The Deliverance of Evil (35 page)
F
ROM THAT DAY ON,
Linda supported him like a third crutch. They didn’t talk about it, or make a conscious decision. It simply happened. She set him up in the guest room of her small top-floor apartment. In the morning she took her car out of the garage in her building and drove him to his physical therapy sessions, and in the afternoon, taking advantage of the Roman spring weather, she insisted on long walks through the streets of the historic center and Trastevere, even though they were crawling with young people and tourists.
When he was tired they went home and sat on her plant-filled terrace with its view of St. Peter’s dome, and there they enjoyed the dinners she made for them. They never spoke of the night Michele Balistreri almost died, nor of the crimes that had been committed. He never mentioned them, and she avoided the subject completely.
Linda met his friends and his brother’s family, and so they undertook the kind of humdrum bourgeois home life that Balistreri had always imagined he would detest. Several couples came to visit them: Alberto and his wife on Saturdays, Angelo and Margherita almost every evening. Corvu and Piccolo often came by after work. They even resumed their weekly ritual of poker, and on those evenings Linda usually went out with Margherita.
They were an ordinary couple, except for the lack of sex. At midnight they went their separate ways, each going to his or her own room to sleep.
Am I in love with her? Then why do I feel as if there’s an insurmountable barrier?
Days passed, and one evening at the end of May, they set two chairs near each other on the little terrace facing St. Peter’s.
In those ten weeks of living together, many things had become important to him. Now all he wanted was silence and Linda. He felt just as he had thirty-six years earlier on that beach on the other side of the Mediterranean.
His arm slipped around Linda’s shoulders. She turned slowly toward him, her face a few inches from his. There was no furrow in her brow; her eyes were clear and calm.
It’s your decision, Michele
.
He remembered the silent pact he had made with the Invisible Man on that distant night.
The manhunt is off. But you have to stop.
He was just an old cop protecting something valuable, something that should never suffer even the slightest harm, something he had to protect from everyone, beginning with Michele Balistreri, his sins, and his remorse.
Because you can’t harm the fairies in a nursery rhyme . . .
The moment passed as the thought came to him. Linda rested her head on his shoulder and fell asleep.
The following evening they were there again, not saying a word, enjoying the warm sunset that marked the beginning of the long Roman summer. Balistreri was scheduled to return to work the next day.
“Michele, I have to ask you something personal.” Linda’s tone was odd; direct questions were not a part of their everyday life.
“That sounds ominous,” Balistreri joked.
But she was serious, clearly unhappy about asking the question. “I’d like to know whether, when you were involved in politics, you caused anyone’s death.”
Balistreri was struck by the roundabout way she phrased the question.
When you were involved in politics . . . you caused anyone’s death . . .
He was certain she knew that, up until November 1973, Michele Balistreri had been a Fascist agitator and a leader of Ordine Nuovo, which was later dissolved by government decree because it had been accused of being a new incarnation of the old Fascist party. And, being a good journalist, she must have wondered why he hadn’t been arrested and put on trial along with the movement’s other leaders.
“Would it change anything between us, Linda?”
She thought for a while. “I need to know who you are today, Michele, and in order to know that I have to know something about who you were back then.”
Balistreri didn’t ask why. He trusted her and her good intentions in asking him.
“I never killed an innocent person nor ordered any innocent people to be killed. In my group, though, there were people who thought that bullets and bombs were the only means for engaging in the fight.”
“And you?”
“After Ordine Nuovo was disbanded, I tried to make the group a political one again, but they only wanted armed struggle, and I lost.”
“Where were you from 1974 to 1978?”
Her tone was perfectly friendly.
I was still part of that group, one of its leaders. But I’d agreed to spy on them.
“I can’t tell you, Linda. It’s for your own good.”
She took one of his hands in hers. “I know you didn’t kill innocent people. But when you found yourself next to people who wanted to kill innocent people, did you let them do it? Or did you stop them?”
I betrayed my former friends because they betrayed themselves, and because they thought combat meant putting a bomb in a dumpster in a crowded place.
“I did what I could, Linda—everything I could to combat what I thought was unjust and dishonorable.”
“And you’d do the same thing again?”
Linda Nardi had a knack for asking questions that knocked him off-balance. Here was another one.
“Today I’d only kill someone if I were forced to do so. That happened five months ago up on that hill.”
She nodded, but her eyes told a different story. She separated her palms, and Balistreri’s hand was left free, light as a feather, and alone.
Morning
H
E HAD BEEN BACK
at work for a little over a month. It was a peaceful time. No one mentioned the shooting or the crimes. By now they were in hands of the public prosecutor’s office and the killers were in prison. Vasile’s accomplices, Hagi’s four employees who had traded Nadia for a vehicle to use for a robbery, were dead. Camarà’s killer was an unknown motorcyclist who had argued with him at the entrance to Bella Blu. There was no connection between the two cases. And even less of a connection between ENT and the secret intelligence service.
