Big Italy (16 page)

“Except when it came to having affairs with women.”

“Carlo was very attractive to women.” She added softly, “As I imagine you must be.”

Pisanelli glanced sharply at Trotti.

Trotti continued, “According to the article in
Vissuto
your ex-husband had many enemies.”

“Perhaps people were jealous of him, perhaps people were envious of Carlo’s success. And like most doctors, particularly parvenu ones, he wanted to go into politics.”

“Destra Nazionale?”

She nodded. “My ex-husband was not a broad-minded man. Many years ago, when we were still together, Carlo was introduced into the political circles of the Democrazia Cristiana. Lots of his medical friends—particularly those from the Mezzogiorno—were doing well for themselves. After only three or four months, he got out of the DC. He’d wasted a lot of his money. But, as he told me, he’d retained his dignity as a human being and as an Italian.” For a moment, her voice seemed to tremble. “It was around 1969, around the time of the first acts of terrorism. Piazza Fontana. Strange, really. Carlo was terrified by the idea of international communism.” She laughed, truly amused. “Whereas a cousin of mine, who’d never known what it was like to travel in the metropolitana or on public transport, who’d had a chauffeur all his life, blew himself up at the foot of a pylon, dying for the cause of the downtrodden masses.”

“The Years of Lead are over, thank God.”

“Until we have democracy and decency in this country, there’ll be violence and Mafia. They are simply the different faces of social injustice.”

“I see you didn’t share your husband’s opinions.”

“Carlo wasn’t a corrupt man. A silly, maddening, childish man in many ways. But honest with others.” She added, “And honest to his own ideals.”

The cat suddenly leaped on to Pisanelli’s lap.

The woman had taken a handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt.

Trotti held up his hand. “In your opinion, signora, why did Bassi go to
Vissuto
?”

“Because they had stopped him making inquiries.”

“They?”

“You should know. You’re the policemen.” She held her head to one side. “What sort of policeman are you?”

“I often wonder.”

“They stopped him, didn’t they? And Bassi had got too accustomed to living off the money we were paying him.”

“Who stopped his inquiries?” Pisanelli had started to stroke the long, white fur of the cat.

A sigh of annoyance. “I don’t know. But Bassi was furious. He’d received an injunction. Somebody—the Pubblico Ministero—ordered him to cease his investigations. Signor Bassi dressed like something on one of those awful American series on ReteQuattro. I think he was afraid of having to go back to doing divorces. Liked to think of himself as an American detective.”

“It was Bassi who told you this?”

“That he watched too much television?”

“Bassi told you he’d been ordered by the Pubblico Ministero to drop his inquiries?”

“I’d known for some time.”

“Before the article in
Vissuto
?”

She agreed. “I haven’t seen Bassi for over two months. I told my lawyer to deal with him.”

Trotti and Pisanelli glanced at each other. “Then who told you about it?”

“It?”

“About Bassi being called off the inquiry?”

“Avoccato Regni phoned me. And of course Gennaro Maluccio …”

“Who?”

“The man from
Vissuto.
” She gave them a thin smile, revealing perfect teeth. “The journalist. If you want, I can give you his phone number. His office is here in Milan. Near Piazzale Cadorna. I’ve got the information here somewhere …”

“W
ELL, IT
’
S NOT
her voice.”

Trotti asked, “What voice?”

“The woman’s voice on Bassi’s answering machine. It’s not Signora Lucchi who wanted to see him.”

Pisanelli’s anxiety was out of character. He lit another Esportazione and Trotti could see the stains of nicotine running along the index finger of his right hand.

“You smoke too much, Pisa.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t see what you’re so anxious about.”

“Nothing,” Pisanelli replied glumly. “Apart from my career.” He raised the shoulders of his suede jacket.

“You were happy enough to take the cassette.”

“The Questore’s a fool. He didn’t realize there were two tapes. He didn’t realize the one I gave him was Bassi’s answering tape, not the tape with the phone message.”

“No reason for slipping the tape with the message into your pocket.”

A fleeting grin. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”

The two men had entered a bar—the only one—in the via Montenapoleone where Pisanelli bought a packet of cigarettes for himself and a packet of kiwi-flavored sweets for Trotti. On the counter there were doughnuts and brioche, snowy with icing sugar, now turning stale within a Perspex pannier.

