Gold, Frankincense and Dust (13 page)

“Ah well, if you don’t slim down a bit, the only criminals you’ll catch will be the lame ones. I gave you a hundred metres’ start on a three-hundred-metre stretch.”

“Hey, commissario, as if this life was not shitty enough, now you want me to stop eating.”

In the meantime, a multitude of the curious had gathered round but they quickly showed their disappointment. “It’s time you got this dirty Moroccan,” yelled a heavily made-up
woman with a crocodile skin handbag. Moroccans had become the whipping boys for all misdeeds committed by incomers.

“There’s a psychosis abroad, and it’s spreading,” Esposito was heard groaning as he walked over to his car. “Thank God I’m not on night duty. Everybody sees monsters when the lights go down.”

The two men stood in silence in the thick mist, getting their breath back.

“Alright, commissario. The fun’s over,” Esposito said as he got into the car and switched on the engine. At that moment Soneri’s mobile rang, but he was once again disappointed when Juvara’s voice came on. “Have you heard about the identikit?”

“Nanetti told me. Will you go over to Signora Robutti’s for an official identification?”

“O.K., but I wanted to inform you that we have the details of the calls made to Nina.”

“Recognise any?”

“There are lots of them, nearly all male.”

“There’s a surprise!”

“I mean, they’re from people who don’t seem to be the same age as her, mature men.”

“Does it give their ages on the printout?”

“No, but if there’s a lawyer or accountant who’s got his own office, he can’t be all that young.”

“Are they all like that?”

“One phone number belongs to a company. I looked it up on the internet and I see it’s a goldsmith’s. It produces and deals in top-of-the-range items.”

“Leave everything on my desk. I’ll be there shortly and I’ll have a look.”

He felt that things were starting to come together, nothing that could be proved, just impressions, feelings and
affinities between tiny clues that were beginning to establish a plausible framework in his mind. His imagination and his experience in dealing with the all-too-human fact which is evil did the rest.

The mobile distracted him once again. This time he reached for it absent-mindedly, expecting a call from Capuozzo or Marcotti with a rebuke for being out of touch for days and not filing a report.

“You’ve been looking for me several times,” Angela said, with some heat.

“Your mobile’s never switched on.”

“These days, I often have to keep it off. Clients call me in my office. The only ones who have my mobile number are you and a few others.”

“You mean one other.”

He heard a slight inhalation of breath, but it might have been a sigh. Angela changed tack. “I’d like to see you right way. Why don’t you come round to my office? I’m on my own.”

He felt a surge of desire for her, but the impulse was dampened by her silence about the other man. She tantalised him with a lover’s flattery but wounded him by declining to give a reply which would give him reassurance or hope. Angela was keeping him on tenterhooks, in an anguished limbo of uncertainty. At times he detested her for this, and never before had Sbarazza’s monologue on the prison of the passions seemed to him so profoundly true.

“You don’t seem too keen,” she said.

“It’s not that. I’ve had a call from the office.”

“You see? For you work is more important.”

“No, if you only knew …”

“Well then. What’s keeping you? I wouldn’t like to pressurise you, or interrupt the work of a public official.”

“I’m on my way,” Soneri said, with unwonted ardour, snapping his mobile shut.

*

Angela wrapped herself around him before he even had time to take off his coat. She was aggressive, as she had been in earlier days when their passion fed off their desire to discover each other. With an equally unusual urgency which she seemed deeply to appreciate, he offered her every assistance, so there developed between them an invigorating struggle, something like the nuptial dance of insects in spring, on the divan, desk and armchairs.

Afterwards, exhausted but gratified, they flopped onto the floor, looking around in disbelief, with childlike wonder. Even in his euphoria, the moment he pondered the roots of this excessive reaction, Soneri’s mood turned grim and he was again overwhelmed by the bittersweet acknowledgement of the precariousness of his condition. Their lovemaking did nothing to take away the savour of dying summer or of the final act of folly.