Balistreri was living with Linda, but also without her. With love, but no sex. He did things he had never done before, such as fixing a leak under the kitchen sink, watching a detective film on television, and attempting to play golf. He spent a whole Sunday in Linda’s garage, getting oil and grease all over himself, trying to repair her old moped.
In the lazy days of summer, enthusiasm for the Italian national soccer team was reaching a fever pitch. There was a growing excitement in the air. Italy’s march toward the World Cup final in Berlin was as unexpected and all-consuming as it had been twenty-four years earlier. There were Italian flags on balconies, and every evening the center was blocked by crazy traffic as Italians drove around rejoicing. In offices, churches, and hospitals and on the streets, the talk was of nothing else. Only “national” dishes were being served in bars and restaurants: salads of tomato, mozzarella, and lettuce, or watermelon, honeydew, and kiwi. The country chose to ignore Lombardy’s talk of secession and dedicate its allegiance once more to the flag. In the hazy heat of a scorching July, Italians were caught up in their team’s adventures on German soil.
Even politics and the great disagreement with foreign residents had been put on the back burner in the newspapers, on television, and in conversation. Indeed, many foreigners—some from conviction, others out of pure opportunism—had become Italian supporters, making a great deal of money selling counterfeit national team shirts on every street corner. People hugged each other in the celebrations after the games. No one could give a damn about killings anymore.
In the middle of the morning, Balistreri and Dioguardi were talking on the phone.
“While the match is on and the city center’s empty, let’s take Linda and Margherita for a nice long stroll,” Balistreri suggested.
“Margherita really wants to watch the final. Everyone’s going to Alberto’s house. Your brother tells me he’s even convinced Linda we should come. Apparently they all think we’re antisocial.”
“Then the two of us can go for a walk and they can join us later. Italy’s going to lose. The center will still be deserted later.”
“We’re going to win, Michele, and Margherita and Linda will be out celebrating with everyone else.”
“Linda would never go out celebrating, Angelo.”
“Okay, but if Italy does win, it’s going to take Linda three hours to get home from Alberto’s.”
They both had a sense of déjà vu, yet they both studiously avoided the subject. They had never spoken again of that night in 1982, but they’d both lost interest in soccer afterward. Together they came to the only possible solution: a walk through the deserted city center, and after the game another walk if Italy lost, or a strategic retreat to Linda’s little terrace if the team won. Just the two of them.
. . . .
For Giovanna Sordi, it had been a Sunday morning the same as all the others for the past twenty-four years. The eight-thirty tram to Verano cemetery, because Sunday was the day she brought fresh flowers: tulips for Elisa’s romantic heart, red carnations for Amedeo’s socialist one. A brief moment of silence without tears and then she recited, “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,” in a whisper: twenty-four times for Elisa, ten for Amedeo. Then the tram again to the old house on the outskirts where she still lived. Midday Mass at the local parish church, and then confession, with no sins to list, just the usual plea, the one that the old priest no longer even heard and for which he granted absolution without penance.
Lord, at least tell me who did it
.
Evening
Strolling through the center of Rome, they felt as if they were on the moon. Even innocent tourists who had never seen a soccer game in their lives had gathered in the squares where the final was being shown on enormous screens. Down the deserted streets, the total silence was broken by collective roars. It was impossible to ignore the game’s progress completely, the result in the balance, the beginning of extra time. Along with the sounds, Michele Balistreri and Angelo Dioguardi were accompanied by an emotion that had nothing to do with the game. They walked along without saying a word, and the more they walked the more the memory wormed its way in gradually, subtly, inexorably. It grew very slowly, soft as a heavy snow fall on a winter’s evening. For almost two hours they wandered around without exchanging a single word, surrounded by the historic center’s overwhelming, incomparable, and silent beauty.
By the time the game reached the decisive shoot-out, they stood pale and exhausted outside the front door of Linda Nardi’s apartment building. In the silence, as millions of people held their breath, they lit cigarettes and traveled back twenty-four years. Balistreri and Dioguardi hurried up the staircase while the crazy crowds rushed onto the streets. They took refuge on Linda’s terrace while the joy spread around them.
During an uproar like this, a monster cut Elisa Sordi to pieces while we couldn’t give a damn.
Balistreri heard a whistling sound close by and turned to see the fireworks display. A line of white was running directly up into the sky; at any moment it would explode in a thousand colors. Instead, it reached a point in the sky, couldn’t manage to go any higher, and fizzled out.
Afternoon
T
HE NIGHT OF WILD
celebration was followed by a day of endless chatter and newspaper headlines, with T-shirts of the world champions on sale even outside cemeteries and in hospitals. Hardly anyone was working, and it would have been difficult to get anything done. To distract himself from the inane office chatter, Balistreri allowed Linda to persuade him to take a late afternoon walk.
