The Past is a Foreign Country (6 page)

LIEUTENANT CHITI WALKED into his office. Even though it was May, it was cold and rainy outside.

He had been in Bari for a few months now. Before coming, he had imagined it as a city where the summers were hot and the autumns and springs mild. What he hadn’t counted on was winter in May.

Nor had he counted on being overwhelmed with work. Bari was considered a quiet place in the Eighties. A place where he could further his career, be promoted to captain, and so on.

It hadn’t taken him long to realise that things were different.

Not only were there plenty of routine crimes – possession of drugs, bag snatching, burglaries – there were also major robberies, extortion, dynamite attacks, murders.

Something not unlike the Mafia lurked beneath the surface. Something opaque, like the stunted but monstrous creature you glimpse through the transparent shell of a reptile’s egg.

And then there were all these sexual assaults. All similar, all clearly the work of the same man. Despite all the efforts they were making to find him, he was proving as elusive as a phantom. And it didn’t help matters that both the carabinieri and the police were involved in the investigation, because as usual when that happened, they were all pulling in different directions.

There had been another assault last night. The fifth, as far as they knew. At any rate the fifth to be reported, because with this type of offence the victims often felt so ashamed, they couldn’t even face going to the carabinieri or the police.

He slumped onto the chair behind his desk, lit a cigarette and started looking through the documents his subordinates had made ready for him.

The report from the patrol, brief details of the victim, statements by a couple of witnesses, if you could call them witnesses: two men who had seen the girl emerge from the entrance to a building, had gone to her aid, and had called 112. About the perpetrator himself, once again there was nothing. He really was a phantom.

No one had ever seen him, apart from the victims. Not that they’d really seen him either. He’d threatened to kill them if they tried to look at him, and they’d all obeyed.

Chiti was about to read the report that would be sent to the Prosecutor’s Department when Corporal Lovascio appeared and said the same thing he said every morning.

‘Coffee, lieutenant?’

Yes, he said, he’d like a coffee, and Lovascio went off to the
canteen
to get it.

The first few times he’d said, no, thanks, he’d go to the
canteen
and get it himself, there was no need for Lovascio to go to all that trouble. He’d meant what he said: he really didn’t want to put anyone to any trouble, he felt uncomfortable having people wait on him. Then he had realised that Lovascio was hurt by these refusals. The corporal couldn’t even conceive of an officer feeling
uncomfortable
because of something like that, and concluded that Chiti was refusing because he didn’t like him. When Chiti realised this, he started saying yes.

He went back to the draft report. He knew he would find all kinds of linguistic errors in it. Some trivial, others quite
unbelievable.
He knew he would let almost all of them pass, and sign off on the report without querying too much. That was another way he’d changed. At first he’d corrected everything: syntax, grammar,
spelling
, even punctuation. Then he realised he couldn’t go on like that.

The men were hurt, he’d spend hours on end trying to correct texts that were usually impossible to correct, and none of his superiors, in the Prosecutor’s Department or anywhere else, ever noticed the difference. So, after a while, he adapted. He would still change a few things here and there, just to show them that he read everything, but, mostly, he adapted.

Anyway, he’d always been very good at adapting.

LOVASCIO CAME IN. As he had already brought the coffee, it had to be for another reason.

‘Colonel Roberti wants to speak to you, lieutenant. He said he’d like to see you at once.’

Chiti put out his cigarette and closed the file. He was sure the colonel wanted to know if they had anything new on the assaults. The case was starting to get out of control and everyone was on edge. But there wasn’t anything new, and the colonel wasn’t going to like that at all.

The lieutenant walked along the corridors of the Fascist-era building that housed the barracks. He had no great desire to see the colonel, and wished his immediate superior, Captain Malaparte, hadn’t been promoted to major and gone to take up a post at
military
school, leaving him alone, at twenty-six, to take charge of the team of detectives.

He knocked at the door, heard the colonel’s thin voice telling him to come in, and walked into the room. He stood to attention, three metres from the desk, until Roberti, having assured himself that military protocol had been respected, signalled to him to approach and sit down.

‘Well, Chiti, anything new on these assaults?’ He’d been right.

‘To tell the truth, colonel, we’re trying to put together all the data we have in our possession. But of course we also need to look
at what the Flying Squad have. Of the five assaults, three were
reported
to us and two to them. As you know, it’s not easy to work with the police…’

‘In other words we don’t have anything new.’

Chiti rubbed his chin and cheek the wrong way, making his
stubble
rustle. He nodded, as if capitulating. ‘No, colonel. We don’t have anything new.’

‘The fucking prosecutor is on my back, the fucking prefect is on my back. The fucking newspapers are on my back about this case. What should I tell the whole bunch of fuckers? What have we done up until now?’