“You like the other guy and he excites you. It’s him you want, not me,” Soneri said.

“So why would I want to make love to you?”

“I’m an old habit dressed up in new attire. The other man has got you fired up and your desire is projected onto me.”

“No.” She shook her head, but the gesture seemed to Soneri dictated more by will power than by conviction. “In that case, I’d have gone to him, but I didn’t. I came to you.”

“It’s fear that’s keeping you tied to me. The fear of change.”

“Me afraid of change?” Angela said in tones of injured pride.

“If we were angry with each other, it’d be easy for both of
us to walk away. Everything would be simpler, but the fact is we’re tied to each other by a deep understanding, and maybe we believe that at our age this cannot be repeated. That’s where the fear springs from,” Soneri said, looking his partner straight in the eye, “but at the same time, we want the thrills we can’t give each other any longer, and so we look for them somewhere else. You’ve found them with that guy, but the excitement you feel is like playing blind man’s buff with your future, and that scares you. You come back to me all charged up, and you try to transfer onto the man who gives you security the excitement you feel with your lover. If you were younger, you wouldn’t give it a second thought. You’d be off already, because you’d have plenty of time ahead of you for correcting mistakes, but as you grow older, you become more careful.”

Angela made no reply and her silence wounded Soneri, who was doing all he could to wring from her some indication that she still loved him.

“He doesn’t know about you.”

“That goes without saying. Adultery and betrayal are based on deception.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

Angela, speaking only in staccato sentences, had a sulky expression. She too seemed to be in search of some form of reassurance which neither was able to give the other.

“You’ll have to make up your mind, Angela. You’ll have to choose between the exhilarating uncertainty of the new and the reassuring continuity of what you have. In each case, you are running risks.”

He got up to go. Angela came with him to the door and hugged him, but said not a word.

HE MADE HIS
way back to the office, walking quickly along the pavements of the already dark city and feeling empty inside. In quick succession, calls came from Capuozzo and Marcotti, both putting the same questions, his superior officer with overblown, plaintive pomposity and the magistrate neurotic and rapid.

“Where do we stand?” Marcotti said, straight to the point.

“The victim’s name is Nina Iliescu,” Soneri said.

She gave a mumbled assent, as if she knew everything already. Soneri assumed she had been talking to Juvara.

“I think I’ve found out where she used to live, but I’d need a warrant.”

“No problem. In these cases, it’s normal practice, isn’t it? Was the house hers?”

“We don’t know. This girl’s life is a mystery that is still to be unravelled. All we have to go on at the moment are telephone printouts, an apartment we need to search and a car with the design of a horse on the side.”

“A horse?”

“It’s the car that dumped the body on the side of the autostrada. The same car was seen by the woman who sold the underwear to the girl, and by Manservisi, the chief of the gypsy community which set up their camp alongside the
rubbish dump near the Cortile San Martino service area. That’s where Mariotto comes from, the only witness that we have so far.” The commissario had to stop, because the magistrate had started yelling down the telephone.

“You’re making my head spin, commissario! I phoned you to get you to clear up some points and you’ve launched into an incomprehensible catalogue.”

It had not occurred to him that he was making a summary for his own purposes rather than recounting facts to her. Until that moment, he had been accumulating sensations and unconnected fragments, and the recitation had given him the opportunity to put them all together.

“No, don’t start again,” Marcotti begged him. “Prepare a report and I’ll read it at my leisure.”

The conversation ended with that request, which seemed to him absurd. What could a report explain? The investigation was at a point which made it the equivalent of a photograph without a caption, or at least that was how it felt to him as he walked among people crowding into bars or heading home. From time to time he felt he was losing his internal balance and was under the influence of some kind of emotional anaesthetic which dulled every sense into indifference. He knew this was a means of avoiding pain. At other times he sought refuge in the past, in the years he had been living with Ada, in his unborn son whom he continually imagined as being close to him and whom he identified with some boys he ran into by chance on his long walks. When this happened, he always ended up remembering Nina. The faces of the two women superimposed themselves – one on top of the other – and their affairs ended up criss-crossing. Perhaps that was why he had taken this case so much to heart.

