Game for Five (14 page)

Massimo looked at his grandfather with a touch of affection. “What kind of ice cream would you like?”

“Chocolate and yoghurt. Thanks, son.”

Having gone back in the bar, Massimo called Tiziana over. “Hi. How are things?”

“Fine. How about you, did you enjoy yourself? How was the sea?”

“Perfect. Not many people about today. I found a place just past Rimigliano that's fantastic. Nobody goes there. I'll take you there one day if you're good.”

“Yes, bwana. What would you like me to wear?”

“A burqa would be fine.”

“When are you going to find yourself a girl, instead of playing the fool with your employees?”

“As long as I have such well-endowed employees, don't even think about it. In fact, I'm planning to introduce the
droit du seigneur
.”

Massimo searched in his money pouch and took out a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, some keys, and a strange gray object, which he put down on the counter together with the rest.

“What's that?” Tiziana said. “A highway toll pass? Why did you remove it from your car?”

“I didn't remove it from my car.”

“Where did you get it, then?”

“I took it from a black Porsche that had treated me like a poor relation on the highway. When I spotted it again with the window down outside the diner, I recognized it and reckoned it'd do a guy like that a lot of good to pay the highway toll all the way from Tripoli.”

“You're crazy, you know.”

“Listen, employee, I have to stay in here for a while. Go outside and arrange the tables, and when you've finished putting up the shot glasses make my grandfather an ice cream.”

“Another one?”

“It's all right, he's not having dinner tonight . . . Hold on, how many has he had today?”

“Since I got here, four.”

Massimo didn't say anything and went behind the counter. He took a knife and started slicing the lemons with extreme slowness and precision, a clear and unmistakable sign that he was becoming increasingly irritable.

Tiziana waited a few moments, then took the scoop and said, “So, how does your grandfather want his ice-cream?”

“Lemon and coffee. With lots of cream.”

 

“Do you have an ace?”

“Three points is what I have.”

“We're at the end of the game, nothing's come out yet, and you don't have an ace? You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I don't have a clue who you're with.”

“I'm with you. First I gave you two, and you have eight from him, after he called the three of clubs, so do you think I'm dumb or something, to give you eight?”

“Grandpa, listen to me, give them to him. With the ace that makes fourteen, there's only one point missing. It'd be stupid.”

“And what if I don't have the ace?”

“Give him three points, it'll come to six.”

“Okay, here's three. What are you putting down?”

“I don't know, I'll have to put down this three of clubs, I hate to waste it for six points but if I don't get out now I'm at risk.”

“You're a son of a bitch!”

“You should know, Ampelio, she's your daughter.”

“Now don't you start. Play properly! If things carry on like this, I'll lose my shirt.”

“But not your shoes, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm saying you came out in your slippers again tonight.”

“Oh, my God, it's true. I was sure I—Massimo, are you all right?”

A justified question. Massimo had closed his eyes and had started rocking back and forth on his chair and moaning.

Ampelio waited a few seconds, then asked again, “Are you all right, son?”

Continuing to moan and rock, Massimo nodded.

“Then what the fuck are you doing?” Del Tacca asked, without an ounce of grandfatherly love.

Still continuing to moan and rock, Massimo made a sign that meant ‘later' with his index finger.

He heard Rimediotti ask how long the prayer to Mecca lasted, and Ampelio answer Ihaventaclue.

After a while, Massimo opened his eyes, said “Good,” got up and went inside the bar.

Four pairs of eyes followed him closely, if irritably, from behind presbyopic glasses.

He sat down on a stool, asked Tiziana something, took out all the things he had in his pockets, put them on the counter, and leaned forward. He looked at them with an affectionate smile, then picked them up one by one, and put them back in his pockets.

He came out a second later, still smiling, with his car keys in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Aldo asked, half amused, half astonished.

“I'm going to find someone.”

“What about the game?”

“We'll finish when I get back.”

“And what do you have to tell this person that's so important?”

“That I know who killed her daughter, and I also think I can prove it. I just need a bit of information.”

 

Calm down, just calm down, or you're going to make a fool of yourself. I feel like the main character in that book by Sciascia,
A Simple Story
, when his superior tells him where the light switch is in the room and he understands the whole thing, who the murderer is and how he did it. And like him, I don't know who the fuck to tell. Alina's mother, yes, strange how in my head “that girl” has become Alina. A name read in the newspapers and a waxen face sticking out of a trash can have become a person. A real person, of course. Someone who lived, drank, loved, and put her trust in the wrong person. I don't feel at ease now. As long as it was a game, an exercise, it was fine. But now . . . look, it's not your fault. This thing landed in your lap without your looking for it, and now that you've understood what happened you just have to prove it. It's not that you think it's a good explanation, it's simply the right explanation. Period. Even if it's unpleasant. You can't do anything about that. Maybe it's best if I start by going to see Fusco. First, though, a shower and change. The only time in my life I discover a murderer, dammit, I really can't do it with salt on my skin, wearing a Daffy Duck T-shirt.

 

 

“. . . ‘confessed that he was the person who murdered Alina Costa and carried the body to the place where it was discovered, in the parking lot by the Belvedere pine wood. The accused man's defense attorney has asked for a psychiatric report on his client, insisting that he could not have been of sound mind at the time of the murder.' Oh, very convenient. That's how they all get out of it, not being of sound mind. Does that mean if I go to the town hall and tell them I was drunk when I got married, I can then go to my wife and tell her to get the hell out of my life? I'd like that.”

“Calm down, Ampelio, they're not going to say he wasn't of sound mind.”