Roberti liked to swear. He probably thought it made him sound virile. As he had a high-pitched voice, the effect was quite the
opposite
, but he would never know.

‘The usual things, colonel. The first assault was reported at least three hours after it happened. The girl went home, told her parents everything and they came with her to the barracks. We sent a patrol over there, but obviously the place was deserted by then. The
police
are dealing with the second and third assaults, because in both cases the girls went straight to casualty, where the police have an officer on duty. We have managed to get hold of the police reports, though, and it seems like those assaults were pretty much the same as ours. They all took place in the entrance halls of municipal
housing
blocks, where the door is always open, even at night. We’re
dealing
with the last two. In one case, the victim came straight to our barracks, on her own. In the other, the latest to date, two passers-by called 112 when they saw the girl on the ground, crying, close to the entrance where the assault took place…’

‘All right, all right. But what actual steps are we taking? Are we tapping anyone’s phone? Are we tailing anyone? Do we have any names? What do our informers say?’

Whose phone are we supposed to be tapping if we don’t have any
suspects? And what use are our informers? This guy is a sex maniac, not a pusher or a fence.

He didn’t say that.

‘To tell the truth, colonel, we don’t have enough to go on to be able to ask the Prosecutor’s Department for a phone tap. And
obviously
we’ve put pressure on all our informers, but no one knows anything. Which isn’t surprising, as we’re dealing with a maniac, not a common criminal.’

‘Chiti, I don’t think you understood what I said. We have to come up with answers on this case, we have to arrest someone. One way or another. I’m leaving Bari next year and I don’t intend to do that with an unsolved case on my hands.’

He seemed to have finished. But then he went on after a brief pause, as if he’d just remembered something important.

‘And this wouldn’t exactly be the best start for your career here either, my dear Chiti. Remember that.’

My dear Chiti
.

He tried to ignore the last remark. ‘I’ve been thinking, colonel, perhaps we ought to consult an expert in criminal psychology. He could draw up a profile of the attacker. That’s what they do in the FBI, I’ve been reading about it and…’

The colonel raised his voice, so that it was even more high-pitched – and distinctly unpleasant. ‘What are you on about? Psychological profiles? The FBI? All that American crap, Chiti – that’s not the way to catch criminals. To catch criminals, you need informers.
Informers,
phone taps, men on the ground. I want all the men on your team out on the streets, talking to their informers, putting pressure on them. I want plain-clothes patrols out all night. We have to get this maniac before the police do. Put together a few men with balls and get them working exclusively on this case, immediately. The FBI, the CIA, all that’s for the movies. Is that clear?’

Perfectly clear. The colonel had never conducted a single
investi
gation
worthy of the name. Thanks to his connections, he’d spent his whole career in cushy office jobs, commanding battalions or teaching cadets.

The lesson in crime detection methods was over, and the colonel made a gesture with his hand to tell him that he could go. The kind of gesture you make to a troublesome servant.

The kind of gesture Chiti had seen his father make many times to subordinates, with the same stolid expression of arrogance and contempt on his face.

Chiti got to his feet, took three steps back, and clicked his heels.

Then he turned and left the room.

ANOTHER OF THOSE nights.

It always happened the same way. Chiti would fall asleep almost immediately, have a couple of hours of deep, leaden sleep, then be woken by a headache. A dull stab of pain between the temple and the eye, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left. He would lie in bed for a few minutes as the pain increased, until he was completely awake. Every time, for those few minutes, he would hope against hope that the headache would pass as
suddenly
as it had come, and he could get back to sleep. But it never passed.

Tonight was no different. After five minutes he got up with his temple and eye throbbing. He went to prepare his forty drops of Novalgin, praying it would have an effect. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and the headache lasted a devastating three, four, even five hours. There would be tears in his eyes and a kind of muffled but implacable beating, nagging and rhythmical, inside his head, like the dull drumbeat of madness.

He swallowed the bitter drink with a shudder. Then he switched on the stereo, put on the first CD of the
Nocturnes
, made sure that the volume was turned down low, and went and sat down in the armchair, wrapped in his dressing gown. In the dark, because with a headache like that light was even more unbearable than noise.

He curled up in the old position as the music began. The same music his mother used to play, all those years ago. In other lodgings
as cold and empty as these, while he listened, curled up just as he was now, and for those few minutes felt safe.

Rubinstein’s piano had the texture of crystal. It evoked images of moonlit glades, familiar mysteries, dark, quiet places full of
perfumes
and promises and nostalgia.

Tonight the medicine worked.

He fell gently asleep, just when he needed it, surrounded by those limpid notes.

Morning again. Time to go down to the office. The same building, the same claustrophobic journey through the service quarters, the canteen, the offices of the operations unit, the officers’ mess. And vice versa.

