Traitors to All (9 page)

He got back into the car and they continued on their way towards Romano Banco, driving slowly because he wanted to get there no earlier than half past one, when Ulrico Brambilla the butcher would probably have finished eating, he didn’t want to disturb him over lunch. When they got to Corsico, they crossed the bridge onto the other bank, then drove through Corsico. A sign at the end of the Via Dante said that Romano Banco was on the left. The broad tarred road went partly between fields and partly between houses, both small houses and attempts at skyscrapers, then another sign indicated that they were entering Romano Banco and that it was forbidden to sound motor horns.

‘The church, go to the church.’

Mascaranti drove towards the little bell tower through broad streets of scattered houses.

Yes, Duca thought, he must really have ordered a lorry full of carnations from Sanremo: next to the little church with its unremarkable little bell tower, so dull and dreary as to be quite touching, you could still smell the carnations, the sickly scent of carnations still seemed to hover over the old houses around the church. Without even getting out of the car, they turned onto the main street. After asking a couple of passers-by, they found the house of Signor Ulrico Brambilla, a small one-storey villa with a few centimetres of garden in front, which wasn’t really a garden, just a strip of ground with patches of green.

‘Signor Brambilla, please.’

The thin, black-clad woman, who was not old – there was still a vestige of femininity in her sallow face, her blue-circled eyes with wrinkles at the corners – said in an anxious voice, ‘He isn’t here, he’s left.’

Ah, so he had already left.

‘Where did he go? I’m a friend of Silvano’s.’ There were some people he didn’t like having as friends, but they had been friends in a way, hadn’t they? Between them they had money matters, girls to be ‘cured’, and even submachine guns: that was a kind of friendship.

The name Silvano had the effect on the woman he had hoped it would, she turned pale and looked at him, then at Mascaranti, and moved aside to let them in. As soon as they entered, they saw it was a simple rustic house: with all his millions, Ulrico Brambilla had left the house as plain as it must have been when he had bought it, he who bought everything, who had bought half of Ca’ Tarino, both houses and land.

‘I don’t know where he went,’ she said. She looked scared: the name Silvano seemed to have scared her.

The first room they came to was a combined living room and dining room, where they probably never ate, they almost certainly ate in the kitchen. There was a rectangular table in the middle, chairs on either side of the table, a hand-embroidered centrepiece in the middle of the table, and there was also a sideboard and a dresser and a wall clock and a floor of shiny red tiles and a stiff little sofa, a kind of long chair for three people, on which they sat without being invited, while the woman in her black peasant dress, almost a regional costume, but with a low neckline, looked at them.

‘I have to talk to Ulrico,’ he said, in the pleasant, somnolent gloom of the dining room: Ulrico must be a man with his head screwed on, he hadn’t employed either an architect or an interior decorator. Not having ever seen him, Duca felt like laughing when he called him Ulrico. ‘It’s about a serious matter.’

This, too, had an effect on the woman. She couldn’t have
been fifty yet, when she was younger she must have been what a Milanese would have called a handsome figure of a girl. But a kind of anger in her overcame the effect his words had had, and she said, ‘More serious than what’s happened? He was supposed to get married, instead of which his fiancée drowns in a ditch, it was such a blow I thought he’d end up in the cemetery, too. Anyway he left, I even told him to go away for a while.’

‘And who are you?’ Duca asked her impudently, wickedly.

‘I’m his assistant,’ she said, ‘his assistant in the butcher’s shops, here and in Ca’ Tarino.’ Then she insisted on adding, ‘The cashier,’ which made her sound more important.

That was notable – in fact, it was what in texts on arithmetic is defined as a notable product. Ulrico had a younger assistant, something of a nymphomaniac, in his shops in Milan, and a mature assistant for his shops outside Milan.

‘I also keep house for him,’ she said proudly, satisfied she had got them to understand what she wanted them to understand.

She kept it very well, Duca thought: the red floor tiles were well polished, not unpleasantly reflective, they were old-fashioned, warmly intimate, no dust, no smells, nothing out of place, if she kept Ulrico as neat and tidy as this, Ulrico was a lucky man.

‘I have to talk to Ulrico,’ he said again, in an even tone, neither threatening nor insistent. ‘It’s very important.’