“That's the least they can do! That son of a bitch . . . Just as the least they can do, it seems to me, is give the boy a medal, because if it wasn't for him . . . ”

The boy, in other words Massimo, was leaning on the counter, calmly eating a croissant. It was the beginning of September, and the season was practically over. These days, the people who came in during the morning were almost all local, and they didn't want a coffee, but a story, which was why it was pointless pretending to be just a barman. So there he was, surrounded by the old-timers gazing at him as if they themselves had made that fine head capable of solving a nasty case like this, as well as various other customers all hanging on his every word.

“While we're about it,” Ampelio said with ill-concealed pride for the third or fourth time that day, “you might as well tell them all what you did.”

At which Massimo, proudly but obediently, started all over again from the beginning, for the benefit of those who hadn't been there before. He recounted how O.K. had told him when, more or less, the poor girl's body must have been put in the trash can, how he had noted that the killer must have been tall, and how he had come to suspect P.G.

“The alibi poor P.G. gave the police turned out to be true. The young guy at the San Piero pharmacy, who's a friend of his, told me he had sold him a box of Imodium at about half past midnight. Except that it seemed such a joke, nobody believed him at first.”

And that was how, between one visit to Fusco and the next, he had reached the moment of release. Emotional release, that is, not the release of P.G., although that had happened too.

“When Pilade pointed out that grandpa had left home in slippers, I recalled that Alina was also wearing slippers when she was found. Not flip-flops or fur slippers, like they wrote in the paper, but a pair of white orthopedic overshoes, the kind doctors wear in hospital. Not something you put on to go out. So I started to think that she must have been at home when she was killed. But that's not possible, I told myself, because she was killed between eleven and one, and at that hour she couldn't have been at home, because . . . anyway, I was distracted for a moment and I looked around a bit . . . and suddenly I saw the stool at the counter.”

Pause for effect, a cigarette somehow lighting itself, I must have smoked forty since this morning, but what the hell. That was the crucial moment, the moment he had really felt like Poirot suddenly understanding everything. With a clear head, without racking his brains, he had noticed something he'd had right in front of his eyes for ages.

Dr. Carli was also very tall.

*

“In the whole of this business there were some things that didn't make sense, starting from when I first became involved. I go to a parking lot at five in the morning, convinced I'll have to explain to a drunken high school student the difference between an inflatable doll and a flesh and blood woman, and I find myself looking at a trash can with a girl's head sticking out of it. I didn't see the reflection of a boot buckle, or anything like that. No, I saw her face staring right at me. Whoever had put her in there either hadn't wanted to waste time hiding her properly or had deliberately left her like that. I was a little skeptical that someone would risk hiding a body in a trash can and then leave it just any old how. On the other hand, if it had been put in full view on purpose that meant that whoever had left her there wanted the body to be found as soon as possible. Does that make sense?”

All the heads nodded.

“So, if we start with the fact that the murderer left the body that way intentionally, we reach the conclusion that he wanted the body to be discovered as soon as possible. And that's where I find the first thing that doesn't make sense, which is that neither P.G. nor Messa have an alibi for the night. To be precise, Messa had one but would have preferred to avoid using it. That doesn't fit very well with the murderer's eagerness to have his crime discovered as soon as possible, a crime committed in the very period when it wasn't possible, or desirable, to reconstruct their movements, that is, between eleven and one. Secondly, we have two possible suspects. One of the two doesn't have either an alibi or a plausible motive. The other may have had a motive, but definitely has an alibi for the period when the murder took place. One doesn't have a motive, the other doesn't have the opportunity. In a nutshell, it doesn't make sense. Do any of you know what an axiom is?”

The senate remained silent.

“I thought as much. An axiom is a proposition that's assumed to be true because it's considered self-evident, and which provides the point of departure for the construction of a mathematical system. Every mathematical or logical system is based on axioms whose validity can't be demonstrated. Among other things, it isn't feasible to thoroughly investigate the validity or cohesion of these axioms, as Kurt Gödel demonstrated in the 1930s. In practice, Gödel demonstrated that in very coherent mathematical system, in other words every system that doesn't contain contradictions, there are true statements that cannot be demonstrated by means of the system itself. When a system investigates itself, it must accept the fact that there are truths that cannot be demonstrated.”

Massimo took a deep drag on his cigarette.

“Every time I construct a system, I have to take for granted certain statements that can't in any way be proved. That's not only the case in mathematics. In real life too, we often base ourselves, whether consciously or not, on certain axioms that we don't even think of checking to see if they're true. For example one of these axioms might be that the TV news, or the parish priest, or the Party always tells the truth. Some of you may remember the old joke about the Communists believing crocodiles could fly because the Party newspaper said so. I always thought my ex-wife told me the truth, and I was very upset when I discovered it wasn't true.”

Ampelio grunted. He was probably thinking more about the crocodiles than about Massimo's ex-wife.

“So let's recap: if there's something that isn't right in the way I've reconstructed the facts, there are two possibilities. One, I made a mistake in my reasoning. Two, I haven't made a mistake but at least one of the premises I started from isn't true. In the present case, what was the premise that was leading me astray?”

Pause for effect.

“The reply now is obvious. The premise that was leading me astray was the one that said that the police, and in general everyone involved in the investigation, tell the truth. That led me to consider as a given something that was actually wrong: that is, that Alina Costa died between eleven and one.”

Pause, sip of tea.

“Maybe it was the fact that I'd been thinking about doctors in hospital, I don't know. I saw the stool, where Dr. Carli had just been sitting, and I thought: Of course, Dr. Carli is also tall. Very tall, over six feet. Now, I can't put what I thought in exactly the right chronological order, but remember that I'd been playing a game of
briscola
for five, and had just finished telling a pack of lies to convince grandpa that I was playing with him, even though it wasn't true. In other words, I was feeling pleased with myself for leading him up the garden path with all my bullshit. Anyway, it occurred to me that Dr. Carli is tall. And that was the starting point for everything.”