Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence (3 page)

‘My respects, sir.’

‘There must be a reason you’re still an inspector at your age …’ the commissioner muttered between clenched teeth, but Bordelli heard him just the same. He went out, closing the door behind him. He wished he was still up in the foggy hills with Botta, looking for porcini mushrooms through the rotting leaves. He went into his office and found Piras there waiting for him, sitting in front of the desk.

‘At ease …’ he said, but the young Sardinian had already shot to his feet. He still limped a little from the bullets that had shattered one of his legs a year before. He was barely twenty-two years old, but his considerable skills had convinced Bordelli to keep him by his side in every investigation. On top of this he was the son of Gavino Piras, a comrade of Bordelli’s from the war, which made him even dearer to the inspector. Gavino had returned from the fighting minus an arm, but hadn’t stopped living a farmer’s life. But, all things considered, even he had been damned lucky … Bordelli still remembered the time Gavino had taken a grenade square in the chest, but it hadn’t exploded. It just bounced off his uniform and fell at his feet like a rock … In the heat of the moment the German had forgotten to pull the ring, and Gavino cut him down with a single burst of fire. After the skirmish, he’d approached Bordelli.

‘Even grenades are afraid of Sardinians, Captain,’ he’d whispered, wild-eyed. He was well aware he’d been saved by a miracle …

‘You wanted to see me, Inspector?’ asked young Piras.

‘Yes, I wanted to share my ball-aches with you.’

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

Without actually admitting it, they were now both convinced the boy was dead. No ransom demands, no anonymous telephone calls.

‘Let’s hope we’re wrong, sir,’ said Piras, who had sat back down in the meantime.

Bordelli went over to the window and looked outside. It was starting to rain again, for a change. The respite had lasted only two days.

‘What should we do, Piras? Reread the reports? Eat them? Go and play a game of
bocce
? What the hell should we do?’

‘If I can speak sincerely …’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Our only hope is to find the body.’

‘Bloody rain,’ Bordelli whispered, watching the large drops splatter on the asphalt. Dejected, he lit a cigarette. A receiver off the hook, buckets of rain, Signora Pellissari’s Fiat that wouldn’t start … A series of unlucky coincidences? Was it a premeditated kidnapping, or had chance stuck her grubby paws in this?

The internal phone line rang. It was the radio room. A car with two corpses inside it had been found a few hundred yards from the monastery of Montesenario. A man and a woman. At first glance it looked like a double suicide.

‘All right, I’m on my way … Inform Diotivede and the assistant prosecutor,’ Bordelli said calmly before hanging up.

‘What is it?’ Piras was already standing.

‘I’ll tell you in the stairwell,’ the inspector muttered, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. He was doing his best not to smoke, but between women and corpses, it wasn’t easy.

‘Slow down, Inspector,’ said Piras, limping.

‘Sorry, I always forget.’

He slowed to the young man’s pace and they went down into the courtyard. It was deluging. Mugnai saw them and came running out with a large green country umbrella that covered all three of them. While walking them to the Beetle, he asked what seven-letter word might describe the
Hill ever dear to Leopardi
.

‘Forlorn,’ Piras and Bordelli said in chorus. They got into the car and left, leaving Mugnai behind to his thoughts.

As they drove through Piazza delle Cure the rain let up a little, but the sky was still black. The inspector was thinking that it was a relief to deal with something concrete, even if it meant two dead.

Half an hour later they were at Montesenario. There was a pair of patrol cars there, as well as a few onlookers. It was still drizzling with a monotonous persistence that tried even the most steadfast patience. Bordelli approached the Fiat 600 and looked inside. A man of about forty with a hole in his left temple and a woman of about thirty with her hand on her bloodstained lap, both with their mouths half open. The back seat was stacked high with fabric catalogues.

‘Keep those people away,’ Bordelli said to one of the uniformed cops. He tried opening the door on the driver’s side. It was unlocked. He stuck his head inside to have a close look at the corpses and bullet holes. The woman had been shot in the belly. Unlike hers, the man’s eyes were wide open. He searched the man’s jacket and the woman’s handbag for their papers, then stepped aside to let Piras have a look. He was almost convinced he knew how things had unfolded, and wanted to see whether the Sardinian agreed. He waited patiently for Piras to finish.

