didn’t like the idea of throwing her back in that room with the whores, not this girl, but he didn’t have any empty rooms, so he made up his mind and called Carrua on the phone, and perhaps because he was tired, or because he had been thrown by this angelic girl and her unlikely confession, he said, as soon as Carrua replied, ‘This is Morini, Superintendent Carrùa,’ with the stress on the
u,
instead of the first
a,
which was the correct pronunciation of the name.

‘Morini, you idiot, I knew it was you straight away,’ Carrua said, sitting up on the camp bed, the pitiful camp bed he slept on every now and again, though very rarely. ‘What do you want?’

Morini went red. ‘I’m sorry, Superintendent Càrrua,’ Morini said, pronouncing his name correctly, ‘but there’s a girl here who’s come to turn herself in.’

‘Couldn’t you have told me tomorrow morning?’ he snarled. He was desperate to sleep, but he put on his shoes because he knew he wouldn’t sleep now.

‘She says she’s the one who pushed that car with Turiddu Sompani and his lady friend into the Naviglio,’ Sergeant Morini said, ‘and as it’s your case I wanted to tell you straight away.’

Carrua gave up tying his shoelaces. He had no idea what was going on, but he said, ‘Bring the girl up here.’

‘She’s American,’ Morini said.

‘All right, so she’s American, just bring her up.’

And now here she was, in Carrua’s office, and Carrua was behind the desk, and on the desk was the girl’s coat, too heavy for such a warm spring night, and Duca was standing next to her, and after looking at her for a while, not really sure why that sweet face should be making him feel so angry, he said to Carrua, ‘The passport.’

Susanna Pani
: that was the name on the passport that Carrua handed him from among the various documents taken from the girl’s handbag. Duca sat down facing her. According to the passport she was one metre seventy-six tall, a remarkable height for a woman, and she was wearing low-heeled shoes, although that wasn’t in the passport, in her sitting position her dress had ridden up quite a bit above the knee and Mascaranti who was on the other side of the girl with a new notebook in his hand was trying to make it seem, from the cold expression on his face, that he was not looking at her and even if he was looking at her that it didn’t matter. The passport also said that she had light brown hair, that her fingerprints had been catalogued in the National Archives in Washington with the number W-62C Arizona 414 (°4), and that she was born in 1937. She was twenty-nine years old, Duca thought as he put the passport back on the desk, but she looked ten years younger, that angelic quality can make you look younger, but angels don’t usually kill two people simultaneously.

‘What’s the connection between you and Turiddu Sompani?’ Duca asked Susanna Pani.

‘He had my father arrested,’ she said, ‘and his friend tortured him and killed him.’

Duca looked at Carrua, his ear echoing with the sweet, childlike sound of that voice.

‘I couldn’t make head or tail of it either,’ Carrua said. ‘I mean, I asked a lot of questions, but I’m sleepy.’ The whole
of that mild May night was a touching invitation to sleep, but with all the thieves and murderers and whores you find in a big city, nobody gets any sleep at Police Headquarters.

Duca tried to find another way in, a Northwest Passage, that would lead him to an understanding of the situation.

‘How come you speak such good Italian?’

‘My grandfather was Italian,’ she said, raising her head proudly. ‘He was from the Abruzzi, our real name isn’t Pani but Paganica, but the Americans found that a bit difficult, and so my father became Pani when he went to military school.’

‘And did they speak Italian in your family?

‘Yes,’ she said, her head still raised, sweetly but proudly, ‘but I studied it, because my grandfather spoke Abruzzi dialect.’ She blushed a little. ‘He even swore in dialect. So my father gave me books to study and learn the language properly, and apart from that I had lessons twice a week from a good Italian teacher in San Francisco, because in San Francisco, and Arizona generally, there’s a big Italian community.’ The subject was clearly one that interested her, and it gave colour to the pearly tone of her childlike voice.

‘There’s some cold coffee,’ Carrua said, ‘would you like some?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ Duca said.

Behind Carrua’s desk, Mascaranti got busy with a bottle full of cold coffee and a drawer with glasses in it, then served the coffee to everyone, including the girl, who drank it eagerly.

‘Only my mother knows how to make coffee like this in San Francisco.’

‘Is your mother also Italian? Duca said.

‘No, she’s from Phoenix, but my father taught her, and she can speak a little Italian, too.’

An idyllic American family, of Italian, Abruzzian origin. He drank a little cold coffee, took out a cigarette and offered one to the girl, who accepted and smoked it serenely. It was like a drawing-room conversation: ‘Have you seen
Africa Addio
?
¹²
Did you see Sophia Loren at Cannes?’ But there were other questions, of another kind entirely, that he had to ask. ‘You said Turiddu Sompani had your father arrested. Why? What had your father done to be arrested? And how could Turiddu Sompani have had him arrested?’

Her reply was quite unexpected. ‘Up until a few months ago I didn’t know anything about it, even mother didn’t know anything, and she died without knowing anything, we received the medal for my father’s death in combat, we thought he had died on the Gothic Line,
¹³
because that’s all it said in the citation from Washington. But we didn’t really know anything, and luckily my mother died without knowing anything.’