Three-Card Monte (7 page)

Inevitable. That's the word. Just like these old codgers' fascination with death. Why do they always start with the deaths and disasters when they read the paper? Maybe they're keeping score. Oh, look, they've just buried another one. Ampelio: six thousand one hundred and twelve, rest of the world: zero. It must be the age. Maybe every day they find it more and more unlikely that they're still alive. Talking of unlikely things, we're starting to wallow in them here. Two murders two summers running, in a town with a population of five thousand. We're going to end up like the town where the main character lives in
Murder, She Wrote
, a town of only three thousand people where every day one of them gets murdered, and then every now and again the main character is invited somewhere to spend the weekend and bang! Somebody's murdered there too. How come they never realize the old biddy brings bad luck? Why are they always inviting her?

While Massimo's brain was wandering incoherently, not needing to help his body, which was busy loading the dishwasher, Ampelio continued reading, as usual interspersing the contents of the article with his own comments:

“‘By the time the ambulance finally arrived, the situation was beyond anyone's control. At the ER, it was found that the elderly professor was already dead, and the doctors could do nothing but verify the fact.' And then they all went back to the bar.”

“How old was he?” Del Tacca asked, putting sugar in his coffee.

“Seventy-four,” Ampelio replied, folding the newspaper.

“Young.”

“Oh, yes,” Massimo laughed as he finished putting the coffee spoons in the drum. “His nanny strangled him.”

“What are you trying to say? That just because Pilade is seventy-five he's lived too long? I'm eighty-three, what are you planning to do, beat me to death?”

There are times when I'd really like to, Massimo thought as he tried to insert the drum filled with dishes into the jaws of the monster, each failed attempt causing a tremendous clatter of flatware.

“It was a joke. Just like yours. A man of seventy-four isn't young.”

“It depends. You're thirty-seven and you seem older than any of us.”

Why are they always picking on me? Massimo was about to reply, when he was interrupted by the noise of pouring rain, immediately followed by Aldo coming into the bar.

“Greetings, everyone,” he said, taking off his raincoat. “What's up?”

“What's up is that you could at least be on time for once,” Del Tacca said. “We've been waiting an hour for you.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't know going to a bar was considered a job.”

“Maybe you didn't,” Ampelio sneered, “but Pilade used to work at the town hall.”

“Anyway, I've a good reason for being late,” Aldo said. “As a good citizen, I was asked to lend my services to the civil authorities. The same request was made to our worthy barman, who's glaring at me right now. Isn't Rimediotti here yet?”

News, the old-timers' faces were saying. Fresh news just in. When one of them asks in that tone of feigned indifference if so-and-so is here yet, it means he has something to report and needs the largest possible audience.

“Never mind. Massimo, will you make me a coffee?”

“No, but I will ask you a question,” Massimo said, having started the dishwasher and now putting the croissants in the oven in the back room. “Weren't we supposed to keep quiet about this?”

Aldo looked at him for a moment, then leaned across the counter to take Massimo's pack of cigarettes.

“Massimo, when I was ten years old I realized that in order to live well I shouldn't listen to what my father and mother said. When I was thirty, if I was going to keep enjoying life, there was no way I was about to listen to what my wife said. When I turned sixty, I had to start ignoring the doctor too. So now I'm seventy-two, do you really think I should do what Fusco tells me? Can I cadge a cigarette, mine are a bit wet.”

Fusco, Ampelio and Pilade silently repeated to each other, looking each other in the eyes, Crime news. Sounds promising.

“Rimediotti won't be coming today anyway,” Pilade said, settling comfortably in his chair. “It's so damp, his back must be killing him.”

Which meant, implicitly: We're all here. There's no need to wait for anybody else. Come on, out with it.

“Well, this morning I was asleep and the phone rings. I go to answer, and a very, very mild voice asks me if I can come to the police station. Outside it's already raining cats and dogs. Why? I ask. We'll tell you when you get here, he answers. Do I have to come right away or can I wait until the animals leave the ark, I ask. It's an urgent matter, so we'd be grateful if you could come right away, the mild little voice answers. Oh, Tiziana, please, since Massimo won't make me a coffee, would you make me one?”