Most of the furniture in his quarters had been supplied by the
administration
. There wasn’t much that was his: the stereo, the discs, the books, and that was about it.

There was a full-length mirror on the wall near the door. A
typically
ugly barracks accessory.

It was hard to avoid looking at himself in the mirror every time he went out. Since he’d arrived in Bari, something had been
happening
to him more and more frequently, something that used to happen to him when he was about fifteen or sixteen, and which he had thought was buried in the remotest nooks and crannies of his teenage years at military school.

He would see himself in the mirror, examine his face, his clothes – trousers, jacket, shirt, tie – and he would have the impulse to break everything. Both the reflecting surface and the reflected
image
. There was a kind of cold rage in that impulse. A rage at that prosaic surface, that image of himself in the mirror, which didn’t in any way reflect what he had inside him. Splinters, fragments, fumes, 
 burning lava, shadows, fiery flashes. Sudden screams. Abysses he couldn’t even look into.

That morning, he felt the same violent impulse.

He wanted to break the mirror.

To see his own image reflected in a thousand scattered fragments.

That morning a so-called operations meeting was scheduled with the marshal and the two sergeants: the members of the team of detectives the colonel had ordered him to put together.

‘Let’s try and go over what we have, and see if we can come up with anything. We’ve all read through the files, so I’d like each man in turn to tell us what he thinks the five assaults have in common. You first, Martinelli.’

Martinelli was the marshal. He was a tough old character, who’d spent thirty years dealing with Sardinian brigands, Sicilian and
Calabrian
Mafiosi, Red Brigades members. Now he was in Bari, not far from his home village, for the last few years before his retirement. He was tall and bulky, with a shaved head, hands as big – and as hard – as ping pong rackets, a thin mouth, and eyes like slits.

No criminal had ever relished the idea of coming up against Martinelli.

He seemed uncomfortable, and shifted on his chair, making it squeak. He didn’t like taking orders from an Academy graduate, Chiti thought.

‘I don’t know, lieutenant. All five assaults took place around San Girolamo, the Libertà area…no, wait, there’s one – one of those the police are dealing with – which happened in Carrassi. I don’t know if that’s significant.’

Chiti had a sheet of paper in front of him. He noted down what Martinelli had said, and as he wrote, it seemed to him that this was
all an attempt to make himself look good. He had an idea about how the investigation ought to be carried out, but it was all abstract. It was based on what he had read in books and, above all, seen in films. Maybe that bastard of a colonel was right. And these men, all of whom were more experienced than he was, probably knew it, too. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, and he made an effort to dismiss it.

‘What about you, Pellegrini?’

Sergeant Pellegrini was plump and short-sighted. He was a
certified
accountant: not exactly a man of action, but one of the few who could use a computer, and find his way through bureaucratic and financial documents. That was why they had taken him on to the team of detectives and kept him.

‘I think we have to look through the records. We have to look for people with previous convictions for filth like this in the last few years and check them one by one, to see if they have alibis for the nights of the assaults. We need to find out if any of them came out of prison recently, maybe just before this whole thing started. At least, that way we’d have something to work on. I mean, these creeps never get out of the habit, prison doesn’t take away the craving. If we find a lot of names that fit, I could start a database. As we go on we can add data and then cross check it… Well, anyway, you can find out a lot if you look in the records…’

At least this was a suggestion that might lead somewhere. Chiti felt a little better.

‘What about you, Cardinale? Any ideas?’

Cardinale had become a sergeant early. One of the very few cases in the carabinieri where someone had been promoted as a
recognition
of unusual merit. He was short and thin, with a boyish face. Two years earlier, while off duty, he had been in a bank when a gang of robbers had come in. There were three of them, one with a pump action rifle, the other two with pistols. Cardinale had killed one and arrested the two others. It was like something out of a film, except
that it really happened, and one man did die. A nineteen-year-old doing his first robbery. Cardinale was not much older at the time, and they had promoted him to sergeant immediately, and given him a gold medal they usually only gave to dead carabinieri.

He was an unusual character. He was studying science at
university
, which was why his colleagues regarded him with a mixture of diffidence and respect. He didn’t say much, and could appear quite brusque sometimes. He had lively but inscrutable dark eyes.

‘I don’t know, lieutenant.’ He paused, as if about to add
something
. As if that
I don’t know
were only the introduction to some clear idea he had in his mind. But then he didn’t add anything.

The meeting lasted another few minutes. They decided to do what Pellegrini had suggested and check men with records for sexual violence. To pull out their files, check when they’d been in prison, look at the MOs, take their mug shots – if there were recent ones, or make new ones if there weren’t – and start to show them around in the vicinity of the places where the assaults had occurred.

Hoping to get somewhere.

Before the attacker did.