Medusa - 9 (2 page)

But that martinet at the military academy had been right. He wasn’t officer material. He could follow orders as faithfully as a dog, but he couldn’t give them in such a way as to inspire the same unthinking obedience in others. Or even in himself. Above all, he lacked the initiative to improvise successfully when things got tough and there was no superior around to tell him what to do. Such as now.

What was he to do? Where was he to go? He hadn’t spoken to his sister for months, and anyway they’d find him there easily enough. The same went for his few close friends, even supposing he could impose on them without explanation. A trip abroad was tempting, but that meant credit cards and identification and all the rest of it, a paper trail that could be traced. What he really needed to do was just disappear until the situation resolved itself.

He strode on with fake purposefulness through the eddying currents. When another café loomed up, he turned into it blindly and ordered a whisky. Gabriele rarely drank, and never before lunch. He knocked the foul-tasting spirit back like medicine, staring at his image in the mirror behind the bar, surprised as always by his sturdy, wiry body and determined gaze. He always thought of himself as tiny, weedy, frail and terminally inadequate. The joke that life had played on him was putting such a personality inside the body of a professional welter-weight boxer. It had saved him from getting beaten up at school, and later at the academy, but even those victories felt hollow, won by deceit. And the women in his life, unlike the men, had never been fooled. On the contrary, they had loved him, those few who had lasted longer than a week or two, precisely for the weakness they had so perceptively diagnosed. For a while it had seemed sweet to be mothered again, but in the end it felt like another defeat.

Besides, they had all wanted to be real mothers, and he had no intention of collaborating in a re-run of that sad sorry farce. Hippolyte Taine, whose collected works Gabriele was currently reading, had as usual got it ruthlessly right: ‘Three weeks flirting, three months loving, three years squabbling, thirty years making do, and then the kids start again.’ He wasn’t going to let that happen to him. Besides, it might turn out to be a boy. He’d had enough of father-and-son routines to last him several lifetimes. The women had sensed this and moved on, and by now Gabriele had lost all interest in the whole business. If you didn’t want children, what was the point? At his age, sex seemed a bit disgusting and stupid, and the present cultural obsession with it depressing and sick. According to various comments that his mother had let slip from time to time, this was at least one thing that he had in common with his father.

The café was starting to fill up now. It was small and rather seedy for this area, and the clientele was very different from that at the previous establishment: tradesmen, street sweepers, delivery drivers, city cops, pensioners, janitors …

It took another moment before the penny dropped, and when it did Gabriele had enough sense not to use his mobile. The café‘s pay phone was at the rear of the establishment, in an overflow zone where the tables and chairs began to peter out and be replaced by stacks of mineral water cases, cardboard boxes of crisps, unused advertising materials and a broken ice-cream freezer with its lid up. On the wall nearby hung a framed black-and-white aerial photograph of a small town somewhere in the alluvial flatlands to the south, Crema or Lodi perhaps. It must have been taken shortly after the war, for there was still little extensive development outside the walls, just a few suburban villas and the railway station. After that the vast plains spread away, faintly lined with dirt roads and dotted at intervals with isolated
cascine
, the rectangular complexes of clustered farm buildings characteristic of the Po valley.

He stood there, phone in hand, staring up at the photograph. Eventually the dialling tone changed to an angry whine. Gabriele hung up, fed in a coin and redialled. He knew what to do now, and it could be done.

‘
Pronto
.’

‘Fulvio, it’s Gabriele Passarini.’

‘
Salve, dottore
.’

‘Listen, you remember that time, years ago, when I locked myself out of the shop?’

A brief laugh.

‘It’s happened again?’

‘It’s happened again. And I want you to do the same thing you did last time. Do you understand?’

‘You mean go down to …’

‘Yes, yes! Exactly what you did last time. I’ll be waiting.’

There was a pause. When Fulvio finally spoke, he sounded flustered, perhaps by the intensity in Gabriele’s voice.

