Gold, Frankincense and Dust (23 page)

“Good evening,” he said, drawing up in front of Soneri. In the background, the mist took on a yellowish tinge in the lights of the service area and hypermarket. There was
no music playing. Perhaps the fairground had moved on.

“I take it something serious has occurred to bring you out in the mist at this time of night. Another death?” Manservisi enquired.

“We just wanted to know how Mariotto is getting on,” Soneri said.

Manservisi gave a raucous laugh. “You must be joking.”

“By no means.”

The gypsy put on a serious face and grew tense.

“Now it’s you who must be joking,” Soneri said.

“Me? Mariotto has already told you all he knew. We’ve told you everything too. What more can you want?”

“That you don’t piss me off with that story about a bull goring him. You know very well it’s not true. Mariotto was beaten up.”

“Commissario, in the mist people see all sorts of things that never happened. Go and ask him for yourself.”

“Don’t talk shit. There’s no doubt he was threatened, and it was probably you who ordered him to keep his mouth shut. In addition, no judge would credit a witness who is mentally defective.”

“I have not ordered anybody to do anything. I defend my community, that’s all I do.”

“And you think you’ll defend it by not talking? Why did the Romanians rush off so suddenly? There must have been a huge row between all of you.”

“This is a big world. There’s room for everybody,” Manservisi said, implicitly confirming what Soneri had suggested.

“Not big enough, to judge by all that’s been going on. They dump a burned body in front of the encampment, one of your lot runs off after a ridiculous theft, and another one is beaten up and it’s passed off as his being gored by a bull. That’s a lot of coincidences.”

“So what are you getting at?” Manservisi said impatiently.

“That you know much more than you’ve told me.”

Manservisi grunted, while somewhere behind him there was a rustling sound and a snort. They must have caught one of the missing pigs and put it in a pen.

“Anyway, the carabinieri did a search of your ex-neighbours and they came up with piles of gold. A magistrate could order the same thing here,” Soneri said, knowing his threat was a bluff.

“Go ahead,” Manservisi said with total confidence. “We don’t touch that stuff. The people here go to work and our children go to school.”

“What became of the Romanians’ gold?”

“How should I know? If you had valuables in your possession, what would you do with them? Not any old stuff, but stuff that had a name and address.”

“Like a painting,” Soneri reflected.

“But you can give gold a new identity. You can’t do that with a painting.”

“That’s true. Gold comes in many shapes and forms.”

He remained where he was for a moment while Manservisi moved off with the same self-assurance with which he had arrived. Juvara was by the fire trying to get warm.

“Let’s go,” Soneri called to him, as he got into the car. Juvara ran awkwardly to the car, and there was no concealing his relief that they were leaving.

“What do you think he meant by that last remark?” the commissario said as they drove through the mist.

“I think he meant that objects in gold are easily recognisable by the person they were stolen from, but they can be melted down and transformed into perfectly anonymous items.”

“Well done. I see you’re beginning to develop an investigator’s mind. Tomorrow I want you to go to Suzzara and see if there’s been a rise in the number of thefts of gold. And persuade our colleagues to tell you if there have been robberies around Cortile San Martino.”

As they reached the city boundary, one of their mobiles rang. Juvara fumbled about for a while before he located the correct one. “It’s yours. They both have the same ringtone,” he said.

It was Marcotti. “Soneri,” she began, “I’ve had the two bombers moved to prison. I wanted to let you know that if you plan to interrogate them, I’ll be there tomorrow morning at nine.”

“Are they talking?”

“No different from the other two: not a word. And they too say they’ve been fitted up.”

“We’ll have to find some way of making them talk. Maybe they could be convinced …”

“Forget it, commissario. I’ve got experience in dealing with gangs from Eastern Europe and it’s not only the Italians who practice
omerta
.”

“Then we have only one card to play.”

“Which card is that?”

“Medioli. I invited him to cooperate, and perhaps he will. He’s not one of the Roma community and doesn’t subscribe to their rites. We could look on him as an infiltrator.”

