That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (6 page)

Doctor Ingravallo settled the ticket in a wallet, went downstairs again, after barely fifteen minutes had elapsed. The stairs were dark. From below, the hall was light: even with the main door closed as it was, the hall received light from a window on the courtyard. Gaudenzio and Pompeo followed him. He looked for the concierge again; she was there, squabbling with somebody.

Since ninety per cent of the tenants, male and female, had withdrawn at his invitation, but only a few steps away, and with their ears pricked up, it wasn't difficult for him to extend his inquiry with a supplementary investigation concerning the mysterious grocer's boy, tacitly reassembling there in the hall the previously dismissed group or clump of humans and vegetables from which he was to press information about the events and, possibly, clarification of the person involved. It turned out that no tenant of the building, whether from stairway A or B, had received anything or was to receive anything, that morning, from any grocer of the capital. Nobody had opened a door to a boy with a white apron, at that hour. "It was all staged," a lady, friend of Signora Bottafavi, then suggested, though she was no friend of la Menegazzi and lived on the fifth floor. "You know, when one of them goes to rob a place, there's always another one outside to keep watch . . . The two of them . . . now you take it from me, doctor . . . the two were in cahoots . . ."

"Don't you ever see delivery boys in this building?" Ingravallo asked, in a tone of conscious authority and, also, annoyance. He drew back his eyelids, breaking his habitual tedium and heaviness: his eyes then received a light, a penetrating certainty. "Of course," la Pettacchioni then said, "why this building is like the Central Station ... The highest type of people live here, people in trade, sir." The others all smiled: "the kind who don't like to eat just any old greens." "Then who did they deliver to? Don't you remember? .. . Who brought the fresh mozzarella to their doors?" "Oh well, sir, they came more or less for everybody . . ." she bowed her head and put her left index finger to the corner of her mouth: "just let me have a think." Now all of them were mentally groping for boys bringing mozzarella: a sudden fervor of hypotheses, arguments, memories: wicker baskets and white aprons. "Yes . . . Signor Filippo here," she sought him, with a glance: and as if she were introducing him: "Commendatore Angeloni, of the Ministry of National Economy," and she pointed him out, in the group. The others then moved aside and the designated man bowed slightly: "Commendatore Angeloni," he then ventured, on his own. "Ingravallo," Ingravallo said, who so far hadn't even been made a cavaliere, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers. The homage due the National Economy.

Signor Filippo, tall, dark of overcoat, with his belly somewhat pear-shaped, and his shoulders hunched and sloping slightly, his face between frightened and ... and melancholy, and in its midst a big, rudder-like priest's or fish's nose, which could sound the great trump of the Last Judgment, if you blew on it—that was how it looked—though commendatorial and ministerial, yes; but in particular there was a something ... a sadness, an insecurity, and with it also a kind of reticence in his eyes, as he looked at the officer, Officer Ingravallo, almost as if afraid of losing his berth . . . the next time the Ministry fell: which was not to fall, on the other hand, until Forty-three, the 25th of July. A strange old crow, my God, all bundled up, inside those lapels and that elegiac scarf: a Ministering cleric from that group of very black ones that nest, by preference, between San Luigi de' Francesi and the Minerva. Unnoticed by the absent-minded or hurrying passer-by, one foot after the other in the easy hour of the day they are used to stroll over their beloved little side streets, from the arch of Sant'Agostino and Via della Scrofa, along Via delle Coppelle or the Pozzo delle Cornacchie, up to Santa Maria in Aquiro. On rare occasions they venture, very slowly, along Via Colonna and enter, agoraphobes all, the cobbled Piazza di Pietra, disdaining the half-liter and the snobbish pizzeria of the Neapolitan : and then from that alleyway of Via di Pietra they may even reach the Corso, but it has to be Holy Saturday, at the very least, opposite the Enciclopedia Treccani, to the most inviting clocks and watches of Catellani, the jeweler. In Lent or low Sundays, mourning and flabby, they are content to flank Santa Chiara, under the globes of the two hotels, up to the elephant and his graceful obelisk, past the shopwindows of rosaries and Madonnas: very slowly, or else: equally slowly, they go back: a bicycle grazing them, they turn into the Palombella and hug the back of the Pantheon, by now, however, retracing their steps as if a bit disappointed by the dusk.