‘What do you think?’ he asked him.

‘It wasn’t premeditated,’ said the young man.

‘Go on …’

‘Two illicit lovers. They had a quarrel, he threatened her with the pistol, she perhaps made fun of him, saying the pistol wasn’t loaded, and so he pulls back the slide and lets it go, not knowing that would make the gun go off. Seeing that he’s killed her by accident, he loses his head and shoots himself.’

‘Makes perfect sense to me,’ said Bordelli, handing him the two poor souls’ papers. The man was married, the woman too, but not to each other.

At that moment the Fiat 1100 of Dr Diotivede pulled up, as black and shiny as a politician’s shoe. The old police pathologist got out with his medical bag in hand, also black, naturally. His snow-white hair gleamed in the morning light. As he approached the two lovers’ car, he gave an almost imperceptible nod of greeting. He always wore a childlike frown on his face, as if he’d just been woken up to go to school. Opening his bag, he stuck his hands inside and then withdrew them already sheathed in rubber gloves. He ducked into the car to touch the corpses. Less than a minute later he peeled off his gloves.

‘The woman died two hours later than the man, maybe even two and a half,’ he said, jotting his first notes down in his notebook.

‘Are you sure about that?’ asked Bordelli.

‘No, I was just kidding,’ Diotivede grumbled, still writing.

‘It wasn’t really a question …’

‘I have to go now, I have a rendezvous with an old lady,’ the doctor said, putting his notebook away.

‘Dead or alive?’

‘What difference does it make?’ said Diotivede, smiling, and he started walking towards his car, bag swaying at his side. A child with white hair, thought Bordelli, also smiling. The doctor swung the car around and headed down the hill.

Piras and Bordelli followed him moments later, descending in silence along the tortuous Montesenario road. There was no mystery to the tragedy, no secrets to uncover. There was no point in waiting for the assistant prosecutor. Prosecutor Cangiani wasn’t the most pleasant person in the world.

And so the inspector found himself wrestling with the case of the missing boy again, and it was clear that Piras was thinking of the same thing. It had become a sort of obsession for both. It was the first time Bordelli had found himself in this situation, and he was having trouble swallowing it. When they got to Piazza delle Cure, Piras shook his head.

‘Shit, Inspector …’

‘What is it, Piras?’

‘I just can’t stand sitting here twiddling my thumbs like this.’

‘What else can we do?’ said Bordelli, lighting a cigarette. Piras rolled down his window and stuck his head outside, as though afraid he might suffocate. He found cigarettes disgusting and couldn’t understand how an intelligent person could waste time smoking them. A cold wind blew in, insinuating itself under their clothing.

‘I can throw it away, if you like,’ the inspector said.

‘And I can go on foot, if you prefer,’ Piras said provocatively.

Bordelli took two or three drags in a row and threw out the cigarette, and Piras finally closed the window. After a minute of very Sardinian silence, he said that when he was about ten years old, a little girl had been murdered in his town. Raped and strangled. In all the towns around nobody talked about anything else. It took them several months to find the killer, and it was only by chance. One day, during mass in a nearby town, a little yellow ribbon happened to fall out of the priest’s pocket. A woman who knew the young girl’s family was almost certain she recognised the ribbon, and to be sure she went to the
carabinieri
after the mass. The little girl had worn her hair in a ponytail, and her mother would always make a bow with a yellow ribbon just like that one. The priest was questioned. At first he pretended to be taken aback, but he was visibly nervous. In the end he confessed. After one hour in jail he hanged himself from the bars of his cell with a sort of rope fashioned from shreds of his shirt …

‘It’s always nice to hear such cheerful stories,’ Bordelli said, smiling bitterly.

‘Well, at least they found the killer …’

‘Not so fast, Piras. Nobody’s said the boy was killed yet,’ said the inspector, thinking the exact opposite.

‘Thirteen-year-olds don’t usually elope,’ Piras muttered.

‘Let’s just wait … You never know.’

