Converging Parallels (29 page)

He then turned and walked towards the Questura parking lot.

“I’m not a good father.” A voice that trembled on the edge of self-doubt. “That’s why they don’t want Anna to see me. A drunkard, a dangerous man.” He was now imploring. “But you can tell them. Tell them that I love her. They will listen to you.”

Trotti unpadlocked the bicycle. “Tell them tomorrow. I’ll come tomorrow.”

“My daughter—I must see her tonight.” Ermagni had stood with his feet apart and his mouth open as he watched Trotti walk
away. Now in his top-heavy amble, he came towards the bicycle. Trotti pulled the front wheel from the concrete slab and swung his leg over the crossbar.

“You’re my friend, Commissario.”

“My wife’s waiting for me.”

“And I’ve got to go to work. It’ll only take a few minutes. A few minutes of your time. She’s your goddaughter, Commissario, don’t forget.”

“Tomorrow.” He released the brake and pushed on the pedal. The bike moved forward and Ermagni began to walk faster.

“Please,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” Trotti called and he pulled out into the middle of Strada Nuova, cutting in behind a large bus. Then later, before reaching the traffic lights, he turned round. Ermagni was still there, standing by the roadside, his large hands hanging emptily at his sides.

A large, clumsy man. A sad man.

P
IOPPI WAS SITTING
cross-legged in front of the television; a few school books were scattered on the floor beside her. She was writing, one eye on the thick green pen and the notepad, one eye on the television. A simple, repetitive jingle and then a famous footballer advertising chocolate.

“Where’s Agnese?”

She jumped up and kissed her father. She smelled of fresh clothes and soap; a clean, reassuring smell after the smoke and the old man in the Questura. “Ciao, Papa.” She gave him a hug and lifted one of her feet.

A clean, youthful smell; it gave him a twinge of envy and of nostalgia.

“Your mother?”

“She waited for you as long as she could. But I’m cooking.”

“Where’s she gone?”

Pioppi’s smile faded. “She had to go out. She waited for you but you’re late.” Pioppi was wearing a loose sweater that hid her young body. She looked like a boy. “There was a phone call and then a man came. About half an hour ago.”

“Who?”

The television was now advertising a brand of floor tiles; a fat baby, unsteady on his podgy legs and a flower in his hand, was walking across a polished floor. Naked except for a spotless diaper.

“Who?” He looked into her eyes, still holding her; then he looked away.

“I don’t know, Papa. He had a car. Mama said it was important and that she had to go—but that she’d be back early. And she said not to wait up for her.” She leaned forward and kissed him again, her hair brushing against his skin. “She’ll be back soon.” She took his hands in hers. “Now, tell me what you want for supper. There are some anchovies in the cupboard and I feel like making a pizza. And we could open a bottle of wine.”

She was trying to cheer him up.

He undid his tie and threw his jacket onto the settee.

In the event, they watched the news on television and then went over the road to the pizzeria.

Quattro stagioni for Pioppi and a Coca-Cola. Trotti had a pizza pugliese and a can of Nastro Azzurro beer.

Pioppi talked cheerfully. Trotti was silent; he had been overworking, he told himself, and he needed to sleep.

No news of Moro on the radio before he went to bed.

Trotti slept for a couple of hours and then woke up, the weight of the pizza and the onions heavy on his stomach. He lay in bed looking at the patterns of lights on the ceiling as cars drove past along via Milano.

He could not get back to sleep and at half past two he got up and put on a dressing gown. He went into the kitchen, heated some water and made a cup of chamomile tea. He did not feel well; his eyes ached and from time to time, he belched. A bitter, bilious taste at the edges of his tongue.

He poured honey into the tea and sipped slowly while his eyes scanned the parish magazine. The clock ticked noisily. Pioppi’s bedroom door was open; he could hear the soft sound of her breathing and he envied her restful sleep.

From time to time a car went past in via Milano; no car stopped.

The phone woke him. He must have dozed off, his head lolling forward. He sat up with a jerk and looked at the clock. Four o’clock. The chamomile was cold.

The telephone continued to ring.

