Death and the Olive Grove (7 page)

‘He died two days ago, between one and two o'clock in the morning.'

‘From a crushed skull?'

‘Wrong.'

‘How, then?'

‘He was poisoned,' said the doctor.

Bordelli's eyes widened.

‘What about that blow to the head?'

‘They did that later, almost certainly with a hammer.'

‘What could it mean?' asked Bordelli, shaking his head.

‘I was wondering myself. Perhaps your little friend had some muscle spasms as he was dying; that can happen with poisoning. And the killer, perhaps fearing he wasn't going to die, finished him off with a hammer.'

‘Anything else?' asked Bordelli, feeling a keen desire to light up.

‘His fingernails were broken, except for the thumbs. He seems to have scraped them against a very rough surface. The fingertips are also a bit chafed.'

‘Could he have done it against a stone wall?'

‘Certainly.'

‘Go on.'

‘His stomach was full to bursting. Want to know what he had eaten?' the doctor asked.

‘Poor guy, I can guess … Black cabbage, beans …'

‘You're on the wrong track.'

‘What do you mean?'

Diotivede picked up a wrinkled sheet of paper from the table and read:

‘Crayfish, gilthead bream, shrimp … there was even a fair amount of langoustine, and a lot of mayonnaise. The wine was a Gewürztraminer or something similar. I won't list the desserts, or you might gain weight.'

‘You're joking, of course.'

‘No,' said the doctor, a little smile on his face.

‘Shit!' said Bordelli.

‘There was no lack of cognac, either, though it was cut with cyanide.'

‘Was it a painful death?'

‘I'd say so,' said Diotivede, adjusting his glasses on his nose.

‘Poor bloke …' Bordelli muttered.

‘But there's another curious fact: it was rather unusual cyanide.'

‘In what sense?'

‘Old stuff, fashioned into very small tablets.'

‘How old?'

‘Very old,' said the doctor.

‘From the last war?'

‘Even before.'

‘Can it keep for so long?'

‘Depends on how you store it.'

Bordelli nervously fingered his chin.

‘Anything else?'

‘I don't think so. And now I'm sorry, but I have to finish the girl,' said Diotivede, pointing towards a gurney at the back of the laboratory. A cascade of blonde hair poured out from under a sheet, and at the opposite end, two very white, slender feet pointed upwards.

‘Is she the one who was found in the dump?' the inspector asked.

‘She is. That fathead Rabozzi's handling the case.'

‘A prostitute?'

‘Apparently not.'

‘Raped?'

‘I was just going to check.'

‘Could I see her?'

‘Go ahead.'

The inspector approached the gurney and raised the sheet a little, then lifted it completely. He looked sadly at the girl. She was barely twenty years old.

‘Beautiful girl,' he said.

‘She looks Parisian,' said the doctor.

‘Do you know Paris well?'

‘Almost as well as I know human intestines. I lived there for five years.'

‘I didn't know that.'

‘You don't have to know everything,' said the doctor.

Bordelli lowered the sheet. He too had been in Paris, in December 1939. He had met a beautiful woman and fallen in love with her like a teenager. Her name was Christine. Their three weeks together had been like a dream, and returning home hadn't been easy. They had started writing to each other. She, too, seemed in every way in love with him, and almost ready to come to Italy. Then Hitler's divisions entered Paris, and he never heard from her again …

Bordelli shook his head free of those memories and put a cigarette in his mouth, which he wouldn't light until outside the laboratory.

‘I'm going. Once you've typed up your report, send it to me,' he said.

‘Goodbye,' said Diotivede, getting back down to work.

When he reached the door, the inspector stopped.

‘Sorry …' he said, turning round.

‘Don't ask me if there's anything else, because there isn't,' the doctor interrupted him without looking up from the microscope.

‘I just wanted to know if you know a cognac called de Maricourt.'

‘Of course I do,' said the doctor.

‘Oh, really? I didn't know it.'

Diotivede looked up from his microorganisms with a sigh and put his hands in his pockets.