They were back at the station. Bordelli left the Beetle in the courtyard, took leave of Piras, and went on foot to the Trattoria da Cesare, on Viale Lavagnini. He greeted the owner and waiters and, as usual, slipped into Totò’s kitchen, where the Apulian cook fought his daily battles between frying pans and clouds of smoke. It was also where the inspector had been taking his meals for years.

Totò was in fine form that day, more or less as he always was. Four feet eleven inches of sheer exuberance and nasty black hair sprouting from every pore. He greeted the inspector and recommended grilled pork chops with black-eyed peas. Bordelli nodded, resigned. He’d entered that kitchen many times swearing he would eat lightly, but rarely if ever had he kept his vow. He sat down and waited for Totò to fill his plate with those gifts of God.

‘Have a taste of this, Inspector … Allow me to teach a Florentine how these things should be made.’

‘Thanks, Totò. It’s just what I need.’

‘That little kid still on your mind, eh?’

‘Could you do me a favour and not mention it?’

‘Of course, Inspector, of course.’

Totò was always busy but never stopped talking. He too told a few little stories of murdered children, down in the Salento, going into the details as though talking about how to make
spaghetti alla carbonara
. Bordelli listened in silence, washing down the pork with a red wine that made him weak at the knees.

After the short tales from back home, Totò started talking about long-haired hippies. He saw a lot of them about, these days. More and more, in fact. He liked them, actually, sort of like puppies. But he simply couldn’t understand how a man could wear his hair like a woman without feeling embarrassed.

‘In the past it was perfectly normal,’ said Bordelli.

‘I’d like to see what you’d look like with hair like a girl’s,’ said Totò, laughing and turning over a huge steak. He poured out a pot of pasta and a minute later set six steaming plates down on the counter of the serving hatch. Then with a smile on his lips he put a slice of apple tart and a small glass of
vin santo
down in front of the inspector.

Leaving the trattoria, Bordelli felt guilty for having succumbed to temptation. He lit a cigarette and started walking at a leisurely pace back to the station, thinking of the long afternoon ahead.

A beautiful girl in a rather short skirt walked past, and he turned around to look at her, very nearly crashing into a scooter parked on the pavement. He almost blushed, thinking he could be her father … if not her grandfather. He turned around again to look at her. But wasn’t she cold, he wondered, with her legs all uncovered like that? He still hadn’t got used to seeing such short hemlines, and they always had a powerful effect on him.

He thought of Elvira and their last night together. A night like all the others, except that the following day she’d left him, after the briefest of phone calls. She was very pretty, Elvira. She had a mole on her lip and another on her left breast.

‘Poor old teddy bear, all alone again …’ said Rosa, doing his fingernails with little scissors and emery boards. Bordelli was lying on the sofa with his shoes off, a glass of grappa resting on his chest. Every so often he raised his head to take a sip. The songs of Tony Dallara softly filled the room at low volume.

Rosa loved doing these little things for her policeman friend, especially when he was down. She would squeeze his blackheads, wash his face with creams, give him manicures, massage his back … Ever since she’d given up the profession she’d become a bit melancholy, but also sweeter. A tender retired prostitute with the soul of a little girl. Her big white cat, Gideon, was sleeping on a chair.

‘I feel like Calimero,’ said Bordelli.
²

‘You’re always chasing pretty girls …’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Yes it is.’ She had a small, strange smile on her lips.

‘At my age I’d like to find a nice, pretty woman who will stay with me till I die,’ Bordelli said melodramatically. At least Rosa wasn’t talking about the missing boy.

‘I know the kind of woman you need.’

‘I love it when you play Mummy for me …’

‘I mean it.’

‘And what kind of woman do I need?’

‘I’ve noticed that you like dark women with long straight hair. Young and slender with dark, mysterious eyes …’

‘Who wouldn’t like a woman like that?’

‘But that’s not the kind of woman you need.’

‘Oh no?’

‘I could easily see you with a blonde of about forty, slightly chubby, always cheerful, who, whenever you came home, would throw her arms around you and drag you to bed.’

‘Just the thought of it turns my stomach.’ Bordelli sighed.

‘You’re not very nice, you know. I was describing someone a bit like myself,’ said Rosa, pretending to be offended. Fortunately she didn’t stop filing his nails.

‘You’re not the least bit chubby,’ said Bordelli, trying to patch things up.