She sat down, moving one of the four chairs at the table, and suddenly a ray of sunlight came through the plain curtains at the half-open window, hit the shiny surface of the table, although not strongly, and was reflected on her face, bringing out the circles under her eyes, the little wrinkles, the tiredness of her skin. Proudly, she did not move from
that reflection, she scorned it, haughtily exposed herself to it in all her decay. ‘I don’t know where he’s gone.’

It was an interesting conversation: he kept saying that he wanted to talk to Ulrico, and she kept saying that she didn’t know where he’d gone. So he decided to raise the stakes. ‘Silvano left me something, Ulrico knows what it is.’

She fell into his little trap, and her face stiffened in the reflection. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

I don’t know anything
means a lot of things. It means that you know something, but you don’t want to say it, want to make it seem in fact as if you don’t know anything. How crafty some people are! But now he knew that she knew.

‘I can’t keep that thing in my home,’ he said to her, but politely. He was starting to feel a bit embarrassed: despite everything, her age, her experience, her peasant guile, she still retained, as so many women do, a genuine innocence. And indeed she now put her other foot in the trap. ‘He’s supposed to be phoning me today, I’ll tell him.’

This was important. Ulrico Brambilla would be phoning, whether or not the woman knew where Ulrico was, he would be phoning. She probably didn’t know, he probably hadn’t told her where he was going, and he might not even be staying too long in one place. Did that mean he was running away? If so, why? There are a lot of reasons to run away, one of them being grief: if your fiancée ends up in a ditch, as the woman in black had put it, downgrading the Naviglio, you might well close up your four butcher’s shops – although Carrua was of the opinion that Brambilla had more, registered in other names, obviously – and go and mourn somewhere far from other people. But maybe Brambilla hadn’t run away for such a nice reason. You can also run away because you’re afraid. Afraid of someone.

‘Yes, do tell him,’ Duca said, still sitting, bolt upright,
on the little dark green sofa, next to Mascaranti. ‘We’ll stay here, and when he phones tell him we need to talk to him, and that we have to hand that thing over to him.’

She stood up. ‘This isn’t a station waiting room,’ she said. She spoke good Italian, with the barest touch of a local intonation, in fact, that was the extraordinary thing, she wasn’t an intellectual, most definitely not, but she was something better, she was intelligent. Her eyes were tired, they suggested liver problems and a difficult menopause, but there was an intelligent look to them. And as she was a woman, her intelligence drove her to be domineering. ‘Get out,’ she said with sudden anger. ‘If you have something to tell Signor Brambilla, write to him.’

Why not? We can write him a postcard. Duca didn’t like either what the woman said or the way she said it, and he stood up and moved around the table until he stood facing her. ‘All right, we’ll go,’ he said, looking straight at her, his eyes saying,
All right, if that’s the way you want it, it’s your funeral.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to Mascaranti.

But when they got to the door, she stopped them, remorsefully. ‘If you want to wait …’ Despite her sallow complexion, her face turned slightly pink. ‘I only said that because you might have a long wait, I don’t know when he’s going to phone.’

He did not even look at her. ‘Too bad for him,’ he said. He asked Mascaranti for a piece of paper and a pen, wrote down his name and address and telephone number as clearly as he could and gave it to the woman. ‘If he’s interested, he can write to me or come and see me.’ They left the house, aware that she was watching them through the half-open door and was making a note of the car, might even be taking down the licence number. Let her. In fact, it was what they wanted.

‘Let’s go home.’

That meant crossing the city again, but everything has an end, even a journey from Romano Banco to the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci. And the case was still in his apartment, still dark green, still with the metal corners that made it look like a trunk. As soon as they got inside they opened it, they didn’t trust anything any more, they were on the scent of a big gang and they didn’t want to lose the opportunity to meet them, to have a sitdown, wasn’t that what they called it? Eye to eye. And an eye for an eye, and seventy-seven scars for seventy-seven scars.

‘It’s like a rose,’ he said to Mascaranti, crouching by the case as it lay open on the floor. ‘Sooner or later a bee will come buzzing around it.’ He wiped his hands on the wood filings. ‘And while we wait, let’s go back to the beginning and take out all the files.’

There were four files, and files can be dull and even repulsive things, especially after you’ve looked through them, document by document, three or four times, or five, especially on a spring day like today, a day when Milan had never been so beautiful, soft blades of sunlight cutting gently and incredibly through all the rooms in the apartment, showing up the dust, the dirty windowpanes, the lost sheen of the brass door handles. But Duca and Mascaranti kept their heads bowed over the kitchen table and those fine, thick, pale brown files.