‘Nobody in Italy knows it. It's never been exported and hasn't even been produced for at least twenty years. The distillery was destroyed during the war and never rebuilt. The last reserves were carried away by the Nazis during the American advance.'

‘Is it good cognac?'

‘The best.'

‘Diotivede, you amaze me. How do you know these things?'

‘Culture.'

‘Tell me something, how can you distinguish cognac from whisky or Calvados? In a dead man's stomach, I mean.'

‘Don't think I taste it,' said the doctor, expecting another of those idiotic quips he'd been putting up with all his life.

‘No, I mean it seriously,' said Bordelli. ‘How do you tell them apart?'

‘There are chemical tables of all the different kinds of alcohol, and each has its own characteristics.'

‘I guess it doesn't get any easier than that …'

‘'Bye, Bordelli,' said the doctor, turning his eye back to the microscope.

But Bordelli wasn't leaving. He had started pacing back and forth, the unlit cigarette still in his mouth.

‘Do you think you could also determine the brand of cognac that Casimiro drank?' he suddenly asked.

‘That's asking too much,' said Diotivede.

‘Forget I asked,' said Bordelli, who muttered goodbye and walked out of the laboratory, leaving the pathologist in peace at last.

He returned to headquarters with his mind in a state of confusion. Climbing the stairs, he ran into Rabozzi. The big lug was wearing his usual mastiff-like grimace, which screwed his face up.

‘Hello, Bordelli.'

‘Hello. I've just seen the girl they found in the refuse dump.'

‘Beautiful, no?… What's wrong? You look glum.'

‘I can't get over what happened to Casimiro.'

‘Your little dwarf friend?'

‘Yeah.'

‘What are you going to do if you find the person who killed him? Shoot him in the head?' Rabozzi asked, chuckling.

‘Let me catch him first,' said Bordelli.

‘If you send him to jail, between one buggering and another, he'll already be out in five years.'

‘I'm going upstairs.'

“Bye, Bordelli.'

Rabozzi strode off with his avenger's swagger, and Bordelli went up to his office. He lit another cigarette. He had started smoking a lot again, blaming it on the hard times. The murdered child and Casimiro's death kept him in a state of constant tension. Despite the time of day, he opened a bottle of beer, flipping the cap off, as usual, with his house keys.

On the desk was a brand-new report: during the night a prominent businessman had caught a burglar in the act of robbing his villa at Bellosguardo and shot him with his hunting rifle, gravely wounding him. Self-defence, the businessman had called it. Bordelli knew the burglar well: Bernardo, an unlucky wretch who had never harmed a fly. He had simply gone to pick up a crumb of prosperity in an Italy with a few very rich people and a great deal of poverty, and for this he was shot with a hunting rifle. There was something about this that didn't make sense. Bordelli finished reading the report, shaking his head. He rang Mugnai on the internal line.

‘Send me Piras, please.'

At that moment there was a knock at the door, and Piras poked his head inside.

‘Mugnai, don't bother. He's already here,' said Bordelli.

He set down the phone and stood up, looking the young Sardinian in the eye.

‘You know what Casimiro had in his stomach, Piras?' And he told him everything Diotivede had told him about the little man's last supper. Piras scratched his head.

‘What a stinking mess,' he said.

Bordelli huffed, then picked up the bottle of de Maricourt cognac and started staring at it as if trying to read the truth in it.

That same night Bordelli returned alone to the olive grove in Fiesole. The sky was clear and full of stars. As it was almost the new moon, he'd brought along a torch. But he knew the place well by now, and managed not to turn it on.

He didn't really know what he'd come looking for. He wanted only to poke about a bit, in the hope of discovering something. He could have asked Judge Ginzillo for a warrant to search the villa, but for the moment he preferred to proceed with caution. He still had no idea who he was dealing with, and was afraid to make a wrong move. Anyway, Ginzillo was too timid, always clinging to legal quibbles like a vine, terrified of wrecking his judicial career with a single mistake. For the moment it was best to forget about Ginzillo, who would only waste a great deal of his time, as usual.

