Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence (8 page)

The fur-clad lady at last overcame her reservations and declared to the world what she wanted. The butcher threw a large piece of meat on the chopping board, as if it were an enemy he’d just killed, and started working on it with his knife.

‘
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona
…’
⁷
he declaimed, pursing his lips like a rose. The lady shuddered with vanity. Then she paid a considerable sum without batting an eyelid and left, carrying the meat-filled package almost with disgust.

‘What can I get for you?’ the butcher asked, turning to Bordelli.

‘Wasn’t the gentleman ahead of me?’ asked the inspector, gesturing to the customer beside him.

‘Go ahead, thanks, I’m in no hurry,’ said the man.

‘You’re very kind … I would like a steak for the grill,’ Bordelli said to the butcher, looking at the slabs of meat spread out in the refrigerated display case. He was thinking he would bring the steak to Totò and eat it that same evening.

‘This is Chianina,’
⁸
said the butcher, putting a gorgeous block of meat on the chopping board. He took two large knives, rubbed them together with the grace of habit, and thrust the blades in.

‘So, it’s mushroom season again,’ the inspector let drop, the way people do in shops while waiting to be served. He wanted to find out whether the butcher went up into the hills for reasons other than for burying a corpse.

‘For those who know how to find them,’ said the butcher, picking up a cleaver to break the bone. At that moment a transparent little old man popped out from the back room, looking as if he was breathing his last. He had a submissive gaze and the manner of a fairy-tale grandfather, which clashed with his bloodstained apron. The butcher changed expression and looked at him harshly.

‘You already done?’

‘Yes,’ the old man whispered, intimidated.

‘Don’t just stand around twiddling your thumbs, go and take care of the pig … What, you’re still here?’ he said, proud of his power. The little old man vanished without a word, silent as a cat. The inspector imagined the miserable life he must lead, spending his days cutting up animal carcasses, hands covered with blood … He felt sorry for him.

‘A few days ago I found a lot of porcini at Poggio alla Croce,’ he boasted, resuming the conversation.

‘You’re either not really a mushroom hunter, or you’re fibbing,’ said the butcher, smiling again, lowering the cleaver to the bone and breaking it with one blow. The man knew what to do with knives.

‘I swear I found some,’ Bordelli insisted, trying to get him to open up.

‘Whoever finds mushrooms never tells where he found them,’ said the butcher, shaking his head in a friendly way.

‘There were so many I decided to be generous,’ the inspector explained, realising his mistake.

‘There are never enough,’ the butcher grumbled.

‘You found some?’

‘Very few.’

‘Where?’

‘Up in the woods …’ said the butcher with a grin, glancing at the customer, who was in no hurry.

‘I’ve learned my lesson. From now on I’ll keep my secret to myself,’ said Bordelli, throwing his hands up.

‘A sacred vow …’ said the butcher. He clearly was a mushroom hunter, and there was nothing odd about his going around in the woods. He could easily have lost his phone bill bending down to pick a porcino.

‘Have a look at this thing of beauty,’ the butcher said, holding up the steak, which he then dropped on to the scale.

‘How much do I owe you?’

‘A thousand seven hundred … well spent,’ replied Panerai, wrapping the meat up. Bordelli paid and returned to the car.

‘Still feel like that panino, Piras?’

‘What was the butcher like?’ the Sardinian asked.

‘A fat guy with a bald head who looks like Goering,’ said the inspector, tossing the steak on the back seat.

‘A likeable sort, in other words,’ said Piras.

‘And a mushroom hunter …’ muttered the inspector, shaking his head as though disappointed.

They went into Scheggi’s. There was a bit of a queue and they had to wait. When their turn came, they ordered two stuffed panini, Bordelli’s with
finocchiona
salami and Piras’s with mortadella. They set to them straight away, with gusto. The moment they got back in the car, the inspector saw the man who had let him go first walk by on the pavement. He had a slight, rather comical limp, head bobbing lightly every two steps. Bordelli followed him distractedly with his eyes, with the strange feeling that something had escaped him.

‘What is it, Inspector?’ asked Piras.

‘Nothing …’

‘Don’t tell me I limp like him.’

‘No, no, compared to him you move like a dancer,’ said Bordelli, starting up the car.

