Gold, Frankincense and Dust (9 page)

“So they set fire to her body not far from where she was found?”

“Somewhere in the surrounding countryside. In this temperature, her body froze quickly but not completely, because we found minuscule fragments of the bag attached to the skin.”

“What about the baby?” Soneri asked, realising the absurdity of the question only when the words were out.

“Don’t go there,” Nanetti warned him, guessing what was going on in the commissario’s mind. “You’ll do yourself no good.”

The commissario held back the rush of confused sensations which threatened to overcome him. “What has Marcotti decided to do?”

“The body will not be released for burial at the moment, but anyway no-one has come forward to claim it. The same with the other one, the old man. It’s no accident they’ve been placed one beside the other.”

“I might have found the girl in the photograph.”

“Ah! Who is she?”

“I’ve still got to find that out from someone who knows her. You won’t believe it, but this is all down to Sbarazza. I ran into him again, and it turned out he’d been sitting in the place of some woman who’d had the newspaper open at the right page and had been speaking about her.”

“If you’re so curious, why not give her a ring?” Nanetti said, but he sounded sceptical.

Instead the commissario telephoned Angela, but her mobile was switched off. Anxiety took hold of him again, but Juvara, unaware of what was going on and seeing him flare up, simply thought that colour was returning to his cheeks. Before they had time to discuss the new developments relating to the case, Musumeci appeared at the door.
“There’s a woman here who wants to see you,” he told Soneri.

For an instant he hoped it might be Angela, but when he went into the interview room he found himself facing a beautiful woman who answered fully to the description given by Sbarazza.

“Serena Robutti,” she introduced herself, with a practised smile.

“I was going to call you,” he said.

“Giuseppe told me you were looking for me, so I wanted to clear this matter up immediately.”

“I was only looking for some information …”

“Yes, very good, but I’d like to make it clear …” Signora Robutti went on, with a steeliness in her voice.

Soneri gestured to her to continue.

“The girl was Romanian. Her name was Ines Iliescu, and when I first met her she was an illegal immigrant. You see what I’m getting at?”

Soneri thought this over for a moment. “You gave her work?”

The woman nodded. “As a housemaid. You know how it is. I’m always in the office, I travel a lot … For a while she slept at our place, but then she made other arrangements. But I assure you, I had every intention of giving her real employment. Since she was an illegal immigrant, I could not do things properly, but I was looking for some way to regularise her situation.”

“You do know that’s what they all say, don’t you? Even on the buildings sites, as soon as someone gets killed in an accident they declare they were going to fix things up the very next day.”

“I swear I would have done it, but I couldn’t as long as she was not quite legal.”

“So how did it all end up?”

“I’m not sure. One day, she quite simply didn’t turn up. I
tried to call her on her mobile, but there was nothing … She just disappeared. Do you understand?”

“You are quite sure she is the one in the photograph?”

“Positive.”

“What was she like?”

“She was very beautiful. The pictures don’t do her justice. They’re very poor quality.”

“Yes, but I mean, what can you tell me about her?”

“I know she was a dancer. Folk dances, traditional Romanian dances.”

“Anything else?”

“We didn’t talk all that much. Apart from anything else, there was the language problem. She seemed to me a decent young woman, one who genuinely wanted to make a new life for herself, to lift herself out of poverty. Maybe a family …”

Soneri listened as though he had just gulped down a cup of boiling hot coffee. In every victim he found the frustrations of all human affairs, and for this reason he always felt close to them. The compassion he felt was an emotion which surpassed individual circumstances, but it was not so in this case, where there was something personal involved.

“If I knew where she was, I could offer her some assistance,” the woman murmured.

“I’d like to know that too,” Soneri said, leaping to his feet with one of those sudden movements of his. There were no more questions to ask, but he was left with a vague, insidious sense of foreboding.

Serena Robutti too rose quickly to her feet. “I hope what I’ve told you will not have implications … you know, for my work.”