“Commissario Trotti?”

“Yes—I was sleeping.”

“You’d better get dressed.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Get dressed quickly, Commissario.” Something familiar about the voice, a man’s voice. “Get dressed and go down to the Bixio barracks.”

“The Carabinieri?”

“As quickly as you can.”

“Who’s speaking?”

The line was cut. Trotti replaced the receiver and stared at it. Then he shrugged. “A practical joker,” he said. He went into the kitchen and made some coffee. Then he got dressed.

Caserma Bixio stood at the far end of via Bixio.

The air was chill as Trotti got out of the car; he parked outside the derelict church and walked across the road, across the circles of white light from the street lamps.

There were no cars in front of the barracks.

A Cabiniere came out of the darkness of his box and asked Trotti in a southern, uninterested voice what he wanted.

“Commissario Trotti, Pubblica Sicurezza.”

The Carabiniere shrugged; his face was pale in the street light; pale and with grotesque shadows deforming his nose and the dark sockets of his eyes.

“I want to speak with Capitano Spadano.”

The Carabiniere must have pressed a button, hidden somewhere in the recesses of the box; a door opened in the large gate and he nodded to Trotti. Trotti stepped out of the street into the courtyard of the barracks.

It was brightly lit, like a football stadium for a late game. Incandescent beams shone down onto the cobbled courtyard. Several jeeps, a few motorcycles and a couple of cars. Men were sitting in the two cars; several whiplash aerials pointing at the dark sky. There was the sound of distorted voices over metallic radios. There was also the sound of music.

Trotti looked up and saw, blinking against the sky, a red light. It went on and off with a slow, pulsing rhythm.

Two potted plants on the far side of the courtyard. A jeep
started up, the headlights were turned on and caught the stalking silhouette of a cat. It scampered into hiding.

Trotti crossed the courtyard, breathing in the mixture of cold pre-dawn air and petrol fumes. He went through a small wooden doorway and entered a long hall. Newly painted walls—grey paint and matching, narrow bars against the high windows. A colorless carpet running along the tiled floor. A few posters along the wall.

Everything was neat; again, Trotti found himself admiring the organization of the Carabinieri. A purposefulness that he had never met in any Questura; a purposefulness that was impressive and slightly frightening.

A man in black uniform went past. His face was familiar; he nodded imperceptibly and disappeared into a room off the corridor.

Trotti went up a staircase, along another corridor, identical in its color and cleanliness to the other one, until he reached a door marked
NUCLEO INVESTIGATIVO
printed in the ground glass. He raised his hand to knock but the door opened before his knuckles fell against the glass.

“Ah, thank goodness.”

The room smelled of smoke and stale cigars.

The man stepped back. “Come in, Trotti, come on in.”

Trotti entered.

“I just phoned your place. A young woman answered. She sounded very sleepy.”

“Most people prefer to sleep at this time of night.”

“A friend of yours?”

“My daughter.” Neither man smiled as they shook hands.

Physically Spadano was small. He was wearing a khaki uniform shirt, dark patches of sweat at the armpits. The sleeves were rolled up. The eyes were grey and his black hair was cut very short and brushed backwards.

“I’m glad you’re here, anyway.”

“What’s happened?”

He glanced at Trotti and frowned, as though he were surprised by the question.

Moths battered noisily against the desk lamp.

Trotti repeated the question. “What’s happened?”

“Perhaps it would be best if you came with me.” Spadano held out his arm and moved towards the door. Trotti followed.

They went to a lift and while they waited, neither man spoke. Spadano frowned, staring at the ground; then when the lift arrived, he politely stepped back to let Trotti enter first.

Three floors; they stepped out into another corridor, this time slightly cooler. They were beneath ground level; there were no windows. The air was damp.

“This way please.”

Although Spadano had lived in the north for most of his life, he had not lost his accent. Palermo. Trotti followed him, a step behind the small, muscular back and the thick neck. Hair that showed no sign of thinning. For a man well into his fifties, Spadano had aged well.

“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, Trotti entered into a flood of blinding neon light.