Technically, there had been three falls into the water. The first went back almost four years. A young couple, a woman of twenty-four named Michela Vasorelli and a man of twenty-nine named Gianpietro Ghislesi, plunged into the Lambro, at the Conca Fallata, just after the Cascina Sant’Ambrogio. A murky episode, isn’t it, Superintendent Carrua? Isn’t it, Sgt Mascaranti? Isn’t it, Lady Justice? The owner of the car, Attorney Turiddu Sompani, who was with them, was arrested, having got out of the car and let young Ghislesi drive even though a) he didn’t have a licence, b) he was completely drunk, and c) he was shouting out that he wanted to drive across the river. Many witnesses had heard the girl who was with him scream, and had tried in vain to prevent him. Attorney Turiddu Sompani had been unfortunate and had come up against a tough young examining magistrate who dragged him to court, accusing him of culpable double homicide, and dropping major hints that
it was not culpable but voluntary. Unfortunately, they were unable to give him more than two and a half years.

Then almost four years had passed and there had been a second fall. Turiddu Sompani, who had not been out of prison for even a year, and an old friend of his, Adele Terrini, fell into the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese two weeks ago. Here, his impatience with repetitions started to irritate Duca, and the irritation reached its height with the third fall. A fine-looking figure of a man named Silvano Solvere, and a lady friend of his, Giovanna Marelli, in black stockings and a red dress coat, were machine-gunned on the road running alongside the Alzaia Naviglio Grande and ended up falling into the canal, where they drowned inside their car. The incident had been witnessed by Sergeant Morini’s team, so there were no doubts about any of the details, and there were plenty of details right there in one of the thick files. He reread them all, one by one, and his irritation became unbearable. The most irritating aspect was that the three events were linked by one person: Turiddu Sompani. The first couple had gone into the Lambro while they were out with Attorney Sompani, then Sompani himself had gone into the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese with a lady companion of his, and finally the third couple were friends of Sompani’s, the young man in the grey cardigan even introducing himself to Duca by saying that he had been sent by Turiddu Sompani.

It was also irritating that the protagonists of these three incidents were all such dubious figures. Of the first couple, the woman, Michela Vasorelli, had been, as was clearly stated in her file, a prostitute, while the man, Gianpietro Ghislesi, was officially unemployed, and unofficially a pimp, not very unofficially because he had been arrested twice for pimping, but thanks to Attorney Sompani had got off scot free.

The second couple had the thickest file of all. The notes on these two amounted to a kind of sacrilegious bible of immorality. First, because ladies always have to come first, there was Adele Terrini. One irritating detail was that Adele Terrini, a young lady in her fifties, had been born in Ca’ Tarino, which coincidentally – though he didn’t believe in coincidences, supposing that he believed in anything – was also the birthplace of the other young lady, the one on whom he had performed a hymenoplasty and who had died, or rather, been killed only a few days ago. Life really was amazing: two women born in Ca’ Tarino, one more than twenty years before the other, but both, within little more than a week, drowned in their cars.

But the more obscure, more repulsive member of this second couple was the man, Turiddu Sompani. The obscurities started with his name, especially his Christian name, Turiddu, because Turiddu is a Sicilian diminutive, and there was no reason in the world why he should be called Turiddu, having never had anything to do with Sicily. Even the surname wasn’t the correct one. Turiddu Sompani had made his appearance in Italy after September 1943 and all his documents had been issued by Republican Fascist authorities, or by the Germans. In one of the files there were the photocopies of many documents, including the certificate granting of Italian citizenship to Jean Saintpouin, with the name Turiddu Sompani in brackets, born in Vannes, Brittany on July 12, 1905. Why a Frenchman, a Breton, should be called Turiddu, why he had taken Italian citizenship at such an unusual time as September 1943,
⁷
was unclear, but there were other documents that dispersed some of the thick clouds surrounding this Lawrence of Lombardy: photocopies of a Fascist Party membership card, then a photograph of Sompani, taken in the mountains, bearded and
with a handkerchief around his neck like a partisan, a small card issued by the SS command in Milan, a universal safe conduct – with that card nobody could stop him, let alone search him – issued, as could be seen from the stamp, by
Ober
something or other, at the Hotel Regina in Milan in June 1944. There was also – just to cover every eventuality – a letter from the Curia thanking their devout friend Turiddu Sompani for his intervention on behalf of political prisoners.