“Right away,” Tiziana says, heading straight for the machine, eager to get it done quickly so as not to miss anything.

“So I put on my coat and go to the police station. And there I'm greeted by this nice young policeman who says, ‘If you don't mind waiting, right now the inspector is conferring with another person regarding the matter.' Fine, I sit down. After a while, the door of the inspector's office opens and who do you think comes out?”

“Massimo, who else?” Tiziana said, handing the coffee to Aldo, thus ruining the climax of his story.

“Massimo?” Pilade said in surpise. “So you were serious earlier, Tiziana?”

“When I told you he was at the police station? Of course I was serious!”

“How was I supposed to know? I thought you were joking.”

“Anyway,” Aldo went on, resuming the reins, “I see Massimo and I put two and two together. Why call both me and Massimo? Because we're both involved with the catering for the conference. So something must have happened at the conference.”

“I don't believe it!” Ampelio cried. “The dead Japanese! Was he murdered?”

“Ampelio, the Japanese died because he tripped over a rug and hit his head,” Pilade said, silencing him with his supposed authority. “How could somebody have murdered him? Did they disguise themselves as a rug and trip him up?”

“No,” Aldo said gravely, while Pilade and Tiziana laughed. “From what Fusco says, it was a lot simpler than that. Some­body poisoned him.”

“Come on, smart-ass!” Ampelio said, also laughing. “What's poison got to do with it? Are there poisons you can give to people that make them trip up? Pull the other one.”

“No, idiot. Just listen to me or we'll be here all day. Appar­ently this guy, who by the way in my opinion was already half dead anyway, died from respiratory arrest. He hit his head, they took him to the hospital, and there he died of respiratory arrest.”

“All right,” Del Tacca said, stubbornly. “So?”

“Do you think that's normal, Pilade?” Aldo picked up the cigarette he had put on the table and lit it. “You hit your head and you choke to death? What are the odds?”

“I don't know what the odds are,” Massimo is watching the croissants get nice and golden in the discreet yellow light of the oven. “But the odds in here are that you shouldn't be smoking.”

“Oh, come on, Massimo, it's like Hurricane Katrina outside. There's nobody about. Who do you think's going to come in and say something?”

“I don't think anyone's going to come in. But you know how it is. We're in a bar, and one thing you can't deny about a bar is that it's a public place. And in public places, you can't smoke.”

“There's something we could do about that,” Ampelio said. “We could make it a private club instead of a bar. Then it wouldn't be a public place anymore, and we could all smoke in peace.”

“Don't even think about it. Apart from the fact that if I started a private club, I'd join the Foreign Legion before I'd make you a member. Anyway,” Massimo turned back to Aldo, “right now, this is a bar. If they come in and catch you, we'll both be fined. I don't give a damn about you, but I don't see why I should be involved. Do you smoke in your restaurant?”

“It's already lit,” Aldo said fatalistically, as if it had been the will of Manitou that had lit the cigarette. “If a cop comes in, I'll pay the fine for both of us. Just stop interrupting. Anyway, the doctor saw how the man had died and got suspicious. So he ordered a postmortem. To cut a long story short, the guy had a whole lot of Tavor in his system. That's what caused him to stop breathing.”

“I see. So?”

“What do you mean, ‘so'? He'd been given a pile of Tavor and it had poisoned him.”

“Right.” Pilade, now safe in the immunity established by Aldo, picked up the pack of unfiltered Stop and took one out. “And who says he was given it deliberately to poison him? My poor brother Remo took Tavor for ten years, and nothing ever happened to him. Apart from the fact that he became senile, poor man, but that was age, not the Tavor.”

One basic technique, in the professional practice of bar talk, consists of objecting to a fact or an argument with an appropriate counterexample, all the better if it refers to events that happened to a close relative, preferably now dead. In some way that's not quite clear, close kinship, according to the oral tradition prevalent in the town, guarantees the authenticity of what you're saying, and at the same time the unavailability of the protagonist of the example due to death makes it hard to refute.