Commendatore Angeloni had moved to Via Merulana some years ago, after the demolitions in Via del Parlamento and Campo Marzio, where he had lived since time immemorial. He must have been a gourmet, judging at least by the little packages, the truffles . . . Packages which, as a rule, he delivered to himself, with great concern and all due respect, holding them horizontally and on his chest, as if he were nursing them: the kind of package from de luxe grocers, filled with galatine or
pate
and tied with a little blue cord. And sometimes, for that matter, they also delivered them to his house, at two hundred and nineteen, at the very top; they "handed" them to him, as the Florentines would say. (Little artichokes in oil. Tunnied veal.)

"Signor Filippo here," Signora Manuela repeated. "Well, sometimes you've had one come, a boy with packages, and a white apron. I've never looked him in the face, so I couldn't come right out and describe him. But now that I think of it, the one this morning could have been yours, more or less. One evening, when I ran after him, he yelled down the stairs that he was going to your house, said he had to deliver some ham."

All eyes were trained on Commendatore Angeloni. The object of this attention became confused.

"Me? Grocery boys? . . . What ham?"

"Why, commendatore dear," Signora Manuela implored, "you wouldn't make me look like a liar, would you, telling me it isn't true in front of the officer here? . . . After all, you live alone . . ."

"Alone?" Signor Filippo rebutted, as if living alone were a sin.

"Well, is there anybody up there with you? Not even a cat...

"What do you mean by saying I'm alone?"

"I mean that if somebody delivers food to your house, when it rains, or in the evening . . . well, it can happen, can't it? Can't it? . . . Am I right?" Her tone was conciliating, as if she had winked at him to say: what kind of mess are you getting me into, you fathead?

And apparently, it
was
a mess. Signor Filippo's embarrassment was obvious: that stammering, that sudden pallor: those glances so filled with uncertainty, even with anguish. Interest and suspense gripped them all: all the tenants looked at him agape: at him, at the concierge, at the officer.

The only sure thing, Ingravallo said to himself, was that the concierge hadn't seen the delivery boy's face this time, either: if he had been a delivery boy. She had seen his heels and also his . . . shall we say his back? That much, yes . . . Professoressa Bertola, now, she had seen his face: it was white, with white lips: but she hadn't seen him the other times. So she had nothing to say either.

The murderer, too . . . Signora Manuela had to admit finally that she wouldn't be able to recognize him again. No. She had never seen him before. Never. Like a thunderbolt it was!

And the two revolver shots, in that darkness of the stairs, hah, God only knows where they ended up.

Officer Ingravallo cut it short. He invited to the police station Signora Manuela Pettacchioni, concierge, and the Signora Teresina Menegazzi nee Zabala, where clerks could type up and the ladies could sign further, if there were further, statements: the second of the above-named, in particular, had to make an official charge. The damages were rather great: the case was serious enough. It was a question of aggravated burglary, and for a value, if not a sum, fairly impressive in its total: about thirty thousand lire, more or less, between the gold things and the jewels (a strand of pearls, a large topaz, among others); and roughly four thousand seven hundred in cash, in the old wallet. "The wallet of my poor Egidio," la Menegazzi sobbed, on hearing herself summoned.

Commendatore Angeloni was asked, with all proper respect, to remain at the police's disposal, for further clarifications. Another nice euphemism. "Remain at disposal," meant, in effect, accompanying Don Ciccio on the various seesaw of trams and buses as far as the Santo Stefano del Cacco Station. In addition Signor Filippo had to skip his lunch.

"I'm afraid I couldn't, thank you," he said sadly to Pompeo, who suggested he break his nervous waiting with a healthy pair of sandwiches. "I haven't any appetite; this is the wrong moment." "Whatever you say, Commendatore. In any case, when you feel like it, Peppino Er Maccheronaro has a place here in Via del Gesù that really fills the bill. He knows all of us; we're good customers. Rare roast beef; that's Peppino's speciality." Signora Manuela, once she had completed, on Don Ciccio's desk, that horrible and interminable tangle that was her respected signature, Manuela Pettacchioni crossed the dim antechamber and decided to take her leave also of the bundled-up dignitary. She gave him a jovial greeting, loud and woman-of-the-people as ever: "Ta-ta for now, Commendatore . . ." And everyone stared at him. "Stiff upper lip, eh? There's nothing to it... and it's over before you know it." And she went out to catch the PV-1, all in a rush, wiggling her ass like a quail and clicking in perilous equilibrium on the heels of her good shoes which were like trampolenes, like an old sow on her trotters. "With all the mess he's in today, he won't feel much like eating artichokes ... He won't even eat a crust, poor Signor Filippo . . . Santo Stefano del Cacco, of all places to end up. That's a place to keep away from!"