The commissario made a reassuring gesture. “All you’ve told me is that you don’t know which clubs she frequented but she enjoyed dancing. It’s something to go on.”

“I don’t think she went to discotheques. As I said, she did folk dancing. Gypsy dances, the gypsy tradition.”

The interview ended on that note. Soneri shook her hand and watched her walk along the corridor without a backward glance. He went into his office and scribbled the name on a piece of paper which he handed to Juvara. “See if your friends in Bucharest can help.”

Immediately afterwards, he dialled Angela’s number but again without success. At that point, the unease he had felt shortly before changed into apprehension and then into fear – not the sort of fear which causes a surge of adrenalin, but one which burrows into the innards, like a worm under the skin. Angela was his security, the nail in the wall which keeps a person attached to life but which all of a sudden gives way. He wanted to talk to her, but had no idea where she was. The telephone in her home rang out, and after each futile attempt, the commissario felt himself gasping for breath in a hostile absence denser than water. He thought of her as though she was already far off, another possibility of life snatched away. This time, however, it was not the same as with Ada. Now he was no longer young, and starting out afresh would be much more difficult. His time was running out.

He decided to concentrate exclusively on the investigation, and left to go to the car park at the sports ground, which would already be packed with cars, vans and stalls and buzzing with unknown languages in a chorus reminiscent of a dirge or a lament. The sound seemed to him like life with its thousand faces or the many indispensable little illusions which coaxed it incessantly forward. At that point, desperate to shake off his disenchantment, he did not hesitate to plunge in head first.

THEY HAD TAKEN
over the furthest part of the car park, making themselves almost invisible from the street. The Council turned a blind eye to the occupation because in the dead of night the foreigners did not bother anyone. Their trucks were lined up as if on a permanent campsite. One row marked the external border, closing off the area destined for the market, while inside it the various vehicles left free the passageways and a little clearing in the centre. Shrouded in mist, well away from the lamp posts in the car park, that little clandestine, extra-territorial community lived in semi-darkness. Some stalls stocked products newly arrived from Romania, while packages, perhaps even including unauthorised passengers, were loaded and unloaded from the trucks. It seemed impossible to recognise anyone in that faint light, but the whole operation was carried out as though in bright daylight. People greeted each other or shouted from a distance, and Soneri thought back to the times in the countryside where he was born when people endured the long, dark winter nights, or when in summer compassionate darkness intervened to put a stop to labour.

In the midst of the general bustle, he stopped to light his cigar. Pasquariello had been right. A sense of community was still alive there, and not only because some of the women
were dressed in traditional costume and seemed to view the gathering as a sort of feast day for their patron saint. The commissario allowed himself to be carried away by the crowd swarming about him, but then quite suddenly the scene was lit up. A small stage had been erected in the centre of the market where a generator produced energy for half a dozen spotlights and for some amplifiers which were blaring out music of a vaguely eastern character. The lights in the centre and the trucks drawn up in a circle to close off the vital core of the community reminded him of the camps set up on the immense, snow-covered plains by earlier generations, arranging their wagons in a circle as defence and tending the fire to keep wolves at bay. That too represented an ancient link, never completely broken, redolent of long, silent journeys which saw fathers and sons shoulder to shoulder. On the stage, a few girls in costume were dancing, while about thirty spectators watched and applauded.

Soneri remembered that Ines had been a dancer so it seemed natural to ask about her. A man eyed him with evident distrust and without speaking a word pointed him in the direction of a corpulent figure standing on his own, keeping them under observation. The commissario went over to him. “I’m looking for Ines.”

“Ines?”

“Iliescu.”

“She’s gone to Craiova.”

“But she was here.”

The man replied without looking Soneri in the face, never taking his eye off the stage. “Comes and goes. Many here like that.”

“Anyone here know her well?”

“Everybody here know. All from Romania. Ask Roman. He make journeys, there and back.”