‘Very well,
dottore
. I’m up to my ears with work this morning, but …’

‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

He hung up, wiped his palms on his coat and returned to the bar, where he ordered and downed a coffee and then paid his bill before leaving the café.

Fulvio was waiting for him just inside the doorway. The janitor was a lean, stooping man whose perpetual expression of amazement, due to the loss of his eyebrows in an industrial accident, gave him a slightly gormless air. In fact, Fulvio was the intermediary, when not the instigator, behind everything that happened in the building. Gabriele had recognized this early on, and had always taken good care to ensure that Fulvio was aware that he both understood and appreciated the situation: a
panettone
from one of the city’s best pastry shops every Christmas, some chocolates for his wife on her birthday, the occasional but satisfyingly large tip now and again.

The janitor beckoned Gabriele in, then pulled the rusty iron door to and locked it again. A dim bulb showed the steep stairway down into the cellarage.

‘Any new developments?’ Gabriele asked casually, using the stock phrase they had evolved for this conversation.

Fulvio sighed profoundly. After the evident and excessive emotion in Gabriele’s voice on the phone, he sounded relieved to return to this well-worn topic.

‘Eh, what can I tell you? Signora Nicolai had another mild heart attack last week, but she’s recovered now and will probably see us all out. Pasquino and Indovina are much the same as ever, and the Gambetta family are still arguing over who gets what from their uncle’s will. But I promise you,
dottore
, an apartment here will become vacant sooner or later.’

‘But probably not during my lifetime.’

‘Eh, eh, eh!’

They walked down the steps and along a narrow passageway that led into a cavernous space filled with dim hulks kept vague by the thin whey of light from open barred windows at pavement level above. Selecting another key from the bunch he carried, Fulvio unlocked a door in the end wall. He switched on a feeble light and they passed through into another subterranean vault, similar in shape and size to the previous one but this time smelling strongly of coal. The floor crunched beneath them as they crossed towards a set of steps in the corner leading back up into the building above.

They were about halfway there when the light went out. The intolerable memory of the shrieks and pleas and curses surged up in Gabriele’s mind. ‘You’d scream like that if it was happening to you,’ he’d thought at the time. That had been the worst aspect of it, the way they had reduced Leonardo – ‘the young priest’, Nestore had jokingly dubbed him, because of his seeming lack of interest in women – to the lowest common denominator of the human animal. People could be destroyed even before they were killed, and he had been an accomplice to such a destruction, as well as to the killing itself. There had never been any hiding from that horror, only forgetting. But forgetting was no longer an option, for the others involved would not forget.

‘
Dottore?
’

The echoes lent Fulvio’s voice an unwonted authority, but the only reply was a wheezing respiration which reminded the janitor of the bellows they’d used to blast the furnace back when he’d started as an apprentice at the foundry. He groped around in his pocket, found his cigarette lighter and clicked a flame.

‘
Dottore?
’

With an effort, Gabriele got the attack under control. The screams faded, the grisly details vanished, the naked rock walls became dressed stone again.

‘I’m all right,’ he said.

‘The steps are just here. Follow me.’

They climbed the stairs and walked along a short passage. After some fumbling with his lighter and keys at the dead end, Fulvio unlocked yet another door, and promptly fell over.

‘
Porca Madonna!
’

The lighter went out and the interior behind the door was dark, but Gabriele advanced confidently, getting out his keys. He knew where he was now. Stepping over the recumbent janitor, as well as the cleaning mop and bucket he had tripped over, he unlocked and opened the inner door. The lattice steel grill protecting the shop windows gave just enough light to see by. Behind him, Fulvio had got to his feet and was groping for the switch inside the door. Gabriele’s hand grasped his arm.

‘No!’

The janitor gazed at him with a look of astonishment which had nothing to do with the absence of eyebrows.

‘No lights?’ he breathed.

Gabriele shook his head.

‘But why? What’s all this about, anyway?’

Bruised and humiliated by his fall, Fulvio sounded angry now.