The Commendatore couldn't calm down. That tick-tock of the awful clock in the room, from one tick to the next, had hollowed the sockets of his eyes: he looked as if he had been dug up from his grave. He was questioned, in the early afternoon, by Ingravallo himself, who alternated blandishments and courtesy with rather heavier phases, falling victim, at times, to that "office torpor" which so usefully weighted his eyelids. Moments of vivacity and irony: bursts of what seemed sudden impatience: boredom, as if the red tape were stifling him: harsh parentheses. Deviti—Gaudenzio, that is—who was unobtrusively present throughout the interview at a little table in the corner, his head on the day's sheaf of documents, later told how, at the first bars of this duet, the harassed, intimidated Angeloni promptly and completely lost his bearings. It's a thing that happens to respectable people, to serious gentlemen, or to those who obstinately make a show of being such, in certain situations which are not adapted to them. An incredible anguish seemed to have overwhelmed the Commendatore. It ended with him blowing his nose, red-eyed: he trumpeted like a widow. He insisted he knew nothing, thought nothing, could imagine nothing, concerning that shop assistant. He insisted painfully, against all normal usage, on that term "shop assistant." The more Ingravallo fell back on a folk-loristic tone, between the Tiber and his native Biferno, the more he taunted by saying "grocer's kid" or "delivery boy," the more the other man withdrew like a snail into the pompous shell of high-flown terminology: which, however, was competely out of place, in that atmosphere of generic police distrust, like jellied eels and artichokes in oil. Via Venti Settembre, with its ministries, its clerks, its doormen, must in that implacable hour have seemed to him a paradise more teetering than ever: a distant Olympus, ruled over by a Quirites Commendatore, indeed Grand 'Ufficiale, but alas, hardly likely to succor him. What? Farewell, the magic papers of the sweet bureaucratic inanity? Farewell, the comforting warmth of the Central Administration? The "considerable" increments in the graph of fishing . . . for sardines? The duty exemptions on pickling? The stormy, yet beloved grumbling of the Excise Office, the holy reverberation of the Superior Court? Farewell? Alone, seated on a bench in the station house, with upon him all the hairsplitting of the homicide squad (so he thought) which made his eyes brim. His poor face, the face of a poor man who wants people not to look at him, but with that schnozz in the middle which constantly prompted opinions, unexpressed, from every interlocutor, his face seemed, to Ingravallo, a mute and desperate protest against the inhumanity, the cruelty of all organized investigation.

At times in the past, yes, they had sent some ham to his house. Who? Who, indeed. A difficult question. No, he couldn't put a name to him. He didn't even remember, perhaps, after all this time. He . . . lived alone. He didn't have any regular tradesmen he dealt with. He bought things here and there: today from one, tomorrow from another. From all the shops in Rome, more or less. A little in each, you might say. At random, wherever he happened to be. When he noticed a bargain, or saw they had good things. Perhaps only some little pastry, often. Just to satisfy a whim ... A bit of marinated herring, perhaps, or a spot of galantine. But more than anything, he blew his nose, some cans of tomato sauce to have a little stock at home. It's convenient to have some on hand. And the things were delivered, of course, by the assistants in the shops . . .

He shrugged, his eyebrows relaxed, as if to say: What could be more obvious?

"You once told the concierge" (Don Ciccio yawned) "that you had bought some nice lean ham in Via Panisperna . . ."

"Ah, yes, now that you remind me of it, I remember it too, once ... I bought a whole ham, a little one, a mountain ham, just a few pounds." The small weight of the ham apparently seemed to him a singular attenuating circumstance. "And, yes indeed, I had it sent to me at home. From the grocer in Via Panisperna, yes, the one at the very end, almost at the corner of Via dei Serpenti... He comes from Bologna."

The poor victim of the interrogation was now gasping. Gaudenzio was dispatched to Via Panisperna.

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