The commissario moved away from that spot which was as bright as a hearth and plunged once more into the semi-darkness of the market. Roman’s somewhat battered coach had seats for about forty people and he himself, in the midst of the ceaseless toing and froing all around, was engaged in negotiations with a family over a trip they wished to make. Goods from Romania were being unloaded and others – refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washing machines and packages containing various items – loaded in their place. The man overseeing the operation recorded everything in a notebook. Each item had a name and a destination, and only when it was loaded or unloaded did bargaining over the price take place. Nearby, women were queuing up at a stall selling Romanian foodstuffs.

The name Ines was known to Roman. “I took her to Craiova two weeks ago,” he explained in reasonable Italian. “She stands out in my memory because she was so pretty.”

“And she hasn’t returned to Italy?”

“Who could say? There are so many ways to come and go. Apart from the established companies, there are lots of others. Here alone there are four. Anyway, I have not seen either her or her sister for at least two months.”

“She has a sister?”

“She’s pretty as well. Just one year between them.”

“Ines used to dance …” Soneri went on, pointing over to the performance area stage behind him, nothing more than a spot of fading light.

“Yes, both did. But not in places like this,” the man explained, hinting that their aims were higher.

“Where?”

The other became guarded, making the commissario realise he had gone too far with this line of questioning, and
that Roman might well have previous experience of police methods. He gave a shrug, but made no reply.

“Do you get a lot of work?” Soneri asked, to change the subject.

“I don’t charge a lot. The big companies take nearly twice as much. If I don’t get people on board, I take goods.”

The commissario looked around at indistinguishable figures moving about between the trucks, loading and unloading.

“Everything there costs less than here,” the man said, before hurrying off to attend to some business and disappearing into the darkness.

Soneri lit his cigar, deeply conscious of being an outsider. It was odd to feel a stranger in your own city, and yet the names being shouted out, the pronunciation of unfamiliar diphthongs, the clothes, the faces emerging unexpectedly from the darkness communicated his non-belonging. One solitude merged with a deeper solitude, both interrupted by a signal from his mobile. It was a text from Angela which said simply:
I am interviewing
: three words conveying coolness, distance and a profound sense of alienation.

Quite suddenly, the atmosphere grew more excited. A name was passed from mouth to mouth, a name initially strange to the commissario’s ears, but which gained in clarity, like an echo becoming more precise as it was repeated: “Gortan, Gortan …” At that moment, the headlights of a black B.M.W. shone on the vehicles and shortly afterwards a portly figure, accompanied by a woman who looked much younger than him, got out.

Soneri moved aside as lights were switched on near one of the vehicles. A decidedly suspicious looking individual, who had the look of a pimp with his favourite at his side, stepped forward. Six or so lackeys cleared a path for him, while
several people hung about waiting to be received. He was plainly someone who had made his fortune, who now dispensed favours or work, and he was perhaps the most pitiless and ruthless of them all, Soneri thought, as he watched him pass in front of him, making his way towards the coach where he would receive the petitioners. The illusion of a happy community evaporated on the instant. In that area of mist he witnessed yet again all the familiar ways of mankind, but as he was falling prey to uncomfortable reflections, his telephone rang.

“Commissario, that Ines, she’s not in the country now,” Juvara said, with unaccustomed abruptness.

“I know. There’s somebody here who says he took her back to Craiova about two months ago.”

“Here where?”

“In the car park between the sports ground and the hypermarket, where the Romanians meet up once a week. They pick up some things here and send others off to their own country. They eat, dance, look for work and do deals. They reconstruct their own lives and then go their own way again. It’s the destiny of all of us, isn’t it?”

Not for the first time, Juvara was left baffled. “But if this Ines isn’t here, who was the old man coming to look for?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself. Why do you think I’m taking an interest in this case?”

“Commissario, I cannot …” Juvara stuttered.

“For the reason that I believe in coincidences. On the one hand, a guy makes a hash of fleeing from the gypsy travellers’ camp, on the other there’s an old man who dies while searching … Behind every fact there is a certain scenario, and it’s up to us to find out if the principal actors are not by some chance the same.”