‘You had your keys all along! So why all this fooling about? What’s going on?’

Gabriele had stepped forward into the centre of the room and stood looking round at the serried spines. Their discreet but sumptuous tones seemed to fill the air like gentle organ music.

Fingers yanked at his sleeve.

‘I demand an explanation,
dottore
!’

Gabriele placed one forefinger on his closed lips.

‘All in good time, Fulvio.’

He felt calm and strong and safe now. He knew each volume by heart, could name the title, author, edition, date and publisher from where he stood. If only he could just stay here, with a nice apartment upstairs so that he could get some sleep and have a shower and change once in a while, but still be able to come down and commune with his books at any time of the day or night!

He went over to the safe located behind the desk where he normally presided over the ceremonies of the shop. The janitor shuffled about awkwardly, mumbling something under his breath. Gabriele spun the dial the requisite number of times and eased the heavy door open. Turning his back on Fulvio, he rapidly pocketed a bundle of banknotes.

‘This is most irregular,’ the janitor repeated in an aggrieved tone. ‘With all due respect,
dottore
, you owe me an explanation.’

Gabriele relocked the safe, then perched over his desk and wrote rapidly on a card. With a last look round, he stood up and walked back to Fulvio. He extracted two of the notes from the bundle in his pocket and held them out.

‘Here’s your explanation,’ he said. ‘I may be away for some time. When I get back, I’ll pay you the same again for each week I’ve been gone. In return, I want you to keep a sharp eye on the shop, and particularly on anyone who comes round asking after me. Keep a note of dates, descriptions and names, if they give any, and above all of what they say. Finally, please fasten this to the window at the front of the shop once I’ve left.’

He handed the janitor the card he had written. Under the name and logo of the bookshop was printed
Chiuso per Lutto
. Fulvio looked at him with a new understanding, sympathy and respect.

‘You’re in mourning,
dottore
? A death in the family?’

Gabriele very faintly smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s what it amounts to.’

II

‘I suppose you’ve heard about that terrible thing.’

Riccardo was standing just inside the kitchen, the piled plates in his hand, looking about him sheepishly as he always did.

‘What thing?’ Claudia asked, relieving him of his burden.

He didn’t answer at once. Instead, he turned back and closed the door to the living room. That was something he had never done before. For a moment she wondered …

But that was silly. It was only Ricco, and besides those days were over. She set the plates down on the counter and looked at him with a touch of asperity. These sociable afternoons with the Zuccottis had a fixed, reassuring rhythm that nothing ever disturbed. The fall of the cards was the only invariable permitted, and even there she and Danilo virtually always won.

‘What are you talking about?’

The question seemed to confuse poor Riccardo still further. And when the answer came, it was in a disjointed stutter, like a terrified declaration of love.

‘That body. Corpse, I mean. In the mountains … What a terrible business.’

He rubbed his hands together helplessly.

‘It had been there thirty years, they say.’

Claudia wrinkled her nose in disgust.

‘There was something about it on the news. Yes, of course, terrible. So why bring it up?’

Riccardo looked at the floor, at the sink, then out of the window at the roofs of Verona, anywhere but at her. It looked almost as if he was going to cry, and the answer to her heartless question was suddenly obvious. He must of course have known the victim, or at least the family. Lightly burdened by remorse, she stepped over and took his hand, rubbing it gently.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

It was at this moment that the door opened and Raffaela walked in.

‘Oh!’

She set down the coffee pot she had carried in as a pretext. This too was new. When they met at the Zuccottis’ home, Raffaela served and Danilo helped her clear up. Here at Claudia’s, she and Riccardo did the work. As at cards, they never cut for partners.

‘I do hope I’m not interrupting anything!’ Raffaela went on archly.

‘Of course not!’ her husband snapped, his fit of nervous hesitancy quite dispelled. ‘I was simply …’

He broke off.

‘Ricco was just telling me about that terrible business of the climber they found dead in that cave near Cortina. I didn’t know you two were personally concerned. I’m so sorry.’