Giacomo’s mortal remains were returned to the family, and the funeral was scheduled for the following morning at the Badia in Fiesole. The inspector was half tempted to attend, then decided that there was no point in it. He phoned Signora Pellissari to reiterate his condolences, but above all to ask her what butcher shop she patronised. The woman gently replied that she went normally to Mazzoni’s in Piazza Edison, a bit taken aback by the strange question. Bordelli assured her that the investigation was proceeding without delay, then left her to her grief.

The butcher was put under round-the-clock surveillance. He didn’t take a single step without being watched. The men in the radio room had the phone numbers of all the places where they could reach the inspector: home, trattoria, Rosa. In the event of big news, they had orders to ring him at any time of the night or day. No matter what happened, at the end of each surveillance shift, he was brought a detailed report of Panerai’s movements. Bordelli never missed a chance to repeat to the men in the field that they should use the utmost caution, change cars frequently, and never get too close. The butcher must never suspect anything, even if this meant losing him when he was being tailed.

There wasn’t much information to be had on Livio Panerai. Forty-four years old, son of Oreste Panerai, an honest butcher who’d died seven years earlier, and Adelina Cianfi, still alive and living in Via del Ponte alle Riffe. An ordinary past as a Fascist Youth, then as a
repubblichino
,
⁹
but without any major blots. No recorded political activity since the end of the war. He’d grown rich with his butcher’s shop. Five years ago he’d bought a ground-floor apartment in a small three-storey villa in Via del Palmerino. He’d married Cesira Batacchi in 1948 and they had a seventeen-year-old daughter, Fiorenza, who attended the Liceo Dante. Clean record. Hard worker. Licence to bear arms for hunting. Owned a dark grey Lancia Flavia and a cream-coloured Fiat 850, which he used to drive to work. Didn’t do anything out of the ordinary during the day. Seemed to live only for his family and his work. One morning before going to the shop he’d gone to the post office to pay a bill. In short, unless proved otherwise, it was probably him who had lost his telephone bill in the woods. One afternoon he’d closed the shop ten minutes early to go and buy a box of shotgun cartridges at the armoury at Ponte del Pino. On Sunday he’d taken his little family to lunch at his mother’s. He almost always stayed home after dinner, though it was true that the constant rain didn’t make one want to go out. In one week, he went out only once, with his wife, to the Cinema Aurora, to see
The Incredible Army of Brancaleone
. And that was all.

In short, a goody two-shoes. Perfectly innocent. But Bordelli didn’t want to give up on the only clue he’d sniffed out, and so he kept having him watched. As for requesting authorisation to have his phone tapped, he hadn’t even tried. He already knew that Judge Ginzillo would never grant it:
Let me get this straight, Inspector Bordelli. You want to violate the intimacy of a free citizen of the Italian Republic because of a telephone bill? Which you found over two hundred yards away from where the corpse was buried? I wonder, are you mad? You need much better clues than that, my dear inspector
… That was more or less what the rat-face would have said. Not out of procedural zeal, but for fear of getting into trouble. He’d never forgotten some small ‘trifle’ which according to him had very nearly derailed his brilliant career.

Commissioner Inzipone was getting increasingly nervous and making no effort to hide it. He harried Bordelli with useless telephone calls, always repeating the same things …
Have you seen the newspapers? What the hell are you waiting for? Why are you sitting on your hands?

The inspector was patiently waiting for the surveillance teams to turn up something new, but as the hours and days passed, his hopes were beginning to crumble. Jack the Ripper, too, was never caught, like so many others. What if the band of monsters killed again?

During the long wait, there was another suicide he had to deal with one morning. A pretty girl of humble origin had hanged herself with the sash of her dressing gown in a luxury apartment she owned in the centre of town. The body had been found by the cleaning woman, the morning following the death. The girl’s mother explained between sobs that Matilde would never have committed suicide and must have been murdered. She was bewildered, having been unaware of the existence of that apartment and wondering how her daughter could possibly have bought it, since she worked as a salesgirl at the UPIM department store. Bordelli likewise thought it seemed fishy and got down to work. It didn’t take long to figure things out. The girl had got sacked almost three months earlier and was the mistress of a sixty-year-old industrialist from Prato. Bordelli paid a call on him, and the businessman immediately owned up to his affair with the girl. He said he was deeply saddened by it all. He made no mystery of all the money he had spent on her. He’d given her the apartment as a gift and even paid the cleaning woman. Appealing to male complicity, he begged Bordelli not to let the matter get into the papers. The inspector smelled a rat. He asked him to come with him to the station and started pressuring him. After less than an hour of questioning the businessman confessed. They’d had a furious row and the slaps had started flying. The girl fell, hitting her head against the corner of a table and died almost instantly. In a fit of panic, he’d hung her from the sash of her dressing gown, to make it look like a suicide. He hadn’t wanted to kill her, it was the last thing he wanted, it was an accident.