“We must act quickly if there’s to be any hope of identifying Bassi’s murderer.”

“You think it’s Bassi’s murderer on the tape?”

“No idea, Pisa. But I’d like to know who it was. Whoever it was, she could’ve been trying to get him out of the apartment.”

“Perhaps it was quite innocent.”

“Perhaps,” Trotti nodded. “But at least it’s a line of inquiry.”

“Why don’t we just go home, commissario?”

“What for?”

“I don’t see why it’s all so important. Why do you care who killed Bassi? He’s dead, isn’t he? Bassi was nothing to you, commissario. He wasn’t even a friend.”

Trotti said nothing.

There was an untouched bottle of mineral water on the table before him. He nervously tapped a phone card against the rim of the empty tumbler.

“Why risk your retirement, commissario? And my career?”

“You should have thought about your career when you handed the second tape over to the Questore.”

“Nice to be appreciated.”

Trotti softened his voice. “If you want to go back to the city, Pisa, I’m not stopping you. Take your car. I’ll get a train this evening. I’ll continue asking my questions by myself. Perhaps Magagna’ll be back.”

“You got through?”

“Magagna’s in Turin.”

“You don’t need me?”

“Magagna’s wife calls him Gabri.” Trotti smiled. “She says Gabri’ll get back this evening. Go home, Pisanelli. I’ll manage alone.”

“There’s no reason for your being here. The Questore …”

“I don’t give a shit about the Questore.”

“You spend your time saying you don’t give a shit. But you’re giving more than a shit over Bassi. It’s not important.”

“Perhaps I enjoy murder inquiries. They add spice to my kiwi sweets.” Trotti placed a hand on Pisanelli’s elbow. “I’ve no right to involve you in my private crusades.”

“Private folly,” Pisanelli said and suddenly he started to laugh. “Why on earth I like you, I just don’t know.”

“They used not to be this long.”

“What?”

“Esportazione cigarettes. They used to be shorter.”

Pisanelli shrugged. “Something to do with European Community Rules.” He added, “Soon the Eurocrats’ll have us all talking English and eating French food.”

“The opposite would be a lot worse.”

Pisanelli smiled wearily.

“You never used to smoke, Pisa.”

“I never used to think I was going to end up middle-aged and bald and without a family.”

A pause.

“I need you to help me.”

“You always do, commissario.”

“You work with Merenda—you haven’t got the Questore monitoring you.”

“I have now.”

“I’d like to point out that I never asked you to like me, Pisa.”

“Worse than liking you, Commissario Trotti. You ask me to sacrifice my career, my marriage and my life.”

“You’ve never really wanted to get married, Pisanelli.”

The younger man’s face immediately clouded. “I think that’s for me to decide.” He tapped the cigarette ash into a tray advertising the Gazzetta dello Sport.

“Whatever happened to Anna?”

Pisanelli’s brief cheerfulness had disappeared like water swirling down an open plug. His face now lengthened, grew more drawn. “She has her own life to lead.”

“Anna Ermagni thought you were the most wonderful man she’d ever met.” Trotti raised his voice in an imitative falsetto.
“Pierangelo understands women. Every time I look at Pisa, I go very weak.”

“You’re a hard man, Trotti. You forget nothing and you forgive even less.” Pisanelli raised his cold glance. “Sometimes I wonder whether you were jealous of Anna and me.”

“Where’s she now?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Anna’s my goddaughter.”

“If you really cared about your goddaughter, you’d know where she is.”

Trotti placed the telephone card in his wallet. He emptied the bottle of San Pellegrino into the glass and drank swiftly, feeling the bubbles dance into his tired face. “You’re going home?”

Pisanelli shook his head.

“We try the other women? The Englishwoman and the mad Quarenghi?”

Pisanelli was silent. For a moment he looked like an old man in an outsized checkered shirt, slumped forward on to the table in the small café.

Outside the yellow ATM trams trundled past.

Milan, moral capital of the Republic. A dying Republic.

Finally, Pisanelli raised his head. “The
Vissuto
offices are nearby. Less than a kilometer to walk and I can see that you’re not tired, commissario.”