It must have been in the first two years of marriage that Trotti had bought the stole. Agnese was only just starting out on her medical studies and they were still relatively poor. Her family, disapproving of the marriage, had made little effort to help them. Trotti could not afford a summer holiday—at least nothing more than a run into the hills or a day by the sea near La Spezia—and then, with the autumn, Trotti remembered, he had received a pay raise. Fifteen thousand lire—chickenfeed by today’s standards but then, in the early 1950s, the strangely large banknotes were hard to come by. Autumn, the first fogs along the Po; and so, to celebrate, he had decided to buy her the stole. Once, walking along Strada Nuova, she had pointed it out in Vanizza’s. It was real fur—but of what kind, he could never remember. Vanizza himself had sold it to Trotti; Vanizza who was himself heading out on a career that was to make him one of the richest men in Italy, a household name, the ambassador of fashion to New York and Moscow—a career that was to put his name on the advertising billboards around every professional football pitch in the peninsula. A career
so successful that he now had to send his grandchildren to school in Switzerland, beyond the grasp of potential kidnappers.

Agnese had loved it. She who had had everything, who had never gone hungry during the war, who had scarcely known about the shortages—she loved the humble present. She threw her arms about Trotti’s neck and kissed him while he smiled, his reflection caught in the bedroom mirror.

“You are an angel,” she said, and for several years, there was not an occasion when she did not wear the black stole.

Then the fur started to wear thin and, after a while, she seemed to wear it less. She was approaching the end of her studies. It was about the time that she qualified as a doctor that she gave up wearing it completely.

Trotti assumed that she had thrown it away. She had occasionally a fit of clearing up and then everything that she did not like or that she considered too old was relegated to the dustbin. It was something he had never really understood; he had grown up in the hills where a shirt would be mended several times before it was handed down to the younger brother who would wear it for as many years again. Nothing was thrown away.

Then they had gone down to Bari. Pioppi was still a little girl and Agnese had managed to get a good job with the American pharmaceutical company. She earned enough money to be elegant at all times, she no longer had to wait for Trotti’s meager monthly salary. Trotti saw nothing wrong in Agnese’s spending money on clothes; the latest dresses from Paris fashion houses, shoes from Florence and several fur coats—scarcely necessary in the mild Adriatic climate—including a mink coat that she wore only a couple of times.

He entered the cell.

The stole was part of the past, a happy past, with its memories of sacrifice and optimism. It now lay like a docile animal on her white shoulders.

The dress she wore was simple and from where he stood, Trotti could have sworn she was still the young student he had married.

She turned to look at him. The eyes were red—she had been crying—and the illusion of youth vanished. She whispered in a hoarse voice, “Go away.”

Trotti stepped towards her and hesitantly placed a hand upon her shoulder. The skin was cool. She shrugged his hand away and he stood with arms hanging loosely at his side.

“Agnese.”

She turned her back to him. “Go away, go away, go away.” She put her hands to her face.

Perhaps her body shook slightly; perhaps she was sobbing. Trotti stared down at the curve of her neck and at the regular lustrous spheres of a pearl necklace he had never seen before. He wanted to help her—of course he wanted to help her but he knew there was nothing that he could do. She did not need him. Spadano coughed.

“Agnese,” Trotti said, addressing himself to the back of her head—there were the first white strands nestling in her black hair. “Agnese.”

He did not know what to say. Tell her that he loved her? It would have sounded foolish, here in the clinical harsh light of the cell.

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. Then silence.

She knew he loved her—perhaps that was why she despised him.

“Agnese.”

“Go away.” She did not move; her voice was unclear as though she was talking to herself. “Go back home. Pioppi needs you.”

Spadano took his arm softly. “Come,” he said and he led Trotti out of the cell. They went back to his office. Neither man spoke in the lift. Trotti stood with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched.

In the office, Spadano pointed Trotti to a chair—in a lot better condition than the canvas ones in the Questura. Spadano went to his desk and took a packet of Toscani cigars from his shirt pocket. He lit one. A pungent cloud of smoke, pierced by his dark eyes. Trotti sat silently. He was staring at his hands, his eyes unblinking.