‘She wasn’t dead,’ said Bordelli.

‘What?’

‘When you hanged her, the girl was still alive.’

‘That’s not true … it’s not possible,’ the businessman stammered, teetering in his chair.

‘Read the post-mortem.’ Bordelli passed him Diotivede’s report. The girl had died of suffocation. The blow to the head wasn’t serious. It had only knocked her out.

The man sat there in shock for a few moments, open- mouthed and round-eyed … Then he burst into sobs. Bordelli turned him over to two guards and had him taken to the Murate prison. He wouldn’t stay there for long, with all the money he had. As it happened it was a case of manslaughter following a failed unintentional homicide. Whatever the case, the whole matter had been cleared up in no time. Whereas the murdered boy … Damn it all …

‘Let me get you something, Inspector,’ said Totò. Lasagna, sausages and beans, the usual flask of red and endless chatter about a thousand topics, from politics to women. Only once did the cook make a reference to the murdered child, and Bordelli was able to change the subject immediately.

After dinner he drove slowly home, burping up essence of sausage. He parked the Beetle, and when he was slipping the key into the main door, he froze. The idea of sitting alone in front of the telly smoking and drinking made him feel depressed, and so he thought he would go into the centre of town and see a film. The last shows would be starting in half an hour. He headed off on foot with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, determined not to light it. To keep out of the annoying drizzle that kept falling without ceasing, he walked right up against the buildings. Their dark façades were dotted with the luminous rectangles of windows, which glowed with the changing bluish light of television sets. Every so often a shadow passed on the pavement, and two eyes shone in the darkness.

The Cinema Eolo was showing
La Grande Vadrouille
, but Bordelli didn’t feel like seeing a comedy that night. He walked past the Gusmano bar, which as usual was full of elderly people playing cards with a flask on the table, some of them still in their overalls. Some youngsters had formed a circle round a pinball machine, spellbound as they watched the little steel ball bounce around.

He went down Via di Santo Spirito, and a woman surfaced in his memory: Milena, a beautiful young Jewess who had turned his brain to mush. She was a member of the White Dove, an organisation that hunted down Nazi war criminals who had escaped trial at Nuremberg, and she’d gone away to continue her work elsewhere. Who knew where she was now, what she was doing, or whether she thought every so often of the old inspector who’d lost his head over her? Without realising it he lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. He didn’t want to think about the women he’d lost, but about those who had yet to appear … if any. At his age it was no longer easy to charm a woman. Being born in 1910 wasn’t so lucky. When he was a kid it was very hard to have a real relationship, unless one happened to find an open-minded girl or to get married, and now that there was more freedom he was pushing sixty.

From high up in one of the buildings he heard the scratchy bars of an old tango, and his heart gave a tug. He’d first heard the song in the days of Mussolini, and it felt as if a century had passed since then. At that moment even the war seemed far away, almost like a dream. At other times it weighed so heavy on him that it felt as if it had all happened yesterday. But he didn’t want to think about the war just now …

He crossed the Ponte Santa Trinita, hoping to find a film to suit his mood. There was a great deal of bustle in the centre of town. People walking, on bicycles, on motorcycles, in cars, groups of youngsters, couples, husbands and wives … There they all were, in the city’s convivial drawing room. In Via degli Strozzi there was a queue of traffic that advanced at a walking pace, and the air reeked of exhaust fumes. The multitude in ferment evoked no sense of joy in him, but merely made him feel lonely. Maybe it was just his black mood nipping at his heels, but he couldn’t lie to himself: he didn’t like Italy. He loved it in his way, in spite of everything, but he didn’t like it. An Italy decayed first by war and now by dreams of wealth. The Italy of the throngs at Piazza Venezia and the throngs in Piazzale Loreto …
¹⁰
The grumblings of an old man, he thought, throwing away his cigarette butt with a sigh.