“And you really believe he’ll help? He doesn’t seem to me quite of this world.”

“Let’s have a go.”

He dropped Juvara off at his house.

“I’ll be in the office first thing tomorrow morning and I’ll get to work on the internet to do the research we were discussing.”

“Internet, internet! Wouldn’t you be quicker going round in person to the officers responsible for investigating thefts? Their office is only two floors up. It’s always better to talk face to face.”

“Whatever you want, commissario, but you really are too dismissive of computer technology.”

“Enough, Juvara! And don’t forget your friend Sauro. You can drive each other crazy with all this talk.”

The inspector made a sign that meant ‘I will obey’, and shut the car door. The commissario accelerated away in the direction of Angela’s house. He wanted to see her and spend the night with her. He parked underneath her residence and called her, but the telephone in the house rang out. Her mobile was switched off. He sank from desire to frustration and on to unhappy thoughts, and then began to think like a policeman and assess all possible hypotheses concerning his partner’s silence, coming inevitably to the worst possible conclusion. He was tired of forever banging his head against forces that refused to yield up their mystery, first in his work and now in his emotional life. Sbarazza had been right: for him it was all too much.

He decided to go home, but then could not bring himself to drive off, so he chose instead to smoke a cigar and walk off his anxiety. He went along Via D’Azeglio with the mist ahead of him and swirling at his back. From time to time groups of Arabs and Africans emerged from the nearby neighbourhoods, their raised voices cutting through the silence of the deserted street. He came to Piazza Garibaldi and crossed into Via Farini before turning into Vicolo Politi in the direction of the court. There were still cars parked in front, perhaps belonging to magistrates. Angela might be busy inside, perhaps questioning a witness. He hung about for a while, and then saw Marcotti, the chief prosecutor, Capuozzo
and Maresciallo Santurro go out. There had been a meeting no-one had told him about, and that promised nothing good for him, unless the agenda had been limited to the explosion at Golden.

He went away certain that there would be trouble the following day, but he did not want to think about it. He was tired, disappointed and frustrated. He could not take any more. The moment he got home, the telephone rang.

“Were you looking for me?” Angela said.

“You talk to me as though I were president of the society of lawyers.”

“Sorry. I’m out of breath. I’ve been working late and I’m extremely tired.”

“So am I. And not only because of work.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I can’t stand any more of this. I can never find you, I can’t reach you to talk to you, and when I do you’re very cold.”

“I’ve really got a lot of work on.”

“And I’m telling you that this is no way to live. You’ll have to make up your mind, Angela. One way or the other. I know you’re still seeing him. You were in the wine bar with him tonight.”

There was a pause. Soneri would have given anything to hear her deny it, but instead she came back at him, totally composed. “So you’re playing the policeman with me again, are you?”

“You’re wrong. It was pure chance. But I believe in coincidences.”

“You’ve already said that. You’d be better to keep your imagination in check, considering the job you do.”

“Angela, I’m serious. I can’t go on this way. This situation is causing me too much pain.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m not ready to decide. I’m too confused.”

He would have liked to tell her to let events take their course, as Sbarazza counselled, but he stayed quiet and it was she who murmured: “I still want to see you.”

Soneri could understand nothing, but at the same time he was aware that there was nothing to understand, that there was nothing for it but to live for the moment, savour it and take everything he could from it without wondering what would happen next.

JUVARA HAD BEEN
at work a full two hours before the commissario arrived at the office.

“You were right,” Juvara told him. “There’s been quite an increase in reports of thefts of gold and jewellery in recent weeks, but the really interesting facts are contained in the data provided by colleagues who investigate theft and robbery. In the area around Cortile San Martino a lot of houses have been burgled and they’ve lost count of the number of cars broken into in the parking area at the autostrada petrol station.”

“A whole industry!”

“And another thing. They’ve not spared the churches either.”

“The churches?”