As it happens, Pilade's example, unlike those generally used in bar discussions, was quite relevant. He could even have been right, which would have meant there had been no murder. What a pity, Ampelio's face seemed to say, it was just starting to get interesting. Fortunately, Aldo knew his facts and came back to the attack.

“It's the doctor that says it. The poor man was sick, and couldn't take Tavor. For him it was like poison. From what Fusco told me, not even Dr. Mengele would have prescribed it. The doctor's in no doubt. He was poisoned. Trust him.”

“Have trust and die poor,” Del Tacca retorted, magisterially exploiting another mainstay in the theory of barroom debate, that is, resorting to a proverb or a figure of speech, to be used, not just to grab attention, but as a lever to be inserted into the weak points of your opponent's dialectical machinery and derail his arguments. “You don't trust the doctor when he tells you you have high blood pressure, and you trust him when he tells you someone was poisoned. You remember what happened the last time we trusted a doctor?”

“It isn't that I don't trust the doctor, fathead. I don't listen to him. It's different.”

“I'm sorry,” Tiziana cut in, “but why—”

Here Tiziana would have liked to ask: Why use something as complicated as Tavor, when there are so many nice poisons to kill someone, especially in the middle of a conference where there are obviously lots of opportunities and lots of possible suspects? But at that moment, through the door and the rain, they caught a glimpse of a man in the blue K-Way of a municipal policeman, who immediately catalysed the attention. At least, the attention of Massimo and Aldo. Massimo glared at Aldo, while the latter dragged calmly at his cigarette as if to say: I assume full responsibility. In the meantime, the man had taken shelter from the rain under the arches and was attaching his bicycle to a lamppost.

“If that's a policeman, I'll pay the fine.”

“It isn't a policeman,” Aldo retorted in a reassuring tone. “I know all of them.”

In the meantime, having finished anchoring his bike, the blue K-Way rubbed his hands and came into the bar.

“Hi,” he said, removing his hood. He wasn't a policeman. Massimo also knew all of them. But there was something vaguely familiar about him. While Massimo was trying to think where the hell he could have seen this guy, if he really had seen him, the man took off the K-Way and Massimo's doubts vanished. With that creased orange T-shirt, the potential customer could only be the loquacious and friendly Professor A. C. J. Snijders.

“A
lungo
, please. And . . . do you have croissants?”

“They're just coming out. You did say a
lungo
?” Tiziana asked, not because she hadn't heard him but because she hadn't heard anybody order a
lungo
since 2002, when her employer had made an extremely pedantic as well as unrequested speech to an improvident Piedmontese tourist about the inherent barbarity of drinking coffee that was too diluted. Making a show of having understood, the tourist had then ordered a
ristretto
and a glass of mineral water, poured the coffee into the glass, and immediately knocked it back in one go before leaving without paying.

“Yes, please. And three croissants.”

“God help us!” Ampelio said, leaning forward on his stick. “Haven't you been home yet today?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don't pay any attention to him,” Massimo said in the hope of reasserting that the bar was his. “This three-legged old man was wondering if they were all for you. You know, people here don't mind their own business even if you kill them.”

“Oh, I get it,” Snijders replied, completely unfazed. “Yes, they're for me. I need to have a good breakfast. I was thinking of visiting Pisa and not stopping for lunch. It's a tourist city. That means it's expensive.”

“And how are you getting to Pisa?” Pilade asked.

“With that,” Snijders replied, pointing to the bike. “I hired it at the hotel.”

“All the way to Pisa by bike?” Tiziana asked incredulously. “In this rain?”

“Why not? I'm not made of sugar.”

“Amazing!” Ampelio said approvingly, clearly satisfied to see that, in this era of vices and perversions like traveling by car, someone still used a bicycle as a means to move around. “It's not even six miles, and flat all the way. You'll be there in half an hour.”