“I was born tired.”

“You’ll need all your energy for your goats, pigs and chickens in the OltrePò.”

“Sandro sold it.”

Pisanelli made no move to get up. He stubbed out the cigarette, squashing the yellowed end into the ash. “Who’s Sandro and what did he sell?”

“The house in the hills. It’s out of the question, now. My cousin was a secret gambler. In the last months of his life he’d apparently managed to squander the savings of a lifetime. Including the little place in Santa Maria.”

“Then you’ll retire to via Milano?”

“Doesn’t look as if I’ve got much choice.”

Brusquely Pisanelli stood up.

Trotti looked at him. “I’ll retire to via Milano—unless …”

“Unless what, commissario?”

“I can get hold of enough money to buy the house back before it’s too late.”

Pisanelli ran a hand through the long hair at the sides of his head. “Let’s go to the
Vissuto
offices.”

“You don’t want to go home?”

“Somebody’s got to look after the old man.”

T
HE HIGH GREEN
gate opened and they stepped into the courtyard. If on the outside the old building kept its traditional, wealthy appearance, on the inside everything was modern.

Tradition and modernity. The two faces of Milan.

Pisanelli followed Trotti through the revolving wooden doors and waited before a locked glass door.

The door was promptly buzzed open by a girl sitting behind a desk. She would have been pretty, but she appeared mildly distraught, harassed by two computers and a blinking light on the telephone console. A telephone receiver was jammed between her raised shoulder and her tilted head.

“The
Vissuto
offices?”

Across the top of the counter she pushed a book towards them. “Sign,” she ordered peremptorily and they obeyed while she spoke softly into the telephone. She was talking about a consignment of something that had gotten lost at Codogno.

Trotti wrote the name of a distant uncle, now in Argentina. Pisanelli entered his habitual scrawl.

Without checking the signatures, the woman handed them identity tabs, telling them to clip them to their coats. With her thumb—her attention had returned to one of the computer screens—she gestured towards the lifts. “Third floor.”

There were four lifts and three arrived simultaneously. They entered the first. It was a French lift and there were posters in aluminum frames. Each poster was an old cover of
Vissuto
magazine.

“You ever read it, commissario?”

Trotti shook his head.

“What do you read?”

“Directives from the Ministry of the Interior. And, whenever I get a free moment, the packets of Caramelle Elah.”

The doors opened and they stepped out on the third floor, facing a very large, open-plan room.

There were many cubicles divided by shoulder-high glass walls. The ceiling was low, and the overhead neon light was much brighter than the December sky. The sound of people typing. Lots of computer screens and lots of young people, well dressed and well-fed, some in bowties, conferring in front of the screens. Jeans and expensive cardigans.

Nobody took any notice of the two shabby policemen.

A young woman was walking along the corridor. She wore black stockings and there was a felt pen stuck behind an ear.

Her T-shirt spoke of peace and love in English.

Pisanelli approached her and coughed politely. “Signora, we’re looking for Gennaro Maluccio.”

She stopped. Her look went from Trotti to Pisanelli. Neither man met with her approval. “You’re policemen?”

Pisanelli briefly showed his ID card.

She was carrying a large folder beneath one arm. She placed it on the carpeted floor. “Enquire over there,” she said, gesturing with an ink-stained hand towards a far cubicle. The dark eyes followed them attentively as they executed her directions.

They came to the cubicle.

Trotti turned back to look at the young woman. She gave a confirmatory nod, without moving.

Pisanelli knocked on the glass door.

A large man was sitting behind an archaic Olivetti typewriter. He was smoking a Toscanelli and ash had fallen on to his sweater.

Red eyes looked up, not hiding their irritation. The thick, grey hair on the man’s head was greasy. His face was greasy. The desk before him was cluttered with books, sheets of typescript and dummy front covers. “Looking for someone?” His accent was thick Milanese.

“Polizia di Stato,” Trotti said.

“Who else wears off-the-peg clothes?”

Pisanelli asked, “You’re modelling for Gianni Versace?”

Trotti silenced Pisanelli with a gesture. “We’re looking for a
journalist. Gennaro Maluccio—the journalist who did the article on the Turellini murder.”