At the entrance to the police station he felt Angela’s silence weigh heavily on him. He thought of calling her, but
he was held back by the fear of getting her voicemail. He pushed open the door and made for his office.

“Commissario, there’ve been calls from …” Juvara attempted to alert him, but the commissario cut him off.

“I’ve spoken to them already. What I want to know is if anyone has been looking for the girl. Missing person reports, I mean.”

The inspector shook his head. “No, there are none.”

“With all these calls …” Soneri said, running his eye over the details on the printout. “When she was alive, there were plenty of them searching for her. Look at all these names.” His thoughts were with those two corpses, the old man and the young woman, lying side by side in the mortuary. Two ghosts whom no-one wanted to claim and who would perhaps be tossed into a pauper’s grave in some cemetery or other on the outskirts.

He drew himself up short when he realised that his curiosity was being reawakened. The world once again held some interest for him. He picked up the printout and dialled the first number at the top of the page, that of a lawyer, Federico Paglia. The telephone rang a couple of times, and then he heard a bored voice ask who was calling.

“Commissario Soneri here. I need to talk to you about Nina.”

“Nina?”

“Or maybe Ines? Is that what you called her?”

The lawyer fell silent for a few seconds, then said: “Come in half an hour.”

Soneri took the printout with him when he went. He was prepared for an evening listening to accounts of the girl, in the hope that this would give him the chance to learn about her from the various men who had desired, possibly even loved, her.

Paglia’s premises were in the Parmigianino quarter. He saw before him a corpulent man, beginning to go to seed, with prominent, fleshy lips and the face of an ageing guardian angel.

“Why are you asking me about Ines?” he began immediately, with a slight hint of alarm in his voice.

“She was killed and her body burned,” Soneri said bluntly.

For a long time, as he had done on the telephone an hour earlier, Paglia said nothing, and then: “So she was the woman …”

“The woman in the autostrada incident, yes,” Soneri finished the sentence for him. “You called her …” he paused to look at the printout, “two days before she died. A seventeen minute conversation at two-twenty in the afternoon.”

“We did speak,” Paglia conceded gloomily. “It is not easy to forget a girl like her.”

“She was your lover?”

“For nearly a year.”

“It was Ines who left you?”

The man nodded. “It was hard to hold on to her. She was a girl with fire inside her, impossible to forget. I lost my head over her. That girl knew what she was about, like no other. To keep her, you had to lose your head, give your instincts free rein, indulge her desires and to hell with day-to-day living. I could not match her energy.”

“So it ended?”

“I must have been mad, but at that time it was exactly what I wanted. Ines gave me everything I had ever desired from a woman.”

“Did you have the impression she was exploiting you?”

“No. If she was, she was an extraordinary actress. I always felt loved,” Paglia said.

The commissario thought for a minute of what exactly it
meant to be loved, but this only made Angela’s silence all the harder to bear.

“I know what you mean,” Paglia said. “Yes, in bed Ines was all raw passion. I never thought it was just an act. At those moments, I always believed she was committed mind and body. Unrestrained, but also attentive. I know precisely what a man of my age is looking for in a lover, but if it lasts more than a year, it can’t be sex alone. I’m not short of cash for that sort of thing. I could have a different one every week.”

“Did Ines ask for money?”

“Never. She wanted something different and adventurous. She wanted to travel with me. Or else, she would stand in front of a shop window, enchanted with a ring so that I would end up buying it for her. She never made direct requests.”

The commissario lingered for a few moments to observe the lawyer as he spoke with great deliberation. Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion, like the clumsy movements of a sea lion. His expression had a flicker of life only when he was recalling his lover. There was something in the man that suggested an undertone of frustration. He must have had an unhappy boyhood, perhaps on account of that unattractive physique which Ines had led him to believe desirable.