Death in Tuscany (40 page)

'That's also a complicated matter. Broadly speaking, the quarries can't be leased to third parties, which is another reason why the new rules were introduced. They establish that the mountain belongs to the municipality, which can lease the quarries to whoever exploits them, provided that person in fact does so. But there are private agreements whereby one person gets another person to do the work, and the municipality isn't too bothered about that. As long as the quarries are kept going, no one loses his job, the rules are followed, and the taxes are paid, we're not going to stick our noses in.'

'Too bad. So you don't know who's running quarries 206, 219 and 225?'

'Wait a moment.'

He went away again and soon returned with a sheet of paper on which he had noted down a name. 'It seems that the taxes are paid on behalf of Simonetta Tonelli by a certain Ugo Palladiani of Florence. That's all we know.'

The two policemen looked at each other, discouraged, said, 'Thank you,' and left the office.

It was after midday.

'Don't worry, Chief Superintendent, I'll send one of my men to check it out properly'

'You have enough on your plate,' Ferrara said. 'I'll deal with it.' He took out his mobile and dialled Headquarters in Florence.

'Ferrara here,' he said to the switchboard operator. 'Put me through to Superintendent Rizzo.'

'Hello, chief,' his deputy said when he came on the line.

'Did Anna Giulietti's warrant arrive?'

'Just got it. I'm on my way there now.'

'Good. Let me know how you get on. Did she also send you the authorisation to see Stella's medical records?'

'Yes, chief.'

'Perfect. Make sure Leone and Fuschi get copies.' 'Of course, chief.'

Outside Carrara Police Headquarters, he got back in his car and set off again for the mountains. He was starting to know the road as well as the route from the Via Zara to his apartment.

He didn't go straight to Simonetta's quarries, to avoid putting the supposed criminals on their guard, but stopped first to question workers in other quarries. He did not discover much. Perhaps there was a code of silence here, or perhaps it was just that people minded their own business, as the group he had met the day before in the bar in Colonnata had said.

In the third quarry he visited, he actually ran into old Franchi, the winner of the bet. He hadn't been one of the most talkative of the group, but it was worth a try.

Ferrara introduced himself as an academic who was writing an article on Carrara marble.

It didn't take long to get in his good books. The man wasn't hostile, just reserved. Gradually, Ferrara got him to talk about the presence of non-local operators in quarries 206, 219 and 225, where he had seen a lorry belonging to a Sicilian company.

'Yes, Mining Extractions. They're the people who work those quarries. At least, they're the ones we sometimes sell waste to. They make a little marble, but mostly dust.' 'But who are they?'

'I don't know. They're from Sicily, yes, but we don't know them and we don't know who their boss is. We usually just call him "the Sicilian". Some of us joke about it and call him "the saviour of the quarries".'

Just like Claudia Pizzi.

'Why's that?'

'Because those are the Tonelli quarries, which had been practically abandoned for ages. If it wasn't for those people, the municipality would have taken them over by now, because you can't keep quarries completely inactive when they could give work to lots of people. Not that there's much left to extract. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about.'

'Perhaps the main reason they took them over was the marble dust.'

The old man shrugged, as if he didn't understand an activity that seemed blasphemous to him and he preferred not to think about it.

'But what does this dust look like?' Ferrara asked.

The man looked around him, then down at Ferrara's shoes. Like everything else - the rubble-strewn path leading to the quarry, the machinery, the toolsheds - they were covered with a thin whitish layer like the one on the tanker lorry he had seen the day before.

'Can't you see?' the man said, with a smile. 'Come on, follow me.'

He led him towards the terraced flank of the mountain where a group of workers were extracting a block.

The operation was a fascinating one. The cutting machines sliced through the marble as if it were butter, raising clouds of white dust that looked like talcum powder.

The old man approached a heap of the dust, picked up a handful, and held it out to him. Ferrara took a pinch of it and let it run through his fingers. It could have been heroin, or pure cocaine.