After half an hour, his bad leg and his age made it necessary to rest. He also needed an espresso. They sat down at a café in Piazza Navona.
At the next table sat a couple with their two adolescent children. The mother read out loud from a guidebook. “Piazza Navona came into being in the first century AD, but as a stadium rather than a square.”
With his mouth full of pastry, the son asked, “Did the Rome team play here?”
The mother carried on with the history of the fountain, the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, and the raised hand on the Rio della Plata statue that blocks the view of Sant’Agnese. “Well, it is a pile of crap,” the girl said, wiping a blob of pastry cream off her face with the back of her hand.
At a certain point the two teenagers got up without a word and went off to look in the store windows around the square that displayed designer clothes, iPods, and the latest cell phones. The mother put the guidebook down and looked at her husband, who was buried behind the edition of
Corriere dello Sport
that described the great Italian triumph in detail. “Do something, would you? They’re your kids, too.” He lowered the newspaper a little, looked over the top at her, and said, “You bring up the kids; I bring home the money.”
Their two espressos arrived with two little glasses of water. By now there were very few cafés that kept up this tradition. Balistreri liked it. It reminded him of the
mabrouka
who performed the same ritual for his father when he was in his study. Papa thanked her with a little nod of the head without taking his eyes off his papers. He always took a sip of water first and then started on the coffee.
He glanced at the next table, where the father had spread the paper out on the table and was continuing to read. His eye fell on a headline buried among the interviews with the team’s heroes. It was tucked in a corner, barely noticeable:
A
TRAGEDY
OF
TWO
WORLD
CUPS
.
He got up and went over to the table. “Excuse me,” he said.
The man raised a pair of hostile eyes, probably expecting to see an immigrant trying to sell him something, but when he recognized a typical Italian face, he softened a little.
“Yes?” he replied, irritated nevertheless.
“Forget about it,” Balistreri said, having just noticed a newsstand at the other end of the piazza.
With Linda looking on, perplexed, he asked for the
Corriere dello Sport
.
The vendor laughed. “Sorry, all the newspapers were sold out by ten o’clock.”
“Even hard news?”
“Even the papers that publish hard news are all about our champions today. All sold out.”
Balistreri went back to the avid reader.
“Look, I need your paper. I’ll give you ten euros for it.”
The man shook his head. “I’m going to frame this and hang it on the wall.”
“All right. Look, I just want to read a little piece that interests me there, and then I’ll give it back to you.”
The other man was now curious. “What do you want to read?”
Balistreri pointed it out to him. The man looked at it with a frown. “Why the hell would you bother with that on a glorious day like today?”
The look on Balistreri’s face made him change his attitude.
“Keep that page. I’m not interested in it,” he said.
Sitting with Linda in the joyful piazza overflowing with crowds of people, Balistreri read the article.
. . . .
A
TRAGEDY
OF
TWO
WORLD
CUPS
. Giovanna Sordi committed suicide yesterday evening by throwing herself off the balcony at her home. Just like her daughter, Elisa, who was brutally murdered twenty-four years ago on the day of Italy’s World Cup victory in Spain, the elderly woman died as the national team was lifting its championship trophy. Was it a chilling coincidence, or did the latest national victory awaken unbearably painful memories for her? The Elisa Sordi case, which at the time was on the front page for weeks, has remained unsolved. No one has ever been formally charged with the murder. Unfortunately, what is a great joy for many is a huge personal tragedy for at least one family.
An extremely sensitive sub-editor, a piece that escaped the chief editor’s notice.
A pang in the stomach, different from all the others he had felt for years. It didn’t even seem to come from the usual point at the bottom of his esophagus, but somewhere deeper, distant, and clear.
He lit a cigarette and thought about Elisa Sordi’s parents: humble origins, a worker in early retirement and a waitress. He remembered the couple’s persistence—which he’d seen as overreaction—during the World Cup final, the desperation and restraint they showed after Elisa was found. He remembered how Amedeo Sordi came down to Homicide every morning to ask whether there was any news. He would sit in a corner and read
L’Unità
, remaining there in silence for hours. No one took any notice of him. He kept it up for two whole years until someone, perhaps his own lawyer, had gently let him know that it was pointless and that he was disturbing the police.
Giovanna Sordi had waited twenty-four years for someone to tell her who had taken Elisa from her and why. And when, after twenty-four years, World Cup champion Italy had replied no, she really couldn’t know who’d done it, she had decided to end it all.
On impulse, he tried calling Angelo. Linda was watching him, the vertical groove clearly furrowing her brow. Angelo replied cheerfully after the first ring.
Balistreri read the article to him. A long silence followed. Finally Angelo Dioguardi hung up without saying a word.