“Four parishes have reported thefts in the last two months, and in every case sacred vessels in gold have been carried off.”

“Did this happen in Suzzara as well?”

“Apparently not, but that could be because they’ve only been there a short time.”

A few minutes passed and then the telephone on his desk rang.

“Commissario Soneri, I’ve got Dottor Capuozzo for you,”
announced the questore’s secretary. It seemed to Soneri there could be no worse way to start the new day.

“I’m phoning about the Iliescu crime,” Capuozzo began. “I’m worried about this investigation because, unless I am very much mistaken, we’re not even within sight of a conclusion.”

“It’s a particularly complex case, Dottore. Initially the identity of the victim was unknown, and then we established we were dealing with an illegal immigrant who was using her sister’s passport, and then there was the case of the old man whose body was found on the bus.”

“All that is understood, but we’re going from bad to worse. Now we’ve got bombs going off. What are we going to tell the city?”

Soneri struggled to stop himself letting out a roar. He assumed that following the uproar created by the disruption of the wedding, some local grandees had been in touch to complain. These were the people to whom his superior was accountable, certainly not the city as a whole.

“We’re working on it.” Soneri said. “Neither Dottoressa Marcotti nor I will rest until …”

“I’ve called a meeting with the Prefect, the Mayor and the President of the Province for this afternoon. We must send out a bulletin.”

The usual comedy with a cast of bureaucrats, Soneri thought to himself. He saw cameras and notebooks clustered around two dozen authority figures, reporting the “tireless work of the security committees”. Perfect for a world which thrived on appearances.

“I hope to have good news for you soon.” Soneri made an effort to be diplomatic. “Sooner or later we’ll draw the right card,” he said, realising as he spoke how deeply that expression had lodged in his mind. As he replaced the telephone,
he felt his anger and unease return. Calls from Capuozzo were utterly vacuous, but, like an alarm clock about to go off, they always induced a state of anxiety.

“Did he tell you about the meeting?” Juvara said, as he got up to go out.

“You knew about it?”

“His secretary called this morning as soon as I got to the office, but she told me there was no need to pass on a message because she’d call back. I thought it better to spare you a half hour’s bad mood,” the inspector explained, before hurriedly adding, “I’m on my way to see Sauro now.”

Soneri signalled his approval with a wave, but without looking up. He was thinking about the meeting. He had no wish to waste time on prattle, the only purpose of which was to command some column inches in the newspapers and give the impression of what the politicians would call “putting all arms of government on an emergency footing”. He decided he would absent himself once again, even if that would do nothing for his relations with Capuozzo. If he was not going to the meeting, what would he do with his afternoon? He attempted to find a motive to justify his absence, but all of a sudden he found his head empty, as though he were about to faint. The only thought that troubled him related to Angela.

He considered telephoning her, but pride and self-respect held him back. It was up to her to make the next move, although he was aware that there might well be no move at all. Everything might be frozen in the final checkmate.

And then, without knocking, Musumeci burst in, providentially bringing Soneri’s mind back to the investigation. “I’ve got a report here from the Romanian police which arrived a couple of hours ago. Our translator has just finished working on it.”

“Report on what?”

“They’ve found Iliescu’s sister. She works in a lap-dancing club in Bucharest, and finally we know the identity of the old man who died on the coach.”

“And who was he?”

“The grandfather, but there are gaps in the report. He had something to do with the Romas. In fact it seems he was one himself.”

“What made him risk his life coming to Italy?”

“The sister was very worried about what might happen to Nina, because she had heard from various sources that the Roma community here were out to get her.”

“Soncini explained the reasons why they were after her, but I’ve no way of knowing if he told me everything.”

“The fact is her sister claims she spent a long time begging their grandfather to come to Italy and try to make peace and stop anything worse happening. According to what she says, she gave him a lot of cash and paid for his journey.”

“He must have drunk the cash or else someone cheated him out of it. The old man was down to his last penny when he died.”