'This is it, more or less,' Franchi said, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of the cutters. 'Except that this isn't the stuff they use. It's just residue, and it's dirty. The diamond used to cut the marble gets burnt in the process, which contaminates the dust. That's why the dust they use is specially ground from the residue.'

'I see,' Ferrara said, as they moved away to a spot where they could talk more easily. 'How long have these Sicilians been here?'

'Six or seven years.'

'Since the mid-Nineties?'

The man thought about it for a few seconds. '1994, to be precise.'

'And you've never noticed anything strange?' 'How do you mean?'

'I don't know. Unusual comings and goings, goods being moved at odd times, strangers visiting the quarries

'No, why? All I know is that the small amount of marble they produce they send to America. But the dust goes all over Italy: to paper mills in Garda, farms in Reggio Emilia, building companies in the north and in Rome, things like that.'

And is that normal?'

'Perfectly normal, why?'

'Just trying to get an idea. I haven't quite got the commercial side of things clear. Marble I understand, it's a unique, centuries-old tradition, but dust

'I don't understand it myself . . . Sure, it sells. But there's no need really to come here for it, you can get it from any quarry anywhere. Our marble is special - to waste it like that . . . Well, what can you do? I'm old.'

'Which means you're wise. At least that's the way it used to be. Now things have changed and no one wants to get old. A mistake, in my opinion. You just have to look at the way the world's going.'

'Too true, Professor.'

He got back to the hotel in the afternoon and found Petra reading in the garden. He sat down beside her, kissed her, and told her what he had found out.

'I wouldn't be at all surprised if this Mining Extractions company turns out to be the centre of a drug trafficking operation. They could be using the marble dust to cut the drugs. It looks practically identical. But I don't understand . . .'

'What, Michele?'

'Why they had to take over three whole quarries. How much do they need? With what you can extract from just one quarry, I imagine you could cut half the heroin in the world for a year!'

'Yes,' Petra admitted. 'It doesn't make much sense.'

They were both silent for a while, then Ferrara, still puzzling over that question, called Police Headquarters in Florence. They told him Rizzo wasn't back yet and he asked to speak to Fanti.

'Well?' he began.

'Hi, chief! I spent all morning trying to get some information from the people in Bellomonte, but they're worse than the three wise monkeys. No one knows anything, they can't get to the files because of an earth tremor in '98 which made the place unsafe and now they're somewhere temporary and are completely impossible to reach . . . plus, they say they've had it up to here with Rome and the mainland. I think I'll have to contact a colleague of mine down there.'

'Do it, Fanti. You have carte blanche. I need to know who
's
behind that company.'

24

Rizzo arrived at the abandoned factory just after two in the afternoon together with Sergi, Ascalchi and three constables. It was a white, one-storey, reinforced concrete building, some sixty-five feet wide and two hundred feet long. The only windows were long narrow ones high up on the walls, close to the roof.

Deputy Prosecutor Anna Giulietti's warrant authorised them to remove any obstacles they had to, and Sergi only took a few seconds with his wire cutters to get through the padlock on the heavy iron shutter. The shutter itself, although half rusted, was not hard to lift, as the runners were well oiled.

Nor was it difficult to force the lock on the iron door.

They found themselves in a large rectangular space, covered by the dust of years and cluttered with heaps of garments, piles of cardboard boxes, long trestle tables, some still standing, others thrown to the floor with all their contents, including sewing machines.

'We've come in on the workshop side,' Rizzo said. 'Let's check the rest of the premises before we start to search.'

'With all this mess, that could take forever,' Ascalchi complained.

At the far end of this large room was a glass door. Beyond the door, a corridor, with two rooms on one side and three on the other. All of the rooms had walls of plasterboard and glass, apart from one which had plasterboard only. This was the toilet, which was filthy. The other four rooms had been the offices. The desks and cheap armchairs were still there. Papers, pattern books, binders and folders were strewn everywhere, telephone wires dangled, and there were masses of cables for computers which had long gone.

At the end of the corridor was another door, identical to the first.

It led to the reception area, shrouded in darkness because the windows, high up on the walls, had been blacked out.