At last he came to a stop, at a spot from where he had a good view of the villa. As usual, the shutters were all closed and no light was visible. The air was still. There was deep silence. He leaned back against the trunk of a great, leafy olive tree and lit a cigarette, taking care to hide the flame of the match. On so dark a night, he risked being seen. He smoked with his hand cupped round the burning cigarette-end, the way he used to do in the war.

All at once he saw a window light up in the villa, but a few seconds later it was dark again. He tossed the butt to the ground and snuffed it out with his shoe. He suddenly felt like imposing on Miss Olga. He was about to return to the car when he noticed something. Turning round, he glimpsed a human silhouette in the distance, walking through the olive trees. He crouched instinctively and held still. He was almost certain he hadn't been seen. The man was strolling casually through the trees, as if he could see quite well in the darkness. The inspector waited for him to draw near, then popped out and came towards the man, shining the torch and pointing his pistol at him.

‘Good evening,' he said. The man quickly sidestepped and stopped. Bordelli lit up his face, and for a moment he thought he was looking at a mask. The face was full of wrinkles, with two powerful eyes that seemed to belong to a wounded animal.

‘Good evening,' said the man, body relaxing. Bordelli lowered the beam of light to the stranger's clothes. He clearly was not a vagrant, and actually seemed rather well dressed. Bordelli raised the torch again to the man's face.

‘Were you looking for something?'

‘Who are you, if I may ask?' the man said innocuously. He had the accent of a foreigner who had lived for a long time in Italy.

‘Police,' said Bordelli. The man didn't seem the least bit surprised.

‘Can I help you with anything?' he asked.

The inspector took a step forward.

‘What are you doing here?'

‘I was out for a stroll.'

‘At one o'clock in the morning?'

‘At one o'clock in the morning,' said the man, unflinching.

‘Why don't you tell me your name, for starters?' said Bordelli, making the mistake of lowering his gun. The man muttered something in a strange language, then bounded forward and, before the inspector realised what was happening, punched him in the stomach. Bordelli fell to his knees, the wind knocked out of him, and the torch slipped from his hand. With some effort he raised his head, then saw the man's black silhouette running like a rhinoceros towards the wood. He took aim with his pistol and was about to fire but decided against it. What sort of bloody language was the big ape speaking, anyway? It sounded like something Slavic, or Arabic.

When he had regained his breath, he stood up, reeling, and with one hand on his liver, he staggered back to the Beetle. He felt like an ass. He sat inside the car for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette under the moon, which that night was as slender as the stroke of a pen. Tossing the butt out the window, he started the engine. He climbed up the Via del Bargellino and a moment later stopped in front of the villa's entrance. He got out of the car and went up to the gate. All was dark. He pulled on the bell insistently, not giving a damn that it was the middle of the night. Lights came on on the first floor, and then on the ground floor. A moment later the door opened, and Miss Olga appeared in silhouette in the lighted doorway.

‘Miss Olga, please forgive me for coming at this time of the night,' he shouted. ‘It's me again, Inspector Bordelli.'

The woman wrapped her shawl about her neck and came forward through the garden. She stopped a step away from the gate and did not open it. This time she was in a dressing gown, and her eyes looked very angry.

‘I vas asleep,' she said, annoyed.

‘I wanted to talk to you for a minute.'

‘Then talk.'

‘Has the baron returned?'

‘No.'

‘Do you know where he is?'

‘Africa, I think.'

‘And you don't know when he'll be back?'

‘
Nein
.' Uttered drily by the puckered mouth of Fraulein Olga, that word brought Bordelli back to the war days. He stared at the woman, imagining her in an SS uniform.

‘Does the villa belong to the baron?'

‘
Ja
… Yes.'

‘When did he buy it?'

‘You can research zese things by yourself.'

‘If you tell me now you'll save me a lot of time.'

‘After the war,' the woman said with a sigh, increasingly irritated.

‘Forgive me for asking, signorina, but does the baron by any chance have a large black spot on his neck?'

‘I really sink you mistake him for anozzer persson.'